New voters?

Did you know that Elon Musk is a naturalized American citizen? Born in South Africa in 1971, the tech tycoon apparently thought, correctly, that his prospects would be improved by acquiring citizenship here. Good for him; in this respect, he's ordinary. (One doubts that actually...)

 

He's not only ordinary but also, as is common, butt-ignorant about his adopted country and the truths about immigration. 

 

It's neither easy nor fast for immigrants to become naturalized citizens who can vote.

The underlying US immigration legal framework has not been thoroughly overhauled by Congress since 1986 (regular order path) and 1990 (asylum process). There have been multiple administrative and court-ordered adjustments; both paths are barely functioning, starved (mostly by Republicans) for funding and strategic vision. Of course people want to come here -- for all our manifold faults, the country is both richer and safer than a lot of their home countries.

 

The most recent failed legal reform effort was this past year. Republican US Senator James Lankford hammered out an immigration compromise which could have passed with bipartisan support and which President Biden agreed to sign. Candidate Trump wanted to keep the existing immigration mess and successfully pressured Republicans to kill it, to the disgust of all parties.

There have been times in my life when my political work consisted of trying to encourage naturalized citizens -- yes, these folks are full citizens -- to join the voting pool. Despite excited headlines claiming "With an election looming, the U.S. is approving citizenship applications at the fastest speed in years," only a small increase in new citizen registrations has become normal in especially fraught elections. I think this phenomenon may date to the California anti-immigrant panic of the mid-1990s. But, just as for other Americans, turning citizens into voters is a slog, taking years to become habitual. And legally eligible non-citizen residents don't rush into the naturalization process; it's expensive, complicated, and sometimes emotionally wrenching.

The Pew Research Center presents some fascinating facts:

Most naturalized citizen eligible voters have lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years. About three-quarters of immigrant eligible voters (73%) have lived in the U.S. for more than two decades. Another 20% have lived in the country for 11 to 20 years, while relatively few (8%) have been in the U.S. for a decade or less.

Among naturalized citizen eligible voters, more than half (55%) live in just four states: California, Florida, New York and Texas. These four states are also the country’s most populous when looking at eligible voters overall. Combined, they’re home to roughly a third of the U.S. electorate (32%).

 The naturalized citizen share of the electorate differs widely in some potential battleground states in the 2024 election. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are widely considered to be among the swing states this fall. ...

In Nevada and Arizona, naturalized citizens make up 14% and 9% of all eligible voters, respectively. They account for 7% of eligible voters in Georgia, and about 5% in both Pennsylvania and Michigan. In Wisconsin, they are just 3% of the electorate.

In overall numbers, Georgia’s naturalized citizen electorate is the largest among these swing states at 574,000, while Pennsylvania is not far behind at 546,000. Both of these states were among the closest in the 2020 presidential election.

 What do I take from this statistical picture of naturalized citizens? 

• Like Americans born here, naturalized Americans don't vote automatically. If you want their votes, you have to talk with them and turn them out. Voting can be intimidating, even when Republicans aren't spreading lies in immigrant communities.

• It's not very clear that naturalized citizens have different issue desires and preferences than anyone else. (Well maybe Ukrainian-origin immigrants might be especially urgent in seeking aid to their relatives under siege.)

• This is still a country enriched by immigrants many of whom choose to become citizens. Immigration by ambitious strivers is what makes this country unique and interesting. It always has been.

It's more than a little sick that so many Republican pols are willing to beat up on some of the best of us.

From the streets of San Francisco

Reporter Heather Knight, along with photographer Loren Elliot, offers a largely sympathetic account [gift article] of some of what the city of San Francisco is doing to care for asylum seeking families who turn up in our midst. 

They huddled in the cold on a graffiti-covered bench last November, the twin girls dozing in their parents’ laps while the older children buried their heads in their phones.

Most nights, the family of six waited like this outside a San Francisco school gymnasium until it could be converted into a homeless shelter. Once inside, they slept each night on a small patch of the floor, then rose early each morning to secure a spot in one of the three showers shared by 69 people. They had to leave by sunrise so the school gym could be returned to its intended purpose.

Margarita Solito, 36, sometimes wondered if the 3,200-mile journey to San Francisco from El Salvador had been worth it. The family left as international migrants, and now they were migrants of a different sort, moving around their new city all day with nowhere to call home.

A year after arriving in the city, Ms. Solito’s fight for housing would pay off, and her family would be able to put down roots. But their journey shed light on the larger crisis of family homelessness in San Francisco and revealed the daily uncertainty that hundreds of schoolchildren face there. ...

Knight reports that 2403 children in the San Francisco Unified School District, 5 percent of total enrollment, are unhoused!

No wonder teachers and school staff wanted to use what space they could find in their building to shelter the children they serve. Neighborhood meetings averted most fears about using the Buena Vista/Horace Mann campus for this purpose. I live nearby; the nightly shelter residents have not discernibly upset the area.

San Francisco is relatively friendly to this work thanks to the tireless agitation of community and migrant groups. 

Today Bay Area Faith in Action rallied outside of the public San Francisco General Hospital in support of another resident of this shelter, Carmen Marquez, who contracted meningitis, spent 6 days in a coma, and then had to have 9 fingers and her lower leg amputated due to the disease. 

The City Department of Homelessness wants to send her and her teenage daughter back to a shelter. They say that despite her medical condition, she does not have enough points in the computer system to qualify for more permanent housing.

If wealthy San Francisco remains at all friendly to our poor neighbors, it's because of tireless agitation from organized people in community groups.

After empire

Conservative Party British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has set a general election for July 4. (We'll be in that country floating the inland canal system on a narrowboat, so I may or may not see something of this.) 

I had been holding Alex Massie's commentary on the contemporary United Kingdom for our visit, but Sunak's surprise move makes it worth publishing now. 

There is much truth in the post-imperial line, “We are here because you were there” but even this undersells the real transformation of the British population.

To observe this is simply to note reality. There is nothing wrong or deplorable about any of this and I see no reason to regret it.

And, overall and with obvious counter-examples to complicate the picture, this transformation has been achieved with comparatively little trouble or fuss. That is not to downplay the experiences of black and asian Britons but, rather, to try and see the larger picture.

High-profile leadership positions are not everything but nor are they nothing. The prime minister is a Hindu whose parents hail from India, the mayor of London is the son of a Pakistani bus driver, the first minster of Scotland is Scots-Pakistani (and so is the leader of the Scottish Labour party), Kemi Badenoch, who may yet be the next leader of the Conservative party, was born in Nigeria, the next foreign secretary, David Lammy, is the son of Guyanese immigrants, and Vaughan Gething, the new first minister of Wales, is a black man born in Zambia.

It is exaggeration to say that among western nations only the United States has political leadership of such diversity (and even then, some of that American diversity is a matter of political appointment rather than electoral success).

Ten million people living in Britain today were born overseas. The paradox of immigration politics in Britain is that politicians talk tough on immigration while presiding over a system of unprecedented liberalism. The rhetoric may sometimes be ugly; the reality is rather different.

Britain is no longer the quaint antiquarian museum of castles, cathedrals, and the slightly absurd monarchy of American imagination. Nor is it the land of a wondrous, universal national health system won by unionized labor. I am looking forward to a glimpse (only) of a more complex reality.

Migration: people keep coming. Some facts.

Republicans screaming about an "invasion" at the southern U.S. border encourage me to tune out accounts of what is actually happening. To my way of the thinking, folks have always wanted to come here when life became brutally unbearable in their previous homes. We live pretty well here, sometimes a lot better than pretty well. So sure, folks will try to come. That's how most current citizens' ancestors got here, Black folks with enslaved forbears and Native people excepted.

But we probably should be aware the current migrant flow is different. A lot more people from different countries are turning up trying to get in.

 ... An NBC News analysis of newly released data from the Department of Homeland Security shows a fundamental shift. Before the pandemic, roughly 9 in 10 migrants crossing the border illegally (that is, between ports of entry) came from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — the four countries closest to the border. Those countries no longer hold the majority: As of 2023, for the first time since the U.S. has collected such data, half of all migrants who cross the border now come from elsewhere globally.

The greatest numbers have come from countries farther away in the Americas that have never before sent migrants to the border at this scale. In the 2019 fiscal year, for example, the number of Colombians apprehended illegally crossing the border was 400. In fiscal 2023, it exploded to 154,080 — a nearly four-hundred-fold increase.

But they come, too, from countries in Africa, Eastern Europe and every region in Asia. There have been dramatic increases in the number of migrants from the world’s most populous countries: Between fiscal 2019 and 2023, the number of migrants from China and India grew more than elevenfold and fivefold, respectively. And some countries that previously sent negligible numbers of migrants to the U.S. border have seen staggering increases. In fiscal 2019, the total number of people from the northwest African nation of Mauritania apprehended at the border was 20. Four years later, that number was 15,260. For migrants from Turkey, the number went from 60 to 15,430. The list goes on: More than 50 nationalities saw apprehensions multiplied by a hundred or more.

Most of these people are counted because they turn themselves in and claim asylum as they are entitled to do under U.S. law. Because Republicans refuse to adequately fund the immigration system, it takes years for their asylum claims to be adjudicated. Most will not win asylum, but they work in the interim.

The linked article explores the narco-capitalist smuggling industry that profits from people from all over the world trying to come. I don't know enough to know how true that reporting is, but there's probably some truth.

Republican screaming peddles a bunch of lies about migrants.  Here are some.

Click to enlarge.

Meanwhile, the large number of immigrants legally allowed to work in the United States since the pandemic has helped us recover much faster from the doldrums of 2020 than other parts of the world, especially Europe.

... About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. And even before that, by the middle of 2022, the foreign-born labor force had grown so fast that it closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Immigrant workers also recovered much faster than native-born workers from the pandemic’s disruptions, and many saw some of the largest wage gains in industries eager to hire. Economists and labor experts say the surge in employment was ultimately key to solving unprecedented gaps in the economy that threatened the country’s ability to recover from prolonged shutdowns.

Donald Trump and his merry band of MAGA nativists want strangle the source of our current economic health.

Spring in the Mission

I know, it is not even the end of standard time. Spring is officially two weeks away. Yet the coming season is in the air. 

 

The view out my window is wildly lush.

The people gather as well. 

 

San Franciscans demand to be heard.

And on light polls and walls around the Mission, these flyers turn up.

click to enlarge if you want to read.

Odd one this. I'm as little a fan of Mayor London Breed as anyone. 

But these flyers call to mind a long time useful axiom I've developed for understanding San Francisco leftist politics: if somebody seems to be trying to co-opt the legitimate moral energy of your justice movement, run -- don't walk -- away from them. These aren't your friends. They are either bloodsuckers or opportunists. They may be actual enemies of justice or they may be deluded, but they aren't your friends. They are trying to seize the legitimate space you are fighting to open.

Where we gonna go?

U.S. law about refugees and a right of asylum is a snarled tangle of temporary branches, feeble novel shoots, and confused and blocked dead ends. Much of this has become semi-permanent by custom and usage. Republicans are straightforward nowadays in wishing to exclude all newcomers (except maybe white Europeans) while Democrats may mean well, but have not had the legislative power and courage to fix this cruel mess.

And unless we are somehow touched personally by the experiences of refugees and immigrants, most of us don't have to know what a shit show this non-system has become. So we don't know, while those ensnared within it fumble and push their way forward, seeking safety in unwelcoming lands.

Erudite Partner has taken a swing in Nowhere to Run at untangling some the elements of refugee law and practice; the history of how we got to this mess; where global refugees and migrants come from; where they end up; and the forces of war and climate degradation that promise to make these human surges even larger in the coming century. She begins:

Back in 1968, my father announced that, if Richard Nixon were elected president that November, he was going to move us all to Canada. ...

Didn't happen. But the impulse -- and often the necessity --  to move on is part of our interconnected lives. This article is a solid pre-primer.

"I never get used to being here ..."

Erudite Partner is off to spend a couple of months on Martha's Vineyard. That's the island in the Atlantic off Massachusetts where Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pulled his stunt, dumping Venezuelan migrants who had no idea where they'd be transported. To the Republicans' shock, the island folks knew what to do -- the state helped the migrants get work permits and sort out their immigration cases. Meanwhile, the company that DeSantis hired to fly the Venezuelans now faces human trafficking charges in the Texas county where they rounded up the confused migrants.

Contrary to common preconceptions, this affluent summer playground has a year round population of hardy working class New Englanders, many of whom are recent immigrants. The Martha's Vineyard Times has put out a series of interviews with immigrant Island residents. These conversations are great fun - learn how newcomers deal with new foods and, above all, the long, cold, gray winter.

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.

Update from Martha's Vineyard

The Venezuelan asylum seekers dumped on the remote Massachusetts island are gone -- moved to a base on the mainland where they have access to housing and immigration attorneys. 

Florida Republican Governor and aspiring presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has more urgent concerns today. His state is under water. Picking on poor people from abroad will have to wait while he bails out, with maximum help from the federal government.

But the Venezuelans made friends in the strange place they were dumped. The Martha's Vineyard Times reports on a return visit from a few of them.

 

Stallings told The Times that he and his wife Jackie visited with the Venezuelan migrants at the base on Sept. 21, and later enjoyed time on the Vineyard with four of those folks on Sunday.

“There was an extremely warm welcome when we got to the JBCC,” Stallings said. The general consensus from all he spoke with was “they were so appreciative of the Vineyard — really enjoyed their time with us, and all of them look forward to coming back to visit soon.”

Stallings said the migrants had good accommodations and food provided to them at Joint Base Cape Cod, with their own rooms — something that couldn’t be provided for them at St. Andrew’s.

Stallings said some of them “absolutely” want to make the Vineyard their home. “There’s a handful of them who would really like to relocate,” he said. The desire is tempered with the reality of the lack of housing, but also that there’s ample work, he said. He also said they are coming to grips with the notions of cold weather and snow....

The housing shortage on the island may make it unlikely these folks will be able to settle there.  But the Vineyard has long had a good sized Portuguese-speaking Cape Verdian population, migrants who made do, crowded together, and made a strong start on building a life in their new country. Maybe Venezuelans will be the next wave of newcomers to find opportunity in this cold and rocky place.

This does my heart good

Martha's Vineyard can seem precious, just a little too pretty and bucolic to be true. But the people who choose to live on this New England outpost have heart. When bully boy Florida governor Ron DeSantis shipped to them a group of bewildered Venezuelan refugees, people knew what to do. In two days, new friends were made and clothed in the colors of the local high school. The state of Massachusetts then stepped up to do government's job, moving the people to a base on Cape Cod where they can be processed with access to immigration attorneys.

Photos by way of the Martha's Vineyard Times, all by Rich Saltzberg except as noted.

A young refugee embraces new found friend Sara Piazza.

Like most everyone else who leaves the island, the migrants departed on the ferry. Photo by Abigail Rosen

Nice to know that some people in these dis-United States still know how to behave when confronted with poverty and pain.

Michelle Norris gets the Island.

Yes, there are Land Rovers and yachts here, but the Vineyard is primarily an island of farms and fishermen, a year-round population that lives close to the land and in many cases works hard to make ends meet.

It’s an island that seesaws between overwork and underemployment. It’s a place where everything — gas, food, housing, toothpaste, you name it — costs more than it does on the mainland. It’s a place where 1 in 6 year-round residents is a registered user of the Island Food Pantry and one-third of schoolchildren receive free or reduced-price lunch.

It’s a place where organized groups go “gleaning” each week, picking produce left behind by farming machines so it can be used in the food pantry. ...

The Vineyard says to MAGA Republicans, cruelty to the weak is not who we are.

War makes human flotsam

A poignant story in the Washington Post tells of young Afghans who, as part of the chaotic collapse of the U.S. military adventure in their country, find themselves in an Adriatic Sea beach resort on the coast of Albania. It's a beautiful and friendly haven ... but what next?

SHËNGJIN, Albania — The 21-year-old university student did not realize it at the time, but he got on the wrong plane out of Afghanistan. 

... For the student, his siblings and hundreds like them who were taken to Albania, a country they had never heard of — and to a beach resort, no less — it has become the strangest of limbos. 

For nearly a year, they have lived in a sprawling beach hotel in Shëngjin, a resort town with a long, wide swath of sand on Albania’s north coast, a little over an hour’s drive from the capital, Tirana. 

“The food is good, and the room is good,” said the student, whose brother had worked for the Americans, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relatives in Afghanistan from possible retaliation by the Taliban. “But we are in a psychological prison because we don’t know what will happen.”

They are more likely to be able to migrate to Canada than to the United States which is being inexplicably stingy with visas for Afghans whose lives we tore to shreds.

• • •

The Adriatic coastline is rugged and beautiful.

This story of exiled Afghans puts me in mind of my uncle's remarkable trajectory out of a Serbian farming village located within the Hapsburg Empire, by way of a desperate season as a child soldier in the Serbian Army during the Great War (World War I, 1914-1918) to England, then the U.S., finally landing in Buffalo, New York. The Austrians shot his father, simply for being a Serb, on the outbreak of war. He swam a river under fire and joined up with other Serbs. The ragtag Serbian army, beset by typhus and outgunned by invading Bulgarians, trekked over rugged passes in winter to the Adriatic Coast.

And suddenly, Stevan Idjidovic's life took another wild turn. The Brits hadn't been particularly useful allies to Serbia, but they offered to take a small number of young Serbian men to Oxford to be trained up as proper English gentlemen. My uncle was one of the lucky ones, suddenly transported from an Adriatic beach to imperial luxury. From photos of that time, you get the sense that the Balkan transplants may have been looked upon as belonging to a category not-unlike Indian subjects receiving their finishing in the imperial center.

Stevan thrived and hustled his way to America, to meeting my aunt, and to landing in Buffalo in the 1930s. He wrote a little book about his war, The Snows of Serbia. 

I wrote a lengthy summary which you might enjoy if Stevan's tale piques your interest.

The Vindmans have a bit of an answer from President Joe

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman came to public notice as the brave national security officer who testified to Donald Trump's plot to extort the Ukrainian president for dirt on the Biden family. He lost his career path for that one. His twin, Yevgeny Vindman, also a White House national security officer, was fired and marched out unceremoniously by the Trump regime.

The twins were born in Ukraine, but joined the Jewish exodus from the late Soviet Union and grew up in New York City, becoming patriotic citizens along the way.

Wednesday, Vevgeny posted a tweet imploring his country to welcome Ukrainian refugees from the Russian invasion. 

Weapons and humanitarian aid ✅. What about refugees? Are we accepting refugees entry into the US? Refugees and immigrants contribute enormously to our country.

Y. Vindman replied to the inevitable questions:

I’m the cuter one. @AVindman is the goofier one.

Thursday Joe Biden promised a small measure of welcome to Ukrainian refugees and aid to European countries bearing the main burden of this mass migration.

Bowing to domestic and international pressure, the United States announced on Thursday that it would accept up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees into the country and would donate $1 billion to help European countries handle a surge of migrants fleeing Russia’s invasion.

The announcement comes as countries facing an exodus of some three million refugees have sought assistance from the United States, which has been engaged in its own struggle to absorb thousands of refugees from the war in Afghanistan.

... Earlier this week, in discussions in Washington, U.S. officials said they were considering bringing in Ukrainians with relatives in the United States under a streamlined family reunification process. Other Ukrainians deemed to be vulnerable, such as members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, political activists and journalists, potentially would be considered for temporary protection, according to the sources.

The Vindmans and even the Times highlight HIAS and Razom for Ukraine as go-to places for charitable donations to help refugees.

• • •

The Times is kinder about our obligations to Afghans than I would be. Can we get Joe Biden to take seriously the plight of people who fled during and after our military belly flop at withdrawal? A good country is one that recognizes its debts.

A new German government, climate crisis, and migration

Economic historian Adam Tooze has passed along elements of the platform adopted by the "traffic-light coalition" composing the newly elected German government. Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats are out. The Social Democrats (the red element), the Greens, and the Free Democratic Party (the cautionary yellow right of center), are in. Olaf Scholz is the new Chancellor -- federal Prime Minister, roughly speaking. 

For anyone who retains an impression of Germany as a the homeland of European regressive nationalism and conservatism -- and after Nazism how could we not? -- this description of the German government's intentions is simply stunning:

“We are united by an understanding of Germany as a diverse society of immigration.” 

In the 1970s-1990s, when the current generation of German leaders were growing up, any such statement would have been politically explosive. 

They continue: “Migration has been and is today a part of the history of our country. Immigrants, their children and grand-children have helped to build our country and shape it. The 60th anniversary of the guest-worker treaty with Turkey is symbolic of that.” 

Like the last Red-Green government, this one promises to modernize Germany’s citizenship laws. This time it will permit multiple citizenship. Naturalization will normally occur after 5 years, or 3 years in the case of exceptional integration performances (sic) (Integrationsleistungen) ... 

Any mention of the concept of ‘race’ will be expunged from the German constitution.

Outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel nearly capsized her government by responding generously to the refugee crisis created by war in Syria. The increasing strength of the proto-Nazi ADF party followed; Merkel was forced to backtrack. The new coalition appears ready to try again to incorporate migrants.

Tooze identifies the underlying and urgent emergency that this new German coalition understands:

This is a government that embraces the climate challenge and has the political backing to do something about it. It has no excuses. Germany is pivotal to Europe’s climate ambitions. And, more generally, the success or failure of this government will tell us a lot about the capacity of sophisticated democracies around the world to adapt to our 21st-century polycrisis.

Climate change prompts new challenges to states and to modern civilization itself from the natural world -- drought, fire, frost, flood, pestilence, and more. Climate change makes civil society and governments unstable. Climate change leads to forced human migration and increased flows of refugees at national borders. These are the great challenges of the 21st century.

• • •

This banner hung on Madrid's City Hall. Why in English?, I don't know. Spain serves as a major entry point for migrants to the European Union, often unwillingly.

British politician David Miliband heads the International Rescue Committee which provides aid to people affected by humanitarian crises all over the world, including people displaced by climate crisis. Founded by the refugee Albert Einstein, the organization got its start in Europe during World War II providing assistance to displaced people. Miliband told the Washington Post that people in the United States could use some simple education about the world's migration challenge.

What do you think people tend to misunderstand about refugee crises, about refugees? 

It’s really important that those of us in America or Europe remember that nearly 90 percent of the world’s refugees are in poor countries, not in rich countries. It’s a myth that Western Europe or the U.S. are bearing an unsustainable burden of refugees; the vast bulk of refugees are in low- or middle-income countries.  

Myth number two is that refugees are displaced for a short period of time, when in fact the averages are closer to 20 years than five.  

Myth number three — this not a short list — is that this is all about young men on the move, when it’s families, with about half of the world’s refugees under the age of 18.  

And myth number four is that refugees are in camps, whereas we know that 60 percent of refugees in the modern era are in urban areas — like Beirut, Istanbul, Islamabad. 

... So we need to change the way we do humanitarian aid. We need to provide education as much as we need to provide water and sanitation. And we’re very clear that a feminist approach is important, not just because two-thirds of our clients are women and girls, but because women and girls face double, triple, multiple vulnerabilities and inequalities, that the structures of power that face them are deeply unequal, and we need to take that into account.

There is nothing in the way the world is currently organized that suggests that the world will see fewer refugees in coming years. Local and international conflicts over power and resources will force people to flee. Climate change guarantees more people will be leaving their homes, both voluntarily and involuntarily. Those of us lucky enough not to be displaced, those of us in rich countries, need to face up to this prospect and figure out what we can do for the less lucky. Our own countries can become better for a well-managed, humane migration influx.

Big changes, huge human migrations

The intrinsic defect of predictions about the future is that they haven't happened -- yet. They are a kind of guesswork, sometimes informed, sometimes offbase, all subject to unexpected variables. I give more credit to projections about the implications of climate change than I do to most predictions just because the forces involved are so large, so beyond the puny scale we apprehend in daily life, that we may be less likely to completely misread them.

And so, here's a short prediction for what escalating climate change will mean, mostly right here in this highly fortunate country.

 

It's a lot more interesting than the teaser on the screen might suggest. Maybe within a few years, the seemingly invariant electoral map will look very different. Most certainly, vulnerable people will be hurt most if the climate evolves as this projects.

H/t Juan Cole.

A Biden victory could be a break for Central America

By way of the Central American human rights organization Cristosal comes an extraordinarily optimistic article from Devex,  which bills itself as "the media platform for the global development community." Journalist Teresa Welsh asks "Would Biden 'rebuild the old program' to reduce Northern Triangle migration?"

It seems ages ago now, but as recently as 2016 ,U.S. policy toward Central American migration was at least nominally to try to improve the quality of life in the sending countries so as to encourage desperate people to stay home. That's not to say that our governments haven't historically made life harder for the people of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. We've propped up a long string of dictators and oligarchs in those suffering countries. But in the middle of the last decade, the U.S. did commit funds to healthier development and to supporting domestic human rights movements.

All that disappeared under Trump. U.S. policy today is to indiscriminately deport migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees and pretend these corrupt governments will deal with the reality of hungry people.

Joe Biden promises that he

"will immediately do away with the Trump Administration’s draconian immigration policies and galvanize international action to address the poverty and insecurity driving migrants from the Northern Triangle to the United States. ... The people of the region understand that addressing these challenges in a sustainable way demands systemic change and reforms across many sectors of society in the Northern Triangle–and that sort of change requires a serious investment of political will and resources at every level."

More substantively, he calls for

    •    Developing a comprehensive four-year, $4 billion regional strategy to address factors driving migration from Central America;
    •    Mobilizing private investment in the region;
    •    Improving security and rule of law;
    •    Addressing endemic corruption;
    •    Prioritizing poverty reduction and economic development.

Just words? Maybe. It wouldn't be the first time in the U.S. relationship with these countries. But Central America needs the northern colossus to at the very least pretend to do the right thing.

And according to Welsh, Biden has a good history with Central America in his previous role.

"Biden met multiple times with the presidents of the three countries, traveling to Central America, chairing meetings, and using personal diplomacy to lobby for an agreement that included pledges to reduce the corruption that has long been endemic in the region.

 "The vice president’s personal engagement was key to getting El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to agree to serious reforms, as well as to significant financial contributions of their own, according to Mark Feierstein, who served during the Obama administration as assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean at the U.S. Agency for International Development."

Fernando Cutz, who worked in the National Security Council under both Trump and Obama, thinks there's hope for a return to a sensible, even helpful, policy after Trump.

“But … in Central America, I do think that — more than almost any other foreign policy area that I can think of — we probably can, in many ways, just rebuild the old program.”

Central America could use some breaks.

The testimony of a former asylum officer

Doug Stephens was charged with making determinations of which asylum seekers could apply for refuge in the United States -- until he couldn't stand what he was ordered to do any more.

"It was like this little window into how bad things happen in the world. This is how you get a group of people who are in a position to do good and slowly pivot them to do bad."

For Trump and his white nationalists, the cruelty is the point.

Talk about burying the lede: success in life depends on where people settle

Why do journalists do this sort of thing? Emily Badger at The Upshot reports on a working paper from a team of economic historians at Princeton, Stanford and the University of California, Davis. They found that in every generation since the 1880s, children of poor immigrants (actually they say "sons") have been more economically successful than children of "similarly poor fathers born in the United States." That is, once immigrant families become established, many prove adept at getting ahead.

The adult children of poor Mexican and Dominican immigrants in the country legally today achieve about the same relative economic success as children of poor immigrants from Finland or Scotland did a century ago. All of them, in their respective eras, have fared better than the children of poor native-born Americans. If the American dream is to give the next generation a better life, it appears that poor immigrants have more reliably achieved that dream than native-born Americans have.

It would seem to me that the phenomenon that needs more study here is what's keeping poor native-born families from doing as well -- but that's not what this study is about.

The researchers examined whether their findings merely showed that first generation immigrants, learning a new language and culture, simply could not make much money, so the successes of their children stood out in contrast to the fathers. And they looked at whether second generation immigrants looked successful because the U.S.-born poor cohort to which they were compared included a lot of African Americans who suffer from the historic wealth gap arising from their family history of being enslaved and subjected to discrimination. But the apparent advantages of immigrant children still appear in the data when Black peers are left out of the comparisons.

So what's going on? Way at the end of Badger's article she explains: new immigrants tend to settle or move to places in the United States where the economy is strong and opportunity is greater.

So what else might explain this pattern that is so consistent through history and across diverse immigrant groups? The researchers point to one other factor that we know influences a child’s economic mobility — where he lives. Both documented and undocumented immigrants have tended to cluster in common international ports of entry, in major cities, in communities where jobs are easier to find. The places they have moved to have frequently been the same places that have offered better economic mobility to everyone.

In their data, when the researchers compare the sons of immigrants with the sons of native-born fathers who grew up in the same county, the difference in their mobility rates largely vanishes. This suggests that what separates these immigrant and native-born groups isn’t necessarily some quality inherent in their culture or work ethic, but rather their decisions on where to live.

Looked at another way, immigrants embody the upward mobility more native-born families in poverty might experience if they were more able or willing to move. In this way, immigrants have one significant advantage U.S.-born families don’t. They’re not bound by generations of family ties or by the feeling they can’t leave a particular place, whether things are going well there or not.

My emphasis. Immigrants do what residents of this rich land have always done if they could. They go where the getting is good; they "head out for the territory." Movement of people for a better life has always been how this country worked.

Like a lot of privileged white people, I can say I did this myself, trading in declining Buffalo, New York roots for mid-20th century California.

What needs sympathetic study is why some people can't, don't, or won't participate in the great national ebb and flow for better lives....
Meet a second generation immigrant who has found her niche -- and should be able to keep it, despite Trump's ugly attempt to expel her.

They die trying ...

I still remember the shock I felt when I first learned that people died while trying to walk across the southwest deserts in order to enter the United States. I really had had no idea such a thing happened in this country. It was perhaps 1972; I researched the scant available accounts of migrant deaths and wrote the story up for the Catholic Worker.

Stephanie Leutert from the University of Texas at Austin has found a unique window on the story of deaths of migrants in the desert. She got access to the notebooks in which Brooks County Sheriff Urbino “Benny” Martinez keeps a record of every time his force finds a body or is called to remove a human skull. Leutert was unprepared for what she encountered:

Indeed, I was wholly unprepared for what [the 2018 Human Remains binder] contained, and the same was true of the similar binders stashed in a filing cabinet in a nearby room, one for each year starting in 2009. I hadn’t expected to see so many women in the case files—certainly not women who carried lipgloss, beaded bracelets and fanny packs. I hadn’t expected to see so many older crossers in their late 50s and 60s, people who were found with reading glasses and who had children and grandchildren already in the United States. I was not expecting so many people who had died trying to get back to families left in the United States.

I also hadn’t expected to be reading love letters, deportation papers and hospital notes found in pockets; looking at wedding rings on left hands and pictures of smiling partners and children tucked into wallets; or analyzing some of the more curious sentimental items that people carried with them, including a bag of pebbles and seashells, two signed baseballs, and a stuffed animal in the shape of a horse. Yet such details—and so many others—filled every page. ...

Leutert plans a series of articles about what she discovered ... I will be following.

U.S. actions have Central American consequences

Amilcar Perez Lopez traveled to San Francisco to work for his family's well-being; the boy from Guatemala kept his head down and was a "good worker" according to those who knew him. He found a neighborhood where there were many others like him; in the photo, the Mission community turned out to protest impunity for the SFPD officers who shot him in the back in 2015.

Erudite Partner argues that the current surge of migration from Central America that Donald Trump is using to stir up racist fears of "invasion" has been building for decades. In fragile states, corruption, and climate chaos have pushed people onto a terrible road."The US has driven Central Americans to flee," she explains:

There is indeed a real crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Hundreds of thousands of people like Amílcar are arriving there seeking refuge from dangers that were, to a significant degree, created by and are now being intensified by the United States. But Donald Trump would rather demonize desperate people than deploy the resources needed to attend to their claims in a timely way — or in any way at all.

It's time to recognize that the American way of life — our cars and comforts, our shrimp and coffee, our ignorance about our government's actions in our regional "backyard" — has created this crisis. It should be (but in the age of Trump won't be) our responsibility to solve it. ...

We broke these countries, we continue to break them, and we don't understand we own this.

A haunting border-crossing narrative

This short film follows the ordeal of a Honduran asylum-seeking family separated by Trump's border police -- and ultimately reunited in the U.S. onto a difficult path forward.

It is beautiful, contradicting the story it tells. I guess that is the story of our times.

I usually don't watch video content, but this is not to be missed.