Citizen Cartwright

Global migrants converge at U.S.-Mexico border

Some migrants streamed across the border and others gathered in makeshift camps as America’s pandemic-era Title 42 restrictions ended on Thursday, a milestone that officials worried could trigger a major new wave of migration that strains border facilities and cities across the country, The New York Times reports.

 

Title 42 was a holdover from the Trump administration and began in March 2020. The authority allowed U.S. officials to turn away migrants at the Southern border, on the grounds of preventing the spread of the coronavirus.

 

The Biden administration has put in place a series of new policies cracking down on illegal crossings and creating new legal pathways. Anybody seeking asylum who didn’t first seek protection in a country they traveled through, or first applied online, will be turned away.

 

U.S. officials plan to open 100 regional migration hubs across the Western Hemisphere, where people can seek placement in other nations, including Canada and Spain.

 

President Biden and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez are holding talks at the White House on Friday.

 

"It was a huge boon for the White House to get Spain and Canada to agree to take in asylum seekers from Latin America,” says The Associated Press. "And it helps reinforce the Biden administration’s argument that the current migration quandary facing the Americas is a global problem that needs a global solution.”

 

The United States increasingly has seen migrants arrive at its Southern border who are from China, Ukraine, Haiti, Russia and other nations far from Latin America, and who are increasingly family groups and children traveling alone, AP says. Thirty years ago, illegal crossings were almost always single adults from Mexico who were easily turned back over the border.

Spain, like many other nations globally, needs workers, and it will be able to choose migrants who have skills needed in the country, AP says. 

 

On Thursday, the House passed legislation that would restart border wall construction and restrict asylum. The vote was 219-213, with no Democrats supporting the bill and two Republicans voting against it.

Who’s going to take care of baby boomers as their health declines?

The staffing challenges that have plagued the healthcare industry for decades will worsen as aging baby boomers stretch the limits of long-term care services, says KHN.

 

The number of adults age 65 and older is expected to nearly double to 94.7 million by 2060, but the number of working-age adults is expected to increase by just 15 percent, according to an analysis of census data by PHI, a research and advocacy organization for older and disabled people that conducts workforce research.

 

Immigrants can play a crucial role in filling the gap, experts say. About 1 in 4 direct care workers currently are foreign-born.

 

"Immigration policies that aim to identify potential workers from overseas to fill long-term care job slots could help ease the strain,” says KHN. "But unlike other countries that face similar long-term care challenges, the U.S. generally hasn’t made attracting direct care workers from abroad a priority.”

 

Some long-term care experts say the United States can’t afford to wait to put policies in place to appeal to immigrants.

“We’re competing with the rest of the world, other countries that also want these workers,” says Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

Another NYTimes editorial on violent extremism in U.S.

Last month, I summarized the first two Times editorials in its series on the danger of extremist violence and possible solutions.

 

As you know, I run almost no media editorials in this blog. But this series contains content that seems to me worth our focus, and I want to summarize it as time permits. Let’s take a look at editorial three, which the Times published on Nov. 19.

 

"One missing piece of any solution is acknowledging that right-wing extremist violence in the United States is part of a global phenomenon and should be treated that way,” the Times says.

 

White supremacy has been part of the story of the United States since its earliest days, but the modern notion of replacement is a foreign import, says the Times. It was outlined in 2012 by Renaud Camus, a French author who's written that immigrants with high birthrates are a threat to white European society. 

 

The idea of a hostile replacement by immigrants has gained some acceptance around the world, even after inspiring mass killers in New Zealand and Buffalo, Norway and South Carolina. While extremists driven to murder are a tiny fraction of those who subscribe to racist ideologies, the mainstreaming of their ideas can make the turn to violence easier for some people, the Times says.

 

And that’s why it's alarming to see the great replacement idea espoused by political leaders around the globe, including Jordan Bardella, who's been confirmed as the successor to Marine Le Pen as head of France’s leading far-right party, says the Times. The idea been cited approvingly by Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary. Tucker Carlson of Fox News talks about it often.

 

A poll by The Associated Press-NORC this year found that about one in three American adults believes that “a group of people is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.” Last year a poll found that 61 percent of French people believe it, too.

 

While domestic law enforcement agencies in the United States have effective tools to target organized extremist groups, a pervasive problem is the political will to turn the power of the state against white supremacists, the Times says. Too often, extremism researchers say, there’s a reluctance in white-majority nations to see white extremists as threatening as nonwhite foreigners.

 

The United States is also newer to thinking about white extremism as a transnational problem, the Times says. 

 

The Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Extremism, released last year, needs more attention and urgency from lawmakers and the public, says the Times.

 

An approach tried in about a dozen countries around the world is de-radicalization programs, which encourage extremists to change their minds or at least reject violence. The U.S., German and British governments have had some success with de-radicalization programs aimed at white supremacists, the Times says.

 

One of the difficulties of the domestic effort against far-right and white supremacist extremists is that the government’s response has to try to avoid alienating people who believe in things like expansive gun rights or strict limits on immigration yet reject violence, the Times says. Often, they're the only credible messengers who can reach deeply radicalized people and talk them back from a more violent course.

 

Tech companies can and should invest more money and resources in content moderation, though that alone won't purge the internet of extremism — especially when the networks for sharing it cross international borders, span continents and come in countless languages, the Times says.

 

Yet “if lawmakers and ordinary Americans make a concerted effort to drive extremist rhetoric out of mainstream politics, the influence of these groups will again fade,” says the Times.

New way for Americans to help resettle refugees here

As the number of people forced to flee their homes has exceeded 100 million this year, for the first time, the Biden administration is asking organizations to team up with it to launch a pilot private-sponsorship program by the end of 2022.

 

President Biden pledged in a 2021 executive order to increase opportunities for Americans to resettle refugees and restore the United States as the world’s safe haven. The Trump administration had decimated the refugee program, which traditionally has tasked nine resettlement agencies with placing refugees in communities, says The Associated Press.

 

The Sponsor Circle Program, a community-led effort, has enabled Americans to welcome newcomers from Afghanistan and Ukraine.

 

Experts say the private sponsorship model could transform the way America resettles refugees and ensure the door stays open no matter who's elected.

“I think there is a real revolution right now that is happening in terms of American communities and communities around the world that are raising their hands and saying, `We want to bring in refugees,’” says Sasha Chanoff, founder and CEO of RefugePoint, a Boston–based nonprofit that's helped jumpstart the effort.

 

The pilot program will match regular Americans with refugees overseas who've already been approved for admission to the United States. Later, the plan will allow Americans to identify a refugee overseas and apply to resettle them, AP says.

AP: How Biden administration’s optimistic border plans turned to chaos

As he prepared to take office, Joe Biden recognized predictions that more migrants might come to the border, but he was firm that policies instituted by Donald Trump were cruel and inhumane and had to be jettisoned, says an Associated Press review of the past year.

And almost immediately after Biden's inauguration, the numbers of migrants exceeded expectations. Plans outlined in a December document to fully resume asylum processing at land crossings were quickly overtaken by events.

 

AP says its review of internal documents and interviews — with U.S. and Mexican officials, migrants, shelter managers, advocates and others — shows how an administration stacked with seasoned immigration advocates was unprepared for the huge increase in people seeking refuge at the border.

 

The Biden administration inherited an asylum system that's been broken for years and sorely tested Biden’s immediate predecessors.

 

In the summer of 2014, large numbers of unaccompanied children from Central America’s Northern Triangle countries — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — showed up along the Texas border in the Rio Grande Valley, a major demographic shift from predominantly Mexican men. That created what then-President Obama called a “humanitarian crisis” and left a deep impression on more enforcement-minded aides who went on to serve in the Biden administration. Spikes have occurred periodically since then, says AP.

Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras accounted for about two of every three border arrests, and people who came in families made up more than half in the federal 2019 fiscal year, both all-time highs. In a throwback to earlier times, encounters with single adults soared during Trump’s last year in office after the launch of Title 42 authority, which allowed migrants to be expelled without a chance to seek asylum on the basis of coronavirus, says AP. And they faced no legal consequences, encouraging repeat attempts.

 

As border crossings soared beyond expectations in June, there were internal rifts between advocacy- and more enforcement-minded aides, says AP.

 

The Biden administration also faced surprises such as the announcement of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas that it would no longer accept Central American families expelled from the United States. Tamaulipas borders most of South Texas, which is by far the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, according to AP. 

 

“Do not come,” Vice President Kamala Harris warned on a June visit to Guatemala, but migrants who kept coming spoke of the change in presidential administrations and stories from friends and relatives who were quickly released in the United States.

 

The United States has flown about 8,000 Haitian migrants to Haiti since Sept. 19, "one of its swiftest, large-scale expulsions of refugees or migrants in decades,” says AP. The mass expulsions, along with treatment of some migrants at the border, have led to sharp criticism of the Biden administration, even from fellow Democrats.

 

The Biden administration has yet to release detailed plans of the “humane” asylum system Biden promised during his campaign, AP says.

Cuts to Biden’s $3.5 trillion package starting to take shape

The president talked on Tuesday with 19 House and Senate lawmakers in separate meetings at the White House, including Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin, W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, Ariz., key opponents of the package’s price tag.

 

Likely to be eliminated or seriously cut back, according to The Associated Press: plans for tuition-free community college, a path to legal status for immigrants who are in the United States without documentation, and the Clean Energy Performance Plan that was the centerpiece of Biden’s strategy for fighting climate change. 

 

Bowing to an aggressive lobbying campaign by the banking industry and pushback from Republicans, Senate Democrats on Tuesday scaled back Biden's plan to pay for the package by having the Internal Revenue Service try to crack down on tax cheats, The New York Times reports.

 

As Democrats try to design a Medicare dental benefit, one idea calls for limiting it based on income, says a separate AP article. That so-called “means test” is drawing internal opposition from many Democratic lawmakers, as well as advocacy groups for older people, like AARP.

 

Biden focused in his Tuesday meetings on providing at least $500 billion in tax credits, grants and loans to combat climate change, much of it likely coming from a package compiled by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the chairman of the Finance Committee. Those include tax breaks for energy producers that reach emission-reduction goals.

That clean energy approach could better align with Manchin’s stated goal of keeping a “fuel neutral” approach to federal policy that doesn't favor renewable energy sources over coal and natural gas that are dominant in his state.

 

The Times notes that Manchin, chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, has received more campaign donations in the current election cycle from the oil, coal and gas industries than any other senator and owns stock valued at between $1 million and $5 million in Enersystems Inc., a coal brokerage firm he founded in 1988. Last year, Manchin made $491,949 in dividends from his Enersystems stock, according to his Senate financial disclosure report.

 

Biden reportedly wants lawmakers to reach an agreement on climate before he leaves for U.N. climate talks in Scotland at the end of the month.

 

Congress has set an Oct. 31 deadline for passage of the package, AP says.

America ends its longest war

The last planes took off from Kabul airport at one minute before midnight Kabul time on Monday.

 

Many words have been brandished in recent days for political purposes and by media needing clicks, and I don’t want to add more. Let’s for now just note the magnitude of what’s happened.

 

A war that began 20 years ago under President George W. Bush as a hunt for Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader who oversaw the 9/11 attacks on the United States, has cost more than 170,000 lives and more than $2 trillion, according to The New York Times.

 

Al Qaeda was driven out and Bin Laden was killed by an American SEAL team in Pakistan in 2011. America gave Afghans "a shot at democracy and freed many women to pursue education and careers,” as the Times puts it.

 

But now the United States has left Afghanistan to the same militants it swiftly drove from power in 2001.

 

As a member of this human family, it’s heart-rending to see Afghans' desperation and fear of what’s next, especially those who helped us and have been left behind.

 

And the desperation and fear of what’s next among those Afghans who did manage to get on a plane — sometimes separated from their loved ones in the chaos. Officials haven’t said whether all the Afghan evacuees who made it to the United States will be allowed to stay, according to The Washington Post.

Census data show U.S. is more diverse, that redistricting will be about the suburbs

Populations of people who identify as Hispanic and Asian have surged and the number of people who say they’re more than one race has more than doubled in the past decade, the Census Bureau reported on Thursday.

 

Overall population growth has slowed substantially over the past decade, and the growth that has taken place — an increase of about 23 million people — has been made up entirely of people who identify as Hispanic, Asian, Black and more than one race, according to the first racial and ethnic breakdown from the 2020 census.

The white population has decreased for the first time in history. The number of people who identify themselves as white on the census form has been decreasing as a share of the country’s population since the 1960s, when the United States lifted ethnic quotas aimed at keeping the country Northern and Western European.

That drop, 2.6 percent, has been in part a result of the aging of the white population — the median age was 44 in 2019, compared with 30 for Hispanics — and a long-running decline in the birthrate. Some social scientists theorize that another potential reason for the decrease is that more Americans who previously identified as white on the census form now are choosing more than one race.

The single biggest population increase has been among people who identify as more than one race, a category that first appeared on census forms 20 years ago and now is the fastest-growing racial and ethnic category.

People who identify as white now make up 58 percent of the population, down from 64 percent in 2010 and 69 percent in 2000.

“We are in a weird time demographically,” says Tomás Jiménez, a sociologist at Stanford University who writes about immigrants, assimilation and social mobility. “There’s more choice about our individual identities and how we present them than there has ever been. We can presume far less about who somebody is based on the boxes they check compared to previous periods.”

The jump in the multirace category is partly to do with the Census Bureau collecting more detailed data, Alba says, and analyzing answers more deeply. He says he believes that part of the decrease in the white population is people switching from the category of white to the category of more than one race.

“The census is doing a much better job at reflecting the growing complexity of the population,” he says. “They are really trying to acknowledge that the world is changing out there.”

Despite the slowdown in immigration at the end of the decade, the proportion of U.S. residents born in foreign countries still is at its highest level since the last big immigration wave around the turn of the 20th century.

While race may be socially constructed, the understanding of it has important political effects, says The New York Times. One change that's been politically resonant has been the shrinking share of the white population, with the right seeing the shift as a threat and the left celebrating it as a kind of demographic destiny in which growing numbers of people of color will vote for Democrats, the Times says.

 

Redistricting: 

 

The once-a-decade battle over redistricting that follows the census is set to be a showdown over the suburbs, as the new census data released Thursday show rapid growth around some of the nation’s largest cities and shrinking population in many rural counties, says The Associated Press.

 

From Texas to Florida, some of the biggest gains have come in states where Republicans will control the redistricting process, but often in and around cities where Democrats have been doing well in recent elections, says AP.

"But many Republicans and Democrats also will be trying to ensure the new lines divide and combine voters in ways that make it more likely for their party’s candidates to win future elections, a process called gerrymandering,” says AP. "The parties’ successes in that effort could determine whether taxes and spending grow, climate-change polices are approved or access to abortion is expanded or curtailed."

Texas had been among several states that needed advance approval from the federal Justice Department for its redistricting plans because of a history of racial discrimination. But the Supreme Court overturned that requirement in 2013 and, in a separate ruling in 2019, said it wouldn't get involved in disputes over alleged political gerrymandering, leaving that to state courts to decide. Lawsuits are expected to challenge redistricting efforts in many states.

Republicans will control redistricting in 20 states accounting for 187 U.S. House seats, including the growing states of Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.

 

Democrats will control redistricting in eight states accounting for 75 seats, including New York and Illinois, where the loss of a seat in each gives them a chance to squeeze out Republican incumbents.

After the 2010 census, Republicans who controlled redistricting in many more states than Democrats drew redistricting maps that gave them a greater political advantage in more states than either party had in the past 50 years, according to a new AP analysis.

But Republicans won’t have as much power as they did last time in some key states, says AP. Republican-led legislatures will be paired with Democratic governors in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which both had full Republican control after the 2010 census. In Michigan, a voter-approved citizens commission will be in charge of redistricting instead of lawmakers and the governor. And in Ohio, voter-approved redistricting overhauls will require majority Republicans to get the support of minority Democrats for the new districts to last a full decade.

Biden’s first formal news conference: migrants, voting, filibuster

After the president opened Thursday’s press conference with an update on coronavirus vaccinations, school reopenings and delivery of stimulus checks, not a single reporter asked him about the coronavirus or the economic recovery, notes longtime analyst Susan Page of USA Today, among many others.

 

“Perhaps it was a sign of his success on those fronts,” Page says.

 

Most of the questions were about the unaccompanied child migrants at the border. As my husband John Dineen, himself a skilled analyst, points out, many of those questions were “performative,” as media sought to create footage for their own purposes.

 

My husband also alerted me to this Washington Post opinion article by Julio Ricardo Varela, the editorial director of Futuro Media, calling out sensationalized reporting such as references to a “flood” or “surge” of migrants at the border.

 

Varela also has published an internal Associated Press memo on its effort to "consistently use accurate and neutral language in its coverage along with giving proper context to border numbers given the political rhetoric on the topic." 

 

Among responses to other questions, Biden said:

 

— GOP efforts in states to regulate voter access are "un-American" and "despicable."

 

— He favors a return to the requirement that a senator keep talking to maintain a filibuster and that he'll consider other options as necessary to getting things done.

 

— American troops probably won’t be out of Afghanistan by former President Trump’s May 1 deadline, but he said he couldn’t picture that troops would be there next year.

 

— He expects to run for a second term, with Vice President Harris on the ticket.

 

Here is a fact check, from AP.

 

Here is a transcript of the press conference, from the White House.

Big win for Dreamers in Supreme Court

The court on Thursday dealt President Trump a major setback on his hardline immigration policies, blocking his bid to end a program that protects from deportation hundreds of thousands of immigrants — often called “Dreamers” — who entered the United States illegally as children, says long-time Reuters reporter on the court Lawrence Hurley.

 

The 5-4 ruling, with conservative Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court’s four liberals, upheld lower court decisions that found that Trump’s 2017 move to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, created in 2012 by his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, was unlawful.

 

The ruling means that the roughly 649,000 immigrants, mostly young Hispanic adults born in Mexico and other Latin American countries, currently enrolled in DACA will continue to be protected from deportation and will be eligible to get renewable two-year work permits.

 

The ruling is the second time in a year that Trump has lost a major case because Roberts faulted his administration for sloppiness in the policymaking process, Hurley says in a separate Reuters article.

 

Roberts’ opinion for the court said: "We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies. The wisdom of those decisions is none of our concern. Here we address only whether the administration complied with the procedural requirements in the law that insist on 'a reasoned explanation for its action.’”

 

Roberts wrote that the administration’s actions in crafting the immigration policy were “arbitrary and capricious” under a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act.

 

"At the end of the day, the man of the hour is Chief Justice Roberts,” says Nina Totenberg, a long-time reporter on the court for NPR. "Amid a politicized and polarized society, he has repeatedly tried to portray the court as apolitical. He sees the growth of organizations on the hard right like the Judicial Crisis Network, and on the hard left like Demand Justice, each trying to stack the court with like-minded justices or pack the court by expanding the number of justices."

"What these decisions underscore is we have a chief justice who's plainly working hard to demonstrate to the American people that the court, unlike the other two branches, is doing its job and doing its best,” says Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus, who's known Roberts for decades. "He wants the American people to believe there is a thing called law and justice. His job is to apply it.”

 

Politically, Thursday's decision played out as expected, with anti-immigration groups condemning the ruling and DACA recipients jubilant and relieved, says Totenberg.

But aside from Trump, lots of Republicans are relieved as well, she says. If the decision had gone the other way, the pressure on congressional Republicans to pass legislation protecting the Dreamers would have been intense.