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🟥Late November: During the last week of the month, I’m at work for two meeting and deadline-filled days, then taking three days with family for the Thanksgiving holiday. I am hard to reach, and replies may be delayed.
The very rough seven months between George Floyd and January 6 were the endpoint of the last Trump administration. But they are the starting point of the next one. The danger, especially for U.S. civil-military relations, is hard to understate.
Things had been chaotic since January 2017, but Donald Trump’s first administration took a sharply darker turn during and after the June 2020 George Floyd / Black Lives Matter protests, all the way to the January 6 Capitol riots.
The Department of Homeland Security had already been captured by Trump loyalists who specifically sought to deter migration through cruelty, most notably during the 2017-2018 family separation crisis. Then, as people took to the streets to protest police killings of Black Americans, the Trump White House sought to involve the U.S. armed forces in internal, politicized missions with few modern historical precedents.
Mercifully, the story ended there: Trump lost the elections five months later, and was dislodged two months after that.
Those very rough seven months were the endpoint of the last Trump administration. But they are the starting point of the next one. The danger, especially for U.S. civil-military relations, is hard to understate.
It was during those last seven and a half months of Trump’s term that the guardrails came down and destructive people gained positions of real power. The generals who had served as brakes on Trump’s wildest urges—McMaster, Mattis, Kelly—were long gone, and Trump was musing about having soldiers shoot protesters in the legs. Things got so bad by the end that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff took it upon himself to call his Chinese counterparts to reassure them that nothing destructively reckless was about to happen.
Soldiers got sent out to clear protesters from part of Lafayette Square, by the White House, so that Trump could have his photo taken with a Bible. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley later apologized for accompanying Trump on that stunt.
Acting DHS officials deployed Border Patrol agents and other federal law enforcement officers to the streets of interior cities like Washington and Portland to confront protesters. In Portland, the confrontations were frequent and violent.
Little-known Trump loyalists like Ezra Cohen and Kash Patel, keeping close watch on acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, gained effective control of the Pentagon.
Nobody called out the National Guard in time to respond to the January 6 insurrection.
Nearly all of the president-elect’s appointments since Election Day make clear that he wants to pick up exactly where he left off during those final, terrible months.
The United States might scrape by as a democratic republic after four years like January 2017-May 2020. But four years like June 2020-January 2021? That would be extinction-level.
We need institutions to guard against that, if they’re even able. Especially the U.S. armed forces, which have a long tradition of resisting any alignment with a political party or leader. But it’s a tradition: the president is the commander in chief, and though it may take a couple of years to pack the high command with pro-MAGA generals and colonels, it’s not impossible to politicize them.
For me, the Harris-Walz campaign lost when it succumbed to tight message control and scripting, which included chucking the border and immigration rights community fully under the bus.
Scripted is the kiss of death in modern presidential politics. The vibes and poll numbers for Harris were best preceding and, in the run-up to the Democratic National Convention, when she and Tim Walz were winging it on messaging and more willing to go off script. No matter what the polls and focus groups may have suggested, “They’re weird” worked better than stumping with Liz Cheney. Trump ran a campaign with almost no discipline, but it didn’t cost him anything. The more disciplined Harris became, the more she struggled. The more carefully Harris sought moderate Republican votes, the less buzz she seemed to receive.
Yes: this nails it. During those heady pre-Convention weeks, before the pricey consultants’ message-massaging took over, I wrote that for those of us fearing what Trump represents, the candidates’ tone offered a chance, finally, to feel “no longer on our own and undefended.”
The best thing about this new tone and energy is the feeling that, at least for now, we’re not on our own anymore. Someone—even if it’s with the same consultants who were writing timidly for Biden before, now unleashed—is finally sticking up for us.
By Labor Day, the Harris-Walz campaign’s pugnacious, crackling-with-edgy-energy messaging was gone. It got washed away by gauzy, vague “moving forward to the future” language and appeals to Dick Cheney-loving border hawks who, except for a narrow educated fringe worried about democracy, were always going to vote for the real version of Trump instead of the “lite” version.
Remember that cool video, shot days after Walz got chosen, of the two candidates just shooting the sh*t, talking about their musical preferences and their backgrounds sticking up for working-class and vulnerable people? It was great! But for some reason, that video, and any similar messaging, got totally memory-holed.
I’ll say it: by October, I felt alone and undefended again. And the candidates’ rejection of the human rights priorities I advocate on border and immigration policy—priorities that much of the Democratic Party shares—personally stung.
Nobody likes being thrown under the bus by should-be allies for advocating what they know is right, for trying to protect vulnerable people. But you know what feels worse? Being thrown under the bus for that in the name of a strategy that utterly failed anyway. I don’t recommend this feeling. It feels f***ing bad.
That’s it. I’m done with recriminations and finger-pointing, they’re not productive. We need to build, we need to be constructive.
I just need to scream out my rage this one time, because I don’t want to see this ever happen again.
People who work with migrants are scared and dejected. Helpers don't deserve this.
If the fascism playbook calls for scapegoating a vulnerable minority, it also means heaping scorn and derision—or worse—on people who serve and defend that vulnerable minority.
I’ve had lots of conversations this week, both one on one and in coalition, with people assisting the migrant population that Donald Trump calls “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” I’ll have more conversations today.
They’re not doing well, and they’re preparing for retrenchment.
Shelter operators, pro bono attorneys, and rights defenders, at the U.S.-Mexico border and elsewhere, are bracing for the scale of suffering they’re about to see, and desolate about their limited power to do anything about it.
They’re also worried about themselves: Will they be able to operate? Will they be fending off legal challenges? Will their communications and relationships be subject to surveillance? Is their personal safety at stake, threatened by both aggressive security personnel and self-styled vigilantes?
They also feel alone and undefended. And that’s with good reason.
Will anyone in the political establishment defend them? An important sector of the Democratic Party absolutely will defend them, and defend the rights of immigrants in general. But will a majority of the Democratic Party step up? The Party that just spent an election season triangulating itself away from the migrant rights’ defense community and tacking rightward (with absolutely nothing to show for it)?
Will traditional legacy media step up, after hedging their endorsements and issuing incessant “Trump Pursues Ambitious Immigration Agenda” headlines?
It’s really not clear.
Helpers don’t deserve to be made to feel like this. If you know someone who does this work, please send them a message today and let them know you appreciate them and that you’ll stick up for them. They need it now, and they’re really going to need it soon.
After the 2024 election result, you may have made a list of things you'd like to do ahead of January 20 to brace yourself. Here's mine.
Here’s some unsolicited advice for how to go about daily life between now and January 20. You may have drawn up a list of your own today. If not, you may feel better after taking a moment to do so.
I’m absolutely not doing all of these things, though I’d like to start many of them.
Resist the urge to post “outrage” takes on social media. Daniel Hunter calls that “public angsting,” adding, “It’s demoralizing us. It’s hurting our capacity for action.” Maybe read more instead. Or better yet, spend the time writing or creating something more thoughtful, something that adds value and context, requiring more “emotional labor” than a hot take. At the very least, say, a blog post at a space you own. Then, when that’s done, go to social media and link to it.
Get off of Elon Musk’s Twitter. And look at Meta’s properties with skepticism, too. The ideal would be Mastodon—decentralized and immune from corporate takeovers, you can even own your own virtual managed server for not too much money, which I do. But very few people are there. More are on BlueSky, which is also run by a corporation that could change its behavior anytime, but at least for now it feels like “old Twitter.” The fact is, if you do communications, you still need a Twitter and Meta presence because so many audiences are still there: even though those audiences probably hate it, “network lock-in” is real. I’m limiting my own Twitter presence to posting links to items hosted elsewhere, and the very occasional quote-tweet. No original content.
Read a lot. Read about the civil-rights era struggles that led to the social gains that this administration threatens to dismantle. Read about anti-authoritarian struggles worldwide. Read about what has worked. Read guides from people who have advised social movements, from Gene Sharp and Saul Alinsky to Srdja Popovic and adrienne maree brown, among many others. See also science fiction, from Octavia Butler to Cory Doctorow and many, many others.
Learn best practices for interacting with aggressive security personnel. Know your rights regarding what you are and are absolutely not required to say and what you are not required to allow to be searched. Also, learn best practices for dealing with violent people and people who threaten others. Learn at least some basics of de-escalation and self-defense.
Make more time for neighbors and co-workers as well as for family and friends. When you do, listen more than you talk.
Turn up your computer’s security settings, even if they’re less convenient. Ditch spying browsers like Chrome. Change passwords. Use a password manager if you don’t already. Cancel accounts for digital services you don’t use. Delete little-used apps that may be leaking location and other data. Consider using a VPN. Encrypt all of your drives and devices. Add more digits to the PIN you use to unlock your phone. Look at more secure communications services like Signal and ProtonMail. Read more tips from the EFF. If your security needs are extreme, use a locked-down Linux distribution like Debian with privacy enhancements, Fedora with security modules, or even Qubes OS.
Be gentler on yourself. Sleep 8 hours. Get exercise, but don’t overtrain; in fact, don’t even “train,” just take it slow, but get outside and see the sky. Cut back on—but don’t necessarily cut out completely—items that dull your alertness or weaken your body’s ability to deal with stress, such as booze, caffeine, drugs, refined sugars and carbohydrates, processed foods, and animal products.
Be kind. Even to people who don’t seem to deserve it. Just err on the side of kindness. Lots of folks aren’t doing well right now.
Working through my 2024 election anxiety with a look at the early vote in a few states.
Ahead of Tuesday’s election, most states have early voting. A few states report the party registrations of those who vote early.
Even though this is almost certainly not a useful indicator of the final result, I have a spreadsheet of those states. (If you click on that link, choose “USE TEMPLATE” at the top, which makes your own copy so you can change the orange numbers yourself, which are my assumptions about how each party’s voters might actually vote).
OK, let’s assume that 96 percent of Democratic-registered early voters chose Harris, and 2 percent of all voters chose third parties. What would Harris need in these states to get over 50% of the early vote so far?
(As of 3:20 PM Eastern on November 1)
Alaska: 8,962 more Republicans than Democrats have voted (15%). To get over 50%, Harris would need:
25% of Rs plus 50% of independents, or
18% of Rs plus 55% of independents, or
8% of Rs plus 62% of independents, or
4% of Rs plus 65% of independents.
Seems barely attainable, probably out of reach, for Harris.
Arizona: 175,951 more Republicans than Democrats have voted (8.1%). To get over 50%, Harris would need:
One way to work through electoral anxiety is by doing useless math.
Here’s a sheet generating predictions from the latest early vote numbers from some key states that report party affiliation.
This is meaningless—early vote may not reflect anything—and is based on gut assumptions (the orange numbers). But maybe it can distract you for a while? And either way, it shows how critical it will be to keep knocking doors and getting voters off of their sofas over the next nine days.
Here’s the Google sheet: click on “USE TEMPLATE” at the top, and change the orange numbers yourself.
This one is about a certain presidential candidate’s proposal for “Mass Deportation.”
That would require a domestic use of the US military that obliterates historic democratic norms. If a Latin American nation were to do similar, we’d call it a danger to civil-military relations and evidence of democratic backsliding.
In 2024, appropriations to FEMA's Shelter and Services Program, which prevents migrants from being dumped on U.S. streets upon release, totaled less than 2 percent of appropriations to FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund.
Donald Trump and others are pushing a completely false story that response to Hurricane Helene has been hobbled because the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has had funds “stolen” to help shelter migrants recently released from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody at the border.
As many have pointed out, there is exactly zero truth to this. But even if that happened, it wouldn’t have amounted to much. In 2024, appropriations to FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which prevents migrants from being dumped on U.S. streets upon release, totaled less than 2 percent of appropriations to FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund.
I’m personally pleased by the choice of Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’s running mate. In a July 27 post, I wrote about Democrats’ need to stop triangulating and calibrating, and to stand up aggressively for core values when they’re under threat as never before in our lifetimes. Walz will do that.
But how is he on human rights and democracy in Latin America?
The record is thin: this is not Tim Walz’s domain. As governor of Minnesota, his most pressing foreign policy concern has probably been relations with Ontario and Manitoba. Before that, during 12 years in the House of Representatives, Walz did not serve on committees with foreign policy responsibilities.
However, we can get a sense from the legislation he voted for and co-sponsored. And here, the outlook is very good for his view of human rights and democracy in the Americas.
Due to labor rights concerns, Walz was a “no” vote on free-trade deals with Colombia (2011) and Peru (2007).
On human rights and democracy, Walz was one of 51 co-sponsors of a 2009 resolution condemning the military coup in Honduras, and one of 103 co-sponsors of the Latin America Military Training Review Act, a bill spearheaded by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) in 2009.
As a representative of a farm district, Walz supported opening economic relations with Cuba, a market for agricultural products. The Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect notes that he voted in the Agriculture Committee for a 2010 bill that would have ended travel restrictions and allowed direct farm sales to the island. He was one of 32 co-sponsors, in 2015, of the “Free Trade With Cuba Act”—a misnomer, as it eased the embargo on Cuba but was far from a free trade deal.
On immigration, both in the House and as a governor Walz has adopted standard liberal positions without making it a signature issue. In 2018, at the lowest point of the Trump administration’s family separations policy, he was one of 195 House members who co-sponsored the “Keep Families Together Act.”
In 2015 he supported legislation backing stricter screening of refugees, but the New York Timesreported that he has since changed this position. In 2008, following a visit to El Paso, he called “on Congress to increase funding for more Border Patrol agents, security cameras, technology and K-9 training,” MPR Newsreported; these are also common positions among Democratic legislators.
All in all, Walz has a solid record on Latin American human rights and democracy issues, though not one of leadership or deep engagement.
Note the shift in tone here from the Biden campaign verbiage on the left to the Harris campaign statement on the right.
The messaging is way sharper. It is also coming more frequently, with rapid-fire, in-the-moment responses to whatever Trump and Vance are saying. They’re not letting dangerous nonsense go unresponded-to, and they’re willing to use plain, aggressive language that probes the Trump-Vance campaign’s weaknesses.
Many atop the Democratic Party hierarchy (probably including an ex-president who delayed endorsing Kamala Harris for days) may now be tenting their fingers and intoning “this is inappropriate to the dignity of the office and the need to reach across the aisle” or whatever.
I disagree. I’m here for this. As one of millions alarmed by the threat to rights and institutions that Donald Trump and his movement represent, I’m very tired of feeling undefended by the cautious, triangulating current that dominates the Democratic Party, especially in the Senate and at the presidential level.
The key word for me is “undefended.” As the MAGA onslaught has worsened this year, the feeling that “nobody is sticking up for us” has been a daily source of dread and stress.
The party and the President were exuding centrism and competence, yes, but also a sense of slowness, constant calibration, and fear of seeming off-putting to imagined swing voters. The result was tired, infrequent, and often boring responses to Trumpist outrages and even occasional embraces (with asylum-seekers at the border, for instance) of “Trump-lite” policies.
The implicit message to people scared for the future of our democracy has been “you’re on your own: the hard work of defense is up to you.” That’s a terrible feeling.
And yes, civil society often is on its own. That’s why it exists: because democratic institutions and parties often do get captured or gridlocked, and people have to organize in order to have their demands listened to, channeled, and met.
But with Trump and the extreme right appearing (until a week ago) to be cruising toward a coronation, the “you’re on your own” feeling was suffocating.
The worst moment was the June 27 debate. President Biden was on the same stage as Donald Trump, the defender of January 6 and the executioner of Roe v. Wade, as Trump spouted a torrent of lies. And Biden failed to respond. He utterly, devastatingly failed. This may have been for reasons of infirmity, but the fact remained: we were on our own.
The best thing about this new tone and energy is the feeling that, at least for now, we’re not on our own anymore. Someone—even if it’s with the same consultants who were writing timidly for Biden before, now unleashed—is finally sticking up for us.
It’s a great start, and I think it explains the surge of energy that we’ve seen over the past few days.
Promising to continue Biden-era asylum restrictions may make short-term electoral sense, but a better answer would commit to fixing the asylum system to guarantee due process while making those restrictions unnecessary.
Kamala Harris’s campaign manager told CBS News that the candidate will continue Joe Biden’s administration’s 2023 and 2024 bans on access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“I think at this point, you know, the policies that are, you know, having a real impact on ensuring that we have security and order at our border are policies that will continue,” Chávez Rodríguez responded.
Chávez Rodríguez’s comments inside a restaurant in Tucson, Arizona are the first indication that U.S. border policy may not change significantly if Harris succeeds Mr. Biden as president, despite pressure from progressive activists angry with the Biden administration’s pivot on asylum.
It’s unrealistic to expect a Vice President to break publicly with the President just days after he abandoned his campaign. It also makes tactical sense to send an “order at the border” message on an issue that polls show is a likely vulnerability for the Harris campaign.
Still, it would be far better for Chávez Rodríguez and other surrogates to follow up with something along the lines of: “…and we will fund and expand the U.S. asylum system so that it can hand down fair decisions with due process, in a matter of months instead of years, which will make these asylum restrictions unnecessary.”
Funding and expanding asylum processing and adjudication doesn’t require passage of new laws. It just requires some modest shifts in allocations in the annual Homeland Security budget appropriation.
Instead of proposing fixes to the badly broken asylum system, though, Chávez Rodríguez shifted to a longtime Biden and centrist Democrat talking point.
“We know at the end of the day the only way to really modernize our immigration system and secure our border is for Congress to pass common-sense immigration legislation,” Chávez Rodríguez added.
While this is true, immigration reform is not going to happen soon—not as long as you’ve got a near-50-50 Senate and the filibuster still in place. So this is “just empty words” at best, or “shifting blame elsewhere” at worst. Neither motivates voters. The campaign will need to do better.
I've been reading a lot of Wendell Berry's and Barbara Kingsolver's views of Appalachia, which sharpened my personal disdain for J.D. Vance.
(As with everything I post here without mentioning WOLA, this is my personal view expressed while writing at home and not during work hours. It does not necessarily reflect my organization’s point of view.)
Political writers are devoting a lot of pixels right now to J.D. Vance’s opportunism, digging into how his ambitions led him to ditch his former views and fully embrace white rage and Trumpism, riding that wave to the Republican vice presidential nomination.
Beyond that, I’m more concerned with a position that Vance hasn’t changed, but has only intensified: whose side he is on in the region he calls home, one of the poorest corners of America.
My view is colored by some reading I did over my two-month work sabbatical, which ends in a few days. More by circumstance than design, I dug into the work of two authors who come from Appalachia, not far from where Vance’s branch of his family lived before they moved to Ohio.
For many Americans—and to some degree for Vance, whose memoir Hillbilly Elegy I read in 2017—the mountainous, deeply rural, coal-and-tobacco region stretching from north Georgia into Pennsylvania is notable for high unemployment, family breakdown, drug addiction, and severe environmental degradation. Popular culture often ridicules its residents as “rednecks” or “hillbillies.”
The essays of Wendell Berry, the 90-year-old farmer and author from Port Royal, Kentucky, lament this condition, but place the blame far away. In his collected essays, which I re-read over my break (don’t miss the audiobook read by Nick Offerman), Berry’s Appalachia is a colony of the United States’ more prosperous areas, especially its cosmopolitan cities and big corporations.
[O]ur once-beautiful and bountiful countryside has long been a colony of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense wealth of energy and raw materials at an immense cost to our land and our land’s people. Because of that failure also, our towns and cities have been gutted by the likes of Wal-Mart, which have had the permitted luxury of destroying locally owned small businesses by means of volume discounts.
…At present, in fact, both the nation and the national economy are living at the expense of localities and local communities – as all small-town and country people have reason to know. In rural America, which is in many ways a colony of what the government and the corporations think of as the nation, most of us have experienced the losses that I have been talking about: the departure of young people, of soil and other so-called natural resources, and of local memory. We feel ourselves crowded more and more into a dimensionless present, in which the past is forgotten and the future, even in our most optimistic ‘projections,’ is forbidding and fearful. Who can desire a future that is determined entirely by the purposes of the most wealthy and the most powerful, and by the capacities of machines?
A blighted area stripped clean of its natural assets, where a small-farmer economy is no longer viable, and from where people need to migrate elsewhere, to cities? That sounds like many regions I’ve known during my work in Latin America, where levels of economic inequality still generally exceed those in the United States, but by less than they used to. One could switch out “campesino” for “farmer” in much of Wendell Berry’s writing, and the argument would be identical. From a 2017 New York Review of Booksessay:
Rural America is a colony, and its economy is a colonial economy. The business of America has been largely and without apology the plundering of rural America, from which everything of value—minerals, timber, farm animals, farm crops, and “labor”—has been taken at the lowest possible price. As apparently none of the enlightened ones has seen in flying over or bypassing on the interstate highways, its too-large fields are toxic and eroding, its streams and rivers poisoned, its forests mangled, its towns dying or dead along with their locally owned small businesses, its children leaving after high school and not coming back. Too many of the children are not working at anything, too many are transfixed by the various screens, too many are on drugs, too many are dying.
…The rural small owners sentenced to dispensability in the 1950s are the grandparents of the “blue-collar workers” of rural America who now feel themselves to be under the same sentence, and with reason.
I also read a work of fiction set in Lee County, the westernmost county in Virginia: Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and I recommended it unreservedly.
Kingsolver, who lives in that area, reminds us that while the people of Appalachia seem defeated now, it was not always so. Two centuries ago, the population of these areas of rural Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Georgia were smallholding farmers. Few owned slaves, and many supported the Union in the Civil War against their states’ plantation owners.
Their farms struggled to get beyond subsistence, then were bought up by coal barons (and much of the Black population migrated north, to industrial centers). They carried out some of the most militant union organizing in U.S. history to improve conditions in the coal mines.
“Men calling a strike, the company calling in the army to force them back to work, the miners saying guess what, we’ve got guns too. Serious shit. Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandannas. Redneck is badass.
…Anyway, it was all in the past, nobody in class had parents working in the mines now. We’d heard all our lives about the layoffs. The companies swapped out humans for machines in every job: deep-hole mines went to strip mines, then to blowing the heads off whole mountains, with machines to pick up the pieces. ”
The labor struggle cost many lives but earned some important gains in living standards—until mechanization, market forces, and captured politicians (of both parties) caused coal labor demand to dry up. Governments under-funded basic services, schools were not competitive enough to prepare students for a life of something better than coal mining. Then, in this century, came prescription opioids, ushered in by pharmaceutical companies’ lies, and then heroin and fentanyl.
Kingsolver, like Berry, paints a portrait of communities devastated by outside political and economic forces.
“Wouldn’t you think,” he [the main character’s teacher] asked us, “the miners wanted a different life for their kids? After all the stories you’ve heard? Don’t you think the mine companies knew that?”
What the companies did, he told us, was put the shuthole on any choice other than going into the mines. Not just here, also in Buchanan, Tazewell, all of eastern Kentucky, these counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned. Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn.
Kingsolver’s lament about the state of the region closely echoes Berry’s:
“Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There’s no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.”
This brings us back to J.D. Vance. Hillbilly Elegy notes the same misery, but blames the people themselves, especially their “culture,” instead of predatory outside forces. Instead of corporations, globalization, and government siding with the economic winners and discarding the losers, Vance’s book blames government welfare programs for creating a culture of dependence and “laziness.”
We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs. Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last. We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.
…As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”
Why would people vote for a politician who, like Vance, believes that they are lazy and that they only have themselves to blame for their problems? Because, the book explains, even the region’s most shiftless laggards insist that they have a strong work ethic.
People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown [Ohio, where Vance grew up, a town featured in Dreamland, Sam Quiñones’s study of the opioid epidemic]. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness. … Of course, the reasons poor people aren’t working as much as others are complicated, and it’s too easy to blame the problem on laziness. For many, part-time work is all they have access to, because the Armcos of the world are going out of business and their skill sets don’t fit well in the modern economy. But whatever the reasons, the rhetoric of hard work conflicts with the reality on the ground.
While Vance passingly refers to economic realities besetting the region, he insists that its residents, and their culture, are more to blame: “It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.”
J.D. Vance became a corporate lawyer who worked in Silicon Valley venture capital, getting to know donors like hard-right billionaire Peter Thiel. He published his memoir and, despite once being a harsh Trump critic, ran for Senate as one of the most unabashedly pro-Trump candidates of the 2022 election cycle. In so doing, he cast his lot with the coal barons, agribusiness enterprises, and corporations that, Berry and Kingsolver forcefully argue, have done such harm to Appalachia’s beleaguered population.
Appalachia’s rural population, though, has voted overwhelmingly for Vance and Trump—not for people who, like Berry or Kingsolver, lean leftward. Even though they enable pollution, oppose wage hikes, under-invest in education, and de-prioritize access to drug treatment, pro-big-business conservatives win by huge margins in the region today.
They do so, usually, by whipping up anger about social issues like immigration, religion, and culture-war rage, often by repeating utter lies including about the 2020 election result. J.D. Vance’s 2022 campaign was a master class in this.
Reading what Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, and others have written about the damage done to Appalachia makes J.D. Vance’s political success one of the most extreme existing cases of “the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.” It’s a cycle that the Democratic Party is far from figuring out how to break.
A big part of the blame lies with the Democrats themselves. When I was young, this region voted solidly Democratic, a legacy of the New Deal era when the federal government invested in infrastructure and jobs, and supported labor unions. That investment and labor support ebbed badly during the past 50 years, as leading Democrats turned away from the region’s population, in some cases even embracing business elites just as Republicans have. From Bill Clinton to Joe Manchin, Democratic politicians have backed big energy companies and advanced free-trade deals and farm policies that harmed small producers.
That opened up a political space that opportunists like J.D. Vance leapt into. And now, like impoverished Colombian campesinos who back the large landowner-aligned candidate promising the harshest security crackdown, the colonized line up behind their most outspoken colonizers.
It’s going to take a lot of work, and a long look in the mirror, to break out of this.
(I think I wrote this in a way to make clear that I don’t want the Biden administration, under any circumstances, to harm asylum seekers’ right to due process and protection at the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead of appealing to morality, however, this post instead emphasizes cold, strategic calculation. Its tone errs on the side of cynicism.)
Imagine that you’re a political operative in the Biden administration or at the Biden campaign. You believe that the stakes are as high as they could be in 2024, as your insurrection-backing, authoritarian-trending, ethically challenged opponent enjoys a slight lead in most polls.
You want the migration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border to be as far off the national radar as possible. That means no chaotic images of mass migrant arrivals seeping into any “mainstream” media outlets (that is, all media to the left of Rupert Murdoch’s properties). No screaming “border crisis” headlines, no big-city mayors going off-message.
You know there’s no way to “solve” the broken U.S. border management, immigration, and asylum systems in the five-plus months that remain until Election Day. You also know that any policy change that toughens conditions for migrants at the border usually brings a short-term reduction in their numbers, even if it doesn’t last for very long. (We call this “wait and see mode”: migrants and smugglers hold back for a while to see what the new policy’s consequences will be, and then numbers recover.)
With others in the presidential brain trust, you have been preparing a measure that would refuse asylum access to people at the border, moving to deport them quickly. This measure would get triggered not by asylum seekers’ protection needs, but by how busy the border happens to be. It would shut down the right to asylum whenever the number of migrants arriving at the border exceeds a certain daily average.
That measure appears in legislation that failed in the Senate in February, and that is being reintroduced—and likely to fail again—this week. An asylum “shutdown” is also likely to be at the heart of a legally dubious executive order that the White House is getting ready to issue.
Perhaps you lament rolling back gravely threatened people’s right to petition for asylum on U.S. soil. (That’s a right that emerged after World War II, has been a U.S. international law commitment since 1968, and has been part of U.S. law since 1980.) You know you’re watering down this right, turning the humanitarian clock backward, and perhaps condemning thousands to possible death, torture, or imprisonment.
But perhaps you justify that, somehow, by telling yourself that you’re “saving democracy.” By pushing the migration numbers down for a few months, you reduce the salience of the border issue, one of the Trump campaign’s main themes, thus weakening the former president’s prospects for a re-election that could be catastrophic for the American experiment.
But then, so far this year, something unexpected has happened: migration at the border has declined even without harming asylum. The number of Border Patrol apprehensions lately is half of what it was during the record-setting month of December 2023. There has been no normal springtime increase. March was less than February, April was less than March, and the number of new arrivals seems to be dropping, too, in May.
The main reason appears to be a migration crackdown inside Mexico. Mexican authorities report stopping about 120,000 people per month, way more than they ever had before. (Mexico is also in the midst of a presidential election, with voting on June 2, a week from Sunday.)
This is causing enormous hardship for people stranded in Mexico, but as a hard-boiled political operative, that doesn’t concern you. What counts is that migrants are solidly in “wait and see mode” for now. Your campaign is enjoying a relative lull in media coverage and public consciousness of the border situation.
Maybe you won’t view it as politically necessary to eviscerate the right to asylum after all. Or, at least, not until cracks begin to show in the virtual wall that Mexico has built. No cracks are yet visible: May numbers are dropping at the U.S.-Mexico border, and also further south in the Darién Gap.
Even by your amoral political calculations, then, it makes no sense to drop an asylum-curtailing executive order right now. Do it too soon, and migrants’ “wait and see” period could fade before November, risking sharp migration increases at the border in the weeks and months leading up to Election Day.
If you share this view, though, then you’re not getting through to your colleagues. According to Politico, the White House is likely to drop the executive order in June.
A June announcement would likely come after Mexico’s election on June 2, half a dozen people familiar with the timeline told West Wing Playbook. It would also allow the White House to roll out the policy before election season really heats up and before the conventions later this summer. The current timeline will also put the president on track to announce the executive action before his debate with Trump at the end of the month.
That makes no sense. If your goal is to keep migration down before Election Day, here is a likely scenario for how this might play out—and it’s not what you’d want:
The June announcement of an executive order causes migration to drop further from levels that, apparently due to Mexico’s crackdown, were already among the lowest of the Biden administration.
The effect is that migration remains low throughout the summer.
But soon enough, migrants and smugglers discern that many asylum seekers can still be released into the U.S. interior. For instance:
So far this fiscal year, one-third of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol came from countries that (a) are not in Mexico and Central America, and (b) are not Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, or Venezuela, the four states whose citizens Mexico has agreed to accept as deportees under the Biden administration’s post-Title 42 “asylum ban” rule.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) runs about 30 deportation flights per month to those countries, which means ICE’s aerial deportation capacity there is perhaps 4,000 people per month. But about 55,000 people per month from those countries have entered Border Patrol custody this year. These countries’ citizens’ probability of removal is quite slim, even with the executive order in place.
As has happened with so many previous short-term policy changes—most prominently Title 42—migration levels start rising, as the “wait and see” period eases. This could happen by early fall, just in time for the most intense period of the election campaign.
That’s why the possibility of a June executive order is perplexing, even from a cold, amoral, ends-justify-the-means political operative’s perspective. Why drop a nuclear bomb on the right to asylum when the migration numbers are already down, and when the effect on border arrivals is not likely to last long?
(My main problem with this piece’s argument is that it appears to green-light issuing an asylum-eviscerating executive order not in June, but later in the election cycle, should an increase in migration occur at that point. The only response is a grim one: if migrant arrivals do indeed start moving upward in the summer or early fall, a White House crackdown would be inevitable. The administration would be certain to take a drastic step to knock the numbers down ahead of Election Day.
In that miserable scenario, it would at least be less awful to see the administration drop its “asylum shutdown” executive order—which until then had been sitting, unreleased, on a White House hard drive—instead of adopting some new, even more harmful escalation on top of an executive order in place since June.)
Four months into 2024, migration at the U.S.-Mexico border remains at some of the lowest levels of the Biden administration. And the phenomenon is not limited to Greg Abbott's Texas.
Of Joe Biden’s 39 full months in office, 2024 so far has seen the months with the third, fourth, eighth, and ninth fewest migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border. April was fourth-fewest.
This was unexpected, since it immediately followed some of the Biden administration’s heaviest months for migration, including the record-setting December 2023. The drop appears to owe to a sustainedcrackdown carried out by Mexico’s government, with migration agents, national guardsmen, and other security forces blocking migrants’ northward progress.
The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott (R), has been claiming that his state government’s border crackdown reduced migration there and pushed it to states further west. That’s not what the data show.
Since record-setting December, and also since migration dropped in January, Arizona—not Texas—has seen the sharpest percentage drop in migration. Arizona has a Democratic governor, and its state government is not carrying out a severe deterrent policy like Abbott’s $10 billion-plus “Operation Lone Star.” Yet Arizona’s migration reduction is similar. So Texas doesn’t get the credit.
We can zoom in further to look at what has happened to migration in each of Border Patrol’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors.
Viewed this way, one of Texas’s five sectors did see the sharpest drop in migration: Del Rio, in mid-Texas, fell 86 percent from December to April; 39 percent from January to April. It is the only Texas sector to have decreased more sharply than the border-wide average.
But Tucson, Arizona—Border Patrol’s busiest sector between July 2023 and March 2024—fell almost as steeply as Del Rio (61% since December and 38% since January).
And after a December-January drop, all other Texas sectors are increasing.
Del Rio’s migration decline was led by super-sharp drops in arrivals from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, three nationalities (along with Haiti) whose citizens the Mexican government allows the Biden administration to deport into Mexico under its May 2023 post-Title 42 “asylum ban” rule.
Deportation into Mexico without allowing a chance to seek asylum is almost certainly illegal: a federal judge already struck this part of the rule down (it remains in place pending appeal). It’s possible that this practice—more than Texas’s concertina wire, buoys, and soldiers—may have affected the choices these nationalities’ migrants made in Del Rio since January.
Border-wide between January and April, for every Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, or Venezuelan migrant who crossed the border irregularly (43,040), more than five instead arrived via legal channels: either the “CBP One” app (about 120,000) to make appointments at ports of entry, or the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program (about108,000) for these nationalities.
In Tucson, no nationalities declined as steeply as did Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans in Del Rio. But the drop has happened across the board, with only modest increases in apprehensions of Colombians and Peruvians.
From what we know of the month of May so far, migration along the border could be declining even further. Twitter reports from the San Diego and Tucson Border Patrol sector chiefs have showed both regions declining over the past two weeks. The El Paso municipal government’s “migrant crisis” dashboard is also showing flat, even slightly reduced, numbers of encounters there.
tl;dr: This piece doesn’t make a human rights argument about asylum access, though it does acknowledge cruelty and human cost. Instead, the argument here is cold, analytical, and practical: the past 10 years’ numbers and experience show that trying to deter protection-seeking migrants just doesn’t work. All it does is push their numbers down temporarily.
As President Biden and candidate Trump head to the Texas-Mexico border, immigration opponents are blaming the President’s border policies for the horrific, tragic February 22 murder of a nursing student in Georgia. But the case of the alleged killer, a 26-year-old Venezuelan man named José Ibarra, shows the futility of trying to put asylum out of reach at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Title 42 was a “nuclear option” for denying asylum—yet it didn’t deter people from coming
Since 1980, U.S. law has clearly stated that any non-citizens on U.S. soil have the right to apply for asylum, regardless of how they arrived, if they fear for their lives or freedom upon return to their country for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.
Once here, they are entitled to due process, and even Donald Trump’s administration had to honor that, hundreds of thousands of times (though they constantly sought to cut corners).
That is presumably what José Ibarra sought to do when he arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso in September 2022. But in fact, Ibarra came to the U.S.-Mexico border at a time when the U.S. government was going to extreme lengths to make asylum unavailable.
Between March 2020 and May 2023, the “Title 42” pandemic policy—begun by Donald Trump and continued by Joe Biden—used public health as a pretext for carrying out the toughest restriction on asylum seekers since 1980. Title 42 empowered U.S. border officials to expel—not even to properly process—all undocumented migrants they encountered.
If they said “I fear for my life if you expel me,” in most cases migrants still didn’t get hearings: they were expelled from the United States as quickly as possible. If they were Salvadoran, Guatemalan, or Honduran—and later Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, or Venezuelan—Mexico agreed to take many of them back across the land border.
In September 2022, when Ibarra turned himself in to Border Patrol, Title 42 was in full effect. But “expelled as quickly as possible” was often complicated.
In September 2022 alone, 33,804 Venezuelans—fleeing authoritarianism, corrupt misrule, violence, social collapse, and cratering living standards—arrived at the border.
That month was an especially busy time for Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector (one of the agency’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors, comprised of far west Texas and New Mexico). Agents there encountered 49,030 migrants over those 30 days, 20,169 of them from Venezuela, including José Ibarra.
(Let’s recall, too, that the vast majority of those people were seeking to step on U.S. soil and turn themselves in to Border Patrol. They weren’t trying to get away. The presence of a border wall near the riverbank is irrelevant: they just want to set foot on the riverbank.)
Of those 20,169 Venezuelan migrants in El Paso that month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used Title 42 to expel… 2.
Why so few? Because U.S. authorities had nowhere to “put” expelled citizens of Venezuela and many other countries. At the time, Mexico was accepting Title 42 expulsions of three non-Mexican nationalities, but not Venezuelans. (That came later, in October 2023, bringing a temporary drop in Venezuelan migration. But despite the threat of expulsion, by the last full month of Title 42—April 2023—the number of Venezuelan migrants had recovered to 34,633, at the time a record.)
In 2022—and again, now—Venezuela’s government, which has no diplomatic relations with the United States, was refusing deportations or expulsions by air. Those flights are very expensive anyway for a country thousands of miles away.
At that pandemic moment, but still today, the sheer number of arrivals at the border—often more than 200,000 per month, at a moment of more worldwide migration than at any time since World War II—often makes detaining asylum seekers impossible, for lack of space and budget. So then, and still now, U.S. authorities release many into the U.S. interior with a date to appear before ICE or immigration courts in their destination cities. (The vast majority show up for those appointments.)
This was the reality even during the draconian Title 42 period, when U.S. authorities did expel people—many of them asylum seekers—2,912,294 times. But even as Mexico took back land-border expulsions of many Mexican and Central American people with urgent protection needs, U.S. officials, unable to expel, released José Ibarra and many others into the United States.
Why cracking down on asylum doesn’t work
Let’s repeat: this is what was happening when it was U.S. government policy to expel as many asylum seekers as it could, as quickly as it could. Washington tried a massive crackdown on asylum, and it failed to deter people. This is what happened to Border Patrol’s migrant encounters during the Title 42 period:
Right now, though, curbing the ability to ask for asylum at the border is in vogue again. Language in a “border deal” negotiated by Senate Republicans and Democrats—defeated in early February because Republicans didn’t think it went far enough—would have switched on a Title 42-like expulsion authority whenever daily migrant encounters averaged more than 4,000 or 5,000 per day.
A spending bill with compromise language restricting migrants' access to asylum just failed on the Senate floor. Four Republicans voted "yes" and five Democrats voted "no."
Republican senators refused to consider a big Ukraine-Israel-border funding bill unless it included language changing U.S. law to make it harder for migrants to access asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. A group of senators negotiated for two and a half months, coming up with a set of measures three days ago that outraged both migrants’ rights defenders who feared people would be harmed, and far-right Republicans who wanted it to go further.
The bill with the compromise language just failed on the Senate floor, by a vote of 49-50. (It was a procedural vote that needed 60 votes to allow debate to begin.)
Republicans demanded that the border-migration language be included, but in the end only four voted for it (Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, and the Republicans’ chief negotiator, James Lankford of Oklahoma). Even Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who had vocally backed Lankford’s negotiating effort, voted “no.”
Five Democrats voted “no.” (Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) had to change his vote to “no” for procedural reasons allowing a reconsideration of the bill.) They were Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Bob Menendez of New Jersey, Alex Padilla of California, and Bernie Sanders (I) of Vermont, who opposed the unconditional Israel aid in the bill.
I hope that the senators move soon to approve aid to Ukraine, this time without weakening the right to asylum.
Here's what the Senate bill text released on February 4 would do to the right to seek asylum in the United States. And it probably won't pass.
The Senate’s leadership has just dropped the text of a $118 billion supplemental appropriation, complying with a Biden administration request, which would provide additional aid to Ukraine and Israel, among other priorities including $20 billion for border and migration needs.
Republican senators’ price for allowing this bill to go forward in the Senate—where Democrats have a majority but most legislation requires 60 votes to end debate and proceed to a vote—was new restrictions on migration at the U.S.-Mexico border.
This 370-page legislative text has been out for less than 2 hours as I write this, so my reading this Sunday evening has not been thorough. But it appears to include a lot of the controversial limits on access to asylum that had already been reported in media. (I summarized those last week in a Q&A document and in our weekly Border Update.)
Provisions include:
Requiring asylum seekers placed in “expedited removal”—usually 20-25,000 per month right now, but likely to expand—to meet a much higher standard of “credible fear” in screening interviews with asylum officers. The goal is to thin out asylum applications and make it unnecessary for as many cases as possible to go to immigration court.
Reducing the time for a large number of asylum seekers’ cases from years to a few months, often while in tightly controlled, costly alternatives-to-detention programs.
It does not appear to tighten the presidential use of humanitarian parole authority to permit some classes of migrants to enter the United States, though it adds a detailed reporting requirement.
Plus, the big one:
As expected, the bill would allow the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to impose a Title 42-like expulsion authority, “summarily removing” asylum-seekers from the United States (except for hard-to-prove Convention Against Torture appeals), when unauthorized migrant encounters reach a daily threshold.
That threshold is:
An average of 4,000 migrant encounters per day over 7 days, which would allow DHS to start expelling people at the Secretary’s discretion.
Expulsions become mandatory once the average hits 5,000 per day, or if encounters hit 8,500 in a single day.
“Encounters” means people who come to the border and end up in Customs and Border Protection (CBP, which includes Border Patrol) custody without documents or authorization. Even if all 5,000 of them are deported or detained, the expulsions authority would still kick in.
“Encounters” includes people who come to ports of entry with appointments made using the CBP One smartphone app; the bill requires DHS to maintain the capacity to keep receiving at least 1,400 of these people each day (nearly the current number of daily CBP One appointments), even when it is expelling people.
While these 1,400 would not be in danger of expulsion, they do count toward the daily “encounter” threshold. If CBP takes 1,400 per day at ports of entry, then the expulsions could kick in if Border Patrol apprehends 2,600 or 3,600 more per day between ports of entry (for the 4,000 and 5,000 thresholds).
Border Patrol apprehensions between ports of entry have averaged less than 3,600 per day during only 2 of the Biden administration’s first 36 full months. They have never averaged less than 2,600 per day.
It is not clear whether Mexico would agree to take back expelled migrants, and if so from which countries.
The expulsions would stop if the past week’s daily average dropped to 75 percent of the amount that triggered it (3,000 per day if the 4,000-encounter threshold was used; 3,750 per day if the 5,000-encounter threshold kicked in).
A previously undisclosed element of the new Title 42-style authority: it would automatically “sunset,” or repeal, after three years. And DHS would have fewer days per year to employ it during each of those three years. (It would take an act of Congress to renew the authority or make it permanent—which is certainly not impossible.)
What do I make of this?
Just as we pointed out in our Q&A last week, if this became law it would send thousands of people back to likely danger. The expulsion authority will ensnare many people with legitimate and urgent asylum claims, denying them due process. It will place many at the mercy of organized crime along the migration route and in Mexican border cities. And it wouldn’t even be justified with a thin “public health” reasoning, like Title 42 was: asylum seekers would be kicked out just because too many other people were fleeing. “The United States cannot deny someone the right to seek safety and protection just because they are number 5,001 in line that day,” a statement tonight from Human Rights First put it.
And again, as the Q&A and another post from last week made clear, it won’t reduce migration, except perhaps for an initial few months. We seem to forget that the Title 42 era (March 2020-May 2023) was one of the busiest times ever for migration at the U.S.-Mexico border. The experience of Title 42 should have made clear for everyone the futility of deterring protection-seeking migrants.
Either way, though, this legislation is probably not going to pass. Though I’m complaining here about some of these provisions’ cruelty, I don’t see enough red meat here to satisfy far-right and rabidly pro-Trump Republicans, especially in the GOP-majority House of Representatives. Even those who were willing to live without a full return to Trump’s policies were demanding a lower threshold number for expulsions, and curbs on the presidential humanitarian parole authority. Since they didn’t get those, they may obstruct the bill.
So the negotiators of this text added language that may endanger people. They took great pains, though, to minimize the harm it might do to asylum seekers. It is good that they tried to do so—but it means that it will be rough going in the MAGA-heavy, election-year House of Representatives.
Audio of a segment on PRX's The World program, recorded Friday, about the very troubling standoff in Texas between federal and state border forces.
Click here for audio of a 5:40 segment on PRX’s The World program, recorded Friday. Host Carol Hills and I talk about the very troubling standoff in Texas between federal and state border forces. “You have this very strange tableau now,” I point out, “of armed National Guard—their patches say ‘U.S. Army’ on them—telling Border Patrol that they cannot enter an area that is actually within the U.S. border on U.S. territory.”
I joined Colombian journalist María Jimena Duzán and former U.S. ambassador to Panama John Feeley on the latest episode of Duzán's popular Spanish-language podcast. The episode was a scene-setter for the 2024 U.S. election campaign
I joined Colombian journalist María Jimena Duzán and former U.S. ambassador to Panama John Feeley on the latest episode of Duzán’s popular Spanish-language podcast.
The episode was a scene-setter for the 2024 U.S. election campaign. Neither John nor I get called on to do a lot of this “election horserace” sort of punditry, but that may have made this a more engaging attempt to explain the current U.S. political moment to a non-U.S. audience.
Today, The American Conservative carried a piece just flat-out calling for sinking boats carrying refugees
A January 2018 Washington Post feature on “The Golden Age of Conservative Magazines” hailed The American Conservative as “an unheeded voice in the face of indifferent or hostile elite opinion.” In 2012, New York Times columnist David Brooks called the publication “one of the more dynamic spots on the political Web.”
And now? Today, The American Conservativecarried a piece just flat-out calling for sinking boats carrying refugees.
There’s even more, but you get the idea. The American right is on a hell of a journey.
A podcast about current migration trends at the U.S.-Mexico border and in the Americas.
Here’s a podcast about current regional migration trends that I recorded last Friday with Maureen and Stephanie from WOLA. They were brilliant. Here’s the text from the podcast landing page at wola.org:
As congressional negotiations place asylum and other legal protection pathways at risk, and as we approach a 2024 election year with migration becoming a higher priority for voters in the United States, we found it important to discuss the current moment’s complexities.
WOLA’s vice president for Programs, Maureen Meyer, former director for WOLA’s Mexico Program and co-founder of WOLA’s migration and border work, is joined by Mexico Program Director Stephanie Brewer, whose work on defense of human rights and demilitarization in Mexico has focused often on the rights of migrants, including a visit to the Arizona-Sonora border at the end of 2023.
This episode highlights some of the main migration trends and issues that we should all keep an eye on this year, including:
Deterrence efforts will never reduce migration as long as the reasons people are fleeing remain unaddressed (the long-standing “root causes” approach). Such policies will only force people into more danger and fuel organized crime. “The question is not, are people going to migrate? The question is, where, how, and with who?”, explains Brewer.
For this reason, maintaining consistent and reliable legal pathways is more important than ever, and the ongoing assaults on these pathways—including the right to seek asylum and humanitarian parole—are harmful and counterproductive.
There can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution for the variety of populations currently in movement, and the focus should no longer be on ineffective policies of deterrence and enforcement. “It’s a long term game that certainly doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker for political campaigns,” Meyer points out.
Organized crime is a huge factor in regional migration—both as a driver of migration and as a facilitator. Official corruption and impunity enable these systems, a point that migration policies often fail to address. Brewer notes that during her trip to Arizona’s southern border in December 2023, the vast majority of migrants she spoke to were Mexican, and among them, the vast majority cited violence and organized crime as the driving factor. In recent months, Mexican families have been the number one nationality coming to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum.
It is a regional issue, not just a U.S. issue, as people are seeking asylum and integration in many different countries. Mexico, for instance, received 140,000 asylum applications in 2023. This makes integration efforts extremely important: many people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border had attempted to resettle elsewhere first. “It’s a twofold of the legal status itself, but then real integration efforts that are both economic and educational, but also addressing xenophobia and not creating resentment in local communities,” explains Meyer.
A Senate Republican “working group” has outlined a border and migration proposal as a likely condition of keeping the U.S. government open past the next “shutdown” date (November 17).
I’m still struggling to express graphically how severe this proposal’s consequences would be for tens of thousands of people facing real danger. Here is another attempt.
As the U.S. government scrambles to agree on a 2024 budget to avoid another “shutdown” on November 17, Republican leaders of the U.S. Senate have laid down a set of border and migration demands as their top condition for agreeing to any new spending deal. If the Biden administration wants aid to Ukraine, for example, these are the GOP demands. Republicans in the House have similar—or perhaps harsher—demands.
Using the one-pager that Senate Republicans shared yesterday, here’s a graphic that shows how thoroughly their proposal would obliterate threatened people’s right to seek asylum in the United States.
This is a right that most of the world adopted after World War II. The congressional Republican proposal would send us back to the 1930s. And the Biden administration is already indicating to Democratic allies that they might have to adopt some of it.
If this ever became law, someone fleeing likely death or imprisonment would only be able to access the U.S. asylum system if:
They tried, and failed, to seek asylum in every country through which they passed on the way—no matter how impoverished, dangerous, or ill-governed the country.
They came to a port of entry (official border crossing), even though Customs and Border Protection, through a practice called “metering,” allows only a bare trickle of asylum seekers to access these facilities.
They could not be shipped off to a third country to seek asylum there (the Trump administration made agreements with Guatemala and Honduras to be “third countries” for asylum seekers).
They were able to meet a higher standard of “credible fear of persecution” in screening interviews performed shortly after arrival at the U.S. border.
They awaited their U.S. immigration court hearing dates while “remaining” in northern Mexico, or while sitting in ICE detention centers—even if they are families with children.
In July, the Republican governor of Virginia, a swing state far from the U.S.-Mexico border, sent a contingent of 100 state National Guard troops to Texas to support Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) border-security clampdown known as “Operation Lone Star.” The troops went, Youngkin said, to combat the “fentanyl crisis.”
Anybody who looks at data could have told Youngkin that 89 percent of fentanyl along the border gets seized at the official border crossings, not in the wide-open areas between the crossings, where his guardsmen were on duty. We also could have told Youngkin that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl is crossing in California and Arizona, not Texas.
But the Governor sent the troops, and off they went to Eagle Pass, at a cost of $2 million over 3 weeks.
And unsurprisingly, over the course of their deployment, they encountered exactly zero shipments of fentanyl.
The guardsmen did see 6,717 people they described as “illegal immigrants” and referred 1,834 to the federal Border Patrol. This isn’t surprising, as several hundred migrants per day have been crossing in Eagle Pass, seeking to turn themselves in to apply for asylum. You can stand by the riverbank there and see migrants, too.
After several days, a “commander’s assessment” document noted “a weakening of the deterrent effect of our Soldiers and Airmen.” Migrants, seeking to turn themselves in anyway, were ignoring commands to turn back.
Troublingly, NBC reported that the internal reports showed “conflict over Virginia’s policy to withhold water to migrants.” Texas has ordered Operation Lone Star guardsmen not only to block and turn back asylum seekers already on U.S. soil, which violates federal law and the Refugee Convention. It also has ordered them to refuse water and other assistance to migrants on the riverbank, held back by Texas’s concertina wire and troops, even in 100-degree heat, even when those migrants are families with children. The reports reveal some “conflict” over Virginia’s enforcement of this inhumane policy.
The tactical impact of Virginia’s National Guard deployment was zero. The impact on morale and readiness was likely negative. But Governor Youngkin got to travel to downtown Eagle Pass for a photo op (his office provides a page of media-ready high-res photos), so there’s that.
This is a single screenshot from today’s New York Times article about the Biden administration’s announcement that it is building new segments of border wall. The highlighted bits are a few paragraphs apart.
It’s unusual to see that much self-contradiction in such close proximity.
If you listen to President Biden today, it sounds like his administration has been forced, against its will, to waive 26 environmental and cultural laws to build abut 20 miles of border wall in Starr County, in south Texas.
But if you listen to the Department of Homeland Security language in the Federal Register, it looks like they’re doing this out of a newfound enthusiasm for border walls.
Biden is correct: the wall-building money comes from 2019 appropriations, passed for then-president Donald Trump by a Republican congressional majority, which the Biden administration and congressional Democrats were unable to rescind. The Impoundment Control Act says that presidents have to spend money as Congress appropriates it, before it expires.
The money in question is in the blue section of this chart, in the 2019 column. (The chart comes from a January 2020 commentary I wrote for WOLA.) By the time Trump left office, the 2017 money was spent, the 2018 money was all but spent, but most of the 2019 money was not, and the 2020 money hadn’t been touched yet. (See this October 2020 “Border Wall Status” report that I saved.)
So President Biden is right: he had no choice but to spend the border wall money before it expired, presumably with the September 30 end of the government’s 2023 fiscal year. But his administration has done a poor job of explaining that today.
Update October 7: After a lot of conversations about this on October 5 and 6, and I feel I should soften the “Biden is right” language above, because it’s more complicated.
While it’s true that Biden had to use the 2019 appropriations money, it’s unclear whether the Impoundments Act required him to waive 26 laws to proceed with the wall construction.
This is a question that federal courts would probably have to resolve. As seen in recent cases, the decision would likely be made following a lawsuit—possibly filed in the federal judiciary’s conservative Fifth Circuit by Republican state governments. It’s probable that the case would escalate to the Supreme Court. It’s understandable that the Biden administration would prefer not to engage its Justice Department in this litigation, considering it could drag on for a couple of years and potentially result in an unfavorable precedent.
However, the question remains: why didn’t the administration devise a barrier design that met congressional requirements without needing to waive environmental and other laws? Such a design would have been more likely to withstand legal scrutiny, and would have earned less criticism from environmental advocates and the President’s supporters.
One possible explanation is internal bureaucratic politics. The wall designs for Starr County were initially conceived during the Trump administration. It’s plausible that career officials from the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection (among them, one suspects, the drafters of that “acute and immediate need” language) were resistant to revisiting the designs. It seems that the Biden administration’s political appointees were not prepared to push back strongly on this issue. So here we are.
This headline is from Wednesday. That was what House Republicans said they’d do, and it’s exactly what they did. They totally died on that hill.
Minutes ago, the House just passed a bill to keep the government open for 45 days—but the chamber’s Republican majority was compelled to cut out the extreme border language that was in earlier versions. They GOP leadership needed Democratic votes to keep the government open.
It turns out that you can’t hold the whole government hostage to a border-militarizing and asylum-killing agenda when you don’t even have the votes within your own party.