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Biden must rethink the US migration system, not just reverse Trump’s policies | Daniel Trilling
If Donald Trump’s presidency was a lesson in how symbolic acts of cruelty can be used to consolidate power, then his successors are trying to demonstrate that the same is true for benevolence. In just over a month, the Biden-Harris administration has issued a flurry of new directives aimed at reversing some of the worst aspects of the former president’s immigration policy.Biden has declared an end to the travel restrictions imposed on numerous Muslim-majority countries, and committed to both reviving and expanding the US refugee resettlement scheme. The administration has presented sweeping new immigration reforms to Congress, which if passed would offer a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people, promised a moratorium on deportations in most instances, and announced a plan to reunite children and parents torn apart by the grotesque family separation policy. On Friday, the US began allowing asylum seekers to cross its southern border for the first time since Trump’s “remain in Mexico” initiative was launched in January 2019.Will the reforms go further than merely reversing those of the previous president? Some of the measures, such as a request last week that officials use the term “noncitizen” in place of “alien” when referring to immigrants, indicate that this is as much about a shift in tone as about substantial changes in policy. But others could have wide-reaching global effects. On 4 February, Biden ordered a report on the impact of climate migration, including a study of “options for protection and resettlement of individuals displaced directly or indirectly from climate change”.This official acknowledgement that climate change forces people to leave their homes is unprecedented – at least for the US, which is the world’s largest historical polluter. “I never thought that this would be a part of any American president’s priorities, especially within the first 30 days of their administration,” said Kayly Ober of the US-based NGO Refugees International, expressing the surprise shared by many climate policy experts.Calculating the number of people displaced by climate change is tricky, since people can move for a variety of reasons, and the subject is prone to alarmist predictions. Of the estimated 24 million people forced to leave their homes by extreme weather in 2019, most stayed within their country of residence. But there is currently no coherent international framework for protecting those who cross borders due to climate change: refugee law only deals with people fleeing persecution or war.Trump has already shown how the US can drag the rest of the world downwards in terms of humanitarian standards: his choking-off of refugee resettlement, for instance, was part of a wider decline. Last year, according to the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR), was the worst on record for resettlement. The situation was made worse by the pandemic, but the UN was already warning in 2019 about low resettlement rates. If the US revives such schemes, and expands them to address the realities of the 21st century, then other countries may be encouraged or persuaded to follow suit.Yet the fact that a liberal president currently occupies the White House is no reason to abandon our critical faculties. As the climate migration expert Alex Randall notes, Biden’s report, which is due in six months’ time, is being produced by his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Will this security-focused framing dispel or encourage the xenophobic responses to climate change that are emerging in various parts of the world?According to the Center for American Progress, there is already a renewed effort among US conservatives to link environmental damage to immigration, while some prominent far-right parties elsewhere are attempting to give their nationalism a green hue. In 2019, Marine Le Pen launched an election campaign in France by promising that a “Europe of nations” could become the world’s first “ecological civilisation”. Borders, claimed her party’s chief spokesperson, “are the environment’s greatest ally”.This points to a more fundamental question, which is whether to address a migration “crisis” by making a humanitarian exception to the existing system of border control, or by rethinking the principles on which the system exists. Formal refugee resettlement programmes, for instance, make a huge difference to the lives of people who benefit from them, yet less than 1% of those registered by the UNHCR are resettled each year.Many refugees who cross borders do so via informal routes, at risk of death and injury, and often to the displeasure of the governments that receive them. Look, for instance, at the way the British government is creating increasingly harsh conditions for asylum seekers who arrive in the UK under their own initiative. Biden’s proposals contain admirable rhetoric about the need to address “root causes” of migration – but Europe’s recent history shows us how, under xenophobic pressure, this noble-minded language can be used to adorn schemes whose ultimate effect is to keep people out, at considerable human cost.Indeed, so does the recent history of the US, where the new moratorium on deportations has already met judicial resistance. In a new book, Border & Rule, the scholar and activist Harsha Walia reminds us that Trump’s cruelty sat atop foundations laid by previous presidents. From the 1990s onwards, there was an increasing effort to criminalise unwanted migration and accelerate border security measures. In 2014, writes Walia, under Obama’s presidency – in which Biden, of course, served as vice president – about half of all federal arrests were immigration-related. A similar process has been under way in most advanced economies: Walia makes a persuasive argument that we should see this not as a domestic policy issue, but as part of a global system in which border control, alongside military and economic policy, is a way for wealthy countries to maintain their power.There is a risk that this wider context induces a kind of paralysis: what’s the point of changing anything if you can’t change everything? But the reason Biden is able to take these bold-sounding steps now is because of the space created by ordinary people who resisted Trump’s crackdowns and brought their political demands to bear on the Democrats in the run-up to last year’s election. They didn’t wait for a president’s permission to demand better – and, despite the change of leadership, there’s no reason to stop now. More
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500,000 Americans have died of Covid. That's more than the population of Miami | Andrew Gawthorpe
Five hundred thousand deaths can be hard to picture. But we have to try. Imagine, for instance, that everyone in Miami, Colorado Springs or Minneapolis died in the course of a single year. If that seems too absurd, combine the number of Americans who died in the second world war, Korea and Vietnam, then imagine that they too had been killed in a single year, on American soil.But such thought exercises only get us so far. They help us understand the scale and speed of the coronavirus crisis, but not much else. In particular, they don’t help us appreciate the ways in which death has been unequally distributed across America, and how that has affected society’s response. The disappearance of an entire city would affect a broad cross-section of society, while wars tend to unify the whole nation even as they kill mostly the young. But coronavirus is different, generating neither equal suffering nor equal concern. Instead, it disproportionately kills the elderly, the poor and racial minorities.These inequalities have shaped America’s response to the virus profoundly, with Republicans minimizing its risk and Democrats seeing it for the national emergency which it is. Republican dismissal of the virus has in part been due to the tooth-and-claw individualism that forms a key part of American identity, but it would not have been possible without something more. It has also been based on the idea that the dead were somehow expendable because of who they were.It comes as no surprise that Republican politicians show little concern for the poor or minorities. But for the lack of concern to extend even to seniors, who form such a key Republican voting bloc, the ideological blinkers must be powerful indeed.Not all prominent Republican voices went as far as the Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who suggested that the elderly ought to be willing to sacrifice their lives in order to save the economy. But the general drumbeat of misinformation and minimization, from Donald Trump on down, showed at best a profound indifference to the fates of the senior Americans who make up the vast proportion of the dead, and yet whose fate is presented as incidental to the need to “reopen the economy”.If the Republican response has been based on a characteristically narrow definition of which Americans are worthy of saving, the response of other parts of society has been much more uplifting. The challenge of the coronavirus has also called forth exactly the things which have always made America truly great but which the contemporary political right stands against: expertise, technological progress, a sense of civic duty, and an inclusive definition of Americanness. Although these ideas remain under assault, Joe Biden’s victory represents the triumph of these values over their opposites – and most of all a victory for the idea that all American lives are worth saving, regardless of whether they are considered economically valuable or not.For this reason, it has been incredibly encouraging to see that the Biden administration has recognized that the response to the virus must also involve addressing the structural inequities revealed by it. Measures such as raising the minimum wage to $15 are morally required after low-paid, disproportionately non-white essential workers have kept society humming at great personal risk during the pandemic. They are also popular among the public at large. Support for raising the minimum wage is at 61%, and 68% of Americans support Biden’s broader economic relief plan.Although Biden’s victory was a necessary first step, the deep callousness revealed by the pandemic will take much more than one election to address. In 2012, Mitt Romney famously lamented the 47% of the population who he said could never be convinced to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives”. But the pandemic has shown that this gets the American problem precisely backwards. The real problem isn’t people who refuse to take responsibility for themselves, but those who refuse to take responsibility for others – including the 47% of the electorate who voted for Donald Trump despite the complete disregard for America life he showed in the handling of the pandemic.What can be done about this 47%? In the short-term, not a great deal. There is little reason to believe they can be won over. Another lesson of the pandemic has been just how deep America’s divisions are – not even a deadly plague has brought together the two sides in what Biden has called America’s “uncivil war”. If the Republican party remains a primarily destructive rather than constructive force, then Democrats must abandon their hopes of bipartisanship and push on without it.Ultimately, Democrats must demonstrate to people the value of a government which cares for their wellbeing, materially, medically and otherwise. Building a coalition of care ought to be easier than a coalition of indifference. But in order to do it, Democrats must seize the opportunity to address the deeper American problems which the virus has revealed. Offering meaningful improvements to people’s lives isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s also the best way of guarding against the return to power of those who couldn’t care less whether their fellow Americans live or die. More
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The Ten Year War review: Obamacare, Trump and Biden's battles yet to come
Once upon a time, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was unpopular, viewed by many as welfare redux. Barack Obama’s promise that “If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan”, didn’t exactly work out. By the middle of the 2010s, so-called Obamacare had cost the Democrats both houses of Congress.
Yet one great recession and one raging pandemic later, the ACA is liked, if not necessarily loved, by a majority of Americans.
The political process “doesn’t stop just because a bill becomes a law”, according to Jonathan Cohn.
As if to prove Cohn’s point, the US awaits a ruling by the supreme court on another challenge to Obamacare, this one brought by the Trump administration and Republican state attorneys general. If they prevail, more than 20 million Americans may lose health coverage. Nearly a half-million have died from Covid. Markets don’t always deliver what is needed.
The Ten Year War is a look back at the “crusade” for universal healthcare coverage, and a sequel to Cohen’s earlier book, Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Healthcare Crisis. Cohn is a senior correspondent at the Huffington Post. His take remains informed and nuanced, not breathless. The Ten Year War also captures acrid and tectonic shifts in US politics.
Cohn persuasively argues that the combatants in the healthcare fight operated with less than perfect knowledge, and that preconceived convictions too often clouded their judgment. Cohn aims at both policy wonks and political junkies. Laced with interviews and quotes from both sides of the aisle, his book is definitely newsworthy.
Obama and Tom Price, Donald Trump’s short-tenured health secretary, speak on the record. David Axelrod, Obama’s counselor, and Michael Carvin, a veteran conservative litigator who unsuccessfully argued against Obamacare’s constitutionality, also talk to the author. Years earlier, in the 2000 election, Carvin was on brief in George W Bush’s winning supreme court gambit.
Obama admits his surprise over Republicans not moving on after the ACA passed, unlike Medicare in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson. “We got no take-up on any of that stuff,” he says. Left unsaid is that blue and red are more than just colors – they are tribes.
By the same measure, Obama acknowledges “that there were those … who suggested that we shouldn’t do anything other than the economy”. That is an understatement.
One of those “outsiders” was Chuck Schumer, now the Senate majority leader. Even then, Cohn writes, the New Yorker grasped the political consequences of going all-in on healthcare amid a meltdown in the jobs and housing markets.
Indeed, after the Democrats lost the Senate in 2014, New York’s senior senator unloaded on Obama before the National Press Club: “After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle-class-oriented programs.” Said differently, the ACA highlighted the inherent instability of the Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition.
Instead, in Schumer’s telling, “we took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem – healthcare reform.” Apparently, there are few things more gratifying in politics than telling a sitting president: “I told you so.”
Of course, political myopia is not the sole province of any one party. Price admits that Republicans too operated in their own universe.
“I think there was a lack of appreciation on the part of all of us in the administration about how difficult” repealing Obamacare would be, he says. Price is a physician as well as a former Georgia congressman.
Price criticizes Trump for fashioning policy to comport with the last voice to whisper into his ear, and for a fundamental lack of understanding of healthcare and insurance.
“We would make concrete decisions about what we were going to do,” he says, “get presidential sign-off, and then within 24 hours the decision would change.”
For Price’s boss, pulling the rug out from under others was standard operating procedure. More - in US Politics
Biden tackles white supremacy in town hall: Politics Weekly Extra
As Joe Biden visited Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week, our guest presenter Kenya Evelyn spoke to the state representative David Bowen about the administration’s early obligations to the Black voters who swung the election in the Democrats’ favour, racial equity in pandemic and vaccine plans, and how the president should combat white supremacy
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Joe Biden took the stage in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week for his first town hall since entering the White House. For some, it was a necessary first step toward combatting racial inequities in the economy and healthcare made worse by the coronavirus. People in the audience asked the president how he was going to make sure everyone got a vaccine, and how he planned to combat white supremacy in the country. Watching intently was David Bowen, a state lawmaker and one of the young progressive Democrats leading the party forward. He told Kenya about his thoughts on the new Biden administration. Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More
