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      'My neighbourhood is being destroyed to pacify his supporters': the race to complete Trump's wall

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      At Sierra Vista Ranch in Arizona near the Mexican border, Troy McDaniel is warming up his helicopter. McDaniel, tall and slim in a tan jumpsuit, began taking flying lessons in the 80s, and has since logged 2,000 miles in the air. The helicopter, a cosy, two-seater Robinson R22 Alpha is considered a work vehicle and used to monitor the 640-acre ranch, but it’s clear he relishes any opportunity to fly. “We will have no fun at all,” he deadpans.McDaniel and his wife, Melissa Owen, bought their ranch and the 100-year-old adobe house that came with it in 2003. Years before, Owen began volunteering at the nearby Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and fell in love with the beauty and natural diversity of the area, as well as the quiet of their tiny town. That all changed last July when construction vehicles and large machinery started “barrelling down the two-lane state road”, says Owen.Once work on President Donald Trump’s border wall began, construction was rapid. Sasabe, a sleepy border town, located over an hour from the nearest city of Tucson, was transformed into a construction site. “I don’t think you could find a single person in Sasabe who is in favour of this wall,” Owen says.The purpose of our helicopter trip today is to see the rushed construction work occurring just south of the couple’s house, as contractors race to finish sections of the border wall before Trump leaves office. Viewed from high above the Arizona desert, in the windless bubble of the cockpit, this new section of wall stretches across the landscape like a rust-coloured scar. McDaniel guides us smoothly over hills and drops into canyons, surveying the beauty of the landscape. Here, as on much of the border, the 30ft barrier does not go around; it goes over – stubbornly ploughing through cliffs, up steep mountainsides, and between once-connected communities.“That was already a pretty good barrier,” McDaniel says of the steep, unscalable cliff in front of us. The bulldozed path of Trump’s wall creeps up over the mountain’s west side, but on the other side of the cliff there is no wall, just a large gap. As with many areas on the border, the wall here is being built in a piecemeal fashion. According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, there are 37 ongoing projects, of which only three are set to be completed this month; others have completion dates as far away as June 2022.In August, at a virtual press conference with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Joe Biden told reporters that “there will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration”. The 37 existing construction sites, in various stages of completion, are likely to be shut down.Yet he will have to formulate a more complex policy than simple suspension. Many of the private contractors building the wall have clauses in their contracts that will trigger large payouts if the government simply stops construction. There are also ongoing legal cases brought by private landowners from whom the government seized land. The exact nature of these obligations may only be clear to Biden once he takes office.In the meantime, Trump has accelerated building in the wake of the election, with crews working flat out, late into the night. Throughout December and into January, mountainsides were exploded with dynamite and large portions of desert bulldozed, to make way for a wall that may not be finished in time.For the past four years, I have been living in New Mexico, travelling in the borderlands and documenting the ongoing impact of the wall on communities and the environment.“They started working nights six weeks ago,” says photographer John Kurc, who has been documenting construction in the remote Guadalupe Canyon in Arizona since October last year. “It’s been nonstop ever since.”This is not about protecting America. It’s about protecting President Trump’s own interestsVerlon Jose, former vice-chair of the Native American Tohono O’odham Nation, tells me he has seen the wall plough through his ancestral homeland. “We are caretakers of this land. We are responsible for these things. Has anyone ever asked for permission from the local folks to do the construction? This is about President Donald Trump. It’s not about protecting America. It’s about protecting his own interests.”When construction stops, there will be large gaps in the new wall. In some places it will join up with older barriers that the Trump administration deemed inadequate; in others it will finish abruptly. “They work as fast as they can to build walls that will just end,” says McDaniel, as his helicopter circles back toward their property over saguaro-studded hillsides just north of the Mexican border. We drop altitude and approach the landing strip – a patch of dirt just off the road – whipping up a small dust storm as we touch the ground.***After four years of daily scandals, and the shocking scenes in Washington DC last week, it’s easy to forget that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 with one signature policy: to build a wall. That was the call echoed at his rallies, the embodiment of Trump’s hardline approach to immigration and his purported “America First” ideology. Trump claimed the wall would address an invasion of undesirable migrants, “bad hombres”, a nationalist rhetoric that resonated with his base. During his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order that included a policy for “the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border”.Construction began in 2019, mostly replacing existing fences, vehicle barriers, and other border structures, as well as unwalled sections of the border. The bollard wall, Trump’s barrier of choice, consists of a series of vertical steel posts set in concrete, with small gaps in between. While in some places it reaches a height of 30ft, it is less of a wall and more of an imposing metal fence.According to Kenneth Madsen, an associate professor in the department of geography at Ohio State University, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has waived 84 laws and statutes – many enacted specifically to protect the nation’s most treasured cultural and ecological sites – in order to expedite construction.Dozens of environmental and public health laws were brushed aside to build walls through parks and wildlife areas, including Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge and Coronado National Memorial. “It has brought devastation to the environment and the communities of the borderlands,” says Scott Nicol, author of a 2018 report for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) about the impact of the wall, and a resident of the Rio Grande valley in Texas.Nicol believes the wall’s charted course has been determined by ease rather than efficacy. Construction has been much busier on federally owned land, not because that’s where there are likely to be more border crossings, but because building on private property is a lengthy process. “Texas has the most border but the least wall mileage to date because the Texas borderlands are mostly in private hands,” says Nicol.According to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, 452 miles of border wall have been constructed under the Trump administration, at an estimated cost of $15bn, one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in US history. In September 2019, Trump promised to build between 450 and 500 miles of wall, so he has reached this goal – even if the vast majority of it is replacing existing barriers.On Tuesday, days after the violent insurrection at the White House, Trump made a final visit to the border in Texas to celebrate reaching this target. During a short speech, he skirted any responsibility for the capital siege, and instead remarked on his successes in halting illegal immigration and securing the border.“When I took office, we inherited a broken, dysfunctional and open border,” he said. “We reformed our immigration system and achieved the most secure southern border in US history.”Has it had any impact on immigration? According to attorney David Donatti, from the ACLU of Texas, the answer is no. In recent months, according to CBP data, the number of people trying to cross has increased. “The wall as a whole is unlikely to have any discernible impact,” says Donatti. “In a race to construct, the administration is building where it’s easier as opposed to where most people cross.”And while the wall may be an impressive barrier, it is far from impregnable. Just after Christmas, Nicol visited a new section in the Rio Grande valley between Texas and Mexico and found numerous ladders scattered on the ground. “You can always go over,” he says.You can also go through. John Kurc started using drones to photograph and video the construction of the wall. The last time he was in the border town of Sonoyta, Mexico, he saw two young men with “yellow, handheld angle grinders” cutting through the wall while a lookout with a radio watched for Border Patrol. “They would put the section back with a special bonding agent and then use paint that oxidizes the same colour as the bollards,” says Kurc. “Then they just go in and out.”Gil Kerlikowske, the Obama-appointed former commissioner of the CBP, says there is not a one-size-fits-all solution for border security: “There are places where the environment is difficult and so remote you don’t need any barrier at all.” In these areas, surveillance and detection technologies would be more useful and cost-efficient, he argues. “It is such an unbelievably complex problem. When someone proposes a simple solution to a complex problem, you can be sure that’s the wrong solution.”***That’s not to say Trump’s wall has had no impact. Back on the ranch, cameras set up by Melissa Owen have captured passing wildlife – mountain lions and javelina, pig-like mammals, the skulls of which can also be found around the house. “There were no environmental surveys, no groundwater surveys, none of that,” says Owen. Once contractors arrived in town last summer, they began “pumping enormous amounts of water out of the ground” in order to mix concrete for the border wall’s foundations.Residents in Sasabe began complaining of reduced water pressure. At San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, groundwater pumping for concrete began draining a crucial wetland and endangering four threatened species of fish. Similar concerns were raised when the Quitobaquito Springs at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, home to the endangered desert pupfish began to dry out as contractors pumped water from the ancient aquifer that fed it. “That’s our water – that’s what we depend on,” says Owen, looking out towards arid ranchland that is suffering from a long drought.We had three different jaguars in 2016 – we haven’t seen signs of any since construction beganMyles Traphagen, borderlands coordinator of the Wildlands Network conservation group, has called Trump’s wall the “single most damaging project” to the ecology of the mountainous Sky Islands region and the animals that call it home – especially the jaguar, which has made a remarkable comeback in the US after being hunted to extinction by the late 1960s.“We had three different jaguars in 2015 and 2016, which hadn’t happened since the 1930s,” says Chris Bugbee, a senior researcher at Conservation CATalyst, an organisation dedicated to the world’s 38 wild cat species.“If this border wall hadn’t started, we expected a female to eventually arrive and have breeding jaguars again,” adds Aletris Neils, Conservation CATalyst’s executive director.The jaguar is one of numerous species – such as the endangered ocelot and the Mexican gray wolf – found in a region that extends from south-western New Mexico into western Arizona and far down into Mexico. If current border wall construction is completed, says Traphagen, “93% of jaguar habitat will have been walled off”.Only males have been seen in the US since the 60s. They have huge ranges and some travel north where there is plenty to eat, before returning south to find a mate. There is currently one jaguar (whose location cannot be shared due to poaching concerns) on the US side, cut off from Mexico because of the wall.Bugbee has spent years tracking the famous “El Jefe” jaguar, one of the few sighted recently in the US, with his dog Mayke. “We haven’t seen signs of any jaguars since construction began,” he tells me when we meet at the Coronado National Forest, where he previously tracked the cat. A mile or so away, construction workers have been blasting and bulldozing over the steep Montezuma Pass, where another jaguar, known as Yo’oko, once roamed.Owen and McDaniel are far from open-border liberals. The entrance to their ranch has a sign that reads: “Border Patrol always welcome”. Owen’s two horses, Rocker and Kiowa, are retired Border Patrol horses – “the best”, she says of their temperament. In her early years on the ranch, Owen says, undocumented migrants and smugglers were coming across the border in large numbers. She would frequently encounter migrants on her property. One morning someone broke into her house. “I don’t want it to go back to then,” she says, but adds that the economic downturn of 2008 has slowed immigration considerably. “No one wants a secure border more than I,” she says. “But a 30ft-tall, poorly constructed barrier is not the answer. It’s a campaign gimmick. My neighbourhood is being destroyed because a megalomaniac wants to pacify his supporters.”During his election campaign, Trump claimed that Mexico would pay for the wall. Once he was in office, Congress provided some $1.37bn a year for construction, but each year the president demanded more, ultimately declaring a national emergency in order to divert military funds to pay for the wall. It’s estimated by the US Army Corps of Engineers that Biden will save about $2.6bn if he stops construction on the border wall in his first day in office.Trump, and some within CBP, have maintained that the wall is a crucial means of halting smuggling. “Illegal drug and human smuggling activities have decreased in those areas where barriers are deployed. Illegal cross-border traffic has also shifted to areas with inferior legacy barriers or no barriers at all,” said a DHS spokesperson in a recent email to the Guardian.Kerlikowske, who also served as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy between 2009 and 2014, admits that drug trafficking is a problem. However, he points out that the vast majority of illicit substances, such as fentanyl, cocaine and heroin, are smuggled through legal ports of entry where elaborate walls and security systems already exist. “During my time as commissioner, I met with hundreds of border patrol agents. No one in the border patrol says we really need a wall,” he says.As you keep building, you keep pushing people into more remote and dangerous areasDonatti from the ACLU of Texas says there is little evidence that walls deter either drugs or undocumented immigration, which is being driven primarily by so-called push factors (war, poverty, desperation) in other countries. “The US federal government has tried to study this several times and has never found support that a border wall stops the flow of undocumented immigration,” he says.One thing border walls are effective at is increasing the number of migrant deaths. As the US has walled off more of its border, the risk to migrants crossing illegally has increased. Since 1998, around 7,000 people have died along the US-Mexico border, the majority in Arizona’s rural deserts and, in recent years, the Rio Grande valley. “As you keep building, you keep pushing people into more remote and dangerous areas,” says Donatti.“It’s a humanitarian disaster,” agrees Eddie Canales, of the South Texas Human Rights Center, who has spent the past decade operating hundreds of water stations in the Rio Grande valley in Texas to save migrants. “We do what we can,” Canales told the Guardian in early 2020. “But people keep dying.” The wall funnels people into more dangerous crossing points, where physical barriers do not yet exist. Summer temperatures in the Arizona desert are brutal; 2020 became the deadliest year since 2010 for those who crossed the border there.***“It’s hard for people to understand what this means to us, as O’odham and Native Americans. What it means to us as the original indigenous peoples of this land,” says Verlon Jose.When I visit Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a pristine tract of Sonoran desert, earlier this year, contractors are busy dynamiting Monument Hill, a sacred mountain and burial site for the Tohono O’odham people. Uprooted saguaros, the huge, tree-like cacti sacred to the tribe, dot the path of the wall. “It was like, ‘Tell me where your grandparents live, and I’ll put a wall through there,’” says Jose.“In certain areas, we won’t be able to continue our traditional practices,” says Jose, whose tribal members span both sides of the border. “We spent billions of dollars on the wall. Why don’t we invest it in our border cities and towns?”According to Norma Herrera, a border resident from McAllen, Texas, the wall’s $15bn price tag is an insult to one of the county’s most impoverished regions, where critical infrastructure is often lacking. This issue was laid bare during the pandemic, when places such as the Rio Grande valley in Texas, a centre of border wall construction, was devastated by Covid. Hospitals reached capacity, deaths mounted, and all the while, the wall continued to rise.“We had more deaths in the region than the entire state,” says Herrera, community organiser at the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, which advocates for marginalised groups in the area. “To see the wall going up, to see resources used on useless steel and concrete, it’s senseless.”According to Donatti, whose parents originally emigrated from Argentina to the US, the wall should be seen in the context of broader exclusion policies – such as the Remain in Mexico programme enacted by Trump, under which asylum seekers arriving at ports of entry are returned to Mexico to wait for their US immigration proceedings. “It’s this idea that there is a fundamental Americanness, and either you’re inside, or you’re out,” he says.That idea was evident in late 2019, when I visited a shelter in Tijuana. The two-storey building in the neighbourhood of Benito Juárez was packed with families, with mattresses sprawled over every inch of open floor. At that time in Tijuana, nearly 10,000 asylum seekers were waiting for their immigration hearings after being turned back at the border and sent to one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico.Many are hopeful that under the Biden administration the approach to migrants and the borderlands will change; that policies such as Remain in Mexico will be undone; and even that sections of the border wall will be removed. A week after inauguration day, a coalition of groups across the borderlands will begin a monitoring project in order to assess the damage, and to see what needs to be done. Some hope certain sections can be removed in order to reconnect critical habitats and communities.Verlon Jose of the Tohono O’odham has a “sliver of hope” that some of the walls will come down. “I believe Biden will not build another inch,” he adds.Others are not so sure. “Optimism? No,” says Donatti of the prospect of the wall coming down. “He hasn’t committed to as much. But there is a strong coalition along the border that will be fighting for it.”John Kurc, who has spent thousands of hours watching the destruction of Guadalupe Canyon, sees the scale of the challenge. “The Trump administration has caused so much damage to these environments,” he says, peering through a set of binoculars as a crane hoists up an isolated section of wall, with huge gaps on each side. “We have a lot of work to do.” More

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      Frankie Boyle’s big quiz of 2020: ‘How much have you subconsciously tried to suppress?’

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      2020: what a time to still briefly be alive. Let’s look back on the year, after a Christmas so grim for Great Britain that it was almost as if Santa had been reading some history. They said it was political correctness that would end Christmas but now, after the humble office worker was reduced to getting off with their own partner at the Zoom Christmas do, we realise it was actually ended by electing people who try to source medical supplies through their mate’s pest control firm. The Tardis would stop in 2020 barely long enough for Doctor Who to empty its chemical toilet.Every so often, I remember we will be leaving the EU in the middle of a plague and the worst recession in modern history, and then black out and wake up at the bottom of my garden in a pile of canned goods. As Brexit negotiations continued, a 27-acre site in Kent was set to become a lorry park that can take 2,000 lorries. Complaining about your locked gym will soon seem very quaint, when every source of dietary protein is in a parked lorry that can’t be processed because the driver has an apostrophe in his name.One way to not get too down about 2020 is to remind yourself that next year will be worse. But how much of the year can you remember, and how much have you subconsciously tried to suppress? Let’s find out!1. The Labour partyIn many ways, the Labour party should be the natural choice to run a bitterly divided country full of people who hate each other. Keir Starmer, looking like a cross between the bloke who says he’s “unstoppable” before getting fired first on the Apprentice, and an Anglican vicar trying to hold in a fart at a funeral, has been pursuing the approval of newspapers that wouldn’t stop backing the Tories if they crop-dusted the whole country in hot shit. The nationalist posturing required makes him look deeply uncomfortable, as if he’s been asked if he personally would sleep with the Queen and is afraid of both answers. By withdrawing the whip from Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer signalled that he can contain the threat posed by the left of the party, which currently consists of a handful of MPs, maybe 10 journalists, and a couple of dozen shitposters called things like @WetAssProletariat.Where did Keir Starmer choose to deliver his keynote Labour conference speech?a) His own kitchen.b) Labour party HQ in Westminster.c) A socially distanced PPE factory in the East End of London.d) A corridor in a deserted Doncaster arts centre.2. Test and traceThe government spent £12bn on it, and yet still the only reliable app for alerting you to the fact that someone deadly is nearby is the one that shows you when your Uber driver has arrived. Of course Jacob Rees-Mogg dismissed complaints from people who had to travel 200 miles for a test: he regularly commutes between now and the 1840s, strapped into something built from plans drawn up to the final words of the tortured HG Wells, with a groundsman furiously shovelling venison into a flux capacitor.Which of these organisations was not given contracts to help implement the NHS test-and-trace system?a) Serco.b) Capita.c) The NHS.d) Sitel.3. Boris JohnsonIt’s difficult to speculate on the long-term effects that the pandemic will have on British politics; all we know for certain is that 40% of the survivors will vote Conservative. One flaw in Labour’s relentless framing of prime ministerial incompetence is that the Conservatives can just replace him with someone more competent – possibly Rishi Sunak, and his air of a sixth former who still wears their school uniform. Boris Johnson may be a marshmallow toasting on the funeral pyre of Britain, a post-apocalyptic snowman with the increasingly dishevelled air of something that’s been tied to the front grille of a bin lorry, a demented, sex-case vacuum cleaner bag; but there’s no denying he does possess some Churchillian qualities: racism and obesity.Which of these did Boris Johnson fail to do in his first 365 days as prime minister?a) Get divorced.b) Have a baby.c) Contract coronavirus.d) Secure a trade agreement with the EU.4. Laurence FoxTaking time out from tweeting denials of his privilege while wearing three-piece pyjamas, Laurence (19th-century) Fox announced the launch of his new political party. He certainly looked determined. Or was it sad? I just never quite know which one he’s doing.No doubt he considers himself to be on the Reich side of history, but he may yet regret his statements on Black Lives Matter: the way his acting career’s going, there could well be auditions where he’ll have to take a knee. Fox’s head points to a combination of robust genes and forceps pressure, showing that from the very start he had a reluctance to face the real world. The sort of people who went to his famous boarding school would never be so gauche as to actually mention the name Harrow, except when phoning up for a Chinese takeaway, pissed.In 2020, Fox received large donations for his laughable new culture-war party, and it must have been odd to receive millions of pounds that wasn’t a divorce settlement from the mother of his children. We can only hope that his interest in politics wanes soon, and he can get back on stage and give us his long overdue Othello.Which of these is not something Laurence Fox did this year?a) Announced a personal boycott of Sainsbury’s.b) Got dropped by his acting agent over the phone.c) Acted in a film.d) Got told to fuck off by the Pogues.5. Social mediaIn 2020, the only thing you could say for sure when you met an optimist was that they weren’t on Facebook. Hate-sharing app Twitter has again spent the year setting itself up as an arbiter of morals, a role it’s as convincing in as the Love Island casting department. Personally, I left Twitter because of death threats: Eamonn Holmes just didn’t seem to be reading them any more.Which of these Twitter users has the most followers, and which the least? One point for each correctly placed. a) Donald Trump.b) Katy Perry.c) Logan Paul.d) BTS.6. Trump v BidenThe broad takeaway from the US election is that Americans count as slowly as one would expect. Joe Biden is not exactly overflowing with presence. You see his picture and the first thing you think is, “Was that already in there when I bought the frame?” Even at his most strident, he barely has the presence of a finger-wagging, spectral grandparent that appears as you hover, undecided, over a perineum. He could become the first president assassinated by an icy patch outside the post office.Still, Biden performed surprisingly well during the campaign, especially when you consider that he had to put up with the distraction of his mother’s voice calling his name gently from a bright light. He’s now so close to death that he can talk directly to the Ancestors, and has been ending every press conference by asking people if they have any questions for David Bowie.How old would Joe Biden be by the end of a second term in office?a) 86.b) 84.c) 88.d) 90.7. AsylumPeter Sutcliffe died and Priti Patel didn’t move on the list of Britain’s 10 Worst People, whereas I went up one. Patel has stood out as uniquely dreadful even in a cabinet that is basically Carry On Lord Of The Flies, dresses as if she’s going to the funeral of someone she hates, and often speaks as if trapped in a loveless marriage with her interviewer.Which of the following proposals did Priti Patel’s Home Office not consider as a way of deterring people from seeking asylum in Britain?a) Building a giant wave machine in the English channel.b) Processing asylum seekers on a volcanic outcrop in the South Atlantic, a thousand miles from the nearest landmass.c) Training swordfish to burst dinghies.d) Housing asylum applicants on decommissioned oil rigs in the North Sea.8. Grant ShappsGrant Shapps looks like a Blackpool waxwork of Clive Anderson, and has the permanent expression in every TV appearance of a man watching his train pull away behind the camera.But what is his actual job title?a) Secretary of state for transport.b) Minister for Brexit.c) Minister of state for international development.d) Chief whip.9. Conspiracy theoristsThe pandemic has been hard on many conspiracy theorists: eight months of men keeping their distance, too. There are people who believe Covid-19 is spread by 5G. If only that were true: put Virgin Media in charge and we’d be clear of it in days.An anti-mask demonstration in Trafalgar Square on 29 August drew thousands of protesters: which of these countercultural celebrities did not speak?a) Piers Corbyn.b) David Icke.c) Chico Slimani from The X Factor.d) Bill Drummond from the KLF.10. Jeff BezosOur disposable culture isn’t all bad. Without it, I’d miss that warm glow on Boxing Day when my son stuffs my gift in the bin and I imagine, in just a couple of years’ time, the joy on the face of the kid who pulls it from a pile of dirty syringes in a Philippines landfill. Jeff Bezos has become the world’s wealthiest man by pioneering a kind of delivery Argos. I look at Bezos and wonder if the rest of us evolved too much: his acquisitiveness is possibly explained by the fact he looks like a newborn constantly searching for a nipple.What was the most money Bezos made in a single day of the pandemic? a) $100m.b) Nothing. He has said all his profits will go towards developing Covid therapies.c) $150m.d) $13bn.11. PrisonGhislaine Maxwell was arrested. For those of you too young to remember, Ghislaine is the daughter of a media mogul whose death sent ripples around the world – because he was obese and fell in the ocean. Steve Bannon was also arrested and charged with fraud. On the wing, prisoners described his potential arrival as “whatever’s the opposite to fresh meat”.But which of the following are not currently in jail?a) Harvey Weinstein.b) Bill Cosby.c) Ricardo Medina Jr, the red Power Ranger.d) The cops who killed Breonna Taylor.12. Donald TrumpThis year’s presidential debates were like looking through the window of a care home on the day the staff thought they’d play prescription roulette. By managing only to speak to his base and alienating everyone else, Trump ended up being the definitive Twitter president. There’s so much wrong with him you could talk about his presidency for ever and never run out of things to criticise. It’s the equivalent of letting a child repaint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and then pointing out all the bits that aren’t as good as Michelangelo’s. “Is that meant to be God, Timmy? Why is he eating a Babybel?”In hospital, Trump was given a new drug made by Regeneron, which sounds like the robot who’ll present Match Of The Day once Gary Lineker’s been strapped into the re-education dinghy. He seemed to pull through, but it’s hard to gauge the health of someone who looks like Frankenstein’s monster won a holiday, and who chooses to have the skin colour of a dialysis machine emptied on to snow.Which of these is not something Trump achieved this year?a) The most votes for an incumbent candidate.b) The most retweeted tweet of all time.c) The highest US death toll in a century.d) The most golf ever played by a sitting President.13. The EurosScotland qualified for next year’s Euros after beating Serbia. Facing a team that grew up in a war zone in the 1990s, Serbia lost on penalties.When did Scotland last qualify for a major tournament? a) Argentina 1978.b) Italia 1990.c) France 1998.d) Mexico 1986.14. DystopiaIf only late-stage capitalism could get behind equality and lead us to a golden age where people of all skin colours are considered equally dispensable. For the time being, we needn’t fear AI. The robot that steals your job is expensive. You are cheap. You can only die, whereas it may get scratched.I wonder if our leaders’ go-to platitude, “We’re all in this together”, will ever ring true? Perhaps after the next wave of austerity, as it blares through speakers in the bunk-bedded dormitory of a derelict Sports Direct, rousing us at dawn so that we can harvest kelp in the shallows in exchange for the fibre waste collected from the juicers of gated communities, wearing nothing but underpants: ones we never seem to fully own, underpants where there always seems to be one more payment due to the Corporation.We will dream of one day having our own igloo built from blocks cut from sewer-fat, maybe even moving to a better neighbourhood, just as soon as it’s hot enough to slide our house there. As we heave our bales on to the gangmaster’s counter, the ex-performers among us will kid ourselves it’s still showbiz, as we’re permitted to crack a joke, and if the gangmaster smiles he’ll throw us a treat. We opt for a classic: surely no one has ever not laughed at one where bagpipes are confused with an octopus wearing pyjamas? But just as we can almost taste sugar, a mangled tentacle drops from our kelp block into our open mouth and ruins the moment.Which one of these was not a scientific breakthrough in 2020?a) The discovery that bacteria can survive in space for several years.b) A bionic breakthrough that allows people with paralysis to control computers using their thoughts.c) The confirmation that there are several large saltwater lakes under the ice in the south polar region of the planet Mars.d) An AI which can alter magnetic fields in the human brain, influencing thoughts.Answers1. d. 2. c. 3. d. 4. c.5. Most to least: Perry, Trump, BTS, Paul. 6. a. 7. c. 8. a.9. d.10. d. 11. d. 12. b. 13. c. 14. d. More

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      Antony Blinken: Biden's secretary of state nominee is sharp break with Trump era

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      After reports first emerged on Sunday night that Antony Blinken would be US secretary of state in the Biden administration, one particular interview from his past began circulating on social media.It was a September 2016 conversation with Grover, a character from Sesame Street, on the subject of refugees, directed at American children who might have new classmates from faraway countries.“We all have something to learn and gain from one another even when it doesn’t seem at first like we have much in common,” Blinken told the fuzzy blue puppet.After four years of an administration that has separated migrant children from their parents and kept them in cages, Blinken’s arrival at the state department will mark a dramatic change, to say the least.While Mike Pompeo has remained a domestic politician throughout his tenure as secretary of state, giving the lion’s share of his interviews to conservative radio stations in the midwest, for example, Blinken is very much a born internationalist.He went to school in Paris, where he learned to play the guitar and play football (soccer), and harboured dreams of becoming a film-maker. Before entering the White House under Barack Obama, he used to play in a weekly soccer game with US officials, foreign diplomats and journalists, and he has two singles, love songs titled Lip Service and Patience, uploaded on Spotify.All those contacts and the urbane bilingual charm will be targeted at soothing the frayed nerves of western allies, reassuring them that the US is back as a conventional team player. The foreign policy priorities in the first days of a Biden administration will be rejoining treaties and agreements that Donald Trump left.There is little doubt that Blinken will be on the same page as Joe Biden. He has been at the president-elect’s side for nearly two decades. After working in Bill Clinton’s national security council, he became Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser in the Senate in 2002, as staff director on the foreign relations committee, and worked on Biden’s failed presidential bid in 2008.After Obama picked Biden as vice-president, Blinken returned to the White House as his national security adviser. His face can be seen at the back of the room in the famous photograph of Obama officials monitoring the raid that killed Bin Laden. More

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      'Never give up': Greek asylum fight is gifted student's hardest lesson

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      Europe’s dreamers

      ‘Never give up’: Greek asylum fight is gifted student’s hardest lesson

      Amadou Diallo arrived in Greece from west African nearly four years ago.
      Composite: Enri Canaj/Magnum

      Amadou Diallo fled child labour in an African gold mine. Only by proving his ability to an elite university has he won the right to a future in Europe
      ‘We want to build a life’: Europe’s paperless young people speak out
      by Fahrinisa Campana

      Main image:
      Amadou Diallo arrived in Greece from west African nearly four years ago.
      Composite: Enri Canaj/Magnum

      From the stack of books Amadou Diallo took with him last summer to the Greek islands, it was a biography of Frederick Douglass that kept finding its way back to the top. One quote from the 19th-century slavery abolitionist particularly resonated: “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
      Diallo was on Sifnos, a holiday destination for cultured Athenians and well-heeled foreign families. An asylum seeker from Guinea, he was working long hours in a hotel. At night he would read the life stories of great men, wondering what shape his own freedom might take.
      Still just 20, the boy who arrived alone from west Africa nearly four years ago has seized every chance given to him. From boutique hotels on fashionably offbeat islands, to a private school where diplomats send their children, he has seen a vision of what Europe has to offer. He has read voraciously and worked hard to educate himself and to belong. But his place in this new world relies on Greece’s asylum process.
      Q&A Who are Europe’s dreamers?
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      Dreamers is the US term collectively given to young people without legal immigration status who were brought to the US as children. Some young people living in Europe without legal status now also call themselves ‘dreamers’ because their struggle against hostile European migration and asylum policies echoes the US campaign. Between 3.9 and 4.8 million people in Europe are believed to be living without residency permits, about 65% of whom are under 35 years old, according to the Pew Research Center. In the UK, a recent University of Wolverhampton study commissioned by the mayor of London estimated there are 332,000 children and young people living undocumented in the UK, including 106,000 children born in the country. Estimating numbers of undocumented people necessarily involves guesswork – and the methodologies are often criticised – but it is thought there are millions of dreamers across Europe. 

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      Diallo did not grow up with dreams of leaving Guinea. It was only after his father died that his life pitched into something that could have been imagined by a west African Dickens. Along with his younger brother, he was sent to live with his stepmother, who he says was abusive and sold him to the owner of a gold mine.
      His life at the mine was essentially one of forced labour. The first time he tried to escape, he was caught and brutally punished.
      Unbowed, he tried again. Locked in with other children, he screamed that there was a fire. The guards unlocked the door and in the chaos he managed to slip away.
      He crossed the border into Mali and took the route north that would eventually lead him to Turkey. From there, he caught a boat to the Greek island of Lesbos. When the 16-year-old finally reached Athens, two months after leaving Guinea, he was spotted by an aid worker who brought him to a children’s shelter run by the Home Project, a non-profit organisation. It focuses on sheltering lone children who, like Diallo, came in their thousands and ended up surviving on the streets, in camps or detention centres. As an unaccompanied minor he was classed as vulnerable and granted temporary protection.
      Through the Home Project he met Anna-Maria Kountouri, an immigration lawyer. She explains that minors have a race against time to gain legal status to remain in Europe, as when they reach 18 it is more difficult.
      To secure his future in Europe, Diallo needed the Greek authorities to accept his asylum claim. But the rejection rate in Greece for unaccompanied minors has risen sharply in recent years under new hardline asylum laws. Children whose cases are rejected are not deported but coming of age sweeps away that protection.
      Between June 2013 and January 2020 a total of 7,558 asylum applications from unaccompanied minors were processed in Greece, of which 63% were rejected. Of the 186 applications processed in January 2020, 71% were rejected. More

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      in World Politics

      Hosting Refugees and Migrants Is a Global Public Good

      by

      On June 20, we celebrated World Refugee Day. This was an opportune time for us all to pay attention to the challenge of forced displacement today. Strikingly, the world is facing the largest forced displacement crisis since World War II, with nearly 80 million people having fled their countries because of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events that have seriously disturbed public order. All continents now face forced displacement crises, and migratory problems cross state and community boundaries.

      Forced displacement has hit Latin American and Caribbean countries particularly hard, highlighting existing vulnerabilities such as increased levels of violence and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. Latin America is now home to one of the largest forced displacement crises in the world. As of March 2020, more than 5 million Venezuelans were reportedly living outside of their country, with 4 million of them in other Latin American countries: Colombia (1.8 million), Peru (1 million), and Ecuador and Chile (for a total of 1 million).

      COVID-19 Arrives in Refugee Camps

      READ MORE

      Since the beginning of the Venezuelan crisis, most Latin American nations have tried to accommodate these recent arrivals, providing migrants with basic education, emergency health care services and legal status. These neighboring countries have provided a global public good by hosting millions at the risk of overwhelming their services and systems. But how will these nations be able to withstand the pressure?

      Hosting countries face the new challenge of integrating larger numbers of migrants and refugees while dealing with the effects of the coronavirus outbreak. When taking into account that more than 60% of Venezuelan migration in Latin American countries is irregular and targets the most vulnerable populations, this crisis is now becoming a question of public health and safety and, ultimately, of regional security. It is time for the international community to provide a collective response that matches the magnitude of the crisis.

      A first step was taken on May 26, with the virtual — livestreamed on YouTube — pledging conference for Venezuelan refugees and migrants that helped raise $2.79 billion in total commitments. This included $653 million of grant funding for the Refugee and Migrant Response Plan, which is a United Nations’ appeal to largely address the emergency needs of the migrant population.

      The situation in Latin America calls for enhanced international support across the humanitarian-development nexus. In other words, the response should address pressing immediate needs —such as temporary shelter and emergency medical services — as well as the medium and long-term imperative of economic and social development through institutions, resilient local systems and service delivery. This is precisely what Colombian President Ivan Duque called for when advocating the shift from “emergency response to medium and long-term development and integration.”

      Five Priorities

      To help countries mitigate the impact of the crisis and charter a pathway to growth and stability, there are five development priorities to focus on.  

      Embed from Getty Images

      First, new ways should be explored to provide regular status to refugees and migrants, including through targeted regularization or employment-based programs. There have been several efforts to provide regular status to recent refugees and migrants arriving from Venezuela.

      Colombia, Peru and now Ecuador stand out for their ambitious regularization programs for hundreds of thousands of irregular refugees and migrants. Amid rising public anxieties over migration in some countries, it may become harder to implement such mass regularization programs or offer regular status to most who seek to enter. The approach followed by Colombia in providing regular status to those who have employment in specific sectors may provide another alternative. Similarly, Peru has been trying to regularize students in the country’s educational system — another strategy that Colombia and Ecuador seem likely to adopt in the future and one that may prove more politically viable in some countries.

      Yet these approaches risk leaving out the vast majority of recent refugees and migrants who do not attend school or work in the formal economy, or the families of those who do benefit from such measures. Policymakers should, therefore, be thinking about the medium and long-term effects where providing legal status to refugees and migrants would produce optimal labor market outcomes — for themselves and the country overall. The details of implementation in each case will matter enormously, but there is room for reiterative efforts that focus on specific different groups over time. 

      Second, health care barriers should be tackled through clear policies on access and financing. Almost all countries in the region, at least in theory, offer emergency health care to immigrants regardless of regular status. Still, specific policies are often unclear, and measures are not always implemented effectively at the local level, which means that migrants often have difficulties accessing health care in practice. In countries where local and regional governments pay part of health-care costs, financial burden sharing is also often unclear, leading local hospitals to cover costs that may never get reimbursed.

      Creating clear policies and procedures defining both the services offered and what amount of costs will be covered and by whom are critical. In some countries, such as Colombia, Peru and Costa Rica, where residents need to enroll in the health care system to be eligible for benefits, it is vital to find agile ways of ensuring that new immigrants can register and sometimes to find ways of covering the costs of their care.

      Third, access to education should be improved through flexible enrollment practices and ongoing support. One of the most critical decisions of countries has been to offer primary and secondary education to all students regardless of their status. In some countries, this was already embedded in the constitution, but others have more recently adopted these measures.

      This helps avoid a generation of young people growing up without education and supports receiving countries to take advantage of the potential human capital of immigrant children who will likely grow up in their territory. In many places, however, strict registration requirements involving documents that are difficult for migrants and refugees to obtain can prevent some from enrolling their children in school.

      There is also an urgent need to work with schools on policies, procedures and curricula to facilitate the integration of Venezuelan children, who may face challenges adapting to their new schools and need additional support to develop critical skills (e.g., history, culture and other country-specific knowledge). In several countries, access to college, graduate education and trade schools is also restricted for those who do not have adequate documentation, which risks wasting the human capital of immigrant youth who aspire to enter professional and technical careers, including in fields that are in demand in their new countries.

      Fourth, migrants’ skills should be unlocked to boost labor market integration and local economies. The majority of Venezuelan adults suitable for paid work in countries across the region were already working before COVID-19. In fact, more than 90% of Venezuelan migrants in Peru and 8 in 10 Venezuelan migrants in Colombia were employed before the pandemic. While recognizing that the labor markets of many countries in the region are characterized by a high degree of informality, care should be taken to ensure that immigrants do have pathways to better-paid and more stable employment in the formal economy and to avoid creating conditions where employers can pay immigrants less than the prevailing wage, to the detriment of both newcomer and native-born workers.

      There is no more important determinant for long-term positive labor market outcomes than ensuring regular status, which helps immigrant workers improve their wages over time and also helps avoid unfair wage competition between native-born and Venezuelan workers. Refugees and migrants tend to be relatively well-educated, which means that there is a wealth of highly skilled human capital that could benefit receiving countries.

      To effectively leverage this potential, countries will need to create agile ways for immigrants to get professional and technical degrees earned in their home countries validated and recognized by employers. Argentina has done this through provincial universities, which has allowed the country to encourage professionals to leave the capital and settle in other provinces where their skills are in demand. Creating expedited credential recognition pathways for applicants willing to settle in an area of the country where their skills are most needed could also help fill labor market gaps.

      Fifth, constructive narratives about immigration should be developed to highlight opportunities while not ignoring its challenges. There is no question that the sudden outflow of 5 million Venezuelans constitutes a migration crisis, and one that host countries are keenly aware of. But this migration is also an opportunity for host countries, as illustrated by increased predictions by the World Bank of regional future economic growth as Venezuelan immigration drives labor market expansion.

      Immigrants, when they have access to legal status, education, health care, financial services and pathways to validate their studies, tend to become net contributors to innovation, entrepreneurship and economic growth over time. Several governments in the region have gone out of their way to maintain their focus on these long-term opportunities, even while dealing with the challenges that the sudden arrival of so many people creates for already overburdened public services. Policymakers require assistance to orient the public debate on migration by keeping an eye on the medium and long-term benefits (and designing policies to help attain them). Still, they must also acknowledge the real strains involved in dealing with sudden, large-scale inflows.

      Inclusive Development

      Multilateral support will be critical in helping countries in the region meet these policy challenges. While migration from Venezuela holds the potential to enhance economic growth in the long term, it is also creating real and tangible short-term costs for already overburdened schools, hospitals and infrastructure. Multilateral support can help countries of the region overcome these challenges and reap immigration’s benefits.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This requires moving from emergency responses to long-term development and integration. While there is still a critical need for emergency services for recently-arrived migrants from Venezuela, as crises in these countries stretch on, it is also important to plan for the medium and the long term. The most important question in the future will be how to support inclusive development that can help host communities and immigrants build connections and improve their livelihoods together. Enhancing access to and quality of schools, health care facilities, housing and urban infrastructure in areas where migrants settle is vital. This is the key to successful integration and also an opportunity to turn a migration crisis into a net benefit for host societies.

      While there is some need for temporary shelter and emergency medical services that international actors could help meet, the greatest needs for support have to do with building local capacity for integration and service provision both to new arrivals and long-time residents. For this, multilateral organizations like the World Bank should continue to be actively engaged in helping better manage the forced displacement crisis, in support of its mission to reduce poverty and contribute to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

      *[The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The World Bank, its Board of Executive Directors or the governments they represent. The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this work.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Malcolm Turnbull on Donald Trump: 'You don't suck up to bullies'

      by

      Malcolm Turnbull on Donald Trump: ‘You don’t suck up to bullies’ Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull meet for the first time onboard the USS Intrepid in New York in May 2017. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images In this extract from his memoir, the former Australian prime minister recounts his deals and negotiations with the US president […] More