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      Immigration Is the Solution for the Falling US Birth Rate

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      Germany faces a major crisis. The German birth rate is considerably below what’s needed to replace the population. German seniors, meanwhile, are living longer and drawing more on state resources for their pensions and health care. There are basically two ways out of this demographic crisis.

      First of all, Germany could boost its birth rate. The German state provides generous family leave and child-care policies — not to mention the famous Kindergelt, the direct monthly payments of child benefits — and the fertility rate has indeed edged up over the years from 1.24 children per woman in 1994 to 1.57 today. But the trend in industrialized countries suggests that it will be difficult to push the rate much higher. The closest to the replacement rate of 2.1 children that any European Union country gets is France at 1.88.

      The second way out of Germany’s crisis would be through immigration. The country could throw open its doors to people from all over the world to take unwanted and unfilled jobs, pay taxes and support the increasingly aging population.

      Germany’s Refugees Face a Future Without Angela Merkel

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      That is exactly what Germany did. The government of Angela Merkel, in 2015 and 2016, accepted over a million refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Germany now has the fifth largest population of refugees in the world (after Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan and Uganda).

      This headline-grabbing decision, five years later, has been a remarkable success. The million refugees have prospered, reports the Center for Global Development:

      “Today, about half have found a job, paid training, or internship. On arrival, only about one percent declared having good or very good German language skills. By 2018, that figure had increased to 44 percent. … Such successful integration also has impacted the local German population. For example, between 2008 and 2015, the number of employees in companies founded by migrants grew by 50 percent (to 1.5 million). It has also mobilized civil society. A survey by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research suggests that 55 percent of Germans have contributed to the integration of refugees since 2015.”

      In 2015, nearly everyone in the media — German, European, international — referred to the millions of desperate people trying to get into Europe as an “immigration crisis.” They should have given it a different label: the immigration solution to Europe’s demographic crisis. Germany wisely chose to take advantage of this opportunity, while the countries of Eastern Europe, by and large, have embraced demographic suicide.

      The naysayers had a field day back in 2015 with their predictions of political failure for Merkel and social chaos for Germany. Today, Germany continues to be the strongest European economy. It has struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic but is now rapidly scaling up its vaccinations. And the anti-immigrant backlash, represented by the far-right Alternative for Germany, has ebbed, with the popularity of the party falling to 11% in recent polls. Meanwhile, with its liberal platform on immigration, the Green Party has surged to 25% and may well win the elections in September.

      It’s useful to bear the German experience in mind as the United States once again tackles its own “immigration crisis.”

      Immigrants Are a Gift

      The United States has been the exception to the demographic rule for industrialized countries. The US fertility rate, at 1.73, is also well below replacement. But because of a constant stream of immigrants, America has managed to grow at a healthy clip.

      Embed from Getty Images

      That began to change in the 2010s. According to the latest census numbers, the US grew at the second-slowest rate over the last decade since the founding of the country. The culprits were a declining fertility rate — the birthrate has declined 19% since peaking in 2007 — and a reduction in the number of immigrants. The impact of the pandemic — in terms of mortality, long-term disability and anxiety over economic insecurity — will only make matters worse.

      America has always depended on immigrants and undocumented workers. That dependency has only grown more acute over the years. Let’s take a look at four critical sectors.

      Between half and three-quarters of the farmworkers who ensure a supply of food to the American population are undocumented workers, and many of the rest are recent immigrants. The pandemic hit farmworkers and food manufacturing workers hard, and even the Trump administration had to acknowledge them as essential workers in reducing their risk of deportation (though not providing them additional protection against infection).

      Even before the pandemic hit, the food sector faced a shortage of workers. “In a 2017 survey of farmers by the California Farm Bureau, 55 percent reported labor shortages, and the figure was nearly 70 percent for those who depend on seasonal workers,” according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, Congress (read: Republicans in the Senate) has failed to provide a legal framework for what remains an essential workforce, pandemic or no pandemic, though the recent Farm Workforce Modernization Act has a shot of passing with bipartisan support to provide a million undocumented farmworkers with legal status.

      The health-care sector similarly depends on immigrants. Of the nearly 15 million people working in the health sector, about 18% are immigrants. COVID-19 is going to exact a heavy toll on this sector, though. According to a recent Washington Post poll, one in three health-care workers are thinking about exiting the profession: “Many talked about the betrayal and hypocrisy they feel from the public they have sacrificed so much to save—their clapping and hero-worship one day, then refusal to wear masks and take basic precautions the next, even if it would spare health workers the trauma of losing yet another patient.”

      Even without pandemic-related job changes, the United States has been looking at a major upcoming nursing shortage: over a million new registered nurses are needed by 2022. Nursing schools are just not keeping up with the demand created by retirement.

      Manufacturing, challenged by foreign competition and outsourcing, has infamously declined in the United States. Despite the spread of automation, this sector too needs more workers. There are currently 500,000 job openings, and one recent report estimates 2.1 million unfilled manufacturing jobs by 2030.

      Then there’s domestic work, one of the fastest-growing sectors of the US economy. Home health aides, child-care providers, housecleaners: the vast majority are women and more than one-third are foreign-born. “By 2026, care jobs will constitute one of the fastest growing professions in the country, and we will need more caregivers and nannies than we have ever needed before,” writes the National Domestic Workers Alliance. “Home-based elder care is already the single fastest growing occupation in our entire economy due to the rapidly growing aging population.”

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      Home health aides directly take care of aging Americans. But the United States needs younger workers across all professions to keep alive federal programs like Social Security that support aging Americans. The cohort of people aged 55 to 64 grew by 70% between 2000 and 2016 while the working-age population expanded by only 15%. That’s bad news for people looking to retire in the future on their Social Security benefits.

      Fortunately, immigrants have come to the rescue. They are overwhelmingly working age and have a higher participation rate in the labor force than the native-born. Their contributions to Social Security help keep the system afloat. The undocumented have been even more generous, providing an estimated $12 billion to the Social Security system through payroll taxes in 2010 alone (without much hope of ever drawing from the system themselves).

      Even with these contributions, however, Social Security is still expected to face a major funding shortfall by 2035 under current projections. One answer: more immigrants. If this story were a fairy tale, the immigrant would be the goose that lays the golden egg. Immigrants didn’t just build America. They are essential to the health and prosperity of the country today. Immigrants are the gift that keeps on giving.

      Whenever a goose starts laying golden eggs, however, someone invariably starts talking about wringing the poor animal’s neck and impoverishing everyone involved.

      The Politics of Immigration

      The Republican Party remade itself into an anti-immigrant force before Donald Trump entered the political scene. Tea Party insurgents called for closing the border with Mexico. David Brat, an unknown economist, ousted House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a 2014 Virginia race by hammering at the immigration issue. Trump, however, took immigration and ran with it, promising to build a new wall along the southern border, shut down travel from predominantly Muslim countries and make it nearly impossible for refugees and asylum-seekers to find haven in the United States.

      Because of Trump’s success in turning his extreme positions into federal policy, immigration largely disappeared as an electoral issue in 2020. The Republican Party focused instead on economic attacks (Joe Biden as a “socialist”) and cultural broadsides (the perennial racist and misogynist dog whistles).

      But with the Democrats back in the White House and in control of Congress, immigration will likely become again a major campaign issue in the midterm elections. The economy is on an upswing, the pandemic is waning and the Biden administration has been competent and relatively scandal-free. Without an actual platform of their own since they decided to turn their party into a personality cult, the Republicans will inevitably characterize the influx of people over the border as a “crisis” and the president’s “biggest failure.”

      The numbers at the border have indeed increased, with the influx for April near a 20-year high. Despite the Republican Party criticisms, these numbers are not the result of Biden administration policies. The number of people apprehended at the border, for instance, spiked in 2018, under Trump, at more than 850,000, which obviously had nothing to do with President Biden.

      The surge so far this year is largely seasonal, a result of pent-up demand from the COVID-19 border closures and a function of all the applicants stranded south of the border by Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. The numbers already appear to be plateauing. And the number of unaccompanied minors being held in Border Patrol facilities dropped dramatically in the last week.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Biden administration has reversed many of Trump’s policies, canceling funding for the border wall, reversing the “Muslim travel ban” and dismantling the “Remain in Mexico” program. Without any fanfare, the president also allowed the ban on guest-worker visas to expire at the end of March. Pictures of joyful family reunifications at the border are now replacing Trump-era images of children separated from the parents.

      The administration has also pledged to address the root causes of migration by funding initiatives in Central America that will reduce violence and corruption, stabilize economies and address humanitarian crises. That, of course, is easier said than done given the authoritarian leadership in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Tasked with tackling this issue, Vice-President Kamala Harris is well aware of the folly of funneling aid into corrupt governments, and she is reportedly lining up civil society representatives to meet on upcoming visits to the region. A long-term strategy of fostering political and economic transformation in the region, however, won’t win any points with Republicans or most voters in the United States in the short term.

      The recent kerfuffle around refugee policy illustrates the political stakes. As a candidate, Biden promised to bring US policies on refugees and asylum in line with international standards and raise the annual ceiling to more or less the level of the Obama years. Because of a failure to file the necessary paperwork, however, the number of refugees admitted into the United States in the first months of the Biden administration remained extremely low. Because refugees are often conflated in the public mind with immigrants — and the administration’s immigration policy was getting poor marks in the polls — the president tried to get away with suppressing the number of incoming refugees. Challenged by members of his own party, Biden again reversed himself, returning to the previous promise of a cap for the remainder of this year of 62,500 and an annual ceiling of 125,000 for 2022.

      The back-and-forth on refugee policy is an unusual deviation from an otherwise consistent set of policies coming from the administration. It’s a sign that immigration will continue to be subject to finger-in-the-wind calculations rather than rational debate. It’s a shame that it will require enormous political courage to embrace policies that are in the best interest of the United States, whether from the point of view of the labor force, the sustainability of the social welfare system or the livelihoods of the newest residents of the country.

      Republicans, with their steadfast commitment to political divisiveness and firearms, love to shoot themselves in the foot. There’s no reason for the rest of the country to follow suit. Maybe a delegation of Syrian-Germans can come to America on a speaking tour to explain how a “crisis” is really an opportunity.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      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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      Biden raises US refugee admissions cap to 62,500 after delay sparks anger

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      Joe Biden has formally raised the US cap on refugee admissions to 62,500 this year, weeks after facing bipartisan blowback for his delay in replacing the record-low ceiling set by Donald Trump.Refugee resettlement agencies have waited for Biden to quadruple the number of refugees allowed into the United States this year since 12 February, when a presidential proposal was submitted to Congress saying he planned to do so.But the presidential determination went unsigned until Monday. Biden said he first needed to expand the narrow eligibility criteria put in place by Trump that had kept out most refugees. He did that last month in an emergency determination, which also stated that Trump’s cap of up to 15,000 refugees this year “remains justified by humanitarian concerns and is otherwise in the national interest”.That brought sharp pushback for not at least taking the symbolic step of authorizing more refugees to enter the US this year, and within hours the White House made a quick course correction. The administration vowed to increase the historically low cap by 15 May – but probably not all the way to the 62,500 Biden had previously outlined.In the end, Biden returned to that figure.“It is important to take this action today to remove any lingering doubt in the minds of refugees around the world who have suffered so much, and who are anxiously waiting for their new lives to begin,” Biden stated before signing the emergency presidential determination.Biden said Trump’s cap “did not reflect America’s values as a nation that welcomes and supports refugees”.But he acknowledged the “sad truth” that the US would not meet the 62,500 cap by the end of the fiscal year in September, given the pandemic and limitations on the country’s resettlement capabilities – some of which his administration has attributed to the Trump administration’s policies to restrict immigration.Biden said it was important to lift the number to show “America’s commitment to protect the most vulnerable, and to stand as a beacon of liberty and refuge to the world”.The move also paves the way for Biden to boost the cap to 125,000 for the 2022 fiscal year, which starts in October.Since the fiscal year began last 1 October, just over 2,000 refugees have been resettled in the US.Refugee resettlement agencies applauded Biden’s action.“We are absolutely thrilled and relieved for so many refugee families all across the world who look to the US for protection,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the head of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, one of nine resettlement agencies in the country. “It has a felt like a rollercoaster ride, but this is one critical step toward rebuilding the program and returning the US to our global humanitarian leadership role.”Biden has also added more slots for refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Central America and ended Trump’s restrictions on resettlements from Somalia, Syria and Yemen.“We are dealing with a refugee resettlement process that has been eviscerated by the previous administration and we are still in a pandemic,” said Mark Hetfield, president of Hias, a Maryland-based Jewish non-profit that resettles refugees. “It is a challenge, but it’s important he sends a message to the world that the US is back and prepared to welcome refugees again.” More

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      Trump’s border wall hits a wall as Pentagon cancels parts funded from its budget

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      The US Department of Defense said on Friday it was cancelling the construction of parts of former president Donald Trump’s border wall with Mexico that were being built using military funds.All unobligated money was being returned to military, the Pentagon said.Trump declared a national emergency in 2019, in an effort to redirect funding to build a wall along the southern border.Joe Biden issued a proclamation on 20 January, his first day in office, ordering a freeze on border wall projects and directing a review of the legality of funding and contracting methods.“The Department of Defense is proceeding with canceling all border barrier construction projects paid for with funds originally intended for other military missions and functions such as schools for military children, overseas military construction projects in partner nations, and the national guard and reserve equipment account,” said a Pentagon spokesperson, Jamal Brown.Brown said the returned funds would be used for deferred military construction projects.It was not immediately clear how much would be returned to the military, but it was likely to be several billion dollars.Trump’s diversion of funds from the Pentagon was heavily criticized by lawmakers, who said it put national security at risk and circumvented Congress.In 2019, the military said more than 120 construction projects would be adversely affected by Trump’s move.The Department of Homeland Security also announced on Friday that it would take steps to address “physical dangers resulting from the previous administration’s approach to border wall construction”.It said it would repair the Rio Grande Valley flood barrier system, into which it said wall construction under the Trump administration had blown large holes. The department also said it work to remediate soil erosion along a wall segment in San Diego. More

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      Puente: binational, bilingual project aims to cover the border with nuance

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      Editor Bob Moore sits at his desk in El Paso, Texas, and turns up the volume on his Zoom meeting English-language channel, where a simultaneous interpreter helps him understand his Spanish-speaking counterpart, Rocío Gallegos, who also sits at her desk, across the border in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.It’s Monday, time for another editorial meeting at the first binational, bilingual border journalism project in the US – or maybe anywhere.Called “Puente,” or “bridge”, the newsgathering collaboration consists of seven digital, TV and radio outlets from the area. “We have long talked about El Paso and Ciudad Juárez as being one region,” said Moore, one of the project’s directors. “But this has never been true with journalism.”That has had consequences. “National media covers the border badly, with a distorted view that comes from what it means in the context of current political views,” said Moore, who was an editor at the El Paso Times for 25 years before one too many corporate-driven budget cuts drove him out of newspapers in 2017 and toward non-profit, digital news.With most national and international coverage, Moore said: “We lose the richness and nuance of the border.”The Puente Media Collaborative hopes to change that, and the project, only several months old, may have come about at just the right time, as the subject of immigration has once again centered national and international attention on the region.The idea came about during the pandemic, said Gallegos, when she talked to Moore about Covid restrictions on crossing the border that were stopping her from sending reporters to El Paso. “You can’t cross the border; I can’t either,” she remembers telling him. They began discussing collaborating on reporting.Gallegos had also led Juárez’s main newspaper, El Diario de Juárez, until 2018. She then became director at La Verdad, or The Truth, a digital outlet – mirroring Moore, who launched the website, El Paso Matters, in 2019.Their ideas on joining forces got a boost in October when their project proposal received $300,000 in funding plus technical support from Microsoft, as part of an initiative focused on supporting local journalism that includes outlets in Mississippi’s Delta region, Yakima, Washington, and Fresno, California – and aimed at helping counteract the loss of 2,100 newspapers in the last 15 years.Puente’s journalists recently released their first stories on the impact of Covid on the region, a year into living with the pandemic – including how border restrictions have affected drug trafficking, and what it means to tighten border crossing in a region that normally sees 50,000 people go back and forth for work and other reasons. There was also a story on how the two countries squandered opportunities to face Covid together.Next, Moore said, “we will be looking at immigration – through a different lens than most of the national media”. The newsgathering itself has been different, since reporters have been collaborating on sources and ideas, and gathering information in both languages. While a final decision hasn’t been reached, Moore thinks the upcoming stories on immigration may be written in Spanish, and translated into English.The collaboration has also led to sharing perspectives on how to frame stories. Gallegos pointed to a recent editorial planning meeting on the upcoming immigration stories. Shoe-leather reporting had already been done in both cities. Discussion turned to sending cameras from Channel 26, the local Univision affiliate and Puente partner, to federal government shelters where children who had crossed the border are being kept.“We were sensitive to what they had been through,” Gallegos said, adding that many were indigenous people who spoke neither Spanish nor English. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t victimize or traumatize them once again” with a camera crew, she said. The Mexican journalists “had a better grasp of what their lives are like”, said Moore. The camera crew agreed to approach the assignment with care.Kathleen Staudt, former professor of political science at the University of Texas, El Paso, and author of nine books on the border, said that she hopes the Puente Media Collaborative provides a lens from the other side of the border, since “too often Mexico is portrayed as the ‘other’” in English-language media.”Brenda de Anda-Swann, news director and 22-year veteran at the El Paso ABC affiliate KVIA – and part of Puente – said “the people who are part of this collaborative have worked on the border for a long, long time … We trust each other. This doesn’t feel unfamiliar, while at the same time it is new.”She said that her news station’s participation in the project will give the outlet “some time to sit back, explore how things work, why they’re happening” – without turning attention away from the news of the day, such as a recent dust storm.Working in collaboration with La Verdad “reflects who we are as a community”, she added. “Having newsrooms on both sides of the border is a perfect reflection of the community, on a personal, business and political level.”She hopes to see the project “bridging the communities through storytelling and information”, and that it serves to “provide best practices for other parts of the world”. More

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      Outcry as Biden breaks pledge to lift Trump-era cap on refugee admissions

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterJoe Biden was condemned on Friday for reversing a campaign pledge by leaving in place the historically low cap on refugee admissions set by his predecessor, Donald Trump.The number of refugees allowed to resettle in the US per year fell from 85,000 to 15,000 under Trump, whose hardline “America first” agenda frequently portrayed migrants as a security threat.Biden had considered raising the cap to 62,500 but instead opted for a policy that officials say will speed up the admissions process while keeping the 15,000 ceiling.The U-turn left Biden facing potentially his first major rebellion from the left of the Democratic party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive congresswoman from New York, tweeted: “Completely and utterly unacceptable. Biden promised to welcome immigrants, and people voted for him based on that promise.“Upholding the xenophobic and racist policies of the Trump admin, including the historically low and plummeted refugee cap, is flat out wrong. Keep your promise.”Her Washington state colleague Pramila Jayapal said: “It is simply unacceptable and unconscionable that the Biden administration is not immediately repealing Donald Trump’s harmful, xenophobic and racist refugee cap that cruelly restricts refugee admissions to a historically low level … President Biden has broken his promise to restore our humanity.”Biden’s order could allow for a wider group of refugees to be considered for resettlement. It adjusts allocation limits set by Trump, providing more spaces for refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Central America, and lifts restrictions on resettlements from Somalia, Syria and Yemen.Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, posted on Twitter: “America needs to rebuild our refugee resettlement program. We will use all 15,000 slots under the new Determination and work with Congress on increasing admissions and building back to the numbers to which we’ve committed.”But refugee advocacy groups expressed deep disappointment, noting that Biden’s campaign website promised he would “prioritize setting the annual global refugee admissions cap to 125,000”.Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, described the move as both “bad policy and bad politics”.“There is no valid policy reason to maintain the shockingly low refugee cap,” he said. “As a political matter, President Biden will alienate a lot of his supporters by failing to turn the page on President Trump’s racism, xenophobia and scapegoating of immigrants and refugees.”The International Rescue Committee called the order “a disturbing and unjustified retreat” and suggested that at the current rate of admissions, Biden’s administration is on track to resettle the lowest number of refugees of any president in US history.David Miliband, the IRC president and chief executive, said: “This is a time of unprecedented global need and the US is still far from returning to its historic role of safe haven for the world’s persecuted and most vulnerable.”Biden previously signed an executive order pledging to increase the number of refugees admitted in the 2022 fiscal year, which begins on 1 October, to 125,000. In the current fiscal year, just over 2,000 refugees have been resettled.The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters the delay was because “it took us some time to see and evaluate how ineffective, or how trashed in some ways the refugee processing system had become, and so we had to rebuild some of those muscles and put it back in place”.Another concern has been the record pace of unaccompanied migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, which has drawn in resources that would go to vetting, processing and resettling refugees.“It is a factor,” said Psaki, noting that the Office of Refugee Resettlement “has personnel working on both issues and so we have to ensure that there is capacity and ability to manage both”.Eleanor Acer, refugee protection director at Human Rights First, rejected this argument.“As the administration certainly knows, the United States has the ability to both increase resettlement and uphold its asylum commitments at the border; not doing so means that America’s beacon of safety for refugees and asylum seekers remains dark,” she said.“It’s also disingenuous for this administration to say it is pursuing ‘other legal pathways’ for Central American refugees to come to the United States while maintaining its shutdown of asylum at the border and leaving the limit for refugee admissions at the lowest level in history.”Apparently stung by the outcry, Psaki later released a statement that claimed there had been “some confusion” over the cap. The statement acknowledged that Biden’s initial goal of 62,500 “seems unlikely” but added: “We expect the President to set a final, increased refugee cap for the remainder of this fiscal year by 15 May”. More

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      The Daca immigrant fighting to empower young Texas voters

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      Claudia Yoli Ferla can’t vote herself.But, by registering and educating others, the 28-year-old immigrant and El Pasoan has helped thousands of fellow Texans gain access to the polls, despite the blot of voter suppression in her state.Now – as Republican lawmakers push reforms that would subject constituents to even more barriers at the ballot box – Yoli Ferla is seeking to fight back by empowering a powerful bloc of young voters who could transform Texas’s political future.“I cannot wait til the day that I get to cast a ballot,” she told the Guardian. “But I know that that moment will only come with the continued organizing of young people on the ground, demanding systematic change not only from Congress, but also our state leaders.”As the incoming executive director at Move Texas, a non-partisan, youth-focused civic engagement non-profit, Yoli Ferla wants to use her platform to uplift the voices, stories and lived experiences of other young people, trying to turn first-time voters into lifetime organizers.Young Texans are far from a monolith ideologically: 72% of Latino voters ages 18-29 supported Joe Biden in 2020, while 51% of their white counterparts swung for Donald Trump.But overall, a strong majority of the state’s youth backed the Democratic presidential nominee last year, signaling a changing of the guard that could help liberals turn Texas blue – if only enough young voters are able to exercise their right.“Our generation has historically, and will continue to be, disenfranchised by our very own democracy,” Yoli Ferla said.Originally from Venezuela, Yoli Ferla immigrated with her mom to El Paso as a child. She grew up undocumented, then eventually won protection through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, which shields her from deportation but does not provide a pathway to citizenship or representation.Meanwhile, in the predominantly Latino border city where she was raised, she learned how marginalized communities, including her own family, have been disproportionately hurt by Texas’s hard-line voter restrictions.From strict ID requirements to no same-day registration and extremely limited vote-by-mail or online registration, Texas is known as one of the hardest places to cast a ballot nationwide. It’s no wonder that the state has chronically low voter turnout, compared with much of the country.“Texas, you know, is now a leader in that anti-democratic, anti-voting fight,” Yoli Ferla said.In recent days, Texas electoral politics have left much of the nation aghast after state lawmakers advanced highly contentious bills, directly targeting many of the innovations that successfully expanded voting access amid the coronavirus pandemic.The legislation would do away with drive-in voting locations, allow partisan poll watchers to record voters, and limit mail-in voting, among other provisions.“We want a system that people can trust, we want it to be accurate, and we want folks to know that it’s accurate,” said Texas state senator Bryan Hughes, leaning into a specious myth about voter fraud fueling Trump’s defeat.“If folks don’t trust the system, they’re not going to vote.”The sweeping restrictions are taking up a lot of air, even as roughly 48,000 Texans have died from Covid-19 and residents continue to build back after a devastating winter storm that left millions without power or water mere months ago.Legislators should be focused on “bigger problems”, Yoli Ferla said, “like addressing the ongoing pandemic, addressing the climate crisis, ensuring that we’re working towards immigration reform and uprooting our criminal justice system”.“But instead,” she said, “they choose to engage in a fight centered on unicorns and fairy tales”.As conservatives’ ironclad grasp on Texas shows some signs of weakness, Yoli Ferla believes politicians who are anti-democratic see the writing on the wall: they’re not going to be able to win on the issues anymore, so they’re shifting the goalpost.“It couldn’t be more clear that the number one priority in their playbook is to suppress our power,” she said.Yoli Ferla envisions a Texas where officials and policies reflect the increasingly diverse constituencies they represent – an ambition that relies on a more engaged electorate.That means she’s got a lot of work to do. But she already knows how to build strong relationships, a secret weapon of hers in the fight to drum up civic engagement.She remembers working on a student voter initiative, where she met a young man who had just turned 18. The program helped him register to vote, but it also got him excited about his local democracy, and he went on years later to work as the field director for a first-time candidate in El Paso.She knows “that his story is not an isolated one”.“When we get young people to have this conversation, to engage in this conversation,” Yoli Ferla said, “when we give ’em an opportunity to really share their story, when we give ’em an opportunity to understand how these issues intersect with their very basic civic duty, which is to vote – I think the lines start to connect.” More

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      ‘A system of global apartheid’: author Harsha Walia on why the border crisis is a myth

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      The rising number of migrant children and families seeking to cross the US border with Mexico is emerging as one of the most serious political challenges for Joe Biden’s new administration.
      That’s exactly what Donald Trump wants: he and other Republicans believe that Americans’ concerns about a supposed “border crisis” will help Republicans win back political power.

      But Harsha Walia, the author of two books about border politics, argues that there is no “border crisis,” in the United States or anywhere else. Instead, there are the “actual crises” that drive mass migration – such as capitalism, war and the climate emergency – and “imagined crises” at political borders, which are used to justify further border securitization and violence.
      Walia, a Canadian organizer who helped found No One Is Illegal, which advocates for migrants, refugees and undocumented people, talked to the Guardian about Border and Rule, her new book on global migration, border politics and the rise of what she calls “racist nationalism.” The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
      Last month, a young white gunman was charged with murdering eight people, most of them Asian women, at several spas around Atlanta, Georgia. Around the same time, there was increasing political attention to the higher numbers of migrants and refugees showing up at the US-Mexico border. Do you see any connection between these different events?
      I think they are deeply connected. The newest invocation of a “border surge” and a “border crisis” is again creating the spectre of immigrants and refugees “taking over.” This seemingly race neutral language – we are told there’s nothing inherently racist about saying “border surge”– is actually deeply racially coded. It invokes a flood of black and brown people taking over a so-called white man’s country. That is the basis of historic immigrant exclusion, both anti-Asian exclusion in the 19th century, which very explicitly excluded Chinese laborers and especially Chinese women presumed to be sex workers, and anti-Latinx exclusion. If we were to think about one situation as anti-Asian racism and one as anti-Latinx racism, they might seem disconnected. But both forms of racism are fundamentally anti-immigrant. Racial violence is connected to the idea of who belongs and who doesn’t. Whose humanity is questioned in a moment of crisis. Who is scapegoated in a moment of crisis.
      How do you understand the rise of white supremacist violence, particularly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim violence, that we are seeing around the world?
      The rise in white supremacy is a feedback loop between individual rightwing vigilantes and state rhetoric and state policy. When it comes to the Georgia shootings, we can’t ignore the fact that the criminalization of sex work makes sex workers targets. It’s not sex work itself, it’s the social condition of criminalization that creates that vulnerability. It’s similar to the ways in which border vigilantes have targeted immigrants: the Minutemen who show up at the border and harass migrants, or the kidnapping of migrants by the United Constitutional Patriots at gunpoint. We can’t dissociate that kind of violence from state policies that vilify migrants and refugees, or newspapers that continue to use the word “illegal alien”. More

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      Republicans have taken up the politics of bigotry, putting US democracy at risk | Robert Reich

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      Republicans are outraged – outraged! – at the surge of migrants at the southern border. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, declares it a “crisis … created by the presidential policies of this new administration”. The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs claims, “we go through some periods where we have these surges, but right now is probably the most dramatic that I’ve seen at the border in my lifetime.”Donald Trump demands the Biden administration “immediately complete the wall, which can be done in a matter of weeks – they should never have stopped it. They are causing death and human tragedy.”“Our country is being destroyed!” he adds.In fact, there’s no surge of migrants at the border.US Customs and Border Protection apprehended 28% more migrants from January to February this year than in previous months. But this was largely seasonal. Two years ago, apprehensions increased 31% during the same period. Three years ago, it was about 25% from February to March. Migrants start coming when winter ends and the weather gets a bit warmer, then stop coming in the hotter summer months when the desert is deadly.To be sure, there is a humanitarian crisis of children detained in overcrowded border facilities. And an even worse humanitarian tragedy in the violence and political oppression in Central America, worsened by US policies over the years, that drives migration in the first place.But the “surge” has been fabricated by Republicans in order to stoke fear – and, not incidentally, to justify changes in laws they say are necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting.The core message of the Republican party now consists of liesRepublicans continue to allege – without proof – that the 2020 election was rife with fraudulent ballots, many from undocumented migrants. Over the past six weeks they’ve introduced 250 bills in 43 states designed to make it harder for people to vote – especially the young, the poor, Black people and Hispanic Americans, all of whom are likely to vote for Democrats – by eliminating mail-in ballots, reducing times for voting, decreasing the number of drop-off boxes, demanding proof of citizenship, even making it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.To stop this, Democrats are trying to enact a sweeping voting rights bill, the For the People Act, which protects voting, ends partisan gerrymandering and keeps dark money out of elections. It passed the House but Republicans in the Senate are fighting it with more lies.On Wednesday, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz falsely claimed the new bill would register millions of undocumented migrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots too.The core message of the Republican party now consists of lies about a “crisis” of violent migrants crossing the border, lies that they’re voting illegally, and blatantly anti-democratic demands voting be restricted to counter it.The party that once championed lower taxes, smaller government, states’ rights and a strong national defense now has more in common with anti-democratic regimes and racist-nationalist political movements around the world than with America’s avowed ideals of democracy, rule of law and human rights.Donald Trump isn’t single-handedly responsible for this, but he demonstrated to the GOP the political potency of bigotry and the GOP has taken him up on it.This transformation in one of America’s two eminent political parties has shocking implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future of democracy everywhere.“I predict to you, your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy?” Joe Biden opined at his news conference on Thursday.In his maiden speech at the state department on 4 March, Antony Blinken conceded that the erosion of democracy around the world is “also happening here in the United States”.The secretary of state didn’t explicitly talk about the Republican party, but there was no mistaking his subject.“When democracies are weak … they become more vulnerable to extremist movements from the inside and to interference from the outside,” he warned.People around the world witnessing the fragility of American democracy “want to see whether our democracy is resilient, whether we can rise to the challenge here at home. That will be the foundation for our legitimacy in defending democracy around the world for years to come.”That resilience and legitimacy will depend in large part on whether Republicans or Democrats prevail on voting rights.Not since the years leading up to the civil war has the clash between the nation’s two major parties so clearly defined the core challenge facing American democracy. More