The housing crisis is one of the most important policy issues facing the nation. Housing shortages increase living costs for large numbers of people, and also prevent millions from moving to places where they would have better job and educational opportunities, thereby slowing economic growth and innovation. Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have taken positions on housing issues. But their ideas are mostly ones that would cause more harm than good. Sadly, neither candidate proposes any meaningful steps to break down the biggest barrier to housing construction in most of the US: exclusionary zoning rules that make it difficult or impossible to build new housing in response to demand.
These policy ideas range from mediocre to awful. A $25,000 subsidy for first-time homebuyers is unlikely to do much to ease housing shortages. The fundamental problem is one of regulatory restrictions on supply. In that environment, subsidizing demand will simply bid up prices. Moreover, the people who most suffer from housing shortages are mostly renters, not would-be homeowners. This subsidy plan does nothing for them. Much the same goes for the plan to provide tax incentives for developers. This won't do much for supply so long as developers are barred from building much in the way of new housing in many places, especially multi-family housing.
If zoning and other regulatory restrictions do get lifted, Harris's tax credit incentives would be unnecessary. And, indeed, there would be no good reason to have the tax code favor housing purchases over other types of consumption.
Rent control is a terrible idea that is actually likely to exacerbate shortages. This is an Economics 101 point broadly accepted by economists across the political spectrum. Don't take my word for it. Take that of prominent progressive ecoonomists, such as Paul Krugman, and Jason Furman, former chair of Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, who points out that "[r]ent control has been about as disgraced as any economic policy in the tool kit."
Finally, there is no good reason to think that corporate landlords are any worse than other types of landlords, or that algorithmic pricing is somehow making the housing crisis worse. To the contrary, corporate landlords are usually as good or better than their "mom and pop" counterparts. Take it from a longtime renter with experience living under both types of landlords; the corporate ones usually maintain their properties better, and have better customer service. And algorithms can help owners identify situations where they can increase profit by lowering prices, as well as increasing them.
Harris is right to want to build 3 million new homes. Indeed, it would be great to build more than that. But, so far, she hasn't proposed much in the way of effective methods of doing it. Unless and until she does so, her aspiration for 3 million new homes is not much more viable than my desire to add 3 million unicorns to the nation's stock of magical animals.
Trump's housing agenda is less detailed than Harris's, but could well be even worse. The housing chapter of the Heritage Foundation's controversial Project 2025 emphasizes that "a conservative Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning." Single-family zoning, of course, is the most restrictive type of exclusionary zoning blocking new housing construction in many parts of the country. Donald Trump has disavowed Project 2025, and claims he "knows nothing about it." But the author of the housing chapter is Ben Carson, Trump's former secretary of Housing and Urban Development. During the 2020 election, Carson and Trump coauthored a Wall Street Journal op ed attacking efforts to curb exclusionary single-family zoning. He recently reaffirmed that position, promising to block "low-income developments" in suburban areas. On housing, at least, Project 2025 seems to reflect Trump's thinking, and that of the kinds of people likely to influence housing policy in a second Trump administration. The Trump worldview is one of NIMBYism ("not in my backyard").
Trump's immigration policies—a centerpiece of his agenda, if anything is—would also have negative effects on housing. Evidence shows that mass deportations of undocumented immigrants reduce the availability of housing and increase the cost, because undocumented immigrants are an important part of the construction work force (an effect that outweighs the potential price-increasing effect caused by immigration increasing the number of people who need housing). Trump and his allies also plan massive reductions in most types of legal immigration. Slashing work visas is also likely to negatively affect housing construction (as well as damage the economy in other ways).
If there is a saving grace to the Harris and Trump housing policies, it's that most of them cannot be implemented without new legislation, which will be extremely hard to push through a closely divided Congress. That's true of the Harris's rent control policies, and her plans to subsidize home purchases, and crack down on "corporate" landlords. Likewise, a Trump administration would probably need new legislation for any major effort to protect single-family zoning against state-level reform efforts.
But Trump's immigration policies are an exception. The executive could ramp up deportation and slash legal immigration without new legislation. Indeed, the Trump administration did in fact massively cut legal immigration during Trump's previous term in office. Deportation efforts could be partially stymied by state and local government resistance (as also happened during Trump's first term). But Trump could partly offset that by trying to use the military, as he and his allies plan to do (whether legal challenges to such efforts would block them is debatable). At the very least, ramping up federal deportation efforts would drive undocumented immigrants further underground, and reduce their ability to work on construction, where laborers are relatively out in the open and more vulnerable to detection than in some other jobs.
In sum, Harris and Trump are offering mostly terrible housing policies. Their main virtue is the difficulty of implementing them.
There are, in fact, steps the federal government can take to ease housing shortages. Most restrictions on new housing are enacted by state and local governments, which limits the potential of federal intervention. But Congress could enact legislation requiring state and local governments that receive federal economic development grants to enact "YIMBY" legislation loosening zoning rules. Perhaps a stronger version of the YIMBY Act proposed by Republican Senator Todd Young and Democratic Rep. Derek Kilmer (their version could be a useful start, but does not have enough teeth). Those who object to such legislation on grounds of protecting local autonomy should recall that YIMBYism is actually the ultimate localism.
Finally, the feds could help pursuing the opposite of Trump's immigration policies, and instead make legal migration easier. That would increase the construction workforce, and make housing construction cheaper and faster.
Sadly, neither major-party candidate is proposing to do any of these things. Instead, they mostly sell claptrap that is likely to make the housing crisis even worse.
Despite an authoritarian regime's efforts to obstruct free and fair elections, Venezuelans turned out in large numbers to vote for their president last Sunday, hoping for change amid widespread political repression and a humanitarian crisis. The U.S. is deeply implicated in this turmoil, as the disputed election results underscore significant geopolitical stakes and can have a significant impact on American interests.
A government-controlled electoral commission declared Nicolás Maduro the winner of the election, claiming he received 51 percent of the votes. Yet exit polls and tallies by the opposition indicate that over 70 percent of Venezuelans supported the opposition candidate, Edmundo González.
Governments around the world have denounced the election as fraudulent and demanded evidence of Maduro's claimed victory. Leaders such as Argentine President Javier Milei and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni have expressed their solidarity with the Venezuelan people's desire for change.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has echoed these concerns, claiming that the election results do not reflect the true will of the Venezuelan people. On Thursday, Blinken affirmed that the U.S. recognizes González as the legitimate winner of the Venezuelan elections.
Even left-wing governments like Brazil and Colombia are pressing Maduro to substantiate his claim of victory, but no such proof has emerged. In a bigger turn of events, the Carter Center, one of the few entities invited to observe the Venezuelan election, condemned the electoral commission for its lack of transparency.
Protests erupted nationwide in response to the disputed election, with thousands taking to the streets. Several statues of former socialist president Hugo Chávez were toppled in the unrest. Clashes with security forces have resulted in hundreds of arrests and at least 17 deaths.
Strategic Concerns for the U.S.
Supporting the democratic aspirations of Venezuelans is crucial for U.S. interests. A free Venezuela will address key U.S. policy concerns such as the rise in illegal migration, untapped market opportunities, the growing influence of Iran and China in the region, and security risks for international commerce in the region.
Should Maduro remain in power, migration to the United States from Venezuela is expected to surge. Surveys show that over 40 percent of Venezuelans plan to leave the country if Maduro continues as president. This potential influx of refugees could strain U.S. immigration systems and social infrastructure, posing a major humanitarian and logistical challenge.
American firms will also miss out on substantial business opportunities in Venezuela if Maduro stays in power. The country's vast reserves of oil and uranium represent untapped markets that could enhance U.S. energy security. Investing in Venezuela's oil industry could help diversify energy sources and reduce dependency on unstable or unfriendly regions, leading to more stable energy prices and a reliable supply of oil for the U.S. market.
Maduro's continued rule will also likely increase the presence of U.S. adversaries such as Russia, Iran, and China in the region. Iran plans to expand trade with Venezuela to $20 billion per year, China is heavily investing in the country, and Russia has signed multiple military agreements with the South American country. As Venezuela continues to distance itself from the democratic world, one can only expect these relationships to strengthen. And having a rogue state relatively close to the U.S. border represents security concerns to American businesses and international trade in general.
To address these challenges, American policy makers need to adopt a more strategic approach. The current administration has focused on negotiating sanction relief for the Maduro regime in exchange for promises to hold free and fair elections. But this has proven insufficient, producing no positive changes in Maduro's behavior.
A new foreign policy approach should include a reassessment of institutions such as the United Nations and the Organization of American States. For years, these institutions have systematically failed to uphold the rule of law and human rights in Venezuela. Additionally, U.S. policy makers should establish measures to prevent regimes from exploiting international treaties and cooperation agreements. This includes sectors like finance and energy, where regimes have undermined democratic nations' interests. Finally, the methodology and effectiveness of sanctions should be reassessed. Despite a series of sanctions imposed by the U.S. on countries like Venezuela, Russia, and Iran, the International Monetary Fund projects economic growth for all these nations in 2024.
Failure to address these issues risks empowering autocrats around the world, jeopardizing U.S. national security, economic performance, and diplomatic standing.
Yesterday, in United States v. Abbott, the en banc US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in favor of Texas in a case where the federal government is suing the state for installing floating buoy barriers in the Rio Grande River to block migration and drug smuggling, thereby creating safety hazards and possibly impeding navigation. The Biden Administration claimed this violates the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899.
Texas argues the federal government incorrectly interpreted the statute, but also asserts that one of the "invasion" clauses of the Constitution gives it the power to install the buoys even if federal law forbids it. Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution states that "[n]o state shall, without the Consent of Congress, . . . engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay." Texas claims illegal migration and drug smuggling qualify as "invasion," and therefore the Constitution gives the state the power to take military action in defiance of federal statues, and even in the absence of congressional authorization for war.
In an 11-7 decision largely divided along ideological lines (with more conservative judges in the majority), the en banc Fifth Circuit overturned appellate panel and trial court decisions that had ruled in favor of the federal government.
The majority decision is based on statutory arguments, concluding that the relevant stretch of the Rio Grande is not covered by the Rivers and Harbors Act because it isn't "navigable." On that issue, I think both sides have some good arguments, and I will leave it to analysts with greater interest and expertise. Significantly, the majority does not address Texas's "invasion" argument, thereby not overturning the panel and trial court rulings against Texas on that issue.
Texas has also advanced the "invasion" argument in another case, one dealing with the legality of the states SB 4 law, giving law enforcement broad powers to detain and expel undocumented migrants. So far, both the district court and a Fifth Circuit panel have ruled against the state on that point.
In a recent Lawfare article and an amicus brief in this case, I have explained why illegal migration and drug smuggling do not qualify as "invasion" under the text and original meaning of the Constitution. An "invasion" is an organized armed attack. In addition, I outline the dangerous implications of Texas's argument. If accepted by courts, it would give states nearly unlimited power to start wars without congressional authorization, and give the federal government a similar blank check to suspend the writ of habeas corpus (thereby allowing it to detain people, including US citizens, without charges).
In a concurring opinion in the en banc court, prominent conservative Judge James Ho argues that the court should have addressed the invasion argument. He contends that the meaning of "invasion" is a "political question" that the judiciary is not permitted to address. Other courts that have ruled that invasion is a political question have simultaneously concluded that the matter is left up to the federal government (while, in several cases, also simultaneously concluding that illegal migration does not qualify as invasion). Judge Ho, however, argues that courts must defer to the Texas governor's assertion that there is an invasion, at least so long as the governor is acting in "good faith."
This theory has breathtakingly awful implications. It implies a state governor can declare the existence of an "invasion" virtually any time he or she wants, and then "engage in war" in response—even without authorization from Congress. Moreover, Ho argues the governor can continue military action indefinitely, even if the federal government has had time to consider the situation, and opposes the state's actions.
The "good faith" restriction is not much of a constraint. Political partisans can persuade themselves that almost any interaction with foreigners they find threatening qualifies as an "invasion." If illegal migration and drug smuggling qualify, why not economic competition (many "national conservatives" view imports as a national security threat)? Why not supposedly harmful cross-border cultural influences (dangerous foreign ideas and art forms are "invading" our people's minds!)? And that list can easily be extended.
If this conclusion were required by the text and original meaning of the Constitution, perhaps there would be no way around it. But that isn't so. As explained in my article and amicus brief, historical and textual evidence overwhelming demonstrate that only an organized armed attack qualifies as an "invasion." As James Madison put it, invasion is "an operation of war." Nor is there any original meaning evidence indicating that courts must defer to state governments on this issue.
The "political questions" doctrine is a judicial invention, not something embedded in text and original meaning itself. I am skeptical that the doctrine makes much sense at all. Even if it should be used in some contexts, there is no reason to think the meaning of "invasion" is the kind of issue that courts cannot or should not resolve. The meaning of that term is at least as clear as that of many other words in the Constitution that courts routinely interpret. At the very least, the political question doctrine should not be interpreted to mandate the absurd consequence that a single state can start a war virtually anytime it wants—since there is virtually always some substantial amount of illegal migration and cross-border smuggling, at least so long as we have drug prohibition and severe migration restrictions.
Judge Ho also argues that actions by nongovernmental groups can qualify as "invasion." This may be true in some situations, as in the case of attacks by insurgents or terrorist groups. It does not follow that illegal migration, drug smuggling, or other ordinary criminal activity qualify.
Moreover, most of the evidence he cites relates to a situation in the 1870s where the governor of Texas used state militia to combat large-scale cross-border banditry from Mexico. This episode—occurring almost a century of the enactment of the Invasion Clause—sheds little light on the text and original meaning. In a recent opinion, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett rightly cautions against reliance on "[h]istory (or tradition) that long postdates ratification." This is the kind of thing she had in mind.
In addition, the 1870s history doesn't really support Judge Ho's position. In an 1874 letter to the Attorney General (which Judge Ho helpfully reprints in an appendix to is opinion), Texas Governor Richard Coke argued that the Mexican bandits had gone beyond ordinary criminality, and "were making war on the people of Texas and their property." He also stressed that Texas state forces were "not authorized to cross the river for purposes of retaliation, nor to make war on the territory or any of the people of Mexico, but only to pursue marauders going out of Texas, and take from them and bring back property found in their possession belonging in Texas." This stops short of claiming a right to "engage in war." Perhaps most important, the Governor acknowledged that "the officers of the United States Government… have the power to prevent… enforcement" of his order to the Texas troops, and that he will withdraw the order if the federal government requests it. That's a far cry from the claim of virtually unlimited power to declare an "invasion" and engage in war in response claimed by Governor Abbott today.
The dissenting opinion by Judge Dana Douglas has additional criticisms of Ho's opinion on the "invasion" issue. I don't agree with all of her arguments. But she's right to point out that Texas's position "would enable Governor Abbott to engage in acts of war in perpetuity."
In a concurring opinion, Judge Andrew Oldham (another prominent conservative jurist), contends that Judge Ho is wrong to argue the majority was required to address the invasion issue. I think Judge Oldham is probably right about that question, but will leave it to commentators with greater expertise on civil procedure.
Yesterday's ruling is not a final resolution of the buoy case. Technically, it only lifts the preliminary injunction against the buoys issued by the district court. However, the majority's analysis makes clear that the trial court will have to resolve the case in favor of Texas on the issue of "navigability." If so, the invasion question need not be addressed, since the en banc majority signaled it does not have to be.
However, the invasion argument is still in play in the SB 4 case, and Texas—and perhaps other states—are likely to continue making it in the future. So long as they persist in doing so, I will keep on explaining why that argument is dangerously wrong.
UPDATE: In the original version of this post, I indicated that the vote in the en banc Fifth Circuit was 11-6, rather than the correct figure of 11-7. I apologize for the mistake, which has now been corrected.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett. (Eric Lee/Pool via CNP/Polaris/Newscom)
In its important recent immigration decision in Department of State v. Munoz, the Supreme Court ruled there are virtually no constitutional limits on the federal government's power to bar non-citizen spouses of American citizens from entering the country. In the process, Justice Amy Coney Barrett's majority opinion (written on behalf of herself and the five other conservative justices) commits serious errors in historical analysis, and violates Justice Barrett's own well-taken strictures about the appropriate use of history in constitutional analysis.
Sandra Munoz is a US citizen whose husband, Luis Asencio-Cordero (a citizen of El Salvador) was barred from entering the US to come live with her, because US consular officials claimed he had ties to the MS-13 criminal drug gang (which connectoin Ascencio-Cordero denies). Munoz filed suit, claiming that, given that the constitutional right to marriage was implicated, the State Department was at the very least required to reveal the evidence that supposedly proved her husband's connection to the gang.
In arguing that there is no originalist or historical justification for US citizens to claim a right to entry for their non-citizen spouses, Justice Barrett cites historical evidence from the 1790s:
From the beginning, the admission of noncitizens into the country was characterized as "of favor [and] not of right." J. Madison, Report of 1800 (Jan. 7, 1800)…. (emphasis added); see also 2 Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, p. 238 (M. Farrand ed. 1911) (recounting Gouverneur Morris's observation that "every Society from a great nation down to a club ha[s] the right of declaring the conditions on which new members should be admitted"); Debate on Virginia Resolutions, in The Virginia Report of 1799–1800, p. 31 (1850) ("[B]y the law of nations, it is left in the power of all states to take such measures about the admission of strangers as they think convenient"). Consistent with this view, the 1798 Act Concerning Aliens gave the President complete discretion to remove "all such aliens as he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States." 1 Stat. 571 (emphasis deleted). The Act made no exception for spouses—or, for that matter, other family members.
Almost everything in this passage is either false or misleading. The quote from James Madison's Report of 1800, does not, in fact, indicate that Madison believed the federal government has blanket authority to exclude immigrants for whatever reason it wants. Far from it. Madison was arguing that the Alien Friends Act of 1798 (part of the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts) was unconstitutional because the federal government lacks such power. Here is the passage where the quote occurs:
One argument offered in justification of this power exercised over aliens, is, that the admission of them into the country being of favor not of right, the favor is at all times revokable.
To this argument it might be answered, that allowing the truth of the inference, it would be no proof of what is required. A question would still occur, whether the constitution had vested the discretionary power of admitting aliens in the federal government or in the state governments.
Note that Madison does not even admit that admission of immigrants is "a favor." He just assumes it is for the sake of argument, then goes on to argue that the Alien Act is unconstitutional regardless, because the relevant power isn't given to the federal government (this is what he argues in the rest of the Alien Act section of his Report). The 1798 Act Concerning Aliens, also quoted by Justice Barrett, is the very same Alien Friends Act denounced as unconstitutional by Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and many others. Opposition to the Act was so widespread that no one was ever actually deported under it, before Thomas Jefferson allowed it to expire upon becoming president in 1801.
I think Jefferson and Madison were right to argue the Alien Friends Act was unconstitutional. But, at the very least, legislation whose constitutionality was so widely questioned at the time cannot be relied on as strong evidence of the original scope of federal power in this area.
The quote by Gouverneur Morris at the Constitutional Convention is not about immigration restrictions at all. It is part of a speech defending his proposal that people must be required to have been citizens for at least fourteen years before being eligible to become US senators. The proposal was rejected by the Convention (which eventually decided on a nine-year requirement). It was denounced by several other prominent members of the Convention, including James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. Madison argued it was "unnecessary, and improper" and would "give a tincture of illiberality to the Constitution" (see Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. 2, pp. 235-37 (Max Farrand, ed., 1911)).
Morris's speech in favor of this failed proposal is not a reliable guide to the sentiments of the Convention. Still less is it indicative of the original meaning understood by the general public at the time of ratification (which is the relevant criterion for most originalists, including Justice Barrett, who has said the original meaning of a constitutional provision is "the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it").
Finally, the Debate on the Virginia Resolutions in the Virginia Report of 1799-1800, also quoted by Justice Barrett, was a record of debates in the Virginia state legislature over the Virginia Resolution (drafted by Madison) a statement asserting that the Alien Friends Act is unconstitutional. The passage Barrett quotes is from a speech by a dissenting member of the Virginia state legislature opposing the Resolution. The majority, however, sided with Madison.
Given this history, the debate over the Resolution cannot be relied on to justify virtually unlimited federal power over immigration by spouses of citizens, or any other migrants. And because Madison and the majority in the state legislature argued that the entire Alien Friends Act was unconstitutional, they understandably did not bother to argue that there was a separate issue regarding exclusion of non-citizen spouses of citizens. To my knowledge, no such case involving spouses came up during the short time the Act was in force.
Justice Barrett also relies on dubious 19th century history:
The United States had relatively open borders until the late 19th century. But once Congress began to restrict immigration, "it enacted a complicated web of regulations that erected serious impediments to a person's ability to bring a spouse into the United States." Din, 576 U. S., at 96 (plurality opinion). One of the first federal immigration statutes, the Immigration Act of 1882, required executive officials to "examine" noncitizens and deny "permi[ssion] to land" to "any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge." 22 Stat. 214. The Act provided no exception for citizens' spouses. And when Congress drafted a successor statute that expanded the grounds of inadmissibility, it again gave no special treatment to the marital relationship….
In her recent concurring opinion in United States v. Rahimi, an important Second Amendment case, Justice Barrett warned about careless reliance on post-ratification history in constitutional interpretation:
[F]or an originalist, the history that matters most is the history surrounding the ratification of the text; that backdrop illuminates the meaning of the enacted law. History (or tradition) that long postdates ratification does not serve that function. To be sure, postenactment history can be an important tool. For example, it can "reinforce our understanding of the Constitution's original meaning"; "liquidate ambiguous constitutional provisions"; provide persuasive evidence of the original meaning; and, if stare decisis applies, control the outcome…. But generally speaking, the use of postenactment history requires some justification other than originalism simpliciter….
As I have explained elsewhere, evidence of "tradition" unmoored from original meaning is not binding law… And scattered cases or regulations pulled from history may have little bearing on the meaning of the text.
Here, Barrett relies heavily on "evidence of 'tradition' unmoored from original meaning" and "scattered… regulations" enacted more than a century after ratification. In fairness, the nineteenth century laws in question were enacted closer in time to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which is where the Supreme Court has said the right to marry arises from (albeit, when it comes to the federal government, the right is read back into the Fifth Amendment). But the 1880s was still a long time after ratification. Moreover, the laws in question were enacted at a time when racial and ethnic bigotry undermined enforcement of much of the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, and such bigotry heavily influenced immigration legislation and jurisprudence.
Barrett also relies on the history in part because the Supreme Court's test for whether the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment protect an unenumerated right (like right to marry) require the right to be "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition." But a combination of badly misinterpreted 1790s history and 19th century history heavily tinged by racial and ethnic bigotry are poor means for applying that test.
As Justice Barrett recognizes later in her opinion, in later years Congress did in fact enact legislation giving spouses of US citizens a presumptive right to enter the United States, though there are exceptions, such as the one for "unlawful activities" at issue in this case. That suggests there may in fact be a historically rooted right to spousal migration, even if not an absolute one (most other constitutional rights aren't completely absolute, either).
Overall, I think Amy Coney Barrett has been a pretty good justice since her controversial appointment just before the 2020 election. But Munoz is far from her finest hour.
The Court's badly flawed handling of history doesn't necessarily mean the bottom-line decision was wrong. Even the dissenting liberal justices agreed the government was justified in denying Asencio-Cordero a visa, reasoning that the possible ties to MS-13 were a sufficient justification to outweigh the right to marry in an immigration case (and, as Justice Gorsuch notes in a concurring opinion, the government did eventually reveal the evidence in question). Alternatively, one can argue the right to marriage doesn't necessarily include a broad right to have your spouse present in the same jurisdiction. There may be other possible justifications for the outcome, as well.
But the Supreme Court should not have relied on a badly flawed interpretation of post-enactment history to justify a sweeping power to run roughshod over marriage rights in immigration cases, even in situations where the right to marry might otherwise impose a constraint. That's especially true given that similar reasoning could potentially be used to apply to other constitutional rights. If the Alien Friends Act of 1798 and 1880s immigration legislation qualify as relevant evidence, they could be used to justify almost any immigration restriction.
Obviously, Munoz is far from the first Supreme Court decision where the justices effectively exempted immigration restrictions from constitutional constraints that apply to other federal laws. Trump v. Hawaii, the 2018 travel ban decision is another recent example, and there are other such cases going back to the 19th century. But Munoz is still notable for its particularly slipshod historical analysis.
In this week's TheReason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman scrutinize President Joe Biden's executive order updating asylum restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border in response to illegal border crossings.
01:32—Biden's new asylum restrictions
21:38—The prosecution of political opponents: former President Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, and Steve Bannon
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsor:
We all carry around different stressors—big and small. When we keep them bottled up, it can start to affect us negatively. Therapy is a safe space to get things off your chest—and to figure out how to work through whatever's weighing you down. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Get it off your chest, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.
An upset that reverberated around the cricket-watching world was made possible by America's most potent superpower: immigration.
In case you haven't heard by now, the United States upset Pakistan at the T20 Cricket World Cup this past Thursday. The history of the two countries' national cricket teams suggests that the win deserves a place in the annals of incredible American upsets on the international stage, alongside those pulled off by the 2018 Olympic curling team, the 1980 Olympic hockey team, and the 1950 World Cup soccer team. Pakistan finished second in this tournament when it was last held (in 2022), and it currently ranks 6th in the world. Meanwhile, the United States was making its first ever appearance in the competition—and qualified only because it was a co-host.
After beating Canada in the tournament's first match, the U.S. team is now in a good position to advance to the second round by finishing in one of the top two spots in its group—though a difficult match with India comes next, on June 12.
The New York Timescalled Thursday's win "a humiliation in Pakistan, where cricket is the most popular sport and part of the national identity"; it added that "many Americans were oblivious" to the result.
But we shouldn't be oblivious about why the result was possible. It's because of immigration. As The Indian Expresspoints out, at least six players on the American team are of Indian descent, including several who are in the U.S. on work visas and who play on the national team essentially as a hobby.
That includes Saurabh Netravalkar, who bowled (the equivalent of pitching) the final over (inning) for the American team. He moved from Mumbia to San Francisco when he was a student. Now he's an engineer at Oracle. Monank Patel, who scored 50 runs in the game, moved to New Jersey from India in 2016 to start a restaurant. Nosthush Kenjige, who recorded three wickets (the equivalent of strikeouts), had been born in Alabama before moving to India and then returning to the U.S. to work as a biologist. Other players on the team were born in Canada, while some others (such as Kenjige) were native-born American children of Indian immigrants.
The rest of the Express article is worth your time to read, if only to appreciate the depth of the cross-cultural story behind the Americans' incredible upset. Saurabh, for example, had not even brought his cricket cleats to America when he moved here from India, believing that his cricket-playing days were behind him. Now he's the star and cricket is growing in U.S. popularity—particularly, and not surprisingly, in places with large numbers of South Asian immigrants.
There may not be a deep well of historical cricketing talent in the United States. But one of the greatest things about America is that if we don't have something, we can import it. And one of the lessons of the upset win over Pakistan is that greater immigration can have positive knock-on effects that go well beyond the initial reasons why someone might choose to move to the United States. After all, we're not handing out cricket visas. Saurabh didn't move to the United States to play the sport at all. He came for an opportunity to study, stayed because he got a job, and ended up helping author an all-time American sporting moment.
Immigration is America's superpower. Being one of the world's freest and most prosperous places means talented people from all over the world want to live and work here. When they do, it's not just their workplaces and immediate families that benefit. The country does too.
But what about all the immigrants who aren't world-class cricketers or scientists, some might ask. No problem! Can you cook or clean or code or care for someone? Can you do road work or construction? There are 8.1 million unfilled jobs in this country right now—and there will only be more economic opportunities as the country grows—so we should welcome all the help we can get. And when the kids of those immigrants grow up to be world-class scientists or athletes or entrepreneurs, America wins some more!
Some folks on social media seem grumpy about the victory because it was a bunch of immigrants and children of immigrants who made it happen. Those people should just say what they mean: that they'd prefer to see America be less successful—and not just at silly things like cricket matches, but at stuff that matters too. Be honest about it: You want America to lose more.
Personally, I prefer winning. And I don't care whether your parents were born in India or Indiana. Come here or stay here. Be an American. Go kick some ass.
Released this morning: The jobs report, released at 8:30 this morning, shows that in May employers added 272,000 jobs, up from the monthly average of 242,000 that's persisted for the first half of the year and far more than most economists predicted.
In April, the unemployment rate was 3.9 percent—a bit higher than the 3.4 percent unemployment the year prior. In May, it slid up to 4 percent.
"The headline number is a source for celebration for President [Joe] Biden, who frequently points to the strong job market when making the case to voters that he has handled the economy well," summarizesThe New York Times. But really, the picture is more complicated.
The economy is finally recovering from its recent high-inflation period, but the recovery has been slower than predicted and the Federal Reserve will probably not be inclined to lower rates anytime soon (which affects people's willingness to transact houses, for example). This new data probably won't change the Federal Reserve's behavior, so interest rates will remain high—a tough pill for Biden to swallow, as that may be one of the major factors leading to people's perception that the economy just isn't working for them.
Maybe Trump isn't so bad? Per The Washington Post, Donald Trump plans "to repeal parts of the 1974 law that restricts the president's authority to spend federal dollars without congressional approval" if he's elected to office a second time. He's claimed his Day 1 in office would include him telling every agency to find a "large chunk" of their budgets that can be cut, taking aim at international aid programs and environmental agencies in particular.
"What the Trump team is saying is alarming, unusual and really beyond the pale of anything we've seen," Eloise Pasachoff, a budget law expert at Georgetown, tellsThe Washington Post. But the national debt—which currently exceeds $34 trillion—is also alarming, unusual, and really beyond the pale of anything we've ever seen, so it's not clear what types of drastic measures ought to be taken to return spending to appropriate levels. For more on the national debt, check out this Just Asking Questions interview with Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), who wears a debt clock lapel pin.
But the specific mechanism Trump plans to use may throw the balance between the legislative and executive branches out of whack. "I will use the president's long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings," writes Trump on his campaign website. Impounding funds, which was banned by lawmakers when President Richard Nixon abused the process, is when a president refuses to dispense funds even after Congress has already appropriated them.
Many quoted by The Washington Post seem to believe this would be a massive constitutional crisis, and there's plenty of reason to be skeptical that Trump would actually cut the amount of spending he says. But it's interesting that Trump gets dinged for proposals like this one, while plenty of Joe Biden's spendiest programs (like student loan forgiveness, which has repeatedly been thwarted by the courts) are deemed totally acceptable.
Scenes from New York: "An investigation from the City's Department of Investigation found that around 1,200 NYPD officers cheated while taking their promotional exam, yet the cheating was apparently for naught, because it didn't meaningfully improve their test scores," reportsHell Gate.
QUICK HITS
"SpaceX received the go-ahead from US air safety regulators to launch its massive Starship rocket on a fourth major test flight, as the Elon Musk-led company works to make the vehicle operational and ready for regular trips to space," reportsBloomberg. "The Federal Aviation Administration granted SpaceX a launch license to move forward with the next test flight, the agency said in a statement on Tuesday." (UPDATE: The launch happened yesterday and was successful.)
Canada's new Online Harms Act would "curtail people's liberty in order to stop future crimes they haven't yet committed," writesThe Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf. Take it from the man himself: "We need the ability to stop an anticipated hate crime from occurring," says Canada's attorney general.
Hunter Biden's gun trial—where he's charged with lying about drug use to obtain a gun—is ongoing but looking especially messy as his sister-in-law/ex-girlfriend Hallie Biden testifies against him, talking about how she disposed of his gun in a grocery store garbage can.
"Congestion pricing, a good idea, died because our government doesn't deserve the money," writes Josh Barro at Very Serious.
"A widely held belief is that the Nordic countries are great bastions of rehabilitation: by focusing on rehabilitation rather than punishment, they have managed to achieve remarkably low recidivism rates. Or so the story goes. This notion, however, is largely a myth," arguesPatterns in Humanity.
Briahna Joy Gray, who hosted Rising with Reason's own Robby Soave (and sometimes yours truly, when I would fill in for Soave), rolled her eyes at a source's account of her sister's October 7 rape and was promptly fired from the show.
Joe Biden's executive order restricting asylum seekers is already having terrible consequences:
"They aren't all asylum seekers" totally misses the point. We don't want to send one person back to persecution or torture. If that requires letting in 10 or 100 who want to work, so what? My tax dollars shouldn't go to help any persecutors or torturers. https://t.co/hoh2MOyyz4
Chase Oliver, who secured the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination on Sunday night, says "there are few better examples of 'bad government' than the overly complex current laws and regulations involving immigration."
"If we can allow peaceful people to be peaceful, we can more easily and effectively end actual crimes at our border and make our communities, immigrant and non-immigrant alike, more safe and prosperous," explains a statement provided by the Oliver campaign.
Neither President Joe Biden nor former President Donald Trump has an immigration platform—or record—that is a clear fit for supporters of free migration and a less intrusive federal government. Oliver's campaign argues that he offers a different approach, calling out the use of eminent domain "to build permanent walls or structures on properties that do not wish to have them" and the "arbitrary caps" that are prevalent in the U.S. immigration system.
"What Chase offers is a way for peaceful people to move freely, safely, and lawfully," continues the statement.
The Libertarian candidate proposes that the U.S. "return to an Ellis Island style of processing immigrants," which would involve simplifying the immigration process "for those who wish to come here to work and build a better life." It shouldn't take "months or years" for those immigrants to receive medical and criminal checks and work authorization, but days "at most."
Oliver also supports creating a path to citizenship for the country's undocumented immigrants. Millions of undocumented immigrants are "doing essential jobs, paying payroll taxes, and contributing to our economic growth," reads his platform. "Formalizing this arrangement" will "allow them to further contribute to the economy by meeting critical labor demand and reducing inflationary pressures" and save "taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement costs," Oliver's website says.
The platform outlines a pathway to citizenship for recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the policy enacted by President Barack Obama that defers deportation action and offers work authorization to immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as kids. Oliver's platform also includes a pathway to citizenship for the children of long-term temporary visa holders, a class of legally present immigrants who must self-deport at 21 if they can't secure legal status before then. There are currently over 200,000 dependent visa holders waiting for relief.
The last point is a unique one. Dip Patel, founder of Improve the Dream, an organization that advocates for solutions for those visa holders, noted that it may be the first presidential platform to outline that relief explicitly. "It is great to see this common sense idea to allow children raised and educated in America with lawful status be [explicitly] mentioned on a presidential candidate's immigration platform," Patel tells Reason. He hopes that all future candidates' platforms will "include this and other nuanced solutions affecting so many who have spent their entire lives in America."
Oliver wants to expand the H-1B visa program, a nonimmigrant visa pathway for highly skilled, highly educated workers. He also supports a startup visa, noting that 55 percent of American startups valued at over $1 billion or more were founded or co-founded by immigrants. This was the conclusion of 2022 research by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), which also found that almost 80 percent of those billion-dollar companies have an immigrant founder or an immigrant in a key leadership position.
"It was great to see the Libertarian Party advocate for a startup visa and a higher level of H-1B visas for high-skilled professionals, particularly since Democrats and Republicans often try to coopt ideas from third parties," says Stuart Anderson, NFAP's executive director. "Our research shows making it easier for highly skilled individuals to remain in the United States, including as entrepreneurs, leads to more jobs, innovation and cutting-edge products for Americans."
Oliver's views on immigration have proven somewhat controversial among some in the Libertarian Party, including members of the Mises Caucus (which "advocated this year in an internal strategy document" to "rid references to…free immigration" from the party platform, reportedReason's Brian Doherty). Quizzed on Reason's Just Asking Questions podcast this week about whether he considered himself "an open borders libertarian," Oliver called it a "very ambiguous term" and reiterated his support for a "21st century Ellis Island."
"If you're there for peace, you just go right on in and get to work and contribute to the economy. You get a job," he continued. "And that will get 99.9 percent of the people quickly filed through the process so they can get to work and contribute to the economy instead of being stuck on welfare or charity programs as they are right now."
No more! Earlier this week, some 3,500 bombs that were meant to be delivered to Israel did not actually make it there. President Joe Biden, long a major arms supplier to Israel, decided that the best way to make his opposition to the Rafah invasion known would be to temporarily stem the flow of weapons.
Biden also "said on Wednesday that he would also block the delivery of artillery shells that could be fired into the urban neighborhoods of Rafah," perThe New York Times. Note that the Biden administration is not pausing all arms shipments, but rather trying to exert specific pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to rethink the Rafah offensive.
"Israel…took control of the Gaza side of a key border crossing to Egypt on Tuesday, securing a strategic corridor as negotiators met in Cairo for talks on a truce and hostage releases," reportedThe Wall Street Journal. "The seizure of the crossing closed a critical gateway for humanitarian assistance for Palestinians, prompting the U.S. to renew calls to reopen the gate."
Bear in mind, also, that the Rafah invasion was not merely to attempt to starve the remaining Gazans in the region through blocking humanitarian aid; an estimated 5,000–8,000 Hamas fighters are believed to be hiding in that city in southern Gaza. The Israeli offensive, which has been smaller in scope than originally thought, aims to stamp them out. It remains to be seen whether the Biden administration exerting pressure in this way will affect Israeli military actions—or how the Rafah offensive is perceived on a national stage.
Many Republicans in Congress reacted unfavorably to this unilateral action by the Biden administration. "It wasn't the Israelis that started this conflict. And I'm just very concerned that we do not try to micromanage Israel's right to defend itself against the terrorist group backed by Iran," said Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine) at an Appropriations subcommittee hearing yesterday.
Of course, the Biden administration is really just interested in using leverage. Once a humanitarian plan for getting refugees safely out of Rafah is communicated by Israel, the White House says the weapons shipments will likely resume.
Climate Guy Gavin: California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who continues to very convincingly swear that he's not running for president, seems to be eyeing the climate-concerned demographic of voters.
All the way back in 2020, when the grid faced blackouts and the state was roiled by wildfires, Newsom pinned blame on climate change, and majorly misrepresented his prioritization of wildfire management strategies like controlled burns.
During a visit to China last year, Newsom made headlines over a glitzy new partnership between California and Shanghai, which Newsom's press office said are "teaming up to fight the climate crisis by cleaning up ports and reducing emissions from the transportation sector." (Whether this has any real effect on emissions coming out of Shanghai seems beside the point.) During an audience with Pope Francis scheduled for next week, Newsom is expected to emphasize how "global temperatures [are] hurtling towards alarming new heights." This is his talk track, possibly responding to the fact that a far greater percentage of California's likely voters tell pollsters that "stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost" compared with a decade ago.
"A key part of his strategy has been to ascribe high gas prices and utility bills to corporate greed and gouging while beating back proposals that he believes go too far like Proposition 30, which would have raised taxes on the rich in 2022 to funnel money to electric vehicles," reportedPolitico. Phrased differently: Newsom does not want to alienate his French Laundry dining companions, and other rich donors who may be considering fleeing the high-tax state, but is very much trying to position himself as someone who takes climate change seriously.
Something to watch in the event that Newsom gets elevated out of his Biden-surrogate position and into the presidential campaign spotlight at any point, whether by the cruel tricks of nature or simple patience.
Scenes from New York:
Over the weekend, a cruise ship appears to have accidentally killed and dragged a 44-foot endangered Sei whale through the East River. Upon being discovered, the whale was towed to New Jersey for a necropsy.
More whales have been living in the waters surrounding New York City for the last few years—I saw whales from Queens' Rockaway Beach two days ago, which is not totally uncommon here—and meeting all kinds of disturbing fates as a result.
"The increase in beached whales could be an indication that the whale population as a whole is growing. Or, less optimistically, rising water temperatures could be changing the hunting and migration patterns of whales, pushing them into areas where they're more likely to become injured by human activity," reportedCurbed last year.
QUICK HITS
"Saudi authorities have permitted the use of lethal force to clear land for a futuristic desert city being built by dozens of Western companies," an ex–intelligence officer told the BBC.
It looks like Congress might take another stab at a border deal, sure to please no one.
Sweetgreen is introducing beef to its menu. Some people are worried it won't hit its climate goals as a result.
Lots of people are criticizing Ann Coulter's blatant bigotry toward Vivek Ramaswamy during a recent podcast appearance in which Coulter went on Ramaswamy's show. What they're missing, though, is that Coulter's entire argument is that "the core around which the nation's values are formed is the WASP" (wrong!) and that she thinks we need more selective criteria as to which immigrants we let in—ignoring the contradiction present where Ramaswamy himself fits the criteria she describes, yet is still discriminated against by Coulter.
.@AnnCoulter told me flat-out to my face that she couldn't vote for me "because you're an Indian," even though she agreed with me more than most other candidates. I disagree with her but respect she had the guts to speak her mind. It was a riveting hour. The TRUTH podcast is back https://t.co/neVjKSs6e9
Pro-Palestine protesters at Princeton don't seem to grasp that their victimhood mentality is getting in the way of their message being taken seriously:
NEW: Pro-Palestine protester at Princeton says she is "literally shaking" because she is starving and "immunocompromised."
The woman accused the school of purposely "physically weakening" her and her peers.
The most significant factor inhibiting the construction of new housing in the United States—resulting in severe housing shortages in many areas—is exclusionary zoning. But a new study suggests immigration restrictions contribute to the problem, by reducing the supply of workers. Here's the abstract to the paper by Eeconomists Troup Howard, Mengqi Wang, and Dayin Zhang:
US housing markets have faced a secular shortage of housing supply in the past decade, contributing to a steady decline in housing affordability. Most supply-side explanations in the literature have tended to focus on the distortionary effect of local housing regulations. This paper provides novel evidence on a less explored channel affecting housing supply: shortages of construction labor. We exploit the staggered rollout of a national increase in immigration enforcement to identify negative shocks to construction sector employment that are likely unrelated to local housing market conditions. Treated counties experience large and persistent reductions in construction workforce, residential homebuilding, and increases in home prices. Further, evidence suggests that undocumented labor is a complement to domestic labor: deporting undocumented construction workers reduces labor supplied by domestic construction workers on both extensive and intensive margins.
The basic idea here is fairly intuitive Economics 101: immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—are an important part of the construction work force. Reducing the number of available workers increases the price of construction, and thereby reduces output.
More counterintuitive is the finding that reducing the number of undocumented construction workers also reduces employment for native workers. But, as the authors point out, this can occur when native-born and immigrant workers in the industry are complements, rather than substitutes. Previous studies document such effects in other industries, and it can occur in this one, too. The authors' findings are consistent with recent work by noted immigration economist Michael Clemens showing that mass deportation—on net—reduces job opportunities for native workers more than it expands them.
Obviously, as the authors recognize, immigration can also increase demand for housing, thereby increasing prices. Similarly, deporting immigrants (or any other group) can reduce demand, thereby lowering prices. But the authors show this effect is outweighed by the ways in which deportation reduces supply, thereby leading to a net increase in housing prices when more immigrants get deported. This makes intuitive sense: allowing in a group that is disproportionately represented in the housing construction industry can result in sufficient new construction to both meet the extra demand created by that group, and also build additional new housing for others.
None of this proves that immigrant workers never displace native-born ones (or vice versa). Similarly, immigrants can sometimes outbid natives for housing (and, again, vice versa). But, on net, the two groups benefit each other economically far more than the reverse. That appears to be true in the housing sector, as in the economy more generally.
If this seems implausible, consider the impact on white males of allowing more women and minorities to compete on a more equal basis in the labor force in the twentieth century. I summarize this comparison in my last post on the impact of deportation:
One helpful way to think about the issue is to ask whether the twentieth-century expansion of job market opportunities for women and blacks helped white male workers, on net, or harmed them. Some white men likely were net losers. If you were a marginal white Major League Baseball player displaced by Jackie Robinson or other black baseball stars after MLB was integrated, it's possible that you would never find another job you liked as much as that one. But the vast majority of white men were almost certainly net beneficiaries by virtue of the fact that opening up opportunities for women and blacks greatly increased the overall wealth and productivity of society.
If, today, we barred women from the labor force, or restricted them to the kinds of jobs open to them a century ago, some male workers would benefit….
But, overall, men would be much poorer, by virtue of living in a far less productive and innovative society. And many men would lose jobs or suffer decreases in wages because their own productivity depends in part on goods and services produced by women….
Similar consequences would occur if we were to reinstitute racial segregation, thereby severely restricting the job opportunities of black workers. While some whites would come out ahead, most would be net losers, as our economy becomes much less productive.
The key point to remember is that the economy—including the labor market—is not a zero-sum game. Men and women, blacks and whites—and immigrants and natives—can all prosper together, if only the government would let them.
President Joe Biden says, "I know how to make government work!"
You'd think he'd know. He's worked in government for 51 years.
But the truth is, no one can make government work.
Biden hasn't.
Look at the chaos at the border, our military's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the rising cost of living, our unsustainable record-high debt.
In my new video, economist Ed Stringham argues that no government can ever work well, because "even the best person can't implement change….The massive bureaucracy gets bigger and slower."
I learned that as a consumer reporter watching bureaucrats regulate business. Their rules usually made life worse for consumers.
Yet politicians want government to do more!
Remember the unveiling of Obamacare's website? Millions tried to sign up. The first day, only six got it to work.
Vice President Joe Biden made excuses: "Neither [Obama] and I are technology geeks."
Stringham points out, "If they can't design a basic simple website, how are they going to manage half the economy?"
While bureaucrats struggled with the Obamacare site, the private sector successfully created Uber and Lyft, platforms like iCloud, apps like Waze, smartwatches, etc.
The private sector creates things that work because it has to. If businesses don't serve customers well, they go out of business.
But government is a monopoly. It never goes out of business. With no competition, there's less pressure to improve.
Often good people join government. Some work as hard as workers in the private sector.
But not for long. Because the bureaucracy's incentives kill initiative.
If a government worker works hard, he might get a small raise. But he sits near others who earn the same pay and, thanks to archaic civil service rules, are unlikely to get fired even if they're late, lazy, or stupid.
Over time, that's demoralizing. Eventually government workers conclude, "Why try?"
In the private sector, workers must strive to make things better. If they don't, competitors will, and you might lose your job.
Governments never go out of business.
"Companies can only stay in business if they always keep their customer happy," Stringham points out. "Competition pushes us to be better. Government has no competition."
I push back.
"Politicians say, 'Voters can vote us out.'"
"With a free market," Stringham replies, "the consumer votes every single day with the dollar. Under politics, we have to wait four years."
It's another reason why, over time, government never works as well as the private sector.
Year after year, the Pentagon fails audits.
If a private company repeatedly does that, they get shut down. But government never gets shut down.
A Pentagon spokeswoman makes excuses: "We're working on improving our process. We certainly are learning each time."
They don't learn much. They still fail audits.
"It's like we're living in Groundhog Day," Stringham jokes.
When COVID-19 hit, politicians handed out almost $2 trillion in "rescue" funds. The Government Accountability Office says more than $100 billion were stolen.
"One woman bought a Bentley," laughs Stringham. "A father and son bought a luxury home."
At least Biden noticed the fraud. He announced, "We're going to make you pay back what you stole!
No. They will not. Biden's Fraud Enforcement Task Force has recovered only 1 percent of what was stolen.
Even without fraud, government makes money vanish. I've reported on my town's $2 million toilet in a park. When I confronted the parks commissioner, he said, "$2 million was a bargain! Today it would cost $3 million."
That's government work.
More recently, Biden proudly announced that government would create "500,000 [electric vehicle] charging stations."
After two years, they've built seven. Not 7,000. Just seven.
Over the same time, greedy, profit-seeking Amazon built 17,000.
"Privatize!" says Stringham. "Whenever we think something's important, question whether government should do it."
In Britain, government-owned Jaguar lost money year after year. Only when Britain sold the company to private investors did Jaguar start turning a profit selling cars people actually like.
When Sweden sold Absolut Vodka, the company increased its profits sixfold.
It's ridiculous for Biden to say, "I know how to make government work."
No one does.
Next week, this column takes on Donald Trump's promise: "We'll drain the Washington swamp!"
Since late 2020, Border Patrol along the United States–Mexico border has encountered over 6.9 million illegal crossers. A recent Pew Research survey reveals that 57 percent of respondents consider "dealing with immigration" a top policy priority this election year—just below "defending against terrorism" at 63 percent.
Amid this backdrop, politicians and pundits have been quick to conflate these issues, holding numerous congressional hearings on the purported threat of terrorists entering the U.S. to commit acts of terror. This has given rise to a flood of rhetoric about said terrorists exploiting border chaos to harm Americans.
Despite this fearmongering, the actual threat of foreign-born terrorism is relatively minor and manageable. New research from the Cato Institute indicates that since 1975, the annual likelihood of an American being murdered in a foreigner-committed terrorist attack is about one in 4.5 million.
Nonetheless, the public remains on edge. A serious car accident and explosion by a port of entry in upstate New York on November 22, 2023, was initially mistaken by many reporters and pundits as a terrorist attack. At the same time, patently fake videos on X (formerly Twitter) claiming that a terrorist had crossed the border circulated widely.
Reports that illegal border crossers who are on the terrorist watch list have been apprehended seem to validate these fears. One person detained and released by Border Patrol in March 2023 was later discovered to be on the watch list. Similarly, Isnardo Garcia‐Amado was detained in Arizona in early 2022, released, and then promptly arrested after the government determined he was on the terrorist watchlist.
Since late 2020, Border Patrol has encountered 357 foreigners on the terrorist watch list attempting to cross the southwest border illegally. But being on the watch list does not necessarily indicate an intent to commit terrorism on U.S. soil—which is what the public actually cares about.
Despite these apprehensions, there have been no convictions, nor have any of the watch-listed individuals been charged with actually planning a terrorist attack—an implausible result if they were all actually terrorists. The watch list seems to largely be leading to apprehensions of Colombians previously involved with groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which pose no direct threat to the United States.
The government should be vigilant, but the public should moderate their fears regarding terrorists crossing the U.S. border. According to the Cato study, not a single American has been killed in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil carried out by an immigrant who entered illegally by crossing a land or water border. That's not to suggest such an event could never happen—it absolutely could. But so far, there's scant evidence to suggest terrorists are using this route or have any intention to do so.
The actual risk posed by foreigners who enter in ways other than across the southern border varies considerably. For instance, the annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack committed by any illegal immigrant since 1975 was zero. Almost 98 percent of all victims of foreign-born terrorists were murdered in the 9/11 terror attacks—the deadliest in world history. The 9/11 hijackers entered as tourists and students, all with visas.
This is not to trivialize the threat posed by foreign-born terrorists to the lives, liberty, and private property of Americans. Since 1975, there have been 3,046 people murdered by foreign-born terrorists on U.S. soil. Every one of those deaths is a tragedy, justifying some level of continued governmental vigilance and resources.
However, perspective is crucial. During the same period, almost 990,000 people were murdered in the U.S. through regular criminal homicides—about 323 times more than those killed by foreign-born terrorists.
If media and political discussions were proportional, they would spend about one minute addressing foreign-born terrorist threats for every 5.5 hours they spend on the threat of regular homicide. However, Republicans on the House Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement have held as many hearings on illegal immigrant terrorists along the border as on normal crime, despite there being no attacks to speak of.
It's vital that Americans grasp the real extent of the terrorist threat to avoid the overblown fears that lead to poor policy decisions. Those misguided policies, informed by inaccurate assessments of the risk, have led U.S. politicians to allocate disproportionate resources to a relatively minor and manageable threat. A rational evaluation of the facts should allow us to breathe a cautious sigh of relief, recalibrating our focus toward more pressing domestic issues.
Venezuelans fleeing the socialist regime of Nicolas Maduro. (NA)
Today, federal District Court Judge Drew Tipton issued a ruling in Texas v. Department of Homeland Security, rejecting a suit filed by a coalition of red states led by Texas, challenging the legality of the Biden Administration's CNVH parole program (also sometimes called "CHNV"), which allows migrants from four Latin American countries to enter the United States and live and work here for up to two years, if they can find a US-resident sponsor willing to support them.
Judge Tipton (a conservative Trump appointee) ruled that the states lacked standing to bring a lawsuit challenging the program. The plaintiff states argued Texas has standing because parolee migrants entering the state would lead the state government to incur various additional costs, thereby proving the necessary "injury in fact" required by Supreme Court standing precedent. But Judge Tipton concluded the evidence shows that the CNVH program actually reduces the number of migrants from these countries who enter the state. Thus, it doesn't increase the costs borne by the state, and therefore Texas hasn't suffered an "injury" sufficient to get standing:
To prove an injury in fact, Texas must show "an invasion of a legally protected interest which is (a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical." Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560, 112 S.Ct. at 2136…. In the context of state challenges to federal immigration policies, states have historically proven injury-in-fact by demonstrating the additional costs paid across state-funded industries because of additional aliens….
Texas's theory for standing "was based on allegations that the CHNV processes were likely to increase the number of CHNV nationals in the State and thus increase the State's costs…." And as observed by Intervenors [a group of sponsors of CHNV participants], the trial record disproves this theory…. Intervenors argue that the undisputed data presented at trial confirms that the CHNV Parole Program has reduced the total number of individuals from the four countries, and consequently, Texas has actually spent less money as a result of the Program….
Judge Tipton canvasses the relevant Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit court of appeals precedent and finds that the right way to measure costs is to consider the net impact of the program in question, not just the costs that may be created by program beneficiaries taken in isolation. Since the evidence shows the program reduces the total number of CNVH migrants in Texas, it actually saves Texas money, and thus the state lacks standing. Earlier in the litigation, the state plaintiffs stipulated that only Texas's costs were to be considered, not those of the other states.
How does the CNVH parole program actually reduce the number of migrants from these four countries entering Texas? Because it allows program participants to come to the US legally without ever having to cross the southern border, many migrants who might otherwise have tried to enter Texas or other border states illegally instead seek legal entry under CNVH. Many go directly to their final destinations in other states by ship, plane, or other means of transportation. Even those who do enter through border states might not stay there very long.
I covered this point in much more detail in an amicus brief I filed defending the legality of the program, on behalf of the Cato Institute, MedGlobal (a medical non-profit serving migrants and refugees, among others), and myself. Our brief does not address standing. But, for reasons explained in the brief, the alleviation of pressure on the border also matters for the merits of the case (which Judge Tipton didn't reach). See also my September 2023 article about the case in the Hill.
I am skeptical of narrow definitions of standing and would have preferred the court to uphold the CNVH program on the merits. However, Judge Tipton does make a good argument that this is the right result under current standing precedent. It is also broadly consistent with the Supreme Court's June 2023 8-1 decision in United States v. Texas, holding that many of the same red states that brought this case lack standing to challenge the Biden administration's immigration enforcement guidelines, even though the states argued that the administration's decision not to deport certain migrants increases states' costs (though there are also ways to potentially distinguish the two cases).
As David Bier and I explain in a November USA Today article, CNVH could do even more to alleviate border problems—and help migrants fleeing horrific oppression and violence—if the Biden administration were to expand it to cover more countries, and lift the arbitrary 30,000 per month cap on the number of participants. The cap has created a massive backlog of applicants.
And, while it may not be relevant to standing analysis (because of the indirect nature of such effects), the economic benefits of increased migration generally outweigh any additional costs to state and federal governments, especially given the immigrants also pay taxes.
This decision is likely to be appealed to the Fifth Circuit. Alternatively, the states might try to find some other way to get standing. The latter, however, may prove difficult if Judge Tipton's ruling stands. For the moment, however, the CNVH program can continue.
This case likely isn't over. But it's not a good sign for the states that they lost in district court despite the fact they chose to file in this district specifically because they were likely get Judge Tipton to hear the case. He's a conservative whom many observers expected to be sympathetic to the states' position.
NOTE: As indicated above, I filed an amicus brief in this case defending the legality of the program, on behalf of the Cato Institute, MedGlobal, and myself. However, the brief does not address the issue of standing. What I write on that question represents solely my own views, and not those of Cato, MedGlobal, or anyone else.
I am, as discussed in the brief, a sponsor in the Uniting for Ukraine program, which is based on the same statutory authority as CNVH, but was not challenged by plaintiff states.
Republican lawmakers in Arizona are advancing a collection of bills targeting illegal immigrants and their activities in the state. One in particular, House Concurrent Resolution (HRC) 2060, has the potential to disrupt all manner of peaceful economic interactions.
Arizona law requires that all employers use the federal E-Verify program to ensure that hired employees are eligible to work in the United States. HCR 2060 would add to existing requirements by mandating that employers use E-Verify to check the legal status of subcontractors and independent contractors. Noncompliant employers could face felony charges and fines of $10,000 per undocumented employee.
HCR 2060 has already passed the Arizona House. If it passes the Senate, it will appear on the ballot in November. And though its sponsor, House Speaker Ben Toma (R–Glendale), says the proposal would keep "Arizona from becoming like California" and stop illegal immigrants from "tak[ing] advantage of Americans," plenty of Arizonans are concerned about its economic consequences.
That includes over 100 Arizona business, faith, and community representatives, who charged in an open letter to state politicians that the "anti-immigrant proposals" being considered by the Legislature "will cause unnecessary disruption to the workforce." Given that "Arizona currently only has 71 available workers for every 100 open jobs," the letter calls for elected officials "to support legal work permits for long-term immigrant contributors" rather than participating in "political gamesmanship."
For all the support E-Verify receives from state and national politicians, the employment verification system has many downsides. It's costly (especially for small businesses), it negatively affects lower-skilled native-born workers, and it's easily gamed. Rather than just impacting undocumented immigrants who want to work, it punishes employers for consensual hiring practices and forces native-born workers to get yet another permission slip to do their jobs and live their lives.
"Nationwide, the surge of E-Verify queries has not coincided with any significant reduction in the number of illegal workers," wrote David J. Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, in 2019. "From 2007 to 2016, the number of illegal workers hovered around 8 million, even as the number of E-Verify queries increased tenfold….The only independent audit of the E-Verify system in 2012 concluded that half of all illegal workers run through the system evaded detection, primarily by borrowing the identification of legal workers."
"The E-Verify program has made significant improvements over the years," says Sam Peak, senior policy analyst at Americans for Prosperity, a libertarian advocacy group. "Despite this, making it mandatory for more people likely exposes them to many uncertainties that could disrupt the hiring process."
HCR 2060's vague language might also leave the door open for Arizonans to face legal consequences, perhaps unknowingly, if the businesses they patronize don't comply with E-Verify mandates. According to the resolution text, any person who "commits obstruction of the legal duty to use E-Verify," including acts "in association with any person who has the intent to obstruct, impair or hinder any person from using the E-Verify program as required by law," is "guilty of a class 6 felony."
What exactly the phrase in association with means is not clear. "What happens if a household unknowingly hires a roofing company that does not use E-Verify?" asks Peak.*
Mandating E-Verify for more Arizona workers will inevitably lead to headaches and increased compliance costs for employers and consumers. Voters would do well to remember those consequences if HCR 2060 appears on the ballot in November.
*CORRECTION: This quote has been updated to correct a mistyped word in the source's comment.
Migrants wait to be processed at the U.S.-Mexico border in Eagle Pass, Texas. (Miguel Juarez Lugo/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom)
Earlier today, as Orin Kerr notes, federal district court Judge David Alan Ezra issued a decision holding—among other things—that illegal migration does not qualify as "invasion" under the Constitution. Article I, § 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution states that "No State shall, without the Consent of Congress … engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay." Texas claims that undocumented migration and cross-border illegal drug smuggling qualify as an invasion under this Clause, and therefore authorize Texas to "engage in war" in response, including taking measures that would otherwise be barred by federal statute.
In this case, Texas is defending the legality of SB 4, a news state law that criminalizes unauthorized migration and gives Texas state courts the authority to order removal of migrants convicted under the law. If Texas's invasion argument fails, SB 4 might be preempted by federal law.
Judge Ezra's ruling is far from the first court decision to conclude that illegal migration is not invasion. There have been several previous such cases, including three appellate court decisions, and Judge Ezra's own recent ruling in United States v. Abbott, a case where the federal government is suing Texas for installing floating buoy barriers in the Rio Grande River in violation of the federal Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 (that decision was upheld by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, but the case is now under review by the en banc Fifth Circuit.
But today's opinion is by far the most thorough judicial analysis of this important issue. Judge Ezra outlines extensive evidence indicating that the text and original meaning of the the Constitution indicates that only an armed attack qualifies as "invasion":
Ultimately, all tools of constitutional construction cut against Texas's position. Contemporary definitions of "invasion" and "actually invaded" as well as common usage of the term in the late Eighteenth Century predominantly referred to an "invasion" as a hostile and organized military force, too powerful to be dealt with by ordinary judicial proceedings. This Court could not locate a single contemporaneous use of the term to refer to surges in unauthorized foreign immigration. The text and structure of the State War Clause imply that "invasion" was to be used sparingly for temporary, exigent, and dangerous circumstances. Put simply, the overwhelming textual and historical evidence does not support Texas's understanding of the State War Clause.
As James Madison put it in his Report of 1800, "Invasion is an operation of war." Judge Ezra extensively canvasses the ratification debates and other Founding-era evidence. He also highlights the radical implications of Texas's position, which woul effectively allow states to usurp the federal government's war powers "whenever they disagreed with federal immigration policy." If it is correct, Texas and other states could "engage in war" against neighboring countries anytime there is substantial illegal migration, which i has been the case at almost all times, ever since the US government first imposed significant immigration restrictions applying to migrants crossing the southern border. Thus, Texas would be free to, for example, use its state National Guard to attack Mexico in order to forestall illegal migration and drug smuggling from there.
Judge Ezra's ruling is also the first to highlight the dire implications of the equation of immigration and invasion for the writ of habeas corpus:
Article 1, Section 9 mentions "invasion" to note that the "Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." Id. art. 1, § 9, cl. 2. The suspension of habeas corpus is a stunning exercise of power. The Writ of Habeas Corpus has been suspended only four times in this country's history: the Civil War,….. KKK insurrections during Reconstruction, a guerilla war in the Philippines, and in Hawaii during World War II…. These examples show that the Writ of Habeas Corpus has only ever been suspended in the face of imminent and overwhelming violent direct threats to the stability of the state or federal government….
Unauthorized immigration is not akin to armed and organized insurrection against the government. Even as Texas points to cartel violence, it cannot maintain in good faith that the cartels will imminently overthrow the state government. Nor can the mere presence of ongoing organized crime, which has long existed in the United States, suffice to justify the suspension of habeas corpus. Despite the serious threat to public safety that cartels may pose, it is difficult to accept that the threat is so severe as to justify the wholesale suspension of Due Process rights in Texas.
Indeed, British suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was a leading concern among American Revolutionaries and carefully limited by the Framers in the Constitution…. For that reason, the Framers drafted the Constitution such that the writ could be suspended only in times of great emergency….
It is not plausible that the Framers, so cognizant of past abuses of the writ and so careful to protect against future abuses, would have granted states the unquestioned authority to suspend the writ based on the presence of undocumented immigrants.
I have previously highlighted this issue myself: If immigration or drug smuggling by cartels qualify as "invasion," the writ of habeas corpus could be suspended at virtually any time, since such activity is virtually always ongoing (at least since the establishment of severe migration restrictions and the War on Drugs).
Judge Ezra also argues that, if illegal migration did qualify as "invasion" states' efforts to "engage in war" in response would still be subject to federal restrictions, under Congress's own war powers, once federal forces are able to reach the scene of the attack. I am less certain of the correctness of this claim than I am about his the arguments. If a state is indeed "actually invaded," it seems to me it would have at least some substantial authority to "engage in war" that the federal government cannot override, even if federal troops are also helping to repel the invasion.
There is more to Judge Ezra's analysis of the invasion issue. Anyone interested in this important constitutional question should read the entire section of his careful opinion devoted to this question (pp. 65-98). It's a true tour de force. For those who care, Judge Ezra is a Republican Reagan appointee.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has indicated that he plans to appeal the decision. And the invasion question may also soon be considered by the en banc Fifth Circuit. We probably haven't heard the last of this issue. But hopefully appellate courts will reach the same conclusion as Judge Ezra.
Today's ruling also includes analysis of other issues in the SB 4 case, especially arguments about whether the law is preempted by federal immigration statutes (Judge Ezra concludes it is).
I have previously written about why illegal migration doesn't qualify as "invasion" here, here, here, and here.
"The United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime. It's a new form of vicious violation to our country," said former President Donald Trump during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Thursday.
Trump's remarks come at a tense moment in the nation's sentiment toward immigration. Americans now say that immigration is "the most important problem facing the U.S.," according to the results of a Gallup poll published this week. Earlier in February, 57 percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center said that "the large number of migrants seeking to enter the country leads to more crime." For many, those ideas became more salient last week, when Jose Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan man who immigrated to the U.S. illegally, was charged with the murder of Georgia college student Laken Riley.
Riley's murder, along with incidents such as migrants drinking alcohol and consuming drugs in public and getting into fights in New York City, have spurred increased coverage of a "migrant crime" wave. "Over the past month, Fox News hosts, guests and video clips have mentioned 'migrant crime' nearly 90 times, more than half of those in the past 10 days," reportedThe Washington Post's Philip Bump on Thursday. Numerous right-of-center media outlets have similarly warned about the "migrant crime wave" inrecentheadlines.
There's no question that some undocumented immigrants have committed heinous crimes. But there are many reasons to be doubtful that recent incidents are evidence of a surging migrant crime wave.
For one, crime is down in the cities that received the most migrants as a result of Texas' busing operations under Operation Lone Star, per an NBC News analysis. "Overall crime is down year over year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles," NBC News reported.
David J. Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, echoes that finding. "We don't have real-time data, but the partial crime data that exist for this year show consistent declines in major crimes in major cities," he says. "The most significant crime spike in recent years occurred in 2020—when illegal immigration was historically low until the end of the year."
"National crime data, especially pertaining to undocumented immigrants, is notoriously incomplete," since it "comes in piecemeal and can only be evaluated holistically when the annual data is released," cautions NBC News. What's more, "most local police don't record immigration status when they make arrests."
However, several analyses conducted at both the state and federal levels find that immigrants—including undocumented ones—are less crime-prone than native-born Americans. Looking at "two decades of research on immigration and crime," criminologists Graham Ousey and Charis Kubrin found that "communities with more immigration tend to have less crime, especially violent crimes like homicide," wroteThe Washington Post's Glenn Kessler. A 2015 Migration Policy Institute reportindicated that undocumented immigrants have a lower rate of felony convictions than the overall U.S. population does.
The Cato Institute's "research has consistently shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes and less likely to end up incarcerated than natives," Bier continues. An article this week by Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, indicated that illegal immigrants have a lower homicide conviction rate in Texas than native-born Americans do, while legal immigrants have a lower conviction rate than both groups.
"Few people are murderers, and illegal immigrants are statistically less likely to be murderers. Still, some illegal immigrants do commit homicide, and that statistical fact is no comfort to victims and their families," wrote Nowrasteh. But "we should understand that more enforcement of immigration laws will not reduce homicide rates."
This has not been Trump's conclusion. "Migrant crime is taking over America," he said in a video posted to Truth Social on Wednesday. "How many more innocent victims must be harmed and how much more innocent blood must be spilled until we stop this invasion…and remove these illegal alien criminals from our country?"
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have proposed tightening legal pathways, such as asylum, as a way to reduce border crossings and improve security. "Banning asylum is not the answer," counters Bier. "Under Title 42 from 2020 to 2023, asylum was completely banned for many crossers, which only led to more people evading the Border Patrol, eliminating the opportunity for people to be screened at all."
Rather than relying on broad-stroke enforcement to capture once and future criminal migrants, there are several more targeted policies the U.S. government could adopt. "It should be legal [for migrants] to obtain a visa in their home countries, which would allow more people to be vetted more carefully abroad and free up Border Patrol to interdict those who evade detection," Bier says. The U.S. could also "negotiate better access to criminal databases in other countries and improve the quality of their data," and "supply foreign governments with advanced fingerprinting and booking technology on the condition that U.S. border agencies have access to the data," he continues.
Riley's death is unquestionably a tragedy. But U.S. immigration policy will be better served by statistically informed conclusions than the emotions sparked by individual crimes.
Why can't we apprehend both of them at the border? Yesterday, both President Joe Biden and his presumed opponent in November, former President Donald Trump, arrived at the southern border for a whole lot of politicking and very little actual problem solving.
Media outlet after media outlet described it as a "split-screen" showdown. The New York Times described it as a visit "pitting the president's belief in legislating against his rival's pledge to be a 'Day 1' dictator." All right.
"A very dangerous border—we're going to take care of it," said Trump upon arrival. Biden has "the blood of countless innocent victims" on his hands, Trump added, citing the recent murder of Laken Riley—an Augusta University nursing student believed to have been killed by Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, while running on trails at the University of Georgia.
"The United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime. It's a new form of vicious violation to our country," Trump said, leaning hard into fear-based messaging.
Biden, on the other hand, blamed Republicans in Congress for sinking deals that would attempt to handle the crisis at the border and kept meekly calling for bipartisan compromises. "Join me," Biden said to Trump—in what the Times described as an "olive branch"—"or I'll join you" in passing the bipartisan border deal that Trump recently lambasted, leading Senate Republicans to turn on the legislation.
If at first you don't succeed, try…an executive order? He's no border dove, though: Biden is reportedly mulling an executive order to majorly crack down on asylum seekers, forcing more rigorous entry standards and deportations for those who do not meet the updated criteria. Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act extends latitude to presidents to block certain categories of entrants if deemed "detrimental to the interests of the United States." This would allow him to bypass Congress entirely.
Ironically, Section 212(f) was how Trump instituted the Muslim ban back in 2017. It's dark horseshoe theory that Biden is now considering sidestepping Congress and using the same provision. It's almost as if actual checks and balances would be helpful here, and setting cogent policy in the first place, as opposed to sweeping executive orders to attempt to bandage long-festering problems.
The number of border crossings has reached record levels. December saw almost 250,000 arrests by Border Patrol, a number which fell by more than half in early January due to Mexican immigration authorities stepping up to the plate. The top five nationalities being apprehended are currently Mexicans, Venezuelans, Guatemalans, Honduras, and Colombians, but people from all over the world are now attempting to cross the border as well—including Chinese migrants (the fastest-growing group of border-crossers).
Whether it's Biden's pointless "join me!" pleas, designed to make the media fawn all over him, or Trump calling illegal border-crossers "fighting-age men"—as if they're creating some sort of militia as opposed to seeking work as, like, dishwashers and roofers—nothing good happened at the border yesterday, and the situation got no closer to being resolved.
Scenes from New York: A little before 4 a.m. Thursday morning, an A train conductor was attacked—his neck slashed, as he stuck it out the window to make sure the train was cleared to leave—at the Rockaway Avenue station in Brooklyn (a few stops before mine).
By rush hour Thursday morning, train crews were boycotting the safety conditions they must work under and calling straphangers' attention to attacks on transit workers. For those of us trying to take the A to work (like me, to film a documentary for Reason), it was a massive inconvenience, as trains operated with severe delays. But safety on the subways has gotten intolerably bad: Year over year, NYPD reports a 13 percent increase in crime within the subway system, and an 11 percent increase in assaults specifically. Last week, a man was shot and killed on the D train. In January, a man was shot and killed on the No. 3. Merely 1,000 of the city's 6,500 subway cars are equipped with surveillance cameras; meanwhile, the Metropolitan Transit Authority has installed bright yellow barriers at the Washington Heights stop to deter criminals from pushing people onto the tracks as part of a new pilot program—which would be terribly expensive to actually scale and wouldn't solve many categories of subway-system crime (like yesterday's neck slashing).
As for the conductor in question, he received 34 stitches and nine sutures and thankfully survived.
Congratulations to The New Republic for finally acknowledging the fact that, generally, plastic isn't actually getting recycled (whereReason has been for a decade-plus): "Between 1990 and 2015, some 90 percent of plastics either ended up in a landfill, were burned, or leaked into the environment," reports The New Republic. Yes, we know.
Russian President Vladimir Putin engaged in some saber-rattling toward the West yesterday, saying that the prospect of nuclear conflict ought to loom large if any countries intervene on Ukraine's behalf. "We also have weapons that can strike targets on their territory," Putin said. "Do they not understand this?"
"Several youth advocacy groups are concerned over the Secure DC bill and its potential impact on juveniles," reports ABC7. NeeNee Taylor, the founder of Harriet's Wildest Dreams, a nonprofit in the area, expressed concern at an event Wednesday night about a provision that would make stealing $500 worth of merchandise rise to the level of a felony. "A couple of my young ladies may have committed retail theft—they were actually stealing clothes for themselves to wear to school," Taylor told the news channel. "So what can we do to avoid them to have to steal the clothes?" Actually, they did not have to steal the clothes. Nor do they need to steal $500 worth of clothes in order to be able to cover their bodies to attend school.
Bloomberg—normally good—seems to think that the Google Gemini scandal—in which its AI-powered image generator simply could not return historically accurate images of white people, but had to turn, like, the Founding Fathers into black men—was actually a "Republicans pounce" situation. (It was not.)
Watch the dudes of The Fifth Column grace the wonderful Megyn Kelly Show with their presence (and tear Keith Olbermann apart):
"He wants to now replace the court with something else…"@mcmoynihan, @MattWelch, and @kmele on Keith Olbermann's meltdown over Supreme Court hearing Trump immunity case.
America is celebrated for its economic dynamism and ample and generously paid employment opportunities. It's a nation that attracts immigrants from around the world. Yet Americans are bummed, and have been for a while. They believe that life was better 40 years ago. And maybe it was on some fronts, but not economically.
Surveys repeatedly demonstrate that Americans view today's economy in a negative light. Seventy-six percent believe the country is going in the wrong direction. Some polls even show that young people believe they'll be denied the American dream. Now, that might turn out to be true if Congress continues spending like drunken sailors. But it certainly isn't true based on a look back in time. By nearly all economic measures, we're doing much better today than we were in the 1970s and 1980s—a time most nostalgic people revere as a great era.
In a recent article, economist Jeremy Horpedahl looked at generational wealth (all assets minus all debt) and how today's young people are faring compared to previous generations. His findings are surprising. After all the talk about how Millennials are the poorest or unluckiest generation yet, Horpedahl's data show them with dramatically more wealth than Gen Xers had at the same age. And this wealth continues to grow.
What about income? A new paper by the American Enterprise Institute's Kevin Corinth and Federal Reserve Board's Jeff Larrimore looks at income levels by generation in a variety of ways. They find that each of the past four generations had higher inflation-adjusted incomes than did the previous generation. Further, they find that this trend doesn't seem to be driven by women entering the workforce.
That last part matters because if you listen to progressives and New Right conservatives, you might get a different story: that today's higher incomes are only due to the fact that both parents must now work in order for a family to afford a middle-class lifestyle. They claim that supporting a family of four on one income, like many people did back in the '70s and '80s, is now impossible. Believing this claim understandably bums people out.
But it's not true. One of its many problems, in addition to the data evidence provided by Corinth and Larrimore, is that it mistakenly implies that single-income households were the norm. In fact, as early as 1978, 50 percent of married couples were dual earners and just 25.6 percent relied only on a husband's income. I also assume that there are more dual-income earners now than there were in the '80s. While this may in fact be true for married couples (61 percent of married parents are now dual-earners), because marriage itself has declined, single-earner families have become relatively more common.
Maybe the overall morosity on the economy has to do with the perception that it's more expensive to raise a family these days than it used to be. Another report by Angela Rachidi looks at whether the decline in marriage, fertility, and the increase in out-of-wedlock childbirths are the result of economic hardship. She finds that contrary to the prevailing narrative, "household and family-level income show growth in recent decades after accounting for taxes and transfers." Not only that, but "the costs of raising a family—including housing, childcare, and higher education costs—have not grown so substantially over the past several decades that they indicate an affordability crisis."
So, what exactly is bumming people out? We may find an answer in the 1984 Ronald Reagan campaign ad commonly known as "Morning in America." It begins with serene images of an idyllic American landscape waking up to a new day. It features visuals of people going to work, flags waving in front of homes, and ordinary families in peaceful settings. The narrator speaks over these images, detailing improvements in the American condition over the past four years, including job creation, economic growth, and national pride.
I believe this feeling is what people are nostalgic about. It seems that they are nostalgic about a time when America was more united and it was clearer what being American meant. Never mind that this nostalgia is often based on an incomplete and idealized memory of an era that, like ours, was not perfect.
This is a serious challenge that we need to figure out how to address. One thing that won't help, though, is to erroneously claim that people were economically better off back then and call on government to fix an imaginary problem.
Since April 2022, the US has admitted some 200,000 or more Ukrainian migrants under the Uniting for Ukraine (U4U) program, which enables US citizens and legal residents to sponsor Ukrainians fleeing Russia's brutal invasion to live and work in the United States for up to two years (I am myself a sponsor for two Ukrainian families). Although the program has many virtues and has been highly successful, the two-year time limit has been a major downside, from the beginning. Many of the Ukrainians will need a permanent refuge. And giving it to them will also enable them to contribute more to our economy and society.
Yesterday, the Biden Administration began a program under which U4U participants can apply for "re-parole." Those whose applications are accepted would be allowed to live and work legally in the US for an additional two years.
This is a step in the right direction. The war in Ukraine shows little sign of ending anytime soon. And many of the refugees may be unwilling or unable to return even after the fighting stops (e.g.—because their former homes have been destroyed by the Russian military). Past refugee crises show that it is often impossible and undesirable to force everyone to return to their original homes, even after the fighting is over.
But the re-parole process does have some downsides. One is that the relevant forms and application process seem unduly complicated, and some aspects of the system are unclear. For example, I cannot figure out whether the two-year extension is tacked on to the end of the original two years, or whether it begins as soon as USCIS accepts an application (in the latter case participants may end up with less than four years total). The filing fees are also hard to determine, though they seem to be $575 per person, if I understand the USCIS website correctly. That goes well beyond any plausible administrative expenses and is a considerable burden for the many parolees who lost everything in the Russian invasion and may be employed at working-class jobs today. At the very least, the fees should be lowered.
In addition, the extension, like the original U4U program, is a matter of executive discretion. What Caesar giveth, he or his successor could taketh away—a very real danger, given the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House. It is not entirely clear whether the president could unilaterally strip U4U parolees of their status before their term ends. At the very least, the president could simply let the term expire and refuse to renew it.
Despite such limitations, the re-parole system is a useful step. Otherwise, many U4U participants will see their residency and work rights expire in 2024 or 2025. But, like the earlier grant of a right to apply for TPS status, this is not a substitute for giving Ukrainians permanent residency rights. Congress must pass an adjustment act to do that; I outlined the case for doing so here. There is in fact a bipartisan Ukrainian Adjustment Act proposed by several members of Congress. But it doesn't seem likely to pass this year. Similar adjustment acts should be adopted to cover Afghans, Venezuelans, and others in similar straits, who fled war and oppression, entered the US through the use of presidential parole power, and now face arbitrary time limits on their residency and work rights.
If you are a U4U participant or a sponsor who needs help with the re-parole process, please let me know and I will see if I can get answers to your questions.
I have made inquiries with government officials and other experts to try to clear up some of the uncertainties noted above. If I learn anything useful, I will update this post.
Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are just two of the questions that Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Justin Amash, the former five-term congressman from Michigan who is currently exploring a Senate run.
Elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. After voting to impeach Donald Trump, he resigned from the GOP, became an independent, and then joined the Libertarian Party in 2020, making him the only Libertarian to serve in Congress.
They talked about the 2024 presidential election and the country's political and cultural polarization that seems to be growing with every passing day. And about how his parents' experiences as a Christian refugee from Palestine and an immigrant from Syria inform his views on foreign policy, entrepreneurship, and American exceptionalism.
This Q&A took place on the final day of LibertyCon, the annual event for Students for Liberty that took place recently in Washington, D.C.
Today's sponsor:
DonorsTrust is the oldest and largest donor-advised fund made for people who live out with their charitable giving the idea of free minds and free markets. If you don't know about donor-advised funds, you should. The fund gives you a simple, tax-advantaged way to easily donate to charities that align with your values. Whether it's promoting education freedom, protecting free speech, or just helping people live better lives, the choice is yours. There are lots of providers of donor-advised funds, but DonorsTrust is the one that understands you the best. DonorsTrust is a great friend of Reason and to all other groups like it.
Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.
Nick Gillespie: Why is Congress broken and how do we fix that?
Justin Amash: We can take up the whole 30 minutes talking about that if we wanted to. We don't know exactly how Congress got to where it is, but today it is highly centralized, where a few people at the top control everything. And that has a lot of negative consequences for our country. Among them is that the president has an unbelievable amount of power because the president now only has to negotiate with really a few people. You have to negotiate with the speaker of the House. You have to negotiate with the Senate majority leader and maybe some of the minority leaders. But it's really a small subset of people that you have to negotiate with. And when that happens, it gives the president so much leverage.
So when we talk about things like going to war without authorization, as long as the speaker of the House isn't going to hold the president accountable and the Senate majority leader is not going to, the president is just going to do what he wants to do. And when it comes to spending, as long as the president only has to negotiate with a couple of people, the president's going to do whatever the president wants to do. So it's super easy in the system for the president to essentially bully Congress and dictate the outcomes.
But there's a deeper problem with all of this, which is that representative government is supposed to be a discovery process. You elect people to represent you. You send them to Washington, and then the outcomes are supposed to be discovered by these representatives through discussions and debates, and the introduction of legislation, and amendments. You're supposed to have lots of votes, where the votes freely reflect your will representing the people back home. But instead, in Congress today, a few leaders are deciding what the final product is and then they're not bringing it to the floor until they know they have the votes. So there's no actual discovery process. Nancy Pelosi used to brag about this; she wouldn't bring a bill to the floor unless she knew it was going to pass. Which is the opposite of how Congress should work.
Gillespie: What are some of the ways to decentralize power within Congress? When you were in Congress, you founded the Freedom Caucus, which was supposed to be kind of a redoubt of people who believed in limited government and libertarian and conservative principles and actually even some liberal principles, but decentralizing authority. You got kicked out of the Freedom Caucus, right?
Amash: Well, I resigned from it.
Gillespie: Well, you were asked to leave. The police sirens were coming, and it's like, "Hey, you know what? I'm going to go," right? But even places like that, that were explicitly designed to act as a countervailing force to this unified Congress, how can that happen? What can you do or what can somebody do to make that happen?
Amash: Well, it does take people with strong will. I think that when we go to vote for our elected officials, when you go to vote for a representative, when you go to vote for a senator, you have to know that that person is willing to stand up to the leadership team. And if that person's not willing to break from the leadership team on a consistent basis—and this doesn't mean they have to be mean or anything like that; it just means that they have to be independent enough where you know they're willing to break from their leadership team. If they're not willing to do that, it doesn't matter how much they agree with you on the issues, don't vote for them because that person is going to sell out. There's no chance they're going to stand up for you when it counts. I think you need to have people who have a strong will, who are going to go there and actually represent you and are willing to stand up to the leaders.
Gillespie: If you are interested in Congressman Amash's commentary on contemporary issues, go to his substack Justin Amash. The tagline is: "A former congressman spills on Congress and makes the practical case for the principles of liberty." It's a great read, particularly on issues you mentioned.
Can you tell us how you discovered libertarian ideas? You got elected in 2010, which was a wave election. It was part of the Tea Party reaction to eight years of Bush, and more problems during the financial crisis and the reaction of the government to that. Where did you first encounter the ideas of liberty, and how did that motivate you to get into Congress?
Amash:The ideas of liberty are something that have been with me since I was a child. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where they came from. I think they came from my parents' immigrant experience, coming to the United States. My dad came here as a refugee from Palestine. He was born in Palestine in 1940. And when the state of Israel was created in '48, he became a refugee. My mom is a Syrian immigrant.
When my parents came here, they weren't wealthy. My dad was a very poor refugee. He was so poor that the Palestinians made fun of him. So that's really poor. When he came here, he didn't have much, but he felt he had an opportunity. He felt he had a chance to start a new life, a chance to make it, even though he came from a different background from a lot of people, even though his English wasn't great compared to a lot of people. So he came here and he worked hard, and he built a business. When we were young, he used to tell us that America is the greatest place on earth, where someone can come here as a refugee like he did and start a new life and have the chance to be successful. It doesn't matter what your background is. It doesn't matter what obstacles you face. You have a chance here and you don't have that chance in so many places around the world.
I think that's where that spirit of liberty came from. It was from my dad's experience especially, my mom as well, coming here as a young immigrant. So I was always a little bit anti-authoritarian as a child. I rebelled against teachers at times. I didn't like arbitrary authority, let's put it that way. When someone would just make up a rule, like this is the rule, "I just say so/" Well, tell me why.
Gillespie: Have you rethought that as a parent?
Amash: No, I mean, I let my kids think very freely.
Gillespie: As long as they follow the rules.
Amash:I don't mind when they are a little bit rebellious. I think it doesn't hurt for kids to have some independence. I encourage them to challenge their teachers, even when they think the teacher is wrong about something. I think that it's a good thing for people to go out there and not just accept everything as it is.
Gillespie: You famously, as a congressman, explained all of your votes on Facebook, which is a rare concession by authority to say, okay, this is why I did what I did.
Amash:Yeah. Actually, a lot of the people in leadership and in Congress didn't like that I was doing that because I was giving people at home the power to challenge them. Instead of just being told this is the way it is, now I was revealing what was going on.
Gillespie: You grew up in Michigan. You went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad and for law school. Was it there that you started coming across names like Hayek, and Mises, and Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard?
Amash: Not really, no. My background is in economics, my degree is in economics. I did well in economics at Michigan, but we sure didn't study Austrian economics. We didn't study Hayek. I think he might have been mentioned in one class. Very briefly he was mentioned, like there was one day where he was mentioned. But I'd say that what happened is, as I went through my economics degree, and then I got a law degree at Michigan as well, I started to realize that I had a lot of differences from other people who were otherwise aligned with me. I was a Republican. I aligned with them on a lot of things, but there were a number of issues where we didn't align— some of the foreign policy issues, but certainly a lot of civil liberties issues.
I started to wonder, what am I? What's going on here? I just thought of myself as a Republican, and I would read the platform and hear what they're saying. They believe in limited government, economic freedom, and individual liberty.
But when push came to shove on a lot of issues, they didn't believe those things. They'd say they believe those things, but they didn't. I've told this story before, I just typed some of my views into a Google search, and up popped Hayek's Wikipedia page. Literally, it was like the top thing on Google. So I clicked on that, started reading about them, and I was already in my mid-20s at this time. And I was like, yes, this is what I believe.
Gillespie: It is interesting because you would have been coming of age during a time when the Republicans were ascendant. But they were the war party. And we were told after 9/11 that you should not speak freely. That was kind of a problem, right?
Amash: Yeah, sure. Throughout my life, I believed in freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression. These are critical values. Maybe they're the essence of everything that makes this country work. The idea that we come from a lot of places—there's an incredible amount of diversity in the United States. I think diversity is always treated or often treated like a bad word these days. But it's a blessing to our country that we have people who come from so many backgrounds. Actually, the principle of liberty is about utilizing that diversity.
It's in centrally planned systems where diversity is not utilized, where someone at the top dictates to everyone else and doesn't take advantage of any of the diversity. They say no, a few of us at the top, we know everything. It doesn't matter. All of your backgrounds, all of your skills, all of your talents, that doesn't matter. What matters is we've got a few people in a room somewhere, and they're going to decide everything. And they know best because they're experts.
Gillespie: You came into office in 2011, and it seemed like there was a real libertarian insurgency within the Republican Party. But more nationally in discourse, people were tired of continued centralization, and government secrecy—famously, a lot of Bush's activities and particularly war spending early on was done in supplemental and emergency preparations, not really open to full discussions.
All of the stuff coming out of the Patriot Act, somebody like Dick Cheney kind of saying we're in control. But then Obama also promised the most transparent administration ever and plainly did not deliver on that.
That energy pushing back on centralization and government power and government secrecy that helped bring you and other people like you to Congress seems to have dissipated. Do you agree with that? And if so, what took that away?
Amash: Yeah, I agree with that. When I was running for office, both for State House in 2009 and when I got to Congress in 2011, there was a lot of energy behind a limited government, libertarian-ish republicanism. I felt like libertarianism was really rising. There was a chance for libertarian ideals to get a lot of traction. A lot of people who used to be more like Bush conservatives were coming around to the libertarian way.
I felt really good about where things were heading. And for the first, I'd say three or four years that I was in Congress, I felt like we continued to move in the right direction. The creation of the Freedom Caucus was kind of a dream of bringing people together to challenge the leadership. They weren't all libertarians or anything like that. There are a few who are libertarian-leaning, but the idea that a group of Republican members—it wasn't determined that it was going to be only Republicans, but it ended up being Republicans—got together and said, "Hey, we're going to challenge the status quo. We're going to challenge the establishment." That was kind of a dream that had come together.
Then when Donald Trump came on the scene, I think a lot of that just fell apart because he's such a strong personality and character, and had so much hold over a lot of the public, especially on the Republican side, that it was very hard for my colleagues to be able to challenge him.
Gillespie: What's the essential appeal of Trump? Is it his personality? Is that that he said he could win and he ended up doing that at least once? Is it a cult of personality? What's the core of his appeal to you?
Amash: I think he is definitely a unique character. He has a certain charisma that is probably unmatched in politics. I don't think I've ever seen someone who campaigns as effectively as he does. It doesn't mean you have to agree with all of the ethics of what he does or any of that, or the substance.
Gillespie: To keep it in Michigan, he's a rock star. He's Iggy Pop. You may not like what he's doing on the stage, but you can't take your eyes off it.
Amash:That's right. He holds court. When he's out there, people pay attention. He really understands the essence of campaigning, and how to win a campaign. He understands how to effectively go after opponents. Now, again, I'm not saying that all of these things are necessarily ethical or that other people should do the same things, but he really understands how to lead a populist movement.
Gillespie: How important do you think in his appeal is a politics of resentment, that somehow he is going to get back what was taken from you?
Amash: The whole Make America Great Again, there's a whole idea there of "someone is destroying your life, and I'm going to get it back for you." That's a very powerful thing to a lot of people. For a lot of people out there, it is more important to get back at others than necessarily to have some kind of vision of how this is all going to work going forward. It's not appealing to me because I understand, we live in one country. We have people of all sorts of backgrounds. And if you're going to persuade people, you have to be able to live with them and work with them, regardless of your differences. It doesn't mean that you can't be upset, be angry about what some other people are doing or saying. But there has to be an effort to live together here as one country. We have too much in common in this country.
Gillespie: Michigan was a massive swing state when he won the election. You voted to impeach Donald Trump. What went into that calculation? What was the reaction like to that? That's a profile in courage.
Amash:Well, I don't think that's my most courageous vote, not even by a long shot.
Gillespie: What was? Naming the post office after your father?
Amash:I didn't name any post offices after my father, to be clear. I think that the courageous votes are the ones where everyone is against you. And I don't mean just one party. It's one thing to vote for impeachment and half the country loves what you did and half the country doesn't like what you did. That's, in my mind, not that challenging or difficult. It's when you take a vote and you know that 99 percent of the public is going to misconstrue this, misunderstand it, be against it. The vote is going to be something like 433 to 1 in the House or something like that. Those are the tough votes. And there are plenty of those votes out there, where you're taking a principled stand and you're doing it to protect people's rights. But it's not the typical narrative.
Gillespie: Is there an example that, in your legislative record, you would put forth for that?
Amash:One of the ones I've talked about before is, they tried to pass some anti-lynching legislation at the federal level and everyone's against lynching, obviously, but the legislation itself was bad and would actually harm a lot of people, including harming a lot of black Americans. There was this idea that this legislation was good and parroted by a lot of people in the media. They didn't read the legislation. In fact, I complained about it and it mysteriously did not pass both houses of Congress after I pointed out all the problems with it. It did pass the House of Representatives. Did not pass both Houses and get signed by the president. Mysteriously, the next Congress, they reintroduced it and rewrote it in a way that took into consideration all of my complaints, and they tried to pass it off like they were just reintroducing the same legislation. I pointed out: They actually saw that there was a problem here and then tried to pretend like, "Oh, we're just passing it again." Those kinds of votes are tough because when you take the vote, everyone thinks you're wrong. Everyone. And you have to go home and you have to explain it. Those are the ones that are tricky.
Back to the impeachment point. Look, I'd impeach every president. Let's be clear. I'm not the kind of person who's going to introduce impeachment legislation over every little thing that a president does wrong. When you introduce legislation to impeach a president, you have to have some backing for it. It can't just be one person saying, let's impeach.
For example, I would definitely impeach President Biden over these unconstitutional wars 100 percent. But the idea of introducing impeachment legislation suggests there's other people who will join you. Otherwise, it's just an exercise in futility. You introduce it. It doesn't go anywhere. It just sits there. If we're going to impeach people, there has to be some public backing, which is why I try to make the case all the time for these impeachable offenses, why some legislation should be brought forth. But you've got to get the public behind you on that kind of stuff. I think that every president should be impeached, every recent president at least.
Gillespie: If Trump's populism, national conservatism, and politics of resentment are sucking up a lot of energy on the right, how do we deal with the rise of identity politics and a kind of woke progressivism on the left? Where is that coming from? And what is the best way to combat that?
Amash:I think a lot of it is just repackaged socialist ideas, collectivist ideas. The idea of equity, for example, is really like a perversion of the idea of equality. In most respects, when people say equity, they mean the opposite of equality. It means you're going to have the government or some central authority decide what the outcomes should be, how much each person should have, rather than some system of equality before the law, where the government is not some kind of arbiter of who deserves what. When you think about it, there is no way for the government to do this. There's no way for the government to properly assess all of our lives. This is in many ways the point of diversity: we're all so different. There's no way that a central authority can decide how to manage all that.
For many of the people on the woke left who say they care about diversity, they don't care about diversity if they're talking about equity. These things are in conflict with each other. The idea that you're going to decide that someone is more deserving than another based on some superficial characteristics. As an example—I've talked about this and I've talked about this earlier in this conversation—my dad came here with nothing as a poor refugee. Yet, in a lot of cases, he might be classified as just a white American. Even though he came here as an extremely poor Palestinian refugee. The New York Times, for example, classifies me as white. They might classify someone else who's Middle Eastern as a person of color.
I think a lot of this is just, someone is making decisions at the top saying, "Well, we think this person is more like this or that, and we're going to decide they're more deserving." But they don't know our backgrounds. They don't know anything about us. They don't know who deserves this or who deserves that. No central authority could figure that out. The best thing we can do is have a system of equality before the law, where the law treats everyone the same. It doesn't give an advantage to any person over another person. It may not be fair in some sense to some people. Some people might say, "well, that's not fair."
Some people, instead of having a dad who's a Palestinian refugee, their dad was some Silicon Valley billionaire. Some person might have a dad who was a professor. Another person might have a dad who worked at a fast-food restaurant. You don't know what the differences are. The government can't figure all of this out and say who is more deserving than someone else. So I really think that the woke left, when they pushed this idea of equity, they're really pushing against diversity. They're saying, a few people at the top are gonna decide who's valuable and who's not valuable, and they're not going to actually take into consideration any of our differences, because no central authority could take it into consideration.
Gillespie: You are a libertarian, not an anarchist. You believe there is a role for government, but it should be obviously much more limited. You are also an Orthodox Christian. Could you talk a little bit about how in a world of limited government, a libertarian world, the government wouldn't be doing everything for everybody, but placing organizations and institutions like the church or other types of intervening, countervailing, mediating institutions would help to fill the gaps that are left by the government?
Amash:The place for these organizations is to help society, not to have government deciding it. When you have some central authority deciding it, you are really limiting the opportunities for the public. You're limiting the opportunities for assisting people. You're deciding that a few people are going to make all the decisions, rather than having a lot of organizations and a lot of individuals making decisions.
When you centralize it all, there are a lot of people who are going to be missed, a lot of people who are going to be ignored. When you let the marketplace work this out, when you let private organizations work this out, there is a lot more opportunity for people who need help to get help. I think that's really important.
Gillespie: There was a libertarian wave—I like to call it a libertarian moment—which I think we're still living in, but we don't understand, rhetoric aside. What are the best ways to get libertarian ideas and sensibilities in front of young people, to really energize Gen Z? The world is getting young again. How do we make sure that these people are hearing and understanding and maybe being persuaded by libertarian ideas?
Amash:For one thing, we have to meet them where they are. I spend a lot of time, for example, asking my kids, which social media kids use these days? They're in a lot of places that the adults aren't. We might be on Facebook—I mean, my generation, your generation. Other people are on X or Twitter. And there are other people on TikTok.
You have to meet them where they are and if they're not on X and—it's still weird to call it X—if they're not on X and you are, well, they're not hearing your message. That's an issue. That's something we all have to work on. I'm probably reaching primarily Gen X and millennial people on X, and I'm probably not reaching Gen Z people as well. I think we need to work on getting them in those places.
Also, I think people who have libertarian instincts, people who want to present libertarianism and have an opportunity, go speak to students at schools. I used to do this as a member of Congress. I used that opportunity as much as I could. When schools would invite me, I'd say, "Yes, I'd be happy to come to the school to speak to the students" and take all their questions and be open about being a libertarian. Tell them frankly that your philosophy is libertarianism and talk to them about it. I think it's great. A lot of teachers end up surprised. I've had many teachers walk up to me and whisper to me, "I think I'm a libertarian, too," after having the conversation because they have stereotypes about what it might mean to be a libertarian and you have the opportunity to change their mind.
Gillespie: I have seen a lot of chatter. I have actually helped publish a lot of chatter that you may be running for the U.S. Senate from the mediocre state of Michigan. Do you have an announcement that you would like to make?
Amash: As a part of the national championship-winning state of Michigan this year, I am exploring a run for Senate. The [Federal Election Commission] FEC requires me to state that I am not a candidate for Senate, but I am exploring a run for Senate.
If you're interested in checking it out, go to https://exploratory.justinamash.com/. I'm giving it serious thought. I think that there is an opportunity for libertarians this year, and there's an opportunity to win a Republican Senate seat this year. So I'm looking at the Republican primary. I think this is probably the best shot libertarians have had in a long time in the state of Michigan.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
Photo Credits: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; BONNIE CASH/UPI/Newscom
Only 3 percent of the people who have applied for green cards will receive one in FY 2024, as the backlog continues to grow and migrants continue to choose illegal migration pathways in large numbers. Today's green card processing "reveals a legal immigration system that is utterly failing to direct aspiring immigrants to pursue the American dream in lawful and orderly ways," wrote David J. Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, in a report released last week.
About 1.1 million green cards may be issued in FY 2024, but there are currently 34.7 million pending applications. The backlog has its roots in the Immigration Act of 1924 and subsequent eligibility restrictions. While 98.1 percent of immigrant applicants were allowed to enter the country with permanent status from 1888 to 1921, just 16 percent of applicants were admitted in an average year once caps were imposed, per Bier. The rate fell to 3.8 percent in 2023.
Adding to the problem is the fact that the government has let 6.3 million green cards go to waste since 1921, failing to meet caps in large part due to processing delays.
Certain nationalities and green card categories experience more severe backlogs and selective processing. "Indians—who make up half the applicants in the employer-sponsored categories—must wait more than a century for a green card," wrote Bier. People who try their luck at the green card lottery, which currently has about 22.2 million applicants, only have a 1 in 400 chance of getting a green card in a given year. Some who apply for family-based green cards "will face lifetime waits for many country-category combinations," according to Bier.
By granting green cards to such a low percentage of applicants each year, the U.S. is leaving a lot of potential growth on the table. "Backlogged immigrants are likely to enter the United States and start working at higher rates than the general population, and they also appear to be more educated on average," wrote Bier. And beyond being an important addition to the labor force, immigrants are helping to reduce the massive federal budget deficit and stave off population decline.
The Cato report suggests that Congress do away with "the unnecessarily onerous rules and arbitrary caps to approve current green card applicants." After tackling the existing backlog, policy changes could be more modest, since "annual legal immigration would only need to increase more gradually to meet future demand."
This report echoes the findings of June 2023 Cato Institute research, which found that "fewer than 1 percent of people who want to move permanently to the United States can do so legally." A variety of factors keep people from qualifying for the existing green card categories, including low annual visa caps, a lack of U.S.-based sponsors (either employers or qualifying family members), narrow definitions of eligible nationalities, and cost.
Green card inaccessibility affects people who are already in the U.S., those who have applied and are still abroad, and those who would apply if not for the daunting and restrictive process. Policies that reduce the backlog and improve future processing could only benefit the American economy and incentivize would-be immigrants to pursue legal rather than illegal migration pathways.
Taking crazy pills: Former President Donald Trump said last evening that the civil fraud verdict that will force him to pony up $355 million for inflating his net worth to banks is actually "a form of Navalny" and "a form of communism or fascism."
When asked about the Russian state's imprisonment and killing of dissident Alexei Navalny, Trump responded: "It's happening here." The indictments are "all because of the fact that I'm in politics," in his telling.
He made these comments last night during a Fox News town hall. On Truth Social, his own alternative social media platform, Trump said, "the sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country."
Alexei Navalny, who was reported dead on Friday, served as an opposition leader in a state that disallows opposition and legitimate voting. Navalny garnered a massive following—more than 6 million YouTube followers, for starters, with at least one video viewed 130 million times—by doing legitimately good journalism digging into the kleptocratic, repressive Putin regime. Navalny offered normal Russians legitimate, well-sourced explanations for why they are so poor: their leaders consistently abdicate responsibility, choosing to enrich themselves. Their leaders are content with everyday people living in squalor and dysfunction, as long as they stay comfortable.
Running for office, and cutting through the state's propaganda, made him so disfavored by the regime that he went into exile. Navalny returned to Russia in 2021 with full awareness that he would be locked up but a devout belief that he ought to continue his work domestically, displaying courage in the face of certain persecution. And sure enough, he was locked up, then sent to an even more remote prison camp called IK-3, in Kharp, which is in the Arctic Circle. His death there was reported last week, but the opposition movement will not die with him. "In killing Aleksei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul," said his widow, Yulia, "but I have another half left—and it is telling me I have no right to give up."
Trump, on the other hand, misrepresented his net worth to banks, defrauding lenders (who…still had a responsibility to do due diligence, a fact ignored in much mainstream media reporting of the case). "Trump claimed his apartment in Manhattan's Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet, nearly three times its actual size," writesReason's Jacob Sullum. "He valued Mar-a-Lago, his golf resort in Palm Beach, based on the assumption that it could be sold for residential purposes, which the deed precluded." But "[New York Attorney General Letitia] James was not able to identify any damages to lenders or insurers," writes Sullum, and "the striking absence of any injury commensurate with the punishment lends credibility to Trump's reflexive complaint that he is the victim of a partisan vendetta."
Both things can be true, that Trump attracts politically motivated ire—which attorneys general and judges are wrong to indulge—and that he also did something wrong by inflating his net worth. But he's a far cry from Navalny—Trump enjoys self-dealing more than fact-finding and truth-telling—and the way this went down, via the court system, where Trump had the right to defend himself, is a far cry from how "justice" gets dispensed in Russia—by Putin, in penal colonies, via murders of anyone whose beliefs threaten the man in charge.
"Clinical psychologists with the Department of Veterans Affairs faced retaliation and ostracization at work after they publicly opposed a gender-inclusion policy that allows men to access women's medical spaces within the VA," reportsNational Review.
RFK Jr.'s "origin story makes this like Odysseus returning to the manor, stringing the bow, this is that iconic moment," said Bret Weinstein on Joe Rogan's podcast. If you say so, Bret.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just announced a lawsuit against El Paso's Annunciation House, an NGO in charge of a shelter network for migrants, for "facilitating illegal entry to the United States, alien harboring, human smuggling, and operating a stash house." But going after charities that help migrants—whatever you think of the behavior they engaged in to get here—seems like a wrongheaded stunt.
I do not think this is true or that there's much evidence for it:
do you want a black pill?
like… a really really black pill?
George Carlin would be pro-censorship if he were alive today b/c he didn't actually love free speech, he just fucking hated Christians
"The enormous contrast between [Alexei] Navalny's civic courage and the corruption of [Vladimir] Putin's regime will remain," writesThe Atlantic's Anne Applebaum. "Putin is fighting a bloody, lawless, unnecessary war, in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians have been killed or wounded, for no reason other than to serve his own egotistical vision. He is running a cowardly, micromanaged reelection campaign, one in which all real opponents are eliminated and the only candidate who gets airtime is himself. Instead of facing real questions or challenges, he meets tame propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, to whom he offers nothing more than lengthy, circular, and completely false versions of history."
Related: People were arrested for laying flowers in memory of Navalny.
pSeeking lives of safety and opportunity, people coming to the United States as migrants and asylum-seekers may carry only their most essential and beloved possessions. When they arrive in the U.S. and are taken into Border Patrol custody, many migrants endure the devastating loss of their property: Border Patrol agents routinely confiscate, trash, or force them to throw away their precious belongings./p
div class=mp-md wp-link
div class=wp-link__img-wrapper
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/publications/from-hope-to-heartbreak-the-disturbing-reality-of-border-patrols-confiscation-of-migrants-belongings
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
img width=1216 height=680 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.02.10-PM.png class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt=An individual holding a small bag of important belongings and documents. decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.02.10-PM.png 1216w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.02.10-PM-768x429.png 768w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.02.10-PM-400x224.png 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.02.10-PM-600x336.png 600w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.02.10-PM-800x447.png 800w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.02.10-PM-1000x559.png 1000w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.02.10-PM-1200x671.png 1200w sizes=(max-width: 1216px) 100vw, 1216px / /a
/div
div class=wp-link__title
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/publications/from-hope-to-heartbreak-the-disturbing-reality-of-border-patrols-confiscation-of-migrants-belongings
target=_blank
From Hope to Heartbreak: The Disturbing Reality of Border Patrol's Confiscation of Migrants' Belongings /a
/div
div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/publications/from-hope-to-heartbreak-the-disturbing-reality-of-border-patrols-confiscation-of-migrants-belongings
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p
/a
/div
/div
pIn a new report published in partnership with organizations working on the southern border, From Hope to Heartbreak, we document routine cases of this abusive treatment focusing on confiscation of medication and medical devices, legal and identity documents, religious items, and items of financial, practical, or sentimental value./p
pThe report relies heavily on hundreds of intakes conducted by the Kino Border Initiative (KBI), which runs a migrant aid center along Mexico’s border with Arizona, and ProtectAZ Health, which offers free medical screenings and care to migrants in Phoenix./p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-standardMedications and Medical Devices/h2
/div
figure class=wp-image mb-8
img width=1280 height=960 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Medications-Near-Yuma-Arizona-December-2023.jpeg class=attachment-original size-original alt=A pile of various medical materials. decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Medications-Near-Yuma-Arizona-December-2023.jpeg 1280w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Medications-Near-Yuma-Arizona-December-2023-768x576.jpeg 768w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Medications-Near-Yuma-Arizona-December-2023-400x300.jpeg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Medications-Near-Yuma-Arizona-December-2023-600x450.jpeg 600w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Medications-Near-Yuma-Arizona-December-2023-800x600.jpeg 800w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Medications-Near-Yuma-Arizona-December-2023-1000x750.jpeg 1000w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Medications-Near-Yuma-Arizona-December-2023-1200x900.jpeg 1200w sizes=(max-width: 1280px) 100vw, 1280px /
/figure
pBorder Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), have routinely confiscated life-saving medications and medical devices from adults and children who have illnesses such as seizure disorders, high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, and genetic conditions./p
pCBP agents took a 5-year-old girl’s epilepsy medications away from her mother. When the little girl, whom we are calling Rosa, experienced convulsions, she was taken to the hospital. When she was discharged from the hospital and returned to CBP custody with new medications and special dietary supplements, CBP agents confiscated those. Not until the family was released to a shelter in Las Cruces, New Mexico, did Rosa receive the medical care she needed./p
pDepriving people of their necessary medication obviously risks their health and safety. It also adds stress to local hospital systems, as people need to visit the emergency room or be hospitalized because their health deteriorates from missing their medication./p
pProtectAZ received a 13-year-old boy, whom we are calling Leonel, at their shelter. Leonel has a genetic condition in which he lacks a necessary amino acid that prevents the build up of ammonia in his body. The condition can have serious consequences if untreated, including seizures, coma and death. Leonel needed to take daily supplements, but they were confiscated by Border Patrol in Casa Grande, Arizona. At the ProtectAZ shelter, Leonel’s health deteriorated, and he had to be admitted to the hospital for a week to stabilize his condition./p
pIn a separate occurrence, a 7-year-old boy with moderate-persistent asthma was detained for two days. His inhaler was taken away, and he wasn#8217;t given a replacement. After being released, he developed respiratory symptoms, and his condition worsened quickly. His family took him to the emergency department, and he was transferred to a pediatric intensive care unit./p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-standardLegal and Identity Documents/h2
/div
figure class=wp-image mb-8
img width=3000 height=2335 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Honduran-passport-and-birth-certificate-Near-border-wall-in-South-Texas-September-2021-Photo-credit_-Scott-Nicol-scaled.jpeg class=attachment-original size-original alt=A honduran passport. decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Honduran-passport-and-birth-certificate-Near-border-wall-in-South-Texas-September-2021-Photo-credit_-Scott-Nicol-scaled.jpeg 3000w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Honduran-passport-and-birth-certificate-Near-border-wall-in-South-Texas-September-2021-Photo-credit_-Scott-Nicol-768x598.jpeg 768w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Honduran-passport-and-birth-certificate-Near-border-wall-in-South-Texas-September-2021-Photo-credit_-Scott-Nicol-1536x1196.jpeg 1536w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Honduran-passport-and-birth-certificate-Near-border-wall-in-South-Texas-September-2021-Photo-credit_-Scott-Nicol-2048x1594.jpeg 2048w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Honduran-passport-and-birth-certificate-Near-border-wall-in-South-Texas-September-2021-Photo-credit_-Scott-Nicol-400x311.jpeg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Honduran-passport-and-birth-certificate-Near-border-wall-in-South-Texas-September-2021-Photo-credit_-Scott-Nicol-600x467.jpeg 600w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Honduran-passport-and-birth-certificate-Near-border-wall-in-South-Texas-September-2021-Photo-credit_-Scott-Nicol-800x623.jpeg 800w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Honduran-passport-and-birth-certificate-Near-border-wall-in-South-Texas-September-2021-Photo-credit_-Scott-Nicol-1000x778.jpeg 1000w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Honduran-passport-and-birth-certificate-Near-border-wall-in-South-Texas-September-2021-Photo-credit_-Scott-Nicol-1200x934.jpeg 1200w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Honduran-passport-and-birth-certificate-Near-border-wall-in-South-Texas-September-2021-Photo-credit_-Scott-Nicol-1400x1090.jpeg 1400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Honduran-passport-and-birth-certificate-Near-border-wall-in-South-Texas-September-2021-Photo-credit_-Scott-Nicol-1600x1246.jpeg 1600w sizes=(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px /
/figure
pConfiscating or destroying legal and identity documents, such as birth certificates, passports, medical records, and documents to substantiate asylum claims, has been a hallmark of Border Patrol’s operations./p
pOne man told KBI that Border Patrol agents tore his birth certificate up in front of him. He managed to save his Mexican identity card because he had hidden it in his shoe. Advocates in the Rio Grande Valley Sector in Texas report finding discarded documents that could be important in substantiating asylum claims, such as police reports and medical records. Volunteers with the Borderlands Collective in San Diego say document confiscation is especially concerning for parents of minor children, who may not be able to prove that they are family without their children’s birth records./p
p“Passports are very important here,” one person had shared. “To open an account, to identify yourself, and I don’t have that document. I don’t have the children’s birth records because they took them from me. That makes me feel terrible.”/p
pMigrants who are deported, expelled or returned to Mexico cannot withdraw or receive money without identity documents. Confiscated or destroyed documents pose a significant barrier to asylum-seekers’ ability to substantiate their claims. The Children’s Legal Center sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on behalf of 68 asylum-seekers whose documents the agency had confiscated. The lawsuit argues the confiscation violates the plaintiffs’ due process rights to seek work authorization and to support their asylum cases./p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-standardReligious Items/h2
/div
figure class=wp-image mb-8
img width=1280 height=960 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Religious-items-Near-Yuma-Arizona-April-2023.jpeg class=attachment-original size-original alt=A pile of religious items, including a small Buddha statue and an image of the Virgin Mary. decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Religious-items-Near-Yuma-Arizona-April-2023.jpeg 1280w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Religious-items-Near-Yuma-Arizona-April-2023-768x576.jpeg 768w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Religious-items-Near-Yuma-Arizona-April-2023-400x300.jpeg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Religious-items-Near-Yuma-Arizona-April-2023-600x450.jpeg 600w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Religious-items-Near-Yuma-Arizona-April-2023-800x600.jpeg 800w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Religious-items-Near-Yuma-Arizona-April-2023-1000x750.jpeg 1000w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Religious-items-Near-Yuma-Arizona-April-2023-1200x900.jpeg 1200w sizes=(max-width: 1280px) 100vw, 1280px /
/figure
pOver the summer of 2022, there was a spike in reports of Border Patrol taking away Sikh asylum-seekers’ turbans. Forcing a Sikh person to remove their turban is a serious violation of their faith. #8220;They told me to take off my turban. I know a little English, and I said, ‘It’s my religion.#8217; But they insisted.#8221; The man pleaded with the officers, but they forced him to remove his turban and toss it in a pile of trash. He asked if he could at least keep his turban for when he was released from custody, but they told him no./p
pWhile Border Patrol has since taken positive steps forward on how it handles turbans and other Sikh articles of faith, the agency’s religious freedom violations aren’t limited to people of the Sikh faith. A person told KBI that Border Patrol agents took his Bible, which he told them had significant spiritual meaning to him, and trashed it in front of him. Border Patrol agents in Yuma told several Muslim migrants they had to throw away their prayer mats. One of the men said his prayer mat had been in his family for more than 100 years./p
div class=mp-md wp-link
div class=wp-link__img-wrapper
a
href=https://action.aclu.org/petition/border-patrol-must-stop-trashing-migrant%E2%80%99s-cherished-belongings
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
img width=1000 height=655 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.21.07-PM.png class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt=An illustration of a young woman walking nervously with a backpack. decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.21.07-PM.png 1000w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.21.07-PM-768x503.png 768w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.21.07-PM-400x262.png 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.21.07-PM-600x393.png 600w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-1.21.07-PM-800x524.png 800w sizes=(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px / /a
/div
div class=wp-link__title
a
href=https://action.aclu.org/petition/border-patrol-must-stop-trashing-migrant%E2%80%99s-cherished-belongings
target=_blank
BORDER PATROL MUST STOP TRASHING MIGRANT’S CHERISHED BELONGINGS /a
/div
div class=wp-link__description
a
href=https://action.aclu.org/petition/border-patrol-must-stop-trashing-migrant%E2%80%99s-cherished-belongings
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tabletIf you believe that people seeking refuge in our country deserve to be welcomed with dignity, join us by advocating for change./p
/a
/div
div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet
a
href=https://action.aclu.org/petition/border-patrol-must-stop-trashing-migrant%E2%80%99s-cherished-belongings
target=_blank
tabindex=-1
p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p
/a
/div
/div
pMigrants’ religious freedom is protected both by the First Amendment and the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which provides additional protection for the free exercise of religion. Some asylum-seekers are fleeing religious persecution in their home countries, and the experience of CBP violating their religious faith can be a retraumatizing experience. CBP has been made aware of their violations for years, suggesting a failure of CBP policy and practice to fully respect the religious freedom rights of migrants and asylum-seekers./p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-standardItems of Practical, Financial, or Sentimental Value/h2
/div
figure class=wp-image mb-8
img width=1200 height=980 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Personal-documents-including-vaccination-records-money-and-a-cellphone-Near-Lukeville-AZ-May-2023.jpeg class=attachment-original size-original alt=A collection of documents, money, and a damaged smartphone. decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Personal-documents-including-vaccination-records-money-and-a-cellphone-Near-Lukeville-AZ-May-2023.jpeg 1200w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Personal-documents-including-vaccination-records-money-and-a-cellphone-Near-Lukeville-AZ-May-2023-768x627.jpeg 768w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Personal-documents-including-vaccination-records-money-and-a-cellphone-Near-Lukeville-AZ-May-2023-400x327.jpeg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Personal-documents-including-vaccination-records-money-and-a-cellphone-Near-Lukeville-AZ-May-2023-600x490.jpeg 600w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Personal-documents-including-vaccination-records-money-and-a-cellphone-Near-Lukeville-AZ-May-2023-800x653.jpeg 800w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAPTION_-Personal-documents-including-vaccination-records-money-and-a-cellphone-Near-Lukeville-AZ-May-2023-1000x817.jpeg 1000w sizes=(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px /
/figure
pMigrants have regularly reported Border Patrol agents confiscate their money and cellphones. These items are of clear value and represent a devastating loss: impoverishment and loss of contact with loved ones. Several migrants told KBI they lost the equivalent of hundreds of dollars to Border Patrol. One man described seeing a Border Patrol agent take 3,000 pesos from another man and rip it up in his face. Other migrants described the loss of family photos on their confiscated cellphones./p
pConfiscation of clothing appears to be widespread in Border Patrol custody, leaving migrants with only a single layer of clothing. “The official asked me how many shirts I had, and I responded that I had two shirts plus a sweater. The official started laughing and told me I had to take everything off but one shirt,” one person recounted./p
pVolunteers and shelters supporting migrants are critical of this practice, especially during the winter and if migrants are traveling north. One shelter in Las Cruces, New Mexico, said it spent $100,000 every month to provide clothes to migrants. Once the Border Patrol sectors in New Mexico reduced their confiscation of people’s clothes, the shelter reported reducing costs for clothing people by half./p
pFinally, migrants report having their cherished belongings confiscated or trashed – children’s toys, heirloom jewelry, and even a loved one’s ashes. One man said Border Patrol agents forced him to throw away his father’s ashes – his father had died while journeying to the U.S. from Nicaragua./p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-standardThe Systematic Confiscation of Migrants' Belongings at the U.S. Southern Border, Despite the Vast Resources Available to Border Patrol, is Indefensible/h2
/div
pCBP’s practice of property confiscation and destruction isn’t only cruel, unnecessary, and, in some cases, life-threatening, in many cases, it likely violates federal law and policy. We outline achievable policy changes that CBP can adopt to protect the dignity, safety, and rights of people arriving in the U.S./p
pBorder Patrol must ensure migrants in its custody and those released from custody have continuous access to their medications and medical devices. Migrants should be allowed to keep as many of their personal belongings as possible in custody and after they are released. CBP must change its policies to comply with federal safeguards of religious freedom in its treatment of people’s religious garb and religious items./p
pThe bottom line is that CBP can and must do better to live up to our nation’s values and commitments to people seeking safety within our borders. People seeking refuge in the U.S. deserve to be welcomed with dignity./p
div class=rss-ctadiv class=rss-cta__subtitleWhat you can do:/divdiv class=rss-cta__titleTell Congress: Protect families seeking asylum/diva href=https://action.aclu.org/send-message/tell-congress-protect-families-seeking-asylum class=rss-cta__buttonSend your message/a/div
pThe Senate voted on Wednesday against a bill that would have been the first major overhaul of asylum and immigration law in a generation — and would have been a disastrous retreat from basic principles of fairness. As our elected leaders continue to debate immigration reforms, they must instead advance humane and sensible solutions that help manage the border without compromising our nation’s values and the safety of people fleeing danger./p
pAlthough branded as a compromise bipartisan “border security” package, this bill would have been a major rewrite of our nation’s long-standing asylum laws. To make matters worse, these changes were attached to a supplemental funding bill that also included a massive investment in failed and punitive immigration enforcement policies, such as funding to finish former President Trump’s border wall, an expansion of nationwide immigration detention, and a significant increase in surveillance targeting immigrant families. Although ostensibly dead, Senate Republicans are reportedly trying again to push for another vote on this immigration package as an amendment to foreign aid, plus additional extremist policies that would remove protections from unaccompanied children./p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-standard1. It would have shut down the U.S.-Mexico border to asylum seekers/h2
/div
pAt its core lay a new rule that would have fundamentally blocked asylum for the vast majority of people who come to our southern border seeking protection. Under this new rule, once an average of 5,000 people arrive at the border daily over a seven-day period, or 8,500 people on a single day, no one would be eligible to apply for asylum between ports of entry. Furthermore, the government would have gained the power to enforce this “no-asylum” rule when there is an average of 4,000 people per day over a seven-day period./p
a
href=https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/showing-up-to-protect-the-right-to-seek-asylum
class=wp-link mb-8
target=_blank
div class=p-4-mobile p-6-tablet
div class=mb-4
div class=wp-link__img-wrapper is-relative
img width=1200 height=628 src=https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/26f980d9135735ce0b525d8e63cce9ca.jpg class=attachment-original size-original alt= decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/26f980d9135735ce0b525d8e63cce9ca.jpg 1200w, https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/26f980d9135735ce0b525d8e63cce9ca-768x402.jpg 768w, https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/26f980d9135735ce0b525d8e63cce9ca-400x209.jpg 400w, https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/26f980d9135735ce0b525d8e63cce9ca-600x314.jpg 600w, https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/26f980d9135735ce0b525d8e63cce9ca-800x419.jpg 800w, https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/26f980d9135735ce0b525d8e63cce9ca-1000x523.jpg 1000w sizes=(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px / /div
/div
div class=
div class=wp-link__title
h3 class=is-size-6-mobile pr-4
Showing Up to Protect the Right to Seek Asylum /h3
/div
div class=wp-link__description pr-3 mt-1
p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tabletFor decades, the ACLU has worked to protect the rights of asylum seekers./p
/div
/div
/div
div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet
p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p
/div
/a
pThis was poised to become an operational nightmare, and there’s no need for speculation regarding the horrible consequences if the government implemented this rule. We need only to look back at the chaotic and violent days under the Trump era Title 42 policy, which similarly closed our asylum system under the guise of public health. During that period a href=https://humanrightsfirst.org/title-42/#:~:text=As%20of%20December%202022%2C%20Human,since%20President%20Biden%20took%20officeover 13,480/a people were raped, murdered, kidnapped, tortured, or extorted while waiting for the border to reopen. As history has taught us, this new rule would not have stopped people from seeking safety in the U.S., but people who have undoubtedly been sent back to danger as a result./p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-standard2. This plan would have fundamentally changed our country’s core protections for people seeking safety/h2
/div
pEven when people were allowed to apply for asylum, they would have been subject to a mind-boggling and dangerous fast-track deportation process, with punishing timelines for those who could not meet new restrictive screening tests./p
pIf passed, the vast majority of asylum seekers would no longer be able to seek court review of their cases, representing a major shift from our asylum and legal system. This would have denied them one of the most essential due process safeguards in a system riddled with errors. Independent judicial review has been a life-saving protection, with courts a href=https://humanrightsfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Preserve_Judicial_Review_of_Asylum_Decisions-formatted.pdfconsistently finding /athat asylum officers wrongly denied people protection. Asylum officers currently conduct their case screenings and interviews with the understanding that their work will be checked by an immigration judge. Eliminating that legal review would have meant sacrificing basic fairness in cases where life or death is at stake./p
div class=wp-heading mb-8
h2 id= class=wp-heading-h2 with-standard3. An unprecedented increase in funding for punitive immigration policies would have been a waste of taxpayer dollars/h2
/div
pThe other major story about this bill is the money. It was a shockingly punitive, pro-detention bill that revived the construction of Trump’s failed border wall and included an unprecedented $3.2 billion for immigration detention — more than even allocated or requested under the previous administration. The bill also included over a billion dollars for surveillance technology that would subject individuals and a href=https://www.aclu-or.org/en/news/whats-hiding-immigration-border-deal-more-mass-surveillancefamilies/a to 24-hour suspicionless surveillance. This amounted to $4.5 billion dollars directed towards harmful and punitive immigration enforcement measures that would have impacted all immigrant families throughout the United States. Most of that funding would have lined the pockets of the for-profit prison industry, which stands to get a href=https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/07/us-immigration-surveillance-ice-bi-isapbillions more/a in taxpayer dollars and without the overdue oversight and accountability./p
a
href=https://www.aclu-or.org/en/news/whats-hiding-immigration-border-deal-more-mass-surveillance
class=wp-link mb-8
target=_blank
rel=noreferrer noopener
div class=p-4-mobile p-6-tablet
div class=mb-4
div class=wp-link__img-wrapper is-relative
img width=1200 height=630 src=https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2168519ceac1da204c4f825d20480d5a.jpg class=attachment-original size-original alt= decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2168519ceac1da204c4f825d20480d5a.jpg 1200w, https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2168519ceac1da204c4f825d20480d5a-768x403.jpg 768w, https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2168519ceac1da204c4f825d20480d5a-400x210.jpg 400w, https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2168519ceac1da204c4f825d20480d5a-600x315.jpg 600w, https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2168519ceac1da204c4f825d20480d5a-800x420.jpg 800w, https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2168519ceac1da204c4f825d20480d5a-1000x525.jpg 1000w sizes=(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px / /div
/div
div class=
div class=wp-link__title
h3 class=is-size-6-mobile pr-4
What’s Hiding in the Immigration Border Deal? More Mass Surveillance /h3
/div
div class=wp-link__description pr-3 mt-1
p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tabletCongress is considering expanding a harmful surveillance program. A second Trump presidency could make those risks even more severe./p
/div
/div
/div
div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet
p class=is-size-7Source: ACLU of Oregon/p
/div
/a
pIn addition to the unimaginable harm inflicted on immigrant families, the bill would have permanently undermined our moral standing in the world, and ensured the return of people to danger and even death./p
pThere is no denying the need for real changes at our southern border. However, none of these callous and extremist policies were ever going to “fix” the border: they wouldn’t have created a fairer immigration system or helped cities, states, and communities support and welcome new immigrants. What’s more, they wouldn’t even have deterred people from seeking protection or opportunities here in the U.S., as their proponents suggested. This bill would have essentially altered who we are as a country without improving the situation at the border from any perspective./p
pWith thanks to Senators Markey, Menendez, Padilla, Sanders, and Warren, all of whom voted against this deal, this harmful legislation will no longer move forward — but our work here isn’t done just yet. Now it’s time for all our elected leaders to take this failed vote as an opportunity to finally get immigration reform right and ensure we pass sensible and humane solutions to address the challenges at the border./p
div class=rss-ctadiv class=rss-cta__subtitleWhat you can do:/divdiv class=rss-cta__titleTell Congress: Protect families seeking asylum/diva href=https://action.aclu.org/send-message/tell-congress-protect-families-seeking-asylum class=rss-cta__buttonSend your message/a/div
Migrants arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border in Eagle Pass, Texas, in July 2022. (Miguel Juarez Lugo/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom)
In recent months, many politicians and media outlets have focused on the "migrant crisis" in various cities, supposedly caused by the arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers. Many of these migrants cannot support themselves, and end up taking up shelter space or living on the streets. In a recent Atlantic article (unfortunately, paywalled), Jerusalem Demsas explains why the supposed crisis is in reality a product of flawed government policies, rather than migration, as such:
When the mayor of New York, of all places, warned that a recent influx of asylum seekers would destroy his city, something didn't add up.
"I said it last year when we had 15,000, and I'm telling you now at 110,000. The city we knew, we're about to lose," Eric Adams urged in September. By the end of the year, more than 150,000 migrants had arrived. Still, the mayor's apocalyptic prediction didn't square with New York's past experience. How could a city with more than 8 million residents, more than 3 million of whom are foreign-born, find itself overwhelmed by a much smaller number of newcomers?
In another legendary haven for immigrants, similar dynamics were playing out. Chicago has more than 500,000 foreign-born residents, about 20 percent of its population, but it has been straining to handle the arrival of just 35,000 asylum seekers in the past year and a half. Some people have even ended up on the floors of police stations or in public parks. Mayor Brandon Johnson joined Adams and a handful of other big-city mayors in signing a letter seeking help with the "large numbers of additional asylum seekers being brought to our cities."
Sometimes the best way to understand why something is going wrong is to look at what's going right. The asylum seekers from the border aren't the only outsiders in town. Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought a separate influx of displaced people into U.S. cities that quietly assimilated most of them. "We have at least 30,000 Ukrainian refugees in the city of Chicago, and no one has even noticed," Johnson told me in a recent interview.
According to New York officials, of about 30,000 Ukrainians who resettled there, very few ended up in shelters. By contrast, the city has scrambled to open nearly 200 emergency shelters to house asylees from the Southwest border.
What ensured the quiet assimilation of displaced Ukrainians? Why has the arrival of asylum seekers from Latin America been so different? And why have some cities managed to weather the so-called crisis without any outcry or political backlash? In interviews with mayors, other municipal officials, nonprofit leaders, and immigration lawyers in several states, I pieced together an answer stemming from two major differences in federal policy. First, the Biden administration admitted the Ukrainians under terms that allowed them to work right away. Second, the feds had a plan for where to place these newcomers. It included coordination with local governments, individual sponsors, and civil-society groups. The Biden administration did not leave Ukrainian newcomers vulnerable to the whims of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who since April 2022 has transported 37,800 migrants to New York City, 31,400 to Chicago, and thousands more to other blue cities—in a successful bid to push the immigration debate rightward and advance the idea that immigrants are a burden on native-born people.
Demsas is largely right here. Ukrainians admitted under the Uniting for Ukraine (U4U) program have not caused any controversy in cities largely because they are allowed to immediately start working, and thereby can support themselves and contribute to our economy. By contrast, asylum seekers aren't eligible to apply for work permits for six months, and even then it often takes the federal immigration bureaucracy a long time to actually issue them.
What is true for Ukrainians is also true of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and Haitians admitted under the "CNVH" program—an extension of the U4U model to a combine total 30,000 migrants per month fleeing oppression and violence in those four countries. Several hundred thousand people have entered the US under the CNVH program. But, like the Ukrainians, they have immediate work authorization, and therefore turn out to be a asset to cities, not a burden.
As Demsas explains, the federal government should abolish the six-month rule and let asylum-seekers work legally from day one. The Biden Administration has taken this step for many Venezuelans already in the US. But it needs to expand work authorization to other asylum seekers.
I do think Demsas gets one point wrong here. For the most part, it is not true that "the feds had a plan for where to place" U4U participants. The program requires each migrant to have a US sponsor. But, beyond that, the federal government makes little or no effort to control where and how they live.
I myself am a sponsor in the U4U program, and have advised other sponsors and migrants. Generally speaking, the migrants decide for themselves where they are going to settle in the US. Sponsors advise, but do not dictate. I now have eight Ukrainian sponsorees. To my knowledge, never once has a federal official attempted to plan where they live and work, or even offered advice on that subject.
Instead of planning and controlling, U4U mostly lets the market and civil society work. That, I think, is the real key to its success. While I don't myself have CNVH sponsorees, I know people who do; that program seems much the same.
Demsas also notes that, even when it comes to asylum seekers, the dfficulties encountered in New York and Chicago have largely been avoided in cities like Houston and Miami, even though the latter also have experienced recent influxes. What's the difference between these cases? I don't know for sure. But a major factor is likely that the cities with serious problems also tend to have highly restrictive zoning rules, which make it difficult or impossible to build housing in response to demand. I have previously noted this issue in the case of New York.
In New York, housing issues have been exacerbated by the city's ill-advised free shelter guarantee, which incentivizes both migrants and poor natives to seek out free housing at public expense. New York would be well-advised to end the guarantee, while simultaneously ending exclusionary zoning rules that block new housing construction.
It is also true, as Demsas notes, that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's migrant busing program—which has heavily targeted New York and Chicago—has caused disruption in those cities:
When immigrants make their way to a city in an organic fashion, they usually are drawn to a place where they have family ties, job leads, or other connections and resources available….
That's very different from the haphazard Texas busing program. When Abbott's buses arrive at their destinations, many of them are filled with people who had specific plans to go somewhere else. Cities then re-ticket many of the passengers. The mayor of Denver told me that roughly 40 percent of asylees who are bused into his city have no intention of staying there.
Abbott should stop the busing program, and instead let migrants choose their own destinations and pay their own way. In addition to increasing the migrants' economic productivity (thereby boosting the US economy) and reducing disruption in New York and Chicago, it would also save Texas taxpayers money. The state has spent some $148 million busing migrants to other parts of the country.
In sum, the "migrant crisis" is largely caused by a combination of perverse federal, state, and local policies that bar asylum seekers from working legally, artificially restrict housing construction, and bus migrants to places other than where they actually want to go. Migrants who enter by programs that avoid these obstacles don't cause any crises. Indeed, they are actually assets to the economy. If governments want to end the "crisis," for the most part they need only get out of the way.
In this week's TheReason Roundtable, Katherine Mangu-Ward is in the driver's seat, alongside Nick Gillespie and special guests Zach Weissmueller and Eric Boehm. The editors react to the latest plot twists in Donald Trump's various legal proceedings and the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
00:41—The trials of Donald Trump in Georgia and New York
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsor:
ZBiotics. Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works: When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for your rough next day. ZBiotics produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make ZBiotics your first drink of the night and to drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/roundtable to get 15 percent off your first order when you use code ROUNDTABLE at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with a 100 percent money-back guarantee, so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked.
Přihlásit se
