Hey, so I know that a bunch of us actually don’t have VR or are all that interested in getting into it, but that new VR Arkham Batman game looks pretty good, right? Shown off at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2024, Batman: Arkham Shadow seems like a pretty decent follow-up to the Arkhamverse, and one done in an entirely…
Batman is one of the most iconic superheroes in comics, and one of the most complex, with almost a century of accrued lore behind him by this point. With that Marianas Trench of mythology to explore, adaptations have always made perfect sense. From early film serials to TV shows and onwards, we live in a world where Batman is always being remade and reimagined by someone.
One of the most successful reimaginings is Batman: The Animated Series, created by Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski. In stark skyscraper canyons dropping away beneath menacing red skies, this cartoon introduced a new generation of viewers to Batman and his rogue's gallery. The art was stellar, as was the noir-infused storytelling, but the casting was just as important. Here was Mark Hamill as the Joker, and the late Arleen Sorkin as Harley Quinn. And holding it all together was Kevin Conroy, stern and perfectly unknowable, and bringing just the slightest trace of grim humour, as Batman.
I've been thinking about Conroy a lot these past few days. A fan favourite, his death in 2022 devastated the community, and it underlined something that had been felt for a long time: here was truly a Batman for the ages. This summer has brought news of a new Batman game, Batman Arkham Shadow, with Roger Craig Smith returning to the character after his turn in Batman: Arkham Origins. New Arkham games are always welcome, and I'm sure Smith will do a great job. But it's been a perfect opportunity for me to think of Conroy again and be thankful for what he brought to the role, regardless of the medium.
In this week's The Reason 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
33:25—Weekly Listener Question
39:56—No one is reading The Washington Post
48:09—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Biden Announces Sweeping Asylum Restrictions at U.S.-Mexico Border" by Fiona Harrigan
"Biden's New Asylum Policy is Both Harmful and Illegal" by Ilya Somin
"Travel Ban, Redux" by Josh Blackman
"Immigration Fueled America's Stunning Cricket Upset Over Pakistan" by Eric Boehm
"Libertarian Candidate Chase Oliver Wants To Bring Back 'Ellis Island Style' Immigration Processing" by Fiona Harrigan
"Donald Trump and Hunter Biden Face the Illogical Consequences of an Arbitrary Gun Law" by Jacob Sullum
"Hunter Biden's Trial Highlights a Widely Flouted, Haphazardly Enforced, and Constitutionally Dubious Gun Law" by Jacob Sullum
"Hunter Biden's Multiplying Charges Exemplify a Profound Threat to Trial by Jury" by Jacob Sullum
"The Conviction Effect" by Liz Wolfe
"Laurence Tribe Bizarrely Claims Trump Won the 2016 Election by Falsifying Business Records in 2017" by Jacob Sullum
"A Jumble of Legal Theories Failed To Give Trump 'Fair Notice' of the New York Charges Against Him" by Jacob Sullum
"Does Donald Trump's Conviction in New York Make Us Banana Republicans?" by J.D. Tuccille
"The Myth of the Federal Private Nondelegation Doctrine, Part 1" by Sasha Volokh
"Federal Court Condemns Congress for Giving Unconstitutional Regulatory Powers to Amtrak" by Damon Root
"Make Amtrak Safer and Privatize It" by Ira Stoll
"Biden Threatens To Veto GOP Spending Bill That Would 'Cut' Amtrak Funding to Double Pre-Pandemic Levels" by Christian Britschgi
"This Company Is Running a High-Speed Train in Florida—Without Subsidies" by Natalie Dowzicky
"Do Not Under Any Circumstances Nationalize Greyhound" by Christian Britschgi
"With Ride or Die, the Bad Boys Movies Become Referendums on Masculinity" by Peter Suderman
"D.C. Water Spent Nearly $4,000 On Its Wendy the Water Drop Mascot" by Christian Britschgi
Upcoming Reason Events:
Reason Speakeasy: Corey DeAngelis on June 11 in New York City
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:
Audio production by Justin Zuckerman and John Carter
Assistant production by Luke Allen and Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline" by The Brothers Steve
The post Partisan Border Wars appeared first on Reason.com.
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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week we return to an old series to see how it's evolved, we go to the underworld and play with the gods, and we go back to the Arkham game that started it all.
What have you been playing?
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.
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.
By contrast, Houston is famous for not having zoning at all (thereby making housing construction easy, and housing itself very affordable). And Miami is at least less restrictive than cities like New York and Chicago.
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.
The post The "Migrant Crisis" is Caused by Flawed Work and Housing Policies, not Migrants appeared first on Reason.com.
Get the Batman: Arkham series in just ₹202!
Steam is commemorating Bruce Wayne’s birthday with a massive sale, offering discounts of up to 90% on several games featuring Batman.
The sale went live on February 19 and will be live until February 26.
You can grab …
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