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Biden's Global, Muscular Liberalism Is an Indefensible Foreign Policy in 2021
Elbridge Colby, The Washington Post
Colby writes:
he central theme of President Biden’s foreign policy is a global, muscular liberalism. Ensuring that democracy “will and must prevail,” Biden told the Munich Security Conference, is “our galvanizing mission.” This appears to mean taking on threats to democracy wherever they lie — challenging both China and Russia, which Biden has said posits “just as real” a threat as Beijing — while continuing the “forever wars,” halting reductions of U.S. forces in Europe, sanctioning the new military government in Myanmar, signaling a firm line against North Korea and more.
This might have been a defensible policy decades ago, when U.S. wealth dwarfed that of the Soviet Union and China. Or in 1999, before China’s rise, the sapping wars in the Middle East or the profound effects of the financial crisis had all been felt. But it is not a sensible policy today.
For the first time since the 19th century, the United States is not clearly the world’s largest economy. China is already larger by many measures and growing faster than we are, including in the wake of covid-19. And traditional U.S. allies are declining in relative wealth and power. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies face challenges as varied as Russia, Iran and North Korea; nonstate terrorists; pandemics; economic recovery; and climate change.
Given all this, Americans must refocus on what our foreign policy should be about. That means, beyond defending ourselves from attack, making sure we can determine our future free of external coercion and being able to trade and invest overseas on terms that promote a broad-based national prosperity. This requires ensuring that key markets, particularly Asia, are not dominated by a hostile power. Such a state could exclude us from these markets and use its growth and power advantages to dominate our national life.
This is not a partisan issue: Strong constituencies on both the left and right are tired of and frustrated by the proposition that U.S. foreign policy should entail safeguarding the success of democracy and development around the globe. Global, muscular liberalism of both parties has manifestly failed to deliver the strength and broad-based prosperity to allow us to shape our future on our own terms. Americans deserve better.
This doesn’t mean withdrawing from everywhere and hoping for the best. Nor does it mean muzzling ourselves about human rights abuses or democracy. But we need to look after U.S. interests in a competitive, rivalrous world — enlightened interests that frequently align with others, yes, but our interests all the same. “Realpolitik” has a cynical, old-world overtone. Yet it means focusing on what matters and working with others who share our interests.
To start, this involves concentrating on China, which is by far the most important entity in the international system other than the United States. If Beijing dominates Asia, the world’s largest market, China will be globally preeminent — and is likely to use its power to coerce and weaken the United States. Consider what China is already doing to Australia, Taiwan and other states. No other global threat — not Russia, Iran or North Korea — can do this. As Winston Churchill said, if we get things right in the decisive theater, we can put everything straight after.
This will require working with whoever would help achieve U.S. goals. The Biden team seems to be betting that democracies will align in a global struggle against what Secretary of State Antony Blinken calls “techno-authoritarianism.” But full-scale alignment is unlikely. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel has demonstrated, most prominently by striking a major investment pact with Beijing shortly before Biden’s inauguration, rhetorical fondness for the “rules-based international order” can exist alongside pursuit of self-interest. Many democracies, especially in Europe, don’t share U.S. threat perceptions, given our country’s history as a Pacific power. Recognizing this, we need to work with those countries willing to invest resources in confronting China, such as India and Vietnam, or those willing to help us shift effort away from lesser threats like Iran — even if those partner countries are not model democracies.
For the first time in a long time, the United States is not overwhelmingly predominant. That means we cannot afford to be profligate with our power, wealth and resolve. Rather, we must manage the threats we face — above all China — in ways that promote U.S. power and well-being, rather than vainly expending them in a global ideological struggle or retreating in hopes that the world will favorably stabilize on its own. Such a course is the only option responsive to the needs and risk tolerances of the great bulk of Americans. It is thus the only responsible foreign policy for our democracy in this day and age.
Students at a community college. (photo: Halfpoint/Shutterstock)
White House Prepares Massive Infrastructure Bill With Universal Pre-K, Free Community College, Climate Measures
Jeff Stein and Tyler Pager, The Washington Post
The infrastructure part of the plan includes hundreds of billions of dollars for repairing the nation's roads, bridges, waterways, and rails.
hite House officials are preparing to present President Joe Biden with a $3 trillion infrastructure and jobs package that includes numerous sweeping domestic policy priorities, according to three people familiar with internal discussions.
After completing the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package earlier this month, Biden administration officials are piecing together their next major legislative priority. While no final announcement has been made, the White House is expected to push a multitrillion jobs and infrastructure plan as the centerpiece of the president's "Build Back Better" agenda.
That effort is expected to be broken into two parts - one focused on infrastructure, and the other focused on other domestic priorities, such as universal prekindergarten, national child care, and free community college tuition. Many details of the plan were first reported by the New York Times. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations, stressed planning was preliminary and subject to change. Some aides stressed that the final price-tag of the package remained unclear.
The infrastructure part of the plan includes hundreds of billions of dollars for repairing the nation's roads, bridges, waterways, and rails. It also includes funding for retrofitting buildings, safety improvements, schools infrastructure, and low-income and tribal groups, as well as $100 billion for schools and education infrastructure.
The infrastructure component of the proposal includes $400 billion in spending to combat climate change, including $60 billion for infrastructure related to green transit and $46 billion for climate-related research and development. The plan also would aim to make electric vehicle charging stations available across the country. The measure would also include $200 billion for housing infrastructure, including $100 billion to expand the supply of housing for low-income Americans.
The second component of the effort would include many of Biden's other domestic priorities. Those include universal prekindergarten and free community college tuition. The package would also dramatically expand spending on child care. The measure would also extend for several years the expansion of the Child Tax Credit recently signed into law for just one year as part of the $1.9 trillion stimulus plan.
The legislation would also include extending subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, as well as free and reduced tuition at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
A White House spokesman declined to comment.
Biden is also expected to be presented with a menu of tax options by Treasury officials to fund the plan. Biden campaigned on raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, as well as increasing taxes on wealthy investors. It was not immediately clear which of his tax plans would be included in the final legislation.
White House officials are also planning to include a measure to force pharmaceutical companies to either lower their prices or pay a steep penalty. The White House's efforts are likely to be similar to the prescription drug bill unveiled by House Democrats in 2019, which aimed to respond to voter frustration over the rising costs of prescription drugs across the country, the people aware of the internal discussions said.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that House Democrats' bill would save the government approximately $450 billion over the next decade. By lowering the cost of prescription drugs, the government would spend significantly less on Medicare and other public health programs.
Although he initially promised to release the jobs package in February, Biden has not yet released his jobs and infrastructure package.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki has given little guidance beyond saying the administration’s next legislative priority has not been determined
Healthcare workers walk out of a King Sooper's Grocery store after a gunman opened fire on March 22, 2021, in Boulder, Colorado. Dozens of police responded to the afternoon shooting in which at least one witness described three people who appeared to be wounded, according to published reports. (photo: Chet Strange/Getty Images)
Boulder Shooting: 10 Killed, Including Police Officer, at Colorado Supermarket
Vivian Ho, Guardian UK
Ho writes: "Authorities have released few other details about the shooting, saying at a press briefing on Monday afternoon that they were still in the early stages of the investigation."
shooting at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, has killed 10 people, including one police officer, authorities said on Monday.
The Boulder police chief, Maris Herold, announced the death toll at a news conference Monday night, fighting back tears.
Authorities have released few other details about the shooting, saying at a press briefing on Monday afternoon that they were still in the early stages of the investigation. The officer who was killed was confirmed as Eric Talley, 51, who had been with Boulder police since 2010, Herold said.
Victims’ families were still being notified so their names were not released, said the Boulder county district attorney, Michael Dougherty.
He said: “This is a tragedy and a nightmare for Boulder county, and in response, we have cooperation and assistance from local, state and federal authorities.”
Dougherty said Talley was “by all accounts one of the outstanding officers of the Boulder police department, and his life was cut too short”.
One person of interest has been taken into custody, but no motive has been released. That person was injured in the incident, said Kerry Yamaguchi, a commander with the Boulder police department. There were no other significant injuries reported.
Matthew Kirsch, the acting US attorney for Colorado, pledged that “the full weight of federal law enforcement” will support the investigation. He said investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were at the crime scene, along with FBI agents.
Police responded to reports of an “active shooter” just before 3pm local time, massing outside the King Soopers grocery store in Boulder. Swat teams, and at least three helicopters were on the roof of the store in the city that is home to the University of Colorado, about 25 miles (40km) north-west of Denver.
A man who had just left the store, Dean Schiller, told the Associated Press that he had heard gunshots and saw three people laying face down, two in the parking lot and one near the doorway. He said he “couldn’t tell if they were breathing”.
Video posted on YouTube showed one person on the floor inside the store and two more outside on the ground, with the sound of gunshots ringing out.
Officers were seen escorting a shirtless man with blood running down his leg out of the store in handcuffs, but authorities would not say if he was the suspect. They did say the suspect was receiving medical care.
Witnesses described a chaotic scene. A man who said he was shopping at the store told KCNC-TV that he heard a loud bang, then heard another, and by the third, everyone was running. He said they ran to the back of the store, found the employee area and workers told them how to escape. Another witness, Sarah Moonshadow, told the Denver Post that two shots rang out just after she and her son, Nicolas Edwards, finished buying strawberries. She said she told her son to get down and then “we just ran”.
Once they got outside, she said they saw a body in the parking lot. Edwards said police were speeding into the lot and pulled up next to the body.
“I knew we couldn’t do anything for the guy,” he said. “We had to go.”
Another, James Bentz, told the Post that he was in the meat section when he heard what he thought was a misfire, then a series of pops.
“I was then at the front of a stampede,” he said.
Bentz said he jumped off a loading dock out back to escape and that younger people were helping older people off of it.
The FBI said its agents were helping in the investigation at the request of Boulder police.
Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, tweeted that he was “closely watching unfolding events at King Soopers in Boulder. My prayers are with our fellow Coloradans in this time of sadness and grief as we learn more about the extent of the tragedy.”
The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said Joe Biden has been briefed on the shooting.
In a statement, the King Soopers chain offered “thoughts, prayers and support to our associates, customers, and the first responders who so bravely responded to this tragic situation. We will continue to cooperate with local law enforcement and our store will remain closed during the police investigation.”
The attack was the seventh mass killing this year in the US. It comes on the heels of a mass shooting in Atlanta last week that left eight people dead, many of them women of Asian American descent.
According to a database compiled by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University, the increase in mass shootings follows a lull during the pandemic, with 2020 seeing the smallest number of such attacks in more than a decade. The database defines mass killings as four or more dead, not including the shooter.
Joe Manchin. (photo: Getty Images)
An Open Letter to Senator Joe Manchin: Stop Worrying About Inflation and Focus on Keeping Hurting Workers Afloat
John Buell, Informed Comment
Buell writes:
ear Senator Manchin;
Corporate media now portray you as on of the most powerful politicians in DC. Hard bargaining on the amount and length of unemployment insurance chopped 100 dollars a week off the compensation workers will receive. This compromise, which you defended on the grounds it would curb Republican obstruction and keep money flowing to the unemployed, still did not win a single Republican vote. Worse still, although the $100 a week reduction may seem a minor matter to you it is exceptionally burdensome to the many workers in today’s economy who stand on the threshold of poverty.
One of your concerns, shared by arch-conservative Senator Lindsey Graham, is that generous unemployment relief would incentivize workers to leave the workforce and sit around watching TV at home. Do you really think that workers are unemployed because they have stopped looking for a job? Why even look for a job when there are no jobs to be found?
Your concerns about workers leaving the workplace reveal an appalling ignorance of the demands and inequities of the labor market.
Your hard bargaining on unemployment insurance may seem like an act of fiscal responsibility and hard-headed realism. Instead it reflects ignorance of the real situation of many even middle class workers and the discipline imposed by the current labor market.. Wheaton College economist John Miller argues that a job, even in today’s economy, “is more secure than enhanced unemployment benefits, and over time will pay more than unemployment insurance benefits. State unemployment benefits expire in less than a year, and in most states they expire within 39 weeks.”
What I would add to Miller is that worker concern to hold a job and forego the expanded unemployment benefits is fully rational. State governments too often play a low road competitive strategy that includes attempts to cut unemployment compensation and workman compensation.
Others who share your concerns about an overly generous government policies, the so-called fiscal hawks, believe that the rebound is will under way and that government is pumping money into an economy closing in on capacity. Uncontrolled inflation may be the result. At the very least once inflation rears its ugly head and becomes a regular player it builds on itself. Workers demand higher wages, employers have to raise prices causing more inflation.
Claudia Sahm, Director of Macroeconomic Policy, Washington Center for Equitable Growth has shown the gaps and improbable events in this horror scenario::. Federal government economists have a history of underestimating the economy’s full potential and overestimating current GNP. Thus the economy is viewed as closer to an inflection point than it proves to be.
Inflation hawks of course are drawing on their recollections of early seventies stagflation, and they view organized labor as one of the villains in the story. Hawks worry that Chairman Powell will wait too long to raise interest rates and curb labor demands. I worry that he will shut the party down too soon, especially if high levels of employment empower labor to gain real wage increases or even, God forbid, to organize. As Sahm points out the Fed has a forty- year history of obsessive fears of inflation.
This obsession has had tragic consequences. Wolf Richter argues:”Long-term, the Employment Population Ratio is one of the most dismal two-decade trends out there. The ratio drops during each recession – that much is normal – but until 2000, the ratio more than recovered each time. In the three recessions since 2000, it never fully recovered before the next recession hit, a testimony to companies trying to bring their costs down by sending work overseas or automating it away:”
This is not an abstract academic argument. Low rates of inflation and the accompanying policies benefit the wealthy and hurt debtors, who are usually poor. Nor is it only the poor who suffer. Even many of the middle class live from paycheck to paycheck, and the possibility of premature economic tightening adds to the general insecurity of our era.
Inflation hawks point to how aggregate employee compensation is back on track. But as Salm argues “narrowly focusing on aggregates is the wrong way to judge the current situation among families. The need remains widespread and urgent. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, half of U.S. families lost employment income last year and less than one fifth received jobless benefits. Millions are behind on paying their rent, mortgage, and student loans. Food banks remain under stress. The breadth of suffering and the gaping holes in our safety necessitate broad relief. “
Senator, lets not repeat the mistakes of the past.
The world has changed over time and disinflationary pressures now persist. Globalization both in practice and as a threat tempers inflation. Labor remains far weaker than in the seventies. Although one cannot totally rule out inflation, tools for dealing with it are available and effective. The greater risk is that personal experiences decades ago and improbable horror scenarios will inflict needless harm on an already desperate nation.
Organized labor is in a moment of renewed power. (photo: Erik Mcgregor/Getty Images)
The Teamsters Hint at a Combative National Project to Organize Amazon
Hamilton Nolan, In These Times
Nolan writes: "The Teamsters, who see Amazon as a direct threat to their historic work organizing the trucking industry, are engaged in a concerted project targeting Amazon."
Fearing a threat to more than 100 years of worker gains, “This entire union is focused on dealing with Amazon.”
s the drive to unionize Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama draws international attention to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) that is leading the effort, other unions are planning their own strategies to organize parts of Amazon’s sprawling operations as well. The Teamsters, who see Amazon as a direct threat to their historic work organizing the trucking industry, are engaged in a concerted project targeting Amazon — and though they’re tight-lipped about the details, they appear committed to a long-term, nationwide effort that could make them one of the company’s most formidable union foes.
The 1.4 million-member Teamsters are more than ten times bigger than the RWDSU. They see Amazon’s vast pool of non-union delivery employees as an existential threat to not only their own members, but to the ability of the trucking industry to provide living wage jobs. Randy Korgan, a goateed organizing veteran whose current title is Teamsters National Director for Amazon, frames the standoff with Jeff Bezos’ company as just the latest incarnation of a struggle that the union has been waging for more than a century.
“We fought to regulate the industry because of the working conditions that were happening in the [19]20s, 30s, and 40s. We obviously find some similarities today,” Korgan says. Despite the popular view of the “roaring 20s” as a grand era, “history clearly shows that working people suffered greatly. And here we come back into the roaring 20s again. Is this a repeat of history? We’ve got to ask ourselves that.”
Korgan is particularly angered by Amazon’s ongoing effort to portray itself as a good corporate citizen because it pays a $15 per hour minimum wage to its employees — a wage lower than what Korgan himself made as a union warehouse worker more than 30 years ago. Amazon itself is the primary driver of a process that is changing warehouse jobs that once paid a living wage into low-income, tenuous, temporary work.
“At every level of the organization you see this high turnover rate, and then you see them introducing this rate of $15, $16 an hour and trying to claim that they need to be patted on the back,” says Korgan. “Aren’t they talking out of both sides of their mouth? Because what is the average wage of someone that works in a warehouse in this country, and is Amazon exploiting and capitalizing on that wage being reduced?”
Currently, the only Teamsters members with a direct connection to the company are workers at Atlas and ABX Air, two firms that do business with Amazon. But the union is eyeing a much larger pool of Amazon employees, particularly delivery drivers, many of whom work for subcontractors rather than for Amazon itself. Though this process serves to insulate Amazon, the Teamsters have in the past organized tens of thousands of workers at subcontractors throughout the trucking industry. Warehouses are also in the Teamsters traditional wheelhouse, and it was reported last month that the union has spent several months organizing hundreds of Amazon warehouse workers in Iowa, though the outcome of that campaign remains uncertain.
The Teamsters have been chewing over the threat posed by Amazon for years. Various Teamster websites are rife with posts like “TEAMSTERS MUST TAKE NOTE OF THE DANGER ON THE HORIZON” and “TAKING ON AMAZON,” all of which note the direct threat the company poses to the stability of the entire transportation industry. But as the Alabama warehouse union campaign has drawn a tidal wave of press, the Teamsters are now loath to divulge too much of their strategy. Korgan is leading the union’s “Amazon Project,” and says he is engaged with workers across the country, and is “absolutely” working with other unions, as well. But he declines to discuss the project’s funding, timeline, or specific targets. He does, however, hint that the Teamsters may pursue a more radical and confrontational strategy when it comes time to seek union recognition from the famously intransigent company.
The classic pathway of seeking an NLRB election to certify a union — the process that is currently underway for the Amazon workers in Alabama — has the benefits of being clearly defined by law, but it also enables companies to spend months bombarding workers with anti-union propaganda, and to throw money at legal challenges. Korgan implies that the Teamsters may seek other pathways to try to force voluntary recognition of unions. (In fact, a Teamsters organizer in Iowa said that the union would prefer to use strikes to pressure the company to recognize its union.)
“There are many platforms to seek recognition, there are many platforms for workers to do concerted activities,” Korgan says. “Truth be told, that [NLRB] process is where corporate America wants organizing to be, and that’s how they want it to be defined. Because they clearly have more of an advantage there than they do in other spaces.”
The recognition that Amazon has become so powerful that allowing it to remain non-union is not a viable option seems to have finally become conventional wisdom within organized labor. It is safe to assume that the Teamsters are only one of several major unions planning ways to organize their own slice of the company. The union campaign in Alabama, where the votes will be counted at the end of this month, will likely be only the first step down a long and contentious road that will last for years.
“No matter what happens in Bessemer,” Korgan says, “it doesn’t change the trajectory of anything that’s going on.”
Migrants in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. (photo: Paul Ratje/Reuters)
Biden Brings Back Family Separation - This Time in Mexico
Jack Herrera, POLITICO
Herrera: "While many families choose to stick together, the pressure to separate weighs heaviest on the most vulnerable - families who fear death."
U.S. agents no longer tear apart parents and children, but families are having to make painful decisions—just on the other side of the border.
ach night as Janiana tries to sleep, she wonders about what’s going to happen to her baby grandnephew. The woman, a 26-year-old from Honduras, lives in a tent together with her 20-year-old niece, the baby’s mother, in a tent village of hundreds of asylum seekers like them that formed right next to the pedestrian bridge that leads from Mexico into California. They’re among the tens of thousands of people crowded in dire conditions across the length of the border who have fled violence, extreme poverty, natural disaster and other circumstances in their various home countries in the hope of being given asylum in the U.S. And as more keep coming, the number of tents keeps growing.
During the day, young children play in the center of the encampment, kicking miniature soccer balls, as their parents watch. At night, when the temperature drops, Janiana can hear the coos and cries of babies throughout the camp, including the one in her own tent. In recent weeks it has rained heavily, and the camp has flooded. There are no bathrooms or showers, and many migrants get by on very little, often forced to skip meals. Tijuana also has one of the highest crime rates of any city in the hemisphere, and the migrants are often the targets.
“We are waiting patiently; we want to cross the right way and obey all orders,” says Janiana, who spoke on the condition that we only publish her first name. “But Tijuana has become a jail city for us. Do you know how degrading it is to sleep outside?”
Across the border, the situation looks different. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have shown up in the United States in the last few months, creating something of a political firestorm. As the Biden administration scrambles to process the children, temporarily housing them in some of the same overflow facilities made infamous during the previous administration, the “kids in cages” critiques have roared back to life. There was a similarly large arrival of unaccompanied minors in 2014 and 2015, but unlike then, when almost all of the migrant children made the entire journey on their own from Central America, today many are splitting from their families right here, in the squalid shelters and camps of Northern Mexico.
The door to the U.S. has been shut tight to asylum seekers since last March, about the time when Janiana first arrived in Tijuana, when the Trump administration issued an order at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic that every migrant — child or adult — would be immediately “expelled” back to Mexico or their home country if they attempted to cross the border, without even a chance to make a case that the persecution they face qualifies them to stay. After he took office this year, Joe Biden kept the policy largely in place, but began to admit unaccompanied minors even while continuing to expel both adults and children who enter with families. Since the shift in policy, some parents and guardians have made the devastating decision, calculated only out of desperation, to send their children off ahead of them, alone, to cross the border.
The result is a new form of family separation — but instead of happening at the hands of federal agents in American government facilities, it’s taking place, family by family, in camps like the one Janiana lives in. The fact that minors won’t be expelled like everyone else has rapidly spread by word of mouth across the length of the border. And while many families choose to stick together, the pressure to separate weighs heaviest on the most vulnerable — families who fear death, whether from persecutors who have followed them to the border, or from extreme hunger.
For Janiana, the possibility of being sent back to Honduras reads as a death sentence. She shows me the scars from her torture at the hands of a powerful gang back home that her family got on the wrong side of. Fearing further reprisals, Janiana fled with her sister’s children, a teenage nephew and teenage niece as well as the niece’s several-month-old son. The children haven’t been reconnected with their mother yet, who successfully entered the U.S. to begin the process of claiming asylum in 2019, before the pandemic. Staying in Mexico, Janiana says, was never an adequate long-term solution and increasingly feels intolerable. She says the family already tried to make a new life in the southern state of Oaxaca, but danger pursued them there, where her nephew was murdered.
Today, Janiana says her only hope is that the U.S. will begin to accept asylum seekers again, especially as the country gets a better hold over the pandemic. At the moment, she says with resignation, “all we can do is wait.” Though there is one painful exception on her mind: If she were somehow able send the baby across alone, he might be allowed to stay.
“It breaks my heart to even think about it,” she says.
Every family with children that I managed to speak to in Tijuana — families that have come from Honduras, Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, southern Mexican states and other countries around the world — admitted they’ve thought about sending their children ahead of them; some have referenced people they know who already made that choice. One Honduran woman described a defeated father so determined to save his daughter that he literally heaved the child over a low portion of the wall into the U.S.; others described coyotes coming into the camp at night, offering to take families’ children alone, so that they can present themselves as unaccompanied minors to the border agents who come to arrest them when they cross.
“It’s happening at the border, where parents discover they have no viable way to enter with a child, and they recognize the danger they’re in,” says Lindsay Toczylowski, the executive director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a legal aid organization that is currently assisting dozens of children whose families chose to send them across the border on their own in the last two months alone. “This kind of information spreads like wildfire: If you hear about a child successfully making it, and your kids are desperate or sick or in danger, there are a lot of reasons why you would make that incredibly difficult decision.”
When asked about the results of the new policy, an administration spokesperson didn’t directly address the separation of families, but told POLITICO that the White House still considers the border closed, and discourages sending anyone over: “We have been clear, from president on down, that the border is closed, and that the vast majority of adults and families are being turned away. We are still enforcing [the pandemic closure] for adults and families, and that message has been very clear. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic, and it’s going to take time to rebuild robust asylum processing infrastructure at our borders.”
At the heart of the current situation, as well as the previous family separation crisis, is a longstanding tension between U.S. laws that give special protections to migrant children and immigration laws that allow the government to aggressively punish adults for crossing the border — a prerogative that’s become increasingly popular on the right.
In many ways, Donald Trump simply exploited this fundamental contradiction to forcibly inflict family separation at the border, but it’s that same contradiction that undergirds Biden’s border policy today, which is pushing some families in Mexico to opt for separation. And it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon.
The roots of this tension between how the government must treat migrant children and how it would often prefer to treat migrant adults go back more than two decades, to the George W. Bush administration. Practically, a person cannot cross the border at a port of entry without the proper paperwork, but while there’s been a law against crossing the border outside ports of entry since 1929, it wasn’t actively enforced for many years. Instead, many undocumented migrants from Mexico and elsewhere who were apprehended in the United States were immediately returned by border enforcement agents through a process called expedited removal, or were detained and processed through the civil immigration system, at the end of which they would either have successfully made their case to stay or would be formally deported.
In the early 2000s, however, as immigrant detention centers filled with people awaiting their days in court, more and more apprehended migrants would simply be given a notice to appear before an immigration judge on a certain date and then be released into the U.S. on a bond or “an order of recognizance.” But in an effort to combat and deter unauthorized immigration, President Bush’s newly created Department of Homeland Security decided in 2005 that instead of routinely releasing border crossers to go through the civil immigration process, they would start to route many to criminal prosecution and imprisonment. The new policy was called Operation Streamline. Importantly, exceptions were generally made for migrants traveling with children and migrant children, who would continue to be processed through the civil system but wouldn’t be charged or detained as criminals.
While President Barack Obama later sought to reform the immigration enforcement system to more narrowly focus criminal prosecutions on those who had committed non-immigration related crimes, he largely maintained the system put in place by his predecessor. But by the summer of 2014, Obama faced a unique situation: a massive influx of Central American migrants, many of whom were families or unaccompanied children and almost all of whom were seeking asylum and thus had a right to a civil immigration hearing of their claims, which could take years, before they could be removed or criminally prosecuted.
The thousands of children arriving on their own often found themselves in harsh conditions in Customs and Border Protection holding cells, originally built to jail single men. From there, they entered into a complex child welfare system: In 2008, Congress had passed an anti-trafficking law that required DHS to refer unaccompanied minors from countries other than Canada and Mexico to the Department of Health and Human Services, which would in turn place children in the care of a family member in the U.S., a foster home or an Office of Refugee Resettlement shelter while they waited for their cases to be adjudicated. This remains the process for handling unaccompanied minors.
Completely unprepared to process large numbers of families, the Obama administration attempted to detain them together indefinitely, but a court order in 2015 quickly blocked that policy. A 1997 consent decree, known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, outlines the conditions under which migrant minors can be detained. Designed to safeguard the basic human rights of children, Flores holds that minors can only remain detained for a maximum of 20 days. To comply, the Obama administration faced a choice: They could either parole parents and children together or release only the children. Rather than separate families, the administration opted to parole parents and children together, and have them return for their court dates.
This practice of paroling undocumented immigrants into the U.S. instead of detaining them while they awaited their civil immigration hearings, which was the norm for decades before 2005, became one of Trump’s most-repeated attacks against liberals in 2016: In campaign speeches, he frequently derided it as “catch and release.” Ending the practice was No. 2 on his ten-point immigration plan, right behind “build the wall.”
From the beginning of 2017, in addition to restricting asylum in a number of ways, the Trump administration sought to use its executive authority to push the country’s immigration law to its enforcement extreme — calling it “zero tolerance” — and attempted to detain essentially everyone crossing the border for as long as their court cases lasted. Throughout his tenure, Trump repeatedly tried to undermine protections for immigrant children. And when it came to families who were apprehended after crossing the border, Trump decided to do what Obama had not: His administration routinely separated children from their parents, so that the parents could be detained indefinitely. The 20-day detention limit created to protect children became the Trump administration’s justification for separation. As migrant families were apprehended, parents would be sent to jail and children would be handed off to HHS as “unaccompanied minors.”
“Family separation,” as the policy split more and more families, became one of the most troubling byproducts of Trump’s push to deter immigration, a rallying cry for Democrats and a political liability even for the most hardline anti-immigrant Republicans. By the summer of 2018, the stories of children — many of them infants — ripped from their parents’ arms had spread across the news. Child psychologists visiting with children in shelters reported that the kids, forcibly separated from their parents, were experiencing a dangerous level of trauma that would affect the rest of their lives. (“We know that separating parents and children … causes toxic stress and is particularly damaging for a child’s brain,” Colleen Kraft, then-president of the American Academy of Pediatrics told me at the time.) Outrage continued to grow, and eventually, under public pressure, Trump signed an executive order reversing his own policy and demanding that DHS keep families together.
However, the underlying policy approach that pushed children away from their guardians was never overhauled. As a result, the executive order prevented children from being separated from their direct parents, but children traveling with other family members — aunts, uncles, godparents, even older siblings — were and still are often separated. DHS justifies these separations by arguing that adults who could not prove they were the children’s legal guardians might be human traffickers. Trump also tried to overrule the Flores agreement to detain families together indefinitely, but the courts blocked him from doing so. The Trump administration then experimented with another form of family separation, offering families in detention a binary choice: Parents could opt to be deported with their children or they could opt to be deported without them, acknowledging that in the latter case HHS would place the now-unaccompanied child with a sponsor or in a shelter as they continue to go through the immigration process on their own.
When the Trump administration implemented the Migrant Protection Protocols — better known as the “Remain in Mexico” program — in December 2018 to force asylum seekers to wait for their hearings outside of the U.S., the policy exempted unaccompanied minors, and many parents released to Mexico with their children made the same decision migrant families are making today: to send their children to cross the border alone so they at least could wait in the U.S.
Then the pandemic hit. In March 2020, the White House strong-armed the Centers for Disease Control to invoke an obscure public health order, Title 42, which gives the executive the power to close the border in a time of health emergency. Citing Covid-19, the U.S. began to immediately turn away thousands of people who would normally be able to make their asylum cases in court — including unaccompanied children. For families in detention, in the midst of the pandemic, the Trump administration also brought a new form of the binary choice back: It made parents choose between staying on their own in detention indefinitely, while their child would be separately processed through HHS, or keeping their child with them in the dismal and potentially deadly conditions of detention during a pandemic, essentially “waiving” that child’s right to parole.
Children arriving at the border alone or with family continued to be expelled until November of last year, when the American Civil Liberties Union convinced a federal judge to issue a stay on the expulsion of unaccompanied minors, arguing that it was illegal under U.S. laws that protect both children and human trafficking victims. That stay was lifted in late January 2021, but, by then, Biden had taken office, and the new administration announced that, while it would keep Title 42 largely in place, it would not expel unaccompanied minors.
“We well understand that out of desperation, some children might not wait. Some loving parents might send their child to traverse Mexico alone to reach the southern border,” Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said earlier this week. “I hope they don’t undertake that perilous journey. But if they do, we will not expel that young child. We will care for that young child and unite that child with a responsible parent.”
But while Mayorkas can see how parents’ desperation can lead them to send their child all the way through Mexico, it seems that the administration did not account for that same sense of desperation to lead families already at the border to send their children across without the adults. Even as more and more children arrive with as many as 13,000 reportedly expected to come in May, the Biden administration continues to insist that it will not turn unaccompanied minors away.
Soraya Vázquez, subdirector of Al Otro Lado, the largest legal aid organization in Tijuana, says that from what she’s seen in the shelters and across the city, the number of children recently arriving to Northern Mexico by themselves has not spiked significantly. As for the increase in minors crossing the border into the U.S., “I don’t think it’s kids arriving by themselves” she says. “Kids are arriving with their families, and then they’re crossing by themselves.”
Mayorkas has resisted the “crisis” label for the present border situation, distinguishing what’s currently happening from the recent past under Trump: “A crisis is when a nation is willing to rip a 9-year-old child out of the hands of his or her parent and separate that family to deter future migration,” he said this week during a House hearing. But while immigration is a complex issue, particularly when it comes to children, and while the Biden administration says humanitarianism rather than deterrence guides its policies, families today are in fact being separated, albeit not by force.
The White House has, as its spokesperson indicated, repeatedly told migrants that “now is not the time to come.” But for would-be asylees like Janiana, the act of leaving home to travel thousands of miles northward in a perilous journey in search of safety isn’t something they can just delay for a more convenient time in the calendar. And, like her, many didn’t leave recently. They’ve been waiting at the border for months.
Yliana Johansen-Méndez, the legal services director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, says the organization has seen a significant uptick in unaccompanied minors in shelters in the U.S. who say that Title 42 forced them apart from their families. Many, she says, have parents or family members still waiting in Mexico. Starting in December, the month after the ACLU case originally stopped unaccompanied minor expulsions, through February, Immigrant Defenders saw the number of migrant children whose guardians sent them ahead to cross the border while staying behind make up 33 percent of the total children lawyers met with in shelters. Johansen-Méndez says this number of “Title 42-impacted” children they’ve encountered, which also includes children separated from non-parent guardians who were expelled after crossing the border, continues to rise, increasing in March by 26 percent from February.
“It really speaks to the inhumanity of the system that exists that families have to make these kinds of heart-wrenching decisions,” Johansen-Méndez says of the voluntary separations happening at the border. “People are desperate and fleeing for their lives. They feel like this is their last option to keep their children safe.” She says the Biden administration should take its obligations to improve the asylum system seriously, and fully rescind Title 42, so that families can enter together. It also, she believes, should revert to the past norm of paroling almost all asylum seekers rather than routinely detaining adults.
In Tijuana, Janiana says she’s grappled seriously with the idea of separating from her niece’s son. (Her niece, who is too old to be considered a minor, wasn’t available to comment for this story.)
“It is a truly heartbreaking choice to make,” she says, as tears start to well in her eyes. “After everything they have gone through with me. We have gone days without food, together.” On a bus ride to Tijuana, she says the baby went three days without anything to eat or drink besides flour tortillas and bottled water that a kind Cuban migrant shared with them. Sometimes, when she’s feeling at her lowest, Janiana says she has been most tempted to send the baby to cross the border alone, but she remains resolute for now that they must remain together. However, she can understand how others have made the decision already.
“It is everyone’s own choice to make,” she says. “The families that choose to make this decision are the families that feel imminent danger, that feel cornered and imprisoned. They [the adult migrants] come to prefer that whatever happens, happens to them but not their children.”
As we spoke in the shadow of the wall between Mexico and the U.S., Janiana said she knows that Biden doesn’t have the power to fix larger forces at play overnight. The contradictions of U.S. immigration laws that create a wedge between children and their guardians will continue even after the border opens, and Janiana may well be separated from her grandnephew when they can enter together. But the longer she and her young family members are forced to wait in destitution in Mexico with no sense of change on the horizon, the harder it becomes to hold on to the conviction to not let the baby go forward alone.
There is something Biden can do, Janiana suggests. “We are here waiting for our turn to enter,” she says. “We are here because we respect the process.” But she says her ability to make decisions about the future — and to simply maintain faith — is crippled by the silence on when, if ever, the border will open for asylum seekers again. “The only thing we ask at this time,” she says, “at the very least, give us some information.”
Winona LaDuke. (photo: Hemp and Heritage Farm)
Winona LaDuke | Tribes Revive Traditional Hemp Economies
Winona LaDuke, YES! Magazine
LaDuke writes:
A post-petroleum transition plan.
ore than 20 years ago, Alex White Plume, a leader of the Oglala Lakota, planted his first hemp crop on Wounded Knee Creek, on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. I call White Plume “the Hemperer.” He’s considered to be one of the grandfathers of the cannabis economy for Native people. Like John Trudell, the great Dakota philosopher and musician, White Plume always said, “Hemp is the way.”
But in 2000, Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided the reservation and seized White Plume’s crop. In fact, there were several raids on his crop between 2000 and 2002. Two years later, he was ordered to stop growing. In 2016, the federal ban was lifted and in 2017, White Plume partnered with Evo Hemp to make hemp supplements. He’s just beginning again.
Not surprisingly, White Plume feels a bit resentful of the profits being made in what’s now become a largely White-dominated industry, while his tribe had to sit on the sidelines.
But the potential for Native people to benefit economically in the hemp industry still exists.
Now White Plume is involved in processing hemp and plans to make a vertically integrated Lakota industry. He envisions a sustainable industry that will create high-paying jobs and bring in a steady stream of income for Lakota tribes.
“This is going to be all Lakota hemp, grown on Lakota [land], produced by Lakota, and we’re going to market it by Lakota,” White Plume says.
The hemp world is changing.
With 10,000 uses, hemp is one of the most versatile plants to grow—and in many ways can be a catalyst for change for Native peoples. We see a New Green Revolution in Indian Country, tied to justice, economics, restoration ecology, and a return-to-the-land movement, and it’s growing.
Just last year, the Fort Berthold Reservation, Colorado River tribes, Iowa Tribe (Kansas and Nebraska), Yurok, Sisseton and Santee Dakotas, to name a few, all got their hemp plans approved by the USDA, but more than that, tribal growers and thinkers are considering hemp as part of the future for Indian Country. And young leaders such as Muriel Young Bear, a Meskwaki woman from Iowa, and Marcus Grignon—a Menominee and project director at Hempstead Project HEART, a John Trudell initiative—represent a new wave of commitment.
Hemp Is the Way
With all but six states having either legalized, decriminalized, or medicalized marijuana, we’re experiencing a renaissance moment of cannabis, including hemp—its non-psychoactive relative. And it’s about time. In the next economy, hemp will be foundational to the just transition, or the New Green Revolution.
Let me explain.
In the 20th century, Norman Borlaug, called the Father of the Green Revolution, gave us advanced agricultural technology, including genetically modified plants. It’s been said among Native tribes that the United States had a choice between a carbohydrate economy and a hydrocarbon economy—an economy that depends on petroleum, coal, and natural gas. As I’ve written before, our current health, economic, and climate crises have proven we made the wrong choice.
The carbohydrate economy is one based on plants. Hemp grows easily; it is resilient and doesn’t require huge amounts of chemicals or water, although there are specific soil requirements for it to grow. It can be foundational to such an economy.
For the past five years, I’ve been a hemp farmer, with permits from the state of Minnesota. My business is called Winona’s Hemp, and our research partner is Anishinaabe Agriculture. In 2020, we grew 20 acres of fiber hemp, and are working with that hemp to create a local economy. We send off our high-quality, field-retted hemp to processors to make cloth for canvas textiles. Our plan is to restore a hemp economy without a lot of chemicals and fossil fuels. The traditional history of hemp is without fossil fuels. We’d like to do as much to restore that practice as possible—focused on appropriate technology, equity, and innovation.
Our focus has been in fiber varieties, with an interest in reducing any fossil fuel use in production and in processing. We’ve sourced varieties from Canada and Europe, with the help of Patagonia and our friends at the Lift Economy. We grew those seeds in fields on and around the White Earth Reservation. We did our best to plant with organic fertilizers, using fish emulsion and horse manure to build our soils. We learned from our experience and by talking to as many folks as possible.
That said, we have a lot of experience here in small field crops, horse cultivation, and traditional varieties. We grew in small plots, hand seeded, and in a larger 20-acre plot, mechanically harvested with 40-year-old equipment.
We also put in a field with horses because some of our partnerships here involve not only our horse-drawn agriculture, but also those of our Amish neighbors. We’ve come to collaborate, as we have similar interests in terms of technology and geography.
We provided seeds to tribes throughout the region, all interested in the same questions: How do you grow it? And, what can you do with it?
What we found is that the plant will teach you: Don’t be in a rush. We are re-creating an industry from the seed to the product—whether smokable or for manufacturing. Some tribes are looking at materials processing—car parts, bags, etc.—others are looking at hempcrete, an improvement on concrete because of its sustainability and the fact that it is a carbon sink.
There’s a lot of room in the New Green Revolution. After all, if you are going to change the materials economy—well, the whole economy—you will need a lot of producers and also some folks in manufacturing. That’s the goal. Indeed, if hemp’s potential is realized, we can transform the materials economy, and that’s revolutionary. That’s our work now, to investigate, vet, and find technologies and economic models that can be replicated.
And though tribes have been reluctant to get into the hemp and cannabis industry, particularly under the Trump era, there’s a growing interest among Native people in this new Green Revolution.
The Wisconsin-based Oneida tribe, strategically situated near Green Bay, Wisconsin, points to a growing market for hempcrete, and hemp hurd, which can be used for insulation.
The Sisseton Tribe, based in present-day South and North Dakota, has been growing hemp for two years in collaboration with researchers from the University of Minnesota. They’re looking at fiber hemp for a composite bag facility—like shopping bags. The tribe has an industrial facility on the reservation, and also rail access.
Diné textile artists are exploring hemp fiber with their Churro sheep wool to make a new specialty textile. The Oatman family from the Nez Perce reservation launched a magazine, Tribal Hemp and Cannabis, focused on tribal hemp and cannabis.
The Tudinu, or Desert People in Las Vegas, have a little “colony” downtown, a mile from the Strip. In l970, they were federally recognized as the Las Vegas Paiutes, and in 2017, opened the NuWu Cannabis Marketplace. That’s a big deal, as the tribe runs the only cannabis lounge in downtown Las Vegas. They may not have much land, but they have a big dispensary.
Tribes are in a unique position. Tribal sovereignty provides their governments leeway in the development of cannabis policies and will be a stabilizing force in turbulent times. Today, confusing regulations and lucrative growth in the cannabis industry set a complex scene, but tribal nations are in a position to continue a course they set.
Tribes have the potential to revolutionize the industry. We have the land—we just need a bit of time, technology, and finances. This is an opportunity for justice—social and ecological—in this post-petroleum economic transition. And we are ready to go.
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