08 May 21
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08 May 21
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Andy Borowitz | Trump Urges Supporters to Follow Him on Facebook Total Landscaping
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "A defiant Donald J. Trump is urging his supporters to follow him on Facebook Total Landscaping, a new social network he has created."
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
defiant Donald J. Trump is urging his supporters to follow him on Facebook Total Landscaping, a new social network he has created.
“Facebook Total Landscaping will be the biggest social network in the world, way bigger than what that loser Zuckerberg came up with,” he said. “No one’s on Facebook.”
Trump said that his new social-media platform, which will operate out of a parking lot outside Philadelphia, will be run by his former attorney Rudolph Giuliani, “so you know it’s going to be terrific.”
“Rudy’s out buying a computer right now,” he said. “He had to replace the one that the F.B.I. took last week.”
Boasting about his social network’s explosive growth, Trump said that he had already friended Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner, and was waiting to hear back on a friend request to Melania Trump.
Rudy Giuliani. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
An Ex-Blackwater Employee Tied to Erik Prince Provided Security for Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine, Sources Said
Christopher Miller, BuzzFeed
Miller writes: "A former Blackwater employee connected to Erik Prince, the billionaire security magnate who served as an informal adviser to the Trump administration, provided security for Rudy Giuliani during his December 2019 trip to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter, BuzzFeed News can reveal."
The newly surfaced connection between Prince and Giuliani comes as federal authorities are investigating the former New York City mayor’s dealings in Ukraine.
former Blackwater employee connected to Erik Prince, the billionaire security magnate who served as an informal adviser to the Trump administration, provided security for Rudy Giuliani during his December 2019 trip to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter, BuzzFeed News can reveal.
The security assistance, which has not been reported previously, came as Giuliani ramped up his campaign to get President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration to open investigations that could damage Biden ahead of the 2020 election, and as Prince pursued a business deal in Ukraine that would grow his personal portfolio and assist the Trump administration in its foreign policy goal of limiting China’s power and influence, according to four sources familiar with his business endeavors.
BuzzFeed News left Prince a voicemail on his mobile phone and sent requests for comment to him and his lawyer by email; they did not respond before publication.
The newly surfaced connection between Prince — the brother of Betsy DeVos, Trump's education secretary — and Giuliani comes as federal authorities are investigating the former New York City mayor’s dealings in Ukraine and ties to its powerful oligarchs and political operatives. Last week, FBI agents searched Giuliani’s Manhattan apartment and office and seized several electronic devices. Giuliani has said he did nothing wrong. He could not be reached for comment for this story; his lawyer, Robert Costello, said he had “no comment.” It is not known whether US authorities are looking at links between Giuliani and Prince; an FBI spokesperson declined to comment.
Prince provided Giuliani with a personal bodyguard by the name of Thomas “Doc” Williams, who accompanied the then–personal attorney for Trump everywhere he went on the Eastern European trip, Andriy Telizhenko told BuzzFeed News. Telizhenko is one of several Ukrainian operatives who worked with Giuliani on his Biden campaign and helped arrange his travel to Kyiv and the Hungarian capital of Budapest with a crew from the right-wing One America News, or OAN, which was filming a segment for a series about the Bidens. Telizhenko was sanctioned by the US in January over attempts to interfere in the 2020 election.
Williams was added to the group by Prince at the request of Andriy Artemenko, Telizhenko told BuzzFeed News. Artemenko is another Ukrainian operative who aided Giuliani and OAN in their quest for dirt on the Bidens and information to support the Republican conspiracy that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election. He is now assisting the FBI in its investigation, according to Politico and two people close to Artemenko who spoke to BuzzFeed News.
A cropped photograph posted to Facebook by Telizhenko at the end of Giuliani’s trip to Kyiv on Dec. 6, and shared widely in the media shows those two men with Artemenko; the former mayor’s communications director, Christianné Allen; another aide; and an OAN camera operator at Zhuliany airport before the group boarded a private jet to return to the US. But an uncropped photograph, obtained by BuzzFeed News, shows three other people who were part of the trip: Chanel Rion, an OAN host; Yan Aronov, a business partner of Artemenko; and Williams, the bodyguard.
Artemenko did not respond to a request for comment after telling BuzzFeed News he would return a call. Artemenko, who also goes by the name Andy Kuchma, and Aronov are both executives of AirTrans LLC, a part of Frontier Resource Group, a company founded by Erik Prince. OAN’s Rion and the network’s president, Charles Herring, did not respond to a request for comment.
Reverse image searches conducted by BuzzFeed News led to several other photographs of Williams, further confirming his identity. They led to social media pages that suggest he is a Marine veteran and an active member of a rugby league for retired members of the military. Furthermore, a 2017 press release announcing the addition of Williams to the advisory council of Protection From Abuse, a nonprofit security service, says he had previously served as director of special programs for Blackwater, the private security company founded by Prince that is now known as Academi.
Additionally, Williams’ Twitter account, where he describes himself as a “former adventure tourist” and shares content about Blackwater and Prince.
Williams blocked a BuzzFeed News reporter on Twitter after a request for comment was sent via direct message. Attempts to reach Williams via Protection From Abuse and his rugby team were unsuccessful.
As Giuliani, the OAN crew, and the Ukrainian operatives moved around Kyiv with their private security guard in December 2019, Prince was apparently looking into a potentially major acquisition in Ukraine.
The four sources who spoke to BuzzFeed News — Andrew Mac, a Washington, DC–based adviser to Zelensky; Igor Novikov, a former adviser to the Ukrainian president; and two other sources with knowledge of Prince’s activities in Ukraine who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the topic — said that in late 2019 and early 2020, Prince was looking into purchasing three aviation companies: Motor Sich, a privately owned jet and helicopter engine maker, as well as the Kharkiv State Aircraft Manufacturing Company and Antonov, both state-run aircraft producers.
While all four sources said they believed Prince’s acquisition of Motor Sich, let alone all three companies, was a far-fetched idea, he was interested enough to make at least two visits to the country in 2019 and 2020, meeting with officials close to Zelensky, according to Mac and Novikov. And helping him was his business associate with local connections, Artemenko.
“I remember him bragging about it in November and December 2019, in Washington and Budapest and Kyiv — I’m working with Erik, we’re trying to buy Motor Sich, and it’s a big contract,” Telizhenko recalled Artemenko telling him. Telizhenko said Artemenko personally brought Prince to the city of Kharkiv to see the factory there.
In April 2020, Artemenko was hired by Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, who also helped Giuliani with his smear campaign against the Bidens and was sanctioned by the US in September for attempting to influence the US election. Artemenko confirmed that agreement in an interview with Politico shortly afterward. Telizhenko and Novikov told BuzzFeed News that in exchange for Artemenko’s help in the US, Derkach was also using the leverage he had in Kyiv to assist Artemenko and Prince.
In a statement sent to BuzzFeed News, Derkach said he was working “solely within the framework of my powers as a member of parliament of Ukraine — a representative of the people of Ukraine.” He said what he did to aid Prince was “in accordance with the US laws” and pointed to a registered lobbying agreement he entered into with Artemenko in April 2020.
Prince’s focus on the latter two companies has not been previously reported. The Wall Street Journal first reported his interest in Motor Sich in November 2019. Prince told BuzzFeed News in February 2020 that he was not pursuing the company.
But BuzzFeed News’ sources said that in late 2019 — and again in recent months, according to one of the sources — Prince was actively pursuing at least Motor Sich. The source who was aware of Prince’s renewed interest in acquiring the company described that idea as “fanciful,” since Zelensky signed a decree in January imposing sanctions on Chinese aviation firm Skyrizon, which has tried to acquire control of Motor Sich by buying stakes from its Ukrainian owners, and Kyiv announced in March that it would nationalize the engine maker.
If Prince had a shot at buying the company, all four sources said, it was while Trump was president; the company was of great importance to his administration as it tried to keep the advanced engine technology first developed by Motor Sich during the Soviet Union away from China. Besides engines for helicopters and aircraft, the company also makes engines for use in cruise missiles and drones.
The tussle over the company, the crown jewel of Ukraine’s defense sector, began in 2016, when Skyrizon attempted to take control of the company, buying 56% of Motor Sich, as it continued to transform and modernize its armed forces to eventually rival the US. But the deal was frozen by the Security Service of Ukraine on national security grounds in 2018, leading to the current confusing and complex situation.
The Chinese investors behind Skyrizon have brought a $3.5 billion arbitration case against Ukraine for blocking the sale.
The Trump administration’s campaign to block China from acquiring a controlling stake in Motor Sich began in 2019, and was led by then–national security adviser John Bolton, and Tim Morrison, then a top adviser on Russia and Europe on the White House National Security Council, according to BuzzFeed’s sources. Bolton and Morrison could not be reached for comment.
On a visit to Kyiv in August that year, three Ukrainian officials told BuzzFeed News previously, Bolton tried to persuade Zelensky to quash Motor Sich’s purchase. One of the Ukrainian officials described the US interest in the Motor Sich at the time as an “obsession.” Another said the pressure to block the China deal came as Trump and Giuliani were pressing the Zelensky administration to open politically motivated probes into the Bidens, and the US was holding up $391 million of military assistance and $30 million of arms and ammunition for Ukraine.
Mac said Prince failed to acquire the company because, in the end, he couldn’t get backing from the US. A second company based in California was also being pushed by US officials at the State Department as a potential and preferred buyer. That company’s managing partner told BuzzFeed News in an interview last year that it was in talks with a Dallas-based private equity firm to buy Motor Sich. But the deal never materialized.
Ukraine isn’t the first foreign locale where the alleged dealings of Giuliani and Prince appeared to overlap. Both men were reported to have attempted back-channel diplomacy with the regime of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro during the Trump administration.
Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay prison. (photo: Getty Images)
US Captured, Tortured, and Cleared Him. He's Still in GITMO.
Spencer Ackerman, The Daily Beast
Ackerman writes: "It's been 19 years since U.S. forces captured Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn and declared him one of the senior leaders of al Qaeda."
Abu Zubaydah was a human guinea pig for the CIA’s post-9/11 torture. Almost 20 years later, as the U.S. moves on, he’s still trying to get out of Guantanamo.
t’s been 19 years since U.S. forces captured Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn and declared him one of the senior leaders of al Qaeda. It’s been 15 years since the CIA quietly revoked that assessment once it was done torturing him. Today, Huseyn, a forgotten man, remains locked inside Guantanamo Bay, a living symbol of the permanent damage wrought by the War on Terror.
As the Biden administration performs the latest government review into closing Guantanamo, attorneys for Husayn, better known as Abu Zubaydah, have decided they’ve waited long enough. They filed a petition on Friday with the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention seeking his release from his 19 years of captivity. They want the panel to exercise its “urgent actions” procedures to appeal to Washington for his freedom, citing his counsel’s “serious concerns for his physical and mental health and welfare [stretching back] for years.”
The attorneys note that the military has yet to vaccinate Abu Zubaydah and the other Guantanamo detainees for COVID-19. “After 19 years of arbitrary detention, the only appropriate legal remedy for Abu Zubaydah is release and rehabilitation,” said the lead lawyer behind the U.N. appeal, Helen Duffy.
The U.N. is an unlikely route through which Abu Zubaydah might go free, but nothing else has worked, including a federal habeas corpus case. The few consistencies in Abu Zubaydah’s Kafkaesque past 19 years have nothing to do with the law and everything to do with the prerogatives of covering up what the U.S. did to him. In 2018, one of Abu Zubaydah’s habeas attorneys marveled that his unlikely goal was to get the U.S. to prosecute his client—just so Abu Zubaydah’s permanent incommunicado captivity would end.
Once Abu Zubaydah was said to be one of the most important al Qaeda captives of all. An infamous August 2002 memo from the Justice Department, instrumental to authorizing the CIA to torture him—and after him, at least 118 others—called him the “third or fourth man in al Qaeda.” But there were doubts inside the CIA at the outset. According to the landmark Senate torture report, on Aug. 16, 2006 the agency formally concluded that Abu Zubaydah “was not a member of al Qaeda.”
Instead of freeing him, the U.S. brought Abu Zubaydah to Guantanamo Bay the following month, where he became the forgotten man he currently is. Some politicians, like Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a former CIA analyst and Pentagon official, have recently declared that the 9/11 era is “over.” But Abu Zubaydah’s ongoing and entirely uncontroversial confinement proves the opposite. He is one of 40 men, few of them charged with any crime even before a dysfunctional military tribunal, who languish at Guantanamo Bay. Abu Zubaydah’s captivity has influenced every one of them.
Abu Zubaydah came into U.S. custody after a gunfight in Faisalabad, Pakistan, that left him badly wounded in his stomach, leg, and testicles. One of his FBI interrogators, Ali Soufan, wrote in his 2011 book The Black Banners that Abu Zubaydah was “not a member of al Qaeda,” but still an important figure, tied to the eastern Afghanistan terror training camp known as Khalden, helping jihadists transit out to Pakistan. The origin of the claim that Abu Zubaydah was one of the seniormost members of al Qaeda, according to the Senate’s 2014 report, was “single-sourced reporting” from the CIA that “was recanted prior” to the Justice Department’s 2002 torture memos.
Soufan famously lost a bureaucratic fight with the CIA against torturing Abu Zubaydah. The CIA, through contractors James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, instead wanted to beta-test a regimen of brutality meant to induce a psychological concept called “learned helplessness.” It meant, among other tortures, locking Abu Zubaydah in coffin-sized and even smaller boxes for 12-1/2 cumulative days; keeping him awake for extended periods through painful body contortions; and, 83 times, drowning him through a simulation called waterboarding. The ostensible point was to get Abu Zubaydah to reveal al Qaeda secrets that they were unswervingly and baselessly certain he possessed.
There were more vindictive impulses as well. One of the CIA’s waterboarders was known as the “Preacher,” Mitchell later testified at Guantanamo, who would douse men’s heads in a pantomimed baptism, an assertion of religious domination. CIA records from Abu Zubaydah’s August 2002 interrogations, published in the Senate torture report, record extreme discomfort among other CIA personnel, “some to the point of tears and choking up.” Abu Zubaydah, in one of his few public statements, recalled that his waterboarders would mock him in between submergings. “I tell him, ‘If you want to kill me, kill me,’” he said.
The Senate torture report records that Abu Zubaydah was almost instantly “compliant.” CIA medical staff found that he was willing to cooperate even before he was tortured. But the brutality was so severe that within days of the “aggressive phase” of his interrogation, Abu Zubaydah would go to the waterboard when his interrogator “snapped his fingers twice.” He would frequently spasm and grow hysterical from the drownings. At least one of them, per the torture report, left him catatonic and unresponsive, with bubbles forming in his “open, full mouth.”
It took six days, on Aug. 9, for CIA interrogators on scene to conclude that Abu Zubaydah had no actionable intelligence. The next day, they re-emphasized it was “highly unlikely” he had the sort of information they sought. When an apparently frustrated CIA official warned Langley they were at the “legal limit” of what they could do to Abu Zubaydah, the head of the Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez, responded on Aug. 12 that “any speculative language as to the legality of given activities” was “not helpful.” Years later, Rodriguez and his deputy, who had been one of the chiefs of the Thailand black site where the CIA first tortured Abu Zubaydah, destroyed over 90 videotapes of Abu Zubaydah’s torture. The deputy and black site chief, Gina Haspel, went on to become CIA director, from 2018 to January 2021.
Within months of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, versions of his torture regimen were used first on other CIA captives and then, in modified form, on military detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Captivity by the U.S. cost Abu Zubaydah an eye—it remains unclear exactly how—and a testicle. In 2007, during a nonjudicial hearing at Guantanamo Bay, he bemoaned that he was “losing my masculinity. Even my beard is falling out.” He apologized, saying that “I don’t like to admit I’m a sick person… almost half of my body is not good.” The Justice Department 2002 torture memo has been criticized for permitting the CIA to inflict pain up to the limit of “organ failure” or long-term psychological damage. Even by those highly narrow criteria, Abu Zubaydah surely qualifies as having been tortured.
In the same hearing, he described “another form of torture”: his separation from the diary he kept for 16 years. Everything the U.S. would need to “refute the accusations against me” is in that diary, which the U.S. took from him, he said. In Abu Zubaydah’s telling, he was a Pakistan-based coordinator of “two guest houses” to get trainees in and out of the Khalden camp. There they would train in “defensive jihad,” by which he meant striking military targets of non-Muslim invaders of Muslim land, “Russia against Chechnya, and of course, Israel against Palestine.” Abu Zubaydah, who was not himself a trained fighter, said he thought bin Laden was too brutal: “Bin Laden wanted al Qaeda to have control of Khalden, but we refused, since we had different ideas.” Seemingly referring to his CIA captors, he told the Guantanamo officers, “They told me, ‘sorry, we discover that you are not No. 3, you are not even a fighter.’”
The War on Terror was disinterested in the distinctions between self-described facilitators of jihadi trainees and al Qaeda. Even taking the CIA at its face-value assertion that its torture program was about intelligence production and not revenge, Abu Zubaydah’s case demonstrates that the CIA predicated its torture program on a false test case, a man whom the CIA brutalized before admitting he was not who they thought he was.
That, Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers suspect, is why the U.S. has never charged Abu Zubaydah with an offense in either military or civilian court. “Had those assertions been true,” wrote attorney Charles R. Church in 2018, “Abu Zubaydah would have been prosecuted long ago rather than being immured in a top-secret military prison.” Before Abu Zubaydah’s torture, according to the Senate torture report, the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit reported that “all major players are in concurrence that [Abu Zubaydah] should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life.”
In that respect, their campaign worked. Abu Zubaydah has had practically no contact with the outside world. Much of what has emerged has been his disturbing artwork depicting naked men strapped to chairs and stuffed into coffins while watched by men clad all in black. In 2016, the military’s assertions against Abu Zubaydah were downgraded to running a “mujahideen training network,” “possibly” knowing in advance about the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies, and other aspects of what the New York Times called a “much-modified but still rather vague description of his history.” Yet the military continued to detain Abu Zubaydah without charge, and inspired little outrage. There is only so much attention the world has shown it is willing to pay to those inside Guantanamo Bay. It pays less with each passing year.
Yet Abu Zubaydah has also won vindications. In 2015, the European Court of Human Rights ordered Poland, which hosted the second black site where the CIA held Abu Zubaydah, to pay restitution. Lithuania, which hosted Abu Zubaydah’s captivity from February 2005 to March 2006, appears to be stonewalling on a similar investigation, although the court already ruled Lithuania to be complicit in Abu Zubaydah’s torture. In December 2017, the U.N. formally removed Abu Zubaydah from its al Qaeda blacklist. And this week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case emerging from Abu Zubaydah’s European human-rights litigation that tests the government’s powers to block him from obtaining testimony from Mitchell and Jessen on state-secrets grounds.
The U.N. panel on arbitrary detention has no power to compel the Biden administration to release the now 50-year old Abu Zubaydah. In February, the administration said it has a review underway to determine how it will close Guantanamo, distinct from its broader counterterrorism review. A senior administration official did not provide The Daily Beast with more information about the timetable for the review or subsequent action, saying only that its review is broadly consultative across the government. The U.S. military’s Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo, reiterated that it is committed to “safe, humane and legal” detentions.
“The torture and detention without charge or trial of Abu Zubaydah for 19 years epitomizes the worst of the War on Terror,” said Duffy, his attorney. “As the 20th anniversary looms, it’s past time to release him, to reveal the truth about his case, and to commit to effective security based on the rule of law.”
'Fox News has continued to spread misinformation about what happened that day.' (photo: Getty Images)
Fox News Made Me Do It: Capitol Attack Suspect Pulls 'Foxitis' Defense
Luke O'Neil, Guardian UK
O'Neil writes: "The lawyer for a Delaware man charged over the Capitol attack in January is floating a unique defense: Fox News made him do it."
Anthony Antonio, who faces five charges over role in January riot, ‘started believing what was being fed to him’, lawyer says
he lawyer for a Delaware man charged over the Capitol attack in January is floating a unique defense: Fox News made him do it.
Anthony Antonio, who is facing five charges including violent entry, disorderly conduct and impeding law enforcement during civil disorder, fell prey to the persistent lies about the so-called “stolen election” being spread daily by Donald Trump and the rightwing network that served him, his attorney Joseph Hurley said during a video hearing on Thursday.
Antonio spent the six months before the riots mainlining Fox News while unemployed, Hurley said, likening the side effects of such a steady diet of misinformation to a mental health syndrome.
“Fox television played constantly,” he said. “He became hooked with what I call ‘Foxitis’ or ‘Foxmania’, and became interested in the political aspect and started believing what was being fed to him.”
Antonio’s segment was somehow only the second most notable part of the hearing. Another defendant shouted obscenities, sending the proceedings into near chaos at one point.
Hurley’s argument calls to mind the infamous “the devil made me do it” defense, although you might argue the devil has nothing on the prolific manipulators at Fox News. And while there is certainly an element of believability to the harmful nature of persistent rightwing propaganda effectively manipulating a person’s ability to distinguish fact from reality – I’ve written here and in my newsletter about something I only half-jokingly refer to as “Fox News brain cancer”, something like a shared psychotic disorder that slowly sucks the life out of people and ruins their ability to connect with their families – it remains to be seen whether or not there is any legal merit to such a claim. Legal experts I’ve talked to certainly don’t think so.
Multiple videos obtained by the FBI from the day of the riot appear to show Antonio as especially active in the chaos. He is seen wearing a bulletproof vest featuring a patch of the anti-government extremist group the Three Percenters. At one point in video footage he can be seen shouting at officers: “You want war? We got war. 1776 all over again.” It was a revolutionary sentiment spread by the radical rightwing congresswoman Lauren Boebert and others on the day.
Elsewhere, Antonio is seen with a riot shield that appeared to be stolen from law enforcement, squirting water on an officer being dragged into a crowd, stealing one’s gas mask, and jumping through a broken window into the Capitol.
Fox News has continued to spread misinformation about what happened that day.
The network is being sued for billions of dollars by two voting machine companies, Smartmatic and Dominion, for spreading lies about their role in the “theft” of the election.
A U.S. census taker. (photo: Census.gov)
The Census Shows the US Needs to Increase Immigration - by a Lot
Nicole Narea, Vox
Narea writes: "The results of the 2020 census are a warning sign that America is on a course for slow population growth."
The 2020 census shows that America isn’t full — and that it needs immigrants.
Economists broadly agree that population growth fuels economic growth in wealthy countries. But the recently released census figures show the US population was 331.5 million people, an increase of just 7.4 percent between 2010 and 2020 — the lowest rate since the 1930s. Projections suggest that, unless current trends change, those numbers could continue to diminish dramatically over the next two to three decades, with the population growing by just 78 million by 2060.
Some parts of the US are already beginning to experience some of the downsides of population slowdown or decline: Shrinking tax bases in rural areas have made it harder for government budgets to support essential services, such as infrastructure and public schools. As population growth slows, the pressure for cuts will likely grow. Meanwhile, the existing population will continue to age; by 2030, the Census Bureau estimates that one in five US residents will be of retirement age.
“Slow population growth, at least in the United States and a lot of other developed countries, will become a dire age dependency problem,” William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brooking Institution’s metropolitan policy program, said. “It puts a big strain on the rest of the population.”
There are ways that policymakers can turn the situation around — the Biden administration has advocated for family-friendly policies that could make it easier for Americans to have more children. But that will not be enough to overcome a widening gap in the number of working-age adults that are able to support an aging population of baby boomers.
That leaves immigration, which has historically insulated the US from population decline and represents a kind of tap that the US can turn on and off. Over the next decade, it is set to become the primary driver of population growth for the first time in US history. The question now is exactly how much more immigration might be needed to accelerate population growth — and whether US policymakers can actually overcome their political differences on the issue to make it an effective tool.
“Immigration is one of the most feasible and rational ways to help respond to this challenge and we know that it will have a really significant impact,” Danilo Zak, a senior policy and advocacy associate for the National Immigration Forum, said.
Immigration is the easiest way to increase population growth
There are two main ways that the US could increase overall population growth: by encouraging people to have more children or by increasing immigration levels.
On their own, pro-natalist policies have historically failed to increase birthrates in the kinds of numbers that would be required to stave off stagnant population growth. Internationally, research has shown that child allowances have led to slight, short-lived bumps in birthrates. From 2007 to 2010, Spain had a child allowance that led to a temporary 3 percent increase in birthrates, but that was mostly because more people decided to have children earlier, rather than have more of them. After the allowance was revoked, the birthrate decreased 6 percent.
President Biden has proposed his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, which would cap child care payments for parents earning up to 1.5 times the median income in their state, guarantee 12 weeks of paid parental leave, and maintain a new enhanced child tax credit for another four years — the kind of policies that might make it easier for families to have children. But even so, the US isn’t likely to see the kind of baby boom of the 1950s and ’60s, when the population was overall very young and a high percentage of women were in their childbearing years.
“Pro-family policies are important, but it’s proven pretty hard to get people to have more children when they don’t want to,” Zak said.
Immigration is a much more reliable driver of population growth. The average age of newly arriving immigrants is 31, which is more than seven years younger than the median American, meaning that they could help replace an aging workforce. They are also more entrepreneurial, which encourages economic dynamism, and more likely to work in essential industries, such as health care, transportation, construction, agriculture, and food processing.
Immigrants may also help stave off regional population declines. Immigrants are more likely to settle in areas where foreign-born populations already live, which are typically large metro areas that have lost population in recent years. Frey found in a 2019 report that, of the 91 large metro areas that gained population since the beginning of the decade, 15 would have actually lost population were it not for immigration, including New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia. In another 11 large metro areas, immigration accounted for more than half of their population growth.
Refugees are also more likely to settle in less dense population centers where housing costs are lower, possibly reinvigorating the nearly 35 percent of rural counties in the US that have experienced significant population loss in recent decades.
Raising immigration levels wouldn’t necessarily require a major reimagining of the US immigration system, though that might offer more flexibility to reevaluate immigration levels periodically — it could be accomplished by just increasing the caps on existing forms of visas and green cards.
“Legal immigration is not something that’s been discussed very much,” Frey said. “I hope ... these census numbers will force people to think about being more serious about that.”
To really reap the benefits of increased immigration, though, the US would have to ensure that immigrants have the ability to integrate, which it has done successfully in the past. Immigrants in the US already have a higher employment rate and labor participation rate than native-born citizens, and immigrant children tend to perform at or above the educational level of comparable US-born children.
In recent years, states and cities have adopted a patchwork of policies to promote immigrant integration, including programs designed to provide English classes, schooling, and professional training; resources to start businesses; and access to citizenship. But Biden has reestablished an Obama-era Task Force on New Americans to expand the role of the federal government in such initiatives.
“We need to figure out how to give those young people the opportunities for success,” Frey said.
Some researchers say America needs to raise immigration levels by more than a third
It’s hard to estimate just how many more immigrants the US would need to accept annually in order to reverse its low population growth trend. In recent history, before President Donald Trump pursued policies curbing immigration and global travel largely came to a halt during the pandemic, the US typically admitted more than 1 million immigrants per year. But under that scenario, census projections indicate that the US would see less than half the population growth between 2020 and 2060 than it saw over the previous 40 years.
Some have argued that the US should try to set its immigration levels equal to its historical per capita rate of immigration, or to the per capita immigration rates of comparable countries, such as Australia or Canada. Others have argued that the US shouldn’t set immigration levels at all and instead let the market decide how many people are needed to fulfill the needs of employers.
But Zak said that all those methods seem somewhat arbitrary and unlikely to spur members of Congress to action. In his research with the National Immigration Forum’s president and CEO, Ali Noorani, he argues that the US should increase net immigration levels by at least 37 percent, or about 370,000 additional immigrants a year, to prevent a “demographic deficit” stemming from low population growth.
That number of immigrants, they estimate, would maintain the current “Old Age Dependency Ratio” (OADR), which is the number of people ages 16 and 64 per person over age 65 — basically, the number of workers available to support one retired person. It’s generally considered to be a good indicator of the demographic health of a country.
Today, the US’s ratio is 3.5, down from 5.4 in 2005 and 6.4 in 1965. By comparison, Japan has an OADR of 2.1, the lowest worldwide, and is scrambling to shore up the viability of basic services for its aging population, such as public pensions, health care, and long-term care systems.
Even just maintaining the US’s current ratio may not be enough to avert the problems associated with an aging population. But it provides a preliminary benchmark for members of Congress, who, in an ideal world, would reevaluate immigration levels every few years. (The last time the US significantly increased legal immigration levels was with the Reagan-era Immigration Reform Act of 1986.)
“When we talk about maintaining the current OADR, it’s a conservative judgment, hoping to at least stop the bleeding,” Zak said. “We look at it as an initial target, rather than a cap. We don’t want things to get significantly worse.”
America needs all kinds of immigrants — not just workers
America doesn’t necessarily need to be picky with regard to the kinds of immigrants it seeks to welcome.
The US might need more workers to help fill growing labor shortages associated with demographic decline, as well as more immigrants who are sponsored by their family members to ensure that immigrant populations feel comfortable putting down roots in the US and having children. The children of immigrants will be a major driver of population growth in the long term.
But immigrants in general, including refugees and asylum seekers, carry the benefit of boosting population in rural areas that are feeling the brunt of the effects of demographic decline.
“When it comes to responding to demographic needs, that really needs to emphasize all different kinds of immigrants and the value they all bring to the country and to help us respond to the demographic challenges we face,” Zak said.
But the US could also take a more targeted approach by addressing existing labor shortages in industries such as home health care, hospitality, transportation, and construction.
The Labor Department has a list of occupations with shortages, making it easier for employers to bring immigrants to the US to fill those jobs, but it hasn’t been updated in many years. Currently, just physical therapists, nurses, and artists and scientists with “exceptional ability” qualify as shortage occupations.
“We need to do an even better job of figuring out where our labor shortages are going to be in the coming years,” Zak said.
The US can fill those shortages with a range of flexible visa programs. Lawmakers have already weighed creating a state-based visa that would allow states to select what kinds of immigrants they will accept based on their specific labor needs. Rep. John Curtis (R‐ UT), with the blessing of Utah’s Republican then-Gov. Gary Herbert, introduced a related bill in 2019 under which each state would get an average of 10,000 visas a year and would be able to determine how long they last and how often they could be renewed.
But the US could also look for policy solutions abroad: Wealthy countries such as Australia have adopted visas for immigrants who can fill national labor shortages, and Canada created its Provincial Nominee Program to encourage immigration to provinces that are experiencing labor shortages.
These kinds of increases in new, legal immigration can be used in tandem with programs to legalize the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already living in the US. Researchers from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania found that the provisions in Biden’s comprehensive immigration reform proposal granting legal status to undocumented immigrants would increase the size of the US population by more than 4 percent by 2050. That’s because it would decrease their likelihood of emigrating and increase their birthrates.
“There’s no doubt that we should be pursuing all of these ideas to help us respond to what’s really one of the most pressing challenges the country will face over the next several decades,” Zak said.
Israeli police detain a demonstrator in East Jerusalem on Friday during protests over Israel's threatened eviction of dozens of Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. (photo: Mahmoud Illean/AP)
Hundreds Injured as Israeli Security Forces Fire Stun Grenades, Rubber Bullets at Palestinians Protesting Evictions in Jerusalem
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Israel braced for more protests on Saturday after violence at East Jerusalem's flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound wounded more than 200 people as the international community called for calm after days of escalating tensions."
Tens of thousands of Palestinian worshippers earlier packed the mosque on the final Friday of Ramadan and many stayed to protest.
srael braced for more protests on Saturday after violence at East Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound wounded more than 200 people as the international community called for calm after days of escalating tensions.
Israeli police fired rubber-coated metal bullets and stun grenades towards rock-hurling Palestinians at Al-Aqsa as anger grows over the potential eviction of Palestinians from homes on land claimed by Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem.
At least 205 Palestinians and 17 officers were injured in the night-time clashes at Islam’s third-holiest site and around East Jerusalem, Palestinian medics and Israeli police said, as thousands of Palestinians faced off with several hundred Israeli police in riot gear.
Violence erupted on Friday when Israeli police deployed heavily as Muslims were performing evening prayers at Al-Aqsa during the holy month of Ramadan.
Video footage from the scene shows worshippers throwing chairs, shoes and rocks towards the police and officers opening fire. Israeli police also closed gates leading to Al-Aqsa inside the walled Old City.
The Palestine Red Crescent ambulance service said one of the injured lost an eye, two suffered serious head wounds, and two had their jaws fractured. Most were wounded in the face and eyes by rubber-coated rounds and shrapnel from stun grenades.
An Al-Aqsa official appealed for calm on the compound through the mosque’s loudspeakers. “Police must immediately stop firing stun grenades at worshippers, and the youth must calm down and be quiet.”
Tens of thousands of Palestinian worshippers earlier packed into the mosque on the final Friday of Ramadan, and many stayed on to protest in support of Palestinians facing eviction from their homes on Israeli-occupied land claimed by Jewish settlers in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem.
Calls for calm and restraint poured in from the United States and the United Nations, with others including the European Union and Jordan voicing alarm at the possible evictions.
“If we don’t stand with this group of people here, [evictions] will [come] to my house, her house, his house and to every Palestinian who lives here,” said protester Bashar Mahmoud, 23, from the nearby Palestinian neighbourhood of Issawiya.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said he “held [Israel] responsible for the dangerous developments and sinful attacks taking place in the holy city”, and called on the UN Security Council to hold an urgent session on the issue.
Abbas praised the “courageous stand” of the protesters.
Protest groups affiliated with Hamas, rulers of the Gaza Strip, said they would resume demonstrations and the launching of incendiary balloons along the heavily guarded Gaza frontier. Hamas has largely curtailed such actions over the past two years as part of an informal ceasefire that now appears to be fraying.
In an interview with a Hamas-run TV station, the group’s top leader Ismail Haniyeh addressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by name, warning him not to “play with fire”.
“Neither you nor your army and police can win this battle,” he said. “What’s happening in Jerusalem is an intifada that must not stop.”
‘Remain steadfast’
With health restrictions mostly lifted following Israel’s swift coronavirus vaccine campaign, worshippers packed tightly together as they knelt in prayer on the tree-lined hilltop plateau containing the mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site.
However, thousands of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank were blocked from reaching the Al-Aqsa Mosque as Israeli forces set up several roadblocks and checkpoints along the way to the holy site.
Continuing tensions in the city at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were front and centre in the Friday sermon given by Sheikh Tayseer Abu Sunainah.
“Our people will remain steadfast and patient in their homes, in our blessed land,” Abu Sunainah said of the multiple Palestinian families in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood who could be evicted under a long-running legal case.
Following prayers, thousands remained in the compound to protest against the evictions, with many waving Palestinian flags and chanting a refrain common during Jerusalem protests: “With our soul and blood, we will redeem you, Aqsa”.
Israel’s Supreme Court will hold a hearing on the Sheikh Jarrah evictions on Monday. Israelis and Palestinians are bracing for more violence in the coming days.
Sunday night is “Laylat al-Qadr” or the “Night of Destiny”, the most sacred in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Worshippers will gather for intense nighttime prayers at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Sunday night is also the start of Jerusalem Day, a national holiday in which Israel celebrates its annexation of East Jerusalem and religious nationalists hold parades and other celebrations in the city.
Sheikh Jarrah’s residents are overwhelmingly Palestinian, but the neighbourhood also contains a site revered by religious Jews as the tomb of an ancient high priest, Simeon the Just.
The spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said the evictions, “if ordered and implemented, would violate Israel’s obligations under international law” on East Jerusalem territory it captured and occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.
“We call on Israel to immediately halt all forced evictions, including those in Sheikh Jarrah, and to cease any activity that would further contribute to a coercive environment and lead to a risk of forcible transfer,” spokesman Rupert Colville said on Friday.
Israel’s foreign ministry said on Friday that Palestinians were “presenting a real-estate dispute between private parties as a nationalist cause in order to incite violence in Jerusalem”.
Palestinians rejected the allegation.
‘Our families are terrified’
Over the past week, residents of Sheikh Jarrah, as well as Palestinian and international solidarity activists, have attended nightly vigils to support the Palestinian families under threat of forced displacement.
But on Friday, Israeli police blocked off the entrances of the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood to hundreds of Palestinians and solidarity activists trying to enter the area, said activists.
Protesters who were prevented from entering Sheikh Jarrah held a group Iftar, the evening meal which breaks the daily fast during Ramadan, and held a vigil at the police barricades.
Mohammed el-Kurd, a Palestinian resident of Sheikh Jarrah, shared photos on social media showing armed Jewish settlers walking around the neighbourhood.
“What if they massacre us?” he asked. “Our families are terrified.”
Israeli border police and forces have attacked the sit-ins using skunk water, tear gas, rubber-coated bullets and shock grenades over the past few days. Dozens of Palestinians have been arrested.
On Thursday night, at least 30 people were wounded and 15 arrested. Videos emerged showing Israeli settlers deliberately provoking a Palestinian communal iftar meal set up outside one of the houses, including using pepper spray. Palestinians responded by throwing chairs at the settlers.
The Sheikh Jarrah cause has escalated over the past week despite the issue running for decades.
Jewish settler organisations filed a lawsuit in the 1970s claiming the area belonged to Jews originally, and seeking the expulsion of Palestinian families living there since 1956.
These families, refugees from the 1948 Nakba, eventually settled in Sheikh Jarrah under an agreement between Jordan and the UN refugee agency.
The Israeli district court ruled that four families – al-Kurd, Iskafi, Qassim and Jaouni – must leave their homes for settlers to take over, or reach an agreement with these settler organisations by paying rent and recognising them as landlords.
The families refused and the court postponed the final verdict to Monday.
A firefighter checks on the evolution of the Castle Fire as it burns in the Sequoia national forest. (photo: Étienne Laurent/EPA)
A Giant Sequoia in California Is Still Smoldering From Last Year's Wildfires
Denise Chow, NBC News
Chow writes: "Deep within California's Sequoia National Park, one of the state's iconic redwood trees is still smoldering from last year's devastating wildfires, according to the National Park Service."
The burning tree was found by the National Park Service during surveys in the area to assess damage from the 2020 Castle Fire.
eep within California's Sequoia National Park, one of the state's iconic redwood trees is still smoldering from last year's devastating wildfires, according to the National Park Service.
The burning giant sequoia was found by scientists and fire crews with the National Park Service, who were conducting surveys in the area to assess damage from the 2020 Castle Fire, which broke out in August and scorched more than 150,000 acres of land.
The smoldering sequoia does not currently pose a threat to life or property, but it does demonstrate "how dry the park is," said Leif Mathiesen, assistant fire management officer for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
"With the low amount of snowfall and rain this year, there may be additional discoveries as spring transitions into summer," Mathiesen said in a statement.
Much of California is in the grips of a worsening drought. Huge swaths of the state, including the areas in and around Sequoia National Park, are under "extreme drought" conditions, indicating that water reservoirs are "extremely low," according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
The dry conditions have states in the western U.S. bracing for what experts say could be another active wildfire season. Last year's record-setting wildfires engulfed millions of acres across Washington state, Oregon, California and Colorado. In California alone, nearly 10,000 separate fires in 2020 scorched 4.2 million acres, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.
Scientists have predicted that devastating wildfires will become more frequent and intense in a warming world, particularly as drought conditions persist and create the ingredients necessary to turn forests into tinderboxes.
The 2020 Castle Fire was thought to have been caused by a lightning strike. The fire spread to at least 10 sequoia groves in the region, but it's not known how many trees — including some that were hundreds of years old — were destroyed.
But sequoias are a fire-adapted species, and low-intensity blazes can actually help these forests thrive by breaking open cones from giant sequoias that release their seeds. In recent years, however, drought conditions combined with high-intensity fires have threatened these groves, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
The still-smoking tree in Sequoia National Park is located in the Board Camp Grove, which the National Park Service said is away from any trails. Agency officials added, however, that the smoldering sequoia "may be still visible from the Ladybug Trail which leaves east bound from the South Fork Campground at the southern end of Sequoia National Park."
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