Editorial | America Started Over Once. Can We Do It Again? – The New York Times

“The Reconstruction Amendments — the 13th, 14th and 15th — are rightly considered the nation’s second founding, the beginning of a centuries-long effort to cleanse America of its original sin and to continue the work of perfecting the union. Interpreting the 14th Amendment in light of its history and original meaning — a method the conservative justices swear by in most other cases — should lead the Supreme Court to wield it much more aggressively than it has. But as an increasingly hard-right majority settles in, it’s reasonable to fear that the court will move in the wrong direction for years to come.”

David Lindsay Jr.
Hamden, CT | Pending Approval
The 14th amend. states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” I agree with the last sentence. We need rights even for illegal immigrants, though we do not have to let them live or work here. When they do work here, there wages should be protected, to prevent their being taken advantage of by unscrupulous Americans. But I agree with Trump, and felt before he said it, that we have to amend the 14th amendment, to remove the instaneous right to citizenship for anyone who is born in this country. This was a fine law to protect slaves after the civil war, but now this sentence is an abomination. It encourages Chinese to fly their pregnant women to Los Angelses, deliver their babies as US citizens, and then fly back to China. It allows illegal immigrants to make American citizens by over populating our country with their children, while they evade the laws and live and work illegally in this country. It creates a magnate of great force, and incentivizes illegal immigration. Soon, there will be a 100 M refugees in the world from civil war and climate change.

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U.S. Immigration Director Threatens to Jail Elected Officials in Sanctuary Cities – Texas Monthly

“Mayors from across the state were stunned today when the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Thomas Homan, went on Fox News and threatened to jail and prosecute elected officials in so-called sanctuary cities who do not fully cooperate with federal authorities in rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants.

“Did he mention me?” an incredulous Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner asked when reporters brought up the remarks.When I asked Austin mayor Steve Adler for a response, he characterized Homan’s remarks as un-American. “Threatening to jail political opponents, especially for laws they aren’t breaking, is not the America I grew up in,” he said. “Austin is the safest big city in Texas, and we follow the law. I will oppose anti-immigrant policies, regardless of the personal consequences, because spreading fear and making threats makes us all less safe.”

San Antonio Mayor Ron Mayor Nirenberg said that it’s up to the federal government to enforce immigration laws, not the local police force. “I trust our police department’s guidance on the proper way to ensure public safety to the best of our ability. Community policing requires the community’s trust in the police department,” Nirenberg said. “It is unfair to punish local law enforcement for the federal government’s failure to do its job.”

Source: U.S. Immigration Director Threatens to Jail Elected Officials in Sanctuary Cities – Texas Monthly

David Lindsay: When Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez won her NY primary for congress, we learned that she calls for the abolishing of ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department that was moved from the Justice Dept to the new Homeland Security Department after 9/11, in 2001. It is hard to find any proof that ICE is doing anything unlawful or heinous, but the article above shows that Trump’s new manager is a disaster. This troglodyte Homan should be replaced, but then, so should Trump. But the Democratic party has to be careful. A majority of voting Americans want illegal immigration to be stopped. A few of us want strict rights for illegal immigrants, protection to always get paid for work performed etc, but we don’t want unlimited or even any illegal immigration. God protect us.
Trumps denial of the threat of climate change is catastrophic. Roughly 22 million of the 68 million refugees in the world are from climate change loss of livelihood or civil war. People of faith or of compassion will want to address these problems in spite of their complexity.

Opinion | There’s a Better- Cheaper Way to Handle Immigration – by Sonia Nazario – NYT

“And now, it has come to this.“We are trading kids in cages for families in cages,” said Cory Smith of Kids in Need of Defense, a legal advocacy group on whose board I serve.

On Wednesday, President Trump said in an executive order that he planned to keep families together by jailing parents and children together during the course of their immigration hearings.On Thursday, the Department of Defense was tasked with finding space on military bases to house up to 20,000 children. Attorney General Jeff Sessions filed a request with a United States District Court in California to modify a consent degree from 1997 — known as the Flores agreement — that set standards for the detention of children and that a judge in 2015 interpreted as requiring that children be released within 20 days.

The Trump administration can’t jail children and parents together without changing this agreement. But there’s no reason to expect its attempt to succeed, said Carlos Holguín, the general counsel for the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, which litigated the 1997 case.”

No Relief in Sight for Parents of Thousands of Migrant Children Still in Custody – By Jack Healy – NYT

By Jack Healy June 21, 2018
“AURORA, Colo. — Micaela Samol Gonzalez, dressed in blue detention scrubs, made her way to the front of a windowless courtroom in Colorado on Thursday and faced the judge. After she gave her name and arranged a future court date for her immigration case, the judge asked whether she had any questions.

She had just one. “My question is regarding my son,” Ms. Gonzalez, whose boy was taken away by immigration authorities shortly after she was accused of crossing the border illegally on a journey from Guatemala, said in Spanish. “I’ve been given a number to contact him but nobody’s replying to me, and I’m wondering if he’s doing well.” ”

David Lindsay:
Reunited these asylum seeking immigrants with their children is easier than you think. Not cheap, but easy.
Any sheep farmer worth his or her wool could tell you its easy to reunite the children with their parents. Sheep farmers do it every spring, when they drive their flock into a close paddock before shearing. The new lambs get separated from the ewes, their mothers, in the excitement of being herded by farmers and dogs from distant fields into a smaller paddock. I witnessed the sorting process at the sheep farm of my cousin-in-law Curtis Read in West Virgina back in the 1980’s. It’s noisy, but the lambs and their mothers find each other and settle down in a cacophony, a symphony of baa-ing.
Just bring all these broken up families together in one place, and they will sort themselves out 1000 times faster than some frozen in the headlights bureaucracy. The whole group could even replace one of our military bases, because not doing something like this, and taking care of these wounded and vulnerable children, could be creating several thousand future America-hating terrorists.

David Lindsay Jr. is the author of “The Tay Son Rebellion, Historical Fiction of Eighteenth-century Vietnam,” and blogs at TheTaySonRebellion.com and InconvenientNews.wordpress.com

Immigration’s Border-Enforcement Myth – by Mae Ngai – NYT

“If we are to have restrictions on immigration, they ought to be reasonable, allow for family unification, operate in sync with the labor market and give refuge to those fleeing disaster and persecution. We can enact statutes of limitations on unauthorized presence (say five years, or even 10), which would recognize not just the inevitability of migrants’ entry but also their incorporation into society. The United States itself had such a policy once — before the National Origins Act of 1924.

But today, the mainstream of both political parties clings to the false logic of the 1980s, which yoked legalization to enforcement. This time around the Democrats are in an especially weak position, not least because extremists in both Congress and the White House are holding the Dreamers hostage to a radical nativist agenda.”

Dreamers- Liars and Bad Economics – by Paul Krugman

“But in any case, adding “and besides, they’re stealing our jobs” undercuts the whole pretense.

Furthermore, the claim was, as I said, junk economics. The idea that there are a fixed number of jobs, so that if a foreign-born worker takes a job he or she takes it away from a native-born worker, is completely at odds with everything we know about how the economy works. Hearing it from a conservative is especially surreal.

The truth is that letting the Dreamers work legally helps the U.S. economy; pushing them out or into the shadows is bad for everyone except racists.

To understand why, you need to realize that America, like other advanced economies, is facing a double-barreled demographic challenge thanks to declining fertility.

On one side, an aging population means fewer workers paying taxes to support Social Security and Medicare. Demography is the main reason long-run forecasts suggest problems for Social Security, and an important reason for concerns about Medicare. Driving out young workers who will pay into the system for many decades is a way to make these problems worse.

On the other side, declining growth in the working-age population reduces the returns to private investment, increasing the risk of prolonged slumps like the one that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s not an accident that Japan, which has low fertility and is deeply hostile to immigration, began experiencing persistent deflation and stagnation a decade before the rest of the world. Destroying DACA makes America more like Japan. Why would we want to do that?”

I struggle with this issue, but I have enormous respect for Paul Krugman, and I can’t find fault with his arguments or facts. I would like more proof that these people are not taking jobs from Americans, but the prooofs are from macro economics, and not always, but  mostsly. When some of us were laid off in the recession of 2008, it might have been because we were older. We were often replaced by younger workers. It is in the next 50 years that all of Kruman’s arguments make sense. In the next 30 years, we are in danger of copying the deadly deflation of Japan.

Here is a comment I endorse:

Socrates

is a trusted commenter Verona NJ September 8, 2017

Aside from the moral obscenity of deporting 800,000 law-abiding young people from the country they grew up in, what’s often overlooked about Republicans and their policies is how consistently destructive they are economically.

The historical record shows that Republican Presidents and Republican policies consistently have long-term deleterious economic effects: see Bush-Cheney’s 2001 – 2009 Reign of Error for a refresher course on Republican economic catastrophe.

A Moody’s Analytics analysis of Trump’s proposed economic policies last year showed that removing all undocumented immigrants from the labor force would trigger an economic recession within one year.

University of California – Davis economist Giovanni Peri says ending DACA would bring a net loss in productivity, given that the U.S. economy is close to full employment.

The CATO Institute estimated that ending DACA would reduce tax revenue by nearly $280 billion over a decade.

The Immigrant Legal Resource Center estimated that deporting DACA-eligible individuals would reduce Social Security and Medicare tax revenue by $24.6 billion over a decade.

The Center for American Progress estimated that that the loss of all DACA-eligible workers would reduce US GDP by $433 billion over the next 10 years.

The proposed elimination of DACA is great for Making America Hate Again…and horrible for Making America Great Again.

But Greed Over People demands mindless White Spite to drive it over yet another Republican cliff.

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Donald Trump’s Cowardice on ‘Dreamers’ – The New York Times

“President Trump didn’t even have the guts to do the job himself. Instead, he hid in the shadows and sent his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to do the dirty work of telling the country that the administration would no longer shield from deportation 800,000 young undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children.

Mr. Sessions, a longtime anti-immigrant hard-liner, was more than up to the task. In a short, disingenuous speech, he said a program set up by President Barack Obama in 2012 — known as DACA, for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — was a lawless policy that “yielded terrible humanitarian consequences” and denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of American citizens. (Mr. Trump echoed these claims in a statement released by the White House.) Mr. Sessions called DACA “an unconstitutional exercise of authority” and said “failure to enforce the laws in the past has put our nation at risk of crime, violence and terrorism.”

False, false, false and false.”

BPC-Immigration-Key-Findings-PRINT – BPC-Immigration-Employment-Wages-Key-Findings.pdf

“Over the past several decades, native-born Americans have become increasingly detached from the labor force, with declining levels of employment and labor force participation. Many have attempted to blame these trends on immigration, under the notion that immigrants displace native-born workers and drive down their wages. Although superficially appealing, these arguments are ultimately overly simplistic and misguided, as they ignore several other factors driving these trends.

A new Bipartisan Policy Center report analyzes the wage and employment outcomes of the foreign- and native-born populations. Since 2000, employment has decreased by 6 percentage points among the native-born population but by just 2 percentage points among the foreign-born population. However, the unemployment rate—defined as the percent of the population out of work but actively looking for a job—has remained roughly equal for the two demographics. This is because native-born individuals have increasingly chosen to exit the labor force for other reasons—namely to retire, enroll in school or enter disability (fig. 1). If native-born individuals exhibited the same change in rates of retirement, school enrollment and disability as foreign-born persons over the last 15 years, the native-born employment rate would be almost identical to the foreign-born rate (see ‘Native (Adjusted)’ in fig. 2).”

Source: BPC-Immigration-Key-Findings-PRINT – BPC-Immigration-Employment-Wages-Key-Findings.pdf

This is one of the answers to my recent question, show me the studies that DACA immigrants do not take jobs away from native workers.

The Very Bad Economics of Killing DACA – by Paul Krugman -NYT

“Trump’s decision to kill DACA — never mind the attempt to obscure things with that meaningless delay — is, first and foremost, a moral obscenity: throwing out 800,000 young people who are Americans in every way that matters, who have done nothing wrong, basically for racial reasons. But it’s also worth noting that Jeff Sessions just tried to sell it with junk economics, claiming that the Dreamers are taking American jobs. No, they aren’t, even if we leave aside the question of who’s an American. DACA is very much a boon to the rest of the U.S. population, and killing it will make everyone worse off.To see why, first note that whatever you think about the economics of less-educated immigrants — most of the evidence suggests that they don’t depress wages, but that’s another discussion — none of it applies to DREAMers. Their educational and behavioral profile, as Cato notes, doesn’t resemble the average immigrant, let alone the average undocumented immigrant; they look like H-1B visa holders, that is, skilled immigrants we have specifically allowed in because they help the economy.

Beyond that, DREAMers are young — which means that they help the economy in not one but two big ways, because they mitigate the economic problems caused by an aging population.”

Source: The Very Bad Economics of Killing DACA – The New York Times

Paul Krugman writes, “But it’s also worth noting that Jeff Sessions just tried to sell it with junk economics, claiming that the Dreamers are taking American jobs. No, they aren’t, even if we leave aside the question of who’s an American.”

Where are the hyperlinks. What are the studies that prove this point. If it is a canard, please show us the proofs, and the data.

 

An Elusive Immigration Compromise – by Ross Douthat – NYT

“The last time Gallup asked Americans if they thought immigration to the United States should increase or decrease, 35 percent chose a decrease, 24 percent an increase, and 38 percent preferred the present rate. Support for increasing immigration has been rising for a decade, but it remains relatively low. To the extent that there is a middle-ground position, it is for something like the status quo.

From polling like this you would imagine that recent immigration reform efforts would have worked in that middle space, trying to tweak the mix of new arrivals without increasing the immigration rate. But instead, most recent attempts at a “comprehensive” bill have sought not only amnesty for illegal immigrants, but an increase in low-skilled immigration, above the already brisk post-1960s pace.

Bipartisan bills dramatically at odds with the shape of public opinion are generally bad for both parties. And sure enough, the attempts at immigration reform under George W. Bush and Barack Obama helped give us both a much-reduced Democratic Party and a G.O.P. helmed by Donald Trump.”