Across The South, COVID-19 Vaccine Sites Missing From Black And Hispanic Neighborhoods

2021/02/06 Leave a comment

Not surprising. Hope someone will do a similar analysis for Canada (once we have a full supply of vaccines):

Georgia Washington, 79, can’t drive. Whenever she needs to go somewhere, she asks her daughter or her friends to pick her up.

She has lived in the northern part of Baton Rouge, a predominantly Black area of Louisiana’s capital, since 1973. There aren’t many resources there, including medical facilities. So when Washington fell ill with COVID-19 last March, she had to get a ride 20 minutes south to get medical attention.

Washington doesn’t want to fall sick again, so she was eager to get vaccinated, which is in line with federal health recommendations. But she faced the same challenge she did last year: finding a local provider, this time for a vaccine. She tried for weeks, checking at pharmacies in the area. And she was put on a waiting list.

Georgia Washington has lived in Southern Heights, a predominantly Black neighborhood in the northern part of Baton Rouge, La., since 1973. After falling ill with COVID-19 last year, Washington was eager to get vaccinated, which is in line with federal health recommendations. But Washington again had difficulty finding a local provider, this time to get a vaccine.

“I’ve got lots of patience,” Washington said. “I just want to get it over with.”

Communities of color have been disproportionately harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now they’re at risk of being left behind in the vaccine rollout.

Using data from several states that have published their own maps and lists of where vaccination sites are located, NPR identified disparities in the locations of vaccination sites in major cities across the Southern U.S. — with most sites placed in whiter neighborhoods.

NPR found this disparity by looking at Census Bureau statistics of non-Hispanic white residents and mapping where the vaccine sites were. NPR identified counties where vaccine sites tended to be in census tracts — roughly equivalent to neighborhoods — that had a higher percentage of white residents, compared with the census-tract average in that county. Reporters attempted to confirm the findings with health officials in nine counties across six states where the differences were most dramatic: Travis and Bastrop counties, Texas; East Baton Rouge Parish, La.; Hinds County, Miss.; Mobile County, Ala.; Chatham County, Ga.; DeKalb County, Ga.; Fulton County, Ga.; and Richland County, South Carolina.

The reasons are both unique to each place and common across the region: The health care locations that are logical places to distribute a vaccine tend to be located in the more affluent and whiter parts of town where medical infrastructure already exists. That presents a challenge for public health officials who are relying on what’s already in place to mount a quick vaccination campaign.

It’s a problem that exists not just in the South but across the country. A team of researchers at the West Health Policy Center and the University of Pittsburgh found nearly two dozen urban counties where Black residents would need to travel farther than white residents to a potential vaccination site — unless health officials act to narrow the disparities.

“We’re hopeful there will be new facilities that are stood up,” says Dr. Utibe Essien, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh who studies health disparities and worked on the research team. “But what we saw play out with COVID testing was there were new facilities that came up, but they relied on existing infrastructure.”

“This is structural and foundational to the racial disparities in our country.”

Troubles getting vaccinated in Black neighborhoods

In the part of Baton Rouge where Georgia Washington lives, there is just one Walgreens where COVID-19 vaccines can be found.

Ever since an interstate was built through Baton Rouge in the 1960s, the population in the northern part of the city has struggled with housing, food insecurity, poverty and crime. These inequities have always fueled disparities in health care in Baton Rouge. The vaccine rollout is just the latest example.

“When you go to north Baton Rouge, there are very few [health care] choices. And then how many of those are participating in the vaccine program?” said Tasha Clark-Amar, CEO of the East Baton Rouge Council on Aging.

Clark-Amar runs about two dozen senior centers around the city, and her organization stepped up to fill the pharmacy gap by obtaining and providing vaccines. Clark-Amar’s group organized a pop-up clinic in mid-January, giving out around 1,000 doses that it secured from the grocery chain Albertsons. But another time, a community health clinic planned to give Clark-Amar around 150 doses for seniors — except the clinic couldn’t deliver on that promise and she had to cancel the pop-up event at the last minute.

“I was livid. I was so angry and frustrated,” she said. “Thirty-five of the people we had registered are between the ages of 80 and 99. Now you tell me, how am I supposed to pick?”

Clark-Amar has been able to schedule other pop-up events. In fact, that’s how Washington was finally able to get a vaccine. She went to one of the council’s pop-up events at a local community center in late January.

Clark-Amar says this patchwork of resources is part of life in many underresourced Black communities.

In the next state over, people are facing similar challenges. In Hinds County, Miss., where the state capital of Jackson sits, there’s only one major drive-through site, which is where the state is sending the vast majority of doses. The state added the site in late January, weeks after it had already put two drive-throughs in the wealthier, whiter suburbs just outside the city.

“It took us a little bit of time to get it logistically set up to make sure we had a Hinds County site,” Mississippi’s state epidemiologist, Dr. Paul Byers, acknowledged at a recent news conference. “But we were always planning to do that. And we are glad that we have that now.”

There’s still a problem for the residents of Hinds County, nearly three-quarters of whom are Black: The vaccination site is north of downtown Jackson in a neighborhood that is 89% white and already has more medical facilities. It’s close to a 30-minute drive from the more rural parts of the county, where many Black residents live.

In Alabama, the state has consistently ranked near the bottom in vaccine distribution since the rollout began.

But in terms of where the vaccine is available, NPR’s analysis found a disparity in one of the state’s largest counties. In Mobile County, 18 vaccination sites are listed on the Alabama Department of Public Health webpage. Fourteen are located in the whiter half of neighborhoods in the county.

Rendi Murphree, director of the Bureau of Disease Surveillance and Environmental Services at the Mobile County Health Department, said it has been hard for the county to get any vaccines at all. She also said distribution is based on which sites have the capacity to store vaccines at very low temperatures.

Joe Womack, a native of a historically Black neighborhood known locally as Africatown, said Black communities in the northern part of Mobile have always dealt with poverty, pollution and health disparities.

“It’s been a struggle ever since the ’70s,” said Womack, president of the Africatown community group C.H.E.S.S.

Beyond the South

Because of the need for a quick rollout, vaccination sites are largely dependent on the health care infrastructure already in place. Places such as pharmacies, clinics and hospitals make convenient sites for vaccines to be administered.

But the locations of those facilities can be inconvenient for millions of Americans. Those are the findings from a team of researchers at the nonpartisan West Health Policy Center and the University of Pittsburgh who analyzed the distance that Americans live from these types of places.

In 23 of the nation’s urban counties, the researchers found, Black residents were less likely than white residents to be within a mile of a site that could potentially distribute vaccines. In just these counties, they estimated 2.4 million Black residents were farther than a mile.

“We worry this is going to exacerbate disparities in outcomes even more now,” says Inmaculada Hernandez, an assistant professor of pharmacy and therapeutics at the University of Pittsburgh who analyzed the data. “The limitations of existing infrastructure in counties are very different.”

And it’s not just in urban areas. In more than 250 other U.S. counties, the researchers found, Black residents were less likely than white residents to live within 10 miles driving distance of a site. Hernandez estimates the true number of places with this disparity to be higher, since the researchers only estimated based on a sample of county residents. Georgia and Virginia top the list of states with the most counties that have this disparity.

The Georgia Department of Public Health declined to comment on the University of Pittsburgh study. The Virginia Department of Health pointed to plans to deploy the National Guard to assist with vaccinations, as well as mass vaccination sites it set up at places like a convention center, a raceway complex and a vacated department store.

“A long history of racism”

The effects of this gap, coupled with historical trust issues between Black Americans and health care providers, are already reflected in the nationwide data showing who’s getting vaccinated. According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis published this week — which included race data on half of those who were vaccinated in the first month of the vaccination campaign — Blacks are lagging behind in vaccination rates, even when accounting for the demographics of health care workers and others who were in top priority groups.

Thomas LaVeist, a dean and health care equity researcher at Tulane University in New Orleans, says medical deserts go back into the early evolution of health care.

“But I do think that the South is perhaps more of a problem than some other parts of the country,” says LaVeist, who is also co-chair of the Louisiana COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force. “Part of that is a long history of racism, Jim Crow and, in some cases, intentional actions that were taken to ensure that some communities did not have access to health care and other resources, while others did.”

And it’s not just Black neighborhoods having trouble getting access. In Texas, with its large population of recent immigrants, the problem of location and convenience is interwoven with a lack of trust.

Texas health officials recently designated several vaccination “hubs” around the state after advocates and local officials raised concerns about the state’s initial plan to rely heavily on chain grocery stores and pharmacies to distribute the vaccine. The hubs will make their own decisions about where to distribute the vaccines they are allocated.

But as the Texas Tribune reported, when Dallas County tried to take it a step further by prioritizing ZIP codes where mostly Blacks and Hispanics live, state officials threatened to withhold doses.

The way that hubs allocate their vaccines is an especially important issue in smaller counties like Bastrop County, east of Austin.

The state’s list of providers in the county shows they are almost all clustered around State Highway 71 — mostly in the city of Bastrop — which is far from the rural county’s outskirts, where many Latinos live.

Edie Clark, a leader with a local faith-based nonprofit, said her group is worried for neighborhoods like Stony Point, which is a small immigrant community in the county.

Clark said members of the Stony Point community are still reeling from events a few years ago when the Sheriff’s Department turned over roughly a dozen residents to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation. Many of those arrested were pulled over for minor traffic violations, like a broken taillight.

“They have a lot of distrust and fear of giving their information out without knowing it’s not going to be used against them,” she said.

Clark said it’s tough to imagine that a lot of people in Stony Point will drive to get vaccinated in the city of Bastrop when they won’t even drive there to get groceries. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced this week that immigration agencies will not make immigration enforcement arrests at vaccination sites.

Fast or fair

Reaching long-neglected communities takes time — and in the race to get vaccines to as many people as possible, time is in short supply.

Still, when the CDC outlined four ethical principles for the allocation of vaccines, two of them included equitable and fair distribution. CDC spokesperson Kristen Nordlund said, “Vaccine allocation strategies should aim to both reduce existing disparities and to not create new disparities.”

But the pressure to get the vaccine out quickly means not everyone follows those principles. In South Carolina, the board of the state’s Department of Health and Environmental Control shunned a proposal last week that would have factored age and “social vulnerability” metrics into its vaccine allocations. It opted instead to distribute solely by county population, citing a need for speed.

“I think when you look at speed, certainly, it’s probably a lot easier and faster and quicker to do those calculations when it’s just based on per capita,” said Nick Davidson, the South Carolina health department’s senior deputy for public health.

In Georgia, the high demand for COVID-19 vaccinations has left little opportunity for providers to build up new infrastructure to supplement what already exists or to work with members of historically marginalized communities on any hesitations they might have about getting vaccinated.

That’s why the Good Samaritan Health Center in Atlanta has been saving a handful of its vaccination appointments for people who might want to meet with a health care provider at the clinic to ask questions before rolling up their sleeves.

“And at the end of most of those conversations, the person says, ‘You know what? That was what I really needed. And now I’m ready to be vaccinated,’ ” said Breanna Lathrop, the clinic’s chief operating officer.

Even for those eager to get the vaccine, it’s hard to find in certain parts of the city. Only one of Atlanta’s five large-scale county vaccination sites falls in the Black neighborhoods south of Interstate 20 — and that outlier sits in a shopping mall directly adjacent to the interstate on the outskirts of the city. Many of the smaller vaccination sites that are in those Black neighborhoods are grocery store pharmacies, which receive a much lower number of doses than what can be found at hospitals and the county sites.

A few hours away in Savannah, Ga., NPR’s analysis shows just one of Chatham County’s half-dozen vaccination sites is located in a majority-Black neighborhood. That didn’t surprise Nichele Hoskins. She’s assistant director of a local YMCA-led coalition called Healthy Savannah and works to flatten out health disparities among people of color.

“In order to get people vaccinated, you’re going to have to have that kind of trust,” Hoskins said, noting it can seem a tedious process. “If you’ve ever done retail, it’s going to take a little bit of hand-selling.”

The Coastal Health District in Savannah, of course, can’t take each patient by the hand. The health director, Dr. Lawton Davis, says it’s tough to formalize a plan targeting Black residents, who make up about 42% of Chatham County’s population. So far, the Coastal Health District has reached out to two Black churches and a community health center in a predominantly Black neighborhood to arrange mobile vaccination clinics. It’s also using an existing hurricane evacuation registry of people with disabilities and health issues to help identify neglected neighborhoods around Savannah.

“There simply is not enough vaccine to go around,” Davis says. “I don’t have a formal document that says this is, you know, step A, B, C and D, but we have had reasonably in-depth discussions and we have, shall we say, a game plan on how we think this will go.”

There are other options in a public health game plan.

“Alternative facilities come to mind,” Jeni Hebert-Beirne, who leads the Collaboratory for Health Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health, wrote in an email to NPR. “Public libraries (an important source of free wifi), community centers/park districts, faith-based organizations, barber/beauty shops. These are places that people regularly convene/gather and places where people are more likely to feel they belong.”

Shivani Patel, a researcher tracking COVID-19 health equity issues at Emory University in Atlanta, is quick to acknowledge that the problem is too large for a state’s public health system to solve on its own. Like many across the country, Georgia’s public health system has seen funding cuts in recent years that have reduced its capacity to respond to the pandemic.

Washington is also promising new support for states: A million more doses weekly are on their way to pharmacies, and the White House’s COVID-19 czar said, “[Pharmacy] sites are selected based on their ability to reach some of the populations most at risk.” The new sites are expected to start receiving the doses next week.

“Every day is potentially more lives lost,” Patel said. “This is extremely urgent.”

WWNO’s Shalina Chatlani is a health care reporter for NPR’s Gulf States Newsroom; she reported from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. KUT reporter Ashley Lopez reported from Bastrop, Texas. WABE reporter Sam Whitehead reported from Atlanta.

Methodology: NPR gathered addresses of permanent vaccination sites from state websites. NPR verified these sites by contacting county and state health officials in the nine counties mentioned in this report. Officials were offered the opportunity to review the findings and point to additional testing sites. What counts as a vaccination site varies by state. NPR geocoded vaccination site locations using the Google Geocoding API joined with Census Bureau shapefiles to determine what census tracts they were within. For each county, the analysis included only census tracts within the county’s official boundaries. The Census Bureau provided demographic data per census tract. The main demographic measure referenced in this story was the percentage of the population that identifies as “white alone,” not Hispanic or Latino. For percent white, NPR calculated the number of sites for tracts above and below the median county’s percentage of white residents. Medians referenced are medians of census tracts and are not population totals, and may therefore differ slightly from population totals.

Source: Across The South, COVID-19 Vaccine Sites Missing From Black And Hispanic Neighborhoods

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Semotiuk: What Is The American Identity And How Should Immigrants Be Absorbed?

2021/02/03 Leave a comment

From Canadian immigration lawyer practicing in the USA, ending his commentary on a Canadian note:

It is no exaggeration to say that the United States always was, is now and always will be a nation of immigrants. From the first migrants who crossed the Bering Strait to Alaska and migrated down the West coast, possibly as early as around 20,000 years ago, to today’s immigrants coming from all the four corners of the earth, America was built by immigrants. In a sense, America is like a huge puzzle, completely finished on one end, but continually growing as new pieces are added to the other, representing newly arriving immigrants.

American Identity

These new immigrants are continually changing America’s identity. It is often said that America is a melting pot in which newly arrived immigrants merge with those already here to produce a new breed of Americans. To draw an analogy, the idea is that integrating new immigrants is like baking a cake. The ingredients of flour, shortening, eggs and sugar are mixed together to bake the American cake. Contrast that view, with say that of Canada’s, that sees itself as a cultural mosaic of brightly colored bits of ethnicity, culture, racial identity and language embedded side by side. These visual metaphors attempt to portray each country’s policies and how they incorporate new immigrants into their societies. Critics of these older formulations advance the notions of diversity and inclusion as better views on how immigration and cultural policies should deal immigrants to their societies.

Personal Identity

Just as immigrants are changing the identity of America, however, the country is also changing the identity of immigrants. Consider that on the first day of arrival on American soil, immigrants bring with them their identities forged back home. These identities may include a different language, culture, religion, dress and values – differences that are not ‘normal’ in North America. In time, many immigrants adapt and take on the ways of the majority in America. An example is that male Sikhs sometimes abandon their turbans and clothes and cut their hair. Externally they may look more like other typical Americans, but inside they may still identify with the Sikh faith and customs. By and large, such immigrants love America and are glad they were allowed to come here. Yet many also love their former homeland as well. There is nothing strange or wrong here: just as one can love her mother and father at the same time, she can also love America as well as Italy, for example, if that is where she is from.

What’s In A Name?

An interesting portrayal of how America influences personal identity is in former President Barack Obama’s book A Promised Land. While he was native born, as he grew up he was called Barry Obama. It was only later in life, as he came to grips with his identity that he changed his name to Barack Obama. This is a common identity experience – many Chinese immigrants adopt English first names to better cope with life in English-speaking America. I myself vacillate between Andy in everyday settings, and my native Andriy, related to my Ukrainian origins.

Being True To Yourself

The underlying question is can you live in America as your true self and still be an American? Or is America the kind of country that expects you to change your identity to ‘fit in?’ In other words, do you have to surrender your cultural identity to become an American? More importantly, is America welcoming when it comes to speaking other languages, or does America expect you to effectively forget your native tongue and just speak English? There are Americans with very different answers to these questions and different expectations related to newcomers to this country. This is what needs to be settled for America to find her way in these troubled times.

A Different View of America

Never was this difference in views about America more evident than in the presidency of Donald Trump. His evident hostility to Mexican and Muslim immigrants, and his apparent empathy, or at least tolerance, for those who want a White America, resulted in clashes on the streets of many cities and in Washington D.C. that seriously tarnished America’s image abroad. The efforts of historic figures like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant to eradicate white supremacists, not to mention the American civil war fought in part to put the legacy of slavery behind it, appeared to be forgotten. Even the efforts of more modern political leaders, like those of President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, President Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were all set back by the recent policies of the Trump administration. It may take years for America to heal and return to honoring its founding creed.

A Return To America’s Founding Creed

But return it must. The days of a country with a single race, single religion and a single culture are gone. They disappeared with the end of World War I and the collapse of the great empires that dominated world politics back then: Tsarist Russia, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman and German empires. Today America has no choice but to transform itself into the multi-ethnic, multiracial and diverse country it needs to be to play a leading role in the modern, multinational, multilingual and secular world. It is time for Americans to return to their founding principles in that regard.

Source: What Is The American Identity And How Should Immigrants Be Absorbed?

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Biden bets big on immigration changes in opening move

2021/01/22 Leave a comment

Good overview:

For the opening salvo of his presidency, few expected Joe Biden to be so far-reaching on immigration.

A raft of executive orders signed Wednesday undoes many of his predecessor’s hallmark initiatives, such as halting work on a border wall with Mexico, lifting a travel ban on people from several predominantly Muslim countries and reversing plans to exclude people in the country illegally from the 2020 census.

Six of Biden’s 17 orders, memorandums and proclamations deal with immigration. He ordered efforts to preserve Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program known as DACA that has shielded hundreds of thousands of people who came to the U.S. as children from deportation since it was introduced in 2012. He also extended temporary legal status to Liberians who fled civil war and the Ebola outbreak to June 2022.

The Homeland Security Department announced a 100-day moratorium on deportations “for certain noncitizens,” starting Friday, after Biden revoked one of Trump’s earliest executive orders making anyone in the country illegally a priority for deportations.

That’s not it. Biden’s most ambitious proposal, unveiled Wednesday, is an immigration bill that would give legal status and a path to citizenship to anyone in the United States before Jan. 1 — an estimated 11 million people — and reduce the time that family members must wait outside the United States for green cards.

Taken together, Biden’s moves represent a sharp U-turn after four years of relentless strikes against immigration, captured most vividly by the separation of thousands of children from their parents under a “zero tolerance” policy on illegal border crossings. Former President Donald Trump’s administration also took hundreds of other steps to enhance enforcement, limit eligibility for asylum and cut legal immigration.

The new president dispelled any belief that his policies would resemble those of former President Barack Obama, who promised a sweeping bill his first year in office but waited five years while logging more than 2 million deportations.

Eager to avoid a rush on the border, Biden aides signaled that it will take time to unwind some of Trump’s border policies, which include making asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for hearings in U.S. immigration court. Homeland Security said that on Thursday it would stop sending asylum-seekers back to Mexico to wait for hearings but that people already returned should stay put for now.

It “will take months to be fully up and running in terms of being able to do the kind of asylum processing that we want to be able to do,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, told reporters.

Despite the deliberative pace in some areas, Biden’s moves left pro-immigration advocates overjoyed. Greisa Martinez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream, called the legislation “the most progressive legalization bill in history.”

“We made it,” she said Wednesday on a conference call with reporters. “We made this day happen.”

It is even more striking because immigration got scarce mention during the campaign, and the issue has divided Republicans and Democrats, even within their own parties. Legislative efforts failed in 2007 and 2013.

More favorable attitudes toward immigration — especially among Democrats — may weigh in Biden’s favor. A Gallup survey last year found that 34% of those polled supported more immigration, up from 21% in 2016 and higher than any time since Gallup began asking the question in 1965.

Seven in 10 voters said they preferred offering immigrants in the U.S. illegally a chance to apply for legal status, compared with about 3 in 10 who thought they should be deported to the country they came from, according to AP VoteCast. The survey of more than 110,000 voters in November showed 9 in 10 Biden voters but just about half of Trump voters were in favor of a path to legal status.

Under the bill, most people would wait eight years for citizenship but those enrolled in DACA, those with temporary protective status for fleeing strife-torn countries and farmworkers would wait three years.

The bill also offers development aid to Central America, reduces the 1.2 million-case backlog in immigration courts and provides more visas for underrepresented countries and crime victims.

The proposal would let eligible family members wait in the United States for green cards by granting temporary status until their petitions are processed — a population that Kerri Talbot of advocacy group Immigration Hub estimates at 4 million.

Unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens who have been waiting outside the country for more than six years are just getting their numbers called this month. Waits are even longer for some nationalities. Married sons and daughters of U.S. citizens from Mexico have been waiting outside the United States since August 1996.

The bill faces an enormous test in Congress. Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, said Wednesday that he would lead the Senate effort. Skeptics will note that Ronald Regan’s 1986 amnesty for nearly 3 million immigrants preceded large numbers of new arrivals and say to expect more of the same.

In a taste of what’s to come, Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, described the bill as having “open borders: Total amnesty, no regard for the health and security of Americans, and zero enforcement.”

To be clear, enforcement has expanded exponentially since the mid-1990s and will remain. Biden’s bill calls for more technology at land crossings, airports and seaports and authorizes the Homeland Security secretary to consider other steps.

Biden warned advocates last week that they should not hold him to passage within 100 days, said Domingo Garcia of the League of United Latin American Citizens, who was on a call with the president.

“Today we celebrate,” Carlos Guevara of pro-immigration group UnidosUS said Wednesday. “Tomorrow we roll up our sleeves and get to work.”

Source: Biden bets big on immigration changes in opening move

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The ‘Racial Caste System’ At The U.S. Capitol

2021/01/21 Leave a comment

Of note. May be similar pattern in Canada:

After the Capitol was cleared of insurrectionists on Jan. 6, there was work to be done. You may have seen the video of a group of Capitol workers cleaning up the great halls, trying to restore order and dignity to rooms that had been trashed and defaced.

James R. Jones, an assistant professor of African American studies at Rutgers University, was watching as the mob rioted through the Capitol’s great rooms and hallways. After the tear gas cleared, he knew what was likely coming next: “It wasn’t lost on me that it was going to be Black workers who had to clean up after their mess.”

Jones was an intern at the Capitol during his undergraduate years at George Washington University, and was struck with how racially bifurcated it was back then. “Whites work for whites, Black staffers work for Black lawmakers, Latino staffers work for Latino members, and so on,” he says. And he says there is a largely overlooked community, almost exclusively people of color, who make sure the Capitol complex runs smoothly.

“There’s a whole army,” Jones points out, “workers who are mostly Black and Brown, who really are the custodians of Congress. They are making sure this vast physical complex is up and running for lawmakers, staff and visitors.”

Jones writes about the Capitol’s segregation in his forthcoming book, The Last Plantation: Racism in the Halls of Congress, which will be published later this year by Princeton University Press. I talked to him about the book’s provocative title, the people who work behind-the-scenes, and some of the things Congress could do to balance out its racial inequities. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

If I were to walk through the Capitol Hill complex and randomly pop into various Senate or House offices, what would I see? Do these places look like America?

Well, you’d see that it’s majority white. And part of that is Congress’s own fault. Congress does not collect demographic data on who it employs. So it becomes really hard to see and measure racial representation among senior staffers. I’ve been part of an effort to collect empirical demographic data on congressional staffers, whether they’re senior staffers or interns. What we’ve been able to see is that a lot of the staffers of color are employed by members of Congress who themselves are people of color.

It matters who’s in the room when policy decisions are being made because those decisions will affect everyone. Staffers are instrumental in helping lawmakers think through complicated issues, issues that will confront communities of color. So whether you’re talking about policing or climate change or even economic policy, it matters who’s in the room and it matters what perspectives are being heard and listened to as policy is being made.

You’ve titled your forthcoming book The Last Plantation. Where did that phrase come from?

The idea of Congress as the “last plantation” developed in the 1970s. Lawmakers, staffers and journalists began calling Congress the last plantation to draw attention to how Congress was exempt from federal workplace laws — laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial and gender discrimination in the workplace. This is a law that remade the country’s racial landscape in a really dramatic way, in many ways, catapulting Black men and women into workplaces previously dominated by white men.

Did anyone speak out against this do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do practice back then, or did they all just look away?

There were a few lawmakers who spoke out and understood that this was a problem. One was Senator John Glenn (D-OH). He was famous before he arrived to Congress; he was an astronaut. He was the first lawmaker to go on record calling Congress the last plantation in a Senate hearing in 1978 that aimed to apply federal workplace laws to Congress.

I can imagine some of his peers were pretty offended. How did that go over with them?

Not well! He later mentioned that some of his colleagues did not speak to him for several months after he said that.

But in many ways Glenn was right: Service workers on the Hill received a different set of benefits than the more visible members of Congress. Sometimes unionization gives workers assurances of some protections, like a minimum wage, health care, some kind of pension, due process in the event of a disagreement with a supervisor. Are the current non-legislative Hill workers part of a union? If they are, does that help?

That’s a complicated question. Some congressional workers are allowed to unionize and some aren’t. Those who are directly employed by Congress cannot unionize. Congress, again, has exempted itself from federal workplace laws that allow American workers to unionize. But there are certain workers who are not employed by Congress who are allowed to unionize, like cafeteria workers. This is a group that fought really hard in the 1970s and 1980s for the right to unionize. They had to use “the last plantation” as a metaphor to draw attention to how there was a racial caste system on Capitol Hill.

So in the cafeteria workers’ case, they embarrassed Congress into doing the right thing?

Again, it’s complicated. Members of Congress allowed them to unionize in the 1980s—but because of that, they couldn’t be federal employees anymore. So they became private employees of these third-party contractors who took over the dining services in Congress. As a result, they gained the right to unionize, but they lost their government health and other benefits. Notably as you mentioned, their federal pension.

On January 20, we’ll have a new president, and a number of new people in Congress and in the Senate. What would you ask them to consider, in terms of changing the demographics on Capitol Hill, as they start their terms?

I would ask them to be transparent about their hiring practices so both the Congress and the White House publish and collect demographic data about who they employ. What we know from other work settings is that these data are important for measuring the presence of discrimination. Without these data, we can’t really hold members of Congress or even the president accountable for who they hire—it becomes really complicated to do so in the absence of this data.

The second thing I’d ask is to make sure that the way in which they’re going about hiring and promotion is fair. Often it’s through social networks, and it’s these social networks that in many ways facilitate the hiring of white staffers; it’s just, you know, this insider’s game. So in many ways, we need to push back and have much more transparent and fair hiring and promotion processes, and make sure that people from different backgrounds are able to work in government.

Source: The ‘Racial Caste System’ At The U.S. Capitol

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U.S. Census Bureau director to resign amid criticism over citizenship data

2021/01/20 Leave a comment

Of note (former StatsCan head Munir Sheikh resigned over Conservative government’s replacement of the mandatory census with the less accurate voluntary National Household Survey):

Facing criticism over efforts to produce citizenship data to comply with an order from President Donald Trump, U.S. Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham said Monday that he planned to resign with the change in presidential administrations.

Dillingham said in a statement that he would resign on Wednesday, the day Trump leaves the White House and President-elect Joseph Biden takes office. Dillingham’s term was supposed to be finished at the end of the year.

The Census Bureau director’s departure comes as the statistical agency is crunching the numbers for the 2020 census, which will be used to determine how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets, as well as the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending each year.

In his statement, Dillingham said he had been considering retiring earlier, but he had been persuaded at the time to stick around.
“But I must do now what I think is best,” said Dillingham, 68. “Let me make it clear that under other circumstances I would be honored to serve President-Elect Biden just as I served the past five presidents.”

A Census Bureau spokesman said the agency’s chief operating officer, Ron Jarmin, will assume the director’s duties. Jarmin served in the same role before Dillingham became director two years ago.

Last week, Democratic lawmakers called on Dillingham to resign after a watchdog agency said he had set a deadline that pressured statisticians to produce a report on the number of people in the U.S. illegally.

A report by the Office of Inspector General last week said bureau workers were under significant pressure from two Trump political appointees to figure out who is in the U.S. illegally using federal and state administrative records, and Dillingham had set a Friday deadline for bureau statisticians to provide him a technical report on the effort.

One whistleblower told the Office of Inspector General that the work was “statistically indefensible.”

After the release of the inspector general’s report, leaders of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights called for Dillingham’s resignation, and several Democratic lawmakers followed suit.

Dillingham then ordered an indefinite halt to the efforts to produce data showing the citizenship status of every U.S. resident through administrative records.

During Dillingham’s tenure, the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census questionnaire, and the president issued two directives that advocacy groups said were part of efforts to suppress the participation of minorities and immigrants in the head count of every U.S. resident.

Trump’s first directive, issued in 2019, instructed the Census Bureau to use administrative records to figure out who is in the country illegally after the Supreme Court blocked the citizenship question. In the second directive last year, Trump instructed the Census Bureau to provide data that would allow his administration to exclude people in the U.S. illegally from the numbers used for divvying up congressional seats among the states.

An influential GOP adviser had advocated excluding them from the apportionment process in order to favor Republicans and non-Hispanic whites, even though the Constitution spells out that every person in each state should be counted. Trump’s unprecedented order on apportionment was challenged in more than a half-dozen lawsuits around the U.S., but the Supreme Court ruled last month that any challenge was premature.

Dillingham oftentimes appeared cut out of the loop on these census-related decisions made by the White House and Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau. At a congressional hearing in July, Dillingham said he wasn’t informed ahead of time before Trump issued his directive on the apportionment numbers.

The pandemic and errors found in the data have forced the Census Bureau to delay releasing the numbers used to apportion congressional seats until early March.

Last week, the Department of Justice and municipalities and advocacy groups that had sued the Trump administration over the 2020 census agreed to put the lawsuit on hold for 21 days so the Biden administration can take power and decide how to proceed with the census and the litigation.

“Director Dillingham’s departure will coincide with the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, providing the new administration the opportunity to appoint competent, ethical leadership committed to the scientific integrity of the Census Bureau,” Arturo Vargas, CEO of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund, said Monday.

Source: Census Bureau director to resign amid criticism over citizenship data

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The fourth wave of international student mobility

2021/01/18 Leave a comment

Of note, the possible implications on the relative attractiveness of Canada as a destination given reforms in the UK and expect reforms in the USA by the Biden administration:

International student mobility is shaped by a complex interplay of national contexts, external factors, institutional characteristics and individual preferences. The enormous impact of external factors has shaped the recent patterns of global talent mobility. 

The framework of ‘three waves of international student mobility’ analyses how external events have influenced the choices and preferences of globally mobile students. 

Wave I was shaped by the terrorist attacks of 2001, resulting in the United States losing its attractiveness as a country for international students to alternative destinations such as Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Wave II was triggered by the global financial recession in 2008 and prompted many US universities to become proactive in recruiting international students. 

A new political order defined wave III in 2016 in the wake of Brexit and the American presidential election. In particular, anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies in the US created many perceptual and real barriers for higher education institutions in attracting global talent.

Now, COVID-19 is impacting global higher education systems around the world and erecting new barriers for student mobility. At the same time, the future of the US and the UK visa and immigration policies may become more welcoming compared to the previous four years. This confluence of COVID-19 uncertainty and political reset suggests we are at the beginning of the fourth wave of international mobility. 

The confluence of factors shaping the fourth wave

The pandemic-induced economic uncertainty is reshaping prospective students’ journeys and prompting the consideration of alternatives. 

According to the Graduate Management Admission Council survey of prospective international students considering enrolling in a graduate management programme in 2021, two out of three (71%) were not changing their original plans. 

However, 17% were willing to consider a business school closer to home and 14% were willing to adopt online learning. This data suggests a potential rise in regional mobility and the adoption of online or even blended learning models for a segment of prospective international students. 

In addition, the political landscape in the US is likely to shift perceptions and hence the considerations of prospective international students. A pre-election poll of prospective international students (non-US citizens) suggests that Joe Biden’s election as US president could create a segment of prospective candidates to consider the US more favourably. 

A quarter of respondents (24%) in the poll indicated that they are more likely to pursue graduate management education in the US if Biden is elected president.

In the UK, European Union students who start a new course after August 2021 will no longer be eligible for home fee status. In its efforts to continue to attract global talent, the UK government is creating pathways for education and work with a points-based immigration system. The new system will treat EU and non-EU citizens equally. 

Specifically, the Graduate Route will allow international students to remain in the UK and work at any skill level for two years after completing their studies. By contrast, in 2012, the UK had eliminated post-study work rights, which hurt its competitiveness as a destination for a segment of international students seeking career opportunities as a part of their motivation to study abroad.

New directions for international student mobility

The visa and immigration policy changes in the US and the UK are likely to become more welcoming over time. This shift is a reversal from what triggered the third wave in 2016. 

Prospective international students may consider these destinations more favourably and, as a result, this may have a ripple effect, intensifying the competition for international student recruitment. 

In sum, COVID-19 uncertainty, coupled with political changes in the US and the UK, suggest the beginning of the fourth wave of international mobility. While COVID-19 is decelerating student mobility, new visa and immigration policies in the top two international student destinations may accelerate mobility towards the US and the UK. 

From prospective students’ perspective, this changing context could influence their preferences and journeys. In this context, it is even more critical for higher education institutions to monitor and track the shifting landscape and double-down on attracting and retaining global talent. 

Dr Rahul Choudaha is a higher education analyst based in the Washington DC area in the United States. He is a director at the Graduate Management Admission Council, an association of leading business schools. As a subject matter expert on mobility trends, student choices and enrolment strategies, Choudaha has delivered over 150 conference presentations and has been quoted over 300 times in global media.

Source: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-nl.php?story=20210111083621946

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Watchdog: DOJ bungled ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy

2021/01/16 Leave a comment

Better incompetence with cruelty than cruelty with competence. Stain on all those involved or complicit:

Justice Department leaders under President Donald Trump knew their 2018 “zero tolerance” border policy would result in family separations but pressed on with prosecutions even as other agencies became overwhelmed with migrants, a government watchdog report released Thursday has found.

The report from the inspector general for the Justice Department found that leadership failed to prepare to implement the policy or manage the fallout, which resulted in more than 3,000 family separations during “zero tolerance” and caused lasting emotional damage to children who were taken from their parents at the border. The policy was widely condemned by world leaders, religious groups and lawmakers in the U.S. as cruel.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, along with other top leaders in the Trump administration, were bent on curbing immigration. The “zero tolerance” policy was one of several increasingly restrictive policies aimed at discouraging migrants from coming to the Southern border. Trump’s administration also vastly reduced the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. and all but halted asylum at the border, through a combination of executive orders and regulation changes.

President-elect Joe Biden has said Trump’s restrictive immigration policies are harmful, but it’s not clear yet what he will do when he gets in office to alter the system. About 5,500 children have been separated from their parents since Trump took office, and many of those parents were deported without their children. Advocates for the families have called on Biden to allow those families to reunite in the United States.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued to stop the separations and a federal judge ordered the families to be reunited, but some are still not. Attorney Lee Gelernt, who has been working for years on the issue, said the practice was “immoral and illegal.”

“At a minimum, Justice Department lawyers should have known the latter,” Gelernt said. “This new report shows just how far the Trump administration was willing to go to destroy these families. Just when you think the Trump administration can’t sink any lower, it does.”

The “zero tolerance” policy meant that any adult caught crossing the border illegally would be prosecuted for illegal entry. Because children cannot be jailed with their family members, families were separated and children were taken into custody by Health and Human Services, which manages unaccompanied children at the border. The policy was a colossal mess; there was no system created to reunite children with their families. The watchdog report found that it led to a $227 million funding shortfall.

According to the report, department leaders underestimated how difficult it would be to carry out the policy in the field and did not inform local prosecutors and others that children would be separated. They also failed to understand that children would be separated longer than a few hours, and when that was discovered, they pressed on.

The policy began April 6, 2018, under an executive order that was issued without warning to other federal agencies that would have to manage the policy, including the U.S. Marshals Service and Health and Human Services. It was halted June 20, 2018.

The watchdog report found that judges, advocacy groups and even federal prosecutors raised concerns over the policy. But Sessions and others wrongly believed that arrests at the border would not result in prolonged separation and ignored the difficulty in reuniting families.

Notes from a conference call Sessions had with U.S. attorneys from border districts record the former attorney general saying in part: “We need to take away children; if you care about kids, don’t bring them in.”

Justice leadership looked at a smaller version of the policy enacted in 2017 in West Texas, but ignored some of the same concerns raised by judges and prosecutors at that time. Top leaders were focused solely on increased illegal activity and didn’t seek information that would have shown concerns over the family separations that would result.

The report follows other scathing investigations of the policy, adding to evidence that Trump administration officials knew a zero-tolerance policy would result in family separations and inflict trauma on immigrant parents and children.

A watchdog report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that children separated at the border, many already distressed by their life in their home countries or by their journey, showed more fear, feelings of abandonment and post-traumatic stress symptoms than children who were not separated. The chaotic reunification process only added to their ordeal.

In a November 2017 email, a top Health and Human Services official wrote that there was a shortage of “beds for babies” as an apparent result of separations in and around El Paso, Texas, that occurred months before the national policy began. Other emails suggest the Department of Homeland Security did not tell HHS officials about the pilot program, even as government facilities for minors run by HHS saw an uptick in children who had been taken from their parents. The emails were released by congressional Democrats in an October 2020 report.

Source: Watchdog: DOJ bungled ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy

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Snyder: The American Abyss: A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob and what comes next.

2021/01/12 Leave a comment

Good long and sobering read:

When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version.

Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible.

People believed him, which is not at all surprising. It takes a tremendous amount of work to educate citizens to resist the powerful pull of believing what they already believe, or what others around them believe, or what would make sense of their own previous choices. Plato noted a particular risk for tyrants: that they would be surrounded in the end by yes-men and enablers. Aristotle worried that, in a democracy, a wealthy and talented demagogue could all too easily master the minds of the populace. Aware of these risks and others, the framers of the Constitution instituted a system of checks and balances. The point was not simply to ensure that no one branch of government dominated the others but also to anchor in institutions different points of view.

In this sense, the responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of Congress. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed his electoral fiction to flourish. They had different reasons for doing so. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences.

Yet other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might actually break the system and have power without democracy. The split between these two groups, the gamers and the breakers, became sharply visible on Dec. 30, when Senator Josh Hawley announced that he would support Trump’s challenge by questioning the validity of the electoral votes on Jan. 6. Ted Cruz then promised his own support, joined by about 10 other senators. More than a hundred Republican representatives took the same position. For many, this seemed like nothing more than a show: challenges to states’ electoral votes would force delays and floor votes but would not affect the outcome.

Yet for Congress to traduce its basic functions had a price. An elected institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow. Members of Congress who sustained the president’s lie, despite the available and unambiguous evidence, betrayed their constitutional mission. Making his fictions the basis of congressional action gave them flesh. Now Trump could demand that senators and congressmen bow to his will. He could place personal responsibility upon Mike Pence, in charge of the formal proceedings, to pervert them. And on Jan. 6, he directed his followers to exert pressure on these elected representatives, which they proceeded to do: storming the Capitol building, searching for people to punish, ransacking the place.

Of course this did make a kind of sense: If the election really had been stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting, then how could Congress be allowed to move forward? For some Republicans, the invasion of the Capitol must have been a shock, or even a lesson. For the breakers, however, it may have been a taste of the future. Afterward, eight senators and more than 100 representatives voted for the lie that had forced them to flee their chambers.

Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.

Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. These last four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it.

My own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or otherwise, allows us to notice and conceptualize elements of the present that we might otherwise disregard and to think more broadly about future possibilities. It was clear to me in October that Trump’s behavior presaged a coup, and I said so in print; this is not because the present repeats the past, but because the past enlightens the present.

Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter.

Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself.

Some of his lies were, admittedly, medium-size: that he was a successful businessman; that Russia did not support him in 2016; that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Such medium-size lies were the standard fare of aspiring authoritarians in the 21st century. In Poland the right-wing party built a martyrdom cult around assigning blame to political rivals for an airplane crash that killed the nation’s president. Hungary’s Viktor Orban blames a vanishingly small number of Muslim refugees for his country’s problems. But such claims were not quite big lies; they stretched but did not rend what Hannah Arendt called “the fabric of factuality.”

One historical big lie discussed by Arendt is Joseph Stalin’s explanation of starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. The state had collectivized agriculture, then applied a series of punitive measures to Ukraine that ensured millions would die. Yet the official line was that the starving were provocateurs, agents of Western powers who hated socialism so much they were killing themselves. A still grander fiction, in Arendt’s account, is Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.

In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.”

The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and of experts but also of local, state and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme Court. It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and all the people who would have had to work on the cover-up.The Presidential Transition

Trump’s electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is defended not so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made some claims. The sensibility is that something must be wrong because I feel it to be wrong, and I know others feel the same way. When political leaders such as Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan spoke like this, what they meant was: You believe my lies, which compels me to repeat them. Social media provides an infinity of apparent evidence for any conviction, especially one seemingly held by a president.

On the surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It sees Trump as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, the pedophiles, the Satanists. More profoundly, however, it inverts the position of the strong and the weak. Trump’s focus on alleged “irregularities” and “contested states” comes down to cities where Black people live and vote. At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people.

It’s not just that electoral fraud by African-Americans against Donald Trump never happened. It is that it is the very opposite of what happened, in 2020 and in every American election. As always, Black people waited longer than others to vote and were more likely to have their votes challenged. They were more likely to be suffering or dying from Covid-19, and less likely to be able to take time away from work. The historical protection of their right to vote has been removed by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, and states have rushed to pass measures of a kind that historically reduce voting by the poor and communities of color.

The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American history.

When Senator Ted Cruz announced his intention to challenge the Electoral College vote, he invoked the Compromise of 1877, which resolved the presidential election of 1876. Commentators pointed out that this was no relevant precedent, since back then there really were serious voter irregularities and there really was a stalemate in Congress. For African-Americans, however, the seemingly gratuitous reference led somewhere else. The Compromise of 1877 — in which Rutherford B. Hayes would have the presidency, provided that he withdrew federal power from the South — was the very arrangement whereby African-Americans were driven from voting booths for the better part of a century. It was effectively the end of Reconstruction, the beginning of segregation, legal discrimination and Jim Crow. It is the original sin of American history in the post-slavery era, our closest brush with fascism so far.

If the reference seemed distant when Ted Cruz and 10 senatorial colleagues released their statement on Jan. 2, it was brought very close four days later, when Confederate flags were paraded through the Capitol.

Some things have changed since 1877, of course. Back then, it was the Republicans, or many of them, who supported racial equality; it was the Democrats, the party of the South, who wanted apartheid. It was the Democrats, back then, who called African-Americans’ votes fraudulent, and the Republicans who wanted them counted. This is now reversed. In the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible. Yet the common thread remains. Watching white supremacists among the people storming the Capitol, it was easy to yield to the feeling that something pure had been violated. It might be better to see the episode as part of a long American argument about who deserves representation.

The Democrats, today, have become a coalition, one that does better than Republicans with female and nonwhite voters and collects votes from both labor unions and the college-educated. Yet it’s not quite right to contrast this coalition with a monolithic Republican Party. Right now, the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people: those who would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians, many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on the grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it.

In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a handful of interests.

At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.Mitch McConnell Got Everything He Wanted. But at What Cost?Jan. 22, 2019

Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something.

Yet Trump never prepared a decisive blow. He lacked the support of the military, some of whose leaders he had alienated. (No true fascist would have made the mistake he did there, which was to openly love foreign dictators; supporters convinced that the enemy was at home might not mind, but those sworn to protect from enemies abroad did.) Trump’s secret police force, the men carrying out snatch operations in Portland, was violent but also small and ludicrous. Social media proved to be a blunt weapon: Trump could announce his intentions on Twitter, and white supremacists could plan their invasion of the Capitol on Facebook or Gab. But the president, for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, could not engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing. Trump could make some voters believe that he had won the 2020 election, but he was unable to bring institutions along with his big lie. And he could bring his supporters to Washington and send them on a rampage in the Capitol, but none appeared to have any very clear idea of how this was to work or what their presence would accomplish. It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around.

The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?

On Jan. 7, Trump called for a peaceful transition of power, implicitly conceding that his putsch had failed. Even then, though, he repeated and even amplified his electoral fiction: It was now a sacred cause for which people had sacrificed. Trump’s imagined stab in the back will live on chiefly thanks to its endorsement by members of Congress. In November and December 2020, Republicans repeated it, giving it a life it would not otherwise have had. In retrospect, it now seems as though the last shaky compromise between the gamers and the breakers was the idea that Trump should have every chance to prove that wrong had been done to him. That position implicitly endorsed the big lie for Trump supporters who were inclined to believe it. It failed to restrain Trump, whose big lie only grew bigger.

The breakers and the gamers then saw a different world ahead, where the big lie was either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The breakers had no choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in it. Because the breakers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim the brimstone and bile, the gamers were forced to reveal their own hand, and the division within the Republican coalition became visible on Jan. 6. The invasion of the Capitol only reinforced this division. To be sure, a few senators withdrew their objections, but Cruz and Hawley moved forward anyway, along with six other senators. More than 100 representatives doubled down on the big lie. Some, like Matt Gaetz, even added their own flourishes, such as the claim that the mob was led not by Trump’s supporters but by his opponents.

Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015. Unable to provide cover for their gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant to their daily purposes. But the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he is out of the way.

As Cruz and Hawley may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it. Just because you have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven a hard bargain. Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a banker, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he denounces elites. Insofar as Cruz was thought to have a principle, it was that of states’ rights, which Trump’s calls to action brazenly violated. A joint statement Cruz issued about the senators’ challenge to the vote nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down.

The big lie requires commitment. When Republican gamers do not exhibit enough of that, Republican breakers call them “RINOs”: Republicans in name only. This term once suggested a lack of ideological commitment. It now means an unwillingness to throw away an election. The gamers, in response, close ranks around the Constitution and speak of principles and traditions. The breakers must all know (with the possible exception of the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville) that they are participating in a sham, but they will have an audience of tens of millions who do not.

If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith.

Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.

Informed observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing white supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. Gun sales in 2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that political violence follows when prominent leaders of major political parties openly embrace paranoia.

Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system, depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it going for four years courts terrorism and assassination.

When that violence comes, the breakers will have to react. If they embrace it, they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will be divided, at least for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal reunification: A breaker candidate loses a narrow presidential election in November 2024 and cries fraud, the Republicans win both houses of Congress and rioters in the street, educated by four years of the big lie, demand what they see as justice. Would the gamers stand on principle if those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025?

To be sure, this moment is also a chance. It is possible that a divided Republican Party might better serve American democracy; that the gamers, separated from the breakers, might start to think of policy as a way to win elections. It is very likely that the Biden-Harris administration will have an easier first few months than expected; perhaps obstructionism will give way, at least among a few Republicans and for a short time, to a moment of self-questioning. Politicians who want Trumpism to end have a simple way forward: Tell the truth about the election.

America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a democratic republic if we tell lies about race, big or small. Democracy is not about minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking a system, but of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and counting their votes.

Source: https://nuzzel.com/digeststory/01092021/nytimes/the_american_abyss?e=6714311&c=zsH9ZmXNh5eMSaix9Dy7Kr6kBCZkryuqvNwFRsSqZy&utm_campaign=digest&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nuzzel

Filed under Government Tagged with , , , ,

USA: Sixty-nine percent of undocumented immigrant workers have jobs “essential” to fighting Covid, says study

2020/12/18 Leave a comment

Not surprising:

More than two-thirds of undocumented immigrant workers have frontline jobs considered “essential” to the U.S. fight against Covid-19, according to a new study released Wednesday by pro-immigration reform group FWD.US.

Sixty-nine percent of undocumented immigrant workers have jobs deemed essential by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the study, which is based on the 2019 American Community Survey by the Census Bureau. The study also estimated that nearly one in five essential workers is an immigrant.

By contrast, the Trump administration has argued that protecting American jobs against foreign workers is crucial to fixing the economic harm caused by Covid-19.

In April, Trump signed an executive order temporarily suspending immigration to “ensure that unemployed Americans of all backgrounds will be first in line for jobs as our economy reopens.” In June, Trump extended the order through the end of the year.

Undocumented immigrants make up 11 percent of agriculture workers, 2 percent of healthcare workers and 6 percent of food services and production workers, the study estimated.

Elizabeth Valencia, 54, on Temporary Protected Status that allows some Salvadorans to work and live in the United States, said she was the only geriatric nursing assistant serving 28 Covid-19 positive residents at a nursing home in Maryland earlier this year after an outbreak affected the staff.

Valencia has lived in the U.S. for 20 years and has worked in the nursing home for almost 18 years, starting as cleaning staff before she trained to be a nursing assistant.

Valencia said all of her co-workers on the floor where she cares for dementia patients are immigrants.

“[The residents] cannot survive by themselves,” she said. “They need us.”

The study also found that 70 percent of the immigrants working in essential jobs have lived in the U.S. for more than 10 years and 60 percent speak English.

Nearly one million of the essential workers are “Dreamers” protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the study found. Although DACA, enacted by former President Barack Obama, won a challenge by the Trump administration in a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, a new case in Texas could end the policy.

DACA recipient Jonathan Rodas works as an operating room assistant at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center while he is attending nursing school. Rodas and his entire household, including his undocumented stepfather, all tested positive for Covid-19 in July. They have now all fully recovered and no one was hospitalized.

But Rodas said he was especially worried about his stepfather needing to be hospitalized because he, like other undocumented immigrants, does not have health insurance. Rodas is now back to work. He said he is not surprised by the study that found one in five essential workers are immigrants.

“There’s not a lot of people out there who want to do that job because they’re scared of it,” Rodas said, talking about working in a hospital during a pandemic. “I’m scared of it. But I do it for the patient. The passion that I have to help people out.”

Source: Sixty-nine percent of undocumented immigrant workers have jobs “essential” to fighting Covid, says study

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Study: Structural racism has material impact on health of ethnic minorities, immigrants

2020/12/16 Leave a comment

Medical study:

Structural racism can lead to discrimination in many aspects of life including criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, political power, and education. A new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine examines the impact of structural racism on health and confirms that chronic exposure to stressors leads to a marked erosion of health that is particularly severe among foreign-born Blacks and Latinx. Investigators say largescale structural policies that address structural racism are needed.

Structural racism is defined as laws, rules, or official policies in a society that result in a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race.

There is evidence that structural racism has a material impact on the health of racial/ethnic minorities and immigrants. Comparing allostatic load–a multidimensional measure of the body’s response to stressors experienced throughout the life course–between immigrants and non-immigrants of different racial/ethnic backgrounds can help shed light on the magnitude of health differences between groups.”

Brent A. Langellier, PhD, Lead Investigator, Department of Health Management and Policy, Dornsife School of Public Health, Drexel University

Investigators examined patterns in allostatic load among US- and foreign-born Whites, Blacks, and Latinx. Using data from the 2005-2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), they collected data on a 10-item measure of cardiovascular, metabolic, and immunologic risk.

Measures of cardiovascular risk included systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, total cholesterol, and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Metabolic risk indicators included body mass index (BMI), blood sugar (HbA1c), urinary albumin, and creatinine clearance. Immunologic measures were white blood cell count and current or previous asthma diagnosis.

Based on the literature suggesting that, for many outcomes, immigrants have paradoxically good health that declines with time in the US, investigators examined aging gradients in allostatic load for each group. They also assessed whether allostatic load in each group changed across NHANES survey cycles. Their analyses were conducted in March 2020.

Results showed that allostatic load increased with age among all groups, but the increases were much steeper among foreign-born Blacks of both genders and foreign-born Latina women. The difference between the first and last survey cycle was most pronounced among US-born Black women (from 2.74 in 2005-2006 to 3.02 in 2017-2018), US-born Latino men (from 2.69 to 3.09), and foreign-born Latino men (from 2.58 to 2.87).

Aging gradients in allostatic load were steepest among foreign-born Blacks of both genders and foreign-born Latina women, and flattest among US-born and foreign-born Whites. Notably, foreign-born Latina women had among the lowest allostatic load at the youngest ages but among the highest at the upper end of the age distribution.

“Our findings add to the evidence that structural racism has a material impact on the health of racial/ethnic minorities and immigrants – and that this effect accumulates throughout the life course,” noted Dr. Langellier. “They further suggest that the disadvantage experienced by racial/ethnic minorities is compounded among minorities who are also immigrants, which erodes the health advantage that many immigrants have at early ages.”

These findings highlight the magnitude of the disparities in health that are produced by inequities in exposure to these risk and protective factors. “Collectively, our findings and evidence in the broader literature suggest that reducing these disparities will require big, structural policies that address structural racism, including inequities in upstream social determinants of health,” concluded Dr. Langellier.

Source: Study: Structural racism has material impact on health of ethnic minorities, immigrants

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

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