Senator Bernie Sanders released his immigration plan on Tuesday. To read it — and every citizen should — is to be yanked back in time, to an America that not so long ago was having a reasonable immigration discussion and a time when major reform had strong bipartisan support and a shot at becoming law.
But since the immigration reform bill was killed, in 2013, the party that killed it — the Republicans — has dragged the immigration debate to grotesque depths that go well beyond the usual nativist bigotry. Republican presidential candidates are arguing, in all seriousness, about sealing the border with fantastical 2,000-mile fences and weaponized drones; merging state, local and federal authorities and private prisons into one all-seeing immigration police state; forcibly registering American Muslims; mass-deporting 11 million Mexicans and others in a 21st century Trail of Tears; and turning away thousands of refugees fleeing war and terrorism in the Middle East.
Mr. Sanders, the Vermont senator seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, turns away from the insanity. His plan starts with the right premise: that immigrants should be welcomed and assimilated, not criminalized and exploited. His proposals seek to uphold American values, bolster the rule of law, bolster the economy and protect and honor families.
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Mr. Sanders has done more than most of the other candidates to seed the campaign with good ideas. But he is still trailing Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose own immigration agenda delivers a similar list of worthy proposals, but with fewer specifics and less breadth than that of Mr. Sanders. We hope she is inspired to match his boldness.
In this bizarre campaign season, Republican candidates are playing reality-TV versions of themselves, filling the air with lies and irrational promises, while the Democrats — Mr. Sanders especially — are depicted by TV comics as cranks and loons. Mr. Sanders’s immigration plan is a powerful counterpoint to that stereotype. It is reality-based, moderate, practical and hopeful.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders is proposing a plan that would bring back undocumented immigrants who have been deported from the U.S. if they have close relatives living in the country.
The idea was part of the Vermont independent's wide-ranging immigration plan released on Tuesday that includes many ideas shared by his Democratic rivals, including more protections for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. But Sanders' plan is the first to extend protections to immigrants who have already been sent back to their home countries.
The proposal takes advantage of an existing tool called "parole in place." In the vast majority of cases, undocumented immigrants who want to apply to become legal residents in the U.S. must return to their home country to start the process. But the Department of Homeland Security has the power to grant "parole in place" status to some immigrants "for urgent humanitarian reasons," which would allow them to stay in the U.S. while their application is being considered.
Sanders' plan would ask Homeland Security officials to bring back people who have been "wrongfully deported." In an email Wednesday, his campaign said that would include undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children, or have spouses, children or parents who are U.S. citizens.
It’s hard not to be aware of Hillary Clinton’s presence on the rolling lakeside campus of Wellesley College, even 46 years after the school's most famous alum graduated. Her portrait hangs here in the political science department, alongside letters she sent to her former professors. At the campus archives, librarians are happy to cart out a stack of yellowed newspaper clippings and worn-out yearbooks documenting Clinton’s four active years on campus. The bookstore sells a Hillary Clinton action figure.
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For politically active Wellesley women, it doesn’t feel like a duty to vote Clinton, but it can feel like bucking the trend not to. But on a chilly Monday afternoon before Thanksgiving break, a loosely organized group of about half-a-dozen students gathered in the empty basement of the campus student center to discuss their against-the-grain support for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
They didn’t all know each other socially — the women quietly found each other through the Wellesley Students for Bernie Facebook page, which now has 275 members and counting (compared with 815 in the pro-Clinton student Facebook group). Many said their support for Sanders put them in the minority in their social circles, but they did not feel moved by the former secretary of state, despite living in the dormitories she once resided in and studying in the classrooms where she learned.
“My dad thinks my support for Bernie is totally misguided because I go to Wellesley,” admitted sophomore Claire Devlin. “He keeps saying it’s bad for the brand not to vote for Hillary, which I just think is the most absurd thing.”
A new NBC News poll showed Sanders with 16 percent support among black Democratic voters in November—that's double his October numbers, but still far behind Clinton, whose support among this demographic stands at 66 percent. In South Carolina—the first primary state where the average voter won't be the color of fresh snow—a Monmouth University poll released earlier this month put Sanders at 12 percent among the state's black voters, compared with 77 percent for Hillary Clinton.
The numbers inform a consensus among the political punditry that Sanders' campaign is essentially doomed, destined to stall out the moment the race moves beyond lily-white Iowa and New Hampshire. As FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver put it recently, the high polling numbers Sanders has been getting in these early voting states are simply a result of "idiosyncrasies of the first two states [that] match Sanders's strengths." That is, they're full of liberal white people.
And yet, the appeals Sanders has been making to black voters don't come out of nowhere. In fact, according to University of Wisconsin historian William Jones, who studies race and class in America, black communities are a good place for Sanders to look for voters whose priorities line up with his economic justice platform.
"African-Americans are the demographic among American voters who are the most receptive to the politics that Bernie Sanders is talking about," Jones said.
On economic policies, for instance, black voters overwhelmingly support the expansion of government programs and protections for workers. In one Center for American Progress poll released last year, 95 percent of black respondents said they would like to see an increase in the minimum wage and have it automatically rise with inflation, compared with 80 percent of all voters; 94 percent of blacks supported universal health care coverage, compared with 74 percent of voters overall. Meanwhile, the most liberal city in America is not Berkeley, California or Portland, Oregon, but Detroit, where 83 percent of the population is black.
So what if 60 percent of Hillary Clinton campaign donors are women? Bernie Sanders's campaign says that more women have given money to the Vermont senator's insurgent campaign.
As of the last reporting period at the end of September, some 301,154 women gave money to Sanders in his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, according to his campaign. That would top the approximately 240,000 women who have given money to Clinton since she launched her campaign.
All the analysis relies on numbers released by the campaigns, since they include small-dollar donors that the candidates are not required to itemize on federal filings.
Symone Sanders, a spokeswoman for the Sanders campaign, said the number shows "the grassroots enthusiasm for Senator Sanders is unmatched by any other candidate. The fact that so many women have decided to donate to the senator's campaign says that his policies and record are indeed resonating with women across the country."
Bernie Sanders recently identified himself as a feminist, making it clear that he intends to fight for women's rights if elected president. The Vermont senator told The Washington Post in September that while he knows many women want to see America led by a female president, voters need to choose the candidate most equipped to make a liberal feminist agenda a reality (and he believes that's him). Sanders does have a very pro-women track record, and he's consistently stood up for women throughout his bid for president. So, there are some things every feminist should know about Sanders' campaign before writing him off as a typical male candidate.
Sanders' campaign website marks women's rights as a key aspect of his political agenda. It reads: "Despite major advances in civil and political rights, our country still has a long way to go in addressing the issue of gender inequality. Many of the achievements that have been made for women’s rights in the 20th century have been under attack by the Republican party — denying women control over their own bodies, preventing access to vital medical and social services, and blocking equal pay for equal work. When it comes to the rights of women, we cannot go backwards. We have got to go forward."
Here are six things every feminist needs to know about Sanders' campaign in order to understand his stances on specific women's rights.
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He's Working On A Childcare Plan
Although he hasn't released the details yet, Sanders is working on a plan to make high-quality childcare and Pre-K available to all Americans. "It is unacceptable that the cost of a quality childcare program is out of reach for millions of Americans," his website says. Affordable childcare and Pre-K would allow more women to return to work after having children, if they want to.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is boosting the size of his campaign staff and increasing state budgets in his challenge against the frontrunner for the party's nomination, Hillary Clinton.
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Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver told Reuters that the campaign rewrote its budgets last week, doubling them to add more staff in each of the states holding nominating contests on March 1.
A dozen states hold votes that day and award delegates on a proportional basis rather than awarding all to the winner, so Weaver said the campaign calculated that it is important to compete hard in all of them rather than skip states where Sanders may not perform as well as Clinton.
Weaver said the campaign has also begun adding two dozen additional paid field staffers in the first contest in Iowa, which holds caucuses on February 1.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wants to reform the H-1B program, in part, by "substantially" raising prevailing wages.
Higher wages is one of the things sought by Sanders, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, in his just-released immigration platform
Higher prevailing wages is seen by critics of the H-1B program as a way to discourage businesses from using foreign labor to replace U.S. workers. "If there is a true labor shortage, employers must offer higher, not lower wages," said Sanders, in his platform.
Sanders, a critic of the H-1B program, also opposes the current system of "binding workers to a specific employer." Employers seek temporary work visas and it is not easy for a visa worker to move to, potentially, better job.
Sanders' plan also establishes a "whistleblower visa" for workers reporting labor violations.
Sanders doesn't go into great detail about his work visa proposal, but at least he brings it up. His main Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, doesn't discuss the H-1B visa at all in her "comprehensive" immigration platform.
When Bernie Sanders, a self-declared socialist, served as mayor here in the 1980s, he often complained that the United States had its priorities wrong, that it should be diverting money from the military to domestic needs like housing and health care.
So when dozens of antiwar activists blocked the entrance to the local General Electric plant because it was manufacturing Gatling guns to fight the socialists in Central America, the protesters expected the mayor’s full support.
Instead, he lined up with union officials and watched as the police made arrests, saying later that in blocking the plant, the activists were keeping workers from their jobs.
It was a classic example of how Mr. Sanders governed — as a pragmatist. He tended to talk globally but act locally, in this case choosing the real and immediate socialist principle of protecting workers over blocking the making of weapons to fight leftists abroad. Although he often shouted about foreign affairs, Mr. Sanders was consumed with running the city.
The mayor who was quick to condemn millionaires also imposed fiscal discipline here in this laid-back blue-collar university town of 38,000 residents. He used a budget surplus not to experiment with a socialist concept like redistributing wealth but to fix the city’s deteriorating streets. And he oversaw the revitalization of downtown, often working with big business.
Back then, the Democrats were considered the old guard, his adversaries; in many cases, Mr. Sanders aligned himself with Republicans to get things done.
“Even though he talks revolution, he’s an incrementalist,” said Richard Sugarman, a longtime friend and a professor of religion at the University of Vermont. “He knows that things will only be changed little by little, one by one. That’s why he’s been effective.”
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