We begin today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson and his take on the president’s border policies:
The Trump administration has manufactured and exacerbated an immigration “crisis” to further the president’s most consistent goal: to Make America White Again.
Tens of thousands of Central American asylum seekers, even hundreds of thousands, do not constitute a serious crisis — not for a continent-spanning nation of 330 million, a nation built through successive waves of immigration. The migrants have severely taxed and at times overwhelmed the systems at the border that must process and adjudicate their claims for refuge, but this is a simple matter of resources. We need more border agents, more immigration judges, more housing.
President Trump, however, treats the migrant surge like an existential threat. “We can’t take you anymore. We can’t take you. Our country is full,” he said this month at the border in California. But, of course, our vast nation is anything but full. Instead of “can’t,” what Trump really means is “won’t.”
Catherine Rampell points out that including a citizenship question on the 2020 Census only makes the data less reliable:
The Trump administration wants to add, at the last minute, a new question to the census. I say “last minute” because usually new survey questions go through years of research, field-testing and public comment, as required by law and federal regulations.
This is to make sure that, among other things, any changes will not disrupt the accuracy of an enumeration mandated by the Constitution. [...]
The question the administration wants to shoehorn in without this process turns out to be particularly disruptive: It asks about citizenship. Given rising levels of government distrust among immigrant and ethnic minority populations, the question could be reasonably expected to depress response rates among these groups and lead to significant undercounts or otherwise inaccurate data.
Here’s a story to make your blood boil from David Leonhardt at The New York Times:
Amazon. Delta Air Lines. Chevron. IBM. General Motors. Molson Coors. Eli Lilly.
What do these companies have in common? They paid no federal taxes last year.
Thanks to President Trump’s 2017 tax law, the number of Fortune 500 companies that pay no federal taxes roughly doubled last year, to 60, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a research group. Some of them effectively paid negative taxes, because they received a refund.
Masha Gessen at The New Yorker examines the dangerous bullying and attacks on Representative Omar:
For the past three months, Americans have observed the process of drawing a target on a politician’s back. The politician is Representative Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota. Two of her fundamental positions—that the United States government and many of its elected officials support an apartheid regime in Israel-Palestine, and that the civil rights of Muslims in the U.S. are routinely trampled by entities that include the government—are as uncomfortable for many Americans as they are indisputable. Her way of expressing those positions—unabashed, and at times seemingly unaware of context—makes her the kind of disagreeable person who is easy for presumptive allies to shun. This, in turn, makes her vulnerable to attack.
On a final note, here’s USA Today’s editorial calling for the president to release his tax returns:
The possibility that the president could be paying a lower rate of taxes on considerably more wealth and income would be matter of considerable concern, particularly on April 15, the due date for taxes. The same would be true if Trump is profiting off his office or shaping policies based on personal gain.
Which is why the president should have released his taxes long ago, and why House Democrats have legitimate cause to demand them now.