Hi.
It’s been a good while since we had a little chat, but since we have a mid-term election coming up I thought it was about time we talked again. Sorry about not speaking up sooner but things have been a bit hectic around these parts with a Washington Post journalist being kidnapped, beaten to death, and butchered in Turkey, more than a dozen pipe bombs being sent to Democrats and the media (by someone who seems like a disturbed Trump “superfan,”) and the synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh (which was apparently a response to the “Soros funded” migrant caravan from Honduras), not to mention neo-Nazis and white supremacists getting arrested for violent beatings on both coasts.
Naturally, we don’t blame most of you guys for any of that. Stuff happens, right? Crazy people gonna be cray cray.
Even though I’m sure you could see how those of us on the receiving end of these kinds of threats and violence might be a little bit upset, angry, possibly enraged, even, I’m not writing to talk about any of that today. If you really mean it when you say things should be “more civil,” this is your chance to prove it.
I can understand how some things might have you somewhat upset too, things like the “caravan invasion” and the way that Justice Brett Kavanaugh was questioned during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Democrats were called “evil people” for that (even though all the available evidence and reports show that Sen. Dianne Feinstein never did share the contents of Dr. Ford’s letter with any other Democrats at all). I can understand that it was upsetting.
I think we can all admit it was ugly. Unseemly, even. I’m sure you would agree that the attempts by right-wing operatives to pay off women to falsely accuse special counsel Bob Mueller of sexual misconduct decades ago have you just as equally angry and upset as the Kavanaugh hearings, right? I’m sure you understand that Democrats aren’t responsible for the actions of a disgusting cop killer who was originally deported by Bill Clinton, then again by George Bush? People really are innocent until proven guilty, aren’t they? Allegations such as those should be from credible sources and be fully vetted, yes? Killers and bombers are mostly responsible for their own actions, aren’t they?
Okay, then.
So now that we have an agreement, let’s work with that. I do believe that in the end there are many more things that we all agree on as Americans, rather than disagree.
In my last open letter to Republicans I went over both the good and the bad of our current situation in America. This time I want to narrow things down to just three subjects: the economy, health care, and immigration, which I admit will take a little time to get through, so bear with me. We know that most of you don't care about the specific words that Trump says, which many of the rest of us find offensive and inflammatory. We’re told you guys don’t take him “literally,” so I won’t bother to complain about his “enemy of the people” rants, his fear-mongering and race-baiting, or any of the other ridiculous things he says because I understand part of why he does that is specifically to get under the skin of Democrats and to perhaps to make (some) Republicans chuckle. Instead, I’m going to focus on what his actual policies are and how they have had some benefits, as well as some of the damage and danger they can create.
I know that “rust belt” Americans take a lot of heat from the so-called elite for being “low information” voters, but I don’t think that’s always the case. You aren’t babies, and you aren’t dumb. I think you guys can figure out fact from falsehood, truth from lies, and make up your own mind. I just don’t think many of you probably bother to even hear our side of the argument anymore. How can you if we never even try to talk to you? Other Democrats will argue that I’m wasting my time even trying to reach out, that no one will be willing to even listen, and that may be true. I know you don’t have a reason to trust what a Democrat-American has to say, but then we don’t have much reason to trust you guys, either. Against my better judgement, I’m going to ignore all that.
We also know that you probably don’t trust the “mainstream media," just as we don’t trust right-wing media sources including Fox News, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Newsbusters, Gateway Pundit, Project Veritas, and Sinclair Media et al. Fine.
I understand that they exist as a supposed counterbalance to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post as media sources, and they figure that their obvious right-ward bias is a counterbalance to the left-ward bias of the others.
At a certain point, we have to get past all that.
Whether something comes from NBC or Breitbart doesn’t prove that it’s true or not true. That requires further examination of the details and the sources. Does the story stand up to scrutiny? Either it does or it doesn’t, and you can only discover that by comparing it to other sources and other stories. Only when you have the full picture can you see what you’re looking at rather than just individual pieces of the puzzle.
If each of us only listens to one set of media which is tailored narrowly for us, we are only hearing half the story. If we only let only one set of media sources inform us then we aren’t listening with a critical ear and we’re aren’t making decisions based on all the available information. only that part of it which is convenient for what we already believe, and is only part of one agenda or another. We all should be doing some of our own research, our own investigation, and our own fact-checking. Knowing the whole truth requires knowing the whole story, even the parts we don’t automatically like or agree with. If we all are willing to listen with an open mind I trust that nearly all of us are capable of putting aside our presumptions and discovering something we may not have really known before. We might even discover the truth, but you have to go looking for it first, not assume you already know it.
Communication is a two-way street.
Also, I’ll have you know that Democrats are just as frustrated by the so-called mainstream media as you guys are because although you may believe they are “left-leaning,” we people who are actually on the left feel that they constantly fail to tell our story correctly and often pander very much to the right just to try and not seem to be too “left-leaning.”
Therefore, we have to tell that story ourselves on sites such as this one.
I pretty much guarantee you will not have heard 80 to 90 percent of what I have to say on any of those outlets, not even on CNN. Just to make things simple I will try to focus on provable and verifiable facts and figures, many of which I’ve previously written about, not just opinions or beliefs. Everyone is welcome to state their opinions of what I present or their own “alternative facts” in the comments as they see fit.
First up: the economy. Last time I wrote an open letter just over a year ago the unemployment rate was 4.3 percent. Now it has dropped down to 3.7 percent, which I’m sure we can agree is a good thing.
Looking back over the past year to when Trump was inaugurated, his total improvement in unemployment has been 1.1 percent.
Go Team America. We did it.
There has been quite a bit of celebrating of this accomplishment, particularly on the Republican side. I’m certain you’re curious why Democrats aren’t quite as happy about it all. Maybe there is some reluctance to grant Trump credit, but I’m not going to assume that’s the only reason. There could be a certain amount of petulance there, although I think being called “treasonous” over it is going a bit far. If you’re actually curious and want to understand, for example, why Democrats didn’t stand up and applaud during this year’s State of the Union address when he celebrated an unemployment rate of 4.1 percent in January 2018, I can tell you.
One constant theme throughout President Trump’s speech, in particular for the kids, was the decision by Democrats not to stand and applaud, especially on issues like border security or historic low unemployment rates, or some of the more emotional personal stories the president highlighted.
“I just wonder if they thought this through past their politics, on many of these things all of America is applauding while they are sitting,” said 14-year-old Natalie.
Part of the reason for this reaction was the improvements made in the unemployment rate over the previous eight years.
Do you see where we were before we reached 4.8 percent unemployment in 2017? We were at 10 percent in 2009 due to the great recession, when Barack Obama became president. During his two terms, unemployment came down by a total of 5.2 percent, which is just about 7.4 times greater than the 0.7 percent improvement from 4.8 to 4.1 percent change that had happened under Trump at time of his speech in January 2018. As of now, it has improved another 0.6 percent to 3.7 percent, but It’s also clear from this larger chart that the overall rate of improvement didn’t really change when Trump came into office. If anything it actually slowed down slightly, but that’s understandable considering how low it has become.
Similarly, the number of jobs generated during Trump’s first 18 months isn’t quite as high as those generated in Obama’s last 18 months. It’s close but slightly lower.
“Nobody would have believed these numbers if I said them during the campaign,” Trump told a cheering crowd of members of the National Federation of Independent Business on Wednesday.
But when it comes to jobs, Trump is like the wealthy heir who, as the saying goes, was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.
Unemployment rates for blacks, Latinos and all Americans began a steady decline in late 2009 that has continued since Trump took office. The same with the plunge in first-time claims for unemployment benefits.
[...]
And the 3.4 million jobs created in the 18 months from December 2016 through May of this year isn’t such an unbelievable number. The U.S. economy added 3.7 million net new jobs in the 18 months immediately before that.
Democrats weren’t unhappy that things have improved. That little 0.7 percent increase was nice and all, but they were really unhappy that Trump was taking credit for a building that someone else had put together brick by brick, piece by piece for the previous eight years. Democrats built that unemployment rate, without any help from Republicans, and they honestly feel that he just showed up when all the hard work was already done and slapped a big gold “TRUMP” sign on the side.
Sorry, but he didn’t build that.
This tendency is something that seems to be a habit of his considering a recent lawsuit against the Trump companies that alleges that they repeatedly made exaggerated and false claims about how well their businesses were doing in order trick people into investing in and buying from them.
At the center of the lawsuit are three separate business entities: ACN, a telecommunications firm that gave Trump money in exchange for endorsing its products; the Trump Network, which was responsible for the ill-fated Trump Vitamins nutritional regimen; and the Trump Institute, a Trump University-like entity that the lawsuit claims offered “extravagantly priced multiday training seminars” that purportedly gave attendees access to Trump’s “secrets” to selling real estate.
Attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Andrew Celli Jr., who are representing plaintiffs in the lawsuit, tell the New York Times that their case “connects the dots at the Trump Organization and involves systematic fraud that spanned more than a decade, involved multiple Trump businesses and caused tremendous harm to thousands of hardworking Americans.”
Among other things, the suit alleges that a hospice worker identified as “Jane Doe” was tricked into investing in ACN in 2014 after watching Trump personally endorse the company in a promotional video. The complaint alleges that Doe spent thousands of dollars to attend ACN seminars in multiple cities across the United States — and only earned $38 from all the training she’d received in selling its products.
This is generally known as “fraud”—allegedly, of course. However the legal system works this out, big promises with fairly small returns seem to be a thing with him. Just see Trump University, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump Shuttle, the Trump Taj Mahal, and so on and so forth.
Anyhoo, I think we can agree that the GDP is doing well this year, although not quite a nicely as some Republicans have been claiming (more than 4 percent for multiple quarters).
Well, It hasn’t done that.
As you can see, second quarter GDP did reach 4.2 percent even if it has already fallen back to 3.5 percent for the third quarter. That’s also good. It’s not bad, but it’s not what we were promised. And if we again look back over the last 10 years, it’s not exactly record-breaking.
There were many low points back then. But there were also several high points in 2009, 2011, and 2014 where GDP exceeded 4.0 percent. It even reached 5.0 percent in the second quarter of 2014. For the most part, it began to finally stabilize in 2015-2016, before the election. So yes, being at 3.5 percent right now is nice—but it’s not historic or unprecedented. This also isn’t the first time that GDP rate has been higher than unemployment, either.
Just for the record, we could have reached this point sooner. Much sooner.
If, for example, Republicans hadn’t completely blocked the American Jobs Act and the $478 billion Infrastructure Bank Bill, things would have been better years ago.
On September 8, 2011 — one year ago tomorrow — President Obama laid out a series of policy proposals known collectively as the American Jobs Act. The plan included stimulus spending in the form of immediate infrastructure investments, tax credits for working Americans and employers to encourage consumer spending and job growth, and efforts to shore up state and local budgets to prevent further layoffs of teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public safety officials.
The American Jobs Act never became law, however, because Republicans opposed it from the start, blasting it as another form of “failed stimulus” that wouldn’t help the economy. (They ignored the fact that the first “failed stimulus,” the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, wasn’t a failure at all.) One month later, the GOP blocked the bill in the Senate, preventing the creation of more than a million jobs and the added growth that multiple economists predicted would occur if the bill passed:
— Moody’s Analytics estimated the American Jobs Act would create 1.9 million jobs and add two percent to gross domestic product.
— The Economic Policy Institute estimated it would create 2.6 million jobs and protect an addition 1.6 million existing jobs.
— Macroeconomic Advisers predicted it would create 2.1 million jobs and boost GDP by 1.5 percent.
— Goldman Sachs estimated it would add 1.5 percent to GDP.
We could have been 2 million jobs and 1.5 percent in GDP ahead way back in 2012-2013, when GDP at the time peaked above 3 percent at least three times, and we would be already rebuilding our crumbling roads, bridges, and infrastructure. But unfortunately we didn’t and we aren’t because Republicans said “No.”
The American people were hurting, and parts of our nation are literally falling apart. They knew we were hurting, and they refused to lift a finger mostly because they knew Barack Obama would have gotten credit for it and they couldn’t have that.
I’m not just saying that because I have a bad opinion of Republicans. I’m saying that because they said that’s just what they were going to do back in 2009.
At first, we thought organized Republican recalcitrance against the president started in October 2010 after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) famously said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Then came Robert Draper’s book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives,” this spring. As the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reported in April, the book reports on a dinner of leading Republicans held the night of Obama’s inauguration.
For several hours in the Caucus Room (a high-end D.C. establishment), the book says they plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama’s legislative platform.
"If you act like you're the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” Draper quotes [Rep. Kevin] McCarthy [R-Calif.] as saying. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”
And Stein highlights this useful passage from Draper’s book:
Show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies. (Eight days later, Minority Whip Cantor would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against Obama’s economic stimulus plan.)
And that’s exactly what they did. The point is that while the unemployment rate came down by almost 6 percent during that time (which Republicans did everything they could to stop), they did everything they could to hurt Obama by hurting the country when it was most vulnerable. Consequently, Democrats were not really enthused to applaud unemployment dropping another measly 0.7 percent after those long, hard-fought years where it was all the way up at 10 percent.
Now If you think the AJA and the IBB were “pork barrel” spending, fine, that’s an argument that can be made—but exactly what are we getting out of Trump’s $1 trillion tax cut?
The fact is not everything about the current economic situation is perfect. Although there are some more jobs, it hasn’t actually translated into more money in the pockets of most Americans. Apparently, 99 percent of companies who benefited from the Trump tax break are hoarding the money rather than raising wages.
Aon’s survey of 1,000 companies was reported by the Wall Street Journal, and is consistent with other surveys of how companies are using the massive giveaway orchestrated by Trump and Republicans in Congress.
A separate poll of 1,500 companies, conducted by Mercer LLC, showed a mere 4 percent of companies “are redirecting tax savings to budgets for bigger paychecks in the coming year,” reports the Journal.
If the GOP-financed kickbacks aren’t going into the wallets of workers, where is it going?
Straight into the pockets of wealthy Wall Street CEOs, or course.
Politico reviewed SEC filings since the passage of the GOP tax scam and found CEOs have experienced a “Trump bump” in their bank accounts since Trump signed the tax scam into law.
Big banks are also hoarding cash, and rich Wall Street corporations are funneling billions of dollars into stock buyback schemes, which mainly benefit wealthy Wall Street investors.
Yes, corporate profits are up largely due to stock buy backs prompted by the tax cuts, but has that improved wages? Well, to look at another angle, the Wall Street Journal says that it has because wages have gone up by 2.8 percent this year, which they say is the best increase since September 2008 when the great recession began. Yay.
The Labor Department’s employment-cost index rose 2.8% in the year to June compared, the government said Tuesday. Wages and salaries, which account for about 70% of all employment costs, also rose 2.8% from a year earlier, the strongest gain for both measures since September 2008.
Since the end of the most recent recession, U.S. unemployment has fallen to 4% in June from nearly 10% nine years earlier. Wage growth, stubbornly sluggish for years following the 2007-2009 downturn, has picked up as the labor market has tightened and employers have raised pay to attract and retain workers.
Unfortunately, the Wall Street Journal happened to completely forget that an increase of 2.9 percent still puts wages below the rate of inflation.
Wages aren’t growing when adjusted for inflation, a new report released Tuesday showed.
According to the Labor Department, median weekly earnings fell 0.6% in inflation-adjusted dollars in the second quarter, compared to the same time period of 2017.
If you don’t trust that particular source on the impact of inflation on wages, here’s another example on that subject from Forbes [who are not known for making Democrat-friendly arguments].
News reports noted that the wage growth hit a nine-year high. And that's good, given its anemic movement for years. However, that is a single number.
Before declaring victory, it would be sensible to put things into context. Below is a graph of the wage numbers from the BLS via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The reported figures are nominal numbers, without any correction for inflation; with correction they are called real. Using some St. Louis Fed techniques for getting a graph adjusted by the consumer price index (nominal figures divided by CPI) to get real wages, here is the year-over-year percentage change in average hourly earnings.
If your pay goes up by 2.8 percent and price inflation goes up by 3.4 percent, did you really get a raise? I don’t think so.
Those tax cuts have also had another impact: they’re driving the the deficit back up to $1 trillion because corporate tax receipts are now at at a 75-year low.
The amount of corporate taxes collected by the federal government has plunged to historically low levels in the first six months of the year, pushing up the federal budget deficit much faster than economists had predicted.
The reason is President Trump’s tax cuts. The law introduced a standard corporate rate of 21 percent, down from a high of 35 percent, and allowed companies to immediately deduct many new investments. As companies operate with lower taxes and a greater ability to reduce what they owe, the federal government is receiving far less than it would have before the overhaul.
And this is what the deficit is looking like now.
Trump has argued that the economy has “surged forward”—although there is no real evidence of any surge in 2017—simply because he has drastically cut regulations. Well, that has a downside, also.
Using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's own numbers, two Harvard scientists have calculated that 80,000 more lives will be lost per decade if President Donald Trump's administration fulfills its plans to roll back clean air and water protections.
The researchers, terming their tally "an extremely conservative estimate," also estimated that the repeal of regulations will lead to respiratory problems for more than 1 million people. Their essay was published Tuesday.
More jobs, kinda, with stagnant and shrinking wages, sorta, and an exploding deficit at the cost of less Americans living, and more of them with respiratory problems. Does that seem like a fair trade-off? I’m not so sure that it is.
There’s also a certain risk that even the good things may be in danger as a result of Trump’s tariff war, which could potentially lead to thousands of job losses, according to the auto industry.
A coalition representing major foreign automakers including Toyota Motor Corp, Volkswagen AG, BMW AG, and Hyundai Motor Co, said the tariffs would harm automakers and U.S. consumers. The administration in May launched an investigation into whether imported vehicles pose a national security threat and President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to quickly impose tariffs.
“The greatest threat to the U.S. automotive industry at this time is the possibility the administration will impose duties on imports in connection with this investigation,” wrote the Association of Global Automakers representing major foreign automakers. “Such duties would raise prices for American consumers, limit their choices, and suppress sales and U.S. production of vehicles.”
The group added: “Rather than creating jobs, these tariffs would result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs producing and selling cars, SUVs, trucks and auto parts.”
We’ll have to see if that actually takes place, but these are the reasons that Democrats did not leap to their feet to applaud “Trump’s economy,” just so you know.
Health care is also a large concern this election cycle, and we know that it can be a headache. Premiums are still higher than anyone would really like them to be, which we can all agree on—but technically they seem to be somewhat higher in Republican-dominated states because they choose not to implement their own exchanges, choose not to expand Medicaid, and also didn’t implement insurance reforms including rate review power that would have given state Insurance commissioners more leeway to control premium prices.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires that insurers planning to significantly increase plan premiums submit their rates to either the state or federal government for review. The threshold for this requirement is 10%.
The rate review process is designed to improve insurer accountability and transparency. It ensures that experts evaluate whether the proposed rate increases are based on reasonable cost assumptions and solid evidence and gives consumers the chance to comment on proposed increases.
According to our own Charles "Brainwrap” Gaba, the result of all this resistance to fully implementing the ACA as it was designed has resulted in an average 11 percent increase in premiums for these states.
Charles Gaba, that indispensable tracker of ACA rates and policies, has fleshed out this phenomenon by comparing the weighted average premium increases for states that implemented the ACA cooperatively, even enthusiastically, with the increases in states that have resisted. (Gaba weights the increases by the enrollments of the insurance companies; in other words, a rate increase by a company with 100,000 customers counts more than one by a company with a few hundred customers.)
He finds that the weighted average rate increase for states that expanded Medicaid is 22.1% for 2017; among the 19 states that still have not expanded the program, it’s 28.9%. In states that formed their own marketplace to enroll Obamacare consumers, the increase is 17.3%; among those that rely on the federal government’s exchange, healthcare.gov, it’s 28%.
Finally, among states that refused to allow consumers to remain in pre-ACA insurance plans that didn’t comply with the new law as of 2014, the weighted average increase is 18.8%; among those that capitulated to hysteria over canceled pre-ACA insurance plans by grandfathering the non-compliant plans for as long as three years, it’s 28.4%.
Put these three factors together, and the states that fully embraced Obamacare will see increases of 18.2%. Those that fully resist will see increases of 29.8%.
Despite all this there actually is some good news about the ACA and the healthcare exchanges this year. Apparently, the premium rates appear to have stabilized and are no longer going to be growing by double digits, as they had for the first six years of the exchange system.
Consumers who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act markets may be pleasantly surprised this fall as average premiums are forecast to rise much less than in recent years.
The price of a 2019 policy sold on the ACA exchanges will increase less than 4 percent, according to an analysis of preliminary filings from insurers in all 50 states by ACASignups.net, a website and blog run by analyst Charles Gaba that tracks ACA enrollment and insurer participation.
And those insurers are expanding their offerings.
"The news about the marketplace this year is very good, both in terms of the premium increase and extent of carrier participation," says Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (The foundation supports NPR's health care coverage.)
She says premiums overall are rising at about the same rates as medical inflation. That modest rise for insurance is a big change from the last few years when prices rose in the double digits.
Stabilizing the system is a good thing. Hopefully, nothing will happen that might destabilize things again, like for example Trump ordering the availability of “short-term” low-cost plans which will pull customers out of the main exchange and potentially drive exchange premium prices back up, just as canceling the individual mandate potentially could. Certainly, these short-term plans are cheaper and that’s good news for cash-strapped people. On the other hand, they also don’t really cover anything, including pre-existing conditions.
The rap on short-term plans is that they are often “junk” plans that collect premiums from people who feel they need to have insurance, but might not understand their terms. This is why the Obama administration passed the 2016 regulations in the first place, as short-term insurance purchases skyrocketed with the advent of the individual mandate. The plans’ offerings, however, aren’t really regulated by Obamacare—or by previous laws, for that matter—and can contain provisions that make little to no sense and are designed to provide minimum real benefits. For example, of the short-term plans the Kaiser Family Foundation recently studied, all covered cancer treatment, but less than 30 percent covered prescription drugs. None of them covered maternity care. In general, short-term plans can and often do deny patients for preexisting conditions.
Protection for pre-existing conditions is a key component of the ACA and many Republicans are now campaigning with the claim that they will “protect” this provision even though they have voted literally 70 times to repeal the ACA in its entirety.
There has been some dispute about the exact amount of times Republicans have backed attempts to diminish Obamacare in some way, whether through a "skinny" repeal which curbs critical provisions to Obama’s health care policy, or through an outright replacement like the House’s 2017 "American Health Care Act." MSNBC Producer Steve Bennen placed the vetoed legislation at #62, though he admits "that may be off by a vote or two."
Attempts by the Republican party to limit or kill Obamacare entirely range from minor provisions or amendments included in other, larger bills, to landmark replacement plans that would each strip upwards of 20 million Americans off their insurance plans.
There may have been over 70 Republican-led attempts to repeal or otherwise undermine the Affordable Care Act since it was signed into law by Trump’s predecessor, with each major replacement or rollback attempt typically including provisions that would strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood as well. But, of the 70 documented attempts to repeal Obamacare, one statistic is indisputable: zero have been successful.
Many of those votes would have completely repealed protections for pre-existing conditions, or else created special “high-risk pool” plans for them, which would be literally 100 times more expensive than the average plan.
Prior to implementation of the ACA, insurers selling individual insurance commonly practiced medical underwriting, excluding people with pre-existing conditions or charging them higher premiums. Medical underwriting effectively excludes a large proportion of total health care spending from the insurance pool. This can permit less expensive policies for healthier individuals, but requires some other mechanism, such as high-risk pools, to help finance costs attributable to the sickest individuals if they are to be covered. Enrollee premiums can finance a portion of the cost of such programs, but by definition, significant additional funding will also be required because the cost of each person covered will be substantial. For example, based on the distribution illustrated in Figure 1, per person costs in the top 10th percentile are more than 100 times, on average, that of people in the bottom 50th percentile.
Trump has recently stated that he supports maintaining protections for pre-existing conditions, even as his short-term plans actually take them away. His administration has currently refused to fight a lawsuit by 20 Republican state attorneys general that would remove exactly those protections by declaring the entire ACA un-constitutional, since his tax bill killed the individual mandate.
President Donald Trump's promise to protect pre-existing conditions coverage, perhaps the most popular Affordable Care Act provision, rings hollow. That's because his administration is backing a lawsuit that would scrap it.
[...]
His administration's actions suggest otherwise. The Justice Department has declined to defend the health care law in court against a suit from 20 GOP-led states challenging Obamacare's constitutionality. They argue the rest of the law does not hold up after Republicans rolled back its individual mandate provision last year. By doing so, the Trump administration tacitly supported the suit, which could roll back Obamacare's coverage guarantees for people with pre-existing conditions if it succeeds.
Many of us agree that the individual mandate was a pain to deal with for most people. Many of us Democrats never supported it—including Barack Obama, originally—because, like most of the ACA plan, it was a “personal responsibility” idea that originally came from the Koch Brothers-funded Heritage Foundation. Even though simply ignoring it only meant you had to pay a small tax penalty that the IRS wasn't really allowed to actually enforce (except to deduct it from your refund if you chose to go without health care and then failed to pay the penalty upfront). We Democrats actually wanted Medicare-for-all, or at least some type of public option in the first place. The ACA was a compromise to try and get Republicans on board by offering them their own plan. Obviously, that didn’t work out because Republicans (as noted above when they decided to oppose everything from Obama) simply wouldn't take their own plan for an answer.
However, there was a good reason that the mandate existed, one that even caused Obama to eventually change his position, and now that it’s gone it just might have the same negative effect on premiums that many people had warned it was going to have.
Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price used to say that Obamacare's individual mandate increased health-care costs. Now he's saying Congress' decision to repeal it could actually increase costs.
Lawmakers repealed the individual mandate, which penalized people who did not purchase health insurance, in the GOP tax reform bill President Donald Trump signed into law in December. The change goes into effect next year.
"There are many, and I am one of them, who believes that that actually will harm the pool in the exchange market because you'll likely have individuals who are younger and healthier not participating in that market," he said. "And, consequently, that drives up the cost for other folks in that market."
While we’re still waiting to see the full impact of these changes on premiums, one thing certainly has changed: fewer people now have health care.
Under Obamacare, 22 million Americans gained health care that they previously couldn’t afford or were blocked from getting due to pre-existing conditions. Under Trump about 4 million Americans have lost their healthcare, and most of them have been Republicans.
About 4 million Americans lost health insurance in the last two years, according to a new survey from the Commonwealth Fund, which attributed the decline to actions taken by the Trump administration.
[...]
Additionally, people who identified as Republican also had significantly higher uninsured rates.
The uninsured rate among Republicans rose from 7.9 percent in 2016 to 13.9 percent in the current survey period, which was conducted between February and March of 2018. The uninsured rate among those who identify as Democrats stood at 9.1 percent, statistically unchanged from 2016.
If the ACA—also known as Obamacare, in case you’ve forgotten—is ultimately repealed, about 22 million Americans could lose all access to care and that could kill between 27,000 and 36,000 people per year.
Nearly 36,000 people could die every year, year after year, if the incoming president signs legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act.
This figure is based on new data from the Urban Institute examining how many people will become uninsured if the law is repealed, as well as a study of mortality rates both before and after the state of Massachusetts enacted health reforms similar to Obamacare.
….
The Massachusetts study examined how much mortality rates dropped after that state enacted its Obamacare-like reforms in 2006. It estimated that “for every 830 adults gaining insurance coverage there was one fewer death per year.” Applying this formula to Urban’s estimation that nearly 30 million people will become uninsured if the fiscal provisions of Obamacare are repealed indicates that about 36,000 will result ever year from such a repeal.
Alternatively, should Congress repeal the entire law, thus avoiding the collapse of many health insurance markets that will result from partial repeal, an estimated 22.5 million people will still become uninsured. In that scenario, the Massachusetts study suggests that more than 27,000 people will die every year who otherwise would have lived.
Using this formula, about 4,800 people per year are now at risk of dying unnecessarily out of the 4 million people who have lost or chosen to forego healthcare during this past year—and again, more of these people are Republicans. That is more people than were killed by al-Qaida during the 9/11 attack, each. and. every. year.
When Democrats criticize some of the Republican-led changes which have made health care harder to access and more expensive, the people that are most likely to be helped and protected by our efforts are you guys. Republicans.
You’re welcome.
There are some fixes that need to be applied to the ACA, as almost none of us think it’s perfect. For example we could and should consider allowing people to buy into Medicare before they reach retirement age so that they have another low-cost option available to them. There are some other ideas to consider, such as adjusting the threshold on the subsidies or modifying the group pool for small businesses, but those aren’t likely to happen the way things are now.
Lastly, there’s the issue of Immigration.
Trump has for months claimed that immigrants are an “infestation” in the nation.
“Democrats are the problem,” Trump wrote. “They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!”
Despite all the many arguments you hear about Democrats wanting “open borders” so that “illegals” can come here to cause crime and vote, that’s simply not true. You will not find any Democrat, anywhere, saying that because simply put: it’ s a lie. Democrats don't often completely agree on anything, but we all agree on that.
What we would prefer is comprehensive immigration reform. Democrats have voted for this several times, while Republicans have blocked it. Democrats have voted for border protection, implementing walls and fences, increasing border patrol, and equipping them with surveillance gear which allows them to electronically fill the gaps where the terrain is too difficult for a physical barrier. They made that exact decision during the 1990s when President Clinton first began constructing fencing and again in 2006 with the Secure Fence Act, where President Bush added to that fencing which is now 700 miles long.
Sen. Chuck Schumer had even offered to begin funding for Trump’s wall, but Trump refused to agree to a deal on DACA and then demanded to change current legal immigration rules including the visa diversity lottery for unrepresented countries (all of whom are fully vetted). Trump then for no good reason demanded drastic changes to the family reunification program, which has given immigrants like Melania Trump the ability to sponsor visas for her parents (which is what Trump calls “chain migration”). Now he wants to change birthright citizenship, which could place a challenge on the citizenship of nearly all his own children, except for Tiffany. Right now no one really knows the specifics of his proposal.
The fact is that there already is a fence which has been extended just about as far as is physically possible because of rough terrain, and a fence is preferable to a wall because that’s what the border patrol prefers for security reasons so that they can see what’s happening on the other side.
(CNN)President Trump wants a wall along the border with Mexico.
Career officials at the agencies most involved in the process, however, are set to recommend a fence—one that will cover only about half the length, CNN has learned.
CNN spoke to more than two dozen sources and experts, including some who are part of high level discussions with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
[...]
One senior U.S. Border Patrol official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told CNN that it's crucial to be able to see through a border barrier. "I'm not calling it a wall because we are talking about a fence that we can look through. That's what we need."
President Obama beefed up deportations during his terms to record levels, peaking in 2012 with more than 409,000 people being removed from the interior and at the border, which is nearly twice as many as the 226,119 people removed by Trump for fiscal year 2017.
So let’s start this final discussion by pointing out that we largely agree on the issue of establishing good border security. What we disagree on is the methods of implementing who is blocked from entry, who is being removed, and why. Obama had a focus of 92 to 98 percent on actual criminals with a conviction record for ICE removals. Meanwhile, Trump has been removing people without any criminal record at all, or who have only had unpaid parking tickets.
The Trump administration is greatly expanding the number of people living in the U.S. illegally who are considered a priority for deportation, including people arrested for traffic violations, according to agency documents released Tuesday.
The documents represent a sweeping rewrite of the nation’s immigration enforcement priorities.
The Homeland Security Department memos, signed by Secretary John Kelly, lay out that any immigrant living in the United States illegally who has been charged or convicted of any crime — and even those suspected of a crime — will now be an enforcement priority. That could include people arrested for shop lifting or minor traffic offenses.
The number of people who’ve been removed from the interior whom ICE says aren’t convicted criminals has gone from 5,498 in 2016 to a total of 13,600 in 2017 under Trump. That’s an increase of 147 percent. Meanwhile, convicted criminal removals that year only went up by 6 percent. [For the record that is still considerably below Obama’s average removal of convicted criminals for fiscal year 2012.]
This right here tells you that their priority is not “crime”: it’s the immigrants themselves, even though Trump claims that his “zero tolerance” policy is necessary because “immigrants bring crime.” The fact is that no, really, they don't. As the New York Times [yes, I know roll your eyes later] has documented, the image of the wild-eyed, murderous criminal immigrant is a myth. While immigration rates have increased, violent crime has been going down.
“Every day, sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants, drug dealers, traffickers, gang members back into our communities,” he said last week. “They’re safe havens for just some terrible people.”
As of 2017, according to Gallup polls, almost half of Americans agreed that immigrants make crime worse. But is it true that immigration drives crime? Many studies have shown that it does not.
Immigrant populations in the United States have been growing fast for decades now. Crime in the same period, however, has moved in the opposite direction, with the national rate of violent crime today well below what it was in 1980.
In a large-scale collaboration by four universities, led by Robert Adelman, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, researchers compared immigration rates with crime rates for 200 metropolitan areas over the last several decades. The selected areas included huge urban hubs like New York and smaller manufacturing centers less than a hundredth that size, like Muncie, Ind., and were dispersed geographically across the country.
Yes, there have been people killed by undocumented immigrants. Yes, Kate Steinle was shot by an undocumented criminal immigrant, but I hate to tell you that what neither Fox nor CNN will also bring up is that he was acquitted for her murder because he didn’t have any gun shot residue on his hands, which is consistent with his argument that the gun was discarded in a bunch of trash and rags and only went off accidentally when he picked the trash up, and also that the bullet ricocheted off the ground before it hit her, indicating that he wasn’t even aiming at her at the time.
A bullet that struck Kate Steinle on San Francisco's Pier 14 ricocheted off the ground first but appeared to have traveled in a straight line from where the man charged in her death was sitting to where she stood, a prosecution witness testified today.
However, retired police Inspector Jim Evans also said he could not be certain where either the defendant, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, or Steinle were located at the time of the July 1, 2015 shooting, making it impossible to conduct an exact trajectory analysis.
That was a tragic, horrible accident, but it was not the cold-blooded murder that Trump has portrayed it as being. It’s not something we should be building public policy based on. Of course there are other cases: traffic accidents with drunk drivers and gangs, even a cop killer who was deported by both President Clinton in 1997 and President Bush in 2001 before sneaking back in and finally ending up on death row. And there is the MS-13 gang, who are indeed dangerous. We should all be concerned about that, but generally immigrants represent a very small amount of the total crime in the U.S., despite Trump’s grossly exaggerated claims.
Similarly, the migrant caravan isn’t a new phenomenon or some dramatic alien “invasion.” It actually happens every year and we usually hardly even notice. It’s a method that migrants use to protect themselves from being robbed and assaulted during their trip because Trump was actually half-correct about one thing: many migrants are often at risk of being attacked and raped, but they aren’t the rapists—they are usually the victims.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recently released the report “Women on the Run” highlighting the violence affecting women in the Northern Triangle. The UNHCR study interviewed Central American women seeking asylum in the United States, and found that 85% came from neighborhoods controlled by criminal armed groups. Women also experienced or were at risk of rape, assault, extortion, and other threats, which 64% of the women cited as their main reason for migrating to the United States.
The extreme violence is reflected in data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which ranks Honduras as first, El Salvador as fifth, and Guatemala as sixth for countries with the highest rates of homicide. Moreover, El Salvador ranks first, Guatemala third, and Honduras seventh globally for rates of female homicides.
Without the ability to safely live in their home countries, many women flee seeking international asylum and protection. The number of asylum applications from Northern Triangle country citizens dramatically increased by 13 times from 2008 to 2014 in the combined countries of Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama. Comisión Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados (Mexican Commission for Refugees) received 17% more asylum applications in the first 8 months of 2014 than it received for all of 2013.
These people are not a diseased zombie horde on the march. They are literally fleeing for their lives and the lives of their children. They are not going to stop, they are not going to be frightened away, and they are not going to be deterred. A wall isn’t going to stop them, U.S. military on the boarder isn’t going to stop them. They’re going to come. Not all of them, since many have already applied for asylum in Mexico. As for the remainder who will reach the U.S. next month and surrender themselves to apply for asylum, only a few will be granted that asylum. Hardly any will try to enter and try avoid to detection because surrendering for asylum is exactly the point. Border Patrol will handle it, just as they handled it every year.
And that isn’t just my opinion, that's exactly how the U.S. Military has assessed the dangers and risks of the migrant caravan.
The United Nations Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, has expressed concerns over “kidnapping” and “security risks in areas the caravan may venture into.” Experts have said that migrants specifically choose to travel in large numbers for “safety” purposes.
Large groups are believed to increase migrants’ chances of safe passage and provide a sense of community and solidarity along the journey. Karen Jacobsen, who acts as the Henry J. Leir Chair in Global Migration at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, explained in a recent piece for The Conversation.
“Whether crossing Central America, the Sahara desert or the mountains of Afghanistan, migrants are regularly extorted by criminals, militias and corrupt immigration officials who know migrants make easy targets: They carry cash but not weapons,” Jacobsen wrote.
“Large groups increase migrants’ chance of safe passage, and they provide some sense of community and solidarity on the journey, as migrants themselves report,” she added.
The U.S. intelligence community assessed that the “most likely course of action” was a dwindling of migrants as it reached the U.S. southern border, with limited transcontinental criminal organizations exploiting the group and “no terrorist infiltration,” an assessment that runs counter to past statements made by the president.
The money quote: “No terrorist infiltration” and “Limited transcontinental criminal organizations exploiting the group”. So, it's not an “invasion”, not even close.
President Obama tried to deal with a similar issue of unaccompanied minors on our borders over the last few years by opening offices for them to apply for asylum within their own countries so that they could enter properly and legally, but Trump has closed down that program.
Update: On Nov. 9, 2017, the Department of State stopped accepting new applications for the Central American Minors (CAM) refugee program. USCIS will stop interviewing CAM cases on Jan. 31, 2018. After that date, individuals with pending applications who have not been interviewed will receive a notice with further instructions.
Trump says he wants people to come “legally,” but he has shut down the very legal means that they have to do so. Homeland Security and the State Department have also made many other changes, including lowering the refugee cap from 75,000 to just 45,000. They've argued that domestic and gang violence doesn't count as credible threats for asylum. They’ve cut funding for the refugee resettlement program by 25 percent, causing more than a dozen of their offices to close. In 2017 Trump ordered a pause for the existing refugee family reunification program. In April, he cut a non-profit legal aid program for immigrants. In May, he cut programs that represented unaccompanied minors in court, even when these programs had helped 95 percent of child immigrants to make their immigration hearings on time.
Republicans are claiming that anyone who tries to come to the United States and ask for asylum without going to a “point of entry” is violating the law and their asylum claim is therefore invalid, which is particularly ironic since the Department of Homeland Security has had the points of entry closed to asylum seekers, causing people to camp outside their doors sometimes for weeks before even being affording an interview to assess their eligibility. They say they’re “breaking the law” when the supposed “legal” way of doing it strategically isn’t available to them. In fact it’s not illegal for them to enter between points of entry anyway, as long as they surrender themselves to apply for asylum within one year.
Under both U.S. law and international treaties that came after the Holocaust, border officials must allow people who say they’re afraid to return home to submit their claims in the asylum process.
Some asylum seekers, instead of coming to a port, cross the border between ports of entry and are caught by Border Patrol agents. Some purposefully cross where they see an agent stationed to ask for help requesting asylum. Agents call these “self-surrenders.”
Border Patrol agents, like their counterparts at ports of entry, are required to ask if people they encounter are afraid to go home.
[...]
Under asylum law, an individual must have suffered persecution or fear suffering persecution because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.
The “because of” is important — even if the person faces legitimate death threats at home, that person might not win an asylum case if he or she cannot show it is for one of these reasons. (There are other types of protections that have different requirements, like the Convention against Torture, that people can ask for as well.)
Asylum law is part of our 1951 U.N. Convention on the Refugee, which was ratified by the U.S. in 1968. That treaty then became part of our U.S. Constitution under the Supremacy Clause.
The 1951 Convention protects refugees. It defines a refugee as a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail him or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution (see Article 1A(2)). People who fulfill this definition are entitled to the rights and bound by the duties contained in the 1951 Convention.
Refugees are forced to flee because of a threat of persecution and because they lack the protection of their own country. A migrant, in comparison, may leave his or her country for many reasons that are not related to persecution, such as for the purposes of employment, family reunification or study. A migrant continues to enjoy the protection of his or her own government, even when abroad.
[…]
The cornerstone of the 1951 Convention is the principle of non-refoulement contained in Article 33. According to this principle, a refugee should not be returned to a country where he or she faces serious threats to his or her life or freedom. This protection may not be claimed by refugees who are reasonably regarded as a danger to the security of the country, or having been convicted of a particularly serious crime, are considered a danger to the community.
Let me repeat: “A refugee should not be returned to a country where he or she faces serous threats to his or her life or freedom.” In this case, asylum law overrides immigration law. It has to, or else the asylum process is meaningless.
America agreed to that as a result of our experience in World War II, including the Holocaust where the U.S. refused to admit Jewish refugees who were ultimately forced to return to Germany under the belief that they were spies; 25 percent of them were ultimately killed.
World War II prompted the largest displacement of human beings the world has ever seen—although today's refugee crisis is starting to approach its unprecedented scale. But even with millions of European Jews displaced from their homes, the United States had a poor track record offering asylum. Most notoriously, in June 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis and its 937 passengers, almost all Jewish, were turned away from the port of Miami, forcing the ship to return to Europe; more than a quarter died in the Holocaust.
Government officials from the State Department to the FBI to President Franklin Roosevelt himself argued that refugees posed a serious threat to national security. Yet today, historians believe that Bahr's case was practically unique—and the concern about refugee spies was blown far out of proportion.
We don’t want to be complicit in another Holocaust, another killing field like Cambodia, another massacre like Rwanda, or another ethnic cleansing similar to what happened in Bosnia.
America is supposed to be a safe harbor, a safe place for people who are in the most desperate need. We agreed to this 50 years ago for very good reasons.
These tragedies are what we don’t want to repeat, and this is the kind of blood we don’t want on our hands. Certainly, we don't want to just let anyone into the country for safety and security reasons. Everyone should be vetted, but we also don’t want to split families, yanking children away from their parents, causing them permanent emotional trauma, and then detain them in tent camps in the middle of the Texas desert indefinitely, or until they hit 18 and send them to adult prison without a trial. And we don’t want to go back on the promises we made to ourselves and the world in 1968. We need a plan for the DACA kids, and we need a plan to pull the undocumented out of the shadows and into the light where they can pay their debt to society and get right with the law.
These are difficult problems and we may not have every answer to every one, but there are certainly better options than those currently on the table.
We don’t need to let people grow sick from pollution to make a few extra bucks for Wall Street but not a dime for Main Street. We don’t need to cut people off from health care just when they might need it the most, and we don’t need to send the military to intimidate mostly women and children who are running for their lives from gangs and violence in Central America.
We need to do better than this.
I’m not expecting agreement on everything here. Perhaps there won’t be agreement on anything. But we won’t know how far apart we are unless we discuss it, and we won’t pull the nation back together if we don’t try.
Sunday, Nov 4, 2018 · 8:23:39 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
ICE spokesman Richard Rocha confirmed the agency arrested a man at the courthouse on Wednesday. He wrote in an email that the arrest was "pursuant to a criminal arrest warrant issued by a Federal Magistrate Judge," but he declined to provide details on the person arrested or federal charges they face.
"As this is an ongoing federal criminal case, no additional information is available at this time," Rocha wrote.
[...]
“In Sacramento, we have never seen this before — which is causing more alarm for the fact that this hasn’t happened before in this area,” Kim said. “When people come to court, they come with the understanding that courthouses should not be used as a bait to enforce immigration laws.”
This person was not a criminal on the run, he was literally in court to get correct with the legal system. This is a large part of why some people have come out to argue that ICE should be abolished, although I happen to think that’s counter-productive. The basic functions ICE performs would simply be transferred to the FBI or the U.S. Marshals which would change the uniforms involved by not what they're actually doing, and that doesn't address the real problem which is the direction and the priorities they’re now being given from the top. ICE can do better than this without being “abolished.”
There is also the so-called “Sanctuary City” issue, which I tend to think of it as a matter of jurisdiction. Local and State Officials don't have the jurisdiction to enforce Federal Immigration laws, that’s not their job and attempting to do so is dangerously close to racial profiling.
The main complaint has been a demand that local police not just notify ICE, but also continue to hold a local suspect in custody in order for ICE to stop by and collect them for deportation after they’re already ready to be released and have served their time — the first problem is that continuing to hold them past their release date is unconstitutional and secondly, it’s an unfunded mandate on local police. Federal officials aren’t making a compelling argument for why people should continue to be held in state facilities - after their state issue is complete — for the benefit of the Federal government, particularly when the Feds aren't offering to pay the states for the additional cost of holding these suspects longer just because ICE is slow arriving for a pickup, they’re just stiffing local cities and states for this bill and then they aren’t willing to admit that if undocumented people feel that local police are acting as an arm of federal immigration enforcement they're going to be less likely to cooperate and come forward as witnesses and informants on outstanding cases. That puts everyone, including non-immigrants, at great risk to criminals when people are too afraid to report what they’ve seen simply because they’re undocumented, just like arresting people who are coming to court to meet their immigration commitments is going to make people stop showing up for court. We don’t need every cop, teacher, doctor and nurse to become an immigration “snitch” for the feds, because that will drive people even further underground, further into the shadows and we already have people creating an underground network of “safehouses” to hide immigrants as if they were Ann Frank living in the attic while being hidden from the German SS.
That’s not a good deal. That’s not what America is about.
It creates an atmosphere of fear in the community, it terrorizes them. Also, the reason that they’re undocumented in the first place is that unfortunately if you wish to come to the U.S. to work and you don’t have a corporate sponsor first, you can't do it legally no matter what your “merit” and qualifications are. If you have the money you can come on a vacation or possibly a student Visa then make business contacts in order to become legally sponsored for a job that has already been turned down by US citizens [under the H1B Visa rules], but if you’re poor or a blue collar worker you’re basically out of luck unless some company decides to randomly pluck you out of the migrant pile and offer an H2B visa for you. The current immigration system doesn’t allow for anyone to do this on their own because many businesses actually want a vulnerable undocumented workforce that can’t take the risk of being deported for complaining when they get overworked, pay gouged, sexually abused and ripped off. And it doesn't allow for a path to pay back your debt to society if you enter without documents for that reason and are otherwise completely law abiding. We need a decent worker Visa program so people don’t have to violate the law and border if they’re simply looking for work, or else enter themselves into modern slave labor under the thumb of an uncaring employer.
Like many of the immigrant workers that I represent at the legal-services nonprofit I work for in Los Angeles, Pulido’s legal status in the U.S. was inextricably tied to her employer. This feature of U.S. immigration law gives exploitative employers a powerful tool to control their immigrant workers, whose lack of familiarity with the laws and customs of the United States already render them vulnerable. Aware of this advantage that they hold, some employers believe they can abuse employees with impunity. If workers complain or threaten to seek help, they are told that leaving their employer may very well lead to deportation. For many immigrant workers, who may have borrowed significant amounts of money to come to America, leaving the U.S. early may mean financial ruin at home. U.S. immigration policy, in other words, leaves them no choice but to endure their employers’ abuse.
This power imbalance between immigrant workers and their employers figures prominently in the U.S. immigration system. The State Department has estimated that 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States each year. (That estimate, the most recent reliable one available, is from 2004—data on human trafficking are notoriously difficult to collect.) And evidence suggests a connection between trafficking and certain visa categories. A report by the anti-human-trafficking organization Polaris identified six temporary visas commonly associated with labor exploitation and human trafficking. (Over the 12 months starting in October 2013, Polaris estimated, 500,000 people came into the U.S. on one of these visas.) Notably, all six categories make it difficult, if not impossible, for immigrant workers to leave the employer or agency that sponsored their visa petition. A separate study by the Urban Institute, a think tank, found that over 70 percent of the 122 trafficking victims it analyzed came to the U.S. with legitimate visas, especially with three of the visa categories flagged by Polaris. According to both studies, trafficking victims reported that their employers threatened to report them to immigration authorities to discourage them from leaving or seeking help.
We need to make sure companies aren’t cheating and not really giving U.S. citizens a decent first chance at these jobs [the way that Mar-A-Lago has been, allegedly], and we need a path to residency for those who are currently undocumented and living in the shadows but are otherwise law-abiding and have established family and community connections. Yes, we should be deporting criminals and we all agree on that but otherwise, this entire system needs serious reform.
In the end, I suspect we have very different visions of what America truly is. Trump’s vision seems to be one where America is like an exclusive private club ala Studio 54 or even Mar-a-Lago. You can only get in if you have enough to pay the price of entry, you’ve already made your fortune, you've already been highly accomplished and the only grubby unclean immigrants that are semi-visible are the ones tending the tables, cleaning the bathrooms and cooking the food behind closed doors; out of sight and out of mind on the other side of the velvet rope.
The rest of us think of America as a sanctuary, a safe haven. The pilgrims, the Quakers and the Protestants who originally began settling in the new world in the 17th and 18th Century were political and religious refugees who were trying to find safety from the persecution of Henry VIII's Anglican Church of England. The Irish came to America for refuge and relief from famine, while the Italians and the Chinese came to escape poverty and find work during the 19th Century. Europeans came to escape the horror of World War I, Russians came to escape the Bolshevik revolution and Stalin, Gypsies and Jews came to escape the pogroms, Hitler and Mussolini during WWII [including Jared Kushner’s grandparents who were sponsored by HIAS], Asians came to escape communism in North Korea and Vietnam, as well as the killing fields of Cambodia during the 20th Century. Most of us came here from somewhere else and very rarely was it because our ancestors had it so great in their previous home, usually they didn't. America isn’t made up of “the best”, it’s made up from “the rest”, the “wretched refuse, yearning to breath free” who’ve then struggled to make the best of themselves after they arrived.
Someone who doesn't really need America can easily leave and offer their allegiance to whoever offers them a better deal, but historically that hasn’t been what being an American is about. It wasn't about whether they were “worthy” of coming here already, people didn't have a pass a test, people didn't have to pay a toll, people didn’t have to impress the doorman with their fancy outfit, it was about how being here could help improve someone’s life over where they were coming from. It wasn't about what they were bringing to America, it was about the freedom that America has brought to them and how much they would become grateful and loyal to America in return. That's what our nation has been built on, that's why we’re the “home of the free” because so many people were not free in so many other places, they could only be truly free in America. It hasn't been about who you already are or what you already have, it's been about who and what you can become once you're free in America to pursue your dreams, and what we can all build together along with all the other escapees, refugees, and survivors. Only together can we fully accomplish the American dream.
E Pluribus Unum, from many we are one.
Of course, we have to be concerned about security, criminals, terrorists and credible threats, we need to do reasonable vetting, we have to be sure people are who they say they are and that their need is real, but when we close our doors in fear and cowardice to those who are at mortal risk we betray what America has always been and what it should be; the land of the free and the beacon of hope for the world.