The Great Policy Thaw: Cash without Conditions and Legalization without Harsh Enforcement …

+ exciting events on 2/26 and 3/2 + some soulful music

In today’s issue Deepak offers a hopeful analysis about Biden’s early moves on immigration and poverty (and The Platypus deploys its little-known but potent venomous spike against neoliberal Democrats).

Plus:

• Details about an event on 2/26 at 1pm that you won’t want to miss: “Immigration Policy in the First 100 Days and Beyond” with Lorella Praeli, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Cristina Jimenez, Cecilia Munoz, and Deepak. Register here.

• Details about an event on 3/2 at 12:30: “Leading for Social Change at a Time of Crisis: Lessons from the Frontlines of 2020 Fights for Democracy and Black Lives” with Rahna Epting, Gara LaMarche and Maurice Mitchell. Register here.

• ICYMI, a link to Deepak’s conversation about “Leading for Social Change at a Critical Time: What Do Leaders Need?” this past Tuesday with Cristina Jimenez and Nsé Ufot.

• and the gorgeous, guitar sorcery of Gábor Szabó.

If you like The Platypus, please invite your friends to sign up – for free or as paid subscribers.

The Great Thaw: How Biden’s proposals on immigration and poverty break with 25 years of failed social policy

Deepak Bhargava

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed two brutal laws – the welfare reform law that imposed work requirements and time limits on assistance for poor women with children, and the less well understood immigration law that laid the predicate for the deportation machine that tears families apart today.  Twenty-five years later, President Joe Biden introduced a sweeping immigration proposal that would for the first time offer a generous path to legalization for 11 million undocumented immigrants without massive increases interior or border enforcement, and he proposed to give thousands of dollars to families with kids for the next year, without requiring their parents to work.

These two moves constitute a huge break in social policy, a thawing of the deep freeze in the bi-partisan social policy consensus that has constrained the scope of progressive policy imagination since the Reagan years.  How did Biden, whose views were not all that different from Clinton’s in 1996, come to lead the charge to reverse pillars of Clinton’s shameful legacy? That’s another fascinating story – but right now, I want to appreciate the magnitude of the progress and the extent of the paradigm shift we’re living through.

In 2001, I was part of a coalition of grassroots and national anti-poverty groups pushed to make the federal child tax credit refundable as part of George W. Bush’s tax plan.  Bush had proposed to expand the size of the credit, but low-income people who paid no federal income taxes would not benefit.  We proposed a plan to make the credit fully refundable, got Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine to champion the idea and campaigned to get it included in the bill.  We were partly successful – the final legislation delivered $8 billion to low-income families per year, one of the few meaningful expansions of anti-poverty programs achieved in that reactionary period.  But the pushback was intense – not unlike what we see today in the opposition to Biden and Romney’s proposals, with right-wingers attacking it as too generous to poor people.  What I really remember about the debate, though, is how many liberals fought us.  Ronald Brownstein, a commentator who I often agree with today about politics, quoted me in a piece he wrote in the Los Angeles Times making the anodyne and obvious point that: “Most low-income families go in and out of the labor market, and there needs to be some kind of basic [income] support for the children in those families.” He then attacked our campaign, calling our idea “The Right Diagnosis. The Wrong Remedy.”  He said that our “logic of unconditional entitlement” was likely to “lead the left into a dead end,” and concluded that our “idea won’t work unless it honors, and demands, work.” 

Isabel Sawhill of Brookings, whose work I do not admire, openly invoked racist and sexist stereotypes to argue against our proposal to give cash to people who didn’t have a job through the refundable child tax credit.  She said: “It’s not consistent with mainstream values, and in the end, it’s going to have perverse effects, both substantively and politically. Substantively because it really will lead to people choosing idleness over work, and perhaps choosing to have children outside of marriage; and politically because the average taxpayer is not going to support this kind of assistance.”

President Biden’s child tax credit proposal is not perfect, but it is huge progress: it would reduce poverty among children by 40%, deliver disproportionate benefits to Black and brown families, and break the conceptual tie between income and work that is the rot at the core of social policy in the U.S.

In his recent column about the debate, Ezra Klein quotes a brilliant colleague, Jamila Michener.  She offers a powerful riposte to the punitive, racist nonsense about social welfare policy we’ve lived with, under Democrats as well as Republicans, for decades:

When I talked to Jamila Michener, co-director of Cornell’s Center for Health Equity, about this, she argued that we do trust parents to make those decisions. We just don’t trust poor parents to make them. She told me the story of coming to Cornell with a 3-month-old and a 3-year-old, and finding out that her mother had stage 3 pancreatic cancer. Michener was vying for tenure at that point, so her husband took five years off to care for their children and her mother.

“Whenever I tell people about that, they say, ‘He’s amazing! What a great partner,’” Michener said. “In the context of a family not living in poverty, to make the decision to stay home for a bit to care for an ill family member is considered virtuous. But for a woman living in poverty to take some time off to care for a family member is vice.” That experience has become a touchstone for Michener in the classroom. She always asks her students why they praise her husband for staying home, but whenever the syllabus turns to welfare or food stamps, they worry social insurance will lead poor mothers to stop working.

Race thrums through this conversation. Whose work ethic is trusted, and whose is not, has always been racialized in this country. “We venerate work for the marginalized — we require it, demand it, for those on the economic margins and for people of color,” Michener told me. “For most of American history, white women weren’t expected to work, they were discouraged from working. It just shows you the flexibility of our assumptions about work as a necessary part of social and political life.”

“People on the right always say, what about the dignity of work?” Michener told me, “and my answer is: What about the dignity of dignity? The ability to be of sound body and mind and do the things most human beings want to do: spend time with your family. Have some time for leisure. Of course there can be dignity in work, and we should create the circumstances to make that possible, but there’s no natural dignity in work. We’ve needed labor movements because work can be harmful and oppressive unless we organize to make sure it has dignity. There are a lot of other factors and ways we need to intervene if we want work and dignity to be words we can use in the same sentence. And the way we do our social policy in this country, we have no right to use those words in the same sentence.”

I don’t expect Clinton and his apologists to recant or repent for the harm they’ve done to poor people.  But I do hope that Biden’s proposal and the intellectual and moral clarity of Jamila’s argument mark a lasting shift in the terms of the debate.

The break on immigration is no less dramatic.  President Clinton had this to say in 1995 about immigration– does he sound like anyone you can think of? “All Americans … are disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering this country.  The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants.  The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders by hiring a record number of border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens …”

For decades, immigration policy in Washington has depended on a simple tradeoff: legalization of undocumented immigrants in exchange for increased enforcement at the border and inside the country.  This basic paradigm was the policy of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The problem has been that since the 1986 amnesty, we’ve gotten ever escalating enforcement without legalization.  Biden’s immigration plan is sweeping and bold: it would offer a generous pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants (and a fast track for Dreamers, farmworkers and holders of Temporary Protected Status).  Crucially, it does not include a massive increase in enforcement expenditures.  (Much credit for the Biden framework, by the way, should go to Cecilia Muñoz who talks about this transformation in the immigration paradigm in an excellent Vox interview with Aarti Shahani).

Of course, progressive proposals don’t mean much without plausible strategies to get them enacted. Movement leaders like Lorella Praeli at Community Change Action are completely right to embrace the progressive Biden framework and to push for a concrete legislative strategy.  They advocate budget reconciliation as a vehicle to get many people legalized rather than a symbolic effort predicated on Republican Senate votes that will never materialize.  She told the New York Times “You’re talking about a fight that we’ve had for over three decades at this point,” . . .  “I’m not interested in a dance. I’m committed to seeing this through and delivering on concrete changes.”

The ruptures in the basic paradigms of social and economic policy are happening not just on immigration and poverty, but also on deficits, race, wages, worker rights and environment.  It is true that progressive proposals are not yet good policy.  And advocates are right to press on the details and on strategy. But progressives should own their contributions to these momentous shifts.  Maybe after a cruel winter, the thaw will bring us a warm spring.

Savvy Corner

Lorella Praeli and Community Change will be hosting an event on “Immigration Policy in the First 100 Days and Beyond” that we highly recommend on 2/26 at 1pm.  The event features Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Cecilia Munoz, Cristina Jimenez and Deepak, and is a soft launch for the forthcoming book Immigration Matters: Visions, Movements and Strategies for a Progressive Future(co-edited by Ruth Milkman, Deepak and Penny Lewis).You can register for the event here.  And please spread the word!

CUNY’s School of Labor Urban Studies and the Colin Powell School for Global and Civic Leadership at City College will be hosting our next event on leadership on Tuesday, March 2nd at 12:30pmEST:  Leading for Social Change at a Time of Crisis: Lessons from the Frontlines of 2020 Fights for Democracy and Black Lives. The event features Rahna Epting, Executive Director, MoveOn.org, Maurice Mitchell, National Director, Working Families Party, and will be Moderated by Gara LaMarche, President and CEO, The Democracy Alliance; Senior Fellow and Instructor, Colin Powell School, CCNY. Please RSVP here.

ICYMI, a link to Deepak’s conversation about “Leading for Social Change at a Critical Time: What Do Leaders Need?” this past Tuesday with Cristina Jimenez and Nsé Ufot.

Delights

Our favorite recent musical discovery is the 1967 album Dreams by guitarist Gábor Szabó, whose sound weaves folk music from his native Hungary with jazz, psychedelia, even Country & Western.  

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