Will the U.S. become a “fortress democracy”? + Dog Meets Buddha + Lil Nas X
Historic win for immigrants in NY + upcoming events to launch new book Immigration Matters
Immigration will be one of the main axes on which the country’s politics and economic future turns in the years and decades ahead. An aging, native-born population, climate change driving refugees in larger numbers to the U.S., and escalating white backlash to demographic change will make the issue even more central than it is today. While we’ve so far been unable to win a crucial path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants, that issue is at least part of the mainstream policy debate. Meanwhile, new issues, problems, and opportunities are presenting themselves — and to address them we’ll need imagination, strategic savvy, and courage. This issue of The Platypus features some of the best and worst of the contemporary immigration debate — and explores the deep, rarely acknowledged trends driving immigration to the center of the national conversation.
To learn about provocative new ideas at the edge of the current policy discourse, you can tune in to one of two launch events for a new edited volume Immigration Matters: Movements Visions and Strategies for a Progressive Future which includes contributions from 20 leading academics, policymakers, and activists in the field.
On April 27th, the Carnegie Corporation of NY, JPB Foundation, and Open Society Foundations will host a book launch featuring Amaha Kassa, Cecilia Muñoz, Mae Ngai, Ruth Milkman, and Deepak. Register here. Registration is free.
On April 28th, Georgetown University’s Kalmanowitz Institute will host a book launch featuring Ruth Milkman, Saket Soni, Marielena Hincapie, and Amaha Kassa. Register here. Registration is free.
Full details about both events are at the bottom of today’s newsletter. In the coming weeks, we’ll be letting you know about more Immigration Matters events featuring other contributors.
http://thenewpress.com/books/immigration-matters
One strangely neglected but stunning fact is that the U.S. population grew by a smaller amount between 2019-2020 than in any year since 1900, as illustrated in the chart below. The trends are driven partly by Trump’s restrictive immigration policies and Covid deaths but also by the long-term factors of an aging population and lower fertility rates. If we continued on a course of close to net-zero migration, there would be only two working adults for every retiree by 2060 – an unsustainable ratio. (The ratio in 1965 was 6.4 working-age adults for every retiree). The country is very far from “full” as Trump infamously claimed.
While the economic imperative for immigration is clear, the politics of the U.S. and Europe are being driven by white fears of demographic change. (This Thomas Edsall piece summarizes some of the bracing research about white attitudes to a perceived loss of power). The second chart below shows that the foreign-born share of the population in the U.S. has grown dramatically since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. (The Act’s sponsors did not intend this boom in immigration from the Global South. In fact, it is a huge irony that the very family preference policy inserted in the 1965 bill to preserve continued dominance of European migration backfired so spectacularly). The course of U.S. politics since the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the immigration law in 1965, including the recent authoritarian turn, should be read through the lens of white backlash to growing political power and demographic strength of people of color. The U.S. political map is also shaped by patterns of uneven migration: the bluing and purpling of places like Arizona, California, Georgia, Nevada, and Texas (high immigrant-receiving states) and the reddening of states like West Virginia (which has the lowest share of immigrants in the country and supported Trump more strongly than any other state) reflect this dynamic.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen the worst and the best of our country’s posture toward immigrants. The hysteria about the seasonal surge of asylum seekers at the southern border has shown the potency of racialized backlash to immigration. But Harry and I recently interviewed Cecilia Muñoz for a 5-minute NowThis video, in which she challenges the lies and tells the truth about what’s happening at the border. She makes a similar case in her interview with Issac Chotiner in the New Yorker. You can also watch Deepak debate a Heritage Foundation flunky in this Associated Press video, or read these excellent pieces in Newsweek and Capital and Main breaking down the current state of the immigration debate.
On the inspirational upside, the victory this week in New York to create a $2.1 billion fund for “excluded workers” is a historic breakthrough. Undocumented people who received not a dime from the trillions in aid Congress has authorized over the past year in “survival” checks and expanded unemployment insurance will now be eligible for cash relief. Nearly 69% of undocumented workers are the very “essential workers” praised for braving Covid to keep the country fed and cared for. Yet, while our lives depend on their labor, our policies disregard their humanity. The lack of survival aid to immigrant communities has been a moral disgrace. Coming on the heels of a 23-day hunger strike by grassroots immigrant leaders and a brilliant campaign leveraging the political power of immigrants in New York, the victory breaks the connection between immigration status and access to the welfare state – which may be an even greater rupture than the federal refundable child tax credit that provides unconditional cash income to people without regard to work. This is another example of the way that organizing can move the “Overton window” — expanding the range of political possibility. The Platypus tips its bill to the amazing immigrant rights organizers and heroic grassroots leaders who sacrificed so much — and won this momentous victory. While Gov. Andrew Cuomo deserves no credit (he didn’t include the fund in his proposed budget and did his best to undermine it), we give a huge shout out to our friends at Make the Road NY, the New York Immigration Coalition, New York Communities for Change, Desi Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), and the Fund Excluded Workers Coalition. Watch the very moving moment when the hunger strikers learned that they had made history. From the New York Times:
Undocumented workers could receive up to $15,600, the equivalent of $300 per week for the last year, if they can verify that they were state residents, ineligible for federal unemployment benefits and lost income as a result of the pandemic. . . . In the months leading up to the budget deadline, undocumented immigrants sought to draw attention to their cause.
Protesters gathered outside Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office and shut down bridges, carrying hard hats, pots and pans, and brooms and mops — the instruments of the jobs they had held — along with banners saying, “Our Labor Saved Lives.” And as the measure neared approval, about a dozen supporters who camped around a Manhattan church staged a three-week hunger strike that ended Wednesday . . .
After the deal was struck, undocumented workers described in interviews months of desperation as work had dried up during the pandemic. “There were days I couldn’t sleep. To be honest with you, we had nothing,” said Giovanna Carreño, a house cleaner who had supported her two children in Yonkers for more than a decade before the coronavirus arrived and her six clients told her to stay home. Ms. Carreño, 50, who immigrated from Peru, resumed working a few days a week this year, only to fall sick with Covid herself. She said she paid taxes and asked that the government recognize the contributions she and other workers made to the economy.
Nationally, there has been a deeply asymmetric political response to the rising significance of immigration to the country’s political and economic future. Conservatives have weaponized the issue, using it to stoke fear and foment white, authoritarian politics. Liberals and progressives mobilized against the worst excesses of the Trump years and have pushed (thus far unsuccessfully) for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants but have not articulated a clear vision about future migration. Democrats have moved to the left on the issue, but their preference for talking about and legislating on other topics has only fueled nativist fires. The result has been a stalemate, leaving us with an immigration system that is inhumane and broken. In the short run, Democrats have a big choice to make: will they include a path to citizenship for essential workers, Dreamers, farmworkers, and TPS-holders in the American Jobs Act? Doing so would powerfully turbocharge the economy, change the political math in irreversible ways, and liberate millions of people – but the Party’s ingrained tendency to flinch and deflect worries us!
In the long run, this issue is going to get increasingly fraught, because climate change (caused mostly by the Global North, especially the U.S.) is driving growing numbers of refugees from the Global South who can’t grow crops in increasingly inhospitable climates and who are fleeing the effects of extreme weather events — like the two category-4 hurricanes that struck Honduras in two weeks last November, rendering hundreds of thousands homeless. How will we respond to the challenge of up to 200 million climate refugees worldwide by 2050? The political challenges of dealing with a modest number of climate refugees from Central America today suggests that we are not ready for what is to come. It may be the biggest political and humanitarian challenge of our lifetimes. Deepak proposes a new “Statue of Liberty Plan” to make the U.S. the most welcoming country on earth for immigrants, arguing in a chapter in Immigration Matters that “Without an immigration policy that welcomes many more people, we will become a fortress democracy–which is no democracy at all.”
And we can do this. After all the handwringing about Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to welcome 1.2 million Syrian refugees to Germany, including Trump calling her decision a “catastrophic mistake,” a comprehensive analysis by Thomas Rogers in the New York Review of Books reveals that “the apocalyptic predictions have not materialized” and that “recent experiences have shown that even small communities in Germany ‘can handle immigration.’” A particularly moving aspect of the experience is that
According to the Federal Family Ministry, more than half of all Germans have worked in some way to help the migrants since 2015 by offering language courses, donated clothes, or other free services—a torrent of support initially known as Willkommenskultur, or “welcome culture.”
The German experience suggests that it’s possible to move past the stale debates of the past and embrace increased immigration – and perhaps even make integration a shared civic project.
Reading Recommendations
In “A losing gamble. How mainstream parties facilitate anti-immigrant party success,” Carl Dahlström and Anders Sundell analyze political dynamics in Sweden and conclude that when left and center-left parties tack right in response to nativist insurgencies, they are making a very bad mistake.
The emergence of anti-immigrant parties in Western Europe has provoked very different responses from mainstream parties. Some have tried to counter the anti-immigrant parties while others have tried to recapture lost voters by taking a tougher stance on immigration. Country comparative studies have tried to determine the effectiveness of different strategies, but systematic testing has been impaired by small-n problems. This paper therefore exploits sub-national variation in 290 Swedish municipalities to investigate the effect of mainstream party strategy on anti-immigrant electoral success. The paper finds that a tougher stance on immigration on the part of mainstream parties is correlated with more anti-immigrant party support, even when controlling for a large number of socio-economic, historical and regional factors. This result indicates that mainstream parties legitimize anti-immigrant parties by taking a tougher position on immigration. However, the results presented in the paper show that it is not sufficient for one mainstream party to take a tougher position; it is only when the entire political mainstream is tougher on immigration that the anti-immigrant party benefits. What is more, the toughness of the parties on the left seems to be more legitimizing than the toughness of the parties on the right.
In their important National Immigration Forum report “Room to Grow: Setting Immigration Levels in a Changing America,” Ali Noorani and Danilo Zak present a demographic argument for increasing immigration levels.
The U.S. population is aging, dramatically. Fertility rates are falling, life expectancy is rising, baby boomers are reaching retirement age, and net immigration levels are not high enough to keep pace. According to the U.S. census, nearly one in every four Americans is projected to be 65 years or older by 2060.1 At that point, 94.7 million people over age 65 will be living in the country — close to twice the number today. At the same time, the overall population is growing at a slower rate than it has in almost a century, leaving unfilled openings in crucial industries such as health care, agriculture, and information technology. . .
Our analysis suggests that a sustained increase in net immigration levels based on the Old Age Dependency Ratio (OADR), or the ratio of working-age adults to adults at retirement age, provides a natural solution to many of the problems that demographic deficit causes. Immigrants are well-positioned to fill critical shortages, whether in the labor market or the country’s demographic composition . . .
Using publicly available census data and modern demographic concepts, we project that at least a 37% increase in net immigration levels over those projected for fiscal year 2020 (approximately 370,000 additional immigrants a year) will help prevent the U.S. from falling into demographic deficit and socioeconomic decline. For more on these figures, see “Methodology,” p. 12.
Were you wondering what Stephen Miller, Trump’s evil White House aide, is up to? No? Well, it may not surprise you to learn from this article in The Hill that it’s nothing good.
Stephen Miller, senior policy adviser for the Trump administration, on Wednesday announced the launch of a legal nonprofit organization aimed at “resisting the radical left’s agenda.”
“For too long, conservative and traditionalist Americans have been outflanked, outspent, out-organized, and outmaneuvered by radical progressive legal organizations. It has been a years-long, one-sided legal assault. The consequences for American values, American society, and the American Constitution have been tragic and profound,” Miller said in a statement unveiling America First Legal (AFL).
Miller told The Wall Street Journal that anything President Biden does "that we believe to be illegal is fair game."
Miller, 35, said the AFL was already working on a slew of lawsuits in Texas, hoping to use the same strategy that progressive groups used to block Trump administration policies by pursuing injunctions in more liberal court jurisdictions.
In his Nation article “Black Immigrants Matter,” Jack Herrera draws needed attention to the plight of Black immigrants, noting that although they
. . . make up less than 5.4 percent of the undocumented population in the United States, they made up 10.6 percent of all deportation proceedings from 2003 to 2015—almost double their share of the undocumented population. . . .
The situation has reached a crisis during the pandemic. Since Covid-19 hit the United States, the share of Black immigrants in detention has gone up, especially in family detention centers. According to data collected by RAICES, a refugee and immigrant rights organization, more than 44 percent of all families locked in ICE detention this past summer were Haitian. RAICES also found that on any given day in the past year, Haitians were the single largest nationality group in family detention. Many of these families, fleeing widespread political violence in Haiti, have since been deported.
Herrera also provides historical perspective on the importance of the refugee camp at Guantanamo Bay, which, after the brutal 1991 coup in Haiti, held “as many as 34,000 people living in flimsy tents surrounded by rows of razor wire.” Citing the central character in the article, Guerline Jozef, the co-founder of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, Herrera writes,
For Jozef, this moment is critical to understand. This is the beginning of the mass incarceration of immigrants in the United States, she says. Though the government had detained immigrants and even US citizens it had deemed undesirable before—Eastern Europeans at Ellis Island, Chinese and other Asians at Angel Island, Japanese in internment camps during World War II—the tactics tested out on the Haitians at Guantánamo set the modern detention machine in motion. “It began with the mass detention of Black people,” Jozef says, adding that a new landmark in this dark history was reached in 2016, when Haitian families began to be separated, laying the groundwork for the family separation crisis under Trump.
In case you missed it, Abram Lustgarden’s brilliant feature piece from last July in the New York Times Magazine, “The Great Climate Migration Has Begun,” will change how you think about the future of politics and society. How we respond to millions of climate refugees will soon be the greatest social justice challenge of our lifetimes.
For most of human history, people have lived within a surprisingly narrow range of temperatures, in the places where the climate supported abundant food production. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting north. According to a pathbreaking recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined. By 2070, the kind of extremely hot zones, like in the Sahara, that now cover less than 1 percent of the earth’s land surface could cover nearly a fifth of the land, potentially placing one of every three people alive outside the climate niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years. Many will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and political chaos, but others will be forced to move on. A 2017 study in Science Advances found that by 2100, temperatures could rise to the point that just going outside for a few hours in some places, including parts of India and Eastern China, “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.” . .
We focused on changes in Central America and used climate and economic-development data to examine a range of scenarios. Our model projects that migration will rise every year regardless of climate, but that the amount of migration increases substantially as the climate changes. In the most extreme climate scenarios, more than 30 million migrants would head toward the U.S. border over the course of the next 30 years.
And a superb piece by Marcela Valdes, “Their Lawsuit Prevented 400,000 Deportations. Now It’s Biden’s Call,” tells the story of how U.S. foreign policy is a key driver of migration from Central America, especially El Salvador.
In 2018, nearly two million undocumented immigrants in the United States were from Central America, more than from any other region except Mexico. Many people have heard about the violence, the lawlessness and the destitution that provoke these people to enter the United States. But few remember America’s role in creating these conditions during the Cold War. In Guatemala in 1954, the United States overthrew a democratically elected president who tried to implement labor and land reforms. In Nicaragua, it funded a covert war against a socialist government and lined a harbor with mines. In Honduras, it spent more than $1 billion in military aid and tacitly supported death squads. In Panama, it established a neocolonial Canal Zone and set up a school, the U.S. Army School of the Americas, that trained some 60,000 Latin American military officers to use torture and execution techniques. It’s telling that Costa Rica — located about an hour from El Salvador by plane, and more than twice El Salvador’s size — is not a significant source of immigration to the United States; it’s the most prosperous nation in Central America. Unlike its neighbors, Costa Rica avoided military intervention by the United States.
Delights and Provocations
We join with the rest of the civilized world in our amazement at Lil Nas X’s music video “Montero (Call Me By Your Name).” Some conservatives are upset by the content, but The Platypus, taking a cue from the honey badger, doesn’t care. “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” is a work of liberatory genius. Don Abram, founder of Pride in the Pews, reflects on the significance of this cultural event in his article “Lil Nas X is inviting the Black church in with ‘Montero’.” We have traveled some distance down the “Old Town Road.”
We are also thrilled to present a video you will not see anywhere else but The Platypus: “Clyde (the dog) Meets the Buddha.”
Savvy Corner
We hope you’ll buy — and help spread the word about — Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future. It’s out on April 27th, but you can pre-order today: http://thenewpress.com/books/immigration-matters
Here’s the RSVP link: https://immigrationmatters.eventbrite.com/
IMMIGRATION MATTERS Book Launch Event, April 28th Book Launch hosted by Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor
Four contributors to the book IMMIGRATION MATTERS will speak at a session on “The Future of Immigration Policy,” on Wednesday, April 28, 2021, from 2:30 to 4:00 pm. Please join us to hear:
Marielena Hincapie, Executive Director of the National Immigration Law Center
Amaha Kassa, Executive Director of African Communities Together
Saket Soni, organizer and leader of Resilience Force
The session will be moderated by Ruth Milkman, co-editor of IMMIGRATION MATTERS: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future (The New Press), which will be released on April 27.
The session is on the first day of a larger event, organized by Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, on “Constructing a New Social Compact: A Public Forum on Empowering the Post-Pandemic Working Class,” from Wednesday, April 28th – Saturday, May 1, 2021. This multi-day virtual convening will bring together activists, academics, faith leaders, policy experts, global labor activists, workers, philanthropists, labor organizations, students, and elected leaders to analyze, evaluate, and propose next-gen solutions for the intersectional issues affecting working people’s lives in a post-pandemic world. This convening will envision and advance a new social compact that centers working people and their communities over calls for austerity. All are invited to participate in this important conversation.
Register here. Registration is free.