“Moise himself had a tumultuous presidency beginning in 2017, marked by authoritarian tactics and inability to gain the Haitian people’s trust. Soon after he was elected, Moise revived the nation’s army, disbanded two decades before. This was a controversial decision in a country still dealing with the aftermath of its catastrophic 2010 earthquake, stoking fears that the army would drain already limited resources. Further skepticism came from the army’s history of human rights abuses and the multiple coups it had carried out. The decision to bring the army back set the tone for Moise’s presidency, as he continuously prioritized his interests and power over those of the people. In the absence of a functioning legislature, Haitian law allows the president to rule by decree, and in January 2020, Moise refused to hold parliamentary elections and dismissed all of the country’s elected mayors, consolidating his power.
Further exacerbating problems, in February, Moise refused to leave office despite legal experts and members of an opposition coalition claiming that his term ended on February 7. Moise claimed that his presidency was meant to last until 2022, due to a delay in his inauguration after the 2017 election, and his refusal to step down led to mass anger and frustration culminating in public protests and chants of “no to dictatorship.”
While the identity of the killers has not been confirmed, speculation seems to be determined by party alignment. Moise supporters have stated that he was shot by a predominantly Colombian group of hitmen, while some opposition politicians claim that he was killed by his own guards. Others have said that the Colombians were hired as personal guards to protect Moise from external threats. Fifteen Colombian suspects are currently in custody along with two Haitian-American suspects, and others are still believed to be at large.”
“Abbott has so far provided little information about how he will finance the project, which will undoubtedly carry a hefty price tag. In Texas, one section of Trump’s border wall came out to be $27 million a mile. Abbott intends to provide $250 million in state revenues as a “down payment.” Those funds will come from a disaster account, a transfer made possible because he issued a disaster declaration in order to take a number of executive actions against migration. Abbott also expects that crowdfunding will help supplement state funds. So far, that effort has collected roughly $450,000.
David Donatti, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas who specializes in border issues, has concerns about Abbott’s financial approach.
“He has declared a disaster, and by that authority, he’s moving $250 million into an account that allows him to” build a border wall, says Donatti. “For a state like Texas,” $250 million “is a lot of money…that could be used for hurricane recovery, toward recovery from something like the freeze that we experienced.” Donatti calls it “an absurd abuse of power if nothing else,” even though the result of that abuse would provide “an ineffective solution to people coming to the United States.”
According to the governor, construction would also hinge on voluntary land concessions from borderlands residents. In Texas, most land along the border with Mexico is privately owned. That gives Abbott two options: either entice landowners to donate their property or seize it from the unwilling. To build his wall, Trump chose to initiate land grabs in the borderlands through eminent domain, which is a legal doctrine that allows the government to seize private property for public use. Affected landowners nominally must receive just compensation, though practically the process is rife with abuse.”
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“Regardless of the wall’s future, Abbott is already implementing policies beyond a physical barrier to keep migrants out. As Reason’s Billy Binion reported, Abbott “has directed the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDJC) to clear out the Dolph Biscoe Unit, a state prison in Dilley, Texas, so that law enforcement can arrest and detain some undocumented migrants there.” He’s made it so that migrants are subject to “aggravated trespassing” charges, a misdemeanor, giving the state the authority to arrest migrants who are otherwise governed by federal immigration frameworks. As Donatti points out, that “quite clearly tramples on the federal government’s prerogative to immigration control.” Abbott has also revoked licenses for child care services found to be looking after undocumented migrant kids, which might lead to those minors being shuttled into inadequate emergency detention facilities.”
“The US can anticipate these spikes, which are symptoms of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Central America’s “Northern Triangle” — Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. For years, these countries have suffered from gang violence, government corruption, extortion, and some of the highest rates of poverty and violent crime in the world. The pandemic-related economic downturn and a pair of hurricanes late last year that devastated Honduras and Guatemala, in particular, have only exacerbated those longstanding problems. Many of the migrants arriving on the southern border, sometimes in large caravans, likely felt they had no choice but to seek refuge elsewhere”
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“The US doesn’t have a system in place to ensure that migrants are treated humanely and in accordance with federal law when these spikes occur. Children have consequently been kept in jail-like holding facilities operated by US Customs and Border Protection beyond the 72-hour legal time limit. That is why the Obama administration, the Trump administration, and the Biden administration have been condemned for keeping “kids in cages.””
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“several immigrant advocacy groups and think tanks have devised potential frameworks to improve migrant processing. Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema have also drafted a bill that would implement related reforms, though it’s not clear whether the legislation will draw significant support from members of either party. Those strategies will become all the more important as the Biden administration begins to lift pandemic-related restrictions at the southern border and resumes processing migrants en masse.”
“North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is rewiring his nation’s government to operate less like a dictator’s playground and more like an organization that can handle multiple crises at once.
According to reports this week from CNN, Reuters, and other media outlets, Kim appointed a de facto second-in-command back in January to help lead the country’s ruling Workers’ Party of Korea. As “first secretary,” a title Kim himself held from 2012 to 2016 (he assumed the grander role of “general secretary” in January 2021), this as-yet-unknown person will serve as the despot’s “representative” to the WPK.
Experts were quick to say this person won’t actually be North Korea’s second-in-command. It’s at best a kind of executive secretary role, someone who has the authority to handle day-to-day party operations but not the power to make key decisions without the boss’s say-so.
“It means no change to [Kim’s] status as the supreme leader of North Korea, but it will mean a change in his leadership style,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, a Seoul-based fellow at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, DC. In fact, “Kim technically always has had a ‘second-in-command’ in every party, state, and military institution,” she added.
The new and unprecedented role, then, isn’t really about some already prominent North Korean official gaining more authority. Rather, it’s Kim’s latest reform to ensure his regime can handle all affairs of state without his consistent, direct input.
“It should suggest to us that Kim is doing things internally,” said Ken Gause, director of the adversary analytics program at the CNA, a Virginia-based think tank. “He’s changing this regime and making it a more normalized organization.””
“The new president wants the rich to pay much more in taxes, in order to finance a $1.8 trillion plan to invest in things like child care, education, and tax cuts for the poor that are meant to reduce inequality.
But standing in the other corner of the ring is a sophisticated wealth management and accounting industry that is ready to fight, eager to temper every aggressive proposal and exploit every loophole to please their clients who pay them big bucks to defend every dollar.
Over the next few months — and over the next few years, if Biden’s plan manages to pass in some form or another — these forces will collide. Passing the tax bill is only the first step. The execution could be harder. No matter Democrats’ intentions, they may find that their plan lets tech billionaires off the hook.
And so the wealth management industry is brimming with a cocksure optimism that they can outsmart the bureaucracy.”
“Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of voter suppression laws. Many provisions currently being pushed by Republican state lawmakers make it harder to cast a ballot in a certain way — such as by mailing in the ballot or placing it in a drop box. Or they place unnecessary procedural obstacles in the way of voters. These provisions often serve no purpose other than to make it more difficult to vote, but they also are not insurmountable obstacles.
Other provisions are more virulent. They might disqualify voters for no valid reason. Or allow partisan officials to refuse to certify an election, even if there are no legitimate questions about who won. Or make it so difficult for some voters, who are likely to vote for the party that is out of power, to cast their ballot that it’s nigh impossible for the incumbent party to lose.”
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“the most common kind of law that seeks to make the results of an election impervious to the will of the voters: gerrymandering. The Census Bureau expects to provide states with the data they need to draw new congressional and state legislative districts this fall. Once that data is available, states like Georgia and Texas are likely to draw maps that seek to entrench Republican rule as much as possible. (Democrats also engage in gerrymandering, but blue states are more likely to use independent commissions to draw district lines, or to have other safeguards that limit partisan redistricting.)
Gerrymanders can potentially make the fight to control a legislative body all but impervious to the will of the voters. In 2018, for example, Democratic candidates for the Wisconsin state assembly received 54 percent of the popular vote, but Republicans won nearly two-thirds of the seats.”
“Every time a credit card is swiped, the bank charges a fee. It seems trivial, but those fees add up — enough to help pay for rewards like points-funded hotel rooms and cash back. To compensate, businesses raise prices, and so cash users (who tend to be poorer) are often subsidizing the perks going to credit card users (who tend to be richer). And the higher the rewards, the bigger the cost to the unsuspecting people paying for it.”
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“Credit card rewards aren’t generally taxed like regular income, so to a certain extent, they’re even a bigger benefit than they appear on paper.”
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“Klein also said that interchange fees that go up with rewards cards can disproportionately impact small businesses compared to large corporations, many of which are often able to negotiate lower fees or strike deals with big credit card companies. According to the Wall Street Journal, Walmart, Costco, and Amazon have all been able to leverage their size and reach to bring down their fees.”
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” not all businesses accept all credit cards, or accept credit cards at all. American Express has the reputation of having high transaction fees that many merchants avoid. And the nice rewards cards often have higher swipe fees than more basic cards issued by the same company. But once a merchant says that they’re going to accept one brand of credit card, whether it’s AmEx or MasterCard or Visa, they can’t really discriminate among the cards under those brands. In 2018, the Supreme Court decided that credit card issuers were allowed to bar businesses from offering consumers incentives to pay with less expensive credit cards. Essentially, if a retailer accepts one type of AmEx, it’s going to accept all of them.
Klein says he thinks if merchants were more easily able to discern which rewards cards to take and which to avoid, some of the poor-to-rich transfer problem could be solved. “A reasonable way for the market to help solve this problem is for the merchants to be able to say, ‘I’m not going to take the Sapphire, the swipe fee is too high,’” he said. “The economist in me is like, the market can correct this to some degree.”
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“Another potential policy fix would be to lower interchange fees, which the Durbin Amendment, part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill, did for debit card transactions. If swipe fees for credit cards were capped, rewards would almost certainly diminish, too. But so would the regressive nature of credit card spending.”
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“For many people without credit cards, the problem isn’t that they don’t want one, it’s that they can’t get one because their credit score is too low or they don’t have enough of a credit history to get approved. It’s harder for the unbanked to build up savings, get traditional loans, or pay basic bills. And so they wind up losing money — they turn to expensive payday lenders that charge exorbitant interest rates and risk getting pulled into debt traps or resort to financial products that charge them more specifically because they have less. Rich people reap most of the benefits of the stock market’s rise, a rise that’s fueled by the productivity of workers.
To put it plainly, it’s expensive to be poor in America. And when it comes to rewards cards, it’s expensive to the benefit of the rich.”
“The US started dramatically ramping up immigration enforcement in the 1990s with bipartisan support. The line of thinking was that making it more expensive and arduous to cross the border would dissuade more people from making the journey in the first place. It became the preferred strategy for policymakers because it was easy to sell to constituents, even though it wasn’t necessarily grounded in a deep understanding of the factors driving unauthorized immigration.
But a growing body of research shows that the threat of immigration enforcement isn’t an effective deterrent for migrants in the long run. Emily Ryo, a professor of law and sociology at the USC Gould School of Law, found in a paper published earlier this month that it has no significant effect on people’s decision to migrate from Mexico and Central America’s “Northern Triangle”: Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
In cooperation with Vanderbilt University and the Latin American Public Opinion Project, she designed an experiment that was included in the 2018-’19 AmericasBarometer survey of nearly 11,000 voting-age adults across the four countries. She divided the respondents into three groups and provided them with different prompts offering information about how many migrants are apprehended by US officials when trying to cross the border, subject to detention for an indefinite period of time, and face a lack of judicial process when it comes to their deportation. They were then asked how likely it would be that they would choose to live and work in the US in the next three years.
The patterns in responses across the groups were strikingly similar, though they were provided with different information about US immigration enforcement policy. Most said they weren’t likely to go to the US, but in all three groups, about 21 percent said they were “a little likely to go,” 10 percent said they were “somewhat likely,” and roughly another 10 percent said “very likely.”
Knowledge about US deportation and detention policy didn’t have any significant effect on their intentions to migrate.”
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“Another study, conducted by Vanderbilt University political science professor Jonathan Hiskey and co-authors, similarly found that knowledge of heightened US deterrence efforts didn’t influence people’s decision to migrate.”
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“Another unintended effect of US immigration enforcement has been the increase in the number of undocumented immigrants living in the US from roughly 3 million in 1986 to over 11 million today. Princeton sociologist Doug Massey and his co-authors found in a 2016 paper that the rapid expansion of immigration enforcement in the years following 1986, the last time that a major immigration law was passed, actually caused more migrants to decide to settle in the US permanently.
Before then, Mexican men had moved back and forth across the border, usually looking for opportunities for temporary work and crossing in El Paso and San Diego. The US’s decision to expand immigration enforcement didn’t really alter their ability to cross the border. They weren’t much more likely to be apprehended when they attempted to cross, and even if they were discovered by US immigration officials and swiftly returned to Mexico, they could still succeed after multiple attempts.
What changed, however, was the costs and risks associated with returning to their home country and then attempting to reenter the US. Migrants had to start crossing in more dangerous regions of the border, going through the Sonoran Desert and Arizona, and came to rely more heavily on the services of paid smugglers, which became more expensive. Between 1980 and 2010, the probability that a migrant would return after their first trip to the US consequently dropped from 48 percent to zero, according to Massey’s paper.
“The combination of increasingly costly and risky trips and the near certainty of getting into the United States created a decision-making contest in which it still made economic sense to migrate but not to return home to face the high costs and risks of subsequent entry attempts,” the authors write in the paper.
In this way, immigration enforcement had the opposite of the intended effect. And the authors write that if policymakers had never increased border patrol’s funding beyond accounting for inflation, the population of undocumented immigrants living in the US likely would have “grown substantially less.””
“Texas health officials on Wednesday sent notices to 46 state-licensed shelters housing thousands of unaccompanied migrant kids across the state, asking them to “wind down” operations by Aug. 30 in response to an emergency declaration from Gov. Greg Abbott.
Notices were sent out following an order by Abbott directing the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to “discontinue state licensing of any child-care facility in this state that shelters or detains unlawful immigrants”, as part of a border emergency declaration earlier this week.
Texas’ state-licensed shelters — which must comply with both Texas and federal standards — have some of the most stringent requirements for the care of migrant children and teen shelters nationwide.
In response to the order, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a statement, saying they are assessing the governor’s directive and “do not intend to close any facilities as a result of the order.”
If carried through, the order would close down state-licensed facilities that currently provide beds for some 4,200 migrant children and teens, according to data from mid-May, provided to Houston Public Media by Texas Health and Human Services.
That’s nearly one fourth of the nearly 17,000 kids Health and Human Services said are currently in federal custody. These are children and teens who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border without a legal guardian and are being processed and cared for by the federal government as they reunite the kids with family living in the United States.
Taking away that Texas shelter space would lead to more migrant kids in the federal government’s emergency shelters, some of which have been criticized for their poor standards of care.”
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““These kids deserve better,” said Wendy Young, president of Kids In Need of Defense (KIND), which provides legal support to migrant children and teens. In a written statement, Young argued that there need to be more state-licensed shelters for kids, not fewer.”
“Home broadband is more important than ever. It’s also seemingly a luxury good.
Just over half of Americans making less than $30,000 a year have home broadband, a service that’s increasingly important for numerous aspects of life, from school to work to socializing. A much higher 92 percent of households bringing in $75,000 or more per year have home broadband, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center.”
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“That’s due to the high cost of internet in the United States — about $60 a month — which is more than many Americans can afford. Nearly half of those without broadband don’t have it because they say it’s too expensive, according to the survey. Broadband in the US is more expensive than in many other developed nations.
The crux of the issue is that the US is very large and building out internet infrastructure is expensive, so internet companies are more likely to do so in areas where there are lots of paying customers: wealthier and populous areas. Since internet companies are not regulated like utilities, they have little economic incentive to build out internet to isolated or poorer areas, where there are fewer customers or at least fewer customers who can afford it. The result is a digital divide in which many poorer and more rural Americans lack access to broadband internet.”
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“In the meantime, about half of those without broadband say they can do everything they need to do online with their smartphone.”
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“People can do plenty of things perfectly fine on a smartphone, but there is an upper limit (try writing and sending a cover letter, toggling through different tabs and apps for work, or even being able to get the same options on your bank’s mobile website as its regular website).
“In most cases, it’s easier to use a bigger screen with a connected computer than it is to use a smartphone. If you don’t have [a computer with broadband], you’re not really plugged into the modern economy,” Rainie said, pointing to how important having a computer with broadband is for things like applying for a job. “The data shows you’re not capable of being the kind of social, political, and economic actor that people who have broadband are able to be,” he added.”