“Using the word invasion as a substitute for illegal migration is both offensive to anyone who’s lived through a real one and insulting to the intelligence of everyone else. If you can’t tell the difference between 100,000 Germans arriving in Paris at the head of an army in 1940, and 100,000 Germans arriving in Paris today as tourists, it’s time to crack open a history book, not opine on immigration policy.”
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“Migration across the border may involve violations of U.S. laws, but the comparison to an invasion ends there. Border crossers aren’t coming to overthrow the government or take over the Capitol (unlike a few nativists this year). Indeed, it’s the U.S. government that is attempting to assail the migrants, not the other way around. People crossing the border actively try to avoid conflict with U.S. authorities either by 1) evading detection and peacefully moving to their destinations, or 2) intentionally seeking out U.S. agents to submit to the government’s legal procedures. Reporting from the frontlines of this supposed conquest, The Wall Street Journal described how some invaders were inquiring for directions to the closest “immigration office.”
An “invasion” isn’t just an overstatement. It’s a completely unserious attempt to demand extraordinary, military-style measures to stop completely mundane actions like walking around a closed port of entry to file asylum paperwork or violating international labor market regulations in order to fill one of the 10 million job openings in this country. But the goal of this nativist language warfare is nothing less than the removal of immigrant rights. “We cannot allow all of these people to invade our country,” Trump tweeted in 2018. “When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came.””
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“Migration is the exact opposite of an invasion. Nearly all these so-called invaders are coming to serve Americans. This supposed invasion will contribute to the strength and prosperity of the United States, not undermine it. This isn’t Santa Anna’s soldiers crossing the Rio Grande. It’s four kids with their mom reuniting with their dad at a farm outside of Atlanta. They’re not coming to blow us up or take our stuff—they’re coming to work with us, work for us, and buy our products. They want to be us, not conquer us. And that’s the most important point: A crackdown on migration does not vindicate the rights of Americans to be free from foreign attackers. Rather, it is a violation of our rights to associate, contract, and trade with peaceful people born in other countries.”
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“There is no invasion. It’s just an overheated political analogy in pursuit of a policy outcome—if only the wielders of the word would admit that. If nativists have a good argument to make against liberalized immigration, let them make that argument instead of mangling the English language.”
“Portugal’s health care system was on the verge of collapse. Hospitals in the capital, Lisbon, were overflowing and authorities were asking people to treat themselves at home. In the last week of January, nearly 2,000 people died as the virus spread.
The country’s vaccine program was in a shambles, so the government turned to Vice Adm. Henrique Gouveia e Melo, a former submarine squadron commander, to right the ship.
Eight months later, Portugal is among the world’s leaders in vaccinations, with roughly 86% of its population of 10.3 million fully vaccinated. About 98% of all of those eligible for vaccines — meaning anyone over 12 — have been fully vaccinated, Gouveia e Melo said.”
“A housing shortage in cities across the country is costing people more than just money. Unable to find affordable housing closer to the office, an increasing share of Americans are spending extraordinary amounts of time getting to and from work.
The number of “super commuters”—people who spend more than 90 minutes commuting one way—has grown by 45 percent, or three times the rate of the overall workforce, according to a new report from rental website Apartment List.”
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“”I think of this as primarily a symptom of excessive housing costs and lack of supply close to the urban core in the nation’s most expensive markets,” says Chris Salviati, an economist with Apartment List and co-author of the study. “These are places that have been rapidly adding jobs, but not adding new housing to meet that demand.”
That’s true of the ultra-expensive New York City region, which tops the nation both in the number of super commuters and in the percentage of the workforce that super commutes. Some 762,000 people there spend over 90 minutes getting to work, or about 7.2 percent of all workers.
Not far behind is the San Francisco Bay–San Jose region, where 269,000 people (6 percent of the workforce) super commute. That represents a staggering 255 percent increase in the number of super commuters from 2010.
Both have added a lot more jobs and workers than housing over the past decade.”
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“The Apartment List study suggests more transit spending and expanding transit service as a means of improving commute times for riders. Constructing new highway capacity in growing areas with lots of motorists would be another way to speed up travel times, says Feigenbaum.
Congestion pricing, whereby motorists are charged a variable fee to use highway lanes or enter a city’s downtown, could also help reduce travel times for both drivers and bus transit riders.”
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“For every super commuter, there are likely many more people who are either choosing to spend more on housing to be closer to a particular job or who are forgoing better employment opportunities altogether because of the excessive travel times involved.
Both outcomes make people poorer, even if they aren’t spending three hours in traffic.”
“A joint Stanford Graduate School of Education/New York Times study of 70,000 public schools in 33 states three weeks ago showed that those offering remote-only learning at the beginning of 2020–21 experienced a 3.7 percent decline, while those with in-person schooling went down 2.6 percent. “In other words,” Stanford education professor Thomas S. Dee told the university’s publicity department, “going remote-only actually increased the enrollment decline by about 40 percent.”
New York City, despite being mistakenly held up by Democrats and teachers unions as a model for school reopening, rattled parents’ nerves all 2020–21 with repeated school-year delays, capricious shutdowns, hybrid scheduling, and hair-trigger building closures. Meanwhile, private schools, and public schools as close by as Long Island, remained open all year, without ever becoming “superspreaders.”
It makes intuitive sense that parents with means would seek both greater predictability and better educational outcomes for their kids, whether that means moving to a more reliable school district or shelling out the money for private options.”
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“If the New York example plays out nationwide—and keep in mind, the 2020–21 K-12 decline happened absolutely everywhere—then the impact on public education, local and state governance, and politics itself could be profound. About one out of every five state-government dollars is spent on primary and secondary education. Spending formulas tied to enrollment will see major declines; those that aren’t will face political pressure from taxpayers rightly wondering why the bill is so high for a service fewer people want. The trend toward tethering education spending to students rather than school buildings will continue shooting upward.”
“According to the CDC’s reading of the Public Health Service Act, the Court noted, it has “broad authority to take whatever measures it deems necessary to control the spread of COVID–19.” That includes the authority to override rental contracts and property rights across the country, since the CDC argues that evictions could promote the spread of COVID-19 by forcing people to live with friends or relatives, in homeless shelters, or in other “congregate or shared living setting[s].” But as the Court noted, “it is hard to see what measures this interpretation would place outside the CDC’s reach, and the Government has identified no limit…beyond the requirement that the CDC deem a measure ‘necessary.'”
The Court offers some illustrative hypotheticals: “Could the CDC, for example, mandate free grocery delivery to the homes of the sick or vulnerable? Require manufacturers to provide free computers to enable people to work from home? Order telecommunications companies to provide free high-speed Internet service to facilitate remote work?” But those examples only scratch the surface.
If the CDC’s understanding of its powers were correct, it would have the authority to make any of its frequently contentious COVID-19 recommendations, including its advice on mask wearing by K–12 students and the general public, mandatory. Rather than focus on people who move because they are evicted, it could simply decree that no one is allowed to change residences. It could require every American to be vaccinated against COVID-19. It could unilaterally impose nationwide shutdowns of businesses and order every American to stay home except for “essential” purposes. It could prescribe fines and jail sentences for people who defy those requirements, as it has with the eviction moratorium. And it could do any of these things not just in response to COVID-19 but also to control the spread of any communicable disease, including the seasonal flu and the common cold.
Where does the CDC think it gets this limitless discretion? The Public Health Service Act, which Congress approved in 1944, says “the Surgeon General, with the approval of the Secretary [of health and human services], is authorized to make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession.” It adds that “for purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the Surgeon General may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.”
A regulation delegates that authority to the CDC, which has heretofore used it rarely and for narrow purposes such as banning the sale of small turtles that carry salmonella. But last fall, when it first imposed its eviction moratorium, the CDC claimed to discover previously unnoticed dictatorial powers. In the CDC’s view, “other measures” includes literally anything it claims will help reduce the spread of communicable diseases.
Two-thirds of the federal courts that have considered the issue, including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, have said the CDC does not have the power it claims. They generally have taken the view that “other measures” must be similar in kind to the specific examples listed in the statute.”
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“The Court adds that “even if the text were ambiguous, the sheer scope of the
CDC’s claimed authority…would counsel against the Government’s interpretation,” since “we expect Congress to speak clearly” when it means to authorize powers of “vast ‘economic and political significance.'””
“Body camera footage released along with the lawsuit shows Grashorn stepping out of his police cruiser. Love and Hamm’s other dog, Bubba, is sleeping on the ground but gets up and begins running toward the officer. Grashorn draws his gun on the dog, but the couple yells at the animal to come back. It pauses and turns toward its owners, but Herkimer jumps out of the truck and lopes toward Grashorn with its tail wagging. Grashorn shoots the dog. (The audio is not captured by the body camera, which retains 30 seconds of footage before it is turned on, but not sound.)”
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“After the shooting, Grashorn refused to allow the distraught couple near Herkimer, ordering them to go back to their truck. When Hamm demanded to know why Grashorn had shot the dog, Grashorn yelled that he had “no way of knowing” whether Herkimer was friendly and that he “wasn’t in the business to get bit.”
The lawsuit says that Loveland police refused to let the couple retrieve their dog and take it to a veterinarian until a Loveland police supervisor arrived on the scene. Hamm was ticketed for having a “dangerous dog.” The ticket was later dismissed by the district attorney.
Herkimer died four days after being shot. An internal review by the Loveland Police Department found the shooting was justified.”
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“Reason has been covering sad incidents of “puppycide” like Herkimer’s for decades now. In 2019, a Faulkner County, Arkansas, sheriff’s deputy was fired and charged with animal cruelty after he casually shot a small dog because the owner refused to walk outside to talk to him. The shootings lead not only to devastated families and viral news stories, but expensive lawsuit settlements for cities. In 2019, St. Louis paid $775,000 to a woman whose dog was shot during a no-knock SWAT raid over an unpaid gas bill. The Detroit Police Department has settled a string of lawsuits for shooting dogs during drug raids.”
“Labor unions such as the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers have been lobbying federal regulators to mandate that all freight trains operate with two-person crews in the cab. That’s long been the standard industry practice for safety reasons. The engineer drives the train, while the rail conductor handles equipment inspections and monitors track signals. Unions worry that advanced automation will allow railroads to run safely without a second person in the engine—and they want the government to step in to protect those jobs.
This dreaded automation is indeed occurring. All major rail systems in the U.S. now use positive train control (PTC), essentially a computer-based override system that monitors speed and track signals to avert collisions. The adoption of PTC—mandated by Congress since 2008—has helped dramatically reduce rail accidents. Data from the Association of American Railroads (AAR), an industry group, show accidents are down 30 percent since 2000, while employee injuries have fallen by more than 40 percent. Railroading is safer now than it has ever been, in large part due to those technological advances.
With PTC systems handling many of the in-cab duties that were formerly the rail conductor’s responsibility, railroads are seeking to reassign some of those workers. Because rail conductors typically do equipment inspections and perform other duties before trains depart from rail yards and after they return, some will continue to work in that capacity. But any changes to the employment structure have to be approved as part of collective bargaining.”
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“without clear and convincing evidence that two-person crews are necessary for trains to operate safety—and with PTC doing a better job of preventing accidents than humans used to—there’s no compelling reason for the government to get involved in this dispute. Private railroads and unions can make their own arrangements.
If Biden needs more convincing, he should check in with his beloved Amtrak. The government-run passenger rail system dropped its own two-people-in-the-cab mandate back in the 1980s.”
“One of Sessions’ final moves in office was to sharply limit when the Justice Department could enter into consent decrees. Vanita Gupta, who ran the Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration, called that policy “a slap in the face to the dedicated career staff of the department who work tirelessly to enforce our nation’s civil rights laws.” The Biden administration rolled back Sessions’ directive, and Gupta is now back at the Justice Department as an associate attorney general.
Sessions was correct that consent decrees should be used judiciously. Justice Department investigations and settlements are a heavy-handed imposition of federal authority. But they can also provide recourse for citizens who have been betrayed by rotten police departments and indifferent local governments.”
“Over the past 20 years, the U.S. has launched more than 13,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan. We don’t really know for certain how many people have been killed, let alone how many of those people were civilians and not terrorists. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism tracked the drone war in Afghanistan up until February 2020. It calculates that between 4,000 and 10,000 deaths in Afghanistan were from drone strikes. Of those, it says, between 300 and 900 were civilians and somewhere between 66 and 184 were children.
These wide variances in these estimates reflect the lack of transparency and reliable data. It wasn’t until the last couple of years of President Barack Obama’s administration that the Pentagon even provided data about drone strikes. And then President Donald Trump’s administration ended that practice.”