“Immigrants have applied to become US citizens in increasing numbers since Trump took office, which some policy analysts say is the effect of the president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. But the path hasn’t been easy. They’re facing ballooning processing times, higher fees, more intensive vetting, and the possibility of later losing their citizenship at the hands of the Justice Department’s “denaturalization section.”
As of December 1, they also have to pass an updated, more difficult citizenship test. And on November 18, the Trump administration also updated its policy guidance to advise officials at US Citizenship and Immigration Services to scrutinize citizenship applicants about how they obtained their green cards, among other factors, changes that immigration advocates argue will result in longer processing times and more denials.
Both changes represent additional barriers to citizenship for the roughly 9.2 million immigrants living in the US who are eligible to naturalize.”
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“The Trump administration has pursued a vast regulatory agenda aimed at curbing asylum and other humanitarian protections for migrants arriving on the southern border.
As part of a last-minute push, it issued a death blow to the system on Thursday with a sweeping final regulation that would bar huge swaths of asylum seekers from obtaining protection, including those who face persecution on the basis of gender and resistance to gang recruitment, and as victims of criminal coercion. Those targeted by international criminal gangs like MS-13 will therefore likely face a much narrower path to asylum under the rule.”
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“The Biden administration would have to issue new regulations to rescind any of the regulations Trump has finalized, including likely going through the burdensome process of giving the public notice and the opportunity to comment. It could also try to revise any regulations subject to ongoing litigation through a court settlement.”
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“Though Trump has often claimed that he supports legal immigration, he has put up substantial barriers to foreign workers and is continuing to do so in his final days in office.
Trump issued an executive order earlier this year that froze the issuance of visas for most foreign workers applying from outside the US through the end of the year on account of Covid-19, and he is expected to extend that order. President-elect Joe Biden has criticized the policy, calling it a “yet another attempt to distract” from his administration’s “failure to lead an effective response to COVID-19.” He told NBC News in June that the policy “will not be in my administration.”
The Trump administration is also pursuing regulations that would hamstring the health care industry, universities, nonprofits, and businesses that rely on foreign talent.”
“the US Federal Trade Commission and 48 US state attorneys general filed major lawsuits against Facebook that argue the social media giant is a monopoly whose anti-competitive practices harm Americans.
The two lawsuits, which follow more than a year of investigations, are the biggest antitrust challenge Facebook has faced. They both essentially call for Facebook to be broken up by forcing it to undo its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, which together have billions of users.
The lawsuits allege that such action may be necessary because Facebook has crushed its competitors and achieved dominance by buying potential rivals, and that this limits American consumers’ choices and reduces their access to privacy protections.
“They stifled innovation, and they degraded privacy protections for millions of Americans,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led the states’ lawsuit (which includes 46 states plus Washington, DC, and Guam), told reporters on Wednesday. “No company should have this much unchecked power over our personal information and our social interactions.”
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But a blog post published by the company on Wednesday called the lawsuits “revisionist history.” The company emphasized that its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram were approved by the FTC years ago, and said allowing a “do-over” would raise a concerning precedent that “no sale will ever be final.””
“The Phoenix City Council on Wednesday unanimously agreed to pay $3 million to the family of Ryan Whitaker, who was shot and killed several months ago by police investigating a noise complaint and who did not receive immediate medical assistance after the incident.
Taxpayers will be footing the bill. Taxpayers are also footing the bill for the salaries of the cops—Officer Jeff Cooke, who pulled the trigger, and Officer John Ferragamo, who too was on the call—as they are both still employed by the Phoenix Police Department (PPD).”
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“Whitaker answered the door with a firearm at his waist, which he legally owned, and can be seen in the body cam footage immediately getting on his knees in surrender. Cooke then shot him twice in the back.”
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“The PPD has developed somewhat of a sordid track record of late. The city shelled out $475,000 to Dravon Ames and his family after police brandished their weapons and threatened to shoot him and his pregnant fiancée when their 4-year-old daughter shoplifted a Barbie from a Family Dollar store in May 2019. “I’m gonna put a fucking cap right in your fucking head!” a cop can be heard saying in video footage captured via a bystander. That same officer, Chris Meyer, is seen kicking Ames after he had been handcuffed, and the family’s suit alleges the officer punched Ames “very hard in the back for no reason.” Meyer has since been terminated.
And in August of this year, Ramon Lopez died after a group of cops pinned him down on hot asphalt for several minutes, streaking his back with what appear to be burns. He was reported for loitering in a parking lot, “sticking his tongue out,” and “looking at people’s cars.”
All three instances provide a gruesome window into excessive force. But they also put forward an important lesson on the potential effects of overcriminalization—particularly in Whitaker’s and Lopez’s cases—where armed agents of the state are routinely relied upon not only to address violent crimes, but to investigate minor inconveniences.”
“The Biden administration has ended former President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy, which provided the underpinnings for family separation by seeking to prosecute every migrant who crossed the border without authorization.
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop the separations in 2018 — after more than 5,000 families were separated. Attorneys still can’t find the parents of more than 600 children; many of the parents were deported back to their home countries, while others are believed to be in the US. Biden has promised to create a task force to work on family reunification, and an announcement is expected later this week.
The Department of Justice issued a memo on Tuesday night rescinding the policy, which was implemented in April 2018 under then-US Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Acting US Attorney General Monty Wilkinson wrote Tuesday that the policy was “inconsistent” with the DOJ’s mandate to consider individual circumstances — including criminal history, the seriousness of the offense and the potential sentence or other consequences of conviction — when making decisions to charge people with the crime of crossing the border without authorization.
Trump officials claimed that they had no choice under the zero-tolerance policy but to prosecute and detain the adults while sending the children to other facilities designed to administer their care. But the officials ignored the possibility of releasing the families from detention together, as prior administrations had done.”
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“The Trump administration started separating families in immigration detention back in 2017, beginning with a pilot program in El Paso, Texas. The practice was later expanded along the border in the spring of 2018, when Sessions announced the zero-tolerance policy.
Parents were sent to immigration detention to await deportation proceedings. Their children, meanwhile, were sent to separate facilities designed to hold children and, in some cases, released to other family members in the US or to foster homes. Previous administrations, in most cases, would have simply released the families from detention together if there was insufficient room in family detention facilities.”
“A new poll of 1,164 likely voters conducted January 15 to 19 by Vox and Data for Progress (DFP) reveals an oft-ignored truth: Sometimes the reason optimal policy doesn’t happen isn’t because of bad politicians; it’s because voters don’t want it to pass.
In the poll, 60 percent of likely voters said they would support sending a $1,400 one-time payment to most Americans as part of Covid-19 relief. That’s great news — the $1,200 stimulus checks last year were shown to have reduced poverty and helped Americans stay afloat in the first months of the crisis.
But that same number (60 percent) support means-testing the aid, agreeing with the statement: “Checks should be phased out based on income so higher income people receive less money.” The poll, which has a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points, also found that nearly as many likely voters (56 percent) are opposed to sending stimulus checks to undocumented people.
Voters may not fully understand the trade-offs to means-testing and restricting aid to undocumented Americans (namely, that many people experiencing financial difficulties may be left out due to poor targeting). But the stance is consistent with another DFP finding, which Matt Yglesias wrote about for his newsletter Slow Boring, revealing that voters would rather some vaccine doses expire than allow “some people to cut in line.” In essence, that means most voters would rather have more people get Covid-19 and potentially die than have someone get a vaccine dose before they “should.”
Opposition to the wealthy receiving financial assistance from the government and hostility to undocumented immigrants isn’t surprising, but these findings showcase something very important: Voters are so concerned about the perceived “fairness” of the economic response that it could hamstring optimal policymaking.”
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“America is in a crisis, and it’s a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Yes, some people who get the money may save it, they may not be financially harmed by the pandemic, and it may feel unfair, but it’s better that everyone struggling gets the money as quickly as possible than we slow down the process over a flawed conception of justice.”
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“Proponents of means-testing may point to recent data that stimulus checks to Americans earning over $75,000 don’t benefit the economy — in essence arguing it’s a waste of government spending. However, as Matthews pointed out, the simple fix to this would be to just tax rich people more later to recoup the costs instead of wasting time during a pandemic trying to design the optimal program. Additionally, we only have this data in hindsight — at the time, it wasn’t obvious where the dividing line between “affected by the pandemic” and “unaffected” was.”
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“One silver lining in the poll is the finding that 51 percent of likely voters are in favor of automatic stabilizers that “automatically trigger more spending on programs like unemployment insurance or SNAP if the economy experiences a contraction.” It’s something Biden has signaled his support for and that could help the nation avoid wasting precious time the next time there’s a recession.”
https://www.vox.com/recode/22254270/robinhood-gamestop-amc-block-wallstreetbets-day-trading
“House and Senate Democrats on Tuesday reintroduced a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, more than doubling the current $7.25 hourly rate.
The House reportedly plans to include the measure in its upcoming COVID-19 relief legislation. The main problem: That would provide the polar opposite of relief to businesses buckling under the weight of COVID-19 and the associated government lockdowns.
As has been the case over the past year, the congressional aid package is, in part, supposed to resuscitate livelihoods decimated by state-required closures and restrictions. It’s richly ironic that a heightened minimum wage would be yet another mandate that business-owners might need help counteracting. Relief from the relief.”
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“The Democrats’ measure is unlikely to pass in conventional fashion, as it would require the votes of at least 10 Senate Republicans to overcome the filibuster. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) said instead that they will pursue a backroad and seek to make it law via budget reconciliation, though the restrictions on that process make success there unlikely as well.
Sanders is undeterred. “Let’s be clear. The $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage is a starvation wage,” he said in a statement. “No person in America can make it on $8, $10, or $12 an hour.” There are a few problems there. The foremost: It’s even harder to make it on $0 an hour.”
“Chicago Public Schools, though, has already implemented many of the mitigation strategies that government planners have in mind, and the district believes teachers can safely go back to class. Officials have good reason to think this: Outside major cities, many schools—including a great number of private schools that lack easy access to government dollars—have been open since at least September, and there’s simply no evidence of widespread disease in classrooms. Schools have not played host to superspreader events, and there’s little reason to think that students are infecting their teachers. Even the CDC, which is hardly known for taking an incautious approach to resuming normal life, says that schools can reopen safely.”
“There was a really open question: Are schools going to be the locus of tremendous spread? That conversation has shifted a lot, but in the summer there was this idea that we’re going to open schools and that’s going to be the thing that destroys everything.
That does not seem to be true. We’re not seeing schools as the locus of large amounts of spread. The rates are actually quite low—even though the way we measure rates, just to be clear, is not spread in schools, but just people affiliated with schools who have COVID. So it doesn’t mean they got it at the school. But even there, we’re seeing rates that are pretty much in line with what we’re seeing in the community. Maybe a little bit lower for students, maybe a little bit higher for staff.
We’re seeing fairly optimistic information about the idea that you could have schools operate safely, even in areas where there’s some reasonable amount of community spread. Masking probably does matter. That’s probably the most robust correlate in the data, that those places that are masking seem to have much lower rates than places that are not. But I think the thing that we got the most attention for—rightly, because it moved people’s priors a lot—was just this idea that not everyone at the school got COVID the day it opened.
We are seeing some of these differences across age groups. To the extent that there are places with larger numbers of cases, they seem to be high schools.”
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“we have seen the thing that people feared at the college level. Not at all colleges, but a lot. When Penn State opened, you could see on a COVID map where Penn State is, because it was just totally overwhelmed. In some ways I find it actually surprising that we have not seen more high schools that looked like that. And I’m not sure why that’s so different.”
“Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Joe Biden agreed Tuesday to extend the New START nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which is due to expire next month, according to Kremlin and White House summaries of a phone call between the leaders.
“They discussed both countries’ willingness to extend New START for five years, agreeing to have their teams work urgently to complete the extension by February 5,” the White House said.”
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“Formally called the “New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty,” the agreement limits Washington and Moscow’s deployed nuclear weapons to 1,550 each. It was signed in 2010, entered force on February 5, 2011 and was set to expire on its 10th anniversary.
New START is the last remaining nonproliferation agreement between the former Cold War superpower rivals, after another key nuclear accord, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, expired in August 2019.”