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Economists have long warned that the aging US population means the nation will need to rely on a steady influx of foreign workers to meet demand. Yet Washington has repeatedly failed to reach a deal on immigration reform. And the Trump administration repeatedly put up obstacles to legal immigration, including restrictions imposed in 2020 that cited the pandemic's impact on the jobs market.

"Immigration was completely upended by the pandemic," said Bradley. "Go to any resort town in America. Where you would normally have individuals on temporary J-1 visas, they are nonexistent."

"The survivability of your business comes down to how lucky you are in the lottery," Bradley said.

"But labor supply will be a longer run issue, just like before the pandemic," Zandi said. "There are reasons to believe it will be a bigger problem post-pandemic because immigration is a shadow of what it was."

"The [Biden] administration deserves a lot of credit for taking that step," Bradley said. "They are operating within the limits of where the current law exists."

Beyond immigration reform, the Chamber told CNN Business it will urge states to use American Rescue Plan funding to help parents struggling with the high cost of childcare.

"There is no question the disruption of in-person schooling and childcare has reduced the number of caregivers, principally women, who are in the workforce and able to work," Bradley said.

Arizona announced plans on May 13 to use funds from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to assist working parents with childcare costs. The state said it will provide three months of childcare assistance to people making $52,000 or less who return to work after collecting unemployment benefits. The initiative is part of Arizona's decision to end the $300 enhanced unemployment benefit.

"The president deserves credit for identifying a lot of important problems that we need to discuss with the American Families Plan," Bradley said, specifically citing the affordability and accessibility of childcare. /* dynamic basic css */ .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container {margin:0;padding:0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container .ob-clearfix {display:block;width:100%;float:none;clear:both;height:0px;line-height:0px;font-size:0px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container.ob-multi-row {padding-top: 2%;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-container {position:relative;margin:0;padding;0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-link, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-link:hover {text-decoration:none;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon-container {position:absolute;left:0;height:50%;width:100%;text-align:center;top:25%;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon {display:inline-block;height:100%;float:none;opacity:0.7;transition: opacity 500ms;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon:hover {opacity:1;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-rec-rtb-image {background-color:white;background-position:center;background-repeat:no-repeat;width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;bottom:0;left:0;right:0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-rec-rtb-image.ob-lazy-bgimg{background:none!important;}.AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what{direction:ltr;clear:both;padding:5px 10px 0px;} .AR_36 .ob_what a:after {content: "";vertical-align:super;;;background-image: url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/achoice.svg');background-size:75% 75%;width:12px;height:12px;padding-left:4px;display:inline-block;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:right center;border-left:1px solid #999;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what a{color:#757575;font-size:11px;font-family:arial;text-decoration: none;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what.ob-hover:hover a{text-decoration: underline;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia_covid, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_feed_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sfeed_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_text_logo{vertical-align:baseline !important;display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;padding:0px 5px;box-sizing:content-box;-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_16x16.png') no-repeat center top;width:16px;height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia_covid{width:auto;height:16px;max-height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_67x12.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:12px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_text_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_text_logo_67x22.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:22px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_feed_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_feed_logo.png') no-repeat center top;width:86px;height:23px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sfeed_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_smartFeedLogo.min.svg') no-repeat center top;width:140px;height:21px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sphere_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_sphere.svg') no-repeat center top;width:93px;height:27px;vertical-align:baseline!important;display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;padding:0px 0px;box-sizing:content-box;-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;} @media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),(min-resolution: 192dpi) { .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_16x16@2x.png') no-repeat center top;width:16px;height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px; 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voting rights advocates note that there has been a major setback in their world.

Also, 33 states now have Voter ID laws in place with increased identification requirements for people seeking to cast ballots

“I anticipate arrests, in and outside the Capitol,” Brooks said. “Congress allowing the Voting Rights Act to be gutted has disrupted our democracy … so our democracy should get back to functioning as it should.”

acts of civil disobedience and even a mid-April march from

What many view as the gutting of the Voting Rights Act has prompted civil rights advocates to take action. A coalition of 100 organizations including the NAACP will stage a string of protests

controversial one for civil rights advocates, who maintain that some groups of Americans, including older people and minorities, are less likely to have the sort of identification that would be required.

"We are making it very clear that we're protecting the right to vote, insuring the integrity of the right to vote and getting out the vote. This is not all of us registering people to vote and waiting for November with polite patience."

Rights that had appeared to be resolved as matters of controversy in American politics are unfortunately once again up for grabs. It’s hard to imagine what’s more American than insuring the right to vote for all Americans, and what could be more un-American than impeding it?”

Citizen Cruz: Our view

Legal case against the Canadian-born senator's eligibility is weak, but not non-existent.

The most boisterous exchange in Thursday night's Republican debate was not over terrorism, guns or the economy. It was over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s eligibility under the Constitution

to run for president because

“Democrats are going to be bringing a suit,” Trump predicted, adding, “There’s a big question mark on your head.”

the chances of any litigation proceeding and succeeding on this are zero.”

Cruz is as American as anybody born on U.S. soil.  And Trump, by suggesting that the Constitution’s “natural born” citizen clause could actually keep Cruz out of the White House, is trying to eliminate an oppone

the founders wrote that only "a natural born citizen" is eligible to be president. They  did not define the phrase further.

Cruz was born in Canada, but there is no doubt that he is an American citizen because his mother was a U.S. citizen.

1787, the founders feared that some foreign-born interloper, perhaps from England, might come to the USA and seek the presidency for nefarious reasons

candidacies of others have been challenged on this point. Former Michigan governor George Romney, who was born in Mexico to two American parents and ran for the 1968 GOP nomination, was threatened with legal action before he dropped out for other reasons.

The overwhelming weight of legal scholarship is on Cruz’s side. Many scholars assert that an infant born to an American parent, regardless of location, acquires citizenship “at birth” and therefore passes the “natural born” test

They argue that the meaning of “natural born” should be viewed in the context of the 1700s, when where you were born was the controlling factor.

In 2008, a bipartisan Senate resolution was passed by unanimous consent, asserting that McCain was indeed a “natural born” citizen

If the problem can't be fixed legislatively, a constitutional amendment would be necessary. Those are hard to pass, as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, discovered after he introduced one in 2003 that would have allowed anyone who has been a citizen for 20 years, and is otherwise eligible, to become presiden

Amnesty is not immigration reform: Opposing view

There have been several legislative attempts to overhaul U.S. immigration policy over the past decade. All of them failed

how immigration affects the economic, social and national security interests of the American people — was, at best, an afterthought.

Immigration has taken center stage in the 2016 campaign because many Americans have come to recognize that it is a policy without any definable public interest objective

Granting amnesty — euphemistically called “a pathway to citizenship” — is not immigration reform

institutionalizes the government’s failure to protect the interests of the American people, and encourages still more illegal immigration.

amnesty benefits illegal aliens, it does not promote any public interest. Nearly half of all adult illegal aliens have not completed high schoo

high-productivity, high-earning workers. What it will do, over time, is make them eligible to add to the 51% of immigrant-headed households in the U.S. that rely on some form of welfare.

Amnesty would also exacerbate the already alarming erosion of America’s middle class, as former illegal aliens would be eligible to compete legally for all U.S. jobs and petition for millions more similarly skilled relatives to join them here.

The American people are seeking a new direction in the long simmering debate over immigration.

through persuasive insistence. On issues as diverse as the alleged dangers of immigration and the nature of truth, Trump’s words have the power to cleave public opinion, turning nonpolitical issues into partisan maelstroms and turning partisan attitudes on their head.

Years ago (even months ago) it would have been absurd to imagine “law and order” Republicans souring on the FBI; or that the party of Reagan and Bush would turn on the NFL, America’s most orgiastically patriotic sport.

In 2014, about 60 percent of both Republicans and Democrats said the FBI was doing an "excellent" or "good" job. Last year, their views forked: Republican approval of the agency fell by about 10 points, while Democratic opinion improved by a similar margin.

And yet, because Democrats have become more pro-immigrant under Trump, a record-high share of Americans now say "immigrants strengthen the country.”

Trump evinces not a Midas touch, but a Moses touch—an extraordinary talent for planting a stake in the ground and dividing the landscape before him.

In mid-2016, 20 percent of both Republicans and Democrats considered Russia an “ally” or “friendly.” One year later, Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats to say the same.

Immigration had for years been a marginal political topic, especially when compared with issues like jobs and terrorism. But Trump effectively recast immigration as a question of American identity and national security.

The construction of a wall along the Mexican border, once a fringey scheme, became the centerpiece of the GOP presidential candidate’s agenda. Today, three-quarters of Trump supporters say that “building the wall” should be the highest priority of his presidency

Less than 20 percent of Republicans said they had unfavorable views of the NFL in the summer of 2017. But their disapproval had more than tripled by October, after Trump blasted players for kneeling to protest police violence during the national anthem

Trump’s “mere” words could starve his party of moderate legislators, while encouraging Democratic candidates to embrace more liberal positions to distinguish themselves as distinctly anti-Trump.

It's tempting to downplay the power of Trump's words by saying their influence is “merely” shifting public opinion. But that's not quite right. First, there’s nothing subtle about Republican voters clutching nativism, the far-right right clutching Nazism, or Democratic voters radicalizing in defiance of the president.

Second, Trump’s rhetorical posture has some real policy implications. Though he hasn’t yet signed any major legislation on immigration, his harsh stance on undocumented workers empowered the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to increase arrests by 40 percent in his first year, often to shocking effect

And his constant disparagement of experts who refuse to parrot his policies has sucked the talent out of several government agencies, notably the State Department.

Trump’s refusal to accept critical information as true—from his denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election to the “alternative facts” about his inauguration size—has demolished the right’s faith and trust in a free press. Three-quarters of the GOP now say that news organizations make up anti-Trump stories.

Even worse, a January study found that nearly half of Republicans believe that accurate stories that “cast a politician or political group in a negative light” are “always” fake news. Trump, along with Fox News, has given his supporters the license to self-deport from reality.

Trump’s obsession with building and broadcasting an alternative ledger of facts has made epistemology the fundamental crisis of his term

In its first month, the administration invented or mainstreamed a new vocabulary of mendacity—e.g., fake news, alternative facts—and within 10 months, Trump made more than 1,500 false or misleading claims, according to The Washington Post. That’s roughly six lies, exaggerations, or omissions per day

No legislation, no executive order, and no official speech has caused this shift. It is the president’s words, delivered often via Twitter and amplified on Fox News, that have exploded the very notion of a shared political truth.

The insistence that Trump’s words don’t matter isn’t incidental to the GOP’s broader strategy. It is the strategy—to quarantine Trump’s most noxious rhetoric and proceed apace with traditional Republican governance.

The idea that a president’s words don’t matter is a deeply ahistorical position. And that’s particularly true for the GOP

Perhaps Republicans don’t treat Trump as a typical Republican president because, in a very real sense, Trump is not really the president. Instead, he has become a kind of nationalist identity guru for the new American right.

an anonymous White House source all but acknowledged this strategy, telling Axios that the president would spend 2018 seeking “unexpected cultural flashpoints,” like the NFL’s kneeling controversy. The White House sees Trump’s principle talent as the ability to activate cultural resentment among his supporters, encouraging them to redefine their identity and values around a nativist anger.

Politics is downstream from persuasion, and law is downstream from language.

So the statutory issue in Jennings was whether these statutes, which do not mention bail, should be read as forbidding bail proceedings—or read against the background of the Constitution, which plainly regards bail as a fundamental right? For criminal proceedings, bail hearings are presumed; should immigration detention—which is civil—be an exception? Six of the circuits have said that bail hearings must be held if detention is “prolonged.” The Ninth Circuit, where Jennings originated, ordered that ICE provide bail hearings for its detainees every six months. The detainees would be entitled to release unless ICE could show by “clear and convincing evidence” that they were dangerous to the community or likely to flee.

In dissent, Breyer, joined by Ginsburg and Sotomayor, contended that the constitutional issues in this area are weighty. Though popular discourse increasingly denies this obvious fact, the immigrants immured in the ERO archipelago have constitutional rights. The Fifth Amendment says that “[n]o person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”—and from the founding to the present, “person” has included citizen and alien alike. Some of the immigrants in the class, having been halted at the border, are not, as a matter of immigration law, “in” the United States. But that’s a legal fiction for immigration purposes, Breyer noted:

under 230,000 foreigners are currently subject to deportation and more than 60,000 of them don't even have a temporary residency permit and technically have to leave the country immediately.

Reports of refugees who have raped or even killed women leave a more lasting impression than features about Syrians who are quickly able to establish themselves as dental technicians in Germany or about successful second-generation entrepreneurs from Turkey

This has led to an additional problem: Terminology. Terms like immigrant, German, foreigner or "immigration background" no longer work particularly well in a country of immigration.

many immigrant children are still far away from reaching their potential. The share of second-generation immigrants from Turkish families with a university-prep high school diploma, for example, is 25 percent while for Germans it is 43 percent

many immigrants pass down their limited education to their children,"

the comparison is of only limited utility due to the fundamental differences between Canadian and German immigration policy. Canada carefully chooses its immigrants and they tend to be well-educated and fluent speakers of English. In 2016, the country only took in around 50,000 refugees

the German government does need to muster sufficient courage to impose more regulation on immigration, reform the European asylum system and find effective ways to send rejected asylum applicants back to their home countries more expeditiously.

"From the moment I get a job in Germany, it is generally well enough paid that it is possible to build up a life on that basis." Work is the great equalizer, Schneider believes. "Socialization via work did wonders for the guest workers and it still works today."

To be antiracist, according to Kendi, is not merely to be against racism

Kendi defines an “antiracist” as “one who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea”

To be an antiracist, he says, is to adopt a belief system that is built on a few core principles.

One of the foundations of antiracist thinking is that “the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences—that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group.”

Another is that “racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.”

Kendi believes an antiracist world would be one in which “equal opportunities and thus outcomes exist between the equal groups.”

There are obvious counterarguments to his thesis that racist policies are necessarily the cause of all racial inequities.

For instance: recent studies show that, as a group, Asian Americans now achieve better academic outcomes and earn more money on average than White Americans. Following Kendi’s reasoning, the cause of that racial inequity must be racist policies that either favor Asian Americans or discriminate against White Americans. But he never explains what racist policies could possibly account for this gap.

Kendi cites the widely used example of Black immigrants, who are more likely to have a college degree than native born Black Americans and Americans overall

Kendi acknowledges the success of Black immigrants and attributes it largely “self-selection,” noting that immigrants are more likely to be driven, resourceful, and resilient.Ta-Nahesi Coates has made a similar point that “comparing any immigrant group to virtually any native-born group is like comparing the most ambitious members of one team with the entirety of another team.

these discrepancies contradict his definitive statement that racist policies are the cause, rather than a cause, of racial inequities.

After pointing out that Black immigrants earn more on average than native-born Americans, but still earn less than other immigrant groups, Kendi declares:: “An ethnic racist asks, Why are Black immigrants doing better than African Americans? An ethnic antiracist asks, Why are Black immigrants not doing as well as other immigrant groups?”

Why aren’t both questions worth exploring?

Kendi’s analysis of Black immigrants is representative of a larger trend in the book. Kendi makes valid points or cites relevant evidence, but then draws a sweeping conclusion that does not logically follow from that evidence

He also repeatedly frames questions with complex answers as necessitating an either/or proposition.

By frequently dealing in absolutes—“One either allows racial inequality to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space…”—Kendi does little to dispel common criticisms of antiracism.

Kendi takes some passing digs at McWhorter, but he never thoroughly addresses many prominent criticisms of antiracism head on. As a result, How To Be An Antiracist often reads like one side of a debate with no opponent

Readers inclined to agree with Kendi may not be troubled by the lack of evidence, or his reluctance to thoroughly address prominent counterarguments. But those who pick up his bookwith some skepticism are unlikely to have their minds changed.

The big promise that Democrats failed to keep was the passage of an immigration reform bill that would legalize the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

Latinos haven’t forgotten Mr. Obama’s promise. That’s why Democrats have a “Latino problem.”

Now it falls to Mr. Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, to overcome this lack of trust within the Latino community. “I think it was a big mistake,” Mr. Biden said of the Obama administration’s mass deportations during our interview. “It took too long to get it right.”

Mr. Biden’s second promise is specifically for Dreamers. “I will also legalize Dreamers again,” he said during our February interview, “making sure they are not deported. These are already Americans.”

Mr. Trump’s policies have had a profound effect on immigration: From 2016 to 2019, annual net immigration to the United States fell by almost half, to about 600,000 migrants per year.

It’s possible that Mr. Biden’s policies could send the wrong message to people in the Southern Hemisphere. So, in order to discourage new caravans of people from traveling to the United States from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, Mr. Biden has said he plans to invest $4 billion to create jobs in Central America and tackle the root causes of migration.

While Biden promised to reverse Trump's most restrictive immigration policies, he did not include immigration among his four top priorities: the coronavirus pandemic, economic recovery, racial equity and climate change.

Biden is largely expected to go back to the priorities that were in place at the end of the Obama administration.

the Biden administration must be careful not to unwind Trump's restrictions too quickly before getting their own processing system in place — or they will risk a new surge at the border.

The chief justice also appeared to accept the state of Texas' view that increased costs for drivers licenses were enough to give the states standing to sue over Obama's actions.

Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller called the DAPA program "an unprecedented, unlawful exercise of executive power," arguing that DAPA amounted to "one of the largest changes in immigration policy in our nation's history."

Kagan pressed Keller on whether the administration had the right to tell so-called “low-priority” immigrants that they weren’t likely to get deported

Political identity has become so central because it has come to overlap with so many other aspects of identity: race, religion, lifestyle. In 1960, I wouldn’t have learned much about your politics if you told me that you hunted. Today, that hobby strongly suggests Republican loyalty. Unmarried? In 1960, that indicated little. Today, it predicts that you’re a Democrat, especially if you’re also a woman.

Meanwhile, the dividing line that used to be the most crucial of them all—class—has increasingly become a division within the parties, not between them.

Since 1984, nearly every Democratic presidential-primary race has ended as a contest between a “wine track” candidate who appealed to professionals (Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, and Barack Obama) and a “beer track” candidate who mobilized the remains of the old industrial working class (Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton).

The Republicans have their equivalent in the battles between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” candidates. Until this decade, however, both parties—and especially the historically more cohesive Republicans—managed to keep sufficient class peace to preserve party unity.

The Great Recession ended in the summer of 2009. Since then, the U.S. economy has been growing, but most incomes have not grown comparably. In 2014, real median household income remained almost $4,000 below the pre-recession level, and well below the level in 1999. The country has recovered from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Most of its people have not. Many Republicans haven’t shared in the recovery and continued upward flight of their more affluent fellow partisans.

What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom. He jettisoned party orthodoxy on issues ranging from entitlement spending to foreign policy. He scoffed at trade agreements. He said rude things about Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. He reviled the campaign contributions of big donors—himself included!—as open and blatant favor-buying. Trump’s surge was a decisive repudiation by millions of Republican voters of the collective wisdom of their party elite.

It’s uncertain whether any Tea Partier ever really carried a placard that read keep your government hands off my medicare. But if so, that person wasn’t spouting gibberish. The Obama administration had laid hands on Medicare. It hoped to squeeze $500 billion out of the program from 2010 to 2020 to finance health insurance for the uninsured. You didn’t have to look up the figures to have a sense that many of the uninsured were noncitizens (20 percent), or that even more were foreign-born (27 percent). In the Tea Party’s angry town-hall meetings, this issue resonated perhaps more loudly than any other—the ultimate example of redistribution from a deserving “us” to an undeserving “them.”

As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Owners of capital assets, employers of low-skill laborers, and highly compensated professionals tend to benefit economically from the arrival of immigrants. They are better positioned to enjoy the attractive cultural and social results of migration (more-interesting food!) and to protect themselves against the burdensome impacts (surges in non-English-proficient pupils in public schools). A pro-immigration policy shift was one more assertion of class interest in a party program already brimful of them.

The Republican National Committee made it all official in a March 2013 postelection report signed by party eminences. The report generally avoided policy recommendations, with a notable exception: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.

Republicans’ approval ratings slipped and slid. Instead of holding on to their base and adding Hispanics, Republicans alienated their base in return for no gains at all. By mid-2015, a majority of self-identified Republicans disapproved of their party’s congressional leadership

In 2011–12, the longest any of the “not Romneys” remained in first place was six weeks. In both cycles, resistance to the party favorite was concentrated among social and religious conservatives.

The closest study we have of the beliefs of Tea Party supporters, led by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, found that “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients. The distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘people who don’t work’ is fundamental to Tea Party ideology.”

Half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP had stopped their education at or before high-school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000.

Trump Republicans were not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent said they were very conservative; 19 percent described themselves as moderate. Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards.

What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of Trump supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil—a dozen points higher than the norm for all Republicans

More than other Republicans, Trump supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that the president was born in the United States, according to an August survey by the Democratic-oriented polling firm PPP. Sixty-six percent believed the president was a Muslim.

Trump promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s austerity. “We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.”

He promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in the Middle East, this time in Syria. “If we’re going to have World War III,” he told The Washington Post in October, “it’s not going to be over Syria.” As for the politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions in Syria, “I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.”

He promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past. “I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”

Trump has destroyed one elite-favored presidential candidacy, Scott Walker’s, and crippled two others, Jeb Bush’s and Chris Christie’s. He has thrown into disarray the party’s post-2012 comeback strategy, and pulled into the center of national discussion issues and constituencies long relegated to the margins.

Something has changed in American politics since the Great Recession. The old slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the orthodox candidates more vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war.

there appear to be four paths the elite could follow, for this campaign season and beyond. They lead the party in very different directions.

Maybe the same message and platform would have worked fine if espoused by a fresher and livelier candidate. Such is the theory of Marco Rubio’s campaign. Or—even if the donor message and platform have troubles—maybe $100 million in negative ads can scorch any potential alternative, enabling the donor-backed candidate to win by default.

Yet even if the Republican donor elite can keep control of the party while doubling down, it’s doubtful that the tactic can ultimately win presidential elections.

The “change nothing but immigration” advice was a self-flattering fantasy from the start. Immigration is not the main reason Republican presidential candidates lose so badly among Latino and Asian American voters, and never was: Latino voters are more likely to list education and health care as issues that are extremely important to them. A majority of Asian Americans are non-Christian and susceptible to exclusion by sectarian religious themes.

Perhaps some concession to the disgruntled base is needed. That’s the theory of the Cruz campaign and—after a course correction—also of the Christie campaign. Instead of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Enforcement.”

Severed from a larger agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in 2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst like identity politics for white voters. In a society that is and always has been multiethnic and polyglot, any national party must compete more broadly than that.

Admittedly, this may be the most uncongenial thought of them all, but party elites could try to open more ideological space for the economic interests of the middle class. Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare rather than end it. Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to deliver more benefits to working families in the middle. Devise immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them. Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward, and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation. Take seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and the anticompetitive practices that inflate college tuitio

Such a party would cut health-care costs by squeezing providers, not young beneficiaries. It would boost productivity by investing in hard infrastructure—bridges, airports, water-treatment plants. It would restore Dwight Eisenhower to the Republican pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and emphasize the center in center-right

True, center-right conservative parties backed by broad multiethnic coalitions of the middle class have gained and exercised power in other English-speaking countries, even as Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 and 2012. But the most-influential voices in American conservatism reject the experience of their foreign counterparts as weak, unprincipled, and unnecessary.

“The filibuster used to be bad. Now it’s good.” So Fred Thompson, the late actor and former Republican senator, jokingly told an audience on a National Review cruise shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency for the first time. How partisans feel about process issues is notoriously related to what process would benefit them at any given moment.

There are metrics, after all, by which the post-2009 GOP appears to be a supremely successful political party. Recently, Rory Cooper, of the communications firm Purple Strategies, tallied a net gain to the Republicans of 69 seats in the House of Representatives, 13 seats in the Senate, 900-plus seats in state legislatures, and 12 governorships since Obama took office. With that kind of grip on state government, in particular, Republicans are well positioned to write election and voting rules that sustain their hold on the national legislature

Maybe the more natural condition of conservative parties is permanent defense—and where better to wage a long, grinding defensive campaign than in Congress and the statehouses? Maybe the presidency itself should be regarded as one of those things that is good to have but not a must-have, especially if obtaining it requires uncomfortable change

You might be lucky and be among the very few who are released from immigration jail and allowed to live in our country while your asylum application is pending. This won’t mean that your immigration case will be over though. Your immigration case will not be solved for years, and even though you have a case for staying in this country, the government will make you wait for years before you get a final answer.

Then, something unexpected will happen. You will get sick or you will get very depressed. Maybe you will be sad because you miss your family. Because of how sick or sad you were, you will sleep in one day, miss a shift at work, and you will be fired. You will run out of money and while looking for jobs, one day you will jump the turnstile to get on a train for a job interview. To you, it was worth the risk, but you miscalculated.

You will get arrested and charged with a crime for the first time in your life. You will swear never to make a mistake again but it will be too late.

But let’s say you don’t get deported. If for some reason, and against all the odds, you find an immigration judge that listens to your story and understands your life is at risk if you return to your country, you will be granted permission to stay here. Then, you finally may feel that something good came your way.

I know you have heard so many wonderful things about this place. I am sure that you heard that we were a “nation of immigrants,” correct? Well, that’s a thing of the past. We even changed the mission of the government agency handling asylum applications so it is clear to you. We are now “committed to protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.” What values, you ask? Well, whatever we pick to justify that you are not welcome here.

I know. I know you will come because I am a refugee living in the United States and I know what it means to escape death. I am so ashamed that we will do this to you and I am angry because my new country has betrayed me and every other person who believed in it. This place is not what it used to be. Just know that.

Among the terrible effects of negative polarization is the widespread perception — often created by presidents and presidential candidates themselves — that a president governs for the benefit of his constituents alone. Thus, in a very real way, voting becomes an act of self-defense

With all that in mind, how should a conservative react to President Trump’s alleged comments about immigration from “sh**hole” or “sh**house” countries?

First, if you’re spending your time defending the notion that some countries are truly bad places to live, you’re missing the point entirely

Trump wasn’t talking about which countries he’d most like to visit or retire to. He was talking about which countries’ immigrants should be most and least welcomed by the United States.

. From the opening moments of his presidential campaign, Trump has made sweeping, negative remarks about immigrants from third-world nations. Even when he qualifies those remarks (“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”) the qualification is weak.

Isn’t it reasonable for a Mexican American to assume that when Trump says Mexico is “forcing their most unwanted people into the United States,” he is expressing a negative personal perception of Mexican immigrants?

Moreover, time and again, Trump has engaged in actions and rhetoric that inflame broader racial tensions and betray possible racial bias.

One doesn’t even have to delve too deeply into Trump’s alleged comparison of Norway with the “sh**holes” of Africa to understand why a reasonable observer would believe that he has problems with entire classes of Americans, immigrants, and citizens of other nations.

it’s just as ridiculous for conservatives to pretend that the outrage over Trump’s comments truly centers around his assessment of Haiti and Africa when it clearly centers around his assessment of Haitians and Africans. His remarks came amid a discussion of immigration policy, after all.

At this point I simply can’t see how a conservative could look a concerned third-world immigrant (or descendent of a third-world immigrant) in the eye and assert that this president judges them fairly and without bias. The intellectual and rhetorical gymnastics necessary to justify not just Trump’s alleged comments yesterday but his entire history and record of transparent hostility to certain immigrants are getting embarrassing to watch

There are millions of Americans and lawful immigrants who hear comments like Trump’s and understand that he’s talking about them. Why shouldn’t they be angry? Why shouldn’t conservatives unite to ask the president to do and be better?

a president can make our political culture better, or he can make it worse. And Trump seems determined to make it worse.

Republicans have seized upon the surge, labeling it the “Biden border crisis” in a new series of political ads and splashing coverage across conservative media.

Mr. Biden and his homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, are balancing their desire to reject Trump’s uncompromising approach — particularly with regard to unaccompanied minors, who have arrived at the border this month at a rate of roughly 400 people a day

A month ago, immigration didn’t register as a top concern for most Americans. A Pew Research Center poll in early February found that just 38 percent of the country thought that “reducing illegal immigration” should be a major priority among the United States’ foreign policy goals.

But in a CNN poll released last week, immigration was the only issue, from a list of seven, on which Americans gave Mr. Biden meaningfully negative reviews.

Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee this week, Mr. Mayorkas acknowledged that the situation at the border “is undoubtedly difficult,” and sought to manage expectations.

On Tuesday, Biden is expected to follow his first-day actions by tackling family separation, the root causes of migration, and the legal immigration system.

The Senate is also expected to confirm Alejandro Mayorkas as Homeland Security secretary on Tuesday, after Monday night's vote was delayed due to weather.

Biden pledged to set up a task force focused on identifying and reunifying families separated at the US-Mexico border under the Trump administration's controversial "zero tolerance" policy.

The task force will be chaired by the Department of Homeland Security secretary and work across the US government, along with partners, to find parents separated from their children under the former administration. CNN previously reported that first lady Jill Biden is expected to take an active role in the task force.

It will be charged with identifying all children separated from their parents or legal guardians on the southern border, facilitating and enabling the reunification of children with their families,

Lawyers are unable to reach the parents of 611 children who had been split from their families by US border officials between 2017 and 2018, according to the latest court filing in an ongoing family separation case.

"The Biden administration is committed to remedying this awful harm the Trump administration inflicted on families," a senior administration official said, calling the policy a "moral failure" and "national shame."

"The goal of the task force is one to identify, but two to make recommendations as to how the families can be united, taking into account the menu of options that exist under immigration law," the official said.

The administration plans to provide aid to the region to support initiatives combating corruption and revive the Central American minors program that had been ended by Trump and allows certain at-risk youths to live in the US, according to a senior administration official.

The policy, informally known as "Remain in Mexico," has left thousands of asylum seekers waiting in dangerous and deplorable conditions on the border.

The Biden administration has stopped new enrollments into the program, but has not disclosed its plans to address the thousands of migrants still waiting in Mexico, saying only that they will be taken into account as new systems are put in place.

"The situation at the border will not transform overnight," a senior administration official said. "This is in large part due to the damage done over the last four years,

The order will also call for a series of actions to restore the asylum system, which was drastically changed over the last four years and made it exceedingly difficult for migrants to be granted asylum in the US.

Like the other executive orders, it also seeks to reverse Trump-era policies that targeted low-income immigrants, including calling for a review of the public charge rule which makes it more difficult for immigrants to obtain legal status if they use public benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps and housing vouchers.

"It's hard to have two fears," says Ramirez, sitting in the parish hall of the suburban church in north Austin. "I'm afraid they'll separate me from my son, that immigration agents will come at any minute.

Biden pledges to reverse Trump's harsh immigration restrictions and reenact more lenient Obama-era policies, such as restoring the asylum process and creating a path to citizenship for unauthorized migrants already in the U.S. Biden's extensive immigration rollback runs to 22 pages.

Ramirez says they fled Ivan's abusive grandfather in the Mayan highlands of Guatemala five years ago, made it to the Texas border, and asked for asylum from the Obama/Biden administration. When her asylum request was denied, they fled to the safety of the church rather than let ICE remove them.

"If I could vote I would prefer Joe Biden," she says, "because, though he has deported lots of people, he was never as bad as Donald Trump, who has divided mothers from their children."

In her hopes for a Biden victory, Ramirez is articulating the aspirations of some 50 immigrants who have taken sanctuary in churches across the country and are publicly fighting their removal orders. And there are millions more.

The list expecting relief from a Biden admnistration includes 11 million migrants who are living in the U.S. illegally, thousands of asylum-seekers waiting in dangerous Mexican border cities for their cases to be heard, and thousands more DACA recipients, plus their parents and siblings. DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program started under Obama that gives temporary protection from deportation to immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

One other small thing to note: More than a fifth of Americans, according to this survey, now speak a language other than English at home. In Nevada and Florida, nearly a third of residents don’t speak English at home.

very few previous waves of immigrants have been so homogeneous for as long as the Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and Central America currently are; their numbers are higher than any other previous wave; and few have been so thoroughly dispersed.

the sheer scale of the cultural transformation of the last couple of decades — the CDC predicts that close to a quarter of Americans will be Hispanic by 2035 — is undeniable.

If you ignore that, or insist that worrying about too fast a pace of cultural change is inherently racist, it’s relatively easy to insist that there is no immigration crisis

if you believe that nations require some continuity and cultural unity to cohere and endure, then the picture is somewhat different. There is a reason this issue has become so prominent in this country. And it isn’t entirely bigotry.

The image of Latinos breeding makes them not quite human, parasites among a host people, an enemy within given sanctuary when they should be cast out. The aliens among us are not like us, but, unfairly protected, they breed and bring danger.

The notion later became a staple of Nazi propaganda. From 1944 : “Jewry is the product of the inbreeding of asocial, criminal, sick, degenerate, and rejected elements. . . . [It] leads a rootless, parasitic life at the expense of the host peoples. Its current homeland is largely the criminal neighborhoods of the great cities of the world.”

let’s look at the modern custom in this country of likening immigrants and minorities to breeding animals.

rump appointee Carl Higbie resigned after the publishing of his earlier complaints that black women think “breeding is a form of government employment.”

ep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) has spoken of immigration policy as “allowing any kind of vagrant, or animal . . . to come in.”

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a Trump ally, described the screening of immigrants: “You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog.”

Dan Stein, the president of the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform, famously said immigrants are conducting “competitive breeding” to dilute the white majority.

White nationalist Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute frets about white “displacement by the subject race through differential fertility rates and interracial breeding.”

Dive into the fever swamps of the Internet and social media and you will find the conspiracy theory that minorities’ higher birthrates are designed to bring about “white genocide” in America: “We can’t let the Muslims and Mexicans outbreed us . . . Their goal is to come here and breed whites out of existence . . . What they will do is breed like rats and displace white people and white culture. . . . They’re outbreeding us and outvoting us.”

they are all now a part of Trump’s only sincere ideological project, the preservation of white political and cultural dominance.

Trump has adopted policies that would be responsible for the displacement of nearly a million people of color in less than 12 months in office.  

The benefit of this history is that we know how the story ended then; with the adoption of racist immigration laws, and the immigrants from the “shithole countries” of the turn of the century defending the country in two world wars. But their children and grandchildren, having assimilated into the very whiteness Walker and his ilk saw as endangered, now repeat the same slander laid upon their ancestors against a new generation of immigrants looking for a better life in America. The old lies are now again embraced by the descendants of those who once suffered because of them.

The president was not making an assessment of the relative quality of life in Haiti or Norway, he was condemning entire populations of people of as undesirable because of where they were born. Trump’s remarks do not merely express contempt for foreigners; but also for every American who shares their origins.

The president’s focus on the nationality, rather than on the personal merits, of immigrants suggests what he means by “merit-based” immigration: Not accepting those immigrants who have mastered science or engineering or some other crucial skill, but instead a standard that finds white Scandinavians acceptable, while ruling out Haitians, Salvadorans, and Africans. The only “merits” here are accidents of birth and geography, owing to no individual accomplishment at all.

Trump’s is not a logic that employs facts, it is one that employs tribe. It is the logic of “us” being better than “them,” with white Scandinavians reflecting a self-definition of “us,” that excludes blacks and latinos regardless of their relationship to this country.

To describe the issue here, as many media outlets have, as one of coarse or vulgar language, is itself an obscenity. The president’s remarks reflect a moral principle that has guided policy while in office, a principle that is obvious to all but that some simply refuse to articulate.

there are policy and human-rights implications to what the president says and does. Dehumanizing rhetoric is a powerful real-world tool, especially when it’s coming from the president of the United States.

As with his remarks on Wednesday, it’s unclear whether Trump was referring specifically to gang members or to undocumented immigrants as a whole. This ambiguity could perhaps be chalked up to the president’s imprecise speech, but it’s connected to real policy. This unclarity is a key mechanism in the federal government’s targeting of immigrants across the country.

In 2017, ICE arrested and detained Daniel Ramirez Medina, a young undocumented immigrant who’d been shielded from deportation by enrolling in the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. ICE tried to strip him of his protected status and deport him, all because they claimed a tattoo of his birthplace proved his affiliation with a gang. According to criminal-justice and immigration advocates, the number of MS-13 arrests is inflated by these flimsy cases. In the Ramirez case, a federal judge criticized ICE for lying even in the court of law about Ramirez’s affiliation, saying the “agency [offered] no evidence to this Court to support its assertions.”

According to The Marshall Project, immigrants only have to meet some very loose criteria in order to fall into the gang dragnet, including hanging out where gang members usually frequent or being labeled as a gang member by a “reliable source,” such as a teacher.

the treatment of individuals caught up in the dragnet—from frigid detention centers to the separation of mothers from children—certainly still resembles what might be reserved for animals.

the combination of draconian rhetoric and the elision of nuance between real and perceived criminal elements is a crux of how racism has worked for centuries in this country and around the world.

“superpredator” originates as a zoological term for apex predatory animals—to mobilize massive public support for new criminal-justice policies and provide a moral high ground to marginalize any opponents.

any reasonable assessment of mass incarceration in black America will show that the damage has long been done. In Illinois, for example, over 80 percent of juveniles sentenced to life without parole under the superpredator dragnet were minorities. Driven to bloodlust against an ill-defined population of black youths made to be less than human, America strained against the Constitution and the basic precepts of human rights to stamp out a threat—based on a theory that has since been discredited.

The true peril of Trump’s comments on Wednesday is this: that the state will be further empowered to suspend human rights.

Dehumanization is not just a buzzword, but a descriptor of a specific and well-known psychological and sociological process, by which people are conditioned to accept inflicting increasingly inhumane conditions and punishments on other people

dehumanization means both a broadening of what’s acceptable and just who is unacceptable.

The most likely outcome of Trump’s “animals” rhetoric isn’t a return to some mythological Pax Americana, as his supporters might suggest. Quite the opposite: It could fuel more informing on neighbors, more regular harassment for people of color, a deeper and wider dragnet, and an increased acceptance of brutality and extralegal practices. That’s what happens when people stop being people.