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border wall
Cruel Immigration Policies Are Not the Solution
Biden once seemed to understand that punitive measures were not going to make either immigrants or U.S. citizens safer, or make our immigration system more orderly. He must rediscover those commitments and stop playing politics with people's lives.
Mar 30, 2024
When President Biden was campaigning in 2020, he pledged to strengthen our country by supporting and welcoming immigrants. Early in his presidency, he began taking steps in that direction.
On his first day in office, Biden proclaimed an end to his predecessor’s “Muslim ban,” which summarily banned migration from several Muslim-majority countries. And In February 2021, Biden introduced an executive order aimed at reversing some of the Trump administration’s damage to our immigration system, from family separations to backlogs in our asylum system.
“Securing our borders does not require us to ignore the humanity of those who seek to cross them,” Biden said at the time. “Nor is the United States safer when resources that should be invested in policies targeting actual threats, such as drug cartels and human traffickers, are squandered on efforts to stymie legitimate asylum seekers.”
Biden seemed to understand that being “tough” does not mean you have to support cruel and ineffective policies. Unfortunately, as immigration has become a more polarizing topic, the administration has backed away from this more humane approach.
Instead, in many ways Biden has actually continued down Trump’s path on immigration.
For example, the Trump administration enforced a rule called Title 42 during the height of the COVID pandemic, which severely limited entry into the United States—supposedly to protect public health. Biden continued to implement that policy for years, even without the flimsy public health justification.
The bipartisan Senate border bill Biden recently endorsed includes funding for a border wall he once promised not to fund — along with new restrictions on asylum and a measure that would authorize the president to shut the border down completely. Biden is also considering using the same authority the Trump administration invoked in its Muslim ban to restrict asylum access.
A few weeks ago, Biden and Trump separately visited the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead of proposing actual solutions to support our immigration system, Biden uplifted the failed Senate bill—and even went so far as to invite Trump to “join him” in working to it.
During his State of the Union address in March, Biden had the opportunity to distinguish himself from Trump. Instead, his speech demonstrated a strong disconnect between his rhetoric and actions.
Biden said he would not demonize immigrants, but in the same speech used the offensive term “illegal immigrant.” No human being is “illegal.” Continuing to echo that language is dehumanizing and puts immigrant communities at risk of violence. (Biden later said he regretted using the term, but did not apologize for using it.)
Biden said he would not separate families, but his current and proposed immigration policies have separated and continue to separate families. He said he would not ban people from the country because of their faith, but his proposed action would make asylum harder for nearly everyone regardless of their faith.
Invoking his Irish heritage, Biden has alluded to the Great Famine in Ireland to sympathize with immigrants looking for a better life in the United States. But families seeking shelter today from similar hardship would have extreme difficulty getting into the country under the policies he wants to implement.
Biden once understood that punitive measures were not going to make either immigrants or U.S. citizens safer, or make our immigration system more orderly. He understood that we’d need to create pathways to legislation and citizenship, honor our responsibility to offer refuge to asylum seekers, and live up to our American values.
If Biden’s sincere about finding real solutions, he needs to remember those commitments. It’s time to stop playing politics with immigrants’ lives.
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'Beyond Misleading': Katie Britt Border Story Debunked With Bruising TikTok Takedown
"This is worth every minute," said one person who watched the 7-minute take down.
Mar 09, 2024
A freelance journalist is receiving widespread praise for his "must-see" critique of a story told by Alabama's Republican Senator Katie Britt during her official Republican Party response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union on Thursday night.
In the 7-minute and 23-second video posted to TikTok on Friday, reporter and book author Jonathan M. Katz deconstructs a key portion of Britt's speech, remarks overall that were widely panned as a "creepy" representation of the far-right, xenophobic, Christian nationalism that has found a home in Donald Trump's GOP.
The specific claim in question centers on Britt's telling of a story about a 12-year-old girl who suffered sexual violence, including rape, at the hands of drug cartels—but the details of the horrifying story, according to the facts established by Katz, reveal a clear effort to deceive those watching her speech.
"Holy moly... Jonathan Katz exposes Katie Britt as a lying sack of shit."
In the video, Katz says the facts he was able to determine about Britt's claims—which she delivered to millions of American viewers on Thursday night as the response was featured live on Fox News and countless live streams across the internet—was "beyond misleading."
Watch:
@katzonearth This isn’t going to make her like TikTok more. #katiebritt #sotu #stateoftheunion #lies #politicians #biden2024 #trump2024 #immigration #traffickingawarenes #mexico #bordersecurity #fyp ♬ original sound - Jonathan M. Katz
"Holy moly. This is worth every minute," said writer Nick Knudsen after watching the video. "Jonathan Katz exposes Katie Britt as a lying sack of shit."
Because the woman he identified as the source of the story, a Mexican activist named Karla Jacinto Romero, has retold her personal history repeatedly in public, including in front of Congress, for years and explained that events described took place in Mexico between 2004 and 2008 when she was a child and George W. Bush was president, Katz slammed Britt for making it seem "as if this woman had confided something in her and as if she was describing actions that had taken place on or even near the U.S.-Mexico border during Joe Biden's presidency," which just isn't true based on the record.
"I don't know even know what to say," Katz remarks in the video, "except that it is just fundamentally dishonest."
The gut-wrenching story that Britt told to fearmonger over Biden's border policy and denigrate immigrants and asylum-seekers to right-wing voters and unsuspecting viewers, explains Katz, "didn't happen in the United States" and "it's not an example of something that happened recently and is not even an example of something that happened on the border, and certainly not something that happened under Joe Biden."
But why would she do that? "It's very clear to me," says Katz, that Britt was "trying to create an association in the people's mind between Joe Biden, the border, Mexicans... or people of Latin descent, and sexual violence. That's what she's going for and she's doing it on the basis of what you can only say is just an out and out lie."
Katz said Friday he reached out to Britt's office for some kind of explanation but had yet to hear back. He said he would update his post if he learned more from the Senator or her office, "But for now it just looks like she got on national television and lied about something really horrific and really important for her own personal and her party's political gain."
The Washington Post later confirmed with Sean Ross, a spokesperson in Britt's office, that the women referred to during Thursday night's speech was Karla Jacinto Romero, but disputed anything about the senator's language was misleading.
But many who had watched Katz's seemed much more convinced of his case and others condemned Britt for exploiting Romero's story for cynical and deceptive political gain.
Josh Marshall, editor-in-chief of TalkingPointsMemo, congratulated Katz on the "amazing" piece and said the video revealed that Britt is "not only an emotionally disregulated freak, but a big fat liar."
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US Immigration Policy Should Reflect That Immigrants Are Good for This Country
A real solution to immigration would be to embrace the fact that immigration makes us stronger. It’s time to think bigger than cruelty at the border and the Senate’s most recent, doomed plan.
Feb 29, 2024
Immigrants are good for this country. They work critical jobs, pay taxes, build businesses and introduce many of our favorite foods and cultural innovations (donuts, anyone?). But for decades, powerful players have chosen the self-serving politics of division over sensible immigration policies.
The immigrant experience is essential to the American story. Our communities comprise those who came here to seek safety, work, study and join their families. They make the United States the strong, diverse nation that it is.
Immigrants were more likely to be essential workers during the pandemic, and there’s no shortage of crucial roles for them in the future. As the population ages, more of us will need things like home healthcare — a workforce that’s one-fourth immigrant and needs to grow fast to meet the need.
We should embrace the vitality and diversity that immigration can bring [and]0 refuse to be divided by those who want to scare us...
In fact, experts say that limiting immigration could cost our country $7 trillion in the years to come. That’s the projected economic benefit of recent arrivals over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.
We need immigration. And many of us know this, with 68 percent of Americans saying immigration is good for the country. Yet, over the last few decades, our government has made it much harder and more punitive for immigrants to claim their rights to a dignified future.
Detention centers, deportations and walls are deadly, and inhumane, and tear families apart. We spend untold billions on these cruelties — more than double what we spent 20 years ago. And they don’t make it any less likely that some people will need to leave their home countries for freedom, safety or opportunity.
Yet, we continue responding to the “problem” of people seeking refuge here by doubling down on these false solutions. All of us — new immigrants and descendants of old ones — are stuck in this policy limbo because of powerful people who benefit from dividing us and preventing real solutions.
From politicians who win office with anti-immigrant campaigns to White supremacists who peddle racist conspiracy theories and corporations that rely on undocumented workers to keep wages low and deny workers’ rights, these people stoke fear about immigrants to divide us for their own gain. In reality, immigrants commit fewer crimes, pay more taxes and do critical jobs that most Americans don’t want.
The border policy proposal recently brought up by the Senate isn’t a real solution. It’s a threat. The so-called “border compromise” would have gutted the asylum system, ramped up mass surveillance and enforcement, and built a pointless and harmful border wall. It completely ignored the fact that the border region comprises communities that are safe to live in and help local economies thrive.
That proposal isn’t the best we can do. A real solution to immigration would be to embrace the fact that immigration makes us stronger. It would open up pathways to legalization and citizenship for immigrants who have been contributing to this country for years and for many of those who are making the trip now.
Our government must also address the real reasons that scores of people are leaving their homes in the first place — including U.S. economic sanctions that are strangling their home economies, our outsourced war on drugs that can make migrants’ home communities unlivable, and climate change-driven weather events that send millions fleeing.
Congress has made real progress before, and it can do it again.
The 1986 immigration law signed by President Ronald Reagan granted legalization to millions of undocumented immigrants. President George W. Bush supported a proposal that would have led to legalization for millions more. Under President Barack Obama, the Senate passed a plan that would have opened the door to legalization for many of the current 11 million undocumented people living and working in the country.
It’s time to think bigger than the Senate’s most recent, doomed plan. Immigrants have always kept this country moving forward. We should embrace the vitality and diversity that immigration can bring, refuse to be divided by those who want to scare us, and enact some genuine immigration reform.
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