Frontispiece of Tom Paine’s Common Sense

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE. USA, Apr 27 2026 (IPS)

This is the third part of a three-part commentary. Read Part 1: No Kings? Meet King Don and King John – Part 1 of 3,   Part 2 of 3

Whose head?

In foreign relations, as in immigration, King Don the Con appears to be channeling King John the Bad and often surpassing him.

However, our wannabe monarch should consider one more exemplar, this one fictitious: Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen could be another spiritual ancestor of the Golden Emperor. After all, his Bling Dynasty has been a creature of fiction more than fact.

Carroll wrote in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

“Let the jury consider their verdict.” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
“I won’t!” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

As we’ve seen, King Don has demonstrated a similar disdain for legal niceties. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards” could be the motto of much of his foreign policy as well as immigration enforcement. He often skips indictment, trial, and verdict, and jumps straight from accusation to carrying out the sentence.

There is one striking difference between the two monarchies, though: the Red Queen’s courtiers understood that she was not playing with a full deck, and so they ignored her ranting. The Golden Emperor’s toadies are too cowardly to tell him that he’s acting increasingly unhinged, and have become immune to shame about their North Korea-like sycophancy. A possible exception is “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, who may be even more deranged than his boss. His speeches sound like they’re written by a B-grade action-movie screenwriter torqued on crank. Economist Paul Krugman said in an interview that some people in the Pentagon are calling him the Secretary of War Crimes.

In the summer and fall of 2025, Trump marshalled a massive armada of ships, air power and troops in the southern Caribbean. The official name was Operation Southern Spear, and they were clearly positioned to threaten Venezuela. But while they were waiting to carry out the eventual abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moros, Trump reportedly ordered them to unleash military strikes against small boats that he said were smuggling drugs.

Instead of ignoring the President, as the Red Queen’s courtiers did, Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio obediently began extrajudicial executions of civilians in small boats. The victims reportedly included sailors, fishermen, bus drivers, laborers, and possibly some small-time smugglers.

The Defense Department reportedly confirmed to Congress that as of March 17 the U.S. military had killed at least 157 people in military strikes on 47 alleged drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. More strikes have allegedly occurred since, raising the death toll to at least 163 people.

As an Elizabethan connoisseur of royal mayhem might have put it: “As flies to wanton boys are we to King Don. He kills us for his sport.”

If Trump had wanted to make a serious case to the world that he was actually combatting drug smuggling, he could have ordered normal policing operations: intercept and impound the boat, display the packets of drugs and weapons captured, perp walk the smugglers and publicize their indictments and convictions. However, the his government has not publicly presented evidence that drugs were being smuggled or that the crews were connected with drug cartels or terrorists.

U.S. forces did not give the boats or crews a chance to surrender. They simply blew them (and any evidence of their alleged crimes) to smithereens. In one case, they reportedly slaughtered two survivors of an initial strike who were still clinging to the wreckage. Some boats were apparently carrying more people than would be needed for a crew, so perhaps some were just passengers. In another strike in which two survivors were rescued, they were not arrested by the U.S., but instead returned to their respective countries, Colombia and Ecuador. This was an improbable outcome if they were in fact smugglers or terrorists.

Here’s the lowdown: regardless of whether the crews or passengers were smuggling anything, they were civilians. Even if a war had been in progress, it would have been illegal under international and U.S. military law to kill non-combatants. But this was not a war with a foreign government, nor an attack on the U.S. by terrorists. Given that many of the strikes killed four or more people, the customary threshold for mass homicide, the operation should be investigated as serial mass murders.

Even before the strikes began, the senior Judge Advocate General (JAG, a military lawyer) at the U.S. Southern Command in Miami questioned the legality of the strikes and voiced concerns that they could amount to extrajudicial killings, NBC News reported. This JAG’s opinion was reportedly overruled by more senior officials.

Many other military lawyers and other officials also voiced concerns about the strikes’ legality up their chains of command. The “Former JAGs Working Group”, formed by victims of Hegseth’s earlier mass firings of JAGs, issued a statement that it “unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both.”

Questions about the operation’s legality also apparently troubled the head of the U.S. Southern Command. Admiral Alvin Holsey abruptly announced that he would step down from his post in December, without offering any explanation for his decision. But the New York Times reported that Holsey, too, had expressed concern about the legality of the killings. This brought him into conflict with Hegseth and the White House. Ultimately, Hegseth pushed out the Admiral.

Six Democratic members of Congress who are veterans made a video that simply told serving military members: “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders.” This is advice commonly given to soldiers. Trump responded hysterically on Truth Social: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”, and reposted another user: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!” [Buchanan 11/20/2025]

Trump reserved his nastiest blast of vitriol for the only U.S. senator in the group, Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy combat pilot and astronaut. Defense Secretary Hegseth moved to demote and censure Kelly and reduce his retirement pay. In February, a federal judge temporarily blocked the demotion and criticized Hegseth for trying to punish a veteran and member of Congress for First Amendment-protected speech. Ironically, the attacks on Kelly seem to have supercharged his political fund-raising and helped establish him as a credible Democratic presidential candidate for 2028.

The rationales for killing civilians on small boats followed an opportunistic trajectory: first frame the strikes as tools to intimidate Maduro, then claim to be interdicting drug smuggling to save American lives. Next up the ante to fighting narco-terrorists. Finally, admit that the main goal of the whole operation was to take back oil from Venezuela that somehow belonged to the U.S.

After the abduction of Maduro, the usefulness of boat strikes to intimidate the now deposed president, if it ever existed, should have expired. But since then, Trump has continued to claim he is protecting U.S. citizens from “narco-terrorists” by destroying small boats.

The U.S. Southern Command claims with each strike that it is targeting boats along “known smuggling routes” that U.S. intelligence has identified. But it has yet to provide evidence that these boats were actually carrying drugs – perhaps because it is hard to collect it when the boat is blown to bits remotely from the air. And whether or not smuggling goes on along those routes, people living on the coasts of Latin America use small boats for public transportation, carrying legal goods, fishing, and many other purposes. Unsurprisingly, some may follow the same routes that smugglers use (as I have witnessed traveling in a small passenger panga on the Caribbean).

As the case of the Venezuelan deportees established, Venezuela is not a major drug producer; it serves primarily as a conduit for illicit substances produced elsewhere in South America and bound for European markets, not the U.S. Furthermore, in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the main drug being moved is cocaine, which is rarely fatal for users. The fentanyl that Trump flagged as responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in the U.S. is produced almost exclusively in Mexico and smuggled into the U.S. from there.

As a congressional interrogator at a hearing on the strikes asserted, any amounts of drugs the strikes may have destroyed were insignificant, and are having no impact on the volume or price of drugs entering the U.S.

Furthermore, small boats are only one of numerous modes of drug transport from South to North America and Europe. Drug enforcement has been playing Whac-A-Mole for a half-century with submersibles, commercial shipping, air freight, small planes, drones, tunnels, parcel post, package express, U.S. citizen travelers, and the list goes on. Despite high-profile drug seizures, arrests of drug lords, and spasms of violence, drug markets keep calm and carry on. Meanwhile, fatal overdoses, almost exclusively from fentanyl, spiral upward.

And narco-terrorism? Sorry, but in the non-fiction world, organized crime and terrorism are fundamentally different beasts.

Big drug cartels resemble legal transnational corporations in many ways. Their main purpose is to make money – and then they have to launder it, which also requires business acumen. They have vast decentralized networks that include voluntary and involuntary sub-contractors and investors. They spin off subsidiaries in different countries. They can be very violent when competing over plazas, treating migrants as a profit center, or responding to attacks by governments, but usually they want to run their businesses without visibility or drama. The most successful organized crime executives have been the cagey facilitators and deal-makers.

Occasionally, when the gangs have become stronger than the police forces, governments have had to use the military to confront them. But only patient use of law enforcement tools like the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act and socio-economic programs to offer foot soldiers ways to get out of the life can ultimately disentangle their roots from society.

On the other hand, organizations that practice terrorism use violence or the threat of it for political, social, or ideological purposes. They want to visibly menace and destroy their enemies, and they are not primarily concerned with making money.

Many political movements from the American Revolution onward have practiced terrorism – in that case against Tory sympathizers with the British crown. And as in most wars, the British army also practiced terrorism against civilian colonists. Whether a given armed group is classified as terrorists or freedom-fighters generally depends on which side of the conflict the observer stands.

Organized crime may sometimes pursue socio-political objectives, and terrorists may sometimes use illicit activities to fund themselves. But defending against each phenomenon requires very different approaches. The Global War on Terror and the War on Drugs have both been long-running failures because neither terrorism nor organized crime can be eliminated militarily.

When King Don calls an organization “narco-terrorists”, he is simply slapping a label on it that gives him legal cover for using military force to blow things up and kill innocent bystanders. (“Oopsie!”, as his buddy Bukele might say with a smirk.) And as a bonus, the violence may distract his followers from his rich stew of corruption, juicy emoluments and tender pardons garnished with a soupçon of Epstein.

Despite the smoke screens, international efforts to hold Trump responsible for serious human rights violations have begun in a few venues.

A panel of experts convened by the United Nations Human Rights office in September 2025 concluded that the boat strikes violated the right to life under international law and the law of the sea. Their statement asserted: “International law does not allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers. Criminal activities should be disrupted, investigated and prosecuted in accordance with the rule of law, including through international cooperation.”

The U.S. had accused the Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua of mounting “an ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion’ of the U.S., at the behest of the Venezuelan Government.” But the experts found that “There is no evidence that this group is committing an armed attack against the U.S. that would allow the U.S. to use military force against it in national self-defence.”

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an organ of the Organization of American States, also held a hearing on the boat strikes in March. It heard testimony from several human rights organizations and the U.S. government. “We are doing everything in our power to hold the Trump administration responsible for its egregious violations of both U.S. and international law”, Jamil Dakwar of the ACLU testified. “These extrajudicial killings,” said Angelo Guisado of the Center for Constitutional Rights, “were poorly veiled cover to justify the illegal overthrow of the Venezuelan government, as admitted by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.” A State Department spokesman responded: “The IACHR lacks the competence to review the matters at issue.” He also accused the Commission of interfering in domestic litigation.

The Trump administration has not released the names of the slain. But a few families have come forward to identify their loved ones. Human rights groups are representing two of them seeking redress from the government.

Although we have focused on the boat strikes as Trump’s most literal implementation of “Off with their heads!”, the operation that they were supposedly a warm-up for – the ousting of Venezuela’s president – also resulted in pointless and illegal bloodshed.

On January 3, 2026, Trump cried “Havoc!” and let slip the dawgs of Delta Force. The U.S. invaded Venezuela, abducted its president, Nicolás Maduro, and charged him in a U.S. court with heading a drug-smuggling cartel and illegally possessing firearms. During the operation, U.S. officials estimated that at least 75 people were killed by U.S. forces. The Venezuelan defense minister later said that 83 were killed and more than 112 injured by U.S. forces. He confirmed that the operation killed 47 of its personnel, and the Cuban government said that 32 of the dead were Cuban citizens. Some reports have suggested that additional civilians may have been killed.

As mentioned previously, an investigation by U.S. intelligence services had already found that the Venezuelan government did not direct or cooperate with Tren de Aragua, and was instead generally hostile towards the gang. So whatever his other faults, Maduro was evidently not a drug lord.

These charges also beg the question of how a president who is the commander-in-chief of an army and under protection of a presidential guard can be guilty of illegally possessing firearms. Stay tuned to Maduro’s trial in federal court in New York City for more details.

In any case, just for the record, it is generally illegal under international law for one country to invade another, kill its citizens, and capture or assassinate its leaders.

To understand Operation Southern Spear, it may help to compare the capture and abduction of Maduro with Trump’s pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted in a U.S. court of large-scale drug trafficking and imprisoned. His brother Tony had already suffered the same fate.

Trump’s pardoning of JOH at the same time he was detaining Maduro on similar charges was widely seen as contradictory. But on the contrary, the message was eloquent: the law means nothing, and King Don the Con doesn’t care if friends break it. All that matters, even if you’re a convicted narco, is that you shamelessly genuflect to him and declare undying fealty.

Despite U.S. criticism of the Maduro government, the abduction of the Venezuelan president left his vice-president in charge as the temporary president, and did not remove any other high officials from the existing Venezuelan government. So much for régime change.

In an outburst of candor, Trump confirmed afterwards that his main motivation was to force Venezuela to give back “our oil” to the United States. This was apparently done under what he calls the “Donroe Doctrine”. The reality was that since long before Maduro, Venezuela had expropriated the assets of some foreign oil corporations, as many developing countries have done. But Trump conveniently omits the backstory that foreign oil companies had originally expropriated Venezuela’s oil from Venezuela. This was fueled by concessions from dictators in the first half of the 20th Century. [Wolfe 1/9/2026]

Treachery, lechery, mendacity and cruelty? Sorry, King John the Bad: in immigration, foreign policy and many other domains, King Don the Con has elevated those qualities far above your crude medieval badassery.

Kings and laws

When the New York Times asked Trump if there were any limits on his global powers, he replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me. … I don’t need international law.”

It is true that Trump has a finely calibrated moral compass. The problem is that it always points to himself.

Conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig laid out the challenge starkly: “Once more, we must ask, as Lincoln did, whether a nation so ‘conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,’ can long endure. …We have been given the high charge of our forebears to ‘keep’ the republic they founded a quarter of a millennium ago. If we do not keep it now, we will surely lose it.”

The millions of partisans of No Kings and other resistance initiatives are working overtime to organize the massive and diversified political insurgency necessary to throw King Don the Con into the toxic waste dump of history and to re-establish something resembling the rule of law. Some of the political opposition seems to be slowly awakening from its torpor and showing signs of life. However, if the MAGA fever has not broken by 2028, I fear that our democracy and human rights will be languishing in hospice.

The last word goes to Tom Paine, the sharp-tongued English pamphleteer who lit a fire under colonial revolutionaries in 1776 with Common Sense: “[A]s in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

This is the third part of a three-part commentary. Read Part 1: No Kings? Meet King Don and King John – Part 1 of 3, Part 2 of 3

About the author

Sign at No Kings demonstration. Credit: Peter Costantini

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE. USA, Apr 24 2026 (IPS)

This is the second part of a three-part commentary. Read Part 1: No Kings? Meet King Don and King John – Part 1 of 3 to start from the beginning. Part 3 of 3

Habeas tattoo?

Among Trump’s most outrageous assaults on the rule of law has been an array of legal wrecking balls demolishing due process, habeas corpus, related foundational rights, and the separation of powers in the bargain.

For many years, his target of choice for these efforts has been immigrants. But in his second term, not only has he escalated his persecution of those with and without protected immigration status, he has also increasingly attacked the rights of U.S. citizens to free speech, assembly, the press, due process, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. The targets have included journalists and news sources, academics and universities, state and local governments, corporate officials, military officers, Federal employees, and members of Congress.

One operation of Trump’s mass deportation machine stands out as a template for negating the rule of law: the summary removal, without anything resembling due process, of 261 mainly Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo – Terrorism Confinement Center). They were given no prior notice of their deportation and were not told their destination. For 137 Venezuelans, The Trump administration invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA) which, it claimed, allowed summary deportations without recourse to habeas corpus or other due process. The other 101 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadorans were also summarily deported, under uncertain statutory authority. Once in CECOT, many were disappeared indefinitely without appeal, held incommunicado without contact with families or attorneys, and routinely tortured.

The Alien Enemies Act allows nationals of enemy countries during wartime to be summarily expelled or detained. It was last invoked during World War Two to imprison American citizens of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps, an injustice for which the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 formally apologized.

President Trump justified the use of the AEA because, he claimed, the Venezuelans were members of Tren de Aragua (TdA – Train of Aragua), a metastasized former prison gang. He claimed that TdA was a “narco-terrorist” organization controlled by the Venezuelan government that had invaded the U.S. and was in a state of war with this country. He used these assertions to justify invoking the AEA, posting on Truth Social: “These are the monsters sent into our Country by Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats. How dare they! Thank you to El Salvador and, in particular, President Bukele, for your understanding of this horrible situation.” In effect, Trump was trying to outsource his violations of constitutional rights to a small friendly dictatorship.

On March 15, 2025, the date the removal flights were scheduled to take the detainees to El Salvador, the non-governmental American Civil Liberties Union filed an emergency petition in federal court to stay the removals. Federal Judge James Boasberg, a George W. Bush appointee, immediately ordered the deportations paused. All the deportees, he ruled, had to be brought back to the U.S. and offered due process to defend themselves against removal.

Although Boasberg demanded that even planes already in the air be turned around, the Trump administration said that the orders came too late and it couldn’t recall the planes. It also claimed to have no control over El Salvador, although it had paid that country at least $6 million to imprison the men. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, the self-described “world’s coolest dictator”, posted sardonically on X: “Oopsie!” The court rejected all of these arguments, but nevertheless the planes delivered the deportees to the Salvadoran mega-prison.

Later in March, Boasberg told the government that it must prove that those targeted for removal are in fact “alien enemies” and allow them to challenge the designation before deporting them. The Trump administration ignored the court’s ruling, and went on expelling more Venezuelans and Salvadorans to El Salvador, arguing that courts had no jurisdiction over what it called foreign policy.

In this stalemate, some observers questioned whether the executive branch was effectively placing itself above constitutional restraints such as habeas corpus by intentionally ignoring valid orders from the judiciary.

Trump and Congressional Republicans bitterly attacked Judge Boasberg and called for his impeachment. This prompted Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to issue a rare rebuke, reminding them that impeachment is not an “appropriate response” when disagreeing with a judicial decision.

An appeals court ruled in March that the Trump administration was denying the detainees’ due process. “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemy Act,” commented one judge.

In April, the Supreme Court allowed the government to continue deportations on the technicality that the detainees had filed for relief against summary removal in the wrong court. But it also affirmed that “an individual subject to detention and removal under that statute [the AEA] is entitled to ‘judicial review’” and advance notice.

Outside of the courts, the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch accused the U.S. and Salvadoran governments of “enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention” of the Venezuelan deportees. “These enforced disappearances are a grave violation of international human rights law,” said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at HRW. “The cruelty of the US and Salvadoran governments has put these people outside the protection of the law and caused immense pain to their families.”

Several news organizations investigated the alleged criminal records and gang affiliations of the Venezuelan men, and found them mostly non-existent. The New York Times reported that “most of the men do not have criminal records in the United States or elsewhere in the region, beyond immigration offenses” and “very few of them appear to have any clear, documented links to the Venezuelan gang.”

The ACLU filed Homeland Security’s “Alien Enemies Act Validation Guide” as an exhibit in a lawsuit. Verónica Egui Brito of the Miami Herald analyzed this “scorecard”, which the agency had used to determine whether the accused were members of Tren de Aragua.

It turned out that two of the criteria that supposedly indicated gang membership were certain tattoos and “urban street wear” such as jerseys and sneakers featuring basketball great Michael Jordan and his Chicago Bulls. But experts on Latin American gangs pointed out that TdA did not use specific tattoo images to identify its members. USA Today reported that internal Federal Bureau of Investigations and Department of Homeland Security documents have for years questioned the validity of using tattoos to identify TdA members. As to the Jordan and Bulls merch, it has long been among the most popular street fashions in much of the world, and could probably be used to falsely accuse thousands of young men in most cities of gang membership.

The whole “validation guide” appeared less a serious tool for criminology than the Trumpian equivalent of a Dick Tracy Magic Decoder, designed to help immigration “crimestoppers” detain anyone whose markings, clothing, accent, or skin tone struck them as suspicious.

Some of the men’s families also challenged the deportations, denying that the men were gang members or criminals at all. A few deportees became causes célèbres.

Most notoriously, the U.S. government admitted that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man with a U.S.-citizen wife and child, had been removed by mistake. The Supreme Court ordered that the government bring him back to the U.S. Yet even after that, the Trump administration tried to prevent Abrego Garcia from returning, and at first Bukele flatly refused to let him go. After Abrego Garcia was finally repatriated, the Trump administration tried to charge him with an unrelated minor infraction, then to deport him to one of several African countries. Costa Rica offered to take Abrego Garcia and he accepted, but the Trump administration refused. In February 2026, a judge ruled that ICE could not re-detain him. But the government continues to litigate his case.

In the face of strong exculpatory evidence for most of the deportees, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem opined: “They should stay there [in the Salvadoran prison] for the rest of their lives.”

Finally, after four months of imprisoning the Venezuelans in CECOT under its proprietary interpretation of the Alien Enemies Act, the Trump administration abruptly sent most of them back to Venezuela in a swap of prisoners.

In December 2025, Judge Boasberg rejected most of the government’s arguments on the merits of the case, including Trump’s premises for invoking the AEA, and found that the U.S. denied the men due process. Finally in February, he issued an order that any of the deported Venezuelans who still wanted to challenge their removal had to be allowed to return to the U.S., with travel expenses paid by the U.S. government, to continue their immigration cases in court. The judge and the Venezuelans’ counsel, however, recognized that only a few of the men were likely to accept the offer.

In the emerging reality, there was a remarkable lack of evidence that any of the 200-plus deportees were actually members of Tren de Aragua, or that more than a handful had committed any serious crime. Beyond that, the Trump administration’s cases rested on a series of evidentiary dominos that cascaded down with a few pushes from legal and journalistic investigations.

In presidential debates during 2024, Trump falsely claimed that members of Tren de Aragua had “taken over” Aurora, Colorado, and other U.S. cities.

In fact, it turned out that a small number of armed young men, whom the police had not linked to TdA, had committed burglaries and firearm offenses against the residents of a couple of run-down apartment complexes with some Venezuelan residents. One of them, and nine others suspected of ties with the gang, were arrested by the police. The Aurora police chief told USA Today that “the city is not taken over by gangs”, and that, as in most other metropolitan areas, there were gangs there before any Venezuelans moved in.

Further investigations by several news organizations found that TdA is not a major drug smuggling enterprise, just a former prison gang that was evicted from prison and spread out to prey largely on Venezuelan refugees in South America. Around 90 percent of the nearly 8 million Venezuelans who have left their country went elsewhere in Latin America; only about 10 percent came to the U.S. A national survey by USA Today of federal, state and local law enforcement found that, despite claims of thousands of TdA gangsters, authorities had arrested fewer than 135 confirmed members. These have mainly committed petty street crimes such as purse-snatching, retail theft, and jewelry store robberies, many against other Venezuelans.

TdA bears little resemblance to the major cartels and maras of Mexico and Central America. These operate more like big transnational corporations heavy with advanced armaments, lawyers, and accountants. They are the ones who produce and smuggle most of the drugs entering the U.S., particularly fentanyl, the most deadly. The small gangs of Venezuelan petty thieves in a few cities were well within the capabilities of local law enforcement to dismantle with normal police work.

A key element of White House arguments for invoking the Alien Enemies Act was that Tren de Aragua was controlled by the Venezuelan government. However, this claim was also contradicted in an internal assessment by an elite forum of U.S. spy agencies. The National Intelligence Council concluded in a “Sense of the Community Memorandum”: “ [T]he Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

Joe Kent, Trump’s former head of counterterrorism, asked the Council to reconsider these findings. It did so, and came back with the same conclusions. Not long after, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard removed Michael Collins, a veteran intelligence analyst, from his post as acting chair of the Council.

The affair suggested that Kent, Gabbard, White House advisor Steven Miller, and their crew were trying to provide Trump with bespoke intelligence, custom tailored to fit whatever fabricated casus belli he was trying to invent. But some career intelligence professionals pushed back, calling bullshit on their manipulations.

Other dominos fell as more Trump claims were discredited by well-established geopolitical realities. The President claimed that he had saved tens of thousands of lives by dismantling Tren de Aragua and keeping drugs out of the U.S. However, the only drug responsible for large numbers of overdose deaths in the U.S. is fentanyl, a powerful opioid, which is almost exclusively produced in and exported from Mexico.

Venezuela reportedly plays little to no role in the fentanyl trade. Nor is it a major producer of cocaine or other drugs. It is mainly a trans-shipment corridor for cocaine from other South American countries headed for Europe, not the U.S.

In the end, the courts upheld the rights of some of the Venezuelan detainees trampled by Trump. But the long delays and tortures they suffered made those rights seem more aspirational than enforceable.

Beyond the Venezuelans, the rejection by the Trump administration of immigrants’ rights to habeas corpus and due process has been pandemic across the U.S.

An investigation by Reuters found that since October 2025, hundreds of judges have ruled more than 4,400 times that the government is unlawfully detaining immigrants, yet the government has continued the illegal detentions undeterred. This ignoring of or delay in complying with court orders has also made a travesty of the separation of powers, which requires that the executive branch respect the rulings of the judiciary.

A federal judge ordered the release of one such detainee, writing: “It is appalling that the Government insists that this Court should redefine or completely disregard the current law as it is clearly written.”

Many of these attacks on immigrants seem to be obvious violations of U.S. and international immigration laws. While some have been successfully remedied in court, they may also be a disturbing test run: the President has openly floated the idea of deporting U.S. citizens who have been convicted of serious crimes to El Salvador and imprisoning them there indefinitely without due process.

He has also tried to criminalize assistance to immigrants by arresting and, in a few notorious cases, killing or gravely injuring U.S. citizens who were trying to defend their neighbors against violence and harassment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other immigration agencies.

“The path to authoritarianism is being built on the backs of immigrants”, asserted Kiko Matos, President of the National Immigration Law Center, in TIME magazine. “While [the Trump administration is] ostensibly targeting immigrants, what is being constructed is both the infrastructure and compliance that will facilitate a broader loss of rights for all Americans.”

There’s a familiar progression that Trump and his cadre have inflicted on their shifting scapegoats. They start by branding immigrants as dangerous individual criminals, a go-to move of nativists for centuries. Then they escalate to alleging that they are gangsters working for foreign cartels. Then they try to link those cartels to an enemy government and declare them “narco-terrorists”.

Moving on to other targets, it’s easy to apply this field-tested stratagem to those who Trump calls “the enemy within”. And so protesters, activists, civil society groups, opposition politicians and other critics end up labeled “domestic terrorists”.

A similar public-relations gambit was used against the crews and passengers of small boats in the Caribbean north of Venezuela and the eastern Pacific.

This is the second part of a three-part commentary. Read Part 1: No Kings? Meet King Don and King John – Part 1 of 3 to start from the beginning. Part 3 of 3

About the author

Frames from White House video. Original video: https://telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2025/10/19/king-trump-bombs-protesters-with-brown-liquid-in-ai-video

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE. USA, Apr 23 2026 (IPS)

This is the first part of a three-part commentary. Read Part 2: No Kings? Meet King Don and King John – Part 2 of 3,   Part 3 of 3

After Donald Trump’s second election as president in November 2024, he said coyly that he wanted to be a dictator … but just for a day. On his first day in office, his sharpie signed an impressive pile of presidential orders, many of dubious legality. The next day he continued to govern like a DIY duce. He has not stopped since.

He has brought family members, incompetent political boot-lickers, and fellow kleptocrats into what is looking less like an administration and more like the Bling Dynasty, ruled by the Golden Emperor, Donald Khan. He continues to troll his opponents by hinting at a third term, which is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.

A far-flung grassroots opposition coalition has adopted the motto “No Kings”, which has resonated across a wide political spectrum. After all, British subjects began a war of independence 250 years ago to liberate their colonies from the vagaries of the reputedly bipolar King George III of England.

So far, No Kings has held three spirited days of national action, the last of which reportedly attracted some eight million people to thousands of locations across all 50 states. Many demonstrators carried homemade signs taking the piss out of Trump on a great variety of issues. One favorite read, “Sorry world, grandpa’s gone off his meds again”; another, “Fight Truth Decay”. Big inflatables of Trump as a baby in diapers, penguins, frogs, and other fanciful creatures abounded. Also very visible in Seattle-area demonstrations were Vietnam -era military veterans and American flags.

The movement has been broadened by a wide range of other constituencies challenging mass persecution and deportation of immigrants, defending laid-off public employees, trying to reinstate devastating Medicaid (public health insurance) cuts, opposing military intervention abroad and at home, and getting up in Trump’s face on other critical issues.

In response to the October 18th No Kings rallies, Trump posted what looks like an artificial intelligence-generated video on Truth Social, his personal social media platform. It features a cartoonish figure of him wearing a golden crown, flying a jet fighter that drops massive amounts of excrement on demonstrators in city streets below. It’s the kind of dreck that a troubled third grader addicted to AI might come up with if left unsupervised. (Apologies to the many third-graders who are much more mature than that).

Nevertheless, barring some deus ex machina, the world is stuck with Donald Trump for at least three more years. So as he reinvents royalty as reality show, whom could he adopt as a model and inspiration?

Which king?

There have certainly been constitutional monarchs who served their countries honorably in ceremonial and advisory roles. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands earned widespread respect by supporting the resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II. King Juan Carlos I of Spain played a key role in guiding his country back to democracy in the 1970s after decades under Generalísimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde’s fascist dictatorship.

But this does not seem to be the sort of reign Trumpísimo has in mind.

In a more colonialist and mercantilist vein, there’s always el Rey Fernando II of 15th and 16th Century Spain. With la Reina Isabel, he completed the Reconquista, expelling Jews and Muslims from Al-Andalus (an early foreshadowing of Trump’s Muslim Bans). His reign unleashed the mind-bending tortures of Torquemada and the Holy Inquisition (so much more imaginative than the ham-handed bludgeoning at Trump’s Salvadoran rent-a-gulag). Fernando’s conquistadores plundered the gold (so much sexier than tariffs), demolished the temples, and subjugated the peoples of the ancient civilizations of the Americas with sword and cross. Trump is off to a slow start with his incoherent threats and clumsy aggressions against Iran, Venezuela, Greenland, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Canada, and Palestine.

For sheer absolutist excess, don’t forget Louis XIV of France. His little country place at Versailles throws shade all over Mar-a-Lago. Whereas Lou could rock a moniker like “le Roi Soleil” (the Sun King), Trump will have to settle for “the Tanning Bed King” or perhaps “the Drill Baby Drill King”. And how about “L’état, c’est moi” (The state is me)? Sorry, but does the Donald have anything punchier than “I’d like you to do me a favor, though”? Or “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” (Unfortunately, his supine Supreme Court majority has his back on this one.) Then there’s “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the President.” Sounds like a third-grade class president throwing a tantrum. (Again, apologies to the many third graders who would never behave this boorishly.)

Compared to these historical peers, Trump comes out more mafioso than monarch.

But fear not. British historian Marc Morris has highlighted a promising spiritual forefather for the Trump monarchy.

King John, also known as John Lackland, ruled England from 1199 until his death in 1216. He came to be nicknamed Bad King John for his treachery, lechery, mendacity and cruelty. Morris quotes a contemporary chronicler, Anonymous of Béthune: “He was a very bad man, more cruel than all others. He lusted after beautiful women and because of this he shamed the high men of the land, for which reason he was greatly hated. Whenever he could he told lies rather than the truth … He was brim-full of evil qualities.” Remind you of anyone?

Troubadour Bertran de Born piled on: “No man may ever trust him, for his heart is soft and cowardly.”

“He was a total jerk,” wrote Morris. “He didn’t just kill, he was sadistic. He starved people to death. And not just enemy knights, but once a rival’s wife and son.” In another incident, John locked 22 noble prisoners of war in a castle and left them to die of starvation.

In 1215, the English barons (the most powerful nobles) rebelled against King John and forced him to sign the Magna Carta. This historic accord established a prototype for the rule of law in the English-speaking world. It evolved to apply to kings and paupers, although at the time it was mainly an agreement between the monarchy and the nobility.

“For the first time Magna Carta established publicly the principle that the king was subject to the law,” wrote historian Nick Higham. “It also led indirectly to the development of a new kind of state, in which the money to govern the country came from taxation agreed by parliament.” (Russell Vought take note.)

Article 39 articulated the legal concept of habeas corpus (“you have the body” in Latin), which established freedom from arbitrary detention by the government without just cause. This became a keystone of due process under the law. The Magna Carta also established that the king could levy taxes only with the approval of a council of nobles. This evolved into the first parliament fifty years later.

The Magna Carta was intended to resolve conflicts between the Crown and the barons. But within a few weeks, John disowned it and failed to honor his commitments. The document specified that the remedy for non-compliance was that the nobles could go to war again against the king, which they did. France then invaded England in support of the rebels, and the barons invited the French Prince Louis to assume the throne of England.

When John died of dysentery in 1216, he was widely reviled. Chronicler Matthew Paris wrote an epitaph for the king: “Foul as it is, Hell itself is made fouler by the presence of John.” But after his death, Louis was chased out of England and the Magna Carta was eventually revived again.

As a poster prince for unbridled monarchical power, then, John ended up leaving a mixed legacy from a MAGA point of view. On the downside, Trump might consider him “a loser” because he signed away the unlimited divine right of kings. But on the upside, he rapidly reneged on the Magna Carta and duked it out with the nobles and France until the end.

All told, King John the Bad checked most of the boxes for an early political progenitor of King Don the Con.

The Con?

Did you catch the clever double entendre? The President is a felon, convicted on 34 counts of “fraudulently falsifying business records” by concealing a $130,000 payment of hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels to influence the 2016 elections. He is also a world-class con artist, snagging a $400 million Boeing 747 as an emolument from Qatar. It will initially serve as Air Force One, but the sweet part is that after he leaves office, the “flying palace” will be housed in the lobby of his presidential library and hotel in Miami.

And let’s not forget that Don was also found liable for sexual assault and defamation in a civil lawsuit. A jury awarded plaintiff E. Jean Carroll a settlement of $83.3 million dollars, of which $65 million was for punitive damages. An appeals court upheld the judgement, finding that: “The record in this case supports the district court’s determination that ‘the degree of reprehensibility’ of Mr. Trump’s conduct was remarkably high, perhaps unprecedented”.

On the policy front, the title of the second Trump administration’s master plan, Project 2025, apparently contained a typo: it should have been called Project 1214. In practice, it has become a blueprint for rolling back human rights, democracy and good government to pre-Magna Carta irrelevance, unleashing the king’s unchecked power, and disemboweling essential government functions.

Clearly, in many domains of regal malfeasance, King Don has already surpassed King John. He has made so many efforts to demonstrate that the rule of law does not apply to him that we can only consider a few of the most egregious here.

His pièce de résistance remains his efforts to declare the 2020 presidential election invalid and to overturn the outcome by a violent coup d’état on January 6, 2021. The details have been replayed endlessly: more than 60 lawsuits in nine states against the election, all thrown out of court as baseless; Trump’s speech spurring on the armed, violent mob; the rioters at the Capitol, equipped with gallows and noose, chanting “Hang Mike Pence” (the Vice President responsible for certifying the count of the electoral results); their violent incursion into the Capitol in an effort to stop the electoral process; a rioter defecating on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s desk; the killing and maiming of police trying to protect lawmakers. All this took place in front of the entire nation in newscasts and congressional hearings for long afterwards.

Perhaps the most stunning outcome, however, is that Trump, the MAGA movement, and most of the Republican Party have never acknowledged that in 2020 the electorate told the President, “You’re fired.” Instead, he tethered his return to office in 2024 to a dark-matter constellation of lies about the elections. He called J6 “a day of love”, and pardoned some 1,500 convicted members of the most dangerous rabble of terrorists to attack this country since 9/11. He continues to force gutless Republicans to drink the same Kool Aid for many years after his story has been thoroughly discredited.

Don the Con also has doubled down on other debunked lies about the 2020 election, such as widespread electoral corruption and voting by non-citizens. Using these falsehoods, he is pushing to take control of elections and voter rolls away from the states, to whom the Constitution grants these powers, and give them to himself. He is also trying to make voting harder for lower-income and elderly people with ploys like requiring proof of citizenship to vote – such as a birth certificate or passport – which has never before been a requisite.

Trump’s power to negate the rule of law by spawning alternative realities is one that King John might have envied.

Modern communications technologies give Trump the means to corrode our shared understandings that were inconceivable 800 years ago. The President assaults social and news media like a “leaf blower”, as satirist Stephen Colbert put it, deafeningly flooding the zone with simple, mendacious messages. Don will probably not perish from dysentery as John did, but he has infected global political spaces with informational dysentery. His propaganda machine serves as a disinformation sump pump that sucks out poison from MAGA cesspools and inundates physical and virtual public squares.

During Trump’s first term, the Washington Post counted 30,573 false or misleading claims, around 20 per day. In his second term, the pace seems to have picked up.

Veteran White House correspondent Peter Baker wrote a New York Times piece headlined “Trump’s Wild Claims, Conspiracies and Falsehoods Redefine Presidential Bounds”. He observed, “Truth is not always an abundant resource in the White House under any president, but never has the Oval Office been occupied by someone so detached from verifiable facts.”

Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former White House communications director, told Baker that Trump has completed “50 years of distorting things and telling lies and … 50 years of getting away with it, so why wouldn’t he make the lies bigger and more impactful in this last stretch?”

In one case, Trump accused the United States Agency for International Development of sending $50 million worth of condoms to the Palestinian organization Hamas. After journalists debunked the original story, Trump continued to repeat it, but increased the alleged total to $100 million.

“What were dubbed ‘alternative facts’ in his first term,” wrote Baker, “have quickly become a whole alternative reality in his second.”

This is the first part of a three-part commentary. Read Part 2: No Kings? Meet King Don and King John – Part 2 of 3,   Part 3 of 3

About the author

Demonstration against Trump-era policies in Seattle, May 1, 2025. Credit: Peter Constantini

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, USA, Jul 28 2025 (IPS)

President Donald Trump reportedly wants to add his own head to Mount Rushmore National Memorial. But the National Park Service says there’s no room next to the four current presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. [Branch & White 6/27/2025] Here’s an innovative proposal for how to immortalize him right there in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

On the backside of the same rocky bluff where the monument is located, the President will unveil a full-body statue of himself. His combover is made of gold-plated carbon fiber that scintillates in the breeze. He bestrides an imposing masonry wall fronted by a moat filled with alligators and poisonous snakes, an idea that he purportedly floated during his first term. [Shear & Davis 10/2/2019]

The statue is as dynamic as its subject. Starting at dawn, Trump’s nose gradually grows out all day into a long, Pinocchio-like proboscis.

The soundtrack features the greatest hits from the President’s vast playlist of falsehoods – the Washington Post counted 30,573 false or misleading claims over his first term, around 20 per day. [Kessler et al 1/24/2021]. And veteran White House correspondent Peter Baker has analyzed them extensively in the New York Times. [Baker 2/23/2025] The nose grows proportionately to the magnitude and creativity of each whopper. Then it retracts at night.

The grand finale comes at sundown, when the President’s pants suddenly catch fire. In honor of his “Drill, Baby, Drill” energy policy, we’re not talking an LED or laser light show here. This has got to be something with a respectable carbon footprint, like methane. The blaze illuminates the whole monument and can be seen from outer space.

At this point, you may be wondering whether the President would embrace this sort of monument to his mendacity. Well, don’t underestimate his passion for inspired grifting (for example, see his pardon of Steve Bannon). [Costantini 10/4/2021]

As one pundit put it: “His superpower is his shamelessness.” [The 11th Hour 5/22/2025] The President once notoriously joked that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” [Dwyer 1/23/2016]

The Supreme Court later backed his boast with a king-size get-our-of-jail-free card in Trump v. United States, in which it ruled that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for official acts taken while in office. [Congressional Research Office 7/5/2024]

Why would he not take equal pride in his ability to pull the most brazen prevarications out of his ample posterior and watch some of his base worship them as gospel, while others just revel in “owning the libs”.

Don’t miss the other entertaining features. Every couple of hours during the day, one of Trump’s arms extends out, the palm of his massive hand facing upward. A drone tricked out as a model of his new Air Force One 747 lands on it like a falcon, accompanied by fireworks and martial music. Look! The plane has a new name emblazoned on it: “The Emperor of Emoluments”!

At alternate hours, Trump’s other arm rises up with the palm facing down, sporting a gold-plated ring with giant zirconium jewels. Actors impersonating public figures approach, kiss the ring, and tell him their troubles.

He agrees to help, adding: “I’d like you to do me a favor, though.” Somber music from The Godfather amps up the gravitas. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, visitors can ask for pardons and other favors on a cell-phone app. An AI Trump entity reads the petitions and responds with appropriate noblesse oblige or scorn. But if he asks if you’re a public employee, beware: if you say “Yes”, his favorite reply is “You’re fired.”

Below the statue, a small herd of human heads on toad bodies greets visitors. These are talking robots representing Trump’s toadies: cabinet members, advisors, political allies, business partners, even tech bros. They sing extravagant praises of the President with quotes from his North Korea-style cabinet meetings. One group asks guests to sign a petition to award the President the Nobel Peace Prize. [CNN 7/7/2025]

On some evenings the lighting changes, and Trump’s statue is costumed as Czar Donald the Impaler. If you’re very lucky, you may catch a glimpse of a shadowy Stephen Miller whispering in his ear, cosplaying in monk drag as his Mini-Rasputin. He’s just a hologram, too.

However, someone did recruit a special force of live ICE agents who roam the monument in plain-clothes packs. As long as you don’t “look foreign”, you have nothing to fear from them. If you do “look foreign”, you could win an all-expenses-paid open-ended vacation to El Salvador or South Sudan.

Looking for fun for the kids? Saddle up for an immigration rodeo. Holograms of immigrant families climb over the wall and try to cross the moat.

Players mounted on robot horses can “shoot them in the legs” with laser tags, as Trump suggested, and then herd them into two virtual concentration camps bristling with razor wire: one for kids, one for parents. [Shear & Davis 10/2/2019]

The more families you separate, the more points you earn. You can also bump your score up by denying the captives water or medical care. Then you can use your accumulated points to score Trump merch like golden watches, golden sneakers, and Holy Bibles.

But the fun is not just for kids. For adult fans of Trumponomics, there’s the Tariff Shoot. Who knew that tariffs are not really economic policies? As Trump has demonstrated, they are weapons you can use to blast countries you just don’t like.

For example, even though virtually no fentanyl enters the U.S. through Canada, the Big Guy has imposed crippling tariffs on our northern neighbor until they end all fentanyl smuggling. [Zahn 7/11/2025] The Tariff Shoot turns this boring trade tool into a dope game.

You shoot virtual tariff arrows from an electronic bow at a rotating holographic globe. When you hit a country, your game controller shows what goods you can put tariffs on and how much you can raise prices. You can also loot mineral rights and expropriate territory for your own private virtual country.

If you bankrupt a country, you can acquire outright ownership. Then at the end, you receive your winnings in Trump-backed cryptocurrency tokens. Best of all, if you hit the capital of a country, say Ottawa or Mexico City, you win a kewpie doll of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney or Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.

And then there are other kinds of fun after the sun goes down. Away from the plebeian hurly-burly, there’s a secret part of the Trump monument open only to very rich men. It’s concealed behind a stone door located somewhere on a neighboring bluff. You have to buy the GPS coordinates and entry codes for a price starting well over seven figures.

And security? Let’s just say word on the Dark Web is that Erik Prince’s mercenaries enforce the non-disclosure agreement. Once you find it and enter the codes, the hidden door opens briefly and then slams shut behind you with a metallic clang. You’ve just gained entry into a virtual re-creation of Jeffrey Epstein’s private island. We’ll leave the rest to your imagination. But hey, big spender, not to worry. Counsel advises that it is not legally possible for holograms to be underage.

As magnificent as it will be, the Trump Monument at Mount Rushmore is just the opening play. It will serve as the spearhead of a much broader blitzkrieg to disrupt Big Park. A revamped DOGE will be called in to root out inefficiencies and corruption from national parks and monuments and finally to sell them off to private equity.

Plans are hatching to redevelop the tired old presidential faces. Move over, El Capitan: imagine rock climbing up Honest Abe’s nose. Join the kids hurtling down the bomb water slide in the gap between OG Washington and TJeff. And Trump’s real estate hounds are sniffing out a site to build a 50-story hotel on top of one of the surrounding bluffs.

Picture the majestic Trump Golden Calf Resort and Casino, featuring crossover themes from the Old West and the Old Testament. It will enforce the signature Trump policy of pay-to-play: if you want access to the premium features of the Trump Monument, why wouldn’t you want to stay at the premium lodging on-site?

And did someone mention links? If you’re looking for Trump-class golfing during your stay, plans are afoot to turn a nearby patch of the Black Hills into valleys full of putting greens.

Some may call it tacky totalitarianism, but the markets are jonesing at the prospect of an Orlando of the Prairies.

A final word to the wise: President Trump will decree that birthright citizenship does not apply on the grounds of his national monument. So don’t forget to bring birth certificates for the whole family. And for their moms.

See also

Peter Baker. “Trump Uses Lies to Lay the Groundwork for Radical Change”. New York Times, February 23, 2025.
https://nytimes.com/2025/02/23/us/politics/trump-alternative-reality.html

Peter Baker. “Trump’s Wild Claims, Conspiracies and Falsehoods Redefine Presidential Bounds”. November 3, 2024.
https://nytimes.com/2025/02/23/us/politics/trump-alternative-reality.html

Congressional Research Office. “Presidential Immunity from Criminal Prosecution in Trump v. United States”. Washington, DC: July 5, 2024.
https://congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB11194/LSB11194.2.pdf

Peter Costantini. “The Roadrunner and the Wall”. Ciudad de México: Americas Migration, October 4, 2021.
https://americasmigration.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-roadrunner-and-wall.html

John Branch & Jeremy White. “Room for One More on Mount Rushmore? (The President Wants to Know.)”. New York Times, June 27, 2025.
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/27/us/mount-rushmore-trump.html

CNN. “’It’s a great honor’: Trump receives Nobel Peace Prize nomination from Netanyahu”. CNN Politics, July 7, 2025.
https://cnn.com/2025/07/07/politics/video/trump-netanyahu-nobel-nomination-letter-digvid

Colin Dwyer. “Donald Trump: ‘I Could … Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn’t Lose Any Voters’”. National Public Radio, The Two-Way, January 23, 2016.
https://npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/23/464129029/donald-trump-i-could-shoot-somebody-and-i-wouldnt-lose-any-voters

Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo & Meg Kelly. “Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years”. Washington Post, January 24, 2021.
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years

Michael D. Shear & Julie Hirschfeld Davis. “Shoot Migrants Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trumps Ideas for Border”. New York Times, October 2, 2019.
https://nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html

The 11th Hour. “’His superpower is his shamelessness’: A look at Trump’s crypto dinner” (interview with Salman Rushdie). MSNBC, May 22, 2025.
https://msnbc.com/11th-hour/watch/-his-superpower-is-his-shamelessness-a-look-at-trump-s-crypto-dinner-240173637966

Max Zahn. “What to know about Trump’s new tariffs on Canada”. ABC News, July 11, 2025.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/trumps-new-tariffs-canada/story?id=123678621

This commentary is a satirical take on recent political proposals and historical memory

Poster shared by the Nevada Immigrant Coalition on Instagram warns that ICE agents may operate in plain clothes and be mistaken for other law enforcement.

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE. US, May 26 2025 (IPS)

On May 21, I was in the Seattle immigration court accompanying a young mother from a South American country who was applying for asylum to a routine hearing. Local media had reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested several people there the previous day.

Immigration courts have long seemed to be relatively safe places where immigrants were unlikely to be arrested, because they were already in the immigration legal system. [EOIR] [ICE]

While we were waiting, a group of four Haitians with a four-month-old baby sat down across from us. When I heard them speaking Kreyol and French, I introduced myself as someone who had lived in Haiti. We chatted briefly about their country and the immigration situation here, and smiled at the baby. Then they were called into court before us, and when they emerged, they seemed unperturbed by whatever was the outcome of their hearing.

This infernal Catch-22 is showing immigrants who have escaped from dangerous places that they have mistakenly entrusted their hopes to yet another gratuitously cruel police state for migrants. It is falsely branding all of them as criminals and dumping them into a rent-a-gulag of private for-profit prisons

However, when they walked out of the waiting room, they were surrounded by a group of burly men in Northwest-style outdoor wear and ball caps who proved to be agents of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations. The officers wore nothing that identified them as ICE or police, and I did not see them display any badges or warrants. They operated quietly, apparently trying not to attract public attention. They did not arrest the baby and its father, but took the mother and the two other men.

The arrestees looked stricken but did not resist, and I don’t believe the police handcuffed them. The father was left holding the baby in a basket, stunned and unbelieving. Further down the hall, another group of officers arrested a man who spoke to them in Spanish, asking them not to arrest him and crying. They put handcuffs and leg shackles on him and wrestled him onto an elevator.

This brought the young woman I was accompanying and myself to tears, as it was designed to do. Fortunately, though, her case was not dismissed. She was granted a future court hearing and was not detained by ICE.

As they were designed to do, the arrests left other witnesses, many with children, fearing that they could be next. Remember, this is not a court where people had to go because they were accused of crimes; they were there to make their cases for asylum or other protections, or to change their address. They were following authorized paths of immigration.

Staff from the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a Seattle non-profit law office, circulated through the Federal Building explaining the new situation: the courts are now dismissing some immigrants’ cases at the request of the government. This might seem like a good thing for the immigrants, but it’s not: without an active case, most of these immigrants have no immigration status.

They are now vulnerable to being grabbed by ICE and placed in expedited removal, a form of rapid deportation without recourse to a judge. This provides la migra, as they are known in Spanish, with a new, unforeseen way to terrorize immigrants. [NWIRP]

The strategy of the Trump administration for immigrants with pending cases requesting authorized statuses such as asylum seems to be to deploy a variety of ways of questionable legality to summarily reject and remove them, or to make life so miserable here that the immigrants “self-deport”.

National and international media have reported similar arrests of immigrants after dismissing their cases across the country. [Anguiano & Singh 5/22/2025] As CBS News pointed out, expedited removal can be used to summarily deport immigrants “who entered the U.S. with the government’s permission at legal entry points”.

So it could possibly be applied to the nearly one million immigrants who entered the U.S. using a cell-phone app introduced by the Biden administration, which allowed them to enter with authorization. [Montoya-Galvez & Cavazos 5/23/2025] Hundreds of thousands who entered under the auspices of other government programs may also be at risk.

This is not an immigration policy; it is the business end of an ethnic cleansing policy. It dovetails nicely with the long-term imperative of white sado-nationalists such as Trump’s Make America Great Again movement to try to reverse what they call “The Great Replacement” of white U.S.-born citizens by immigrants of color from Latin America, Africa and Asia.

As historian Mae Ngai of Columbia University told me in an interview, “I think there’s too many brown people in this country for [the Trump administration’s] tastes — that’s what it all comes down to.” [Costantini 1/16/2019]

The Department of Homeland Security has introduced other new operations to threaten immigrants as well. In Nashville, Tennessee, the state Highway Patrol is reportedly running joint operations with ICE officers on the streets of immigrant neighborhoods.

According to New York Times columnist Margaret Renkle, ICE has been throwing “a wide, seemingly race-based net” to catch people who might appear to be immigrants with flurries of traffic stops for minor infractions by the state patrol. These stops allow ICE to check the immigration status of large numbers of local residents and detain some of them. [Renkl 5/22/2025]

Nashville is a city with a two-thirds Democratic electorate in a heavily Republican state. State Senator Jeff Yarbro told Renkle: “They were basically pulling someone new over every two minutes. That’s not a ‘public safety operation.’” And Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell commented: “What’s clear today is that people who do not share our values of safety and community have the authority to cause deep community harm.”

On top of other forms of arbitrary deprivation of immigrants’ rights, these new attacks are destroying any sense of safety for people who are trying to follow the rules. They already seem to be resulting in more fearful immigrants skipping appointments, and then being subject to even more certain arrest and removal.

This infernal Catch-22 is showing immigrants who have escaped from dangerous places that they have mistakenly entrusted their hopes to yet another gratuitously cruel police state for migrants. It is falsely branding all of them as criminals and dumping them into a rent-a-gulag of private for-profit prisons. More detainees will likely be rendered to El Salvador, Libya, South Sudan, and other human-rights-free zones and held without due process or habeas corpus.

The Statue of Liberty wept.

* * *

Notes

For the past 40 years, I have volunteered with immigrants. Since the first Trump administration, I have accompanied them to court and other official appointments. Accompaniment is organized by local immigrant justice and human rights groups, and usually entails working with attorneys (which I am not) to support and inform immigrants, and interpreting between English and their languages (in my case, Spanish and French).

Immigration courts are run by the Executive Office for Immigration Review in the Department of Justice. They are administrative courts and not part of the judiciary branch. [EOIR]

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the police agency within the Department of Homeland Security that enforces immigration laws in the interior of the country, while Customs and Border Protection (which includes the Border Patrol) handles enforcement from the border up to 100 miles inland. [ICE]

References

Dani Anguiano & Maanvi Singh. “Ice arrests at immigration courts across the US stirring panic: ‘It’s terrifying’”. London: The Guardian, May 22, 2025.
https://theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/22/ice-arrests-immigration-courts

Peter Costantini. “Manufacturing illegality: An Interview with Mae Ngai”. Foreign Policy In Focus, January 16, 2019.
https://fpif.org/manufacturing-illegality-an-interview-with-mae-ngai

Legal Information Institute. “habeas corpus”. Cornell Law School, no date
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/habeas_corpus

Camilo Montoya-Galvez & Nidia Cavazos. “ICE ending migrants’ court cases in order to arrest and move to deport them”. CBS News, May 23, 2025.
https://cbsnews.com/news/ice-ending-migrants-court-cases-arrest-move-to-deport-them

Margaret Renkl. “The ICE Raids in Nashville Aren’t About Public Safety”. New York Times, May 22, 2025.
https://nytimes.com/2025/05/22/opinion/ice-raids-nashville-immigrants.html

The Holy Bible, Trump Edition: "They shall beat their swords into nine irons." Credit: Shutterstock.

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, USA, Feb 28 2025 (IPS)

Like any self-respecting don of a powerful crime family, Donald Trump – AKA “Don the Con” – always gets a taste of any action going down on his territory. And that territory, as recent events have made clear, knows no borders. (I mean, except for the southwest one.)

The capo di tutti capi of TrumpWorld says that he wants to acquire Gaza and turn it into “The Riviera of the Middle East”. And it’s no secret what the jewel in the crown has to be: a magnificent golf course. [Shear et al 2/5/2025] [Baker 2/5/2025]

Given conditions in Gaza, this will be a challenge. But a leaked and probably apocryphal memo from the TrumpWorld real-estate division (formerly the U.S. Department of State), lays out an ingenious strategy for the centerpiece of the rebranding of Gaza.

———-

To: Gaza Desk

OK, campers, minimize PornHub and listen up.

I’m working on some promotional material for the Riviera project. Please return any comments yesterday.

——

Trump Links Gaza at Rubble Beach

Welcome to a whole new dimension in golfing adventure: Trump Links Gaza. Here, you can tee off into a breathtaking new experience: rubble golf. We found a strip of land short of water, vegetation and soil, but with plenty of gravel, broken concrete, and twisted rebar. So we had to think outside the box of grassy fairway | water hazard | putting green.

Our solution? If life gives you rubble, make rubble golf. At Trump Links Gaza, the whole length of the 18 holes will be one big rubble trap. We’re working to make it the Pebble Beach of Middle Eastern war zones, so we’re dubbing it Rubble Beach.

For chipping out of bomb craters and demolished building foundations, your pitching wedge will be your best friend. You may lose a few more balls than usual, but looking for them will be like a treasure hunt: you’ll never know what you may find.

Our attorneys tell us we are required to warn you about the unexploded ordnance. No worries, this is where the adventure really begins, and the risk just heightens the excitement. Accidental death and dismemberment insurance is available in the clubhouse.

For small mines or unexploded shells, simply plant one of the skull-and-crossbones flags we’ve provided nearby – but not too close.

If you happen to uncover a large bomb, about the size of a Fiat 500, do not take the time to plant a flag: run for your life. Those bunker-busters weigh 2,000 pounds and have a blast radius of three football fields. Best of all, we’re proud to say they’re made in the U.S. of A. Now we’re talking real adventure golfing. (Not to worry too much, the previous owners assure us that all such bombs dropped on Gaza did detonate – creating much of the rubble you will be enjoying.)

You may unearth piles of bones, but don’t be alarmed. They are probably sheep or goat bones. If they seem a little larger, they could be – Who knows? – calves or llamas.

Golfers may occasionally come upon torn or burned children’s books in Arabic, pieces of stuffed animals, shards of plates or glasses, and shreds of kaffiyehs or hijabs. In a small number of cases, visitors have also noticed what seem to be small children with distended bellies wandering around outside the razor wire perimeter.

The previous proprietors explained that the area had been taken over by squatters, who were very messy and did not keep track of their children. Their security forces removed nearly all the offenders and tried to eliminate any traces of them, but may have missed a few here and there.

We apologize for any unpleasant experiences that may keep looping in your head. (Although as you may not have noticed, on page 9 of the visitors’ waivers you agreed not to hold us liable for any PTSD or recurrent nightmares that may result from what you see here.)

Allow us to put you at ease on one other point: because conditions are so rough, it’s no big deal if you lie about your score. In fact, it’s an official Trump Links Gaza policy: falsifying scorecards and telling tall tales about your eagles and birdies are encouraged. There’s so much latent creativity out there, we don’t want to inhibit it with the buzzkill of fact-checking.

This adjustment will also keep Trump Links Gaza in step with the rest of TrumpWorld and its wholly owned subsidiary, the U.S. government. The corporate guidance on truthiness was enunciated most eloquently by Vice President J.D. Vance.

He was asked by reporters why he and President Trump kept saying that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were illegal immigrants who had stolen and eaten pet cats and dogs, even after the false story had been debunked by Republican officials and the Wall Street Journal. Vance, apparently speaking in tongues, told National Public Radio: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” [Garrett 9/15/2024]

So don’t worry about handicaps or pars. We’ve created an arithmetic-free zone here to let you celebrate your fairway prowess with your most improbable golf memes – and to emulate the liberating example of our leaders in the Oval Office.

Stop by the clubhouse afterwards for a complementary house cocktail: an ivermectin sour with a splash of hydroxychloroquine.

The Trump Links Gaza Management

—–

So let me know what you think. There are no stupid comments – well, actually, there are a few. You’ll know if yours is one when HR tweets you your pink slip and the security guards bring you a cardboard file box.

Breaking news for your eyes only: Bibi told the transition team that the squatters who were in the area of Trump Links Gaza before the transformation are now in custody.

They will be charged as criminal aliens and most will be deported to permanent camps in Rwanda and El Salvador. But in the interim, TrumpWorld has signed a contract with a U.S.-based private prison firm to build facilities to hold them until they can be shipped out.

However, we are considering keeping a small number of them in Gaza as guest workers, much like the H-2B workers long used by Trump enterprises in the U.S.

These will be lodged in the immigration prison and let out only to work as dishwashers and laborers at the new Gaza minimum wage (lol it’s negative – they will be charged ten dollars a day for the privilege of getting out of their cells for healthy exercise). Meals, rent and utilities will also be deducted. Hey Elon, can your boyos from the Department of Government Efficiency match that?

As exciting as it is, Trump Links Gaza is only the beginning. Think glacier golf in Greenland -your ice axe doubles as a putter – and aquatic links on jet skis in Panama.

But Canada is le grand prix, as the snail-sucking surrender monkeys put it. The Boss may have to drop a few bunker-busters on the tundra to nudge them towards statehood. The Canucks may complain about losing their health insurance and being tased for saying “Eh”. They may gag at having to call Hudson Bay “MAGA Bay”.

But once True North has been downgraded to Magnetic North and welcomed into the Union, TrumpWorld will buy up some well-known golf course, tart it up, and lean heavily on the new “governor” (actually, proconsul) to have the Canadian Open moved to it – as Beloved Leader tried unsuccessfully to do in Scotland with the British Open. (Don’t breathe easy yet, haggis-eaters – Donald Trump has a long memory.) [Landler et al 7/16/2021]

I’m proud to say that golf diplomacy has become the linchpin of our transition from the “No more forever wars” foreign policy to a new one: “Many short and sweet annexations”. Who’s next?

As the Good Book, Trump Edition, says: “They shall beat their swords into nine irons.” Fore!

ArnoldPalmersJunk (Like my new handle?)
Vice President for Golfing Anschluss

Trump Links Gaza at Rubble Beach: Come for the adventure, stay for the gaslighting.

References

Peter Baker. “An Unbound Trump Pushes an Improbable Plan for Gaza”. New York Times, February 5, 2025.
https://nytimes.com/2025/02/05/us/politics/trump-gaza-netanyahu-takeover.html

Mohamad Bazzi. “Trump is using the presidency to seek golf deals. Hardly anyone’s paying attention.” London: The Guardian, February 27, 2025.
https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/27/trump-pga-liv-saudi-arabia

Jonathan Freedland. “Trump is fueling lethal fantasies of driving people from their land”. London: The Guardian, 7 February 2025.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/07/middle-east-land-people-donald-trump-gaza

FXB Center for Health & Human Rights. “Press Release: New study shows Israel air-dropped 2000lb bombs within lethal and damage ranges of hospitals in Gaza”. Boston, MA: Harvard University, October 10, 2024.
https://fxb.harvard.edu/2024/10/10/new-study-shows-israel-air-dropped-2000lb-bombs-within-lethal-and-damage-ranges-of-hospitals-in-gaza

Luke Garrett. “Vance defends spreading claims that Haitian migrants are eating pets”. National Public Radio, September 15, 2024.
https://npr.org/2024/09/15/nx-s1-5113140/vance-false-claims-haitian-migrants-pets

Mark Landler, Lara Jakes & Maggie Haberman. “Trump’s Request of an Ambassador: Get the British Open for Me”. New York Times, July 16, 2021.
https://nytimes.com/2020/07/21/world/europe/trump-british-open.html

Michael D. Shear, Peter Baker & Isabel Kershner. “Trump Proposes U.S. Takeover of Gaza and Says All Palestinians Should Leave”. New York Times, February 4, 2025.
https://nytimes.com/2025/02/04/us/politics/trump-gaza-strip-netanyahu.html

Artist's conception of Miss Sassy chilling at the day spa (Actually, our kitten Brinca chilling at the day spa). Photo: Peter Costantini

By Peter Costantini
TUCSON, Arizona, US, Nov 4 2024 (IPS)

A small incident in the mounting mayhem of the 2024 elections crystalized the state of the dark art of politics in these United States. In Springfield, Ohio, a small midwestern industrial city, a woman named Anna Kilgore noticed that her cat, Miss Sassy, had been missing for a few days. Kilgore notified the police that she feared her kitty might have been caught and eaten by the Haitian immigrants who lived next door.

A few days later, Miss Sassy showed up in Kilgore’s basement, uneaten. The woman, to her credit, apologized to her neighbors.

But before the prodigal feline’s return, false rumors began to circulate in Springfield and online that illegal Haitian immigrants were kidnapping and eating pets. The allegations were denied by the police, the Republican mayor, and the state of Ohio’s Republican governor.

Nevertheless, the tall tale was picked up and amplified by social media and right-wing news sources. Over 20 bomb threats were called in to public institutions. The governor stationed state police in schools, some of which were forced to close temporarily, and deployed bomb-sniffing dogs and surveillance cameras around the city. The large Haitian community was terrorized.

Beyond Springfield, a key strategy of the Trump – Vance campaign appears to be to repeat and refuse to retract a variety of big and small lies about immigrants that have already been discredited

The kicker came when ex-President and current Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump repeated the already debunked rumor during his nationally televised debate with Vice President and current Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on September 10.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” the ex-president said. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country.” [Botelho 9/20/2024] U.S. Senator from Ohio and current Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance also continued to recount the falsehood in public appearances. Both Trump and Vance have made racist and xenophobic tropes about Haitians and other immigrants signature themes of their campaign.

Springfield is a formerly deindustrialized factory town that has revived economically and has again attracted numerous manufacturing jobs. But during the period of stagnation, much of the previous working-class population apparently sought work elsewhere.

So when the city’s economy boomed again and manufacturing jobs returned, but workers were scarcer, word circulated on the grapevines of immigrants and other job seekers. Over the past four years, an estimated 12 to 15 thousand Haitians have moved to Clark County, of which Springfield is the seat, now making up roughly 10 percent of a county population of 136 thousand.

The City of Springfield itself has a population of a little under 60 thousand. But nobody sent the Haitians, as some of the rumors have suggested; they reportedly came on their own with encouragement from government and businesses. [City of Springfield Immigration FAQ] [US Census Bureau – Clark County and Springfield, OH]

According to the City web site, “Haitian immigrants are here legally” under temporary programs such as humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status. Regardless of their immigration status, the Haitian community has helped revitalize the local economy and opened 10 new businesses. [US Census Bureau, Springfield and Clark County] [City of Springfield Immigration FAQs] As with any sudden influx of people, the population increase has sometimes strained educational and medical services and housing. But this is a problem of economic growth, which would likely occur whether or not the newcomers were immigrants.

Despite criticism from across the political spectrum, neither Trump nor Vance has retracted their immigrants-eating-pets story. When challenged, their evidence includes “I read it on the Internet” and “My constituents wrote to me about it”. They are also propagating falsehoods that the Haitian immigrants are bringing diseases and crime.

Vance acknowledged backhandedly that he had known all along that the story was false. According to the Wall Street Journal, the city manager had told him that there was no evidence that the rumors were true. [Fowler 9/18/2024]

Yet the Senator persisted: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” he asserted. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” [Garrett 9/15/2024]

The vice-presidential candidate also lied about the legal immigration statuses that have allowed most of the Haitians in Springfield to stay in the U.S. temporarily: “Well, if Kamala Harris waves a wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien.”

But Harris had nothing to do with deciding the immigrants’ legal status.  They would have had to be approved by the Departments of Homeland Security and possibly Justice. And the asylum, TPS and other forms of relief they were granted are legal immigration statuses that have been around since well before the Biden administration. [Kreemer 10/2/2024]

Beyond Springfield, a key strategy of the Trump – Vance campaign appears to be to repeat and refuse to retract a variety of big and small lies about immigrants that have already been discredited.

At one of his rallies, Trump claimed that In Aurora, Colorado, a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment building and swathes of the state. Local police said there were problems in a building where some Venezuelan immigrants live, but that the issues were serious housing code violations, such as lack of heat or running water, not gangs. [Hu 9/11/2024]

After Hurricane Helene, Trump and other Republicans alleged that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had diverted federal disaster relief money to undocumented immigrants. “They stole the FEMA money,” he said, “just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season”.

FEMA said that Trump’s claims were untrue, and that undocumented immigrants are not eligible for cash assistance. Trump managed to piggyback another lie onto his first: undocumented immigrants cannot vote and there is no evidence that the Biden administration has tried to bribe them. [Strickler et all 10/4/2024]

Trump has also spearheaded a national Republican campaign that falsely claims, as in the FEMA story, that undocumented immigrants are voting illegally in large numbers. The idea has been thoroughly discredited. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told me that non-citizen voting is “at best vanishingly rare” and “is not an issue that has or will impact any election. That is a conspiracy theory and a mythology that is not true.” [AZ Sec of State press conference 10/31/2024]

It has long been illegal for non-citizens to vote, and everyone who registers to vote has to swear on penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen 18 years old or older. But the Republican fearmongering is getting steadily louder. Republican legislatures are passing bills prohibiting what’s already prohibited, and some GOP politicians are calling all immigrants, even naturalized citizens who can legally vote, “illegals”.

Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, has offered no evidence that non-citizen voting is a problem. But he declared at a press conference, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.” [Benen 7/19/2024]

In the mendacity derby, Trump, Vance and Johnson are shoo-ins for win, place and show.

I was curious how Miss Sassy felt about all the brouhaha, but her publicist was not taking my calls. I suspected the famous feline might have tired of her celebrity and gone dark. Still, since Vance admitted that he made up fictional stories to get the attention of the media, I decided to do the same for my interview with Miss Sassy. But unlike Vance, I will not lie about it – I’ll tell you what’s true and what I’m making up.

So here is an intuitive transcript of my imaginary interview with Miss Sassy. My comments are in parentheses.

Miss Sassy

I’m glad you asked that. I’m called Miss Sassy because I’m very outspoken and sometimes even impudent.

I hope you won’t think I’m species-ist, but honestly, you can’t get good human help anymore. You’ve probably heard the saying: “Dogs have masters, cats have staff.” Well, my staff in our house in Springfield, Ohio, is well-meaning, but … let’s just say she’s not one of the sharpest claws on the paws. (If you live with cats, you know they think like this.)

Despite what those crazy-ass MAGAheads are saying, when I wandered over to check out the Haitians next door, they were really nice to me. Dahling, it was like a day spa with a three-star restaurant. They gave my paws a pedicure, massaged my back and haunches, scratched my chin, and broke out the catnip. Then they poured me out the juice from the cans of tuna fish they opened for tuna salad.

Another day they made a Haitian dish they called lambi, some kind of seafood in a butter sauce, and they let me try it. It was to die for. (Completely invented. But I have lived in Haiti and I believe that Haitians generally love their pets. And I have had delectable lambi on an idyllic beach in Saint-Louis-du-Sud.)

So no, they didn’t try to eat me. Au contraire: they fed me some pretty tasty stuff. When I found out what my human accused them of, I got so mad that I peed on her favorite chair. (Can’t confirm this, but it sounds intuitive.)

As you may have heard, my human retracted her story when I showed up healthy and rested. She explained that that she found me in the basement of our house after a couple of days, acknowledged that the Haitian neighbors did not eat me, and apologized to them. So I forgave her. (Most of this has been widely reported, although forgiveness is hard to verify.)

What I don’t understand about some humans is how they can keep on repeating the same lie about the neighbors eating me when they know it’s not true. Yes, I’m talking about that politician who carries an orange-haired rodent around on his head – oh, sorry, I mean the combover – and that baby-faced guy who looks and sounds like his intern. Agent Orange, as the filmmaker Spike Lee calls him, repeated the lies about me and Springfield on TV during a national debate. What’s even harder to fathom is why a lot of people still believe them. Arrogant humans like to say they’re the most intelligent species. Well, these days, the evidence is scarce. (The rodent part is false. But it’s just insult comedy, and as Puerto Ricans know, the ex-president is a big fan.)

But hold on, I do have a theory about that. Nowadays everyone’s talking about Artificial Intelligence. And being a very intelligent cat, I’ve gotten curious about AI too. My human thinks I’m just walking on the keyboard of her computer and tries to shoo me off, and sometimes I type things like “xdr54tttttthjn” just to keep her in the dark. But actually I’m doing research and downloading articles nonstop. (Take everything about AI with a grain of salt.)

Now here’s the theory that I’m working on: I think Trump and Vance and the Republicans have come up with a new mutant form of Artificial Intelligence that I call Artificial Stupidity. AI tries to teach machines to talk like humans. AS teaches humans to talk like machines. (Of course this is made up, but doesn’t it explain a lot?)

Maybe you’ve noticed that the whole MAGA crowd, and their wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party, are constantly parroting the same keywords and talking points and memes. They all sound like they’ve been programmed to be mindless automatons.

Here’s my hypothesis: AI uses large language models to teach neural networks how to learn. AS uses yuge wordsalad models – starting with all the speeches and tweets of Beloved Leader – to inject anti-social venom that bypasses the frontal lobe, hijacks the amygdala, and teaches the MAGA faithful whom to hate and how. It sends a symphony of racist and sexist dog whistles into their vulnerable brains.

As it takes over their minds, AS seems to incubate a form of emotional vulnerability called Big Daddy Syndrome. It’s a condition that most dictators, demagogues and cult leaders know how to manipulate. Whatever the problem, Big Daddy’s answer is “Don’t worry your dependent little head about this. I’m the only one who can take care of it for you. I have a concept of a policy. Just leave it to me.”

Please excuse the New Age pop psychology, but would you believe I used to talk with Sigmund Freud’s ghost about problems like this? He told me, “This is a classic case of psychological displacement in two dimensions. The subjects are substituting Big Daddy for a missing or abusive father figure. And they’re attacking immigrants who have done nothing to harm them to displace the bosses or billionaires or politicians who have actually been hurting them.”

To assert Big Daddy’s dominance over his followers, Trump cultivates a brash rhetorical style. The late-night TV satirist Stephen Colbert compared it to a leaf blower. I think of Big Daddy spraying disinformation and bigotry all around him as a sort of senile tom cat obsessively marking his territory. Then Vance follows up, trying to spin everything and make excuses, like the poor clown in the circus parade sweeping up after the elephants.

But really, how do you know when Trump is lying? Here’s the tell just watch his lips. If they move, he’s probably lying. (Badabing badaboom)

I think it might have been Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon who said, “Before Truth can put on her shoes, my lies have gone halfway around the world. But, truth be told, the proceeds from my lies are in an attaché case full of unmarked bills in a bank in the Cayman Islands, and I’m on my second mojito.” (This is a total fabrication. Although in fact Bannon was convicted and serving time for embezzling a million bucks, but Trump pardoned him and got him out of jail.)

OK, so it’s clear that Trump is an inveterate liar. But is it really fair to call him a fascist? Well, at least two retired generals and a former Defense Secretary who had worked for Trump, and some of the most respected academic experts on fascism have all said publicly that they consider him a fascist. Many of his ex-cabinet members and advisors have chimed in that he is a dangerous authoritarian. The ex-President replied that he was “the opposite of a Nazi”, whatever that is, and called Harris “fascist” in return. His rhetorical strategy has been reduced to the old playground taunt, “I’m rubber, you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” (See a recent front page of the New York Times.) [Baker 11/2/2024] [Zerofsky 10/23/2024]

As you can see, I don’t understand why MAGA people can’t see through Trump. But I also don’t think most of them are bad or stupid. After all, my human may wear a Trump T-shirt, but I know she’s got a good heart. The problem is, a lot of them are what are being called “low-information” voters, meaning they don’t pay much attention to any news at all, and only take in random snatches of what’s actually going on. Then they vote without having much idea of whom or what they are voting for. (You did not hear this first here.)

Look, there’s no shame in being ignorant – we’re all ignorant about many things. And it surely takes a strong stomach to follow politics. But then Big Daddy comes along selling his snake oil about who’s responsible for all your problems, and the answer is always: it’s the f___ing immigrants. Not coincidentally, immigrants are mostly Brown and Black people like our neighbors.

Then, when Trump serves you a steaming bowl of bile, you slurp it all up and wash it down with an ivermectin chaser, and then maybe act it out in a fantasy state of confusion or fear or hate. But dawg, the truth is that you’re hurting real flesh-and-blood people like the Haitians, and shaming the rest of us, too. (About four out of five immigrants to the U.S. come from Latin America, Asia or Africa.) [Pew Research Center 9/28/2015]

P.T. Barnum, of Barnum and Bailey Circus fame, supposedly said: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” In J.D. Vance, Trump has brought in young grifter talent who’s a little smoother at scamming people. That’s why I call him J.D. Barnum, and he seems to have revved the production line up to a sucker every second. (There is no evidence that Barnum said this, but it’s usually attributed to him.)

Just imagine what your children and grandchildren will think of you if they learn you were one of the poor schlemiels who fell for Trump’s and Vance’s toxic hogwash. Do yourself and all of us a big favor: pull your head out of your hindquarters and just say no to the lies of Don the Con and J.D. Barnum.

~ ~ ~

At this point, Miss Sassy’s cell phone rang, and she’s like “Sorry, I have to take this.” It sounded like it might have been Oprah. Then without taking leave, she sashayed back down the stairs into the basement.

References

Peter Baker. “Amid Talk of Fascism, Trump’s Threats and Language Evoke a Grim Past”. New York Times, November 2, 2024.

Peter Baker. “Trump’s Wild Claims, Conspiracies and Falsehoods Redefine Presidential Bounds”. New York Times, November 3, 2024.

Avery Kreemer. “Federal policy that paved way for Springfield’s Haitian boom debated”. Dayton, OH: Dayton Daily News, October 2, 2024.

City of Springfield Ohio. “Immigration FAQs”. City of Springfield Ohio, accessed November 1, 2024.

Pew Research Center. “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065”. Pew Research Center, September 28, 2015.

United States Census Bureau. “Springfield city, Ohio”. USCB, accessed November 1, 2024.

Elisabeth Zerofsky. “Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind.” New York Times, October 23, 2024.

Mushroom workers rally, Sunnyside, Washington, April 18, 2023. Credit: Peter Costantini

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, USA, Aug 31 2023 (IPS)

The Yakima River runs southeast from the Cascade Mountains through central Washington state to merge with the Columbia a little north of Oregon. From the small city of Yakima on down, its course broadens from a winding canyon into a wide valley bounded by austere low ridges of gray-green sagebrush and tawny grasses. In mid-April, the new leaves of the willows and cottonwoods light up the riverbanks with luminous chartreuse.

“De colores, de colores se visten los campos en la primavera …”
“Colors, the fields are clothed with colors in the spring …”
(From an old farm workers song)

The valley beyond the river bottom was once mostly semi-arid rangeland punctuated by basalt cliffs. But as irrigation systems spread across it in the early 20th Century, it morphed into rich farmlands. Expanses of vineyards stretch across the valley and climb the hills. One part of the Yakima Valley Highway has been renamed “Wine Country Road”, and at intersections, signs point to wineries and tasting rooms.

Tall frameworks of wood and wire stand waiting for hop vines to grow up them. The Yakima Valley produces more than three-quarters of the hops grown in the United States. Apple and pear orchards are beginning to bloom. In fields of corn and beans, the first green shoots are just poking up.

The town of Sunnyside drapes over a hill about 30 miles southeast of Yakima city. The town’s 16 thousand residents are 86 percent Hispanic, and Yakima County is over 52 percent, in a country where the Hispanic population is approaching one-fifth of the total and growing.

Yearly per capita income in Sunnyside is $15,570 and the poverty rate is 18.6 percent, compared with $43,817 and 9.9 percent for the state of Washington. That means that average yearly income here is a bit more than one-third that of the state, and poverty is almost twice as high. [U.S. Census Bureau. “QuickFacts”]

Sign at mushroom workers rally, Sunnyside, Washington, April 18, 2023. Credit: Peter Costantini

At the south end of town, across Interstate 82, Midvale Road is lined with industrial processing and service facilities: warehouses, pipelines, silos, and tanks for dairy, candy, feed, fertilizer and equipment. At the end of this agribusiness stronghold, rows of long white structures looking like opaque greenhouses are identified by a sign: “Windmill Farms”. Inside, on multi-level bins in windowless, climate-controlled rooms, mushrooms are growing. The delivery trucks parked outside the farm still have “Ostrom Farms”, the name of the previous owners, painted on their sides.

Over a year ago, Ostrom workers began to raise complaints about working conditions, wages, and management, working with organizers from the United Farm Workers union. Getting no response, they voted overwhelmingly to form a union to bargain with the company. Ostrom responded by laying off all its workers and selling the farm to Windmill Farms, which is controlled by an investment firm

Along the road outside the mushroom farm one April afternoon, workers, their families, and their supporters walk a picket line. Crimson flags bearing a black Aztec eagle on a white circle flutter in a stiff wind. Red, white, blue and green undulate as well: a young boy hoists an American flag as an older man waves the Mexican tricolor. Homemade signs say “We Feed You” and “La Union Es La Fuerza” (“The union is strength”), and “Queremos unión – Protesta (“We want a union – Protest).

From a portable sound system, the Mexican ranchera (country) music of Joan Sebastian and Los Tigres del Norte lends an upbeat accordion and guitar cadence to the proceedings.

These mushroom workers are picketing Windmill Farms to demand that it right some flagrant wrongs that Ostrom Farms, the former owner, inflicted on them before selling the farm. The new owners, they say, have not remedied the problems.

Over a year ago, Ostrom workers began to raise complaints about working conditions, wages, and management, working with organizers from the United Farm Workers union. Getting no response, they voted overwhelmingly to form a union to bargain with the company. Ostrom responded by laying off all its workers and selling the farm to Windmill Farms, which is controlled by an investment firm. Windmill told the former workers that they could reapply to work there, but would have to accept restrictions on their workplace rights.

Before the sale, Ostrom had replaced most of its workers, who were predominantly Hispanic women living in the area, with male “guest workers” brought in from Mexico on H-2A temporary agricultural visas. They have limited labor rights and can easily be fired and deported. A few of the original workers were hired back, but some not at their old jobs.

The demonstrators are demanding that Windmill rehire workers who were fired, address their grievances, recognize their union and bargain a contract with it. Members of other unions have come from around the state to show solidarity.

The president of the United Farm Workers, Teresa Romero, has come up from California. She addresses the crowd in Spanish:

“We’re here today fighting for all of you. But we can’t do this without the leadership, that you’ve demonstrated. It’s not easy. Many of you have been fired for demanding your rights. But we’re going to keep fighting for the workers who are still inside and who are afraid. And the fear they feel is very justified because many of you were fired. … Here we are and we’re not leaving! Thanks to all who are supporting us from outside of the farm workers movement, but who realize how hard it is for workers in the fields to organize.”

She ends her speech with “¡Sí, se puede!” (“Yes we can!”), the traditional farm workers grito. And the crowd continues cheering, “¡Sí, se puede!”.

Next, an animated man with a goatee and sunglasses smiles at the assembly. José Martínez is one of the leaders in forming the union. He was fired by Ostrom, but then rehired by Windmill. His Spanish is hoarse and passionate:

“I want to send a very clear message to the company: we don’t want to destroy you. The only thing we want is that you treat us with dignity, equality and respect as human beings. And to have a union, that’s what we’re fighting for. Thanks to all of you who have come from different places to support our cause. We won’t leave until we reach this goal. ¡Viva la causa! ¡Viva César Chávez! ¡Viva la unión! ¡Siempre pa’adelante!” (“Long live the cause! Long live Cesar Chavez! Long live the Union! Always forward!”)

Daniela Barajas was fired by Ostrom but found a job with a different company. She tells the crowd in Spanish:

“We’ve just begun to fight. Although I haven’t worked in the mushroom farm more than a year – I was one of those who was fired – I continue supporting the people who are there [and] those who don’t have jobs to feed their families. They have a right to better treatment at work. And we’re not going away until they recognize a union there..”

Her speech is echoed by chants of: “¿Que queremos? ¡Unión!” (“What do we want? Union!”).

The union’s Secretary of Civic Action, Juanito Marcial, drove over with some other workers from the Seattle area to offer solidarity to the mushroom workers. The Chateau Sainte Michelle winery there, where he works, is the site of the United Farm Workers’ first contract in the state. Workers won it in 1995 after an eight-year struggle, and it remains in force. Most of the UFW’s membership, however, is in California where the union began.

Marcial recalls that history in Spanish: “We’re here, the comrades who work at Sainte Michelle under a union contract. And I want to tell you that we now have an average of 27 years, the only agricultural site that has a [UFW] contract [in Washington], and that we’re enjoying various benefits for workers. We’re saying to you, comrades, that this is just the first step, we can’t weaken. Hasta la victoria siempre! (Until victory always!)”

The UFW regional director, Victoria Ruddy, closes the rally by thanking the workers for a year of struggle. “As don José says, ‘¡No vamos a parar hasta ganar unión!’” (‘We won’t stop until we win a union!’) And the crowd ambles over to a nearby park for a picnic.

“Yes, we can! The union is strength!” UFW rally, Sunnyside, Washington, April 18, 2023. Credit: Peter Costantini

New bosses, but still no union

“Yes, we can! The union is strength!” UFW rally, Sunnyside, Washington, April 18, 2023. Photo: Peter Costantini

Sign at mushroom workers rally, Sunnyside, Washington, April 18, 2023. Photo: Peter Costantini

The road that led the mushroom workers to their April 18 rally outside of Windmill Farms was riddled with corporate switchbacks and legal potholes.

In 2019, Ostrom Mushrooms closed a mushroom farm in western Washington state, laid off more than 200 workers, and moved its operations to Sunnyside. The firm received generous public subsidies from different levels of government for construction of a new $60 million plant.

In Sunnyside, Ostrom hired a new workforce varying between 200 and 300 workers. Most were local Hispanic women. At that time, CEO Travis Wood complained of a shortage of labor despite the advantages of year-round work and controlled-climate conditions inside the facility.

“In mid-2021,” The Washington State Attorney General found, “Ostrom hired new management to improve its production. [It] believed Ostrom needed to replace its largely female workforce because [women] had childcare obligations and could not work late hours or weekends. … [M]anagement decided to replace its domestic workforce with workers from the H-2A guest worker program.”

Consequently, Ostrom employees elected a leadership committee to raise issues about wages and working conditions with management. They began to consult with United Farm Workers organizers and the non-profit Columbia Legal Services.

In June 2022, the workers submitted a petition to Ostrom calling for “fair pay, safe working conditions, and respect”. It alleged that managers had threatened and bullied workers, instituted mandatory overtime shifts and raised production quotas to excessive levels. Workers were overworked and undervalued, said Ostrom worker Joceline Castillo. But Ostrom stonewalled the petition.

Meanwhile, in August 2022, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a civil complaint against Ostrom under state laws. Ferguson accused Ostrom of discrimination and unfair employment practices based on employees’ sex, citizenship, or immigration status, and of retaliating against employees who opposed these violations. Ostrom had gone ahead and replaced most of its local female workers with male “guest” workers brought in from Mexico, whose H-2A temporary visas give them fewer labor protections. However, the H-2A program requires that the employer first demonstrate that it cannot hire enough workers from the local workforce, which was evidently not the case.

The complaint also charged Ostrom with “engaging in unfair and deceptive practices … by misleading actual and prospective domestic pickers with regard to job eligibility requirements, wages, and availability of employment.”

However, Ferguson was unable to directly address retaliation against union organizing or the use of H-2A workers to replace resident workers. These issues fall under federal law, while the state attorney general can enforce only state laws.

The National Labor Relations Act, the 1935 federal statute that regulates union organizing and collective bargaining, excludes farm workers and domestic workers from its coverage. So the Ostrom workers were not able to go through formal legal procedures for union recognition or to invoke the law’s protection against retaliation for union organizing.

Nevertheless, in September 2022 the workers announced their vote, held under UFW auspices: 70 percent chose to form a union. They asked management to sit down and bargain on wages and working conditions. Ostrom refused.

The Ostrom workers and UFW organizers upped the ante in their campaign by marshalling community support. They organized periodic informational pickets at the Ostrom farm in Sunnyside. And in a reprise of the farm worker boycotts of the 1960s and 1970s, they began in November to picket outside of a supermarket in Seattle. They asked consumers not to buy Ostrom mushrooms, but instead to seek out mushrooms from two unionized farms in California.

In November, the State Department of Labor & Industries responded to a complaint and found working conditions at Ostrom that could cause injuries to workers. The agency fined the grower only $4,000, but also investigated another complaint.

Then on February 14, the campaign hit a roadblock. According to the UFW, Ostrom Mushroom Farms management held a company-wide meeting to tell all its workers that they were fired immediately. As of that midnight, Ostrom’s facility would be sold to Greenwood Mushroom Sunnyside IA, LLC, a new entity owned by Windmill Farms. Based in Ashburn, Ontario, Canada, Windmill also uses the Greenwood Mushrooms label at farms in Ontario and Pennsylvania. In turn, Windmill is owned by Instar Asset Management, a Toronto-based private equity firm.

The fired Ostrom workers were told they could reapply for jobs under the new management. But they would have to fill out new applications, possibly accept different jobs, and sign arbitration agreements that forbade suing the employer or unionizing.

The Windmill and former Ostrom workers, including those now unemployed, pushed ahead with their campaign. Some of the original workers who were rehired complained that they ended up in worse jobs with lower pay.

Under Windmill Farms management, working conditions were still “pretty bad”, according to workers committee leader José Martínez, who had worked at Ostrom for three years. “They want you to go fast” to meet an hourly quota of picking 50 pounds of mushrooms, he told me. “They put you on probation for 90 days. If you don’t make [the quota] they’re gonna let you go.” The biggest problem, though, is that “there’s no communication with them. Sometimes one supervisor comes and tells you one thing, and then another one comes after and changes the whole thing.” If the company recognizes the union, he said, “everything is gonna be fine.”

Shortly after the rally, though, Martínez was fired by Windmill, which claimed he wasn’t meeting production demands. But he suspected he may have been fired because of his pro-union activism.

Finally on May 16, the Washington State Attorney General’s Office announced that Ostrom and Greenwood had signed a consent decree. Ostrom agreed to pay $3.4 million into a fund to compensate workers who suffered discrimination or retaliation for reporting it – over 170 may be eligible. In the agreement, Greenwood agreed to discontinue the “unfair and discriminatory employment practices” identified under Ostrom, and established a framework for compliance training and monitoring to prevent future violations.

“Ostrom’s systematic discrimination was calculated to force out female and Washington-based employees,” Ferguson said in a statement. “I want to thank the workers who spoke out against this discrimination in the face of so much danger and stood up for their rights. My team fought for them and today we secured an important victory.”

Beyond substantial compensation for the workers, the settlement avoided a drawn-out court battle. But because it was based on state law, it could not compel recognition of the union or rehiring by Windmill of the fired workers, nor could it address the prohibited use of H-2A temporary workers to replace resident workers.

A worker still employed by Windmill, Isela Cabrera, commented: “I am very happy for my coworkers who experienced humiliations and retaliations by Ostrom management.” She said that she hoped the consent decree would help begin to improve conditions, “as this new management continues to commit favoritism and retaliation. We want our fired friends to get their jobs back and for Windmill Farms to recognize our union.”

UFW President Romero explained to me that one focus of the union campaign will be on persuading Instar’s investors, some of which may be union pension funds, to pressure Windmill Farms to recognize the union.

The state branch of the AFL-CIO, the main national labor confederation, announced the formation of a solidarity committee. Its president, April Sims, emphasized: “All workers deserve fair treatment at work and the freedom to join together to negotiate for better wages and working conditions. Workers at Windmill Farms are getting neither of those things. We stand in solidarity with these brave mushroom workers and we will fight side-by-side until we win a union contract at Windmill Farms.”

On August 10, the U.S. Department of Labor announced fines totaling some $74,000 and awards of unpaid wages amounting to over $59,000 to compensate 62 H-2A temporary workers at Ostrom who had been underpaid and misled about housing and meals. But did not announce any action against Ostrom for claiming that they could not find enough local workers, as the H-2A program requires, while simultaneously firing large numbers of them.

Windmill Farms, Sunnyside, Washington, April 14, 2023. Credit: Peter Costantini

Catching a national wave of union organizing

The Ostrom / Windmill campaign joins a nascent national upswelling of union organizing across many industries. These initiatives, however, are swimming against half a century of anti-labor riptides.

Union membership in the U.S. in 2022 was 10.1 percent of wage and salary workers, with only 6.0 percent in the private sector, a post-WWII nadir. In 1955, 33.2 percent were unionized, more than three times as many. Union activists are frequently though illegally fired for organizing, and bargaining requirements for employers are often poorly enforced.

Agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from national labor protection laws in the 1930s, a relic of Jim Crow segregation that has never been remedied. The low-wage workers in those two fields at the time were mostly Black, Mexican or Filipino. Today they are mainly Hispanic, and among those most in need of strong labor protections.

If the former Ostrom workers had been in an industry other than agriculture or domestic work, they would have been covered by a federal law that protects worker efforts to unionize and forbids retaliation. And if rules had been enforced requiring businesses to show a dearth of local workers before hiring H-2A “guest” workers, the resident Ostrom workers could not have been legally replaced.

Despite these obstacles, a labor resurgence seems to be gaining momentum nationally. Mainly in low-wage service industries, most visibly at major employers like Starbucks and Amazon, organizing drives are making headlines. A 2022 Gallup opinion poll found that 71 percent of the U.S. public approve of labor unions, up from 48 percent in 2010 and 64 percent before the pandemic.

The Ostrom / Windmill campaign is also a protagonist in the renewed activism among agricultural workers. The United Farm Workers, founded in the early 1960s in California, reached a zenith in the later 1960s and 1970s, when it won numerous contracts and improved conditions in the fields. Its boycotts of grapes, lettuce and wine focused national attention on the widespread exploitation and abuse of farmworkers.

On the political front, the UFW spearheaded major improvements in labor laws, mainly in California. In 1975, a union campaign won the state’s approval of the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which recognized farm workers’ right to organize.

Over the next two decades the UFW’s organizing waned and membership shrank. But in this century, membership has reportedly doubled and the union has spearheaded new campaigns for farm worker rights and against wage theft and sexual harassment.

Recently, Washington state’s Democratic government passed legislation guaranteeing farm workers at least the state minimum wage, which is currently $15.74 per hour, and time-and-a-half overtime pay for more than 40 hours weekly beginning January 1, 2024.

The 1995 UFW contract won by workers at the Chateau Sainte Michelle winery is still in force today. And the Sunnyside workers are urging consumers to buy mushrooms grown on two unionized California farms. According to the UFW, over three-quarters of the fresh mushroom industry in California is unionized, as are thousands of workers on vegetable, berry, winery, tomato, and dairy farms.

Other independent unions as well have successfully organized farm workers in recent years, including Familias Unidas por la Justicia (Families United for Justice) in Washington state, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida.

That black Aztec eagle in a white circle on a crimson flag may have to soar long and high outside of Windmill Farms and its owners’ offices to win a contract there. And many unions may have to walk picket lines outside of other farms, stores, and warehouses – and also city halls, statehouses and Congress – to ensure safe work environments and a decent living for all human beings who do “essential” work.

Yet despite the barriers erected against them, agricultural laborers are pursuing new strategies with old-fashioned grit to defend their workplace rights and build collective power.

“¡No, no, no nos moverán! Como un árbol firme junto al río, ¡no nos moverán!”
“We shall not, we shall not be moved! Just like a tree that’s standing by the water, we shall not be moved!”
(From an old farm workers song)

See also
Longer version with references: Americas Program – Mushroom workers want a union

About the author: Americas Program – Our People

Katy Rodríguez (R) and her son (in his father’s arms) when they were reunited after leaving the Migrant Assistance Centre in San Salvador following their deportation. Like thousands of other families, mother and son were separated for four months after entering the United States without the proper documents. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, USA, Sep 9 2022 (IPS)

For a while in 2018, the Donald Trump administration’s “family separation” policy looked like it might become the Stalingrad of his war on immigrants. It was clearly a bridge too far politically, given the global outcry it provoked. Even parts of the Republican party couldn’t stomach it. So Trump retreated strategically on family separation, and intentionally left the program so disorganized that reuniting parents and children became a still-incomplete ordeal.

At the same time, though, he launched other forms of bureaucratic blitzkrieg to punish and separate families seeking asylum and other legal statuses and move towards an immigrantenrein United States. His final offensive, Title 42, slammed the door on nearly all forms of immigration at the southwest border under the widely rejected pretense that it would prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Over four years later, the casualties of family separation are still being found and healed. According to the July 31 report of the White House’s Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families, there are still 941 children, about 17 percent of the total separated, who are not yet reunited or in the reunification process. But media attention has faded over time.

Over four years later, the casualties of family separation are still being found and healed. According to the July 31 report of the White House’s Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families, there are still 941 children, about 17 percent of the total separated, who are not yet reunited or in the reunification process. But media attention has faded over time

Now Caitlin Dickerson and The Atlantic magazine have done the wounded and the world a service by digging deep and doggedly to flesh out this ugly history, shining light into the back alleys of the Trumpist immigration project and onto the faces of its victims.

“’We need to take away children’ – The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy” is an exhaustive and meticulous investigation of the systematic jailing of immigrant parents and their separation from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border. It comes at an auspicious moment to remind us how much the guts of Trump’s immigration initiatives were infected with lawlessness and gratuitous sadism.

She provides powerful evidence that traumatizing kids and preventing their parents from finding them were precision-targeted, intentional thuggishness, rather than careless bureaucracy. And her research demonstrates that if Trump’s wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party, takes power again, it will double-down on its attacks on immigrants’ lives, which it sees as a winning political strategy.

Trump’s nose-thumbing at the Espionage Act and the various laws trashed at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, along with his reflexive obstruction of justice in many investigations, finally appear to be the target of serious attention from the Department of Justice and others.

However, his assaults on many thousands of immigrant families, while they struck a dissonant chord for even some of his supporters, were soon drowned out politically by other abuses and scandals. Now Dickerson’s full orchestration amplifies the original themes, counterpointing many of the current motifs of 45’s fugue of criminality. And critically, she gives eloquent voice to many of the families torn apart by the policies, along with the psychologists, lawyers, community groups, and a few bureaucrats with a conscience working to reunite and heal them.

This story of family separation broke in the spring of 2018 after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced his “Zero Tolerance” policy, which included jailing asylum-seeking parents and taking away over 5,500 of their children, according to Physicians for Human Rights. But as Dickerson documents, pilot efforts to separate families began early in the Trump administration in 2017, although officials claimed that no such policy existed. (Note: I got a glimpse into a tiny corner of that landscape of pain volunteering to accompany a few parents and kids who had been separated.)

Even some Congressional Republicans and groups such as conservative evangelicals panned the policy as excessively cruel. Many organizations for human and immigrant rights insisted that what Sessions was trying to criminalize was in fact protected by U.S. and international law: migrants have the right to ask for asylum at or in between official ports of entry, or anywhere else in the U.S.

In fact, they have to be on U.S. territory to make their request. Zero Tolerance, which supposedly necessitated separating children because it threw their parents in jail for asking for asylum between ports of entry, was an attempt to sweep away the basic premises of asylum by executive fiat.

The last surviving prosecutor of the Nazis at Nuremberg decried family separation as a “crime against humanity”. Physicians for Human Rights issued a report condemning the policy as a form of torture and forced disappearance. And the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called it “government-sanctioned child abuse”.

A report by the Department of Homeland Security’s own Office of the Inspector General criticized the agencies involved for inadequate recordkeeping and data management that made it difficult to reconnect parents and children.

Dickerson makes clear that the shoddy family tracking system was an intentional effort to render reunification more difficult. John Bash, a U.S. attorney in El Paso, Texas, testified in court that he was horrified by the policy’s effects on children. All that was needed, he reportedly said, was a simple spreadsheet to record the information linking parents and children. But none was created.

From recently disclosed internal emails, Dickerson discovered that plans to reunite parents and children were “faulty to the point of negligence” because “inside DHS, officials were working to prevent reunifications from happening.” Bash testified that he and other government attorneys made efforts to close cases against migrant parents within a few days in order to allow their children to be reunited with them rapidly, before they could disappear into the separate branch of the Department of Health and Human Services that took care of unaccompanied children. He said he was later outraged to learn that these efforts were quashed by Trump operatives within Immigration and Customs and Enforcement and the Border Patrol, who were determined to punish families by keeping them separately detained and incommunicado, long-term or permanently, against all legal and ethical standards.

A 2018 lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ms. L v. ICE, elicited a ruling that the family separation policy was unconstitutional. The court ordered the government to reunite all separated families, and the Trump administration went through the motions of complying. But as ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt later wrote: “The reason so many families have not been located is because the Trump administration withheld their names and then failed to disclose information that could have helped us find them.” Even after the judgement, Trump’s operatives continued to expand the jailing of immigrants and tearing apart of their families through other means.

Through his four years, Trump relentlessly cranked up the volume on the false narrative that an enormous “invasion” of dark-skinned “illegal aliens” had to be deterred by increasingly brutal, sometimes borderline psychotic, measures. The President reportedly proposed that the border wall should be electrified and that a water-filled trench should be dug the length of it and stocked with alligators or poisonous snakes. He also asked his advisors about the feasibility of shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down when they tried to cross the border. His immigration Rasputin, Stephen Miller, later allegedly floated the idea of reinstating family separation with a vicious twist.

Under “Binary Choice”, immigrant parents with children would be forced to choose: allow their children to be taken away from them, or waive humanitarian protections for juveniles so that the whole family could be imprisoned together indefinitely. A revelatory book by New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear, Border Wars, details many similarly unhinged policy debates in the Trump White House.

When the Biden administration took power with promises to humanize the immigration system, it appointed an interagency task force to finally reunite all of the families. But progress has been slow on the difficult cases remaining, largely because of the Trump administration’s poor record-keeping and obstructionism.

The task force reported that as of July 14, almost a year and a half after its establishment, there are still 1,217 children not known to be reunited with their families {although some of these may have found each other but not informed the government). Of these, 276 are “in process for reunification”. But of the rest, 764 have “contact information available but not reunified” and 177 have “no confirmed contact information available and reunification status unknown”. So a total of 941 are not yet in the reunification process. However, the total still not reunited has been reduced by 510 since September 2021.

Biden appointed Michelle Brané, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, to run the task force. “The idea of punishing parents who are trying to save their children’s lives, and punishing children for being brought to safety by their parents by separating them, is fundamentally cruel and un-American,” she told Dickerson in 2018, prior to being appointed. “It really to me is just a horrific ‘Sophie’s Choice’ for a mom.”

Legal efforts to grant permanent legal status to affected families and to make illegal the separation of parents and children for purposes of deterrence are both on hold, ACLU attorney Gelernt told Dickerson. The Biden administration pulled out of negotiations with separated families on payment of restitution for their suffering, according to reporting by Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. Allegedly, the administration withdrew partly out of fear of political damage from mendacious attacks by Republicans claiming that Biden was making immigrants millionaires by negotiating damages. In fact, the government had not yet made an offer, but was trying to settle because it believed that the court would hold it liable.

One positive Biden policy change, allowing unaccompanied children to request asylum when their families still could not, may have led to unintended consequences. As a result, more children were reportedly being sent to the border alone to get them out of perilous Mexican border areas controlled by organized crime. And in reality, many long-running immigration policies, from unjust deportations to long detentions, have also had the effect of tearing apart families.

Overall, Biden’s immigration initiatives have slowly eliminated some of Trump’s worst abuses, but have delayed removing others and in some cases extended them. A few of the most capable immigration advisors, such as Andrea Flores, former director of border management for the National Security Council, have left the Biden administration out of frustration with backsliding and delays on reform, according to a piece by Blitzer. Other high-level administration officials confirmed that “resistance to easing Trump-era restrictions” on immigration came from high up in the White House: “Ron Klain, the chief of staff; Susan Rice, the head of the Domestic Policy Council; and Jake Sullivan, the national-security adviser”. All three are “political people”, but none is an “immigration expert”, Blitzer’s sources told him.

Despite the threats to democracy exposed by the January 6 hearings and other investigations, some in the Administration seem to be underestimating the magnitude of the menace posed by Trump and the MAGA movement to a just immigration system.

The heart of Trumpism is a strain of white sado-nationalism. It is an explicitly racist and xenophobic ideology that proposes ethnic cleansing to ultimately end most immigration, legal or not, and kick out most immigrants, more than four out of five of whom are from Latin America, Asia and Africa.

It is motivated in part by the great replacement theory: in a nutshell, Make America White Again. And it is punctuated by brutality against vulnerable immigrant families and efforts to trample the civil and human rights of all people of color. As historian Mae Ngai of Columbia University told me in an interview, “I think there’s too many brown people in this country for their tastes — that’s what it all comes down to.” And Adam Serwer of The Atlantic nailed its essence: “The cruelty is the point.”

Trump has created “something akin to a fascist social and political movement,” as philosopher Jason Stanley of Yale University put it. And it has become the North American vanguard of a nascent fascist international, led by Trump and Vladimir Putin, and featuring luminaries such as Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Marine Le Pen of France, Matteo Salvini of Italy, and other mainly European leaders.

Fascism needs scapegoats to blame for the mythical fall from greatness, and immigrants are a favorite whipping boy for many of them. Other conservative but not fascist movements have also borrowed or innovated anti-immigrant ideas: for example, Boris Johnson and the British Conservatives’ failed plan to ship rejected asylum seekers to Rwanda, in Central Africa, is a crackpot variant on Trump’s now-defunct Remain in Mexico policy.

If Trump or another MAGA standard-bearer is elected in 2024, they will likely try to resurrect some form of family separation, along with other aggressive policies floated at the end of his term, such as further limits on asylum, an end to birthright citizenship, and more use of active-duty troops at the border. His closest immigration advisors, including Stephen Miller, Stephen K. Bannon and Kris Kobach, continue to publicly advocate for these sorts of scorched-earth measures, and will undoubtedly lobby hard for them in Congress if the GOP wins either house in November.

Regardless of the occupants of the White House or Congress, Trump successfully filled the ranks of Homeland Security and related departments with leadership and rank-and-file staff who shared his ideology. Dickerson fleshes out the rogues gallery with some lesser-known cadre and renders a detailed account of how they took control of the far-flung immigration bureaucracy.

The Washington Post recently editorialized on family separation: “There has been no accounting for the officials who conceived, pushed and carried it out. Nor has the U.S. government offered the traumatized families permanent legal residence in the United States, even as a means of reuniting deported parents with their children. … Congress must ensure future presidents never try this again.”

The Biden administration needs to stop looking over its right shoulder on immigration: negotiation with the MAGAfied GOP on this is futile, but it has managed to alienate many among the immigrant communities and allies essential to the Democratic coalition. It’s way past time to return to the kinds of immigration policies that Biden initially promised, based on global realities on the ground, human rights, and family values.

Restrictive immigration policies such as Title 42 have serious consequences on migrants. Credit: Esteban Montaño/MSF

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, USA, Feb 1 2022 (IPS)

The specters of slave patrols and Ku Klux Klan night riders haunted the viral videos. They showed cowboy-hatted Border Patrol agents on horseback insulting and threatening Haitian families with children as they crossed the Rio Grande into Texas. The outrage reverberated around the world and inside the Beltway. But the story soon disappeared from the news cycle.

Immigrant justice groups at the border said it was the latest in a long parade of abuses inflicted by immigration enforcement. And they called for broad and deep changes.

The theatrical brutality against mainly Black immigrants, and the government’s contradictory responses to the large encampment where it took place, shone a harsh light on the exclusionary immigration policies of the Donald Trump administration, some of which have been continued by the Joe Biden administration.

The Del Rio episode laid bare internecine conflicts over how to roll back Trump’s restrictions and move towards Biden’s stated goal of a more “humane” immigration system.

The theatrical brutality against mainly Black immigrants, and the government’s contradictory responses to the large encampment where it took place, shone a harsh light on the exclusionary immigration policies of the Donald Trump administration, some of which have been continued by the Joe Biden administration

Ultimately, the encampment should be understood as a massive campaign of civil disobedience asserting the right to seek asylum. It ended with starkly contrasting outcomes. Many thousands of refugees were flown back to Haiti without a chance to make their case, but a number half again larger was taken into the United States immigration system and allowed to pursue asylum.

Border Patrol follies

The drama began in early September, when thousands of migrants began arriving at the Mexican border town of Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila. Fording the river’s shallows carrying children and possessions, they improvised a tent camp under the International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas.

Most sought to ask the United States for asylum, which U.S. and international law allow them to do anywhere on U.S. territory. The majority were Haitians and many others were Central or South Americans. Two-thirds traveled in family groups.

Few Haitians, however, came to the U.S. border directly from Haiti: most had left their home country years ago after a devastating 2010 earthquake and settled in South America, mainly in Chile and Brazil. The pandemic and the ensuing economic crash reportedly left many without jobs and visas there.

The incoming Biden administration flatly told migrants that the U.S. border would remain closed to them during the pandemic. Yet many displaced Haitians heard rumors to the contrary, and apparently decided the trip north was worth the risks and costs.

Previous efforts of large groups of immigrants to reach the U.S. border together often took the form of “caravans” on foot. By contrast, many of the Haitians traveled in smaller groups, coordinating by cell phone. Some reportedly took public transportation, while others boarded a large number of buses and other vehicles arranged by organizers and possibly smugglers. Some observers said they must have had the acquiescence of Mexican officials.

Del Rio hosts a small border crossing about halfway between more crowded ports of entry downriver in the lower Rio Grande valley and upriver around El Paso. These migrants may have chosen it because of reputedly smaller presences of organized crime on the Mexican side and of border-enforcement authorities on the U.S. side. By converging together on one crossing, they sought safety in numbers.

U.S. officials were caught off guard, and thousands of migrants were able to enter the U.S. to ask for asylum. They needed to buy food and necessities, but were blocked from going to stores in Del Rio. So they had to cross the river to Ciudad Acuña to buy supplies, and then cross back to bring them to the camp. Although the border was officially closed to most migrants, U.S. authorities initially accepted this informal arrangement.

The Border Patrol officers who assaulted the migrants September 19 were apparently breaking this tacit agreement. Their performative thuggishness seemed stage managed to incite Trump’s rabidly anti-immigrant base. But it served no enforcement purpose. The migrants were not trying to escape into the U.S. interior. They had strong incentives to wait there for a chance to ask for asylum.

President Biden and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas condemned the Border Patrol actions and vowed to quickly investigate the events and punish those responsible. The Department of Homeland Security opened an investigation that Mayorkas said would be concluded in “days, not weeks”. Nearly two months later, however, DHS issued a statement that the investigation was ongoing.

“These investigation and discipline systems at the border agencies are really broken and need a complete overhaul,” Clara Long of Human Rights Watch warned. Civil-society organizations say there has long been systemic anti-migrant prejudice undergirding a culture of impunity in CBP, making it very difficult to hold officers accountable for abuses.

“Suddenly the nation realized that we have a Border Patrol that beats up Black immigrants or people of color”, Fernando García of the Border Network for Human Rights told me. “We’ve been telling that story for years. … Yesterday, they were the Haitian refugees. But in the past, we talked about Guatemalan children dying in detention centers.” These and other abuses show that “the Border Patrol acts with impunity. … So we responded by denouncing the aggression, but also by calling for systemic change.”

Breaking camp

By the time of the Border Patrol aggression in mid-September, the encampment had grown to an estimated 15,000 people. Conditions there were called “deplorable” by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. Republican politicians loudly accused Biden of creating a crisis at the border.

Border authorities, some said, failed to heed reports of large groups of migrants heading north. “The arrival of vulnerable asylum-seekers is not a crisis,” Wade McMullen, an attorney at RFK Human Rights, told Michelle García of The Intercept. “The militarized response and lack of preparation — that’s the crisis.”

As the situation in Del Rio degraded, the Biden administration abruptly shifted into high gear. It deployed federal personnel from several agencies to process all the immigrants.

On September 24, DHS Secretary Mayorkas announced that the camp had been completely emptied. However, the conflicting methods employed revealed clashing policy approaches among Biden’s advisors.

The number of migrants summarily expelled to Haiti without a chance to ask for asylum rose from Mayorkas’s estimate of 2,000 to 8,700 by mid-November. A larger number – 13,000 was later reported – were allowed to request asylum in immigration courts. Of these, 10,000 were released to sponsors around the U.S., while 3,000 were held in immigration detention as their cases proceeded. Another 8,000 “voluntarily” returned to Mexico, Mayorkas said, and roughly 4,000 were still being processed by DHS.

The U.S., Mayorkas announced, had established a $5.5 million program to assist the repatriated Haitians, to be distributed through the United Nations. The cost of flying the migrants to Haiti, however, amounted to $15 million paid to a private prison company.

The mass expulsions to Haiti represented a dereliction of U.S. obligations under international and U.S. asylum law. Yet a number of migrants half again larger than those expelled was allowed to enter the immigration system and request asylum. The Biden administration said little about how it triaged people to their divergent fates.

Expulsions to Haiti

Dissension has reportedly surfaced within the administration between advisors favoring “aggressive enforcement” to deter immigrants, and others favoring more welcoming policies towards asylum seekers.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a close Biden ally, publicly broke with Biden’s policies. He called for an end to the expulsions back to Haiti, which he said “defy common sense”, and termination of Trump’s “hateful and xenophobic” policies. Asylum seekers, he said, should be offered due process at U.S. ports of entry.

Haiti, a small Caribbean nation, is in the throes of cascading disasters: an earthquake that killed more than 2,000, followed by a hurricane; the assassination of the president; and the dissolution of the legislature and much of the police force. Major swathes of the capital are controlled by gangs that rob and kidnap with impunity, bringing much of the already struggling economy to a halt. Haiti clearly has no capacity to receive returning emigrants.

Two veteran U.S. diplomats assigned to Haiti resigned in protest against what one called “inhumane, counterproductive decision” to expel thousands of Haitians back to a “collapsed state … unable to provide security or basic services”. The other warned that returning individuals to places where they “fear persecution, death, or torture” violates asylum law, and asserted: “Lawful, more humane alternatives plainly exist.”

International human rights authorities condemned both the summary methods used to expel the migrants and their forced return to Haiti.

Four human rights organizations of the U.N. issued a joint statement calling on governments “to refrain from expelling Haitians without proper assessment of their individual protection needs”, to uphold their human rights in mobility, and to offer better access to “regular migration pathways.”

“International law prohibits collective expulsions and requires that each case be examined individually”, they explained. “Discriminatory public discourse portraying human mobility as a problem risks contributing to racism and xenophobia and should be avoided and condemned.”

Public-health measure or asylum ban?

The mass expulsions began in March 2020, when the Trump administration invoked an obscure federal law to rapidly expel nearly all migrants at the border without any chance to request asylum. U.S. Code Title 42 enables the government to suspend normal immigration procedures in a public-health emergency. U.S. Code Title 8 codifies pre-pandemic due process allowing immigrants to petition for asylum and other relief before immigration officials.

Trump used Title 42 to expedite removal of migrants of all ages. The incoming Biden administration decided not to expel unaccompanied children, and one Mexican state has refused to accept families with small children. Yet Biden has continued Title 42 expulsions of most families and adults in the face of a crescendo of criticism. A court blocked use of Title 42, but the ruling was stayed on appeal. Meanwhile, some migrant families have sent their youngsters to request asylum alone, getting them out of the dangerous borderlands, but separating yet more families.

Numerous authorities have discredited the law’s public-health rationale, highlighted the damage it has done, and advocated for its termination.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s top medical advisor, told CNN: “Let’s face reality here. The problem is within our own country. Focusing on immigrants, expelling them … is not the solution to an outbreak.” Were immigrants were a major reason why COVID-19 was spreading here? “Absolutely not.”

A letter to the Biden administration from leading scientists condemned Title 42 as “scientifically baseless and politically motivated” and urged the administration to rescind the order. Signatories recommended implementing public-health measures that “process asylum seekers at the border and parole them to live in safety in their communities.” In a commentary, two public-health experts wrote that forcing migrants back to Mexico put them again “at the mercy of the violent Mexican cartels they were so desperate to escape.”

Internationally, a United Nations Refugee Agency official asserted that “protecting public health and protecting access to asylum … are fully compatible.” During the emergency, many countries deployed “health screening, testing and quarantine measures, to simultaneously protect both public health and the right to seek asylum.”

Filippo Grandi, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, criticized the expulsions of hundreds of thousands of people without screening, and called for the government “immediately and fully to lift its Title 42 restrictions.” Denying access to asylum procedures, he said, “may constitute refoulement” (forced return to the location of previous persecution). “Guaranteed access to safe territory and the prohibition of pushbacks of asylum-seekers are core precepts of the 1951 Refugee Convention and refugee law,” he explained.

Before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, advocates submitted an emergency request for protection of 31 asylum seekers excluded from the U.S. under Title 42. The commission adopted a resolution providing guidance for governments “to protect the rights of Haitians” who are migrants or otherwise displaced.

While the Biden administration has ended many of Trump’s injustices, it has persisted in defending some of his most widely condemned measures, including Title 42. “It’s like [former Trump adviser] Stephen Miller’s ghost is still pulling the strings of Biden’s immigration policies”, commented Nicole Phillips of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. The administration “needs to do more to root out Stephen Miller’s ghost.”

A door opened for some

As it summarily expelled some of the Del Rio migrants, the U.S. also accepted many more to pursue asylum in the pre-pandemic Title 8 system.

DHS Secretary Mayorkas said that 13,000 of the migrants would be allowed to “have their asylum claims heard by an immigration judge in the United States”, nearly 50 percent more than the 8,700 sent back to Haiti. Of those accepted, 10,000 were released into the U.S. to family or sponsors, while the other 3,000 were detained by ICE while their cases proceed. “The numbers placed in immigration court proceedings are a function of operational capacity and also what we consider to be appropriate,” was Mayorkas’s non-committal explanation.

The 10,000 immigrants released from Del Rio were sent initially to a network of non-governmental shelters, where they could arrange transportation to locations around the country.

The arrival of the refugees at Annunciation House in El Paso elicited an outpouring of solidarity from the local community, Hannah Hollandbyrd of Hope Border Institute told me. Volunteers took people to the airport, and tested them for COVID-19. According to shelter director Ruben Garcia, nearly all of the 2,000 refugees released there were able to move on to their final destinations after spending only a few days there.

The proportion of migrants at Del Rio released to pursue asylum followed the trend for all border encounters during the past year.

With little publicity, Biden’s immigration enforcement began to gradually reduce its reliance on Title 42. Border Patrol enforcement actions under the measure were 88.3 percent of encounters during October-December 2020, Trump’s last full quarter, denying any possibility of asylum in nearly all cases. They dropped sharply to 49.4 percent during July-September 2021 under Biden, so that half of the cases were handled under Title 8’s due process allowing for asylum claims.

“Voluntary” returnees to Mexico

Of the migrants in the Del Rio camp, Mayorkas said that some 8,000 returned to Mexico “voluntarily”, a number nearly equal to those flown back to Haiti. Many of these migrants will likely try again to enter or re-enter the U.S. at some point

Most of these migrants have relocated downriver to Mexican border cities in the lower Rio Grande valley, according to Camilo Cruz of the International Organization for Migration. Many Haitians, he said, have been applying to Mexico to regularize their migration status there. Mexican government data showed that more than 26,000 Haitians asked for asylum in Mexico in the first three quarters of 2021, up from under 6,000 in both 2019 and 2020.

In an interview in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, over 400 miles upriver from Del Rio, Cruz told me that few Haitians had appeared there, but that the shelters were still beyond capacity with other migrants excluded from the U.S.

In Haiti, where the IOM gives returning Haitians financial aid after their arrival, IOM Chief of Mission Giuseppe Loprete told EFE that thousands of migrants are leaving because of the earthquake and other crises. But he noted that many who had been living in Chile or Brazil are going directly to those embassies in Haiti and asking for permission to return there.

According to an IOM report, from January through October 2021 an estimated 100,000 migrants, 62 percent of them originally from Haiti, crossed the Darien Gap between South and Central America.

However, despite some reports that more large groups of Haitian migrants might be heading north, CBP reported that border encounters with Haitians fell by 93 percent from September to October, and remained very low in November.

Welcoming the stranger

Despite the white sado-nationalism that surfaced at Del Rio, the outcome could be seen by future migrants as a partially successful campaign of non-violent civil disobedience to thwart unjust laws, such as Title 42, and brutal enforcement.

The migrants in the camp were able to request asylum relatively more frequently than asylum seekers nationally during the same period. About 60 percent of those processed by the U.S. were accepted into the asylum process under Title 8, while 40 percent were expelled to Haiti under Title 42. For all immigrants reaching the border in September, the ratio was roughly 47 percent accepted versus 53 percent expelled.

These ambiguous outcomes aside, the Biden administration’s removal of Haitian migrants to Haiti remained a gratuitously cruel operation that threw the victims into a life-threatening situation. Title 42 should have been terminated at the beginning of Biden’s term, and none of the Haitians should have been expelled to Haiti.

The global backlash against the expulsions has been politically costly. Yet ironically, the Del Rio incident did foster a consensus across a surprisingly wide political spectrum on ways to avoid future recurrences of those kinds of injustices.

The mayor of Del Rio, Bruno Lozano, and the Val Verde County executive, Lewis Owens, had criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the border. Yet both agreed that the process has to be reformed to allow migrants to ask for asylum at ports of entry.

Hollandbyrd of Hope Border Institute also emphasized the urgent need to open ports of entry to asylum seekers and end Title 42. Longer-term solutions, she said, will require restoring and expanding the asylum system, diversifying other legal pathways for immigration, and addressing the root causes of migration.

U.S. Representative Veronica Escobar, Democrat from El Paso, has introduced a bill into Congress that would establish “a humane and equitable asylum process designed for America’s immigration realities in the 21st century.”

U.N. High Commissioner Grandi voiced an international consensus: “I encourage the US administration to continue its work to strengthen its asylum system and diversify safe pathways so asylum-seekers are not forced to resort to dangerous crossings facilitated by smugglers.”

On issues of border-enforcement reform, the Border Network for Human Rights has been meeting with the local Border Patrol for many years, Executive Director García said, and has negotiated accountability mechanisms with them including standards for use of force and training in de-escalation techniques.

BNHR is part of a coalition, the New Ellis Island Border Policy Working Group, which is partnering with congressional representatives to codify transparency and accountability of border security operations in legislation.

In its foreign policy, the Biden administration has emphasized the need for a “rules-based” international order. Among the most fundamental international rules are human rights, and of these, asylum and refuge are existential. Yet human rights defenders from the United Nations to local NGOs are spotlighting grave U.S. failures to protect human beings in motion. A truly “rules-based” immigration policy would uphold these rules and welcome the stranger.

* * *

Peter Costantini is an independent analyst based in Seattle. For nearly four decades he has written about migration and Latin America, and has volunteered with immigrant justice groups.

The full referenced analysis on which this piece is based can be downloaded as a PDF file from:
https://tinyurl.com/costantini-delrio

Border tent camp at El Chaparral Port of Entry, Tijuana, Mexico, March 2021. Credit: The Jewish Voice.

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, US, Sep 28 2021 (IPS)

A widely condemned Trump administration program designed to slash legal immigration to the United States, initially terminated by the Joe Biden administration, has been reinstated by court rulings on a Republican lawsuit. Human-rights and immigrant justice advocates have gone on the legal and political offensive against the decision, and are pressing the Biden administration to bypass the court’s roadblock.

The Migrant Protection Protocols, commonly known as Remain in Mexico, make asylum at the United States border more difficult and dangerous to obtain by forcing migrants initially accepted into the process to return to Mexico to await their next asylum hearing.

Human rights and immigrant justice advocates have protested forcefully that Remain in Mexico is a violation of the law and of migrants’ human rights, and must not be reinstated

During the United States presidential campaign, Joe Biden criticized the program as “dangerous” and “inhumane” and said he would end it. After taking office, his administration immediately suspended new enrollments into Remain in Mexico, and on June 1 terminated Trump’s original December 2018 program. So far, Biden has allowed some 13,000 affected immigrants to re-enter the United States to await their hearings, but an estimated 25,000 remain in limbo near the border. Tens of thousands more have apparently dispersed to other parts of Mexico and Central America, or crossed without documentation into the U.S.

In an effort to restore Remain in Mexico, the Republican attorneys general of the states of Texas and Missouri challenged the Biden administration’s repeal of the program in a U.S. District Court in Texas, and on August 13 a Trump-appointed judge ordered it reinstated. The Biden administration appealed unsuccessfully to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and then to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking them to stay the Texas ruling while the case proceeded. But on August 24 the Supreme Court rejected the request and allowed the original District Court decision to stand until the appeal is decided.

In response, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement disagreeing with the court decisions and regretting that the Supreme Court declined to issue a stay. “DHS has appealed the district court’s order”, it said, “and will continue to vigorously challenge it. As the appeal process continues, however, DHS will comply with the order in good faith.”

Civil society and Congress push back

Human rights and immigrant justice advocates have protested forcefully that Remain in Mexico is a violation of the law and of migrants’ human rights, and must not be reinstated. An official of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Gillian Triggs, called Remain in Mexico “a menace to the asylum system and to the compliance of the U.S. with its international obligations.“ She told Alberto Pradilla of the Mexican news site Animal Politico, “All people have a right to seek asylum. The difficulty with MPP is that, in effect, it denies access to a process.”

The original District Court ruling held that the Biden’s government’s memo terminating the program had not considered all relevant factors nor given sufficient justification for cancelling it. In response, immigrant advocates have called on Biden’s policy-makers to quickly redraft the memo with a fuller explanation for the rescission that would pass muster with the courts. “The government must take all steps available to fully end this illegal program,” commented Omar Jadwat, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, “including by re-terminating it with a fuller explanation. What it must not do is use this decision as cover for abandoning its commitment to restore a fair asylum system.”

“It is abundantly clear that the United States cannot safely reinstate MPP and that any attempt to return people seeking safety to harm in Mexico will violate U.S. and international legal obligations to refugees”, argued a letter from over 30 Democratic members of Congress, led by Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX16) and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ). “MPP does not represent our values as a country and should be permanently discarded along with the many other unlawful Trump administration policies designed to punish and deter refugees from seeking safety.”

Debate continues within the Biden administration, according to Anita Kumar of Politico, on whether to redraft the memo terminating Remain in Mexico to meet the courts’ objections, or to try to comply with the ruling by implementing “Remain in Mexico Lite”, requiring smaller numbers to wait in Mexico in better living conditions and with more access to attorneys. However, Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, told Kumar: “One of his campaign promises was to end MPP. He did that. He should stand by that. The answer is not to simply find a gentler, kinder MPP 2.0. That completely flies in the face of his promise.”

Over 70 civil-society groups and coalitions from the U.S., Mexico and Central America took a different tack: they sent a letter (reprinted below) to the Mexican government calling on it to refuse to cooperate with the revived Remain in Mexico program. When Trump originally launched it, the Mexican government said it did not agree with it, but would cooperate for humanitarian reasons. The organizations now urge Mexico to reject U.S. requests to accept returnees, which the Biden administration and the courts appear to recognize would make it impossible to reinstate the program. The letter points out that the Mexican Supreme Court and National Human Rights Commission are currently hearing cases about the legality and human-rights consequences of the program, and warns of the probable harm that would be inflicted on migrants by its reinstatement.

Negotiations are reportedly being conducted between Mexico and the U.S. on issues raised by the program’s provisional reinstatement. So far, the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been publicly non-committal on how much it is willing to cooperate, invoking national sovereignty to deny any obligation to comply with a U.S. court’s decision, yet not ruling out humanitarian assistance.

Migrant Protection Protocols, AKA Remain in Mexico

What the Trump administration officially called the Migrant Protection Protocols had nothing to do with protecting migrants. On the contrary, the measure put them in mortal danger, sending 72 thousand mainly Central American migrants who had already been accepted as potential candidates for asylum back to await their court hearings in Mexico, often for many months, sometimes for more than a year. As the ACLU’s Jadwat put it: “The whole purpose of the policy was to punish people for seeking asylum by trapping them in miserable and dangerous conditions.” The ACLU and other civil-society groups challenged the program in court, but were unable to overturn it during Trump’s term. They are considering restarting legal action if the Biden administration re-implements the policy.

Some border areas to which migrants have been returned by the program are so dangerous that the U.S. State Department warns travelers of the same threat level as in Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen. They are dominated by organized crime, often in league with corrupt officials and police, and many thousands of returnees have fallen victim to violent crimes. Returned migrants are frequently forced to live in unsanitary tent camps and overcrowded shelters. Access to U.S. immigration attorneys is severely restricted, and migrants often encounter difficulties entering the U.S. for their hearings. As a result, the percentage of asylum seekers returned to Mexico under the program who eventually receive asylum is reportedly only 1.6 percent of completed cases.

The United Nations and international human rights groups have sharply criticized Remain in Mexico as a violation of the rights to request asylum and to avoid refoulement – forced return to situations of persecution that migrants are trying to escape. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and former President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet Jeria, said she was “profoundly disturbed” by the Migrant Protection Protocols and related Trump policies that had “drastically reduced protections for migrant families.” Amnesty International warned: “Trump’s efforts to end asylum are an all-out assault on human rights.”

“Zero Tolerance” for immigrants

Remain in Mexico was only one among many repressive weapons deployed by Trump’s immigration bureaucracy in its blitzkrieg on asylum. Early in his term, his administration began to restrict and sometimes cut off access for migrants to request asylum at official ports of entry, which is guaranteed by the Refugee Act of 1980 and international treaties. Around the same time, Attorney General Jeff Sessions imposed what he called “Zero Tolerance”, which decreed that all migrants trying to cross between ports of entry would be imprisoned, and that children would be separated from their parents. This also violated those laws and treaties, which protect the right to seek asylum anywhere along a border or within U.S. territory. The forced separation of families was condemned across much of the U.S. political spectrum. Physicians for Human Rights, a U.S. NGO, called it a form of torture and forced disappearance, and the American Association of Pediatrics characterized it as “government-sanctioned child abuse” that could cause “irreparable harm” with “lifelong consequences”.

Buttressing these interlocking virtual walls against seeking asylum, Trump’s cadre erected legal barriers against those already in the asylum process. These included Remain in Mexico and efforts to force Central American or Mexican governments to accept asylum seekers in lieu of granting them asylum in the U.S.

Some of these programs were struck down by courts. But Trump’s immigration Rasputin, Stephen Miller, and fellow operatives continued to launch other salvos against authorized and unauthorized immigration. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, they took advantage of it to strongarm the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into issuing an emergency order, known as Title 42, which prohibited nearly all immigration across the southwest border and ordered the rapid expulsion of migrants without a chance to ask for asylum. Although the Trump administration justified the measure as a means of preventing the spread of the pandemic, a loud chorus of public health experts inside and outside of the CDC objected that Title 42 could not be justified for public health reasons, and was yet another effort to exclude legal immigrants seeking asylum.

The incoming Joe Biden administration has eliminated some of Trump’s worst attacks on immigrants. But it is still enforcing Title 42, except for children, and continues to pressure other governments to stop immigration through Mexico.

The scope and brutality of the Trump administration’s policies made clear that its ultimate goal was to eventually end all immigration to the U.S., except perhaps from Norway. It came close to completely eliminating the refugee program. In measures tantamount to ethnic cleansing, it also tried to exclude Muslim, African, and other immigrants and visitors of color. It also imposed measures to make both lawful permanent resident status and naturalization more difficult to achieve and maintain. More than four-fifths of migrants to the U.S. are from Latin America, Asia and Africa, as Trump’s cadre were well aware. Their white sado-nationalism unleashed scapegoating and repression that reeked of racism, xenophobia, and fascism. As Adam Serwer observed in The Atlantic of Trump and his supporters: “The cruelty is the point.”

In the eyes of many observers around the world, the Trump régime came to be viewed as a rogue state that flagrantly denied the human rights of migrants. The Biden administration could take a step towards repairing the damage by refusing to reinstate one of Trump’s most destructive violations.

(Full text of the letter and list of endorsers)

Civil Society Organizations Call on the Mexican Government to Reject Any Reinstatement of MPP

https://www.womensrefugeecommission.org/research-resources/civil-society-organizations-call-on-the-mexican-government-to-reject-any-reinstatement-of-migrant-protection-protocols

For more information

American Immigration Council. “The ‘Migrant Protection Protocols’”. Washington, DC: American Immigration Council, January 22, 2021
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/migrant-protection-protocols

Hecho en América. “’Quédate en México’ y la expulsión de migrantes al territorio mexicano” (video). YouTube, August 26, 2021.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPIyxBVPP4A
Laura Carlsen of Americas Program interviews three Mexican analysts on the reinstatement of Remain in Mexico (in Spanish).

Central American mother and daughter reunited at U.S. airport. Credit: Anonymous.

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE , Apr 7 2021 (IPS)

“A crime against humanity” and “a disgrace to our great country”: that’s how 99-year-old Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nazis at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, characterized the Donald Trump administration’s coercive separation of thousands of immigrant children from parents seeking asylum.

Former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein cited a statement by the American Association of Pediatrics that the family-separation policy was a form of “government-sanctioned child abuse” which could cause “irreparable harm” with “lifelong consequences”. He added: “The thought that any State would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable.”

Now, a report from Physicians for Human Rights raises questions of criminal liability and accountability arising from the policy. And it points to potential avenues towards justice for both victims and perpetrators.

“’You Will Never See Your Child Again’ – The Persistent Psychological Effects of Family Separation” makes the case that separation of immigrant children from their parents by U.S. immigration officials constitutes torture and enforced disappearance.

“The U.S. government’s treatment of asylum seekers through its policy of family separation constitutes cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and, in all cases evaluated by PHR experts, rises to the level of torture”

To investigate the families’ experiences, PHR clinicians performed psychological evaluations of a sample of asylum seekers from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador who had suffered an average of over 60 days of forced separation at the hands of U.S. immigration authorities.

They found that before leaving Central America, all the families had already “been exposed to trauma” due to “targeted acts of violence”, mostly due to gang activity. All parents feared for their children and believed that traveling to the U.S. would offer them protection.

When the families arrived in the U.S., however, treatment by the U.S. government compounded the pain. “Parents reported that immigration authorities forcibly removed children from their parents’ arms, removed parents while their children slept, or simply ‘disappeared’ the children while their parents were in court rooms or receiving medical care.” Nearly all parents said they were given no explanation of why their children were taken away, where they were being held, or if they would be reunited.

Mental-health diagnoses by medical experts found that nearly all the victims suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and many also met diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder.

Citing the United Nations Convention Against Torture, PHR asserted that “the U.S. government’s treatment of asylum seekers through its policy of family separation constitutes cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and, in all cases evaluated by PHR experts, rises to the level of torture.” It found that “the policy and practice of family separation also constitutes enforced disappearance, which occurs when state agents conceal the fate or whereabouts of a person who is deprived of liberty.”

The report concludes that the U.S. government is obligated by domestic and international standards to “provide redress to victims of torture and ill-treatment, including in the form of rehabilitative services; ensure the families of disappeared children know the truth of their family members’ whereabouts by dedicating adequate government resources to ensure timely reunification for all separated families, including deported parents; and prosecute U.S. officials who have broken the law.” The document ends with detailed recommendations to the Biden administration and Congress for policy changes to achieve these and further ends.

Physicians for Human Rights executive director Donna McKay said in a statement that families who suffered this treatment should be given “legal residency in the United States”, along with ongoing mental health care and “redress in monetary compensation” as recommended by the report. She urged the new Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, to deliver on his pledge that the family-reunification task force proposed by President Joseph Biden would explore “lawful pathways” for citizenship for separated families. And she called for “accountability for the perpetrators of the family separation policy”. PHR is a New York-based non-governmental organization that shared in the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.

From 2017 through 2019, the PHR report said, 5,512 children were coercively separated from their families by border officials. Of the 1,556 children separated between July 1, 2017 and June 26, 2018, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, 207 or 13.3 percent were younger than 5 years old.

In 2018, the ACLU brought a successful lawsuit, Ms. L v. ICE, in which a federal court held the practice unconstitutional and required the government to reunite all separated families.

Yet even now, the damage continues. As of January 2021, more than 611 of the forcibly separated children had still not been reunited with their parents, according to the ACLU. Lee Gelernt, Deputy Director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said that even after the ruling in Ms. L v. ICE, Trump administration officials delayed furnishing or withheld critical data, and provided stale contact information. As a result, some children have remained separated from their parents for nearly two years.

Gelernt told me in an e-mail that the organization currently has a civil class-action suit for damages pending in Arizona against individuals responsible for family separation.

Family values and razor wire

The full scope of family separation, though, is much broader than just those forcibly torn apart by Trump. It also encompasses the many immigrant children and parents already in the U.S. who have been separated by deportations, imprisonment, and other forms of persecution targeting immigration status during the three previous administrations. For example, many of the hundreds of thousands deported after raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were parents whose children were left behind, sometimes without a breadwinner.

From the beginning of the Trump administration, restrictionist policies also inflicted harm on thousands more children who sought asylum alone, or who remained with their families. Many who were already accepted into the asylum process were imprisoned for long periods in poor conditions. Tens of thousands of others were forced to wait for their court dates in dangerous camps in the Mexican borderlands. Thousands more were blocked from even asking for asylum by the “metering” of asylum claims, which made asylum seekers put their names on long, unofficial lists and wait in Mexico to even approach border officials. Many others were excluded by unofficial and later official shutdowns of border crossings.

Much of this anti-immigrant blitzkrieg has been sharply criticized by international human rights officials. Michelle Bachelet Jeria, the current U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and former president of Chile, said she was “profoundly disturbed” by several Trump policies that she said had “drastically reduced protections for migrant families.” She singled out family separation, Migration Protection Protocols (Remain in Mexico), “the arbitrary privation of liberty”, and “the denial of access to humanitarian services and assistance”.

Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, asserted: “Trump’s efforts to end asylum are an all-out assault on human rights. … The obligation to protect the rights of people seeking safety is a bedrock principle of U.S. and international law – and the U.S. is failing miserably. The ‘crisis’ at our borders is not the result of people ‘flooding our border’ – it is a crisis of xenophobic policies that masquerade as security measures and serve only to exacerbate human suffering.”

The abuse, torture, and disappearance of children and parents were not accidental or unintended. Trump, his then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and his advisors Stephen L. Miller and Steve Bannon were ideologically fueled by what might be called white sado-nationalism.

As Jen Kirby of Vox reported, Trump complained during a meeting discussing Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries: “Why do we want these people from all these shithole countries here? We should have more people from places like Norway.” Roughly four-fifths of all immigrants to the U.S. come from Latin America, Asia and Africa. So Trump’s operatives implemented an array of deliberately cruel practices aiming to deter any form of authorized or unauthorized immigration.

Some of the ideas they reportedly considered bordered on the psychotic. According to N.Y. Times reporters Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh.” He also reportedly suggested that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, but his staff told him that this would be illegal. Later he proposed shooting migrants in their legs to slow them down, but was again told that this was not allowed.

Most of the hundreds of executive orders and bureaucratic snares Trump’s cadre did deploy may not be indictable. But they gratuitously inflicted harm on all kinds of immigrants, violated their human and civil rights, and attempted to demonize them. The multiple border “crises” Trump produced and directed were B-grade agitprop portraying a border overrun by “bad hombres”, and calculated to turbo-charge anti-immigrant hatred among his gullible base.

The Refugee Act of 1980 assures immigrants the right to ask for asylum, not just at ports of entry, but anywhere along the border.

To enforce Sessions’ “zero tolerance” policy, however, Customs and Border Protection constructed a Catch-22. They slow-walked reception of asylum seekers at official ports of entry with “metering”. Then, when growing numbers forced to wait weeks or months in dangerous camps began to cross the border away from ports of entry to request asylum from the Border Patrol – which was their legal right – officials castigated them as a surge of “illegal aliens” and detained them. To further impede the asylum process, Trump implemented his Remain in Mexico policy (ironically entitled the Migrant Protection Protocols), which forced some 70 thousand who had been granted asylum hearings to await their court dates in Mexico. The administration also made agreements with Central American governments to send some migrants back to the very places they had escaped from in the first place. The cumulative damages inflicted by Trump policies effectively eliminated the right to asylum.

Many of the increased numbers of children and families now requesting asylum at the border are driven by the bottled-up desperation of those tens of thousands of migrant families stranded in limbo over the past two years. These backlogs have also been exacerbated by Trump’s undermining of many programs that had previously accepted and integrated children and families, leaving staffing and infrastructure in smoking ruins.

Tragically, most of the crises and suffering could have been easily averted. All Trump had to do, rather than declaring “zero tolerance”, was to treat asylum seekers lawfully and rationally. If, instead of doubling down on his “wall” scam, sending troops to the border, and filling private immigration prisons, he had moved decisively to get asylum seekers out of Mexico, brought in more asylum agents and case managers at the border, expanded immigration courts, worked with non-profits to receive asylees, and sent well-targeted resources to Central America and Mexico, there would have been little or no border drama, and much less waste of public resources. But the manufacturing of threats and crises, the criminalization of immigrants and the militarization of the border were precisely the point.

Family separation and other forms of persecution of immigrants are not only wrong, cruel and often unlawful. They are also nonsensical. Asylum seekers, refugees and other immigrants – authorized and unauthorized – are not a threat to be repulsed. On the contrary, they are fellow humans who deserve encouragement and welcome, and fellow workers caught in the riptides of the same global economy. They are also a valuable resource for a stagnant, aging U.S.-born population: decades of evidence demonstrate that immigration’s benefits to the people and the economy of this country far outweigh any costs.

Violating immigrants’ rights also weakens U.S. national security. When other countries see the U.S. torturing children and parents while stonewalling asylum seekers and refugees, the credibility of U.S. criticism of other countries’ human rights abuses is devalued.

Digging out of the rubble

On January 20, a bombed-out migration landscape greeted the incoming Biden administration. His first day in office, the new president sent draft legislation to Congress to provide a path to citizenship for most of the 10.5 to 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. He also issued several executive orders to remedy injustices around immigration, including asylum and family separation. But the new administration has not yet been able to ramp up capabilities fast enough to handle the backlog of long-suffering families and unaccompanied children at the border, or to rebuild or repair much of what Trump dismantled. And some of Biden’s positive proposals seem to be stalling because of depleted reserves of political capital.

The new family-reunification task force mandated by Biden and chaired by DHS Secretary Mayorkas has gotten quickly to work. A court filing reported by Priscilla Alvarez of CNN showed that the number of children and parents still separated under “zero tolerance” had been reduced from 611 in January to 506 in late February.

Mayorkas told news media that efforts were ramping up to bring back into the U.S. in-process asylum seekers excluded under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico”, which has been cancelled by Biden. The secretary announced that admissions of those affected by the program have been expanded to three U.S. ports of entry. The administration hopes to give the separated families the choice of where to be united, he said, and if they choose to reunite in the U.S., “we will explore lawful pathways for them to remain in the United States and address the family needs.”

These compensations should also be offered to all others who were unjustly prevented from applying for asylum or wrongly rejected.

The Biden administration should also ensure that no families are being separated by its current border policies. Currently, families with children and adult individuals seeking asylum are being summarily turned back at the border in most areas under Title 42, a controversial public-health provision promulgated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Trump. Unaccompanied children, however, are being accepted into the asylum process at the border. Because of this discrepancy, turning back families may give them an incentive to help older children escape danger by sending them on alone. The sooner those families can be allowed to cross and request asylum together, the quicker one source of children crossing alone, and consequent family separation, will be reduced.

“Transforming border reception to a humanitarian model requires many, large federal agencies to implement a wholesale shift in short-, medium-, and long-term approaches,” wrote Clara Long of Human Rights Watch. “While the administration has made important progress, kids are still stuck in border jails because the administration of former President Trump destroyed what system existed for keeping kids safe at the border. The current situation requires urgent, sustained action to address this failure. Safe, swift reunification procedures should continue to be refined, starting from the moment kids cross the border.”

Beyond the work of the Family Reunification Task Force, the Biden administration must not let bygones be bygones. It should open investigations at multiple levels into abuses by the Trump administration of all kinds of immigrants.

The president should mandate internal investigations by inspectors general in Justice, Homeland Security and other relevant departments. Any remaining Trump political appointees should be vetted and, if appropriate, fired or moved to where they can do no further harm. Those found to have violated laws or regulations should be subject to legal or administrative action.

Congress should convene a select committee, along the lines of the 1975 Church Committee, to investigate crimes and abuses by the Trump administration against immigrants and refugees, including the Muslim and African travel bans. They should recommend far-reaching reforms and investigate responsible officials.

Finally, other governments and non-governmental organizations should pursue the possibility of bringing charges against those responsible for family separation before international human rights bodies such as the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Another avenue to explore might be actions in courts of other countries, invoking universal jurisdiction for grave international crimes. This is the legal doctrine used by Spanish magistrate Baltazar Garzón Real to bring human-rights charges against Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

Trump, Miller and their accomplices may not end up on trial in a glass booth in Tegucigalpa. But there is some cause for hope for asylum seekers and refugees. It will require sustained pressure from the movements for immigrant justice and human rights, and responsive action at all levels of government, to untangle the wrongdoing, make all the victims whole again, and punish the perpetrators – all in the face of the violent mobs of xenophobia and racism, spurred on by Republican demagogues. Ultimately, It will require reinventing immigration law, regulations and practice to ensure that the rights to asylum and refuge, along with all the other human rights of immigrants, are fully respected in the United States.

Yard signs at polling place in South Phoenix. Credit: Peter Costantini.

By Peter Costantini
PHOENIX, Arizona, Jan 12 2021 (IPS)

The Valley of the Sun is a vast, flat stretch of Sonoran Desert, etched by arroyos and studded with small, jagged peaks. It spans about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west to east and 40 miles (64 kilometers) north to south in south-central Arizona (the state that borders southern California to the east). After cruising through southward on one of the tangle of freeways that vein the expanse, we can leadfoot it another 100 miles (161 kilometers) southeast to Tucson across much the same hardscape, only gradually gaining elevation. The saguaro cacti grow more thickly, but the higher cordilleras maintain a discreet distance most of the way.

Along Interstate 10, irrigated fields of alfalfa and cotton still unroll green corduroy out to the horizon. But if we could drive through time-lapse photography of the past half-century, farms and desert would be inexorably replaced by malls with supersized parking lots fed by seven-lane arterials.

Earth-toned subdivisions of single-story ranch houses with dirt or paved yards would sprout profusely, and in their driveways would throng hosts of one-ton, dual-rear-wheel pickup trucks with dazzling chrome grilles. Miles of warehouses and car dealerships would sprawl willy-nilly across the thorny aridity, leapfrogging over undeveloped tracts of sagebrush and gravel.

As the years passed, the flows of water in the irrigation canals that bring it to fields and houses and golf courses would dwindle, as the Colorado River and its tributaries were diverted to growing populations and agricultural valleys across the Southwest and California.

If we could watch the residents of those houses over fifty years, we might notice an increase in elderly snowbirds retiring southward to a warm place. More recently, refugees from California real-estate prices would appear. All along, we would see growing numbers of families who looked like they had come from south of the border – including quite a few whose ancestors had been here since before the border was there. (Of course if we could go back a few centuries, nearly all the residents would look a lot like them.)

Many of them would go out in the mornings to weed and harvest those green fields and build the houses and clean the hotel rooms and do the other back-torqueing work that turns the Valley’s wheels of commerce. If the time-lapse visuals had a soundtrack, their accents might migrate from sibilant norteño to Spanglish to Arizona twang. And in recent years, more of their kids would be going off to class at the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, or a community college.

The Valley of the Sun is still indisputably a warm place – that hasn’t changed. Phoenix, at its center, is the hottest city in the United States by some measures, with daily high temperatures averaging over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius) from mid-May through mid-October. Last summer, the mercury peaked at 118 degrees (47.8 Celsius), and it has previously hit 122 (50 Celsius). From the air, slot canyons look like deep cracks in the earth through which you can almost glimpse the glow of the infernal brimstone below.

The politics, too, is hot enough to fry an egg on. And it’s contentious enough that the egg would probably end up scrambled.

View of downtown Phoenix across South Phoenix. Credit: Peter Costantini.

Cowboy conservatism: riding off into the sunset?

This year, Arizona flipped from Republican to Democratic in presidential and U.S. Senate races, and the Valley of the Sun led the way. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden squeaked by Republican President Donald Trump by 0.3 percent, roughly 10,500 votes, to win Arizona’s 11 electoral votes. Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton by 3.5 percentage points in 2016, so the 2020 vote shifted nearly 4 points towards the Democrats. This turnround was driven in part by a nearly 10 percent increase in voter turnout over 2016, a significant part of it in Hispanic communities.

(Note: The U.S. president is elected by an electoral college system rather than by popular vote. Each state is assigned a number of electoral votes roughly proportional to its population. The candidate winning the most popular votes cast in a state, regardless of the margin, wins all of the state’s electoral votes – except in two states. In 2016 and 2000, the Republican candidate won the most electoral votes nationally and thus the presidency, but the Democratic candidate won the national popular vote.)

In the contest for a U.S. Senate seat, Democrat Mark Kelly comfortably defeated Republican incumbent Martha McSally by about 2.3 percentage points. In 2018, Democratic candidate Kyrsten Sinema had won Arizona’s other U.S. Senate seat, also against McSally.

Before that, Arizona had two Republican U.S. senators since 1994. This year, in another drift to the left with libertarian overtones, state voters legalized recreational marijuana by 60 to 40 percent. And by 3.5 percentage points, they approved a tax surcharge on high incomes to fund education, sponsored by the Democrats and teachers’ unions.

A big factor in this slippage of political fault lines has been the mobilization of the state’s growing Hispanic population and other communities of color by grassroots organizations, led by mostly young local organizers.

A time-lapse sequence of politics here would show Arizona’s leftward crossing of the electoral boundary this year as the culmination of a gradual trajectory away from cowboy conservatism towards political and ethnic diversity.

Before 2020, a Democratic presidential candidate had carried the state only once since 1948. In 1964, Arizona offered up as Republican presidential candidate Senator Barry Goldwater, a locked-and-loaded Cold Warrior well to the right of most of his party. His campaign was buried in a Democratic landslide by the incumbent president, Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The old Arizona’s rock-ribbed right projected its hegemony into this century, often coalescing around racist anti-immigration policies. In 2010, Arizona passed Senate Bill 1070, known as “the show me your papers law.” It required local police to stringently enforce immigration laws, even though immigration enforcement in the U.S. is a federal function.

Polls showed that the law was popular with conservatives, and five other states passed similar laws. Unsurprisingly, this led to racial profiling and harassment of those who appeared to be “Mexican”, and 100 thousand undocumented immigrants reportedly left Arizona.

The long-time sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio, became a national conservative celebrity by encouraging his deputies to harass anyone they suspected of being immigrants. He also confined jail inmates in tents in 100 degree heat, forced male prisoners to wear pink underwear, and put some of them to work on chain gangs. “He was our Trump before Trump came along,” one Arizonan told me. In fact, after Arpaio’s 2017 conviction on criminal contempt, for ignoring a court order to end racial profiling of immigrants, Donald Trump granted his first presidential pardon to the former sheriff.

Over the past decade, Hispanic groups have grown strong by pushing back against the free-range bigotry and nativism of the state’s Republican establishment. They began with sit-ins at the state capitol against SB 1070, and eventually litigation by civil-rights groups that reached the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back or restricted most of the law.

In the electoral arena, their organizers engineered the recall of state legislator Russell Pearce, the law’s primary sponsor. Community advocates and victims sued Arpaio repeatedly, turning him into an expensive political liability for the county, and finally sealed his electoral defeat in 2016. These groups have also worked to defend asylum seekers, Dreamers, and undocumented immigrants against deportations and the many other depredations of the Trump administration.

Each election, community organizations have sent growing brigades of high-energy, bilingual high-school and college students out into their own residential neighborhoods and shopping districts to mobilize voters. They’ve also developed creative ways to reach potential voters online: for example, the non-profit Arizona Center for Empowerment runs a web site called Votería AZ that uses images and names based on the popular Mexican game Lotería, similar to Bingo, to engage voters to register and vote.

“One of our biggest programs is voter registration – it’s been front and center since SB 1070,” explained Fred Oaxaca, Data Manager of One Arizona, a coalition of these groups. “Every year thus far has always been the biggest voter registration that we’ve done.” When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, he told me in a video call, they wanted to keep all their people safe, so their operations had to pivot suddenly from “everyone out in the field to phones, texts and online.”

Pandemic restrictions hurt their field work, he acknowledges, but he considers their efforts successful nonetheless. Scanning a monitor, he says that in 2018, there were 617 thousand total registered Latinx voters, some 294 thousand of whom turned out to vote, around 47 percent. This year, 802 thousand Latinx voters were registered – an increase of 30 percent – and 375 thousand had voted just by mail-in ballot when we talked. When the final tally is published in February, including in-person and drop-off voting, he expects to see a big increase in total Latinx voter turnout.

A lawsuit brought by several community and civil-rights groups won a ruling obliging the state to move back its deadline for voter registration from October 5 to October 15. During this 10-day extension period, those groups registered an additional 35 thousand voters, according to Eduardo Sainz of Mi Familia Vota (My Family Votes), a national non-governmental organization headquartered in Arizona. If those votes hewed to the roughly two-to-one Democratic ratio of the statewide Hispanic vote, they would have provided an advantage of around 10 thousand votes, roughly the margin of Biden’s Arizona victory.

Over the course of the campaign, coalitions of community groups said, they rang 1.15 million doorbells and made 8 million phone calls to mobilize voters of color across Arizona. Turnout for Latinx, Black and Native American voters all increased substantially this year over 2016, a coalition spokesman told Rafael Carranza of the Arizona Republic.

Alejandra Gomez of Living United for Change in Arizona, a coalition member, summed it up: “All of this was, I think, the perfect storm for our communities coming together and beginning to center all of our communities that had been really left out of the process, especially in Arizona.”

Promise Arizona’s get-out-the-vote truck, Phoenix. Credit: Peter Costantini.

Riders of the purple wave

Driving these political shifts from deep red to a bluish shade of purple are broader demographic transformations. Hispanic people have become the second largest racial or ethnic group in the U.S. after non-Hispanic whites, with 18.5 percent of the national population in 2019. With numbers up by nearly one-fifth since 2010, they are the second fastest growing race or ethnicity, after Asian Americans.

Out of Arizona’s population of 7.38 million people, 31.7 percent – nearly one-third – were Hispanic in 2019. Roughly 84 percent of Hispanic people in the state were of Mexican national origin. Hispanic voters now represent around 24 percent of the state’s eligible voters, up from 15 percent in 2000. The important role they played in this year’s electoral changes was reflected in exit polls: Arizona’s Hispanic voters cast 19 percent of the vote, giving Biden a 61 to 37 percent advantage over Trump, and Kelly a margin of 65 to 35 percent over McSally.

“The community of Mexican origin gave Joe Biden the victory in Arizona. And now the bill is coming due,” asserted commentator Jorge Santibáñez in the Los Angeles Times. Many needs of the community have been neglected for years, he wrote. “Joe Biden must not repeat the error of Obama, who promised immigration reform in his campaign, but never even proposed it. Biden won Arizona because of this community, and he needs to remember that.”

Ironically, some of the growth of the Hispanic electorate over recent decades came as a result of growing restrictions on migration. When Oaxaca’s parents emigrated from Mexico, he says, they never expected to stay here. “Their main goal was get here, make money, buy some land back in México, go back, build a house, live their lives.” Going back and forth was the norm then for Mexican migrants.

But that changed, he said, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the ensuing border enforcement clampdown. “9/11 placed a wall on the rotating door that was the border. It created a barrier to leap, so it became far more dangerous to travel here, to go in and out. So people stayed. And they wanted to keep building, to provide for their families that were still back there. That was a key factor for my family too.”

Some of those immigrants were able to become naturalized citizens and voters. Many of their children have now turned 18 and registered to vote. Quite a few have become organizers and leaders as well, as did Oaxaca. After going to college in California, he returned to Arizona to do movement work. “I grew up with a lot of these folks,” he said. “Politics is local: it starts with families. If you can’t change your home, why go elsewhere?”

“Ultimately,” Oaxaca said, “the goal here was eliminating the hateful policies from 10 years ago. It was a ten-year plan and we’re at 10 years. I’m excited to start proposing policy rather than preventing policy.” The point, for him, is to try to make direct changes in people’s lives to make them safer, “so folks don’t have to worry about whether or not they’re going to be able to pick up their kid from school. It’s a very big fear that people talk about, but it’s often a very simple thing.”

These days, One Arizona is looking beyond its Latinx base. “In the last 4 years,” Oaxaca explained, “we’ve been doing a very concerted effort on expanding our coalition. We’ve brought in Native American groups, Asian-Pacific Islander groups,” and organizations in the Black community.

Native Americans make up over 5 percent of Arizona’s population, one of the highest proportions of any state. “The tribal areas, especially the Navaho Nation, turned out at much higher rates, and we can clearly see that there was more enthusiasm and energy there. Being able to learn from them is really exciting, on how we do this work better, how we involve the community.”

“One of the things that makes us here in Arizona stand out is the makeup of the people doing the work and the leadership of it,” Oaxaca told me. “A lot of our staff are of color, and there’s a lot of younger executive directors.

There’s a wide mix that embodies a lot of what our communities look like. They continue to guide this ship, and continue to bring others into the fold. I started off as a 17 year old, now I’m a 25 year old who’s also in those rooms. It’s getting people engaged earlier, and those folks are going to be the next round of leaders who push new policies that they care about.”

These population tectonics are thrusting up a brave new political landscape: a majority-minority population in Arizona – with people of color outnumbering White people – by 2027, according to one estimate. For the whole U.S., the change is visible on the event horizon perhaps two or three decades out. This milestone is reportedly a bugbear of Trump’s immigration consiglieri, and it lights the tiki-torches of the ignorant armies of white supremacists.

Other changes in Arizona have put wind in the Democrats’ sails, including a fast-growing and increasingly progressive youth vote, much of it Hispanic, and increased support among suburban women. Another oft-cited local factor is the arrival of ex-Californians fleeing unaffordable rents and mortgage payments in the Golden State. Newcomers from other states also continue to arrive, often seeking year-round sun. Some conservative talk-show hosts fear that the newcomers carry viral loads of West Coast rad-lib tendencies.

Nevertheless, the old Arizona is not disappearing any time soon. Republicans held on to slim margins in both houses of the state legislature, and the governorship, held by a Republican, was not on the ballot this year. The Democratic shift in statewide races did not occur in many local contests.

How much of the presidential vote was against Trump, more than for Biden, remains an open question. Preliminary figures showed that Trump may even have gained a few percentage points among Hispanic men. Biden was boosted by an endorsement from Cindy McCain, the widow of John McCain – former Republican Senator from Arizona and presidential candidate – who often clashed with Trump. And the new Democratic U.S. Senator, Mark Kelly, ran as a moderate and was already personally popular as a former astronaut and the husband of another widely-respected politician.

“Yes, I think [the Latinx] population will continue to grow,” Oaxaca told me. “But the demographic shift doesn’t define the destiny of the political sphere. The Latinx community is not a monolith. There’s a difference between me as first-generation compared to a third-generation Arizonan who’s been here for a long time.

On the political side, there’s a level of maturity that’s happened in the community, but also in the way they’re being looked at, given their growing potential and political power.” Maturity, he said, means continuing to push their agenda no matter who’s in the White House: “Don’t let them take us for granted, hold them accountable.” Political machines are starting to take note, he said, and this time “the Republicans have been trying to do a lot more to make inroads, because of an understanding that it’s not ‘one size fits all’.”

Volunteer at polling place handing out water to voters, Phoenix. Credit: Peter Costantini.

Showdown at the AZ corral

The old political Arizona lives on as well in small groups of “Latinos for Trump” at city polling places. And outside the state elections office in downtown Phoenix, where votes were being counted, hundreds of Trump supporters demonstrated for days. A week after Election Day they were still occupying a parking lot there.

Big banners portraying Trump as Rambo carrying a grenade launcher were unfurled next to clusters of American flags, and a variety of Make American Great Again and other Trump-themed merch was on sale. Alex Jones, the prominent conspiracy theorist, had made an appearance, and his truck was parked nearby. Sheriff’s deputies kept the proceedings out of the streets.

Mingling with the crowd were small clusters of solid types in tactical gear, open-carrying hefty, military-looking guns. I asked a stocky man with a Van Dyke beard wearing camouflage what he was afraid of if Biden became president. He covered his head and howled “The world is gonna end”, then smiled and said he was just joking.

Taxes would increase, he believed: “I don’t want to pay more taxes. I don’t want it to be mandated that if I don’t have medical insurance that I have to pay a fine. And I’m not giving up my guns, I don’t care what they say. I’m not an illegal person, I don’t break the law.”

Gesturing at his long gun, he said “Americans, this is us.” If Trump won, he said, “I would like to see some changes in the immigration department. I would like to see heavy funding for the police departments, and massive amounts of training. That might lead us to a better selection of police.

Like a Navy Seal – they don’t just walk out and be a Navy Seal after 286 hours of training. That’s years. There’s a lot of freedoms that’s been removed for us the American people over time by politicians. And it needs to back up. Big government is not good for no country.”

Most of his concerns seemed squarely in the Republican mainstream of the past half-century, begging the question of why someone would feel the need to carry guns to express them. I asked him what he was packing. He smiled: “By definition of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division, this is an AR-15 pistol.” The AR-15, though, is often categorized as a semi-automatic rifle. It has reportedly been used in several mass murders, and is a hot button in gun-control debates.

The pro-Trump demonstration was predominantly White, but two of the speakers were a young woman and a pre-teen-looking boy, both of whom could have been Hispanic or Native American. The young woman said she had worked in urban ministries in Phoenix, was very concerned about school choice, and had been a victim of human trafficking. The boy pumped his fist and yelled, “This is for the future generations! This is for the USA! We get to choose our future! And we vote Trump!” to loud applause.

On a corner across the street, a few dozen Biden and immigration-rights supporters, many of whom appeared to be Latinx, held a counter-demonstration with a Biden-Harris sign and a Mexican flag. Small groups of pro-Trump people crossed the street at one point to engage them, and a few camo-clad open-carriers shadowed them.

One MAGA supporter wearing a black motorcycle helmet brought over a bullhorn and harangued the opposing demonstrators point blank at full volume. Some other Trump supporters also seemed to be trying to intimidate the pro-Biden demonstrators. But most debated civilly, if heatedly, with people on the other side. The sheriff’s deputies watched but didn’t intervene.

At other times, however, Trump followers’ actions have reportedly been more menacing. At a previous demonstration there, a TV journalist said that she and her photographer had been threatened by Trump supporters and were filing a police report. A month after Election Day, the Arizona Republican Party reportedly asked on Twitter if its members were willing to die to overturn the outcome. And Katie Hobbs, the Arizona Secretary of State who ran the elections, announced she had received “escalating threats of violence” from Trumpists who believed the President’s spurious claims of electoral fraud. They picketed her home, chanting “We are watching you!” Hobbs, a Democrat, was widely praised for running impeccable elections despite the pandemic.

Faith in South Phoenix

Just a few miles from the political circus at the elections office, the new Arizona is flourishing in the predominantly Hispanic area of South Phoenix. To get there, we cruise down South Central Avenue, a main north-south drag currently hosting construction crews and orange barriers along parts of its median. A light-rail line from downtown will be transecting the heart of a very car-oriented community. Along with it could come a proposed big-box store, which is raising concerns among the neighborhood’s small businesses.

Along the avenue, a billboard hawks payday loans from “Tio Rico Te Ayuda” (“Rich Uncle Helps You”). Dollar stores rub elbows with Mexican restaurants and churches. Between Llantera Hispana, a tire outlet, and Annette Mayorga American Family Insurance, the storefront office of Promise Arizona greeted its community in October with a big sign in English and Spanish urging people to register to vote. It’s acronym, PAZ, means “peace” in Spanish.

Promise Arizona’s web site describes it’s philosophy: “We believe that building immigrant and Latino political power is key to bringing hope, dignity, and progress to our communities.” In pursuit of that goal, it has evolved into hybrid organization: community development group, cultural center, immigrant justice advocate, Latinx issues lobby, and voter mobilizer. Much of the group’s political effectiveness seems to derive from being embedded in the community and its culture with deep, multi-generational ties. Instead of an outsider from a political party knocking on your door, it could be the son or daughter of a friend, and the group may have helped a relative get a green card. Fundamentally, it’s community members working with community members to take care of their common needs.

Walking into its main meeting room on a given day, you might encounter an English class, a workshop on filling out citizenship forms, students learning how to navigate technology, a prayer vigil, or a voter-registration phonebank. Many of its meetings are conducted in Spanish. You might be welcomed warmly by Petra Falcon, the founder, executive director, and wise woman in residence. Earlier in life she was an organizer for the United Farm Workers Union. Now, besides serving as matriarch for five children and six grandchildren of her own, she has nurtured and mentored a new generation of up-and-coming leadership.

PAZ and other parts of the Arizona movement for immigrant justice were born out of a 103-day sit-in at Arizona’s state capitol opposing the repressive Senate Bill 1070. The group was also active in the coalition that successfully recalled the legislator who sponsored the bill, and the series of efforts that threw out racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Many of Falcon’s alumni have gone on to organizing and political careers.

A young man with a gentle voice wearing an ASU cap showed me around the PAZ office. Twenty-year-old Alexis Rodriguez is PAZ’s field director, as well as a junior at Arizona State University. He was recruited to activism by a young state senator, Tony Navarrete, who had been deputy director of PAZ. The lawmaker came into Rodriguez’s mainly White high school with his team – “it was a lot of Brown people, people like me, Latinos.”

They exchanged ideas with the students about potential solutions for decreasing gun violence, which piqued Rodriguez’s curiosity. He ended up doing an internship with Navarrete’s campaign, registering people to vote and collecting petition signatures. The student learned from the legislator about working for his community, “building up the economy in our district, creating more opportunities for our families. And now with COVID, he was able to bring in so many drive-through testing locations.”

While still in high school, the young organizer was inspired by a 2018 teachers’ walkout and strike. Thousands of teachers from around the state marched on the capitol in a sea of red T-shirts. Their movement was dubbed “Red for Ed”. Rodriguez agreed with the teachers that the public education for which he was grateful was woefully underfunded.

He organized some friends and classmates to drive down to the capitol to show support. “I ended up packing my truck with about 7 seats, another friend took her car with 5, a different car with another 4. When we found them, our teachers started clapping and cheering. And I’m like, ‘What’s this? We should be clapping and cheering for you guys.’ They’re taking this huge risk to make positive change.”

The teachers’ demand for better school funding finally met with success this year when voters passed an initiative to raise the state income tax on high incomes and dedicate the proceeds to education.

Navarrete introduced Rodriguez to Falcon, who took him on as an intern. PAZ was doing transit-oriented development work, canvassing the community about the impacts of the coming light-rail line, and Rodriguez began by collecting assessments from community members in the transit corridor.

In one corner of the meeting room, Rodriguez showed me a traditional Mexican altar for Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead), which fell just before Election Day. “We created an ofrenda, inviting our relatives who have passed away to celebrate their lives with us.

And we provided them with tequila, with what they liked to eat, with pan de muertos (bread of the dead). We have pictures of family members, and marigolds (a traditional flower for ofrendas).” PAZ people lit candles and said rosarios for their dead.

Next to the ofrenda was a mosaic of la Virgen de Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint. PAZ members often pray to it, Rodriguez said. Across the room was another Virgin, a small statue. PAZ delegations have taken her with them on trips to Washington, DC, and Texas. “All across the nation,” he recalled, “she’s been through so much with us, and has seen all of the struggles of our family, and all of our wins and losses.”

PAZ, said Rodriguez, is “a faith-based organization. We focus a lot on prayer, and going into the culture of things.” It is not officially connected with any particular church, but “a lot of our community of Spanish speakers are Catholic.” The group has affiliations with different churches around Phoenix, providing information and doing immigration clinics for them.

A cloth wall hanging in the meeting hall reads: “PAZ – Promise Arizona. Faith. Hope. Vote.” PAZ has been deeply involved in electoral and political work since SB 1070. “For the past 10 years, every election has been important: we get involved in all of them,” Rodriguez said. PAZ registers, organizes and mobilizes the community on social issues and specific electoral campaigns. And this organizing has had an impact on his own family as well.

“My mom, she’s now a resident, but she emigrated from Guanajuato, México,” Rodriguez told me. “She’s the reason why I’m here, and why I have so much opportunity, and why I have the right to vote.” For 35 years, he said, she’s worked hard, now as a housekeeper for Hilton and a janitor at Walmart.

“Now, every time she sees me on the news, she gloats to her friends at church. She’s so happy that I’m fighting for her and our immigrant community as well. She’s very, very proud.” Of her 6 kids, he’s the first going to college. “She never had the space to talk about politics before, my dad too. Now it’s how we bond: we talk about politics and laws. It’s a whole new conversation.”

The dynamism of astute young organizers is at the heart of the new Arizona. They’re crunching data, organizing text banks, riding herd on social media, and training their field people to use online canvassing apps.

But their movement is also grounded in old-fashioned political tactics of feet on the street, even though the pandemic has slowed this work down. PAZ has a campaign pickup truck, a white half-ton festooned with flags and signs exhorting people to vote. It accompanies canvassers into neighborhoods and shopping malls, broadcasting music and messages. The camioneta was donated by Dr. Tom Nerini, a volunteer. Another volunteer, Manuel Gutierrez, decorated it and drove it as a get-out-the-vote-mobile.

Voters entering polling place in South Phoenix. Credit: Peter Costantini.

Hope in Maricopa

PAZ’s electoral efforts focus on the South Phoenix area. It’s one of the main concentrations of Hispanic people, who make up 43 percent of the city’s population – although their percentage of the electorate lags. With 1.70 million inhabitants, Phoenix is the nation’s fifth largest city. It’s also the capital of the state and the county, and is home to more than a third of the county’s population.

Maricopa County, with 4.57 million inhabitants, contains 62 percent of the state’s population. Encompassing most of the urban and suburban areas in the Valley of the Sun, it dominates the politics and economy of Arizona. The state, county and city populations and economies are all growing at healthy rates. Hispanics make up 31.4 percent of the population, slightly lower than the statewide figure. But in the county, according to the Morrison Institute for Public Policy, “more than two thousand Latinos turn 18 every month and become eligible to vote.”

In 2020, Maricopa flipped from Republican to Democratic in the presidential vote. Since 1952, it had voted Republican each year, except for Bill Clinton in 1996. Biden carried the county by 2.2 percentage points, a swing of 5 points from Trump’s 2.8 point margin in 2016. The victory was powered by an increase of 300 thousand Democratic voters. County turnout was a record 80 percent, a level unmatched in the past century. (National turnout in U.S. presidential elections usually runs 50 to 60 percent; this year it was 66.7 percent, and Arizona’s was 65.9 percent).

Some of the increased turnout may have been suburban and rural Republicans turning out for Trump. And several mainly middle-class White areas of the city and suburbs flipped from Republican to Democratic. But a decisive part of the Democratic turnout growth seems to have been newly motivated Hispanic and young voters in the city, notably those fired up by the efforts of community groups.

An under-reported geographical trend, Fred Oaxaca observed, was the strong Democratic advance in Pima County, the state’s second largest, and its seat, Tucson, the second largest and most Democratic city. Tucson’s population, like Phoenix’s, is about 43 percent Hispanic, and many of the Hispanic community groups have branches there. “Pima saw a considerable consolidation of the vote,” he said. Biden won Pima by 18.7 percentage points, a margin of 97 thousand votes compared to Hillary Clinton’s 57 thousand vote margin in 2016.

Saddling up for the future

As it catches its breath after the electoral sprint, PAZ is beginning to think about the next ten years.

At the national level, Rodriguez said, the top priority is immigration reform. “Hopefully, Biden invites us to the table and is like, how can we provide immigration reform? And how can we provide a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients and their parents, our immigrant community.”

In South Phoenix, he said, “we’re really invested in developing affordable housing” with local partners. “We’ve done assessments here in the South Central Corridor, so we know people’s annual incomes and how much they pay for rent.” PAZ is particularly focused on providing housing for mixed-immigration status families, “where they can pay the rent, but maybe also provide some savings, so all the paycheck doesn’t just go for rent and utilities.” For PAZ, affordable housing is key to preventing gentrification due to development around the light-rail line and the proposed big box store.

During the pandemic, PAZ has helped people deal with unemployment, access emergency funds, and avoid utility shutoffs. The organizing around these issues that have been so critical in mobilizing the community, he said, will not slow down.

Away from the political hurly-burly and the sprawl, the original Arizona persists in the dry wash of the Salt River just south of downtown Phoenix. There, creosote and mesquite, ponds full of turtles, monarch butterflies and birdsong go on weaving tenacious webs of life. On Piestewa Peak, within the city limits, palos verdes still thrust taproots deep into the fractured ferruginous quartzite.

If we could do time-lapse imaging of the coming decade, odds are it would show, in the strip malls and the cul-de-sacs, rich social ferment continuing to fertilize new Arizonas on the Sonoran hardpan of the Valley of the Sun.

Drop box outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s office in Phoenix, Arizona. Credit: Peter Costantini.

By Peter Costantini
PHOENIX, ARIZONA, US, Nov 2 2020 (IPS)

It sits stolidly, bolted onto a concrete base outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s office in Phoenix, Arizona. Weighing in at around 600 pounds,  it sports “anti-tampering features” and “heavy-duty, all-weather construction”. Security agents check it periodically and it appears to be watched by a camera. As I scrutinize it, a man in an SUV pulls up and deposits a ballot in its slot. He tells me he votes this way every election, then drives off.

Despite its impassive demeanor, this drop box and its fellows have flirted with media celebrity. If they could talk about how they came to be deployed – or not – this year, they could tell a tabloid-ready tale teeming with lurid details about the sad state of democracy in these United States of America.

But this one didn’t even offer a “no comment”, so let’s tease out its story from other sources.

Voting procedures in the U.S. vary widely from state to state, in a matrix of Byzantine complexity. Several states conduct elections nearly completely by mail, and most others offer mail-in ballots as a routine option. A few, however, allow absentee ballots only on request and for restricted reasons.

Most states permit bypassing the U.S. Postal Service by dropping mail-in ballots off at a drop box or a polling place, while only four states ban drop boxes. Many states also allow early voting in-person for days or weeks before the election as a way to forestall crowds on Election Day. In several other states, though, permitted voting methods are unclear or pending litigation.

Voting procedures in the U.S. vary widely from state to state, in a matrix of Byzantine complexity. Several states conduct elections nearly completely by mail, and most others offer mail-in ballots as a routine option. A few, however, allow absentee ballots only on request and for restricted reasons. Most states permit bypassing the U.S. Postal Service by dropping mail-in ballots off at a drop box or a polling place

This year, the COVID-19 pandemic left many voters loathe to enter a polling place to vote out of fear of exposing themselves to the virus. Numerous volunteer poll workers, who are often elderly, also decided to sit this election out. In response, many states decided that numbers of polling places would have to be reduced.

Given the unusually high expected turnout, though, this would likely mean long lines of voters. Most states had long allowed “absentee ballots” to be mailed in by those away from home or with physical limitations. So this year, in many places, mail-in voting was expanded, often by sending a request form for a mail-in ballot to every registered voter.

States with all-mail voting (including my home state of Washington) have made voting more accessible to all voters for many years with hardly a whisper of misconduct or controversy. President Donald Trump himself has voted by absentee ballot.

But as the phenomenon gained momentum, he and a chorus of Republican politicians began to raise a hue and cry against mail-in voting, accusing it of fostering massive fraud, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Throughout most of the country a pattern emerged: Democrats were tending to vote in advance by mail or drop box, while Republicans, perhaps heeding presidential warnings, were more likely to plan to vote in person on Election Day.

Then in June, Louis DeJoy, a major Trump and Republican donor, took over as Postmaster. Without missing a beat, he began to dismember the United States Postal Service – a long-term goal of the Republican Party, which has sought to privatize it and break its labor unions. DeJoy reportedly has significant financial interests in firms that compete or do business with the USPS.

The new Postmaster removed essential equipment, fired experienced management, and eliminated employee overtime, resulting in substantially slower mail delivery in some areas. All this obstruction came at the beginning of an electoral season when a major surge of voters, particularly Democratic ones, were counting on reliable, speedy delivery of ballot requests and ballots.

With predictable chutzpah, Republicans in several states have sued to require that mail-in ballots be counted only if they are received by Election Day, rather than if they are postmarked by that day, which is the norm. This would put mailed votes at the mercy of politically motivated postal slowdowns.

I couldn’t find one of the junked mail-sorting machines that was willing to go on record.

Credit: Peter Costantini.

Public outcry and Congressional hearings made DeJoy back off on some off his restrictions, but the capacity of the post office to handle high volumes of ballots remained in question. Many voters who had received mail-in ballots became concerned that, if returned by mail, they might still face delays.

Yet entering polling places to drop them off added some risk of exposure. One good solution was to deposit the ballots into the secure drop boxes that roughly two-thirds of the states and many localities already provided outside polling places and in other locations.

Last June, the Trump campaign had sued the State of Pennsylvania for adding ballot drop boxes around Philadelphia, the state’s biggest city, with a combined Black and Hispanic population of 58 percent. Both of these groups vote heavily Democratic.

A Federal judge appointed by Trump found that the campaign “failed to produce any evidence of vote-by-mail fraud in Pennsylvania,” including fraud related to drop boxes. A research project by the Brennan Center for Justice calls voter fraud “a myth” and explains: “Extensive research reveals that fraud is very rare. Yet repeated, false allegations of fraud can make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to participate in elections.”

Nevertheless, Trump later tweeted that ballot drop boxes are a “big fraud” and “make it possible for a person to vote multiple times”. Twitter reportedly put a notice on the tweet saying that it violated its “civic integrity policy.”

The response of some other Republican officials has been – you’ve probably guessed by now – to severely restrict the number of drop boxes. In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott imposed a limit of one drop box per county.

The populations of Texas’ 254 counties, however, vary from under one hundred to several million. Democrats fought this restriction in court, but lost. Now Harris County, where Houston is located, has one drop box for nearly 4.8 million residents. Not coincidentally, the county’s population is around 60 percent Black and Hispanic.

Similar limitations on drop boxes have been imposed by the Republican Secretary of State of Ohio, also provoking a legal rumble. My Phoenix drop box, though, seems to have job security. Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State has rolled out a well-distributed network of its siblings, some of them in drive-through locations. This year, over 80 percent of Arizona voters will send in an absentee ballot, either through the mail or via drop boxes, without perceptible controversy.

Still, the malevolent hybrid of Machiavellian yet transparent voter suppression, bred by the coordinated attacks on mail-in voting and drop boxes, is a lowlight in a campaign full of Republican assaults on democracy. Enumerating them all is a job for historians – and civil-rights attorneys. But another one stands out for sheer vindictiveness.

In most states, prisoners are not allowed to vote, but ex-felons who have done their time and finished probation have their civil rights, including voting, restored. In Florida and a few other states, however, released ex-felons were not allowed to vote again except by special dispensation.

In 2018, Florida voters approved, by a two-to-one margin, a constitutional amendment that restored voting rights to ex-felons. But not long after, the state’s Republican legislature intervened and added a provision that to have their rights restored, ex-felons had to pay all prison fines, fees and restitution charged against them during their incarceration.

Most people emerge from jail with little or no cash on hand, so this amounted to revoking their newly reinstated suffrage. A legal challenge initially struck down the legislature’s changes, but a federal appeals court reversed the lower court and upheld the pecuniary provisions, although confusion persists on how they should be carried out. Out of the 1.4 million ex-felons who initially had their rights restored, a disproportionate number of them people of color, it appears that fewer than one-quarter of them will be able to vote in this year’s elections.

If this sounds like something right out of Jim Crow, it’s not far off. Among the many ways that Black voters were disenfranchised after the end of Reconstruction was imposition of a poll tax, which had to be paid in order to vote.

Few African Americans could afford the cost, and those that could were often denied their rights by other chicanery or violence. The first judge’s ruling against the legislature said the financial requirements amounted to an unconstitutional poll tax.

This chaotic landscape of multi-faceted voter suppression has grown worse this year, but it has roots at least a century and a half old. Just a bit more than a decade after the Civil War, repressive measures like the poll tax combined with outright terrorism – lynching, arson and mass murder – to snatch away the rights and economic advances Black people had won since the end of slavery.

This continued up until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, with the Democratic Party playing the dominant role in denying democracy across the South. With the social changes spearheaded by the movement, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 under Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, the center of gravity of Southern racism moved into the Republican Party, which embraced it tightly with President Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy”.

A political rallying point of the segregationists was the concept of “states’ rights”, the idea that they could defend Jim Crow against Federal efforts to desegregate by invoking the primacy of each state to determine its own laws. Federal enforcement helped Black and liberal movements and politicians roll back some of the worst abuses.

Under the Voting Rights Act, most of the states of the South and a few others with a history of discrimination were forbidden to make changes in their electoral laws without Federal approval. But then in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder that the patterns of discrimination the Act guarded against were no longer occurring, and removed the requirement for federal supervision of voting laws.

Very quickly, many of those states re-enacted restrictions on voting, some more subtle than before, but aiming towards the same old goal: making it harder for people of color people to vote.

Ironically, along with the reactionary effects on voting rights in conservative-run states, the resurgence of states’ rights and loosening of federal control has provided more leeway for some blue states to enact liberal and progressive reforms despite the Trump administration’s opposition.

All but one of the states that have chosen all mail-in voting are run by Democrats. States and cities have enacted sanctuary and immigrant-justice laws in defiance of regressive federal immigration regulations and enforcement.

Underlying all the political and legal hurly-burly, three structural elements deeply entrenched in the U.S. Constitution and statutes help ensure that fundamental democratic principles such as neutral, fair electoral administration and “one person, one vote” remain problematic.

Unlike many other countries, the United States does not have a fourth, electoral branch of government, independent of the executive, legislative and judicial, that could standardize electoral law and practices nationally.

Some jurisdictions have independent, non-partisan electoral commissions, but they are often appointed by a partisan executive. Many electoral authority posts, though, are partisan, and as the 2000 Florida fiasco and Bush v. Gore made indelibly obvious, political pressure and voter exclusion in high-stakes contests can bulldoze even-handed election administration.

The U.S. has a bicameral legislature with a Senate comprising two senators from every state, large or small. This is perhaps the most blatant Constitutional violation of “one person, one vote”: a citizen of the most populous state, California, with a nearly 40 million residents, has only a tiny fraction of the representation of a citizen of the least populous one, Wyoming, with under 600 thousand. Both states have two senators.

The old justification that the collegial deliberations of the Senate would restrain the tendencies toward mob rule in the House of Representatives has been rendered ridiculous by the Republican Senate leadership’s comportment over recent years, but it always reeked of elitism. Senators from smaller states have often been excessively beholden to the biggest local industries: Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington state, for example, was known as “the Senator from Boeing” for his fealty to the dominant aircraft manufacturer.

In the United Kingdom, by contrast, the House of Lords, the U.S. Senate’s counterpart, has been reduced to a mainly advisor body with little political power. Democrats have long contemplated trying to bring in the District of Columbia, and possibly Puerto Rico, as new states with two senators each, but this would be a heavy lift politically. It’s hard to see a feasible reform short of major changes in the Constitution.

The Electoral College is another negation of “one person, one vote”. Although numbers of electoral votes are very roughly proportional to state populations, they still give considerably more representation to smaller, more rural, whiter states. The winner-take-all nature of the electoral vote, with the exception of two states, means that it frequently does not reflect the popular vote.

The Electoral College is an 18th Century institution that gives far too much leeway to the whims of appointed electors, and can be too easily overridden by state legislatures. It has become enough of an embarrassment that some reforms are attracting public attention. The best known is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Under it, states pledge to give all their electoral votes to the candidate winning the national popular vote, but this goes into effect only after states representing 270 electoral votes, the majority needed to elect a president, have signed onto the agreement.

Elections in 2016 and 2000, in which the winner of the Electoral College lost the popular vote, have inflamed bitter national divisions and installed governments that led the country into ongoing catastrophes. A previous contested election, in 1876, was resolved by both parties agreeing to end Reconstruction, snatching away the barely restored civil and human rights of Black people for most of the next hundred years.

The country’s rickety electoral infrastructure might not be able to weather another such blow.

For one more electoral cycle, at least, the salvation of democracy here may lie in the same decentralization that has caused such frustration. Beneath the brazen attempts to disfigure democracy, there remains a strong, grassroots culture of fairness.

There are millions of voters willing to stand in long lines, even if they’re caused by political manipulation, and puzzle out confusing regulations in order to cast their votes. And there are thousands of local officials and volunteers of all political persuasions who are willing to work long hours and brave stifling bureaucracy to make sure that all votes are counted.

I returned to check on the original drop box. It was clearly the strong, silent type: no complaints, no publicity seeking, it just did its job. I took a few more pictures. A security guard shook his head and told me that he had never seen a drop box attract the paparazzi like this one.

Excerpt:

A photo-collage. Credit: Peter Costantini.

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, Oct 23 2020 (IPS)

By late September, the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States had claimed 200,000 lives. That’s equivalent to a slightly higher toll than the 418,500 United States deaths in World War II, adjusted for relative population and duration. [See note below.]

With four percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has suffered 20 percent of global COVID-19 deaths.

Tragically, most of these deaths need never have happened. They were caused primarily by the public-health equivalent of friendly fire: massive malpractice and deception by the Donald Trump administration. A Columbia University study in May estimated that over four-fifths of those deaths could have been avoided if emergency measures had been invoked nationally just two weeks earlier in March.

With four percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has suffered 20 percent of global COVID-19 deaths. Tragically, most of these deaths need never have happened. They were caused primarily by the public-health equivalent of friendly fire: massive malpractice and deception by the Donald Trump administration

Contrary to political posturing, there was never a trade-off between saving lives and saving the economy. Passively accepting mass deaths has not worked to restart economic activity. Instead, opening up too much too fast has fanned the viral flames in many areas, forcing the re-shuttering of businesses and stalling incipient recoveries.

As much of the world recognized months ago, the fastest and most effective way to restart the economy is to aggressively control the pandemic. As Federal Reserve Bank chairman Jerome Powell, a Trump appointee, told Congress: “’The path forward for the economy is extraordinarily uncertain and will depend in large part on our success in containing the virus.”

The problem was not that Trump failed to lead. Had he simply left the management of the crisis to competent public health authorities, the country would be in a much better place. Instead, despite his awareness of the dangers of COVID-19, his demagogic helmsmanship steered the country 180 degrees off course on a perilous bearing.

The President’s white nationalism and “America First” rhetoric have mutated into an exceptionally dimwitted strain of American exceptionalism. Call it the Sinatra Doctrine: Trump did it his way. Consequently, many borders are closed to U.S. travelers. His Republican régime is now scorned by much of the world as a rabble of incompetent, racist, corrupt bullies whose hubris has turned the richest and most powerful empire in history into a rogue government stewing in its own juices. Many in Trump’s flock have elevated the freedom to not wear facemasks into a cause nearly as sacred as their right to open-carry assault rifles into legislative chambers.

As Dr. Joseph Varon, chief medical officer of a Texas hospital, put it: “I’m pretty much fighting two wars: a war against COVID and a war against stupidity. And the problem is that the first I have some hope about winning. But the second one is becoming more and more difficult to treat.”

With minimally competent leadership and international cooperation, however, the U.S. could have dramatically diminished the catastrophe. But it would have required the Trump administration and Senate Republican leadership to learn from countries that have taken the most effective public health and economic paths, and to share the advances made here. The U.S. government would have had to join the global fight to protect vulnerable communities and economies, rather than C-suites and share prices.

A tentative consensus is emerging in much of the world that the best way to keep families and firms safe and solvent and to rekindle economic growth is to confront the pandemic early and systematically with all the resources and resolve that would be mustered for a military conflict.

This approach requires complementary policies: a comprehensive public health model that integrates massive testing and contact tracing, combined with an approach to economic relief and recovery that marshals the fiscal resources necessary to preempt mass unemployment by covering payrolls before workers are laid off. These measures mutually reinforce each other: strong early health interventions make it possible to quash the pandemic rapidly and allow the economy to begin reopening sooner, while effective economic relief for afflicted families relieves the desperation to get back to work that has led to premature restarts, resulting in renewed outbreaks.

These models, however, are based on multilateralism in the world and inclusivity within the country, both alien to Trumpism. Excluding millions of “essential workers” and vulnerable families in marginalized communities at home, and billions of people in poorer countries with underfunded public health systems, risks undercutting those remedies and allowing the pandemic to continue ravaging humanity.

Public health

The public-health piece of this global model has been crystalized by former World Bank president Jim Young Kim, a veteran of campaigns against cholera in Haiti and Ebola in West Africa.

Kim argued that stopping COVID-19 requires orchestrating “[f]ive elements, five weapons: social distancing, contact tracing, testing, isolation, and treatment.” With this model, countries including South Korea, Singapore, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia and Germany have “gained control over the virus.” These countries have recognized that the novel coronavirus “is sneaky, nasty and durable – and that it has to be hunted down” using “large teams of public-health workers … on a war footing.”

This approach incorporates the insights of the battles against SARS, MERS and other previous epidemics.

While China initially tried to cover up the epidemic, it soon made an about-face and contributed significantly to global efforts. The WHO made some questionable judgements, but has continued to play a key role, providing international coordination and assistance to countries that need it.

The Trump administration, for its part, failed to learn from China’s early denials, which it praised. Many months later, it continues to deny the seriousness of the pandemic, with fatal consequences.

Trump has initiated U.S. withdrawal from the WHO, which would deprive the organization of its biggest source of financing. He has rejected international cooperation on developing vaccines, and pressured government agencies to approve a U.S. vaccine before the U.S. presidential election.

Prior to the crisis, the Trump administration had cut two-thirds of U.S. public health staff based in China, and disbanded the National Security Council directorate charged with pandemic response.

When the pandemic hit, Trump failed to scale up testing and contact tracing to track down recently exposed people. He abdicated his powers to accelerate and coordinate production of tests, personal protective equipment, and medical equipment. Instead, his boondoggles such as Project Airbridge enriched medical supply companies while failing to deliver supplies to hard-hit states.

Trump’s political gyrations have produced a CT scan of the internal weaknesses of U.S. health and social services. The absence of federal standards have fragmented requirements for mask-wearing and social distancing into a patchwork of disparate state regulations. Reflecting the deep inequalities in American society, low-wage workers in “essential” industries, communities of color, immigrants and prisoners have suffered disproportionately.

Inclusivity, though, is not simply an imperative of a just society, but also a necessity for defeating a pandemic: the more groups excluded, the larger the sacrificial population in which the virus can regenerate itself.

Unpayable bills for tens of thousands of dollars that some patients have received for their treatment highlight the country’s lack of universal health insurance and affordable medical care, shortcomings almost unknown in other wealthy countries. Containing COVID-19 is much harder when many working and unemployed people can’t afford to pay for testing and treatment.

Nevertheless, the Republican machine has continued trashing protections for all these groups. It is poised to extirpate what’s left of the Affordable Care Act, and has hamstrung occupational safety and health agencies. It has turned the process for developing a vaccine into a private-sector, America Only horse race.

Yet most developing countries don’t have the capacity to produce vaccines. No less a competitive capitalist than Bill Gates, Jr. argued: “We need to get most of the world vaccinated to bring the pandemic to an end. … [T]he disease will keep coming back into the developed countries if we don’t end it in the entire world.” The process of vaccine development and production, he said, involves many countries. “[T]here’s no doubt that only cooperation will get us out of this thing.”

Inclusivity, then, is indispensable domestically and internationally. And the “war footing” essential to implementing Kim’s response model requires public solidarity to override private profit.

Economic relief and recovery

The economic-recovery component of the global model is not just a matter of deploying better social safety nets: it’s about preventing people from falling out of the economy into those nets in the first place. And it requires scaling up responses to the magnitude of the moment.

“The coronavirus pandemic is a human tragedy of potentially biblical proportions,” emphasized former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, and the response must be to mobilize as for a war. “The key question is not whether but how the state should put its balance sheet to good use. The priority must not only be providing basic income for those who lose their jobs. We must protect people from losing their jobs in the first place. If we do not, we will emerge from this crisis with permanently lower employment and capacity, as families and companies struggle to repair their balance sheets and rebuild net assets.”

Several European and Asian countries have adopted corresponding policies. Denmark’s approach provides a clear example. The Danish government took over the payrolls of companies harmed by the pandemic, preventing workers from being laid off, and guaranteed at least three-quarters of their salaries up to a living-wage level. For those already out of work, the plan improved and extended benefits. For businesses, the plan covered some fixed expenses and deferred taxes. The economic measures accompanied a strict public-health lockdown.

The three-month program cost slightly more per capita than the first U.S. relief package. Yet it had strong support across the whole Danish political spectrum, including from labor unions and employer associations.

Thanks to the interaction of the public health and economic measures, the country was able to reopen its economy more quickly than most of Europe and keep monthly joblessness no higher than six percent, while in the U.S. it reached 14.7 percent. The pandemic-induced drop in economic output is predicted to be a little more than half that of the whole Eurozone.

Many other European nations, including Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France and Spain, have also implemented similar programs to keep workers on payrolls of distressed firms, as have Asian countries including South Korea and Singapore.

The U.S. economic response, by contrast, foundered on the weaknesses and fragmentation of existing safeguards, and was later dragged down by Republican stonewalling.

U.S. Federal Reserve Bank Chair Jerome Powell called the economic hit from the pandemic “without modern precedent” and cautioned that that the recovery might be slow. “Additional fiscal support could be costly,” he said in a speech, “but worth it if it helps avoid long-term economic damage and leaves us with a stronger recovery.” Former Fed Chairs Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke have also vocally advocated for aggressive fiscal and monetary policies to revive the economy, and downplayed concerns about the deficit and debt.

Economic relief packages pumped over $3 trillion dollars into the economy and initially helped to stabilize households and firms. But rather than keeping workers employed, most of the funding went to augmenting unemployment insurance for those laid off. In the U.S., this program is administered by the states, however, resulting in a fragmented bureaucracy. Average benefits are smaller amounts and of shorter duration than in most other wealthy countries.

In the face of the pandemic, some states’ administrative machinery has been unable to handle the surge in unemployment claims. An estimated forty percent of people who applied for benefits were not receiving them in late September.

A particularly acute consequence of much unemployment in the U.S. is the loss of health insurance. Coverage is typically tied to employment, so when workers are laid off, they lose their access to health care in the middle of a pandemic.

Although Democrats in the House of Representatives have passed two versions of another major relief bill, the White House and Senate Republicans have stalemated negotiations with demands for substantial benefit cuts.

As a result, millions of low-wage workers are confronting debilitating crises: hungry children, unpayable medical bills, and looming eviction or foreclosure, sometimes leading to homelessness. Long-term unemployment is reportedly rising for those laid off or furloughed because of the pandemic. As usual in the U.S., these setbacks have hurt families of color and mothers of school-age children disproportionately.

Although by now most of the economy is functioning again at some level, legislation has been proposed in Congress to create robust paycheck protections. In future downturns, its proponents say, it could serve as an “automatic stabilizer” to take the load off of unemployment insurance systems.

Facing the current resurgence of COVID-19 and the threat of future pandemics, the next U.S. administration should explore ways to implement global-consensus public health and economic measures as soon as possible. It will also have to address long-standing demands for universal health insurance, mandatory sick days, and more functional unemployment relief.

Internationally, the U.S. should quickly rejoin the World Health Organization and double its old contribution. To provide financial support for restarting the economies of developing countries, restructuring of debt could help free resources for the desperate needs left in the wake of the pandemic. Another avenue worth exploring to provide sustainable non-debt financing is the creation of Special Drawing Rights through the International Monetary Fund.

The next U.S. administration could restore faith in its ability to learn from its mistakes if, in cooperation with the global community, it can create robust new systems of public health protection and economic regeneration inclusive of all its communities and all nations.

Note: World War II lasted 45 months; the COVID-19 pandemic death toll reached 200,000 after eight months. The U.S. population in 1942 was 134,900,000; in 2020 it is 331,000,000.The average monthly toll for the U.S. in World War II was equivalent to 22,822 deaths, in proportion to the 2020 U.S. population; the pandemic monthly toll for the U.S. as of September 2020 has been 25,000 deaths.

Memorial to migrants who died crossing, on U.S.-Mexico border fence, Tijuana. Credit: Peter Costantini

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, Jan 4 2018 (IPS)

A century ago, Italian immigrants told a joke: “Before I came to America, I thought the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I learned three things: one, the streets were not paved with gold; two, the streets were not paved at all; and three, they expected me to pave them.”

More recently, Mexican and Central American immigrants have been drawn northward by similarly voracious demand for their labor. Starting in the 1980s, a massive exodus of Mesoamericans swelled, cresting around 2000. Let’s call it the Millennium Migration.

The majority of the migrants were Mexican, and most were undocumented. They were driven by powerful push-pull effects: the disastrous 1990s depression in Mexico next door to a boom in the States as its population grayed.

It’s clear that the influx produced modest but tangible benefits for nearly all native-born consumers and workers. Even the six percent of the workforce with no high-school diploma experienced few to no negative effects, suffering mainly from broader forces like automation and outsourcing. In an economic sense, there was no immigration crisis.

The migratory surge built on a century-long tradition: circular migration back and forth to the rhythms of the US and Mexican economies. Many migrants were driven by the Mexican Dream, sending home remittances and returning to build a house there.

This time, though, the economy pulled them into new industries beyond agriculture, like construction and lodging, and towards new areas of the Midwest, Southeast and Northeast.

The influx slowed after the 2000 dot-com crash, and ended with the bursting of the housing bubble and the resulting Great Recession. Since 2008, slightly more undocumented people have gone back to Mexico than have entered the U.S.

The Millennium Migration was the largest in U.S. history in absolute terms. It left Latinos as the biggest minority group with 16.3 percent of the population, and shifted demographic and political balances in many areas.

Nearly a decade later, it’s clear that the influx produced modest but tangible benefits for nearly all native-born consumers and workers. Even the six percent of the workforce with no high-school diploma experienced few to no negative effects, suffering mainly from broader forces like automation and outsourcing. In an economic sense, there was no immigration crisis.

Millennium immigrants avoided areas of unemployment, and gravitated towards places with plentiful low-wage jobs. If they could not find work, they usually moved on to look elsewhere.

Most undocumented workers lacked the education and English to compete with natives. They often segmented into parallel, complementary labor markets. And they tended to “bump up” natives into jobs requiring better communications skills.

Most labor and community organizations have welcomed immigrants as allies. The infrequent cases of immigrant-native workplace friction have nearly always been fomented by unscrupulous employers. Undocumented workers forced to live in fear and insecurity are much more vulnerable to management pressures to accept lower wages and worse working conditions. The best way to protect immigrants and native workers, most advocates agree, is to join forces to defend everyone’s human and labor rights.

Those rights, under international law and the U.S. Constitution, are nearly the same for immigrants as for citizens. Yet the immigration system makes it difficult for many immigrants to exercise them. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has ruled twice against the U.S. government for discriminating against Mexican workers. And the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights of Migrants has criticized the U.S. for biased and inhumane treatment of immigrants, especially children, and denial of due process for them.

Entering the country without papers is not a crime. It’s an administrative infraction similar to parking overtime or trespassing for a benign purpose. Most of us are no less “illegal”: we routinely exceed speed limits or commit other minor violations.

Over recent decades, though, demagogues like pundit Lou Dobbs and ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio have incubated a nativist and racist constituency by scapegoating immigrants. Now the Trump administration has made the West Wing a bouncy house for bigots, who are lighting the neo-Nazis’ and Ku Klux Klan’s torches.

Names of migrants who died crossing, on U.S.-Mexico border fence, Tijuana. Credit: Peter Costantini

A half-century-long escalation of unjust laws and repressive enforcement – dubbed “Juan Crow” – has manufactured “illegals” by criminalizing immigration and militarizing the border. Juan Crow set quotas for Mexicans so low that it left them no practical way to migrate legally. It legislatively twisted simply re-entering the country and other minor misdemeanors into phony “aggravated felonies”, punishable by prison and deportation. And it continually feeds a guaranteed stream of non-criminals through a judicial assembly line into abusive private prisons, whose owners bankroll their congressional enablers.

To the kids who skip school because they’re afraid that their parents will be taken away while they’re gone, this persecution must feel a lot like a police state. To those imprisoned for non-crimes, the detention centers must feel a lot like a gulag.

Juan Crow has multiplied the border enforcement budget many times. It has not been very effective at keeping out immigrants, but it has raised the costs in money and lives by pushing crossers out into the Sonoran Desert.

The gold-plated iron fist has also effectively backstopped and subsidized Mexican organized crime. The narcos now tax or control most crossings. Trafficking, kidnapping and extorting migrants may be a bigger profit center for some than drugs. To avoid them, many crossers either overstay visas or cross concealed at a legal port of entry.

The increased dangers and costs have also forced many migrants to stop circulating. This has created a paperless but deeply rooted diaspora of over 11 million. Two-thirds of them have lived here for more than 10 years, and nearly half of these own houses. More than four-fifths of their children are U.S. citizens, while many of the rest are Dreamers.

Today, shrinking demographic and economic pressures in Mexico make another mass migration improbable. More non-Mexicans than Mexicans are now detained at the border, both in much reduced numbers. And China and India have passed Mexico as the leading sources of new immigrants.

The Millennium Migration has enriched the “gorgeous mosaic” that we’re still struggling to become. Yet its realities are continually distorted by restrictionist immigrant-bashing.

We expected the migrants to pick our crops, build our houses and clean our hotel rooms. But they did much more: they became part of our communities and economies. A decade later, those millions without papers have earned a freeway to citizenship, starting with the Dreamers and their families.

Minimal human decency – and enlightened self-interest – demand that we dismantle Juan Crow. These pilgrims merit paths out of the desert that let them reunite families and reestablish circular migration responsive to needs north and south of the border. Safeguards should prevent employers from taking advantage of immigrant or native workers.

Mexican-American comedian George Lopez said that when people ask him how he feels about Trump’s proposed wall, he tells them, “You know what? We’ll get over it.”

At a recent gathering, a man in a cowboy hat put it more bluntly: “Aquí estamos y no nos vamos, y si nos sacan, nos regresamos.” – “Here we are, and we’re not leaving, and if they kick us out, we’ll come right back.”

Peter Costantini is an analyst and writer based in Seattle. For the past three decades, he has written about migration, labor, Latin America and international economics for Inter Press Service and other news sources. He is currently embedded as a volunteer with immigrant-rights groups.

This commentary is based on a heavily footnoted and referenced paper, available for download from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/59dffb37e4b09e31db9757cd

The Third Geneva Convention and the UN Covenant Against Torture do not exempt tortures that somebody believes to be “effective”. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, Washington, Feb 7 2015 (IPS)

“Enhanced interrogation”: the George W. Bush administration bureaucrats who coined the term had perfect pitch. The apparatchiks of Kafka’s Castle would have admired the grayness of the euphemism. But while it sounds like some new kind of focus group, it turns out it was just anodyne branding for good old-fashioned torture.

Unfortunately, the debate around it unleashed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report has largely missed the point.If the leaders of the richest and most powerful empire in history can claim that defending it requires torturing prisoners, what other government or non-state actor will hesitate to make the same claim?

Certainly, the report did provide overwhelming evidence that torture did not produce useful intelligence.  The CIA had concluded previously that torture is “ineffective”, “counterproductive”, and “will probably result in false answers”.

An FBI agent wrote that one prisoner had cooperated and provided “important actionable intelligence” months before being tortured.  Some CIA agents and soldiers reportedly questioned the legality of the policies and resisted carrying them out.

A Bush Justice Department lawyer acknowledged: “It is difficult to quantify with confidence and precision the effectiveness of the program.”  In any case, it is inherently impossible to know that any intelligence purportedly extracted by torture could not have been elicited by legal interrogation.

Fundamentally, though, whether torture “works” or not is immaterial.

The Third Geneva Convention and the U.N. Covenant Against Torture do not exempt tortures that somebody believes to be “effective”.  The codes are based on the hard-headed calculation that by agreeing not to torture non-combatants, nations can reduce the probability of their own non-combatants being tortured.

Post-WWII trials imprisoned and executed German and Japanese officials for war crimes including torture.  Nuremberg and Tokyo established the indelible principle that acting as responsible government officials, or following the orders of one, is not a defense against accusations of war crimes.

Granted, these norms have been observed as much in the breach as in practice.  And on the blood-soaked canvas of the past century, the damages of torture pale beside the scope of suffering inflicted by the “legal” savageries of war.  Yet if the leaders of the richest and most powerful empire in history can claim that defending it requires torturing prisoners, what other government or non-state actor will hesitate to make the same claim?

Dick Cheney, former Vice President and current Marketing Director for the Spanish Inquisition, says: “I’d do it again in a minute.”  No one should doubt his sincerity.

One of the “enhancements” was reportedly an effort to fabricate a justification for invading Iraq.  High Bush administration officials allegedly put heavy pressure on interrogators “to find evidence of cooperation between al-Qaeda and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime,” in an effort to fabricate a justification for invading Iraq, according to a former senior US intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist cited by McClatchy News.  No such evidence was found.

But beyond such immediate imperatives, the torture policy meshed seamlessly with a discretionary war premised on lies and optimized for “Shock and Awe”.  This neat ideological package asserted the unchallengeable power of a “Unitary Executive” above constitutional checks and balances, national law and international treaties.

Echoing Richard Nixon’s circular self-justification of three decades earlier, Justice Department lawyer Steven Bradbury told Congress: “The president is always right.”

Strategically, the Bush-Cheney project targeted conceptual smart bombs on the very idea of human rights.  The rest of the world got the message, and the damage to US national security has yet to be repaired.

“Enhanced interrogation”, however, has roots reaching back decades into CIA collaboration with dictatorships in Latin America.

Brazil’s National Truth Commission recently concluded that from 1954 through 1996 the US gave some 300 military officers “theoretical and practical classes in torture”.  Current President Dilma Rousseff was one of those tortured by the military, which ruled the largest country in Latin America from 1964 through 1985.

Over the past half-century, the CIA has been implicated in providing similar training to military dictatorships across South and Central America.  The United States also provided military aid and advice to many of them, participated in coups against elected governments, and was complicit in the murder and disappearance of hundreds of thousands, according to investigative journalist Robert Parry.

In Guatemala, for example, the CIA trained and supported a military and intelligence apparatus that exterminated close to 200,000 people over 30 years and committed genocide against Mayan communities, according to an independent Historical Clarification Commission.

The origins of US torture policies go back to early in the Vietnam War. According to the Senate report, “In 1963, the CIA produced the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, intended as a manual for Cold War Interrogations, which included the ‘principal coercive techniques of interrogation …’”.

In 1983, sections of KUBARK were incorporated into the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, “used to provide interrogation training in Latin America in the early 1980s”.

One of the CIA officers who provided these trainings was later “orally admonished for inappropriate use of interrogation techniques.”  But his efforts ultimately proved to be a good career move.  In 2002, the CIA made him chief of interrogations.

Bush’s head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center allegedly destroyed videotapes of torture and discouraged field agents from questioning the practices, according to historian Greg Grandin.

In 1992, the Pentagon destroyed most documentation of these training programmes, Parry reported.  The orders came from the office of then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

In response to mounting evidence of decades of torture, what would an “indispensable nation” do?

The release of the Senate report was an important precedent. But until perpetrators all the way to the top are brought to justice, our government will rightly be seen as hypocritical when it criticises the human rights violations of others.

Ultimately, the gravity and scope of wrongdoing call for a reincarnation of the 1975 Church Committee, which investigated abuses by intelligence agencies in the wake of Watergate. It should serve as a truth commission exposing the US government’s use of torture, terror and other human rights violations, going back 40 years to where Church left off.

The official U.S. Senate history of the Church Committee cites historian Henry Steele Commager, referring to executive branch officials who seemed to consider themselves above the law: “It is this indifference to constitutional restraints that is perhaps the most threatening of all the evidence that emerges from the findings of the Church Committee.”

Meanwhile, allies have begun digging.  In 2009, Spanish jurist Baltasar Garzón Real opened two investigations of the Bush torture programme, one of which is still pending.  In December, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin filed complaints accusing several high Bush administration figures of “the war crime of torture” under German and international law.

The odds of seeing Cheney and company in a glass booth may be slim.  But it would be a small victory for humanity if they had to look over their shoulders whenever they travel abroad.

As some of us never seem to learn, genuine national security is about not black ops and drones, but hearts and minds.

As an epitaph for the Bush-Cheney vision, consider Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem “Ozymandias”:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, Dec 23 2014 (IPS)

Since his college days, John Schmitt says, he’s been “very interested in questions of economic justice, economic inequality.”

Photo courtesy of John Schmitt

He served a nuts-and-bolts apprenticeship in the engine room of the labour movement, doing research for several unions’ organising campaigns. Today, he’s an influential proponent of new approaches to low-wage work that have reoriented how many economists and policy-makers understand the issue.

Schmitt is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He also serves as visiting professor at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and was a Fulbright scholar at the Universidad Centroamericana “Jose Simeon Cañas” in San Salvador, El Salvador. He holds degrees are from Princeton and the London School of Economics.

IPS correspondent Peter Costantini interviewed him by telephone and e-mail between August and December 2014.

Q: Among policy prescriptions for reducing income inequality and lifting the floor of the labour market, where do you see minimum wages fitting in?

A: I think the minimum wage is very important. It concretely raises wages for a lot of low and middle-income workers, and it also establishes the principle that we as a society can demand that the economy be responsive to social needs.

It’s a legal, almost palpable statement that we have the right to demand of the economy that it serve us and not that we serve the economy. It’s not the solution, in and of itself, to economic inequality. But it’s an important first step.Two of the last three increases in the minimum wage were signed by Republican presidents, with substantial support from Republicans in Congress. So it’s a very American institution that has had a long history of bipartisan support.

And it’s an easy first step. It’s something that we’ve had in this country since the 1930s, and it has broad political support. It regularly polls way above 50 percent, even among Republicans. And in the population as a whole, 65 to 75 percent of voters support it.

Two of the last three increases in the minimum wage were signed by Republican presidents, with substantial support from Republicans in Congress. So it’s a very American institution that has had a long history of bipartisan support.

And it’s effective in doing what it’s supposed to do, which is raise wages of workers at the bottom. It does exactly what a lot of people think our social policy should do: reward people who work. Almost everybody agrees that if you’re working hard, you should get paid a decent amount of money for that.

Also, it doesn’t involve any government bureaucracy other than a relatively minor enforcement mechanism. Because everybody knows what the minimum wage is. There’s a social norm and expectation that people who work should get at least the minimum wage. [More]

Q: Beginning in the early 1990s, a new approach surfaced that challenged the old contention that minimum wage increases reduce employment among low-wage workers.

A: It was called the New Minimum Wage research. A lot of economists at the time were looking at the experience of states that had increased the minimum wage, and were finding that state increases seemed to have little or no effect on employment.

It caused a lot of controversy, which is still raging. I think the profession has moved a lot towards the belief that moderate increases in the minimum wage, like the ones that we historically have done, have little or no impact on employment.

I think what most economists are persuaded by is that the empirical evidence is not that supportive of large job losses. There’s just a lot of good research out there that consistently finds little or no negative employment effects.

The textbook model for how the labour market works is just a vast oversimplification. It can be useful in some contexts, but it’s not useful to understand a pretty complicated thing, which is what happens when the minimum wage goes up.

One of the key insights is that employers aren’t operating in a competitive labour market nor are employees. There’s the possibility that employers make adjustments in other dimensions besides laying workers off: they raise their prices somewhat, or they cut back on hours [without layoffs].

And from a worker’s point of view, if they raise your salary by 20 percent and they cut your hours by five or 10 percent you’re still better off, right? Because you’re getting paid more money and you’re working fewer hours. So there are a lot of ways that firms can adjust to minimum wage increases other than laying people off. [More]

Q: So from a worker’s point of view, I still come out ahead. Low-income work is already very unstable.

A: An important ingredient here is labour turnover. There’s a new paper that looks very carefully at what happens to labour turnover rates before and after minimum wage increases, and finds substantial declines in turnover for different kinds of workers.

A different analysis looks at a living wage law that was passed at the San Francisco airport a few years back. They found something like an 80 percent decline in turnover of baggage handlers after the minimum wage went up, the living wage.

People who don’t work in business don’t fully appreciate that turnover is extremely expensive, even for low-wage workers. Filling a vacancy can be 15, up to 20 percent, of the annual cost of that job. The people who have to fill it are managers, using their more expensive time. And meanwhile, you’re losing customers.

So if the minimum wage reduces turnover, which evidence is increasing for, then it can go a long way towards explaining why we see so little employment impact of minimum wage increases. [More]

Q: What happens when cities increase the minimum wage?

A: I have a lot of faith in the democratic process. So when a city focuses on where to set the wage, a lot of people weigh in: business people, workers, unions, community organisations, low-wage workers, local academics.

There’s a city-wide conversation. And I think this is one reason why we consistently don’t see big employment effects: that process usually arrives at some wage that’s a vast improvement over what we currently have and within the realm of what the local economy can afford.

I think we probably consistently err on the side of caution rather than on the side of going too far. [More]

Q: How do you see the 15Now movement, the fast-food workers movement, changing the labour movement?

A: There’s a lot of dynamism behind the fast food and 15 folks and what’s happening in Seattle, a lot of city and state campaigns to increase the minimum wage. They’re putting a focus on wages and wage inequality, and the need to reward people for working hard.

They’re also focusing attention on other issues that are going to be really important in the future: for example, scheduling questions. One of the recurring problems for fast-food and retail workers is not just that their wages are so low, but also that they have little or no control over their schedules.

I think any time you have people agitating for economic and social justice and getting national attention, it’s encouraging for the possibility of turning around three going on four decades of rising economic inequality.

The single most important thing is to keep some oxygen flowing here so that this conversation can continue: the media cover it, people talk about it when they’re having a beer with friends, or when they’re downtown and they see a bunch of McDonald’s workers out making noise. That’s not something we’ve seen a lot of in the last 35 years. [More]

Edited for length and clarity. For full interview, see version on IPS blog. Edited by Kitty Stapp.

Excerpt:

A rally to raise the minimum wage in Herald Square, Manhattan, Oct. 24, 2013. Credit: The All-Nite Images/cc by 2.0

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, Aug 11 2014 (IPS)

In 1958, when New York State was considering raising its minimum wage, merchants complained that their profit margins were so small that they would have to cut their work forces or go out of business.  In 2014 in Seattle at hearings on a proposed minimum wage increase, some businesses voiced the same fears.

A national minimum wage was established in the United States in 1938.  Since then, Congress has increased it every few years, although since 1968 it has fallen far behind inflation and productivity growth.  By 2015, over half of the states and many localities will have raised local minimum wages above the federal level.

Graphic: Peter Costantini

Each time such raises are proposed, bitter debates break out over the potential effects.  Somehow, though, economic devastation has been repeatedly averted.

What actually happens when the minimum wage increases moderately is that total expenses across all industries go up a tiny amount, usually less than one percent.  So the wage hike has little or no effect on the great majority of businesses.  The higher costs are absorbed mainly through tiny price increases, reductions in turnover and increases in productivity.

Historically, the yearly average for recent local minimum wage increases has been 16.7 percent.  But some have been far higher.  For example, in 1950 the national minimum wage jumped 87.5 percent from 40 to 75 cents. And in 2004, the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, raised its minimum from 5.15 to 8.50 dollars, a 65 percent increase.

Even after Santa Fe’s big raise, the average resulting cost increase for all businesses was around one percent.  For restaurants, it was a little above three percent. [More]

The small impact of raising the wage floor may be surprising to those unfamiliar with the historical record.  But the accounting is straightforward.  Nationally, only 4.3 percent of all workers earn the federal minimum wage or lower; perhaps two or three times that number would have their wages lifted by a moderate minimum wage hike.

The average raise will be somewhere around half of the difference between old and new minimums, because most affected wages will fall somewhere in between.  As a result, the total growth in payroll is small for most businesses.  And payroll, in turn, averages only about one-sixth of gross revenues for all industries nationally. [More]

Because total cost increases for most businesses are minimal and can be covered by other adjustments, moderate minimum wage raises’ effects on low-wage employment have been close to zero.  This is the broad consensus of two decades of rigorous empirical studies at national, state and local levels.

A comprehensive study of state minimum wage increases in the U.S. found “no detectable employment losses from the kind of minimum wage increases we have seen in the United States”, including for the accommodations and food services sector.  Two recent meta-studies of the past two decades of research, and examinations of increases in cities including Santa Fe, San Francisco and San Jose, also found no discernable negative effects on employment for low-wage workers.

As Harvard economist Richard Freeman put it, “The debate is over whether modest minimum wage increases have ‘no’ employment effect, modest positive effects, or small negative effects.  It is not about whether or not there are large negative effects.”

A letter to the President and Congress signed by 600 economists in support of raising the national minimum wage to 10.10 dollars cited “the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers”.

Even The Economist, the influential British neoliberal magazine, recently observed: “No-one who has studied the effects of Britain’s minimum wage now thinks it has raised unemployment.” [More]

In worst cases where an employer cannot adjust to payroll increases with price increases or efficiencies, the response will more likely be to reduce hours slightly than to cut jobs, because of the costs and disruption of layoffs.  However, any increase in wages large enough to prompt a reduction in hours would likely be big enough that the paychecks of workers receiving it would still come out ahead.

In many low-wage jobs, hours already fluctuate from week to week, workers frequently change jobs voluntarily or involuntarily, jobs come and go, and businesses start up and fold.  For low-wage workers already facing this instability, higher total yearly pay nearly always trumps any loss of yearly hours.  In fact, working fewer hours leaves more time for family, training or other work.[More]

Minimum wage increases do tend to compress the lower part of the pay scale.  Those who were making around the old minimum will now be making nearly the same as those who were making near the new minimum.  The differences between the lower rungs of the wage ladder will be diminished, which may prompt changes in business processes and work relationships.

In this situation, most businesses maintain some hierarchy, with the new minimum pushing up the wage levels just above it by small amounts.  But this “ripple effect” adds only a little to total payroll costs.  One study found that a 2004 increase of 19.4 percent in the Florida state minimum caused an average cost increase for businesses, from both mandated raises and ripple effects, of less than one-half of 1 percent of sales revenues. [More]

Only one sector has significantly higher concentrations of low-wage workers and a larger proportion of payroll expenses: accommodations and food services.  It is not a major part of the economy in most places: nationally it accounts for 2.2 percent of sales and 3.6 percent of payroll.  In these industries, 29.4 percent of workers are paid within 10 percent of the minimum wage.  The rule of thumb for restaurant payroll is about one-third of total revenues, twice the overall proportion.

Even for hotels and restaurants, however, the rises in operating costs are still covered mainly by modest price increases and significant reductions in turnover.  Many businesses in this sector have enough flexibility to raise prices without reducing revenues, especially when competitors face the same wage increases. [More]

In all sectors, low-wage workers tend to have high turnover rates, sometimes more than 100 percent annually.  Minimum wage increases often help trim personnel expenses related to firing and hiring by reducing workforce turnover and absenteeism.  Businesses may also gain from better-paid and more secure workers becoming more productive.

Businesses can also compensate for payroll growth through reductions in benefits or training, and improvements in work processes or automation.  Some employers may also accept a small reduction in profits until the wage increases are absorbed.

Even given these multiple channels for adjustment, there are often small businesses who find it hard to cover a minimum wage increase.  In recognition of this, most local minimum wage laws either exempt smaller firms and non-profits or phase in increases more slowly for them. [More]

In the broader economy as well, raising the wage floor may have positive effects.  Increased spending prompted by higher wages can stimulate growth in low-wage workers’ neighbourhoods.

Rising minimum wages also often reduce government spending on poverty programmes. Contributions to unemployment insurance, Social Security and Medicare rise with higher incomes.  Any positive or negative effects, though, will tend to be small-scale relative to the overall economy. [More]

In an era of secular stagnation and political stalemate, minimum wage increases offer an effective, politically popular, and positively motivating way to reduce income inequality from the bottom up, without reducing low-wage employment.

An expanded version of this article with footnotes and references can be found here. Part one of the series can be found here. 

Download of zip file with example spreadsheets

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

A minimum wage protest outside a McDonald’s in downtown Seattle. Credit: Peter Costantini/IPS

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, Jun 3 2014 (IPS)

“Supersize my salary now!”  The refrain rose over a busy street outside a McDonald’s in downtown Seattle.

A young African-American mother carrying a little girl told the largely youthful crowd that she had walked off the job to join them because “we’re getting tired of being pushed around”. Her five-year-old took the microphone in both hands with a big grin and led a spirited chant: “We’re fired up, can’t take it no more!”

Green signs sported a hashtag, “Strike poverty 5-15-14 #FastFoodGlobal”, red T-shirts reasoned “Because the rent won’t wait – 15 now”, and a blue banner exhorted “15 dollars an hour plus tips. Don’t steal our wages.”

A few hundred ethnically-diverse demonstrators filled a sunny afternoon with demands that fast-food chains pay a living wage. Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant said that workers in over 150 cities, including her hometown of Mumbai, India, had walked off their jobs that day. 

Fast-food worker Sam Laloo spoke: “I believe in this movement because I’m trying to save enough to go to college and better myself. And I can’t go to college because I don’t make enough money. So it’s a Catch-22.”

According to the organisers, the protest was linked with fast-food worker actions in over 30 countries by coalitions of worker centres, labour unions, community groups and faith organisations.

This prosperous Pacific Northwest seaport, though, is the place in the U.S. closest to actually raising the minimum wage for all workers to something approaching a living wage. From the current Washington state minimum wage of 9.32 dollars an hour — already the highest in the country — Seattle’s mayor, city council, and a majority of citizens according to some polls all support ratcheting up the wage over 60 percent to 15 dollars.

The debate now centres on how long the ramp-up period should be for different-size businesses and non-profits, whether benefits and tips will be included in the wage, and other implementation details.

Seattle would seem a promising test case for these efforts. Home to Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon, the metropolitan area boasts relatively low unemployment and burgeoning technology jobs with good salaries. The electorate votes heavily Democratic and organised labour wields some influence.

Fast food workers protest for higher wages in New York City, July 2013. Credit: Annette Bernhardt/cc by 2.0

Nationally, President Barack Obama has proposed an increase in the federal minimum wage. Democrats introduced legislation in both houses to raise it from the current 7.25 dollars an hour to 10.10 dollars an hour over two years, and index it to inflation thereafter. Recent national polls show strong support for the raise, even among conservatives. But the proposal was filibustered by Senate Republicans, throwing the initiative back to states and localities.

From its establishment in 1938 through 1968, the national minimum wage roughly tracked inflation and productivity.

But sporadic increases since then have failed to keep up with prices, leaving the current inflation-adjusted wage below its 1968 high.

Meanwhile, the standard has fallen far behind productivity growth: had it kept pace, by 2012 it would be nearly three times as high, 21.72 dollars instead of 7.25.

To bypass the federal stalemate, state and local efforts to raise minimum wages have proliferated since the 1990s. Twenty-six of the 50 states have raised or are raising their base wages above the federal level, with increases scheduled in eight states and the District of Columbia.

More than 120 cities have also raised their benchmarks, and efforts are underway in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, New York and Portland, Maine.

This resurgent movement to raise the floor of the labour market is surfing the zeitgeist of renewed international debate on economic inequality.

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, the chef d’oeuvre of French economist Thomas Piketty, has levitated to number one on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. Piketty documents “forces of divergence” in modern capitalism driving current levels of wealth concentration unequalled since the 1920s. To remedy some of the “potentially terrifying” consequences, he proposes a global tax on wealth.

Piketty is no prophet crying in the wilderness. Institutions as influential as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank have joined the chorus. IMF managing director Christine Lagarde has flagged growing income inequality as a threat to stability, and called for policies to reduce poverty and advance “inclusive” growth. 

Fed chair Janet Yellen has called “a huge rise” in income inequality “one of the most disturbing trends facing the nation”.

Both the IMF and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have recently recognised that moderate minimum wage raises may be beneficial.

As a non-fiscal policy not requiring direct outlays by cash-strapped governments, minimum wage hikes have proven attractive even to some on the right.

The Economist magazine, a British champion of market hegemony, has swung from opposition to grudging acceptance that measured minimum wage increases can do more good than harm. Another business-friendly voice, the U.S. news service Bloomberg, has editorialised in favour of raising the national minimum.

Conservative British Finance Minister George Osborne recently advocated an increase in the U.K. base wage. And centre-right Chancellor Angela Merkel approved Germany’s first minimum wage legislation in April, setting the benchmark at 8.50 euros (11.75 dollars) in 2015.

As the minimum wage in much of the U.S. falls ever farther behind the economy, labour-market undertows have constrained increasingly older and more-educated workers to take low-wage jobs.

• In 2011, only 12 percent of workers making less than 10 dollars an hour were under 20 years old and only 19.8 percent had not completed high school, a drop of roughly one-half for each measure since 1979.
• The proportion with at least some college increased more than two-thirds to 43.2 percent.

Nevertheless, some politicians and business groups confront each proposed minimum wage increase with a chorus that it will destroy jobs. Historically, though, the predicted damage has yet to materialise.

After decades of experience, rigorously empirical studies have consistently found no significant effects on employment due to minimum wage increases at national, state or local levels.

Increased costs to businesses have been absorbed mainly through very small price increases. Other means of reducing costs have included increased productivity through lower turnover and absenteeism, better organisational efficiency, compression of the wage scale, and sometimes slightly reduced average hours.

These trends held even for Santa Fe, New Mexico, after its 65 percent minimum wage hike in 2004, the biggest local raise. There, increased expenses against revenues averaged around one percent for all affected businesses. The restaurant and hotel industries, which use more low-wage labour, had average cost increases of three to four percent. To cover these, a 10-dollar meal would have had to rise to 10.35.

In any case, the pertinent question is not whether any jobs are lost: it is whether affected workers end up better off after the increase.

Unlike the high-school-to-Social-Security factory jobs of a half-century ago, today’s low-wage service jobs are notoriously volatile. Involuntary and voluntary turnover is often high, and weekly hours also frequently fluctuate. From a worker’s point of view, a “lost job” usually translates into days or weeks until the next job, not a life-changing loss.

After previous minimum wage increases, even if total hours worked yearly were reduced slightly for some workers, the size of the hourly raise would nearly always ensure that their total yearly income would be higher than before the increase.

Back at the Seattle rally, council member Sawant preached to the choir: “Because of our courage, our solidarity with each other, not because of the powers that be, we have brought things to this point where 15 can become a reality in Seattle and inspire the whole nation and the whole world.”

Excerpt:

A 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant heading to the U.S. Credit: Wilfredo Díaz/IPS

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, Washington, Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

Puzzled by the immigration debate in the United States? Remember the Maginot Line.

That formidable French system of fortifications was built in the 1930s by André Maginot, the French minister of war, to guard against invasion from the east. Unfortunately, the Nazi blitzkrieg did an end run around it and overran France in six weeks.

Poor Maginot has become shorthand for “fighting the last war”. But at least he was trying to confront an existential and imminent threat.

The dreaded invasion of “illegal aliens”, against which our own Maginots have built hundreds of miles of border walls, called out the National Guard and scrambled the drones, actually peaked in 2000 and has long since been over.

Since the onset of the Great Recession, slightly more Mexicans have gone home to Mexico than have come here, and currently net migration appears to be near zero. The total population of undocumented immigrants is down about eight percent from its 2007 peak.

And ultimately, rather than devastation, the influx has brought modest but widespread benefits to our economy and society.

This exodus began in the mid-1990s, driven by powerful push and pull forces. In Mexico, the North American Free Trade Agreement drove many poor farmers off their lands, and the Peso Crisis of 1994 slashed real wages by some 20 percent. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy’s technology-fuelled upswing raised wages even for low-income workers.

Such an economic convergence is unlikely to occur again. The ups and downs of the Mexican economy are now more tightly coupled with ours. And declining birth rates In Mexico along with increasing education and job opportunities suggest that factors pushing emigrants towards El Norte may continue to shrink in the medium to long term.

But our Maginots are still hunkered in their bunkers, demanding measures that were never cost-effective and often counter-productive against a phantom enemy.

The U.S.-Mexico border runs nearly 2,000 miles, much of it across the Sonora Desert, between a very rich country and a moderately poor one. It can never be completely secured against migration no matter how much it’s militarised. We long ago reached the point of diminishing returns for throwing money, technology and manpower at it.

Maginot-isation has made crossing more grueling and dangerous, but nearly all those willing to keep trying get across eventually. Meanwhile, an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the undocumented simply entered legally and overstayed their visas. The only things that effectively deter determined immigrants are tight job markets here or improved ones back home.

The border enforcement surge has also had some nasty unintended consequences. The resulting tripling of the cost of a coyote (guide) has provided an effective subsidy to the drug cartels that control key areas of the border and prey on migrants. Heavy enforcement in populated areas has driven more crossings out into the desert wilderness, where outrageous numbers of people continue to perish.

The fortified border has also discouraged circular migration. Since the beginning, the dominant pattern has been to travel back and forth every year or two and eventually build a better life back home. Now growing costs and dangers have led more immigrants to stay longer in the U.S. or to settle here permanently and bring their families.

After over a century of rising and falling with the economic tides of both countries, unauthorised immigration is deeply embedded in both cultures and economies. It’s illegal in the same way that speeding or parking overtime is.

You can also look at it as a kind of international trespassing, and if you trespass for a benign purpose over a long enough time, U.S. common law allows you to acquire title through “adverse possession”.

As to economic effects, most labour economists have found overall benefits to U.S.-born workers, the broader economy and fiscal balances. Even for the six percent of native workers without a high-school diploma, most research shows close to a wash between negative and positive effects.

Most tellingly, organisations that actually represent low-wage workers, from labour unions to community groups, heavily favour bringing migrants out of the shadows into legality and working in solidarity with them, which would help raise the floor of the labour market.

So let’s see: if undocumented immigrants didn’t do anything wrong and they’re contributing to U.S. society, why is a pathway to citizenship an “amnesty”, as restrictionists often call it?

Rather than debating how many more miles of Maginot Line to build, we should be focusing on how best to integrate unauthorised immigrants into our economy while raising living standards for all low-income families.

Instead of lavishing corporate welfare on Boeing, Raytheon and Corrections Corporation of America to militarise the border and jail non-criminal immigrants, we would get far more bang for the buck by sending a small fraction of that money to immigrant-sending regions in Mexico and Central America for jobs, housing, education and health care. And if we wanted to be over-the-top sensible, we could spend the rest of it on the same things here at home.

Unauthorised immigration to the U.S. is very unlikely to reach the levels of 10 to 15 years ago again. But if it picks up once more in a genuine economic recovery, immigration reform must grant enough visas to unskilled workers to meet the demands of the economy for their labour without squeezing low-wage workers already here.

That will require continuous negotiation and adjustment. A good way to enable this would be to create a public commission of immigration stakeholders from labour, business, communities and academia, such as we already have in communications, trade, banking and other areas.

To deal with the real security issues at the border, we could do worse than to listen to former Arizona State Attorney General Terry Goddard. The detailed plan he has laid out would hit transnational criminal cartels where it hurts by attacking their ability to launder money, and to move it and product across the line.

As satirist Stephen Colbert said of the “border surge” proposed by anti-immigrant politicians, “It worked in Iraq. You hardly see any Mexicans sneaking into Baghdad.”

Peter Costantini covered migration issues from 2006 through 2009 for IPS. He has also written for many publications about Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua and international economics.

A fishing boat departs from Cyvadier, on the Haitian coast. Credit: Peter Costantini/IPS

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE. U.S., Jan 13 2013 (IPS)

On a hillside overlooking Port-au-Prince, a muscular Haitian man in a green tank top raises a heavy steel pry bar over his head and brings it down into a hole, shattering a bit of Haiti’s limestone skeleton.

He’s strong, but after several minutes of pounding in the humid heat, rivulets of sweat are pouring off him. He passes me the tool.

Before long, the vye blan (old foreigner) is soaked and sucking wind. A cluster of Haitians cheers him on, and when he’s beat, another takes the bar and begins his shift as a human pile-driver.

We’re in one of Haiti’s biggest tent camps, housing over 50,000 people displaced by the earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010. It was nicknamed Goudou Goudou because it sounded like a diesel engine approaching.

Four months later, I’m volunteering with a team from the non-profit Architecture for Humanity. We’ve agreed to build a wooden platform for a hospital tent that needs to be moved, so we’re digging holes and setting four-by-fours in concrete to support it.
We arrived on the site planning to use five volunteers from the camp. But 32 showed up.

Besides homes, most had lost jobs and family members. They were tired of waiting in the camp and desperate for useful work. We didn’t want to send anyone away, so we tried to figure out how to integrate them into the project.

Within a couple of days, they had largely organised themselves. The few experienced construction workers became foremen. But there were also accountants and university students, a dislocated cross-section of society.

People were jazzed about learning and teaching construction techniques. They took turns cutting four-by-fours with a circular saw, plumbing them in the holes, and pouring concrete.

A couple of weeks later the hospital tent was open. And a group of people stuck in tent-camp limbo had improved their community and learned some skills. Still, it was a tiny candle against a vast darkness.

Goudou Goudou was the worst catastrophe in the history of the Western Hemisphere. It killed an estimated 200,000, proportionately more than World War II deaths in the United Kingdom. It left a million and a half homeless. Clearly, it called for something like a Marshall Plan.

The devastation immediately prompted generous outpourings of much-appreciated assistance from people around the world. Over three years, foreign governments have pledged over 12 billion dollars in aid. But less than half has been disbursed and it’s not clear where much of that has gone.

Over 350,000 people are still stuck in camps, and many who left moved back into condemned structures. Only about 6,000 permanent new dwellings have been built, and 15,000 old ones repaired. A still-simmering cholera epidemic has killed over 7,600.

About a year ago, I went back to Haiti for five months to work as a network engineer for a small non-profit called Inveneo. We built out wireless broadband Internet into areas of the countryside, and installed solar computer labs in schools. Most importantly, we recruited and trained Haitian technicians and small businesses, and turned the network and labs almost entirely over to them.

It was heartening to learn that there is a small but dynamic information technology industry in Haiti, and that a few universities are graduating capable people into it. Their productivity and inventiveness can create multipliers that reach down the economic ladder. Yet most Haitians are still hanging onto the lowest rungs.

Much ink has rightfully been spilled about the failures of large-scale top-down aid. There are no simple recipes for effective cooperation. But a few guidelines for bottom-up solidarity are coming into focus for me.

First, do no harm

The U.S. Marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 to insure that U.S. bank loans were repaid. Washington supported the Duvalier dictatorship from 1957 to 1986. Since then, it has supported some military regimes and undermined democratic governments.

Official aid, too, has sometimes done more harm than good. Most famously, it destroyed Creole pigs, a hardy native breed, and impoverished many Haitian peasants. These traumas to the body politic take decades to heal, and some of the current aid is still treating them.

Move from charity to partnership

Recently a state-of-the-art public teaching hospital opened in a rural town. Partners in Health, who built it, calls its work “accompaniment”. Over 25 years, the non-profit has trained numerous Haitian doctors and nurses, and sent hundreds of community health organisers back into their villages.

Haiti’s health ministry and public medical school were decimated by the quake. PiH is supporting their recovery and integrating the new hospital with them.

Move from reconstruction to development

Although reconstruction has been agonisingly slow, new capital inflows are already provoking debate. North American mining firms are prospecting potentially rich deposits of gold, silver and copper. A Korean garment factory recently began hiring in a new industrial park.

Haitians and their friends are again facing challenging questions of how to channel tides of investment so that they lift even rowboats, and how to calculate return on investment for the impoverished majority.

Keep it simple and appropriate

Sometimes old technologies work best. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation mobilises farmers to build rock terraces on steep hillsides and plant crops on them. This reduces flooding and deforestation, and expands arable land.

Some newer technologies have also matured. With few areas connected to the unreliable electrical grid, the government has begun pilot solar programmes in the countryside. A small Haitian firm, ENERSA, is manufacturing photovoltaic panels and installing them around the country.

Build human capacities, communities and institutions, not just things

Start with the 90 percent of kids who don’t have public schools, and the more than half of adults who can’t read or write. Free education and universal literacy are indispensable for developing human capital, capturing value added from the economy and expanding democracy.

Stoke the Haitian genius for do-it-yourself and sweat equity, built on deep traditions of lakou (community) and konbit (cooperation).

For at least 40 years, peasant organisations have mobilised hundreds of thousands of members to practice sustainable farming. Now the Papaye Peasant Movement is constructing “eco-villages” to resettle displaced families, in partnership with the Unitarian-Universalist Service Committee.

They are just one branch of a widespread root system of community cooperatives, unions and social enterprises, many operating under the radar of official aid. Many draw on the talents and resources of the Haitian diaspora.

Take the long view

Measure the success of initiatives over a decade or two, in the context of national priorities. Once a road is built, for example, it deteriorates fast. Maintaining it requires heavy equipment and operators, engineers and planning. Ultimately, government must become the funder and coordinator.

You may have heard the saying: “Give people fish and they eat for a day; teach them to fish and they eat for a lifetime.”

This is a good principle, but you quickly find out that a lot of Haitians are already fishing. And it’s tough to make a living.

So help them get better nets. Underwrite bigger boats so they can fish further out. Incubate their formation of processing and cold storage cooperatives. Work with the public sector and businesses to improve transport to the cities to develop markets there. And here’s the key: as soon as possible, slide into the background. Learn from the guts, elbow-grease and creativity of their efforts to build durable economies and communities on that Haitian limestone.

*Peter Costantini has visited Haiti three times since 1995. He has covered Latin America for three decades, while making his living in the technology industries. Before that he was a construction worker and community organiser.

In the evening the lowering clouds burst. Through the night they loosed their torrents on the southeastern coast of Haiti.

FAO agronomist Frisnel Désir. Credit: Peter Costantini/IPS

The next morning, the water of the Felse River is at the bumper of an SUV fording it. Another metre and the engine would be submerged.

Just two years ago, the riverbed was only 10 metres wide. Then four hurricanes hit the area in 2008. Now the flood plain spans 300 metres of stone and gravel. Countless tonnes of rocky debris from the mountains rising sharply above the coast have sluiced down to ream out this valley and spread a fan of siltation out into the turquoise Caribbean.

The Felse crossing is on the main route out of the town of Marigot, east of the small city of Jacmel. On the other side, the gravel road takes a sharp turn north and heads up into forested hills. Quickly it becomes more stream bed than road, cutting down to bedrock as it writhes up steep slopes.

For Frisnel Désir, a young Haitian agronomist, this is often the morning commute. Désir works for the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. His mission is to coordinate efforts of local communities and governments to help farm families coax a better livelihood from their land and water.

Serious damage has been inflicted as well by economic disasters. Former president Bill Clinton recently apologised before the U.S. Senate for the destruction of the livelihoods of Haitian rice farmers by policies imposed by Washington and international financial institutions, but many of these continue. Domestic politics has treated the countryside no better, with at best neglect and at worst brutal repression by a half-century of dictatorships, interspersed in the past two decades with weak elected governments.

Today, while over two-thirds of Haitians still live in rural areas, well under one-third of the country’s output is produced there. Around one million small farm families scratch out a bare subsistence on miniscule plots of depleted soil. Over 80 percent earn less than two dollars a day.

This morning, though, far up the rocky track into the mountains, Désir is clambering down the rough stone walls of a project designed to reverse some of the processes that ravage the Felse Valley.

With technical and financial support from the FAO, local communities are building a system of erosion controls extending five kilometres up this steep valley. A series of terraces, contained by hand-built stone walls and backfilled with earth, catches rainwater and reduces erosion.

Each terrace creates a new strip of arable land 10 metres or more wide, where corn, beans, sugar cane and other crops are planted among the pre-existing trees. More seedlings are being grown in the project nursery for planting on the reclaimed land. Participants have also built stone irrigation canals to channel rainwater into their fields, all with hand tools and manual labour.

Looking down the steep ravine, Désir recalls: “Before, this hillside wasn’t arable. So we organised local people to build these terraces. Then we gave people bean and corn starts to plant on them. Now not only have we reclaimed this land for farming, but we’ve also protected the villages below from flooding.”

This particular project is the first one locally on which the FAO has collaborated with the World Food Programme, a partner United Nations organisation. The WFP provides in- kind compensation with its Food for Work programme, the agronomist explains, while the FAO payrolls what is known as Cash for Work. Fifty-four local people in two teams are working on the project for three to four months. Every two weeks they receive their pay, which stimulates the local economy.

The FAO is working on 17 such micro-drainage reclamation projects in the Marigot area, and plans to expand the programme. On a plateau further up in the mountains, Désir says, people plant different crops, including beets, cabbage, onions, carrots and lettuce. The climate is drier there, so the FAO is training farmers in how to capture rainwater in reservoirs and cisterns and conserve it with drip irrigation.

After a bone-jolting ride back down to Marigot, the coastal road is paved. A couple of hundred metres offshore, a rowboat rides the swell. Two men are standing in it, casting a small net by hand. The FAO has been working here too to mitigate the downstream effects of the choked river.

The erosion has washed so much sediment into the sea that it has damaged near-shore fish habitats, the agronomist explains. The local fishing industry has been hurt by the reduced yields, partly because its level of technology is so low. Few have big enough boats or motors to range out beyond the shallows and catch the bigger fish found there.

To remedy the situation, the FAO is helping local communities organise fishing associations, with support from local governments. Four million dollars from Spain and 375,000 dollars from the national government are enabling the associations to buy larger boats with better motors and equipment so they can fish further offshore. The project is in its infancy: so far each association of about 150 people has just one boat, which members have to take turns using.

“Fishing has never fit into the framework of the government’s agricultural policy,” Désir says. “But as it becomes more profitable, a certain synergy could emerge between downstream and upstream, fishing and farming.” Perhaps, he suggests, a small local tax could be levied on fishing that would go to protect upstream drainages that all depend on.

Désir emphasises that all work on the projects is done by local communities and governments, with support from the national Ministry of Agriculture and sometimes international donors. The FAO provides expertise, materiel and some funding, as well as helping to coordinate efforts. Each district has a series of working commissions that bring NGOs and governments together to coordinate projects in agriculture and other domains.

On the terracing project, for example, the six community organisers who mobilise local citizens are employed by the Ministry of Agriculture. But they and others receive on-the- job training from the FAO within the framework of the project.

The catastrophes these modest initiatives respond to are mainly long-term, slow-motion ones. But the appropriate technology they provide and the community organisations they strengthen can have important impacts on the daily lives of very poor people struggling to stay on the land.

Meanwhile, Haiti recently dodged one bullet when Hurricane Earl veered north of the island. But more storms menace before the season ends in November.

Haitian farmers are worried that giant transnational corporations like Monsanto are attempting to gain a larger foothold in the local economy under the guise of earthquake relief and rebuilding.

Haitian small farmers demonstrate against Monsanto. Credit: Courtesy of La Via Campesina

“Seeds represent a kind of right to life,” peasant leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste told IPS. “That’s why we have a problem today with Monsanto and all the multinationals who sell seeds. Seeds and water are the common patrimony of humanity.”

Earlier this month, in the central square of Hinche, an agricultural town in Haiti’s Plateau Central region, a mass of small farmers wearing red shirts and straw hats burned a symbolic quantity of hybrid corn seed donated to Haiti by the U.S. agricultural-technology giant.

They called on farmers to burn any Monsanto seeds already distributed, and demanded that the government reject further shipments.

The actions in Hinche (pronounced “ansh”) were spearheaded by the Mouvman Peyizan Papay, a regional peasant movement that claims 50,000 members, and the national coalition of some 200,000 members to which it belongs. Despite divisions among Haitian peasant organisations, several of the most important groups joined together to participate.

“Our primary goal is to defend peasant agriculture,” he said, “an organic agriculture that respects the environment and fights against its degradation. We defend native seeds and the rights of peasants on their land.”

The international peasant movement advocates for “food sovereignty”, Jean-Baptiste emphasised, the right of each country to define its agricultural policy, of communities to decide what to produce, and of consumers to know that the products they consume are healthy.

“We work with indigenous groups as well, and with them we believe that the earth has rights that we must respect, just as people have rights,” he said.

The actions against Monsanto also were targeted “against the policies of the government that don’t help peasants, but rather accept products that poison the environment, kill biodiversity and destroy family, peasant agriculture,” he contended.

According to Monsanto, 130 tonnes of hybrid corn and vegetable seed out of a promised 475 tonnes have been sent so far, with the first shipment arriving in Haiti during the first week of May. The remaining 345 tonnes, which will be hybrid corn seed, are to be delivered over the coming 12 months.

The company stressed in a news release that the seeds are not genetically modified, as some early reports stated, but acknowledged that some seeds are coated with fungicides and pesticides.

Monsanto consulted with the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture on what seeds would be acceptable to Haitian farmers and well-suited for Haitian conditions, Darren Wallis, a spokesman for the firm, told IPS in an e-mail.

A programme of the U.S. government’s Agency for International Development, the Watershed Initiative for National Natural Environmental Resources, and the non-profit Earth Institute will distribute the seeds along with inputs such as fertilisers and provide technical support, Monsanto said.

WINNER describes itself as “a 127-million-dollar project … which aims to improve the living conditions of the rural populations in Haïti”.

But speakers at the Jun. 4 rally saw the project in a different light, accusing President René Préval of “collusion with imperialism” and “selling off the national patrimony”.

Although Jean-Baptiste was a key architect of the election of Préval to his first term in 1995, the peasant leader now says bitterly of the politician: “He has simply betrayed the ideas that we stood for.”

Jean-Baptiste sees the seed donation by Monsanto as a beachhead in a battle between Haitian popular organisations and the U.S. and European transnational corporations who, he says, dominate the Haitian government and the reconstruction effort.

“The government is selling off the country or giving it away as a gift. Not only is Monsanto trying to get in, but they’re talking about Coca Cola coming in to plant mangoes. The Haitian people are fighting to make sure that all the generous international aid will be channeled into genuine programmes of sustainable development.”

Mistrust of the intentions of transnational corporations and the United States government is strong among many Haitians and based on a long history. The square in Hinche where the demonstration took place is named after Charlemagne Péralte, the leader of a peasant uprising against the occupation of Haiti by the U.S. Marines, which lasted from 1915 until 1934.

The history of damage to Haitian farmers by foreign aid is also long and painful.

In the 1980s, Creole pigs were almost completely eradicated under heavy pressure from the Ronald Reagan administration. The animals were once known as “the savings bank of the Haitian peasant”, and were bred over centuries to thrive in the Haitian environment.

An epidemic of African Swine Flu that began in the neighbouring Dominican Republic was killing pigs, and U.S. authorities feared that it could spread to North America. Although some Haitian organisations proposed alternatives for controlling the disease, the Duvalier dictatorship violently imposed the will of the U.S. in the face of resistance by many Haitian farmers.

The variety of pig sent from the U.S. as a replacement was much less hardy and required expensive inputs and facilities. Virtually none survived. Many Haitian families were never compensated and suffered a crippling blow to their livelihood, in some cases having to pull their children out of school, according to Grassroots International, a U.S. non-governmental organisation.

The group has been working with Haitian peasant groups since 1997 to repopulate Creole pigs across Haiti.

Testifying before the U.S. Senate in March, former President Bill Clinton offered a notable apology for the policies of his administration towards Haitian agriculture. He lamented that forcing Haiti to lower tariffs on subsidised U.S. rice may have helped rice farmers in his home state of Arkansas, but destroyed the capacity of Haitian rice farmers to feed their country.

Calling his policy a “devil’s bargain,” he said: “We should have continued to work to help them [Haitian rice farmers] be self-sufficient in agriculture.”

Chavannes Jean-Baptiste traveled to the U.S. and the United Nations from Jun. 11 to 14 for meetings to discuss the Monsanto donation and alternatives for Haitian agriculture proposed by Haitian peasants.

*Peter Costantini blogs at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/crossover-dreams. He spent the month of May in Haiti.

By Peter Costantini
CYVADIER, Haiti, May 26 2010 (IPS)

In the wake of unimaginable death and destruction, Haitian farmers continue to work hard to wring food for their country out of a depleted land. But now they have company.

Mangoes grow prolifically all over Haiti. Credit: PeterCostantini/IPS

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) estimated in February that since the Jan. 12 earthquake, 500,000 people had migrated to rural areas and smaller urban centres.

With the exception of some rural districts to the west and south of Port-au-Prince, the earthquake did not damage most agricultural areas directly. This mass migration, however, has put heavy pressure on many already impoverished rural communities, who now are trying to house, feed and employ the returnees and newcomers.

At the same time, though, the exodus of so many people to the countryside opens the tantalising possibility of reversing some of the most noxious effects of industrialisation and urbanisation.

For many decades in most developing countries, rural people unable to make a living in the countryside have swollen informal settlements around big cities. Some of the most incapacitating poverty in the world plagues these shantytowns, bidonvilles, colonias and favelas

Now in Haiti, masses of people have streamed out of the mean streets of Cité Soleil and Carrefour to return to their rural hometowns or seek refuge with relatives outside the metropolis.

Whether they can and should be encouraged to stay is one of the most challenging questions facing the Haitian government and non-governmental organisations four months after GouDouGouDou, as the earthquake is nicknamed.

Among international organisations working in Haiti, the FAO is among the most experienced at the rural grassroots. Most of the agronomists, the technical experts who do the heavy lifting in the field, are Haitians. They have a deep, hands-on knowledge of the issues faced by farmers and other participants in the agricultural economy.

Their chief agronomist is named Volny Paultre. Officially the FAO Assistant Representative in Haiti in charge of programmes, Paultre brings to the job a lifelong commitment to Haitian agriculture. He grew up in rural Haiti, the son of a country doctor and a schoolteacher. After studying agronomy at the Université d’État d’Haïti (State University of Haiti), he taught it there for many years. After 15 more years in Haitian public administration, he went to work for the FAO in 1993.

Paultre spoke with Peter Costantini in deliberate, professorial French, punctuated by sweeping gestures, at his office in Port-au-Prince.

Q: What are you going to do with all the urban people who have been displaced to the countryside? Can they make a living as farmers? A: Agriculture is part of the solution to the problems of Haiti. But most of the opportunities are not directly in farming. Farming is saturated.

People may believe that the only activity in the countryside is agriculture, but they’re wrong. There are all kinds of opportunities upstream and downstream from agriculture, and in support of agricultural production.

These are societies that live in the rural environment. They can’t make a living with just one economic activity. People need leisure activities, education, health care – everything other societies need. Farmers themselves require all sorts of specialised services, like seed production and tree nurseries for reforestation. There are 50,000 activities that can be developed in support of agriculture.

Currently in Haiti, 15 to 40 percent of harvests are lost before they can be sold. There’s a need for specialists in cold storage, warehousing, produce drying and processing, marketing and other areas to reduce this figure.

The Minister of Agriculture has introduced what’s called the filière (channel or chain) approach. It takes a product from well before planting up until it goes to market. It looks at all the links in the chain and asks which links are weak or missing and which need to be made more dynamic, so that the maximum value-added, the maximum benefit can be extracted at each stage.

You have to think of the factors of production. Land is one: it’s already broken up into tiny parcels. The FAO recently did a rural census, and found that there are over one million farms. The land just can’t support any more agricultural producers.

Financing for agriculture is another factor: what’s available doesn’t allow any development. Interest rates are 18 to 25 percent, as high as credit cards. So clearly these are structural problems that have to be solved.

Q: Is there a need for agrarian reform? A: There is no land registry in Haiti, so titles are often uncertain. The biggest landowner is the government, and next is the [Catholic] Church. Some other big landowners can barely farm all that they have.

So agrarian reform and reform of agrarian finance is indispensable, obligatory and urgent. It’s one of Haiti’s greatest needs. The FAO proposed a study on agrarian reform to the government, but it was not accepted.

Between absentee landlords who rent out their land and farmers who live on their land, it’s clear that the latter will be more productive and make more money. It’s clear, too, that too much land is not being farmed. Here the policies of the Ministry of Agriculture support direct and discourage indirect usage of the land.

Q: But should land reform aim at redistribution or at the rearrangement of holdings? Farmers tend to have small parcels in zones with different climates, perhaps one in the mountains and one on the plain. This can be a hedge against poor climatic conditions in one area, but it creates the problem of having to travel to different places to farm. Aggregating holdings in one place can mean less travelling time.

Q: Could alternative forms of ownership such as konbit [traditional labor sharing] and cooperatives help here? A: These are ways for small farmers to skirt around some of their problems, because most farming here is done with hardly any money or access to credit. For some crops, such as beans, seeds alone can be 40 percent of the total cost of production.

So say we’re 10 farmers with 10 parcels: today I work for you, tomorrow you work for me.

Many of these associations participate in other common activities. They can be based on many things, for example, religion. We’ve put a lot of effort into understanding what binds them together, and how we can approach these associations to help strengthen communities and development.

Q: What are some of the kinds of agriculture that are well-suited for Haiti? A: Well, mangoes and avocadoes are two big reasons that poor peasants don’t starve between the two growing seasons. Mangoes are a very competitive product here: quadrupling production would create a boom for the economy, for local consumption and export.

Haiti has a very strong comparative advantage in exporting fruits and vegetables. If we could intensify those crops a little, it would assure more income to spend on other needs. In much of the rest of the Caribbean, tourism is the primary economic activity. They’re very dynamic, but they don’t have much agriculture. So that’s one of the first markets where we may be able to expand our exports.

There are other activities like raising chickens that don’t require much land. Neither do goats or a few cattle.

Fishing is an important sector that’s very underdeveloped in Haiti. We have 1,300 kilometres of coastline. We’re seeding many freshwater lakes with fish. And we’re encouraging fish farming. The FAO is involved in training people in fishing techniques and developing consensual regulations on issues such as the size of mesh for nets, to prevent overfishing.

Our projects put a great deal of responsibility on local communities, because we’ve found that’s the only way these communities will adopt them as their own.

Excerpt:

There are shortages of lots of things in Haiti: clean water, arable land, trees, living-wage jobs, housing, schools, fuel, reliable sources of electricity and Internet access. But one thing Haiti has in abundance is sunny days.

ENERSA workers making photovoltaic cells Credit: Courtesy of Richard J. Komp

The sun beats down relentlessly on Port-au-Prince: on the tin and plastic roofs of the shacks in the neighbourhood of Cité Soleil (not without reason named “Sun City”) and on the red tiles of the mansions in the hills in the suburb of Pétionville.

Even when clouds roll in from the Caribbean, the sun heats the water droplets and turns Haiti into an enormous sauna.

Haiti’s solar potential is an estimated six sun-hours in the dry season, about the same as that of Phoenix, Arizona, the sunniest U.S. city. In the rainy season it’s not much less.

For the poorest country of the Americas, one with no oil, a crippling dependency on imports, and a landscape denuded in part by charcoal production, harnessing an abundant and free resource to generate power would seem a no-brainer.

And no doubt this idea has occurred to many people. But it took Jean Ronel Noël and Alex Georges to turn the obvious into reality. Starting six years ago, after graduating in engineering and business administration, respectively, from Canadian universities, Noël and Georges put their heads together to find ways to bring jobs to Haiti.

Thus was born Energies Renouvelables S.A. (Renewable Energies, Inc.), the first Haitian company to produce photovoltaic modules and solar-powered streetlights.

The idea behind ENERSA originated with a friend they had in common. His mental “light bulb” turned on while standing with Noël under a broken streetlamp.

In addition to the benefits of clean energy, the two Haitian entrepreneurs hoped to employ and transfer skills to young people in a country where the jobless rate is estimated at 70 to 80 percent, and where, for those lucky enough to have a job, the minimum wage was raised last year from 1.75 to 5.50 dollars per day.

They were also doing their part to reverse the brain drain that has long plagued their country. “We don’t just make solar equipment here,” Noël told Tierramérica. “We make citizens. People have to feel they have a future in Haiti.”

The firm began as a research and development effort in a business incubator that provided a low-rent space for three years and guidance in how to run a business in Haiti. This support came from the faith-based non-governmental organisation Haitian Partners for Christian Development, located in Varreux, an industrial area of Port-au-Prince.

Despite the political upheavals in 2005 and 2006 that forced them to close temporarily, in September 2009 they were able to move out on their own to their current location. The factory is a modern concrete-block warehouse with a steel frame and 930 square metres of floor space, located in the capital’s outskirts.

The business, which reported just 40,000 dollars in sales in 2007, is projected to see sales totalling 2 million dollars for 2010. ENERSA sells to the government, NGOs and the private sector, but so far only in the domestic market.

To date, ENERSA has installed more than 500 solar streetlamps, which run about 1,400 dollars each, in 60 towns. But their long-term target is 35,000 streetlamps in 500 municipalities.

A pile of concrete rubble sits in the factory’s parking lot, a reminder of the Jan. 12 earthquake that wreaked havoc on Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, leaving a death toll of more than 220,000 and damages worth 7.8 billion dollars.

One exterior wall of the warehouse and all of the interior rooms, which had been built of concrete block, were destroyed. But all of the employees survived unharmed.

Despite the destruction, many of ENERSA’s streetlamps shone through the night.

“People formed their own refugee camps around those streetlights before the outside aid groups ever showed up,” Richard J. Komp of the U.S.-based Skyheat Associates, told Tierramérica. Komp is a global expert in solar energy who mentored Noël and Georges.

Three months after the quake, ENERSA had risen from the ashes, rebuilding the factory, and once again producing solar streetlamps – and now looking to expand the products the company offers.

ENERSA’s 22 employees are mainly young men from nearby Cité Soleil. Most of them have had little schooling, so Noël and Georges train them for several weeks in technical skills. Without these jobs, Noël says, their most likely alternative for making a living would have been to join a gang and sell drugs.

According to Noël, ENERSA is the only firm that manufactures solar streetlights in Haiti, although two other firms distribute them here. Steel tubing and sheet metal for lamp poles and mounts are sourced from Haitian suppliers, along with any other parts they can find domestically.

Komp trained the ENERSA staff how to manufacture their own photovoltaic modules, the solar panels mounted on rooftops that convert sunlight to electricity. The firm has to import the components from the United States.

ENERSA also builds its own simple inverters, devices that control the voltage for cell-phone charging circuits.

A recent innovation is a box with electrical outlets, mounted near the bottom of the streetlamp post. There, people can recharge their cell phones, which are ubiquitous in Haiti.

Last Christmas, ENERSA gave motorcycles to four of its outstanding employees. Now they are circulating through Cité Soleil as proof of the possibility of making a decent living at a good job in Haiti.

(*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.)

Photovoltaic panels are gradually appearing in Haiti, alongside streetlights, in a demonstration of what the Sun can do in a country with severe energy problems.

ENERSA workers making photovoltaic cells. - Courtesy of Richard J. Komp

The sun radiates relentlessly over Port-au-Prince: on the tin and plastic roofs of the shacks in the neighborhood of Cité Soleil (not without reason named “Sun City”) and on the red tiles of the mansions in the hills in the suburb of Pétionville.

Even when clouds roll in from the Caribbean, the sun heats the water droplets and turns Haiti into an enormous sauna.

Haiti's solar potential is an estimated six sun-hours in the dry season, about the same as that of Phoenix, Arizona, the sunniest U.S. city. Even in the rainy season it's not much less.

For the poorest country of the Americas, one with no oil, a crippling dependency on imports, and a landscape denuded in part by charcoal production, harnessing an abundant and free resource to generate power would seem a no-brainer.

And no doubt this idea has occurred to many people. But it took Jean Ronel Noël and Alex Georges to turn the obvious into reality. Starting six years ago, after graduating in engineering and business administration, respectively, from Canadian universities, Noël and Georges put their heads together to find ways to bring jobs to Haiti.

Thus was born Energies Renouvelables S.A. (Renewable Energies, Inc.), the first Haitian company to produce photovoltaic modules and solar-powered streetlights.

The idea, which later translated into the acronym ENERSA, was that of a friend they had in common. His mental “light bulb” turned on while standing with Noël under a broken streetlamp.

In addition to the benefits of clean energy, the two Haitian entrepreneurs hoped to employ and transfer skills to young people in a country where the jobless rate is estimated at 70 to 80 percent, and where, for those lucky enough to have a job, the minimum wage was raised last year from 1.75 to 5.50 dollars per day.

They were also doing their part to reverse the brain drain that has long plagued their country. “We don't just make solar equipment here,” Noël told Tierramérica. “We make citizens. People have to feel they have a future in Haiti.”

The firm began as a research and development effort in a business incubator that provided a low-rent space for three years and guidance in how to run a business in Haiti. This support came from the faith-based non-governmental organization Haitian Partners for Christian Development (HPCD), located in Varreux, an industrial area of Port-au-Prince.

Despite the political upheavals in 2005 and 2006 that forced them to close temporarily, in September 2009 they were able to move out on their own to their current location. The factory is a modern concrete-block warehouse with a steel frame and 930 square meters of floor space, located in the capital's outskirts.

The business, which reported just 40,000 dollars in sales in 2007, is projected to see sales totaling 2 million dollars for 2010. ENERSA sells to the government, NGOs and the private sector, but so far only in the domestic market.

To date, ENERSA has installed more than 500 solar streetlamps, which run about 1,400 dollars each, in 60 towns. But their long-term target is 35,000 streetlamps in 500 municipalities.

A pile of concrete rubble sits in the factory's parking lot, a reminder of the Jan. 12 earthquake that wreaked havoc on Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, leaving a death toll of more than 220,000 and damages worth 7.8 billion dollars.

One exterior wall of the warehouse and all of the interior rooms, which had been built of concrete block, were destroyed. But all of the employees survived unharmed.

Despite the destruction, many of ENERSA's streetlamps shone through the night.

“People formed their own refugee camps around those streetlights before the outside aid groups ever showed up,” Richard J. Komp of the U.S.-based Skyheat Associates, told Tierramérica.

Komp is a global expert in solar energy who mentored Noël and Georges.

Three months after the quake, ENERSA had risen from the ashes, rebuilding the factory, and once again producing solar streetlamps — and now looking to expand the products the company offers.

ENERSA's 22 employees are mainly young men from nearby Cité Soleil. Most of them have had little schooling, so Noël and Georges train them for several weeks in technical skills. Without these jobs, Noël says, their most likely alternative for making a living would have been to join a gang and sell drugs.

According to Noël, ENERSA is the only firm that manufactures solar streetlights in Haiti, although two other firms distribute them here. Steel tubing and sheet metal for lamp poles and mounts are sourced from Haitian suppliers, along with any other parts they can find domestically.

Komp trained the ENERSA staff how to manufacture their own photovoltaic modules, the solar panels mounted on rooftops that convert sunlight to electricity. The firm has to import the components from the United States.

ENERSA also builds its own simple inverters, devices that control the voltage for cell-phone charging circuits.

A recent innovation is a box with electrical outlets, mounted near the bottom of the streetlamp post. There, people can recharge their cell phones, which are ubiquitous in Haiti.

Last Christmas, ENERSA gave motorcycles to four of its outstanding employees. Now the two-wheelers are circulating through Cité Soleil as proof of the possibility of making a decent living at a good job in Haiti.

Reckless greed on Wall Street is a dog-bites-man story. Still, the renewed feeding frenzy of the alpha dogs of finance in the embers of the bonfire of their own vanities has inspired amazement and disgust across the political spectrum.

The investment bank Goldman Sachs, popularly dubbed "Goldman Calf", reportedly gave its employees some 13 billion dollars in bonuses for 2009. Credit: Peter Costantini/IPS

Despite the damage it yet may cause, though, the spectacle does seem to be helping to disarm some of the banksters’ ideological weaponry. In the debate over why the financial system collapsed and how to rebuild it, economic assumptions that have enjoyed hegemony for the past 30 years are being questioned, and a swelling chorus is supporting a return to stronger regulation.

David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, recently weighed in: “The baleful reality is that the big banks, the freakish offspring of the Fed’s easy money, are dangerous institutions, deeply embedded in a bull market culture of entitlement and greed.”

Stockman welcomed President Barack Obama’s proposed tax on banks because its message is that “big banking must get smaller because it does too little that is useful, productive or efficient.”

While the United States economy remains mired in a weak, jobless recovery, the financial sector has used its political clout and government largesse to once again go for the gusto. In the third quarter of 2009, according to economist Dean Baker, finance grabbed 34 percent of all U.S. corporate profits, a far bigger share than at the peak of the housing bubble.

At Goldman Sachs, the leader of the pack, any embarrassment over the savaging of the global economy is well-hidden. The investment bank, popularly dubbed “Goldman Calf”, reportedly has given its employees some 13 billion dollars in bonuses for 2009. That nearly triples its largesse in 2008 when, according to the Wall Street Journal, 953 employees received bonuses of over one million dollars each.

The bank reported earnings of 13.4 billion dollars for 2009, nearly matching the 15 billion dollars combined total of the five other biggest banks. Its net profit margin was 23.85 percent.

Goldman received 10 billion dollars in funds from the U.S. government’s Troubled Asset Relief Programme in 2008, which it paid back with interest in 2009. The firm also benefitted from other forms of government generosity, including an estimated 12.9 billion dollars as a counterparty of AIG.

The failed insurance behemoth used bailout funds to pay off credit default swaps and other complex wagers on bond markets at allegedly inflated values to Goldman and several other U.S. and European financial giants. For some time before the crash, GS had reportedly been betting against the mortgage market.

The apotheosis of Goldman Sachs has relied on a revolving door between the firm and lofty precincts of the federal government. Henry Paulson, the George W. Bush administration’s secretary of the Treasury responsible for TARP, formerly served as the firm’s CEO. Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, and many other power brokers in both major parties are also alumni.

A long year after the industry’s near-death experience, Goldman’s glass is either full or overflowing, depending on how you look at it. So is popular anger against it. Rolling Stone magazine writer Matt Taibbi celebrated the investment bank as “a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Satirist Andy Borowitz reported tongue-in-cheek that Goldman was in talks to buy the Treasury Department. He quoted an apocryphal Treasury spokesman as saying that the merger would create efficiencies for both because of the high volume of employees and money already flowing back and forth between them. The only hard part, the spokesman said, “is trying to figure out which parts of the Treasury Department we don’t already own.”

Belatedly, Obama and the Democrats seem to have decided that popular anger on the right and the left churned up by the financial industry may be a political wave they can ride.

In December, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would create an independent financial protection agency for consumers, a measure long lobbied for by Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, director of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the bank bailout.

The legislation would also increase banks’ capital requirements and limit their leverage, the extent of their reliance on borrowed funds. And by requiring lenders to hold on to some proportion of the loans they make, the law would restrict securitisation, the practice of bundling mortgages into complex derivatives that frequently have turned toxic, dragging down financial institutions that hold them.

In the Senate, though, prospects for 60 votes to break a potential filibuster look dubious. Republicans appear to be nearly unanimous in their opposition to the reforms.

In the wake of the loss of a Democratic Senate seat in Massachusetts, Obama has gone on the offensive on the issue. The president urged the Senate to approve the financial consumer protection agency, and proposed a new tax of 0.15 percent on the non-deposit debts of the biggest financial conglomerates, to recover all taxpayer losses from the bailout.

In a Jan. 21 speech, he called for structural reforms of the financial system, including limiting the size and financial risk-taking of banks.

On Jan. 31, Paul Volcker, chair of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board, vigorously championed the president’s proposals in an opinion piece in the New York Times.

Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank under Presidents Carter and Reagan, reached back two centuries to recall that Adam Smith had advocated for keeping banks small. He proposed regulations to eliminate the possibility of a few banks growing “too big to fail.” And he echoed the president’s complementary proposal to once again restrict commercial banks from involvement in high-risk activities such as hedge funds, private-equity funds and proprietary trading.

An earlier firewall between commercial and investment banks, first erected by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, was eliminated by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.

Volcker also called for a public “resolution authority” with the power to step in when major financial institutions are in imminent danger of failure, take over, and arrange an orderly liquidation or merger.

Although the proposal didn’t address some remaining dangers such as the “potentially viral network of derivatives contracts,” according to financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson, it “moves us closer to resolving pieces of the ‘moral hazard’ issue, that uncomfortable state of affairs that occurs when companies don’t worry about bet-the-ranch risks because they know that someone (usually the taxpayer) is waiting in the wings to save them if they blow it (as they so often do).”

Financial regulation in one country, even the home of the dollar, risks being circumvented by globe-spanning players. Recognising this, other governments are contemplating similar curbs on financial excesses and discussing joint action.

The City of London has given Wall Street a run for its money in the insolvency sweepstakes. Surveying the wreckage, U.K. financial officials are weighing a levy on banks for an insurance fund to cover future cleanups and a tax on financial transactions to limit excessive speculation. France, too, has supported raising international capital requirements for banks.

On a global scale, the International Monetary Fund is contemplating the creation of an insurance fund into which it would require banks around the world to pay.

“The financial sector is creating a lot of systemic risks for the global economy,” Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn told The Telegraph. “It is fair that such a sector should pay some of its resources to help mitigate the risks they are creating.”

In the wake of a blizzard of economic hardship across North America, native land of the financial crash of 2008 and ensuing Great Recession, the shapes of other possible worlds are emerging from the drifts. Some are frozen and dystopian, but others may harbour green shoots of hope.

Seattle's Labour Temple was built in 1942, as the booming wartime workforce increased the number of local workers and trade unions. Credit: Peter Costantini/IPS

An unapologetic financial oligopoly led by investment bank Goldman Sachs, revived from a coma by an torrential transfusion of government cash, has emerged from the intensive care unit even more concentrated and voracious. Yet other potential scenarios seethe with popular and intellectual ferment challenging the free-market fundamentalism that has gripped the levers of political and economic power for most of the past 30 years.

Amidst the rubble left by the implosion of the financial system, working people and labour organisations across North America have suffered massive collateral damage. Major unions in the U.S. and Mexico have been seriously weakened, but here and there cross-border labour solidarity has blossomed.

“Workers are paying the price for the mistakes of Wall Street,” said Ana Avendaño, director of the Immigrant Worker Programme of the AFL-CIO, the biggest U.S. labour confederation.

“The global crisis is rooted in corporations’ campaign of radical deregulation and corporate empowerment: trade policies that rewarded and accelerated outsourcing, financial deregulation designed to promote speculation, the dismantling of our pension and health care systems, and an immigration policy that allows corporations to treat workers like commodities.”

“These policies resulted in a net loss of jobs, the collapse of the housing market, downward spiral of real wages, and a population of more than 12 million people – eight million workers – living in fear of being deported, too afraid to exercise their rights,” Avendaño told IPS.

It’s incorrect to label what happened an “economic crisis,” Karl Flecker of the Canadian Labour Congress told IPS. “In fact, it was larceny and greed that has brought us a jobs crisis, and the impacts here in Canada have been enormous” in terms of job loss, unemployment and precarious jobs.

Although the Barack Obama administration bailed out the industry, the union made deep concessions on wages, benefits and pensions, both before and after the collapse of the two firms.

Labour worked hard to elect Obama, and the president reciprocated early by appointing a progressive secretary of labour, Hilda Solis. But labour law reforms long advocated by unions appear to sit further back in the legislative queue than some of the administration’s more high-profile concerns.

In Mexico, the labour movement has long been dominated by a largely corrupt, autocratic union federation. The Confederación de Trabajadores de México (Mexican Labour Federation) is tied to the party that ruled the country for 70 years. Independent unions that have broken free of the CTM have often been subject to repression from the government and business.

Now, however, one of the biggest and best known of the independents, the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (Mexican Electricians Union), is at risk of extinction. President Felipe Calderón has thrown 44,000 union workers into the street with his October decision to seize, shut down and – the union warns – ultimately privatise the public electrical company, Luz y Fuerza del Centro (Central Light and Power). Despite months of resistance by the labour movement, Calderón may succeed in silencing a major independent voice for workers.

Marco Antonio Velázquez Navarrete, a leader of the Red Mexicana de Acción frente al Libre Comercio (Mexican Action Network confronting Free Trade), called the government’s actions “an unprecedented blow against the Mexican working class and a drastic rollback of democratic freedoms in the country”.

He defended the SME as “one of the most important representatives of Mexican democratic unionism.” Many unions across the continent have also condemned the government’s union-busting.

Some Mexican independent unions have formed mutual support relationships with their counterparts in the U.S. The Frente Auténtico de Trabajo (Authentic Labour Front), for example, has built a working partnership with the United Electrical Workers Union here.

In Canada, a labour action by mine workers has found solidarity on five continents. Some 3,500 members of the United Steelworkers union have been on strike for six months at nickel mines in Ontario and Newfoundland owned by Vale Inco, a subsidiary of Vale SA of Brazil. The second-largest mining company in the world, which acquired the formerly Canadian-owned mines in 2006, demanded steep cutbacks in bonuses, pensions and job protections despite record profits, according to the union.

USW contracts span the United States and Canada, and President Leo Gerard is a former member of the striking local. Unions in Sweden and Germany have protested against the unloading of Vale shipments in ports there, and a British union spearheaded the introduction of a motion of support in Parliament.

In Brazil, a USW delegation was invited to testify before the Brazilian Senate. Senator Paulo Paim criticized Vale and called the strike “a human rights issue,” saying the union could count on the majority of members of Congress there in “the fight for workers and retirees rights.”

The Toronto Star reported on Jan. 20 that internal documents indicate the company plans to cut its workforce by more than half over the next five years, and push those remaining for greater productivity. The union introduced the documents in a complaint of bad-faith bargaining filed recently with the Ontario Labour Relations Board. The company denied the charges and minimised the documents’ importance.

Despite the hostile economic environment, North American labour has been working to strengthen labour standards in marginalised, low-paid sectors such as domestic work and day labour. Racism in the U.S. Congress in the 1930s excluded some groups such as domestic and farm workers from legal protections and collective bargaining.

Two years ago, AFL-CIO local councils began a collaboration with domestic workers’ groups to pass local legislation giving domestic workers basic rights on the job, according to Avendaño.

Now the federation has joined with the domestic workers’ network for talks at the International Labour Organisation this June on setting global labour standards for domestic work, Avendaño said.

As the official U.S. representative to the ILO, the AFL-CIO invited a delegate from the domestic workers to sit at the table as part of its delegation to the talks. The U.S. groups began dialogues last year with sister groups in other countries to encourage similar partnerships, and to coordinate work on international labour standards.

Avendaño also cited another trade union effort in solidarity with low-wage workers, the “Asian floor wage campaign”. Rather than chasing garment sweat shops around the globe from Mexico to China to Indonesia, U.S. groups are linking up with labour and civil-society groups across the lowest-wage Asian countries, including Indian trade unions.

In each, they are mounting proactive campaigns to establish basic labour standards and “stop the spiral to the very bottom.” The campaign, she said, is “looking at collective bargaining as the ultimate answer to poverty.”

Although immigration has become a political flashpoint in the U.S., labour and social movements there have come together in defense of immigrants. Some U.S. and Canadian unions, particularly in the service sector, are aggressively organising immigrants regardless of legal status, with strong support from major union federations.

Day labourers, the mainly immigrant informal workers who are among the most underpaid and unprotected, are working with organised labour on immigration reform and expansion of workers’ rights. In 2006, the AFL-CIO signed a cooperation agreement with the National Day Labour Organising Network.

As former AFL-CIO President John Sweeney observed then, “When standards are dragged down for some workers, they are dragged down for all workers.”

Ten years ago, the Seattle Ministerial of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) flashed over into a ‘Battle of Seattle’ before the eyes of a startled world.

Throwing the prosperous home of Boeing and Microsoft into turmoil, large demonstrations led by labour and environmental groups were complemented by widespread civil disobedience in the streets. This resonated with a revolt by delegates from developing countries against the strong-arm tactics of the WTO leadership and the United States. The convergence precipitated the rancorous collapse of the WTO’s efforts to inaugurate a “Millennium Round” of trade talks.

In the decade since, the trade body has sometimes seemed afflicted by the institutional equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorder. This may be because many of the forces that surfaced in Seattle are still protagonists in the current impasse over the “Doha Round” of trade negotiations, launched in 2001 in the capital of Qatar.

In each round of talks, which can last many years, representatives of member countries meet periodically to discuss how to bring new arenas of commerce under WTO regimens and increase the scope of commitments to trade liberalisation by member countries.

Doha was branded as the “Development Round”, dedicated to the economic advancement of poor countries through trade. But the supposed beneficiaries’ mistrust of U.S. and European dominance of the organisation has led to the growth of a counterbalance led by China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa.

Nevertheless, efforts by the WTO to salvage Doha continue. In a speech in Geneva, WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy affirmed that the economic crisis has demonstrated “that trade is the stimulus package available to developing countries and that it has to be part and parcel of the economic recovery effort for growth to be sustainable.”

Since Seattle, however, citizens and governments of many member countries have grown more sceptical about the benefits of some existing WTO rules and more hesitant to expand them.

In many developing countries, small farmers and rural communities have become increasingly concerned that poverty could be worsened and development undermined by WTO expansion. Their organisations are pushing to erect buffers against destructive spasms in commodity markets and damage caused by rich countries’ agricultural subsidies. Governments of some wealthy countries, however, have criticised such protections as violations of trade rules.

According to Martin Khor of the non-governmental South Centre, the founding objectives of the WTO included raising standards of living and ensuring full employment in the service of “sustainable development”; reduction of trade barriers and eliminating discriminatory treatment between nations were means to those ends. However, Khor argues in a recent paper, that the trade-promotion measures have “in effect become ends in themselves rather than the means.” Trade liberalisation has elbowed aside development and the broad sharing of economic benefits.

Many labour, environmental and public health organisations worldwide have continued to oppose expansion of the WTO’s scope as well. They are fighting what they see as the use of trade rules to force nations to deregulate expanding sectors of the economy and strip away hard-won public safeguards.

Recently, in the wake of the global financial crisis, continuing efforts to expand the WTO’s remit in the deregulation of international financial services have also been widely called into question.

At the 7th Ministerial of the WTO, which met from Nov. 30 through Dec. 2 in Geneva, organisers limited the proceedings to a “housekeeping” meeting where no major decision-making efforts would be made.

“The proponents of the WTO have been afraid for four years to call a negotiating ministerial,” asserted Lori Wallach of Global Trade Watch, a U.S. non-governmental organisation. The U.S., the European Union, and some big multinational corporations fear an explosion, she told IPS, because they have continued in the face of opposition from the majority of WTO members to push the same “radical WTO expansion agenda that was originally brought up and rejected at Seattle”.

Wallach compared bringing trade ministers together without confronting the underlying issues to “not talking about war while working on the Versailles Treaty” [which ended World War I]. Some developing countries, she says, are calling Geneva the “Muzzle Ministerial”.

In contrast, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, speaking in Geneva, congratulated the WTO for passing “a fairly strenuous test” presented by the financial crisis. “The continued health of the trading system,” he observed, “is due in part to many of our own individual efforts in the face of domestic pressure to turn inward.”

Kirk highlighted the WTO’s Aid for Trade program, which provides targeted aid to assist developing countries to increase their capacities, and noted that the U.S. is the largest provider of trade-related technical assistance. Citing a recent WTO report that found that the least-developed countries were exporting increasingly to newly important economies such as China and India, he called on these new trade powers to make increased “market-opening contributions… commensurate with their role in the global economy.”

As Doha languishes, the foundations of the world economy and much of the world’s understanding of them have indeed shifted and settled. Two enormous speculative bubbles and the most destructive downturn since the Great Depression have led many across the political spectrum to question the gospel of laissez-faire and deregulation.

Challenges to the orthodox trade doctrine undergirding the WTO have emerged as well. New historical critiques such as “Kicking Away the Ladder”, by Ha-Joon Chang of Cambridge, argue that in their early years all the now- wealthy countries adopted tariffs and other trade barriers to protect their young industries, but now deny the use of the same shelters to today’s developing countries.

Most modern versions of economic theory recognise that trade produces losers as well as winners: whether it is effective in reducing poverty, though, has been a subject of sharp debate. A recent WTO review found that, while increased trade is positively correlated with economic growth, there is not a clear causal link between trade and poverty reduction. Trade may even exacerbate inequality, the study found, because it tends to benefit wealthier sectors in both developing and industrialised countries.

One force in the trade debate that had its coming-out party at the Seattle Ministerial – the “global justice movement” – has become a regular at international economic events over the intervening years.

In Geneva, “Our World Is Not For Sale”, a network of 216 organisations, called for a halt to negotiations on the Doha Round, the reversal of WTO commitments, and the adoption of different approaches to the multiple global crises.

Among analyses of the legacy of Seattle, a surprising one came from an erstwhile antagonist of that movement, the then-mayor of Seattle who lost the next election partly as a result of his handling of the protests. “The first introduction to the issues of the 21st Century happened in Seattle,” Paul Schell told a Seattle television station. “We need to become much more sensitive to our impact on the world and the world’s impact on us. Nobody wants to talk about it, but we can’t maintain our standard of living at the expense of the standard of living of the rest of the world. We really need to rethink how much we are consuming the world’s resources, and we are going to have to find our values in something other than more stuff.”

*Peter Costantini was one of the IPS correspondents covering the 1999 Seattle Ministerial.

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, U.S., Jul 8 2009 (IPS)

In Janice Fine’s most recent project, eight workers centres have joined with the Centre for Community Change, where she is a senior fellow for organising and policy, to provide inexpensive financial services to low-wage immigrant workers. The services also provide an income stream and membership base for the centres.

Janice Fine Credit: Courtesy of Rutgers Focus

Such innovation and pragmatism are rooted in over 20 years as a labour, community and electoral organiser. Fine’s portfolio has ranged from Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign to the New England Money and Politics Project to AFL-CIO and construction union organising in Massachusetts and Florida.

Currently, she is assistant professor of labour studies and employment relations at the School of Management and Labour Relations of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Her book, ‘Worker Centres: Organising Communities at the Edge of the Dream’, was published in 2006.

Fine spoke with IPS by telephone from her office in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: The title of one of your papers is ‘A Marriage Made in Heaven? Mismatches and Misunderstandings between Worker Centres and Unions.’ What are those areas of friction? JANICE FINE: First of all, since I wrote that piece, I think there has been a lot more promising cooperation that’s been going on between unions and workers centres. So things have been going in a pretty positive direction.

But in general, at its core the friction is because unions by and large are concerned with getting to collective-bargaining agreements and formalising a relationship between specific employers and specific groups of workers.

In general, workers centres are more informal, and though they do collective action, they’re not working towards collective bargaining, and they don’t sign formal contracts.

The friction is that, in general, workers centres are more social movement organisations, considering themselves part of a larger social movement around fair wages and just and respectable work, around economic and racial justice, and global democracy. And unions behave more like economic organisations, developing political alliances and doing their organising, to advance more of their direct interests.

IPS: At this point, there’s obviously more stress because of the economy. How do you see the paucity of jobs all around affecting these relationships? JF: To the labour movement’s tremendous credit, I don’t think there’s ever been a more explicitly pro-immigrant worker time than the last ten years, and I think that that centre has held despite the economic recession.

So on a policy level, in terms of the national AFL-CIO and national Change to Win and the national unions, there are some stellar examples of working together.

For example the Labourers Union and the workers centres, especially in the Northeast, have been working on strategies to really organise together in residential construction. Unfortunately, that’s happening at a time when residential construction is in crisis. So it’s really unfortunate timing.

There’s a strategic challenge in any economy in organising residential construction, and then there’s the strategic challenge of trying to have a workers centre and a union cooperate. Now that’s all taking place in the context of a global recession. So all those things make this moment a difficult one.

But in terms of good feeling, good will, it’s sort of unprecedented really.

IPS: What about with the possible upcoming immigration reform battle? How do you think cooperation has gone between them on the immigration policy level? JF: By and large there’s a lot of consensus on the need to uphold labour standards, about the need to create some kind of pathway to legalisation for the 11½ to 12 million undocumented workers who are here now, for an end to workplace raids and home invasions. I think that the sticking point is around future flow, how to manage the flow of immigrant workers who are going to continue to come. Both the white-collar workers, because the H-1B programme, there are some white-collar unions that object on the grounds that they feel like there are white-collar native and naturalised workers who ought to be able to compete for those jobs and very often are not able to.

And there’s the more low-income, low-wage, unskilled worker question of what happens with future flow programmes.

IPS: Do you see any chance of having a temporary worker programme that doesn’t undercut standards and that’s fair to the workers? JF: On principle, I totally understand the idea that we don’t want second-class citizens and that we want people who come here maybe for economic reasons who can exercise political and economic rights equal to everybody else once they arrive.

On the other hand, I think that it’s a little bit outdated. There’s no question that in this era, and frankly not just in this era – Mexican workers have been coming for a hundred-plus years to the U.S. – we need to have more of a transnational idea of how workers can travel across borders with their rights intact.

The truth is we’re not going to stop immigration. My own view is this is kind of a good time to get things right because flow is lower. And if we’re not going to stop it, then we in my view should stop looking at immigration as a pathology that needs to be wiped out, that the American movement or every labour movement would be better off without, and understand that both in the E.U. and in the U.S., in lots of places, immigration is now a fact of life.

So the question is: how do low-wage immigrant workers come with rights, enforce those rights, and join with nationally based and locally based institutions like unions and workers centres to press those rights.

There’s that old, great quote: ‘We asked for workers but we got people.’ My experience is that if you ask a low-wage immigrant worker when they come here what kinds of jobs they’ve had, it runs the gamut from construction to dishwashing, restaurant work, and light manufacturing, landscaping. Very few of them have only worked in one sector.

So this idea that we can have sectorally specific programmes, other than in things like agriculture, I just having a hard time thinking that that’s possible. I think we’ve already seen that H-2B [temporary non-agricultural work] and these other programmes don’t work very well.

But there’s no question that, if you take the really broad historical view, there have been unprecedented levels of acceptance in the labour movement of [immigrant] workers, especially given that most of the workers are workers of color, Asian and Latino, but mostly Latino. It’s pretty remarkable.

Excerpt:

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, Washington, Jun 19 2009 (IPS)

Day labourers looking for casual work are familiar fixtures on corners outside home improvement and garden stores across the United States. Less visible are the workers centres that have grown up in many locales to serve and organise these mainly immigrant and undocumented workers.

Pablo Alvarado Credit:

Founded in 2001, the National Day Labourer Organising Network is the biggest federation of immigrant workers centres in the United States, with 38 member organisations in 16 states.

Pablo Alvarado, executive director of NDLON, has guided the organisation into a growing collaboration with the trade union movement.

Alvarado spoke with IPS by telephone from the NDLON office in Los Angeles, California. Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: How do you sum up the cooperation between the labour movement and workers centres? Pablo Alvarado: When you go to a day labour centre, what you see there is workers. When you go to a union hiring hall, what you see there is workers as well. And workers have similar needs around issues of wages and hours.

Our concern is for all organised workers. So I think the more people who come together to fight together, the closer we will be.

IPS: What successes have you had so far? PA: In some places the workers centres have actually become members of the central labour councils.

An example close to where you are is in Portland [Oregon]. When the workers centre was about to be opened there, there was resistance from some building-trades unions, and of course they were concerned about workers being sent to places where there were labour disputes and used as scabs.

Obviously, workers centres have organised workers there. And our belief as an advocacy organisation, as a national workers organisation, is that we have to be in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are fighting for better wages and working conditions.

So we came out with a memorandum of understanding between the workers centre and the unions, and we committed not to send workers to those places. On the other hand, whenever there was a labour dispute, our workers would actually go and join the picket lines.

IPS: The recent joint statement on immigration reform by the AFL-CIO and Change to Win said that they want to improve the existing programme of temporary visas but oppose expanding it. How do you see this whole issue of guest workers? PA: Well, what we currently have is not working. I can give you an example where guest workers were fighting against an employer. They protested. And this employer thought that since these people were guest workers he could call ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. So ICE came and arrested a bunch of workers and took them to prison. These are the type of guest-worker programs that currently exist. We’re talking about servitude.

Obviously we disagree with the way they’re being used right now. A lot of workers from Peru, Bolivia, and other countries were promised so many things when they were brought in as guest workers. They were promised at least 40 hours of work a week and housing.

But when they came in they didn’t have 40 hours and they found out that the housing they were supposed to have they were going to have to pay for. They had paid a lot of money to the recruiters that went to their home countries to bring them over. And they were stuck here, they couldn’t go back because they had invested all the savings of their lives to come here.

IPS: As the recession gets deeper, it puts more pressure within the union memberships on the issues of immigration. How can the day labourers movement deal with that and survive in this really terrible environment? PA: Obviously our organisations are not equipped to provide jobs to everyone. Workers centres are not meant to address the issue of unemployment and to be able to give everyone work.

But we know that there’s a rise in labour-related abuses, including wage theft. So we continue to protect people, providing the wage-theft service whenever a worker is cheated of his or her wages. It has intensified in this crisis, so we are investing more resources in that.

The day labour centres that help people find jobs, we’re about to start investing a little bit more about how to better promote the services that they provide and make the centres more attractive so that more employers can come in, like perhaps more homeowners.

Then the other thing that day labour centres do a lot, and lately have engaged in a more intense way, is finding social services in the community, from food banks to homeless shelters. These centres provide the only networks of support that migrant workers have in this country. The centres become more rooted in the nature of the community that they serve.

IPS: Where would you like to be in five years in building workers centres, in relations with the labour unions, and in developing your network? PA: Obviously we plan to work closely with unions. If there is an immigration reform, we want to make sure that workers at workers centres get union jobs at union wages, as many as we can get in. And help unions articulate perhaps comprehensive apprenticeship programs that are based on the cultural background and education levels of people, in their language.

The future of workers centres is linked to future of labour unions. And workers centres have become very prominent in the fight for worker rights in this country. They have become a primary vehicle to protect workers who are not part of organised labour. So I want to see more of that.

If there’s an immigration reform, does that mean that the issue of the undocumented will end? That’s difficult to say. And even if everybody gets documented, does that mean that the civil rights of people are going to be respected? The answer is no.

So we will continue playing our role as labour-rights and immigrant rights and civil-rights institutions, as organisations for the integration of migrant communities. I only see us becoming stronger within the next five years.

I think workers centres bring this vibrancy that the labour movement hasn’t had in a long time. And I think we can definitely renew the energy in those unions. I think workers centres and unions in our ways complement each other.

Excerpt:

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, Washington, Jun 13 2009 (IPS)

After decades at sea, organised labour has limped into port. Last fall, they helped to elect a sympathetic U.S. president and Congress. Now trade unions are gearing up to push for a major overhaul of labour law. They are also welding an alliance with immigrant and human rights groups to win comprehensive immigration reform.

Ana Avendaño Credit:

As director of the Immigrant Worker Programme and associate general counsel for the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), Ana Avendaño has worked tirelessly and persuasively over many years to turn the listing and leaky workers’ vessel onto a pro-immigrant course.

The AFL-CIO is the largest trade union federation in the United States, representing some 11 million members organised in 56 national and international labour unions.

Avendaño has testified before the U.S. Congress and the U.N. General Assembly on international migration. She served as the U.S. Worker Representative to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Committee on Migration and on the ILO’s Panel of Experts on Migration.

Avendaño spoke with IPS by telephone from her Washington, DC office. Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: When AFL-CIO President John Sweeney spoke to the National Day Labour Organising Network in 2007, there were six workers’ centres affiliated with AFL-CIO. Has the number increased? Ana Avendaño: In August of 2006 our Executive Council adopted a resolution allowing [mainly immigrant] workers’ centers to affiliate with state and local bodies. And that was a major event. Because until then we’d had these two labour movements operating basically on a parallel track. And President Sweeney saw a great opportunity here for collaboration, for bringing these two different worlds together with the aim of improving labour standards for all.

At the same time, President Sweeney entered into a partnership agreement with the National Day Labour Organising Network, under which we pledged to work together, to start dialogue on the local level, to work on immigration reform and other policy matters. Since then we’ve had eight workers centers affiliate, and I have more in the pipeline that should be done fairly quickly. All of these different partnerships around the country, some affiliated and some not, are just one aspect of this larger project to strengthen labour rights generally.

IPS: Do you see this partnership evolving organisationally towards having locals form out of day workers’ centres? AA: There’s a lot of energy and creativity on figuring out ways how to bring workers the right to collectively bargain.

But if you remember, at the genesis of many of the building trades unions, it wasn’t based on collective-bargaining agreements, it was based on this notion of solidarity. If you look at the constitutions of some of the building trades unions, you’ll see, ‘the members pledge to work together for a certain wage’ or various other things, which is exactly what the day labourers are doing.

And so there’s this concept that worker solidarity within a community of workers that are very vulnerable to exploitation is inherently a good thing.

IPS: How does the AFL-CIO support that? AA: We have two other partnership agreements with networks: one with Interfaith Worker Justice and one with Enlace, which is a bi-national network.

And when we came to negotiate these agreements, we made sure that we were at the table as equal partners, that each was contributing our expertise. So this is not about what the AFL-CIO can do for them, or what they can do for us, but what we can do together.

One of the models that has developed around this is enforcement of labour standards.

For example, in Los Angeles, one of the unions is having to deal with a contractor who is not abiding by minimum standards on some jobs. So the workers are working with a day labour centre, acting as the eyes and ears of the union, reporting violations to the union. Then the union is bringing targeted litigation.

IPS: Do you think ultimately that the AFL-CIO will grow membership through this? AA: Well, of course. Anything that grows the labour movement is a positive benefit. But that’s not what’s motivating us right now. We’re dealing with a population of workers that in many aspects is the most vulnerable in our society. And anything we can do that lifts the floor for those workers benefits all workers.

IPS: How do you handle the issue of most day labourers being undocumented? AA: American labour law is very clear that a worker’s immigration status has absolutely no relationship to that worker’s ability to enforce the law or not.

Now of course because our legal system allows employers to police themselves, employers take advantage of that power and become enforcers of immigration law when it suits them. When it’s convenient for them, when workers try to organise or report a workplace injury – then and only then employers ask the workers to see their papers.

So labour unions and workers centres have made clear that the issue of immigration status is something that is a matter between the government and the workers. We’re not in the business of asking about immigration status because that is a tool to suppress workers, to suppress the enforcement of labour standards.

What we’re actually doing is making sure that when workers engage in these labour-standards campaigns, when they are acting in the benefit of other workers, that employees don’t have that tool to ask for their immigration status.

IPS: Of your member unions, which have been the most active in this at the local or regional level? AA: Really the work has been done through the central labour councils and a couple of the construction unions locally. The construction unions are very decentralised, so it’s really different folks in different parts of the country.

IPS: On your long run goals such as immigration reform, how are you working with day labour and other immigrant groups? AA: The question has been for the last few congressional cycles how we accomplish [changes in immigration law].

The whole reform system looked at the issue of future workers and future flow. And the answer to that through past efforts was to bring more and more and more guest workers, temporary workers, which as a matter of public policy and economic policy and labour policy is just a horrible idea.

So the labour movement opposed that. Interestingly, the grassroots groups did as well.

Excerpt:

The hiring hall for Hod Carriers and General Labourers Local 242 is in the basement of the Seattle Labour Temple, a two-story tan-brick building of early-20th century vintage. You walk down a flight of well-worn red-tile stairs and through the double doors.

Day labourers enter CASA Latina workers centre. Credit: Peter Costantini/IPS

A group of older African-American men is playing cards at a green felt table, while other job-seekers read newspapers and chat. In one corner, a dozen men trade economic intelligence in Spanish. Signs painted on a partition warn: “Federal Requirement for Dispatch – 2 Pieces of ID” and “Any job subject to drug and alcohol tests”.

At six every weekday morning, some of the 3,500 members of Local 242 gather there, waiting for a union official to appear at the dispatch window to announce a job call. The Local sends workers out to heavy construction labour jobs on commercial and industrial projects – building labourers, hod carriers, mason tenders and asbestos workers. Their work often involves digging ditches, moving heavy objects and pouring mud, as concrete is affectionately known.

Behind the partition at a busy desk sits Dale Cannon, Secretary-Treasurer and Business Manager of 242. Thick and blunt, Cannon looks like – and was – a concrete foreman.

“Our guys are usually first on the job and last to leave,” he explains. “We place concrete, strip forms and do job-site cleanup.”

Lately, job dispatches “have slowed down quite a bit,” Cannon says. He estimates they’re sending out two to six workers per day instead of a normal 12 to 18. And he’s not seeing much on the horizon, which he scans by talking with developers and architects, and monitoring building-permit backlogs.

Despite the bad economy, he and his local are protagonists in the national trend towards cooperation between trade unions and immigrant workers centres. Their local partner is CASA Latina, an organisation for mostly immigrant day labourers who do primarily yard work and residential construction. Championed by national union federations and day labourers’ organisations, similar efforts at working together are coalescing in perhaps a dozen cities.

“A lot of their people deserve to have an opportunity to join a union,” Cannon asserts. “Plus it provides us with a larger area of people… more fruit to pick off the tree.” Over two years, “our relationship with CASA Latina has been nothing but favourable.”

To join Local 242, you have to be accepted into a state-approved four-year apprenticeship program requiring 4,000 hours of on-the-job training and 380 hours of classroom time. While the training was initially all in English, the union has since hired Spanish-speaking instructors.

CASA Latina recruited some 25 day labourers who met union requirements. About 20 went to an orientation and initial test, and 16 or 17 of those went on to a week-long pre-apprenticeship programme. In the end, eight qualified for the apprenticeship, says Cannon, and currently five or six of these are out there working.

“It was a rocky start for them” because most did not speak English well. But after a year, “those guys are off and running on their own,” Cannon says. Contractors have specifically asked for some of them, “so we know they’re doing a good job when they request them back.”

The relatively small numbers are mainly due to documentation issues, Cannon believes. “The language barrier you can get by – CASA Latina does a good job of making sure that if people are not working, they’re in ESL classes.”

Hispanic officials in Local 242 and the Labourers District Council have helped new labourers learn the ropes.

To get a job through the union, workers need a valid driver’s license, although it can be from another country. They also must have completed 10th grade or a high-school equivalency diploma. In Mexico, advocates estimate, most people in construction have a third to sixth-grade education. Finally, contractors check employee Social Security numbers “before you go out of the trailer,” Cannon says.

A few blocks away from Local 242, day labourers mill about the gravel courtyard of CASA Latina waiting for job calls here as well. A willowy woman circulating among them, Hilary Stern, has been executive director of the workers centre since its inception in 1994.

When the first CASA Latina workers entered the labourers apprenticeship programme, she recalls, the timing seemed good: it was the beginning of spring, when construction typically picks up. But this happened last year, just as the housing market began to go south.

“The Latino immigrant population needs to work every day,” because immigrant workers can’t collect unemployment as citizens can. When they go to the union hall and nothing happens, “they go look for work somewhere else,” and many got discouraged, Stern says.

From the beginning, CASA Latina has been allied with organised labour, she says, and locally they’ve had “a very good relationship.” In some parts of the country, she says, there has been more conflict between them. But in Seattle, “the leadership of organised labour has never seen us as some sort of threat or competition,” although sometimes the rank-and-file is different.

The two groups are aligned politically and have worked together on common projects such as immigration reform and workplace standards. CASA Latina workers have also helped unions walk picket lines during strikes.

With the labourers, the cooperation began at the base: union organisers came to recruit day labourers, and a union attorney consulted with a law student interning at the centre.

When the regional leadership of the union got involved, Stern recounts, they wanted CASA Latina to transform itself into a Labourers local. They saw us as “a primitive form of what they were when they first started out… kind of an amoeba form of a local to which they could just add a little bit of resources.”

The centre’s board of directors, which runs the non-profit organisation, resisted going in that direction, as it serves important social-service functions for their membership as well. Still, Stern sees the union as a potential “stepping stone” towards economic integration for some day labourers.

Other paths into steady employment do exist as well. Some day labourers find continuing full or part-time jobs with employers who hired them from the centre, such as small construction contractors. Others have secured positions in restaurants or on fishing boats bound for Alaska. A few have started their own small businesses. For women, housecleaning jobs sometimes become long-term.

Not all relationships with local unions have been smooth for CASA Latina, though. Two years ago, a conflict arose with the Carpenters Union.

The Communications Director of the Carpenters Regional Council, Eric Franklin, criticised CASA Latina because the workers centre’s rate sheet listed a minimum wage for doing carpentry and other skilled work that was well below union scale. He felt that day labourers had undercut his union and contractors who worked with it, asserting that “the Carpenters oppose a cash economy in construction.”

In the past, Franklin said, his union had offered safety and skills classes to day labourers. The policy of the national union, he stressed, is that you don’t have to be a citizen to be a member. There is no initiation fee to join and the union has bilingual staff.

Cannon dismisses the idea that day labourers are competing with union carpenters. “What really got our attention was the way the Carpenters disrespected the CASA Latina people. They kind of labeled them as criminals to the community for being part of the underground economy.” The friction encouraged him to pursue cooperation with the workers centre.

For organised labour to bring day labourers into the formal workforce in any numbers, Cannon believes, comprehensive immigration reform will be key. To insure that “these people aren’t left behind, we [should] give them the opportunity to pick themselves up like everyone else expects when they come here.”

*Disclosure: the author was a member of Labourers Locals 242 and 541 from 1977 through 1983.