An Oct. 3 rally in Washington DC to end the government shutdown. Credit: Rep. Keith Ellison's office/cc by 2.0

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Oct 12 2013 (IPS)

Early on the morning of Oct. 1, Tapia* left her home in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, took the subway into Manhattan and headed to the federal courthouse on Varick Street.

After spending years in a backlogged legal system, she was going to receive a place in line for a visa and green card that offered permanent status.“I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting, but something always happens." -- Tapia, who cannot travel to see her ailing mother in Mexico

“But when we got there all the courts were closed,” Tapia told IPS.

With the federal government shut down, courts that don’t handle detainees are mostly shuttered, leaving thousands of cases unheard. For asylum seekers or longtime immigrant residents like Tapia, missing a day in court means risking being thrown to the back of a line that can extend for years.

“There were many people there in my situation that day,” she said.

Tapia emigrated from Mexico in 1998 to New York City, where she lives and works as a cook while raising two children, both born in the United States.

“I’ve paid all my taxes and put myself through school,” she said.

Underlying all immigration proceedings is the latent threat of deportation.

“This delay makes me feel nervous and insecure, it shouldn’t be this way,” said Tapia.

The judge at her preliminary hearing – where defendants present evidence arguing their case warrants a final, master hearing – told her lawyer she would assign a “cancellation of removal” (COR) at a later date, when the master hearing could be scheduled.

COR is a status open only to immigrants who have lived continuously in the U.S. for at least 10 years without a felony arrest and whose deportation would “result in exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to a citizen or permanent resident spouse, parent or child.

Tapia’s six-year-old daughter suffers from early learning disabilities and requires assistance. Her two-year-old son is not yet out of diapers.

A quota of 4,000 COR visas is replenished at the start of the federal government’s fiscal year on Oct. 1. Final, master hearings, like the kind Tapia had scheduled, can only take place when visa numbers are available. Once they run out, judges are only able to offer unofficial, off-the-record promises. Defendants, even if confident of a judge’s empathy, have to continue their disrupted lives while their immigration status remains up in the air.

Every October, the window for getting a place in line narrows, leaving more people in limbo. This year, lawyers expected visas to run out in a matter of weeks.

Immigration attorneys say that even before the shutdown, hearing dates for their clients were already being scheduled well into 2017. The time between hearings, unless a judge makes another exception to “squeeze someone in”, quickly adds up.

Three families represented by Cesar Estela, a Newark, New Jersey immigration lawyer, in COR proceedings have already missed their court dates. Estela says the shutdown only adds a perverse additional layer to an already overwhelmed system.

“Every morning a court will have 50 preliminary hearings in 2 or 3 hours,” said Estela. “If they didn’t do that many, the wait for court dates would be five years.”

In a cruel twist, Tapia’s master hearing was already postponed last October after New York City courts were closed due to Hurricane Sandy. Meanwhile, courts in the rest of the country assigned the remaining visas to other applicants.

So Tapia waited another year and scheduled her final hearing for the first day of the fiscal year, also the day the shutdown began.

“My client cannot move on from this hell,” said Tapia’s attorney, Sara Zeejah.

“Because of our system, even cases that are almost completed cannot be taken off the docket,” Zeejah told IPS. “She [Tapia] cannot travel to see her ailing mother in Mexico even though the judge wants to give her a green card.”

Tapia’s children, who are the basis for her claim, are still young. But immigrants caring for older, adolescent children worry that by the time they have their cases heard, their dependents could be over 21, the cutoff for COR.

After several preliminary hearings dating back to 2011, Filho*, a truck driver originally from Brazil, finally had his master hearing calendared for Oct. 4.

His son, who was 15 when Filho first applied, is now 17. With his hearing now cancelled due to the government shutdown, Estela, his attorney, is concerned.

“His next court date maybe in 2016, when his kid is 19,” said Estela. “If the visas run out in the first week, he might have to wait another year, and then he only has one more.”

If Filho’s case isn’t heard before his son turns 21, he could be deported.

In the meantime, Filho can’t leave the U.S. to visit his wife and daughter in Brazil. “I call my daughter five times a day,” an emotional Filho told IPS. “I’m afraid because all these people, like me, have missed their court dates. What if I have to wait another two years? I want to see my daughter.”

As lawmakers in Washington take a piecemeal approach to restoring government services, immigrants and their lawyers feel they aren’t even on the radar.

“I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting, but something always happens,” says Tapia.

Ting I. Li, an immigration attorney in Chinatown, NY, says all types of clients are affected by the shutdown.

“Next week we have a client who originally applied for asylum. While the case was pending, he married a U.S. citizen. To get a green card [through his wife] he needs a judge to terminate those proceedings first. So next week there is a master hearing for a judge to do that. But if the court is closed, the client can do nothing. They’ve already been waiting two years for this date; the next available date will probably be 2016.”

Another lawyer who spoke with IPS but did not wish to be named said court closures have made his job painful.

“One of my clients, a Nepalese man, was supposed to have a hearing that would finalise his wife and child joining him here. Because of the shutdown, it could be another two years. I don’t know what I’m going to tell him.”

*Clients in this story are referred to by one name only to protect their identities.

Lake Mead National Recreation Area is closed due to the government shutdown. Credit: National Park Service

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 4 2013 (IPS)

Frustration is mounting with elected representatives here on the fourth day of a U.S. government shutdown that has left nearly 800,000 federal workers temporarily out of work, and advocates across the political spectrum are working to get their voices heard.

Others are working to strengthen the voices of the country’s citizens."The perception is that government is driven by special interests and that it doesn’t act according to common sense.” -- Steven Kull

Already the shutdown is likely to further decrease the U.S. public’s already historically low trust in their government. Recent polls show that 85 percent of Americans believe that members of Congress are more interested in serving special interest groups than the common good.

Just nine percent of respondents believed that Congress is serving the “American people”. Perhaps more worryingly, 75 percent of people in the United States are convinced that the country is currently headed in the wrong direction.

Out of such a situation, some here are starting to look at ways to foster change from beneath.

“What we’re trying to do is bring back to life the founding vision of our republic, that amidst all of our different factions, the American public can finally have a clear voice,” Steven Kull, the founder of a new organisation, Voice of the People, told IPS.

“The biggest problem is that the American people have lost confidence in the way that our government is operating. The perception is that government is driven by special interests and that it doesn’t act according to common sense.”

The new nonpartisan organisation launched Thursday, unveiling a plan to break the constant polarisation and gridlock that have come to characterise – and plague – Washington.

In launching its Campaign for what it’s calling a Citizen Cabinet Wednesday in Washington, Voice of the People brings together former members of Congress from both sides of the aisle to create a platform that will, hopefully, help citizens better connect with their elected officials.

“Recent research shows that Americans believe that a stronger voice of the people will help government break through this gridlock,” Kull says, noting that the shutdown offered a great opportunity for the launch. “Voice of the People is there to do just that.”

Great collective intelligence

The idea behind the new organisation is to create a policymaking simulation with the U.S. citizenry sitting in the driver’s seat. Citizens from all over the country – drawn from nationwide sampling – will be invited to sit on a panel that will see them think as policymakers for 12 months.

The Cabinet, which will operate primarily as an online platform, will include as many as 120,000 people at one time. They will then be informed about the major issues under discussion by Congress.

“The problem today is what we call the ‘noise of democracy’,” Byron Dorgan, a former U.S. senator, said at the programme’s launch. “There is a deep reservoir of common sense around the country, but it is rarely ever heard in the middle of all the noise coming from big money.”

Indeed, recent polls by Voice of the People President Kull, a political psychologist who studies public opinion at the University of Maryland, show that there exists a “great collective intelligence” in the country, as Kull terms it.

The new initiative will enable tens of thousands of U.S. citizens a new way to speak directly with federal lawmakers.

“The Cabinet is not going to replace traditional tools of communication between the people and their representatives. It’s going to make it stronger and better informed,” Bill Frenzel, a former U.S. representative, says.

After they have been briefed on a range of opinions behind issues before Congress, the Cabinet will be asked to formulate its policy.

“What we’re trying to do here is ensure that people get the most reliable kind of information on key issues,” Martin Frost, another former U.S. representative, explains. “Right now, most of the information out there on the Internet is just factually wrong. We want to address that.”

After the Cabinet comes up with an opinion, Voice of the People will break down the results according to congressional districts and send the information on to members of Congress.

“Of course, this doesn’t mean that members of Congress will automatically vote following this data,” Frost says. “But the [Voice of the People] results will make them better informed.”

One of the challenges for the newly unveiled Voice of the People will be its criteria for drawing samples, deciding on the composition of its panels. Although the initiative seeks to involve the entire U.S. citizenry, there are obvious doubts as to whether the initiative’s samples will be able to include, for instance, non-registered voters.

Meanwhile, the Voice of the People organisers are also heading to Congress to look for legislative backing – and legitimacy – for a part of their new plan. “We’re currently working on getting Congress to pass legislation that would create a national academy for a Citizen Cabinet at the national level,” Kull told IPS.

At the same time, funding remains an important concern, as it does today throughout Washington. Thus far, the initiative has benefited from generous funds from private donors, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Circle Foundation, but major ongoing economic concerns here will undoubtedly prove challenging to additional fundraising.

Three days into the partial shutdown of the federal government, foreign policy mavens are voicing growing concern about the closure’s impact on U.S. credibility overseas.

“This sends a message to allies that they’re somewhat on their own,” according to Richard Haass, a former senior diplomat and president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the New York-based think tank which has long been considered the leading institution of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

“It sends a message to adversaries, or would-be adversaries, that you’ve got a more unpredictable America,” he said in an interview featured on the CFR’s website in which he noted that the timing of the budgetary crisis, “coming on the heels of what happened and didn’t happen around Syria …reinforces the sense of American unpredictability.”

“Imagine if you had grown up anywhere else and knew America only from a distance,” sighed David Rothkopf, CEO of foreignpolicy.com in a long, woeful essay. “You may have heard of the country that led its allies to victories in two world wars. Or you may have heard of a country that was a Cold War adversary, an imperialist manipulator, a source of aid, a bully, but nonetheless a source of strength.

“Whatever the America you imagined,” he went on, “it was almost certainly not the one you see via the headlines today, a laughingstock a subject of scorn, and the inspiration not for hopes as before, but for such doubts as have never existed before.”

The immediate cause of this teeth-gnashing, of course, was the manoeuvre by a minority of Republicans in the House of Representatives associated with the extreme right-wing “Tea Party” movement – and the refusal thus far by the party’s leadership to rein them in — to hold hostage the funding of the federal government to their demands to delay or repeal a major health-care law, sometimes called “Obamacare”, approved by Congress three years ago.

The immediate result is that nearly a million “non-essential” federal workers are being furloughed pending passage of a “continuing resolution” that funds the government.

Among other things, that means the country’s national parks and museums are closed, while administrative and support services for most federal agencies, ranging from those that provide poor families with supplemental food allowances to others that work on national security, are severely short-staffed.

While active-duty members of the military are not affected, many of the Pentagon’s civilian employees have been sent home. Nearly three out of four of the vast intelligence community’s civilian workforce have also been furloughed, the director of national intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, told Congress Wednesday, prompting the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chair, Dianne Feinstein to call the shutdown “the biggest gift that we could possibly give our enemies.”

In strictly foreign-policy terms, the budget impasse is already having an impact. The State Department announced Wednesday that some U.S. contributions to U.N. and other international organisations, as well as peacekeeping operations, have been suspended. Similarly, the disbursement of funds used to buy military equipment and training for U.S. allies, including Israel, will be delayed.

The crisis is also disrupting the administration’s much-touted strategic “pivot” toward Asia.

The White House announced Wednesday that Malaysia and the Philippines – whose growing tensions with China over conflicting territorial claims in the South China Sea have given Washington a major opening – will be dropped from President Barack Obama’s scheduled trip to Southeast Asia next week. Just 12 hours later, it cancelled the rest of his trip – to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Bali, Indonesia, and the East Asia Summit in Brunei – and sent Secretary of State John Kerry in his place.

That marks the third time in as many years that domestic problems have prevented presidential visits to Asia.

“The U.S. government shutdown and President Obama’s decision to truncate his trip to Asia will not change facts on the ground overnight,” according to Michael Mazza, an Asia specialist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), writing on the ‘National Interest’ website Thursday before the surviving two legs of the trip were cancelled.

“They will, however, reinforce two related narratives that have gained purchase in the region: that the pivot is a slogan more than a policy and that the United States is becoming the ‘paper tiger’ that Mao Zedong once described. Those narratives may not be accurate, but in the realm of geopolitics, perceptions matter.”

While the shutdown is already disrupting normal government operations, and particularly the lives of the “non-essential” and their families, of greater concern is the possibility that the ongoing stand-off could continue through Oct. 17, the date on which, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the federal government will run out of cash, possibly sending the country into default for the first time in its history.

“In the event that a debt limit impasse were to lead to a default, it could have a catastrophic effect on not just financial markets, but also on job creation, consumer spending and economic growth,” according to a Treasury report issued Thursday, which said the impact “could last for more than a generation.”

That concern was echoed a few blocks away by the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde. “The government shutdown is bad enough, but failure to raise the debt ceiling would be far worse, and could very seriously damage not only the U.S. economy, but the entire global economy,” she warned.

Just the fact that such a possibility looms larger each day the shutdown continues is harming Washington’s credibility as a “great power”, according to the CFR’s Haass.

“We’ve reached the point now where the greatest threat to our national security, for the immediate and the foreseeable future, is not some other country or organisation; it’s increasingly our own political dysfunction,” he said.

That assessment was echoed in part by Rothkopf who put the “great lion’s share” of the blame for the current crisis on the Republican Party that most observers now see as increasingly incoherent and hostage to its most radical elements.

The “watching world doesn’t see the details…. How can they think anything but that this is a political system in extremis, a country likely in decline?” he asked, complaining of an absence of leadership on virtually every level, including the administration’s and Congress’ recent fumbling over whether to take military action against Syria.

Indeed, the current budget impasse and the great risks it carries if it continues too long should be instructive to those hawks who have long identified Washington’s “credibility” overseas with its readiness to use military force, according to Micah Zenko, a senior CFR fellow.

“For those who claimed that attacking Syria with cruise missiles was required to maintain U.S. credibility in the eyes of Iran’s Supreme Leader, doesn’t Capitol Hill’s behaviour over the past week do more to demonstrate America’s incompetence?” he noted this week on the cfr.org site.

“If the foundations of functioning governance are impossible at home, shouldn’t U.S. allies question America’s commitments to their security thousands of miles away?”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

A deadlocked U.S. Congress proved unable to settle budgetary differences late Monday evening, leading to a federal government shutdown that could soon be felt by foreign aid programmes and their recipients.

Tuesday was the start of the fiscal year in Washington, but polarised lawmakers have been unable to agree on how to fund the federal government in an era of austerity. As such, a vast but complex patchwork of federal government agencies and programmes has been forced to slow or shut down entirely."A shutdown starts to threaten the reliable, longer-term term relationship that is really central to a lot of the programmes that USAID undertakes.” --Lisa Schechtman of Water Aid America

Thus far, much of the focus here has been on the impact on domestic social spending – important food programmes for seniors, children and pregnant mothers, for instance, will be cut off completely – and on U.S. jobs. Indeed, one of the last moves President Barack Obama took on Monday was to sign into law an emergency measure to continue paying members of the U.S. military.

Members of the Foreign Service, however, will likely see impacts if the shutdown continues, as will programmes dependent on U.S. foreign aid.

“Internationally, the U.S. government will not be able to make any new contributions to agencies that deliver food aid and other services to poor and hungry people around the world, nor respond to new humanitarian emergencies. Over time, hungry people relying on U.S. aid will not receive food, and children will not receive inoculations against disease,” Rev. John L. McCullough, the president of Church World Service, an anti-poverty campaigner, said during a press call Monday.

“For decades Democrats and Republican alike have agreed on the vital importance of robust humanitarian and development assistance. But the myopia of some [lawmakers] and their unwillingness to compromise has eroded this consensus, literally taking away food from the mouths of hungry children.”

For the moment, U.S. officials have been quick to offer assurances that most U.S.-assisted development programming would not be affected by the shutdown, which formally began at midnight Monday night. But the complexity of U.S. federal programmes and their varying budgetary schedules means that it is impossible to offer an overarching analysis of the ramifications for USAID, the government’s main foreign aid arm.

“If the government shuts down, initially Department of State and USAID activities can be sustained on a limited basis for a short period of time,” Jen Psaki, a State Department spokesperson, told reporters Monday. “Because we’re able to sustain our operations on a limited basis, the vast majority of normal functions and operations will continue.”

Psaki was unable to say whether this “short period” meant additional funding periods of days, weeks or months, however, noting only that the State Department’s budget analysts were “still punching through” the fallout.

Loss of confidence

But it is clear that U.S. assistance will begin to feel shutdown-related economic pinches – or worse – if lawmakers are not able to reopen the government in the near term. The first to be impacted would likely be some of the development programmes that receive funding in just one-year durations.

According to guidance put out on Friday by USAID, the agency says it plans to “continue as many normal operations as possible … until all appropriated balances are insufficient to continue.” For many programmes, that will mean until funding for the past fiscal year is finished.

Even before that point, humanitarian and assistance programmes will feel strains. During the shutdown, new programmes will be unable to begin, new personnel will not be hired, and even unplanned travel by U.S. officials will be barred.

Further, there are already very real long-term negative implications for the stability and confidence often required for the intricate associations required for modern development programmes to succeed.

“Our biggest concern right now is the loss of confidence and predictability in ongoing U.S. government relationships with partner governments in poor countries,” Lisa Schechtman, head of policy and advocacy at Water Aid America, a development group, told IPS.

“For instance, to implement a successful sanitation programme requires a relatively long-term investment to actually change community behaviour. A shutdown starts to threaten the reliable, longer-term term relationship that is really central to a lot of the programmes that USAID undertakes.”

Further, as fiscal disagreement continues in Washington, Schechtman notes that foreign assistance – although constituting less than 1 percent of the overall budget – will remain increasingly vulnerable to cuts.

“The challenge is that USAID is often disproportionately targeted in budget negotiations, with members of Congress viewing USAID’s work as a good place to start when trying to save money,” she says.

“[Foreign assistance] appropriations are already lacking in comfortable funding levels, which means that their staying power is not as long as we would like. That’s not just about the U.S. government missing opportunities, but also translates into impacts on human lives around the world.”

Protracted disagreement

Although political pressures are quickly growing on lawmakers to arrive at a funding solution to re-open the federal government, the current situation could drag on longer than some have previously suggested.

Despite new moves towards negotiation on Tuesday, there is remarkably little overlap in the negotiating stances adopted by Republicans and Democrats. Thus, unlike previous shutdowns of the federal government (the last took place in the mid-1990s), today’s political positioning appears to offer remarkably little room for eventual compromise.

At the centre of the conservative stance is a demand to halt or dismantle new health-care legislation that also went into effect Tuesday and would require that nearly all U.S. citizens receive some sort of health coverage. Yet that stipulation is a nonstarter for Democrats, particularly for President Barack Obama, for whom the health-care law is considered a signature achievement.

The health-care debate is actually a central part of a much broader disagreement, however, over the size and sustainability of U.S. debt, an issue that has become a key mobilisation tool for conservative Republicans. This spring, a similar stalemate in Congress led to automatic budget cuts of an estimated 3 to 8 percent for every federal government agency, USAID included.

It’s important to note, then, that any hiccup in foreign assistance delivery from the current shutdown would be coming on top of those broader cuts. Further, unless politicians are able to agree to a long-term spending deal, another round of these across-the-board budget cuts are due in the spring and each year for the next decade.

These ramifications are already being felt. This year’s automatic cuts, for instance, could shrink global health spending at the State Department and USAID by almost a half-billion dollars this year alone.