American decency and immigration

Echo opinion about American immigration published in Winston-Salem Journal and originally printed in the Washington Post.

In Maine Writer opinion, thousands of immigrants who risk their lives to walk from South America, Central America and thru Mexico to enter the U.S., are economic refugees. 

Check this documentary:  Define American

George F. Will: The sincerest form of flattery

WASHINGTON, DC — Immigration, a wit has said, is the sincerest form of flattery. This dispirited nation needs some of that, so President Joe Biden has wisely made immigration reform his initial legislative proposal.

The nation also needs a healthy opposition party, and the impending immigration debate will give the Republican Party an early opportunity to rehabilitate its reputation by adopting policies unlike those of Biden's predecessor, who propelled his ascent to the presidency by stoking anxieties about immigration. Congressional Republicans will have to choose between aligning with the animosity of constituents who misunderstand how this nation has prospered by assimilating 100 million immigrants, or with the generosity of the United States' majority.

David J. Bier and Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute report that, for the first time in Gallup's 55 years of polling on the subject, "more Americans support increasing immigration than decreasing it."

Support for decreasing it has plummeted from 50% in 2009 to 28% today. Last year, 77% called immigration "a good thing," and a similar majority today favor a path to citizenship for "dreamers," those who were under 16 when brought here before 2007 by parents who were not lawful residents.

About 40% of unauthorized immigrants came not through porous borders but on visas they overstayed. Of the approximately 11 million (down from 12.3 million in 2007), 62% have lived here at least 10 years, 21% at least 20 years. Of the more than 5 million children under age 18, living with at least one unauthorized immigrant parent, more than 4 million, having been born here, are citizens. The 11 million are not going home. They are home. And Americans' decency would prevent the police measures necessary to extract them from their communities.

Biden's predecessor said "our country is full," although there are 145 countries and territories with greater population densities. 

In fact, two-thirds of Americans live in cities that occupy 3.5% of the land. In 80% of America's counties, the number of prime-age workers (25-54) declined between 2007 and 2017. As a candidate, Biden proposed "a new visa category to allow cities and counties to petition for higher levels of immigrants" for economic reasons.

Bier and Nowrasteh report that America's per capita immigration rate today is "as close to zero as it has ever been." 

Moreover, the nation now has a declining birth rate and an aging population that is retiring, at a rate of 10,000 a day, into Social Security and Medicare systems that are unsustainable without a workforce replenished by immigrants. 

Furthermore, a steady influx of immigrants will enable the U.S. economy to regain, late in this century, its place as the world's largest economy as China's workforce shrinks, a debilitating echo of the 1980-2016 one-child policy.

The debate about immigration that President Biden is reigniting, and especially his proposed path to citizenship for the 11 million, implicates the nation's understanding of itself. And it will roil a dark current of 21st-century politics, concerning which some 19th-century history is germane.

The years 1845-1855 produced the largest single-decade increase in the foreign-born percentage of the U.S. population. Three million immigrants arrived in a nation whose population was 23 million — the equivalent of 42 million arriving between 2000 and 2010, when 14 million actually did. In 1858, when Abraham Lincoln said that half the Americans then living were born elsewhere, immigrants were one-third of the approximately 9,400 residents of Springfield, Ill.

Seven years later, Lincoln was buried there after a nation-saving Civil War victory that had been substantially aided by immigrant soldiers. "There are those damned green flags again," said Confederate Gen. George Pickett as he watched an Irish unit prepare to attack. Ireland's potato famine helped to doom the Confederacy. Recruiting posters were printed in foreign languages, and the 1862 Homestead Act was publicized around the world to attract immigrants, 800,000 of whom came during the war. 

Historian Jay Sexton in "A Nation Forged by Crisis" says about 25% of Union soldiers and 40% of seamen were foreign-born. Union officials cast the war as an episode in a larger struggle for republican government, here and elsewhere, thereby, Sexton says, "decoupling the idea of the nation from Anglo-Saxon Protestantism."

Today, anti-immigration sentiment is disproportionately concentrated among recent Republican voters who are timid nationalists dismayed by the decoupling of the nation from their conceptions of it. Strangely, they fear that the United States cannot be itself if it is as welcoming to immigrants as it was when they were making the United States the success that it is.

Donald Trump in lock step conflict with intel community ~ why?

David Ignatius: Another step closer to the abyss (and an Ignatius perspective on why Trump is determined to protect himself, rather than the Constitution he swore to uphold and protect.)  Trump's war with the inteligence community probably has an alternate motive.

(In Maine Writer lingo ~ what has happened to America?)

An echo opinion published in the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina.

Donald Trump will violate laws and ignore the Constitution for the purpose of saving himself from accountability. In so doing, his failed leadership is taking all Americans into a political abyss from which we may need decades to recover.

Wrote David Ignatius: What Donald Trump did Wednesday to John Brennan isn’t supposed to happen in a democracy. A president who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution carried out a personal political vendetta against a career intelligence officer.

In revoking the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan, Trump took another step toward the abyss. He cited the “risk posed by [Brennan’s] erratic conduct and behavior,” a ludicrous charge coming from our unguided missile of a chief executive.

Brennan’s real crime is that he has been in Trump’s face nearly every day, trading insults on Twitter and cable television* (!). Brennan has taken to using words such as “high crimes and misdemeanors” and “nothing short of treasonous” to describe Trump’s behavior, and likened him to convicted fraudster Bernie Madoff. Stripping Brennan’s clearance was presidential payback, dressed up in national security language.

I wrote back in January that I wished Brennan and other former intelligence chiefs would resist slugging it out with Trump — not because their criticisms are wrong but because they risked tarnishing the credibility and professionalism of their agencies. As I argued, Trump supporters would “fume that the spy chiefs are ganging up on the populist president. Conspiracy theories about an imaginary ‘deep state’ will gain more traction, and the cycle of national mistrust will get worse.”

But let’s be honest: Brennan isn’t a guy who was going to back down in a bar fight, any more than Trump. He’s tough and stubborn, with a chip on his shoulder. He’s a guy who, if you write five positive things about him and one negative, remembers only the negative. Once Trump insulted Brennan’s integrity, as he did after he won the presidency, these two were going to end up in a cockfight.

The prevailing media explanation of the Brennan move was that Trump was trying to distract public attention from Omarosa Manigault Newman, a disaffected former staffer who just published a tell-all book about the president titled “Unhinged.” But I wonder if that was the real Brennan trigger.

Trump himself offered a clearer (and more damning) explanation in an interview Wednesday with the Wall Street Journal, suggesting that he punished Brennan because he was one of the original instigators of the investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. “I call it the rigged witch hunt, [it] is a sham. And these people led it! So I think it’s something that had to be done.”

With Trump, you always have to question what’s rubbing him so raw and driving him toward possibly illegal and unconstitutional actions. As prosecutors like to say: “We may not know what he’s done wrong, but he does.” Does a warped protective impulse drive Trump into these furies of defensive action?

With James B. Comey, ground zero may have been the briefing given by the then-FBI director to the president-elect in January, detailing the salacious sexual allegations contained in a now-famous (but unconfirmed) dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and funded partly by lawyers representing the Hillary Clinton campaign. Trump brought up this sleazy evidence repeatedly afterward and reportedly pressed Comey for a pledge of personal loyalty. When Trump didn’t get it, he fired his FBI director and, in a television interview, blamed it on Comey’s pursuit of the Russia investigation.

Brennan poses a similar challenge for Trump. It’s not that Brennan embodies the “deep state.” In truth, he disliked a CIA operations culture that he felt had rejected him as a young officer; while his modernization efforts at the CIA had supporters, I’d bet that many at the agency were relieved to see him go.

What was so threatening about the former CIA chief? Beyond Brennan’s sheer cussedness, I’d guess that Trump was frightened — and remains so to this day — about just how much Brennan knows about his secrets. And by that, I don’t just mean his dealings with Russian oligarchs and presidents, but the way he moved through a world of fixers, flatterers and money launderers.

Brennan, like Comey, was there at the beginning of this investigation. Trump must have asked himself: What does Brennan know? What did he learn from the CIA’s deep assets in Moscow, and from liaison partners such as Britain, Israel, Germany and the Netherlands? Does Trump think Brennan will be a less credible witness without a security clearance?

The Brennan episode is just one more warning of what may be ahead. Trump appears ready to take our country over the waterfall to save himself. Before it’s too late, Trump should realize: Even in his rage, he can’t fire everybody.

*MaineWriter opinion- I can't imagine John Brennan taking on such aggressive behavior without having a deep understanding about how Donald Trump is in collusion with Russia.

Medicaid expansion working in Republican and Democratic states

Winston-Salem Journal editorial ~ echo 

“Claims are not well founded that Medicaid expansion will cost states considerably more than what objective analysts project,” Mark Hall, a law and public health professor at Wake Forest University, said in a recently completed study, the Journal’s Richard Craver reported on Tuesday.

“Objective analysts” is a phrase that seems to have been missing as the Republican-led state legislature rejected opportunities to expand Medicaid, beginning in 2009.

“Instead,” Hall continues, “those claims are based on sources that are either incomplete, inaccurate, misleading, or out of date in various ways.”

Hall’s study is titled “Do states regret expanding Medicaid?” Spoiler alert: the answer is “no.”

Several red states were also reluctant at first, but over time, they have come around, including some with Republican governors or legislatures, like Arkansas, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, North Dakota and New Hampshire, according to Hall’s report. They express a desire to continue with the program.

N.C. state legislators have resisted calls to expand Medicaid coverage with federal funding initiatives since the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, first offered to pay 90 percent of the costs for the program. Their excuse was that they couldn’t count on the federal government to pay its large portion of the cost.

But that claim seemed dubious from the start. The federal government isn’t known for skipping out on its bills. Many suspected that legislators were motivated more by their reluctance to cooperate with President Obama or let the ACA gain a foothold.

Even if their concern were legitimate, with five years of data on which to draw, Hall writes, “The strong balance of objective evidence indicates that actual costs to states so far from expanding Medicaid are negligible or minor, and that states across the political spectrum do not regret their decisions to expand Medicaid.”

Medicaid enrollment in North Carolina is projected to be at 2.14 million by June 30, representing about 21 percent of the state population, according to a N.C. Department of Health and Human Services report. Another 500,000 North Carolinians could become eligible, if legislators finally dropped their recalcitrance and agreed.

North Carolina has given up billions of federal dollars that could have been used to improve and maintain the health of low-income residents. Gov. Roy Cooper and health-care advocates have urged the legislature for years to expand the program to help the eligible who otherwise have no access to health-care coverage. 

There’s no acceptable reason not to do so now.