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The Spokesman-Review has endorsed candidates for more than 70 years. Our endorsements reflect the publishers views and are made independently of news coverage.

Over the decades, publishers have shifted from solidly Republican to a more centrist, pragmatic and pro-business view, prioritizing candidates and policies that would best serve the Inland Northwest.

As both major political parties have retreated to extremes in recent years, finding such candidates has become increasingly difficult. This years gubernatorial and presidential races exemplify that challenge. There are no ideal candidates among the serious contenders.

Therefore, with significant misgivings on both counts, we recommend voters re-elect Washingtons Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee and Republican President Donald Trump.

Its been nearly 50 years since Washingtonians elected a governor to a third term, but given the state Republican Partys inability to field a strong candidate in this years race, Gov. Jay Inslee should get one.

Theres a lot to worry about with another Inslee term, not least that the governor has seemed more focused on national and global issues than on the issues hitting his own state the hardest. He has spent more time running for president and railing against climate change than addressing homelessness, a far more critical concern to the state.

The distracted governor also remains oblivious to big and small business concerns outside the Puget Sound, especially agricultural industries.

He is beholden to public employee unions and an opponent of education reform and accountability.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Inslee led by executive order far longer than necessary rather than work with lawmakers. On his watch, the Washington Employment Security Department flailed and got ripped off by scammers.

Despite all that, hes the better choice. Republican Loren Culp is token opposition. Hes the police chief in Republic (population: 1,105) who made a name for himself fighting regulations on firearms. Thats not the rsum of a governor.

Inslee offers deep experience working on state policy and executive leadership skills. Washington at least knows what its getting with him.

Donald Trump is a bully and a bigot. He is symptomatic of a widening partisan divide in the country. We recommend voting for him anyway because the policies that Joe Biden and his progressive supporters would impose on the nation would be worse.

The list of Trumps offenses is long. He panders to racists and prevents sensible immigration reform in a nation built on immigrant labor and intellect. He tweets conspiracy theories. Hes cavalier about COVID-19 and has led poorly through the pandemic. He seeks to dismantle the Affordable Care Act without proposing a replacement. He denies climate change.

Voters knew his character in 2016 and elected him anyway. Four years later, the nation is still standing. Indeed, in many ways it flourished until the pandemic upended everything.

The economy and markets roared under Trumps championship of market-based solutions and individualism. Unemployment among communities of color reached record lows. He reset trade and diplomatic relationships in Americas favor. He provided historically high support for traditionally Black colleges. He rolled back extreme environmental regulations and led the way for U.S. energy independence. He backed federal sentencing reform to address inordinately high American incarceration rates. And hes committed to supporting law and order in American cities.

Biden might win on personality and comity, but his policies would strike at the economic well-being of the country. He favors massive growth in government and a historic increase in federal spending through green initiatives, free health services, free education and other ideas grounded in reliance on the state as savior rather than creating an environment in which individual liberty and hard work can thrive. Public employee unions would hold outsized power and demand greater spending.

To afford it all, Biden and a Democrat-controlled Congress would have to impose unprecedented tax increases or accept catastrophic deficit spending.

Taxes and spending likely would increase under Trump, too, but the nation stands a better chance of moderation and reform with him in the White House than it does with Biden pushed left by progressives intent on reshaping America to fit their fantastical vision.

This is an election that pits a wretched human being whose policies and instincts for helping America thrive are generally correct against a doddering, doting uncle who would hand out gifts the nation cant afford in order to win peoples love. Given that choice, economic policy and principle should prevail. Vote for Donald Trump.

Read the rest here:
Editorial: With misgivings, vote Trump for president and Inslee for governor - The Spokesman-Review

Republicans are to blame. Democrats are to blame. All are to blame, as for decades presidents, Congress and government bureaucrats have employed one Band-aid approach after another to try and fix the problem without any real comprehensive, sustainable effort that has a legitimate chance to succeed.

Obama became known as the king of deportations for the number that happened under his watch. Trump promised to build a wall to keep the illegal immigrants out, though that has not happened on the sort of scale he proposed. Congress, well who knows what a divided Congress wants to do?

Meanwhile millions of illegal immigrants live in fear of what may eventually happen to them, even as entire industries are built on having those same immigrants available to perform duties essential to the nations economy. On the one hand, in our public schools we educate children here illegally with their families to prepare them to be productive adults, while on the other we threaten to deport those same children with their families, and make any pathway to citizenship extremely difficult.

Controlling immigration was one of the bedrock issues of Trumps winning campaign four years ago but has little profile this year, having been pushed aside by a pandemic and national economic concerns and perhaps downplayed because it now is obvious there are no simple solutions to the problem, which is easier to address with heated rhetoric than workable policy.

On the core issues of the immigration debate, are we closer to a long-term solution than we were four years ago? It is hard to say that we are.

As a nation, we cant even agree on whether those in the country illegally should be counted in the Census that is done every 10 years. The Trump administration said not to do so, the courts said differently, and still the question of whether those who were counted will ultimately be included in the Census totals used for allocations of political representation are unresolved.

If they are not included, states like California and Texas, with high numbers of illegal residents, will lose congressional seats, while others will gain representation. Those same numbers will then filter down to state and local apportionment processes, so that communities with sizeable illegal populations will lose political clout, and the access to funding for government programs that goes with it. Gainesville certainly has something to lose in the Census number debate.

The full scope of the immigration problem is one that has plagued presidents of both parties for years, predating Trump, predating Obama. It is an issue that demands big-picture thinking and coalition building leadership, replete with human compassion and economic common sense. That sort of political leadership has sadly been lacking at the top levels of government for a long time.

Immigration reform is not at the forefront of this years presidential campaign, nor should it be until we have found a way to get the pandemic under control and the economy on the right path. But the need for action is still very much there.

And it doesnt matter who built the cages, as long as they are never used for the same purpose again.

Read the rest here:
Opinion: We still need immigration solutions - Gainesville Times

Joe Biden also blasted President Trump over a new report that lawyers cannot find the parents of 545 migrant children separated from their families under the Trump administration, saying, its criminal.By Versha Sharma

Published on 10/23/2020 at 1:17 AM

President Trump at the final presidential debate on October 22, 2020 in Tennessee. (Getty Images)

President Trump at the final presidential debate on October 22, 2020 in Tennessee. (Getty Images)

At the final presidential debate before voting concludes on November 3, President Trump deflected blame when pressed about his administration effectively orphaning 545 migrant children, falsely claiming they came to the U.S. with coyotes and cartels, and claimed only undocumented immigrants with the lowest IQ, they might come back to attend their immigration hearings.

Moderator Kristen Welker asked President Trump Thursday night about a disturbing report released Wednesday that said lawyers could not find the parents of 545 migrant children who were separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mr. President, your administration separated children from their parents at the border, at least 4,000 kids. Youve since reversed your zero tolerance policy. But the United States cant locate the parents of more than 500 children. So how will these families ever be reunited? Welker asked.

Trump responded that the children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, during the debate, and immigrant rights groups on Twitter immediately fact-checked his claim.

Coyotes didn't bring them over. Their parents were with them, Biden said in his rebuttal. They got separated from their parents and it makes us a laughingstock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation.

Biden continued, regarding migrant parents: Their kids were ripped from their arms and separated, and now they cannot find over 500 of sets of those parents. And those kids are alone. Nowhere to go, nowhere to go. It's criminal. It's criminal.

On the topic of immigration, Trump went on to make an appalling claim that only people with the lowest IQ might show up for their scheduled immigration court hearings.

He was talking about the catch and release policy, which allows undocumented migrants who are intercepted at the border to stay in the U.S. while they wait for hearings on their cases.

We have to send ICE out and Border Patrol out to find them. We would say come back in two years, three years, were going to give you a court case, you need Perry Masonwhen you say they come back, they dont come back, Joe. They never come back. Only the really.... Trump drew the last word out, before stopping himself and then saying, I hate to say this, but those with the lowest IQ, they might come back.

Biden was visibly dismayed by the comment, closing his eyes and shaking his head in response before Welker asked that they move on.

Trump claimed that less than 1% of immigrants in these cases show up for their court hearings, which is not true. A majority attend their hearings; Politifact says around 60-75% of non-detained migrants attend their immigration court proceedings.

Journalists and immigrant rights advocates on Twitter were quick to point out the appalling and blatant racism in Trumps claim:

Lawyers appointed by a federal judge to search for the parents of the separated children have yet to track down the parents of 545 children, and about "two-thirds of [them] are believed to be in their respective countries of origin, according to a court filing Tuesday by ACLU and Department of Justice officials.

Though Welker said Trump ended his zero tolerance policy, reporters have noted that family separation has continued in 2020, with the administration using the COVID-19 pandemic as a cover.

At the debate, Trump tried to pivot away from the story and kept accusing Biden of having a role in the Obama administration building the cages that Trump has used for family detention, in often miserable conditions. Obama administration officials have said in the past that they built detention centers in order to house an influx of migrants, including unaccompanied teenagersbut they did not use them to cage children forcibly separated from their parents by the U.S. government.

As NPR noted, theres one key difference between the two policies: the Obama administration detained apprehended immigrant children with their parents, while the Trump administration separated children from their parents, which is what Welker was asking about at the debate Thursday night.

Trump also tried to defend family separation and the detention of children by saying they were well taken care of in these facilities, though human rights organizations have published reports on the dismal conditions at many ICE detention centers.

Welker also pressed Biden on his time in the Obama administration and their record on immigration reform. Biden acknowledged, We made a mistake. It took too long to get it right.

He continued: Ill be president of the United States, not vice president of the United States. And the fact is, Ive made it very clear within 100 days, Im going to send to the United States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people. All of those so-called DREAMers, those DACA kids, theyre going to be immediately certified again, to be able to stay in this country and put on a path to citizenship.

In a contrast with Trumps frequent depiction of immigrants as rapists and criminals, Biden said, Many of them are model citizens. Over 20,000 of them are first responders out there taking care of people. During this crisis, we owe them. We owe them.

There was a record number of deportations under Obamaso much so that immigration reform advocates called him the deporter-in-chief. Many of those advocates praised Biden for owning up to the mistakes.

Read more:
Trump Claims Only Immigrants With The Lowest IQ Show Up For Court Hearings In Appalling Debate Rant - NowThis

The political debate over what U.S. policy should be on undocumented immigrants has been heated for decades. The temperature went down for a short period as there was some bipartisan discussion on comprehensive immigration reform, which may have included a path to citizenship.

But the Trump administration has focused on harsher actions on the undocumented, and thousands of DACA recipients remain in limbo despite a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Changing Hands Bookstore

Michelle Malonzo with the book "The Undocumented Americans" by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.

As part of our Page Turners series on important books to read, The Show spoke with Michelle Malonzo of Changing Hands Bookstore about one she is passionate about. Its called "The Undocumented Americans" by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.

The conversation began by talking about whether the authors own experience of having support and benefactors in her immigration process made her want to tell the stories of others who havent been as fortunate.

Go here to see the original:
Page Turner: 'The Undocumented Americans' - KJZZ

The fates of thousands of immigrants and refugees hinge on the presidential election, as President Donald Trump looks to continue his rollback of programs that admit or legally protect foreigners in America.

Joe Biden, in contrast, pledges to dramatically increase refugee resettlement and unwind Trump's efforts to end policies for immigrants to live and work lawfully in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and to end a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The Democratic nominee says he would end Trump's policies "to drastically restrict access to asylum in the U.S." and overturn the president's travel ban affecting Somalia and other Muslim-majority countries.

Khalid Omar lamented that his brother cannot immigrate from Kenya because he has a Somali passport.

"These are the kinds of issues that are very important to our community this year," said Omar, a senior organizer with Muslim Coalition of Faith in Minnesota. "We can change the outcomes if we all go out and claim our voices."

He spoke moments after he helped hang a sign that said, "We Make Minnesota Better off Together" by the Cedar Cultural Center, where faith and community leaders held an event this month to encourage voting.

In his appeals to Minnesotans, Trump has focused most prominently on refugees. The president said during a September rally in Bemidji that Biden planned "to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet. Your state will be overrun and destroyed."

Weeks later, Trump announced that he was limiting refugee arrivals over the next year to 15,000, the fewest in the program's 40-year history. He has steadily dropped the number since taking office, following a yearly average of 95,000 established by presidents of both parties.

Trump's campaign also began running an ad in Minnesota and elsewhere bashing Biden's plans amid a pandemic for "increasing refugees by 700% from the most unstable, vulnerable, dangerous parts of the world." Biden has pledged to raise the refugee admissions ceiling to 125,000 15,000 more than President Barack Obama had authorized before leaving office.

The president's approach has some support in Minnesota, where Beltrami County commissioners voted in January against allowing refugee resettlement. And in recent years, amid tensions between whites and Somali newcomers in St. Cloud, several political candidates called for a pause on refugee resettlement.

"My position consistently has been that the refugee resettlement program is broken and until it is fixed, we should not be bringing hundreds of thousands of refugees which the country is not prepared to assimilate," said John Palmer, who lost his bid for the St. Cloud City Council in 2018 with 43% of the vote.

Trump's election, he said, "gave us a breathing space." For nearly 20 years, he added, "no one of any political persuasion is taking time to put that program in order so that the refugees that need to be resettled in the U.S. will come to a setting in which we can do what we need to for them."

Advocates say the entire refugee program depends on the election.

"The contrast couldn't be starker and the stakes couldn't be higher," said Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a refugee resettlement agency. "Four more years of a Trump administration would presumably be the death knell for the refugee program."

With Biden's plan to raise the ceiling, Vignarajah said, "we're talking about hundreds of thousands of lives the U.S. could be saving."

If Biden prevails in the election, resettlement agencies would need time to restore their capacities after several years of cutbacks and closures under Trump.

The bulk of the Somali diaspora settled in Minnesota in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Trump has repeatedly singled out people from Somalia in his criticism of refugees. During Trump's first three years in office, Minnesota took in just 541 Somali refugees. That compares to 3,499 during the previous three years under Obama. The state's largest refugee groups now are Congolese and Karen migrants from Myanmar.

"Every election year, there is a playbook used by some politicians," said Imam Hassan Jama, executive director of the Islamic Association of North America, during a recent gathering of faith leaders in Cedar-Riverside. "The playbook is to use Muslims, Somalis refugees and immigrants, as scapegoats in order to divide people by what they look like or where they came from instead of offering solutions that could help all of our families."

Daisy Kabaka, a member of the Minnesota Immigration Rights Action Committee (MIRAC), pointed out that the Trump administration has made it harder for new arrivals to win asylum cases and wants to charge them fees for applying, though many claiming persecution in their homelands arrived here with nothing. Kabaka noted that the administration also requires participants in the DACA program, which grants temporary protections for unauthorized immigrants who arrived as children, to renew their status for a year instead of two, while it reviews a Supreme Court ruling that found flaws in how the administration tried to end the program.

Kabaka questions whether immigrants will fare better under Biden, however. Kabaka said Obama enacted DACA in 2012 only after immigrants took initiative, including through hunger strikes, and that he was considered the "deporter in chief" because he sent more people back to their homelands than either the Trump or George W. Bush administrations.

"Just because there's a Democratic president in office, that doesn't necessarily make immigrants feel any better," Kabaka said.

After the Supreme Court ruling in June, Trump said he would try again to end DACA, and the administration has stopped accepting new applications. Biden said he'll make the program permanent on "day one" if elected.

Carolina Ortiz is a DACA recipient working to get out the vote this year, though she cannot vote herself. She's communications director of COPAL (Communities Organizing Latinx Power and Action), a Latino grassroots organization.

"I feel like I'm sleeping and breathing and everything, 'Vote, vote, vote,' but I feel like it is because I can't vote that I need to encourage people who can vote to be my voice and the voice of people like myself that have DACA," said Ortiz, a Mexican immigrant.

After months of phone banking in the Latino community, she said the organization has secured over 15,000 pledges to vote.

Those with Temporary Protected Status face uncertainty after the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently sided with the Trump administration decision to rescind rules allowing citizens of some countries facing natural disasters or armed conflict to live and work here legally. If that holds, TPS holders from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan would lose their legal status next year. TPS designations have been renewed under Republican and Democratic administrations alike for many years, but the Trump administration argues that the program was always temporary.

The Biden campaign has said he will protect TPS holders and offer them a path to citizenship through immigration reform measures.

Continue reading here:
Presidential election weighs heavily on Minnesota immigrants, 'dreamers' and refugees - Minneapolis Star Tribune