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Congressman Fred Upton is hoping legislation intended to ease the labor shortage faced by farmers each year could eventually lead to immigration reform. He tells WSJM News the House this month passed his Farm Workforce Modernization Act. It establishes a program that enables migrant farm workers to get legal status in the U.S. if they commit to five years of farm work and pass background checks.

And if they complete that five years, theyre able to go and become a citizen, they go to the end of the line, but thats an option for them if they choose later on, Upton said.

Upton says migrant workers are desperately needed by farmers.

A good number of our growers have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars almost every growing season because they did not have the workforce, the migrant labor that we need.

Upton says he hears from southwest Michigan farmers all of the time about the issue. He tells us the large approval margin received by the legislation in the House could hopefully get it some attention in the Senate, leading to final passage.

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Legislation Would Create Incentive For Migrant Farm Workers - News/Talk 94.9 WSJM

Teenager Greta Thunberg and countless other Gen-Zers are leading the way in the causes they care about.

Hundreds of people, mainly students, attend the speech by the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg ... [+] during the ''Friday for the future'' event against climate change, in Piazza Castello on December 13 in Turin, Italy. (Photo by Massimiliano Ferraro/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

They may be kids, but Generation-Z is rocking the world with their activism around gun control, immigration reform, and other causes. Now, 16-year-oldGreta Thunberg of Sweden is the youngest individual ever named Times 2019 Person of the Yearan earthshaking nod to her worldwide climate-change youth movement.

With a do-or-die dedication to her mission, Thunberg is not aloneamong her generation. She hasinspired hundreds of thousands of young people toparticipate in climate strikes, demonstrably influencingworld leaderslike noone before themin their call for transformative and urgent change.

Whether you support Thunbergs views and tactics or not, theres nodenying that she and her Gen-Z peersare a force to be reckoned with. Theyrenottryingto change the world; theyrealready doing it and, inmany cases, theyre leading the way. Here arethree key reasons why.

Bottom line: dont underestimate Generation-Z and the passionate commitment they bring to the problems our world faces. They are prepared to stand up for what they believe in, regardless of the cost. And meeting these global-scale challenges head on, as Thunberg and her generation are already doing, will call out every ounce of their tremendous potential.

Originally posted here:
Gen Z Is Already Changing The World. Just Ask Times 2019 Person Of The Year - Forbes

We cant reckon with the extreme inequalities and inherent injustices of immigration policy without an analysis of how borders, the state and capitalism function to create them.

Current liberal immigration news is often centered on reducing current harm resisting Trumps border wall and expansion of concentration camps, advocating for immigration reform and countering attacks on the asylum process. All of these efforts are critical to preventing more unnecessary death and suffering and should not be dismissed. We need more of them.

However, if we truly want to live in a world that is equal, just and inclusive to all, a more honest conversation is required about the politics of borders and migration.

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In order to understand immigration policy, it is important to acknowledge that we live in a world of global apartheid propped up by borders and nation states that exist to protect capital and territory, and restrict mobility. Border militarization is necessary in global capitalism in order to maintain a system of resource and labor exploitation that persists among nations, particularly in the NorthSouth Divide.

Nandita Sharma a professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii in Mnoa and an activist in feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and the autonomous worldwide No Borders movement told Truthout: Every immigration policy is designed to exclude. You can fine-tune it but at the end of the day, who are we to decide who gets to move and who doesnt get to move who gets to live and who gets to die?

Immigration policies will never be just or fair. Lets break it down.

For almost a century after the Declaration of Independence was signed, the United States had open borders. Restrictive immigration laws did not exist in the U.S. until 1875 when the Page Act was signed, which primarily targeted unfree Chinese laborers, or coolies, and women brought for lewd and immoral purposes.

The Page Act was a precursor to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which dramatically shifted immigration policy and laid the foundation for more restrictive mobility laws, and the U.S. grew into the contemporary nation state we know today.

There is a debate on what is meant by the nation state and when it emerged historically, but all states want to control peoples mobility, Sharma told Truthout. Nation states control mobility by preventing people from entering. They tend to be less concerned with people leaving.

The border controls migration materially and in our mind. It exists in one place and yet, the border is everywhere and is constantly shifting, said Marisa Holmes an activist filmmaker, graduate student at Rutgers University, and organizer with the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council (MACC) in New York City in an interview with Truthout. In other words, the border is pervasive, making its way into everyday life even well within the confines of the country: It exists at Border Patrol checkpoints, as agents on New York busses, ICE raids in Mississippi, migrant detention facilities in Philadelphia.

Alejandra Pablos an immigrant rights and reproductive justice organizer and a member of the migrant justice group Mijente told Truthout that in Arizona, its super militarized.

Theres always police, added Pablos, who has been in deportation proceedings since 2011. Theres always check points. Theres always soldiers.

With her Mexican passport, a paper that lets you cross borders, Pablos said she can travel easily into Mexico from Arizona, but she can just never come back again to this side of the wall.

According to Roberto Lovato, a writer and journalist working out of the San Francisco Writers Grotto who has worked or reported on Central American refugee issues for almost 30 years, the border is an illusion, a deadly, murderous, memory-destroying thing.

To create a border, states have to destroy the memory of what came before it.

Many of the memories destroyed by borders have to do with connection. Borders separate and rank people, helping to create and solidify hierarchies of identity. The creation of identities is woven into the fabric of national laws and ideology, and those laws and ideologies reinforce which identities belong (white, male, heterosexual, Christian), and which do not.

Nationalism is an ideology that legitimizes the idea of the nation and organizes a political community on that basis, said Sharma.

Whiteness is a sociopolitical construct, an American lie, as James Baldwin called it, that was created because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation.

It is in The Naturalization Act of 1790, which stated that any alien, being a free white person, could apply for citizenship as long as they lived in the U.S. for two years and in the state where they filed for at least one year.

Whiteness has evolved in the U.S. over time and is inextricably attached to power and labor. It was essentially an adjective for the ruling class, said Sharma.

Whiteness, nationalism and immigration controls are systems of exclusion and hierarchy that the ruling class uses to maintain power. Solidarity among workers is fractured both within the state and across borders, as people imagine themselves to be divided by races and nations.

It is a strategy to dupe this part of the working class into thinking they were something other than working class people, Sharma added. That portion [which] imagines themselves as white continually falls for it over and over again.

Leftist migration scholars and activists point to two common misconceptions of the border. The first is that a wall, borders, or even the entire Department of Homeland Security can stop people from migrating when they need to move. All evidence and studies on this show that tougher immigration policies do not deter people from migrating.

The second, perhaps bigger fallacy according to Sharma, is believing that immigration controls are meant to stop people from entering. Theyre designed to weaken them once they get in, said Sharma. The whole system from start to finish is one that makes money off of all of this misery.

Billions have been spent on border enforcement, migrant detention and surveillance. From detention camp contractors like CoreCivic and the GEO Group to tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Dell, and data-mining companies such as Palantir, who all contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to the staffing of nearly 20,000 Border Patrol agents whose salaries start just above $55,000, to the private prison firms who lobby Republicans, the list of who profits from migration policing and surveillance goes on and on.

For Pablos, borders and capitalism go hand in hand. Were reproducing global mass displacement through our capitalism, said Pablos, who spoke about how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) fueled migration. Meanwhile, the criminalization of migrants ensures that at the same time, capitalism thrives.

Capitalists also profit off of those who make it across the border. When you have 11 million people with no legal status, who risked their lives to get here, who spent their life savings or went into debt in the process, you create a labor pool that is vulnerable, cheap and exploitable.

Trump himself has historically benefitted from undocumented labor and even admitted this is a common hiring practice among employers as a way that people did business.

A cutoff of undocumented labor could well cause a recession and lead the economy to contract.

Entire sectors of the American economy would effectively cease to exist were it not for undocumented immigrants, Sharma said.

Transcending borders and nation states is a revolutionary project. The institutions that sustain them will not be taken down by politicians in our current political system, no matter how progressive that person may be, although the most left candidate might create the political conditions to expand our horizons in terms of challenging borders, according to Sharma.

Like any revolutions in our past, dismantling these systems would require massive mobilization, direct action, organizing, political education, and drastic shifts in consciousness across all borders.

When I talk about abolition, Im talking a lot about creation, Pablos said. Organizers like myself do have that new vision, and were ready to have these conversations. And again, if people created the structures, we can create new things. We can create new values, new principles.

Note: Both Roberto Lovato and Nandita Sharma have books that will be released in 2020. Lovatos reported memoir about the Salvadoran diaspora will be released in the fall. Sharmas Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants will be released by Duke University Press in February.

This story was produced with support from the Freedomways Reporting Project, a fellowship program for journalists in the U.S. South whose reporting advances justice.

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We Can't Obtain Immigration Justice in a World of Borders and Nations - Truthout

Practical obstacles to implementing policy illustrate how agencies assess their own constitutional authority.

Since 2017, the Trump Administrations successive executive orders and administrative actions have relentlessly assaulted the asylum process, dismantled foundational refugee protections, and distorted the immigration admissions system. A new administration must address the damage inflicted on individuals, institutions, and the rule of law. Because legislation is only a remote possibility, reversing recent policies and restoring a semblance of integrity will depend on decisive and effective executive actions

This essay offers personal reflections on some of the bureaucratic barriers to achieving change that a new administration must anticipateregardless of whether its most immediate efforts are merely restorative to return to the 2016 status quo ante or more ambitiously reformative to pursue new normative immigration policies. Although the threshold challenge for an administration is to determine its policies and priorities, the key to actually achieving meaningful reform will depend on the harder task of overcoming bureaucratic inertia and implementing new policies. That will be even more difficult than usual because of the norm-breaking practices of the current administration and the whiplash effect of reversing recently adopted measures.

I write based on my experience as a political appointee in the Obama Administration during the adoption of a series of immigration reform measures in 2014. For two years, I participated in the development and implementation of many of those reforms and in the day-to-day operation of the immigration adjudication apparatus as senior counselor to the Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and then as the senior immigration counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security. My background is atypical for someone in these positions. I spent most of my career litigating cases against federal immigration agencies as the founder and director of the ACLU Immigrants Rights Project, and I had neither the benefit nor the encumbrance of any prior executive branch experience. My discussion reflects on my experiences and elaborates on some of the real-world hurdles to implementing policy pronouncements, such as bureaucratic inertia, resistance to delegating discretion, cumbersome internal legal and policy processes, and the U.S. Department of Justices review of agency action.

Preference for Stasis. One embedded bureaucratic instinct I encountered firsthand is the well-known resistance to change, or perhaps more accurately preference for stasis. Although this might be explained by adherence to predictability, I experienced it as driven more by the entrenchment of the status quo independent of any purported normative valuesat least when the proposed changes were designed to move in a more immigrant-friendly direction.

An especially revealing experience arose from efforts to modify a categorical disqualifying factor in the adjudication of certain immigration benefits. The goal was to dial back just slightly a new ground for disqualification and to authorize adjudicators to exercise case-by-case discretion based on individual circumstances. After considerable intra-departmental discussion, I presented a proposed consensus approach to senior career managers. To my surprise, they opposed the change despite their earlier reported opposition to adopting the disqualification in the first place. I asked if they had supported the bar that we now proposed softening, thinking navely that confronting them with their own earlier views might diminish their current opposition. But that was not the case. Oh no, said one. Instead, the rule was wrong to begin with and a big mistake when it was adopted. But now that its the rule, we dont want to change it.

The preference for the status quo could be motivated by the burden of implementing changes, the risk of never-settled policy, the instinct that future cases should not be treated differently than those already completed, a general opposition to expansion of discretion, and perhaps a shift in normative preferences. But whatever the reason, a new administration intending to reverse recent policies must anticipate substantial bureaucratic resistance to abandoning any entrenched practices, no matter how recently adopted, and even if the career civil servants themselves strongly objected to adoption of the recent policies in the first place.

Resistance to Broad Discretion. A second experience was the bureaucratic resistance to conferring discretionary authority on adjudicators. This phenomenon arose in the context of trying to ameliorate some of the especially harsh consequences of particular immigration provisions where the law conferred greater discretionary authority than was being exercised, and some of us at USCIS sought to expand it.

Contrary to my expectations, I discovered a general opposition from many senior career public servants to expanding the authority of adjudicators to exercise discretion. The managers resisted because they viewed discretion as inviting arbitrary and inconsistent outcomes. Like cases should have like results, they insisted. If individual adjudicators were vested with substantial discretion, then similarly situated individuals would receive different results. Although not expressly framed in constitutional values, the resistance seemed rooted in the due process norms of equality, fairness, and consistency. Invoking the related value of transparency, career managers also explained that outcomes should appear legitimate to the applicant and to the public and thus should be based on identifiable criteria that cash out similarly in similar circumstances.

Yet interestingly, these due process-like concerns for limiting discretion did not seem to generate support for other fairness-enhancing improvements to the adjudication process, such as greater in-person applicant participation, a more active role for counsel, or increased explanation of outcomes. Some reforms of this type might, of course, impose costs that do not arise when restricting the exercise of discretion. But it is noteworthy nonetheless that asserting a fairness norm in one setting did not translate into concern for improved procedures across the board.

Another reason for resisting broader discretionary authority that was less explicit but that I strongly sensed is what political scientist Christopher Hood has called the blame game. Civil servants understandably fear they will be blamedby the public, the media, agency leadership, or their immediate superiorsif favorable exercises of discretion later lead to negative publicity or outcomes. Restricting discretion or choosing to exercise it negatively avoids that risk of blame. The goal of blame avoidance leads to an obvious asymmetry whereby negative decisions denying benefits or relief are safer than granting relief, especially in the immigration context where the subjects of government action are nearly invisible and powerless andunlike powerful regulated industriesrarely able to impose any consequences or costs on an agency that takes negative action.

In a related manifestation of the blame game, it appeared to me that career civil servants were also likely to view with skepticism or suspicion political leaders who sought to delegate discretionary authority to career employees. Such delegation was perceived not as an expression of confidence in the career bureaucrats but as a tactic by senior leaders to deflect accountability or to avoid blame if a decision later became controversial or turned out badly.

The resistance to conferring discretion led to a bureaucratic insistence on rules over standards, for bright lines over multi-factor tests, and for clear guidelines and prescriptive instructions governing any exercises of discretion. In my experience, when such direction is not articulated in some formal policy, the pressure for clarity shifts downstream to insistence on greater specificity in training materials, operating instructions, internal FAQs, or similar, less visible directives. But that, in turn, leads to diminished transparency if lower-level instructions are less subject to public disclosure. In any case, expanding individual discretion as a mechanism for injecting greater flexibility into harsh substantive provisions or prohibitions will encounter bureaucratic resistance.

The Review and Approval Process. The agencys deliberation and approval process is a further hurdle to overcome. One aspect, especially relevant to issues of administrative constitutionalism, is how agencies assess their own legal and constitutional authority.

At the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), primary responsibility for legal analysis lies with the chief counsel of the respective agencies who manage hundreds of career lawyers and report to the DHS Office of the General Counsel. Agency counsel and their staff decide in the first instance whether a proposed policy is legally authorized, requires formal rulemaking, meets constitutional criteria, and satisfies other legal requirements.

As part of that internal review processwhether for drafting proposed regulations, policy memos, field guidance, or new training materialsworking groups are composed of subject matter experts, operational representatives, members of the policy department, specialist lawyers from counsels offices, perhaps representatives of the agencys political leadership, and any other unit that has equities in the policy. The members work together over considerable time to craft and review draft documents until rough consensus is reached. Logjams are broken by elevating disagreements to more senior career managers or to the political leadership of an agency. This process is enormously time-consuming and subject to foot-dragging if any of the participating members raise objections or insist on consulting more widely. In my experience, the processthough working largely as intended to build consensuswas agonizingly slow and open to interminable delay and potential manipulation by those who opposed change.

Moreover, if a significant legal objection arises during this process, the issue must be resolved for the working group to continue, either by satisfying the lawyer who raised it or by elevating the issue through the legal chain of command. Very occasionally, in matters of great importance and where competing persuasive views among senior lawyers or advisors exist, DHS leadership might adjudicate the issue to make a policy choice after considering a range of legal advice. Although the General Counsels Office receives great deference, during my tenure the leadership of DHS was itself composed of enormously accomplished lawyers who actively engaged with legal issues, invited detailed presentations and debate, and exercised judgment to resolve divergent views.

The Department of Justice. The Justice Department plays a prominent role in assessing the legality of potential policies, most formally through the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). The OLC process was striking to me because of the absence of a mechanism akin to the intense adversarial briefing and argument that I was accustomed to in litigation. During my time, I observed OLC publish a major opinion on the legality of the Obama Administrations Deferred Action for Parents of Americans initiative. The OLC process seemed intensely insular indeed what I would call bureaucratically monasticin that OLC considered and resolved legal questions through its own internal analysis and deliberations. Although expertise may be invited by soliciting the views of agency counsel, there appeared to be no institutional mechanism by which differing views from outside OLC could be openly presented, interrogated, and tested against each other.

The OLC process seems especially risky when dealing with a statute like the massively complex and convoluted Immigration and Nationality Act where the OLC approach is in danger of omitting or overlooking important perspectives and insights. OLCs role as the quasi-adjudicator of legal questions would be enhanced if its procedures recognizedas judges understandthat the crucible of adversarial testing is crucial to sound judicial decision-making and will yield insights (or reveal pitfalls) we cannot muster guided only by our own lights.

Lastly, the Justice Department may assess the litigation risk that a new policy could present. But doing so reinforces a status quo bias. Although assessing potential exposure to lawsuits is valuable, litigation risk is not the same as legal impermissibility. A judgment as to whether a policy might reasonably face some legal challenge should not be conflated with the range of permissible agency actions under the law. Otherwise, risk-averse assessments will preemptively constrain lawful agency initiatives.

A new administration can powerfully address the damage done to immigrants, the immigration system, and the rule of law since January 2017 by acting decisively and strategically. But effective implementation of change requires overcoming entrenched policies, anticipating bureaucratic realities, enlisting dedicated career civil servants, and streamlining baroque review processes. Appreciating these institutional realities is essential to overcoming them and to achieving reform when the opportunity comes.

Lucas Guttentag is the Martin R. Flug Lecturer in Law and Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School and Professor of the Practice of Law at Stanford Law School.

Lucas Guttentag is grateful for the encouragement and advice of Nicholas Parrillo and the excellent research assistance of Arjun Mody.

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Reflections on Bureaucratic Barriers to Immigration Reform - The Regulatory Review

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In the wake of every House Republican voting against impeaching Donald Trump, it's reasonable to see the GOP as the president's party, remade in his image. But to truly understand the transformation of the Republican Party during the Trump years, we actually should focus on someone else: Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). Jordan's journey from gadfly loathed by party leadership to ranking committee member, presidential confidant, and party leader exemplifies how the GOP has changed in the Trump Era and how Trumpism won't be easily undone after the 45th president leaves office.

The ideological transformation of the Republican Party has been ongoing for more than a half century. What was once the party of moderates like Dwight Eisenhower and liberals like Nelson Rockefeller, dominated by figures from the two coasts and stalwarts in the Midwest, slowly became a staunchly conservative party centered in the South.

By the time Jordan was first elected to Congress in 2006, the highly conservative Texan George W. Bush was president. But Bush had a pragmatic streak. He cut bipartisan deals on education and immigration reform (which failed thanks to a revolt led by conservative talk radio), added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, and preached compassionate conservatism.

The story of the party's move towards total war politics and Trumpism is the story of how Jordan's breed of politics eclipsed Bush's brand of conservatism.

Jordan was one of the most conservative members of the House during his first two terms. But he was also insignificant with Republicans in the minority. Once the Tea Party wave swept his party to power, however, Jordan was flush with new hardline allies. He was elected to lead the Republican Study Committee, a large conservative group within the new Republican majority.

Within months, he had become a thorn in the side of House Speaker John Boehner, insisting that failing to raise the debt ceiling would not result in the United States defaulting, and opposing a leadership proposal for addressing the matter. His staff even conspired with outside groups to pressure Republicans to vote against Boehner's proposal. Two years later, Jordan was a key player in forcing a government shutdown because President Obama would not agree to delaying and defunding his signature health-care legislation for a year a tactic Boehner had warned would leave leading Democrats grinning because they "can't believe we're this f---ing stupid." Though Republicans were widely perceived to have lost the shutdown battle, Jordan was unrepentant.

He believed that Democrats could be compelled to capitulate through the use of hardline tactics, brinkmanship, and a total unwillingness to compromise.

In 2015, Jordan became the founding chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, a smaller, even more hardline group that would come to fight against numerous leadership initiatives. By that fall, Freedom Caucus members against Jordan's counsel pushed Boehner into early retirement and helped scuttle the candidacy of Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to succeed him.

While 70 percent of Freedom Caucus endorsed Paul Ryan to succeed Boehner, it was only after he made them numerous promises to secure their support. Even so, Jordan and his allies would make Ryan's life difficult as they had Boehner's. So much did leadership worry about Jordan that when House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz announced he would resign from Congress in 2017, leadership helped recruit Rep. Trey Gowdy to run for the position to ensure that it wouldn't fall to Jordan.

In an interview after retiring, Boehner called Jordan a "legislative terrorist" and an "asshole."

In an earlier era, a figure like Jordan who constantly picked fights with his own party's leadership would have faced serious repercussions. Banishment to the most insignificant and unpleasant committees, an inability to get things done for his home district, perhaps even a primary challenge.

But in an era with a proliferation of conservative media talk radio, cable news, and digital outlets someone like Jordan could instead become a star by picking the same fights. Conservative media is a business and the best radio and television comes from black and white content strongly voiced opinions, clear convictions, exhortations to principles, things that stir emotion and keep the audience tuned in. That meant that someone like Jordan preached what viewers and listeners the Republican base heard every day. Further, his style of politics made for far more compelling radio or television than a committee chairman or Republican leader explaining why divided government or Senate rules necessitated compromises.

This fit between the business interests of conservative media and his politics made Jordan one of the heroes on the conservative airwaves and a frequent guest. Stardom gave him too much of an independent power base by the mid-2010s for leadership to punish him meaningfully. He didn't need them for fundraising, and any attempt at discipline would've sent him scurrying to the airwaves to fight back. In the end, it might've been leadership who lost the fight because conservative media had the ear of exactly the sorts of voters who showed up in low turnout Republican primaries, the most critical elections in most Republican districts in an era of geographic polarization.

But while conservative media helped to make Jordan impervious to leadership criticism, it didn't make him part of that leadership. His elevation came thanks to Trump. Jordan caught the ear of Trump, and became a confidant and one of the president's fiercest defenders.

When Republicans lost control of the House in 2018 and Ryan and Gowdy retired, new House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and the Republican Steering Committee installed Jordan, with encouragement from Trump, as the ranking member of the Oversight Committee. This was a significant change from 2017, when there was doubt the Steering Committee would choose Jordan given the animosity from many Republicans towards him. And then as impeachment hearings were about to begin in front of the House Intelligence Committee, McCarthy made the unusual move of temporarily removing another Republican to add Jordan to the committee. McCarthy saw great benefit in Jordan's trademark aggressive questioning and vigorous defense of Trump.

During those hearings, Elise Stefanik, long seen as the anti-Jim Jordan, a leadership ally, one of the most moderate Republicans in the House, and someone previously focused on solutions and bipartisanship, became an instant sensation with Jordan-like questioning and charges against Democrats, and even joined him for press conferences. Reporting indicates that this was a savvy move for Stefanik both in her Republican-leaning district and within the House GOP.

While it's unquestionably easier for leadership to be aligned with Jordan in the minority, when they have no responsibility for governing, it's also true that the onetime leadership antagonist is now the top Republican on a key committee and a major spokesman for the House GOP. Stefanik's move exposes how Jordan's tactics are what Republican voters want from their elected officials. Far from an outsider, Jordan is now part of the Republican establishment one that sees politics much more like he does than George W. Bush. And that's not likely to change even when Trump leaves office, be it in 2021 or 2025.

For better or worse, it's Jim Jordan's GOP now.

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How a 'legislative terrorist' conquered the Republican Party - The Week