The President in El Paso

By Beto O'Rourke, Medium

11 February 19

 

he President is coming to El Paso Monday. He will promise a wall and will repeat his lies about the dangers that immigrants pose. With El Paso as the backdrop, he will claim that this city of immigrants was dangerous before a border fence was built here in 2008.

Beyond refuting his comments about border communities like ours (El Paso was one of the safest communities in the United States before the fence was built here), about walls saving lives (in fact, walls push desperate families to cross in ever more hostile terrain, ensuring greater suffering and death), and about immigrants (who commit crimes at a lower rate than those Americans born here), it’s worth thinking about how we got to this place. How it came to be that 11 million undocumented immigrants call America home, how we came to militarize our border, how we arrived at such a disconnect between our ideals, our values, the reality of our lives?—?and the policies and political rhetoric that govern immigration and border security.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the challenges we face are largely of our own design?— a function of the unintended consequences of immigration policy and the rhetoric we’ve used to describe immigrants and the border. At almost every step of modern immigration policy and immigration politics, we have exacerbated underlying problems and made things worse. Sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes with the most cynical exploitation of nativism and fear. Much of the history of immigration policy (and the source for the graphs that I’m using) is powerfully summarized in a report entitled “Unintended Consequences of U.S. Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America” by Douglas S Massey and Karen A. Pren.

In 1965, the U.S. ended the bracero farmworker program in part because of the substandard wages and conditions in which these Mexican workers labored. And yet, after decades of employing this labor, with our economy dependent on the laborers and the laborers dependent on access to the U.S. job market, the system of low-cost Mexican labor didn’t go away. Many of the same Mexican nationals returned to the U.S., returned to the same back-breaking jobs, only now they were undocumented. Ironically, despite the intent of the 1965 law ending the program, they enjoyed fewer protections and wage guarantees in the shadows as they continued to play a fundamental role in our economy.

As this same population converted from being documented to undocumented a wave of scary metaphors was employed to gin up anxiety and paranoia and political will to employ ever more repressive policies to deter their entry. It was good for politicians and newspapers, terrible for immigrants and immigration policy. Thus began the “Latino threat” narrative. As Massey and Pren write:

“The most common negative framing depicted immigration as a “crisis” for the nation. Initially marine metaphors were used to dramatize the crisis, with Latino immigration being labeled a “rising tide” or a “tidal wave” that was poised to “inundate” the United States and “drown” its culture while “flooding” American society with unwanted foreigners (Santa Ana 2002). Over time, marine metaphors increasingly gave way to martial imagery, with illegal immigration being depicted as an “invasion” in which “outgunned” Border Patrol agents sought to “hold the line” in a vain attempt to “defend” the border against “attacks” from “alien invaders” who launched “banzai charges” to overwhelm American defenses (Nevins 2001; Chavez 2008).”

The fear stoked by politicians produced the intended paranoia and political constituency demanding ever tougher immigration measures. The result of this was not to stop undocumented immigration. Instead it caused the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States to grow.

Here’s why: as we made it harder for people to cross into the United States, we made it less likely that once here they would attempt to go back to their home country. Fearing an increasingly militarized border, circular patterns of migration became linear, with immigrants choosing to remain in the U.S., many of them ultimately joined by family members from their home country.

This government-created condition continued to feed on itself:

The “sustained, accelerating accumulation of anti-immigrant legislation and enforcement operations produced a massive increase in border apprehensions after the late 1970s, when the underlying flow of migrants had actually leveled off. For any given number of undocumented entry attempts, more restrictive legislation and more stringent enforcement operations generate more apprehensions, which politicians and bureaucrats can then use to inflame public opinion, which leads to more conservatism and voter demands for even stricter laws and more enforcement operations, which generates more apprehensions, thus bringing the process full circle. In short, the rise of illegal migration, its framing as a threat to the nation, and the resulting conservative reaction set off a self-feeding chain reaction of enforcement that generated more apprehensions even though the flow of undocumented migrants had stabilized in the late 1970s and actually dropped during the late 1980s and early 1990s.”

This would only get worse.

After terror attacks in the 1990s and in 2001, the Mexican immigrant was a ready scapegoat for politicians, and the intensity and brutality of enforcement and deterrence measures increased. In the face of terrorism that originated in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, the United States chose to conflate the war on terror with immigration from Mexico and Latin America.

With the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001 the number of deportations skyrocketed, with nearly 400,000 sent back to their country of origin in 2009 alone. Not one of the 9/11 terrorists entered through Mexico?—?and yet Mexicans bore the brunt of this country’s immigration response to the terror attacks. Last year, the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism found that “there are no known international terrorist organizations operating in Mexico, no evidence that any terrorist group has targeted U.S. citizens in Mexican territory, and no credible information that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico to gain access to the United States.” This year’s report found much the same: “there was no credible evidence indicating that international terrorist groups have established bases in Mexico, worked with Mexican drug cartels, or sent operatives via Mexico into the United States.”

In addition, walls and fences authorized by the Secure Fence Act of 2006 pushed migration flows to ever more treacherous stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border. More than 4,500 human beings died crossing the border from 2006 to 2017. Far too many of them children.

In recent years, as Mexican migration slowed and then reversed (more Mexican nationals going south to Mexico than coming north to the United States), and as total undocumented immigration reached its lowest levels in modern history, the country was met with the challenge of tens of thousands of Central American families fleeing violence and brutality to petition for asylum in our country.

This too is an unintended consequence. Our involvement in the civil wars and domestic politics of Central American countries, in addition to our ability to consume more illegal drugs than any other country on the planet while leading a military- and law enforcement-first drug control policy, has helped to destroy the institutions of civil society necessary for those countries to function. They can no longer protect their citizens, and their citizens are coming to us.

And how do we meet this challenge? The President, using the same racist, inflammatory rhetoric of years past, seeks to build a wall, to take kids from their parents, to deploy the United States Army on American soil, to continue mass deportations and to end the protection for Dreamers. In other words, he seeks in one administration to repeat all the mistakes of the last half-century. And with past as prologue, we know exactly how that will end.

Not only will it lead to thousands of Americans losing their farms and ranches and homes through eminent domain to build a wall despite the fact that we have the lowest level of northbound apprehensions in my lifetime; it will lead to greater suffering and death for immigrants who are pushed to more dangerous points of crossing; it will fail to meet the legitimate challenge of illegal drugs that are brought to this country (the vast majority crossed at ports of entry); it will further erode our humanity and our standing in the world; and it will not do a single thing to reduce the number of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers coming to this country.

But we still have a choice. In this democracy, if in fact the people are the government, and the government is the people, we still have a chance to prove it.

We can decide that we’ll get past the lies and fear, focus on the facts and human lives in our midst, and do the right thing. The end goal is a stronger, safer, more successful country. Critical to achieving that goal is having immigration, security and bilateral policies that match reality and our values.

1. Extend citizenship to the more than one million Dreamers in this country. Not only those who are in our classrooms but those who are teaching in our classrooms; those who are keeping our country safe around the world tonight; those who contribute more to our communities than they’ll ever take.


2. Give permanent legal protection and a path to citizenship to their parents, the original Dreamers.


3. Bring millions more out of the shadows and on a path to citizenship by ensuring that they register with the government and gain status to legally work, pay taxes and contribute even more to our country’s success.


4. Make us safer and more secure. Significantly reduce illegal drug trafficking and stop human trafficking by investing in infrastructure, technology and personnel at our ports of entry. The ports that connect us with Mexico are where the vast majority of everything and everyone that ever comes into our country crosses.


5. Increase the visa caps so that we match our opportunities and needs (for work, for education, for investment, for innovation, for family reunification) to the number of people we allow into this country. Ensure that those who want to work in jobs that we can’t fill can legally come here and legally return to their home country.


6. Fully accept our opportunity and responsibility under our asylum laws to welcome those whose own governments can no longer protect them?—?including women fleeing abusive relationships.


7. Address visa overstays (which accounts for the majority of undocumented immigration) through better tracking of and notification to visa holders (a first step could be text message reminders) and fully harmonizing our entry-exit systems with Mexico and Canada (when a visa holder exits the U.S. and enters Mexico, we will then know that they have left the U.S.; currently, if they leave through a land port of entry we literally have no clue if they are still here or have returned to their country of origin).


8. Make Latin America and specifically Central America a top foreign policy priority?— stop relegating it to second-tier status?— invest the time, talent and resources to assist in the development of the domestic institutions that will allow these countries to thrive and offer their citizens protection and economic opportunity. It is the only long-term solution to the number of asylum seekers and refugees coming to this country.


9. End the global war on drugs. An imprisonment- and interdiction-first approach has not worked, has accelerated the erosion of civil society in much of Latin America and has militarized a public health issue to the detriment of all concerned.


10. Speak with respect and dignity when referring to our fellow human beings who happen to be immigrants and asylum seekers, who in so many cases are doing exactly what we would do if presented with the same threats and opportunities. No more “invasions”, “animals”, “rapists and criminals”, “floods”, “crisis”?—?dehumanizing rhetoric leads to dehumanizing policies. We cannot sacrifice our humanity in the name of security?—?or we risk losing both.

Monday we will welcome the President to one of the safest cities in the United States. Safe not because of walls, and not in spite of the fact that we are a city of immigrants. Safe because we are a city of immigrants and because we treat each other with dignity and respect. A city that has the opportunity to lead on the most important issues before us, out of experience, out of compassion and out of a fierce determination to see this country live its ideals and rise to its full potential.

We can learn from the errors of our past, have the courage to do what’s right while we still have the chance, and ensure that the President doesn’t commit this country to making mistakes from which we may never recover.

It’s up to us.

All the Laws AMI May Have Broken in Blackmailing Jeff Bezos

By Frank Bowman, Slate

11 February 19

Here are all the laws American Media Inc. may have broken in going after the Amazon CEO.

ast year, we learned that American Media Inc., the company that publishes the National Enquirer, and its CEO, David Pecker, acted as a shield protecting Donald Trump against disclosure of his extramarital activities. In a nonprosecution agreement with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, AMI admitted that Pecker met with Michael Cohen in August 2015 and offered to help suppress stories about Trump’s infidelity. Thereafter, AMI was involved in the hush money payments to both Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, in the latter case using the “catch and kill” technique of buying the rights to her story and then burying it.

It now appears that the media firm may also have acted as a sword slashing at Trump’s enemies. The company recently targeted Jeff Bezos—world’s richest man, CEO of Amazon, owner of the Washington Post, and frequent target of Trump’s ire—by exposing his extramarital affair with Lauren Sanchez. Bezos responded by launching a private investigation of AMI’s methods and possible political motivations. (Did they come after him at the behest of Trump or perhaps Trump family pals, the Saudis?) Then, in an effort both brazen and bizarre, AMI sought to quash Bezos’ investigation by threatening to publish a series of intimate photos of the CEO and Sanchez.

Bezos refused to yield. Instead, he published a blog post that included emails from two AMI officials, chief content officer Dylan Howard and deputy general counsel Jon Fine, in which, incredibly, they described the photos in lurid detail and expressly threatened publication unless Bezos both released any legal claims he might have against AMI and issued a public statement that he had “no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage [of Bezos’ affair] was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.”

Bloomberg is reporting that federal prosecutors have begun looking into whether AMI’s behavior with respect to Bezos may constitute a violation of the aforementioned nonprosecution agreement. There are a number of legal questions at play here. Did AMI’s threats amount to a crime? If so, who could be prosecuted? Why was AMI so desperate to silence allegations that it was acting politically? How, if at all, does this squalid business fit into the large picture of Trump scandals and investigations?

First, AMI’s emails pretty plainly satisfy the elements of federal extortion, 18 U.S.C. §875(d), which prohibits transmitting a communication in interstate commerce “containing any threat to injure the … reputation of the addressee” in order to extort “money or other thing of value.” The emails are in interstate commerce. The threat was to Bezos’ reputation. AMI might argue that it wasn’t demanding a “thing of value,” but under federal law, that’s almost certainly wrong.

The term thing of value extends to intangibles and even to things without any transferrable monetary worth, like cessation of a criminal prosecution, continuation of a sexual relationship, or even an apology. The demand that Bezos refrain from attributing political motive to AMI could itself be a “thing of value.” But even if that were not the case, a release of potential legal claims plainly is a thing of economic value. So it appears that AMI, as a corporate entity; Fine, its lawyer; and anyone within the corporation who approved Fine’s demands could potentially be charged with felony extortion.

Second, by its terms, AMI’s nonprosecution agreement with the Southern District of New York remains effective only so long as AMI commits no further crimes. An attempt to extort Bezos would almost certainly violate the agreement.

At one level, that doesn’t matter very much. The only entity the SDNY promised not to prosecute was AMI, the company, and only for election-law violations committed in 2016. The agreement placed no limitation on prosecutions of individual persons for anything (including the 2016 hush money payments), and it never limited the government from prosecuting AMI or anyone else for future crimes. So regardless of the terms of the nonprosecution agreement, it does not bar prosecution of AMI and its employees for the alleged Bezos extortion.

The behavior Bezos describes in his blog post does, though, create a mare’s-nest of issues regarding the portions of the nonprosecution agreement in which AMI promised to cooperate fully with the government.

The agreement says that all information obtained during such cooperation can be used “for any purpose,” which presumably includes prosecution of AMI or its employees if the new charge were not related to 2016 election crimes. However, there would certainly have been at least an implicit understanding that the SDNY would not prosecute the company or its people based on material divulged during honest cooperation. Moreover, so long as the agreement remained in effect, there might be legal obstacles to using such disclosures, including Federal Rule of Evidence 410, relating to statements made in plea discussions.

But under the terms of the agreement, commission of a new crime by AMI allows the government to use anything learned during AMI’s cooperation to prosecute the corporation, whether for hush money campaign finance violations or anything else. The question of whether such material could be used to prosecute corporate officers like Pecker or lower-ranking employees who talked to prosecutors as part of the cooperation effort is trickier and would depend largely on the particular understanding between each officer or employee and the government.

If this sounds complicated, it is. And that’s one of the primary takeaways of the Bezos revelation: The Southern District of New York originally made the calculation that the information AMI could provide was of more value to the public interest than pursuing a legally tricky prosecution. Now they have to re-evaluate. Not only is extortion a serious crime, but if the SDNY wants to preserve its own credibility, it must respond sternly to a flagrant violation of a nonprosecution agreement that some might argue was too generous in the first place. If SDNY does void the agreement and start prosecuting the company and its people, that would at the very least complicate ongoing efforts to secure information and testimony from AMI personnel about other crimes, possibly including other instances in which the company helped protect Trump.

The fact that AMI would take the huge risk of trying to blackmail the richest man on the planet to stop his investigation of its reporting and possible political motives is superficially baffling. Those actions endangered AMI’s nonprosecution agreement, not to speak of opening the company to new, more serious charges. Moreover, the firm tried to intimidate a guy who could buy AMI with the change under his couch, and tried to do so after revealing Bezos’ affair and his colorful texts, thus squandering whatever leverage they might have enjoyed from the photos.

That said, the National Enquirer’s business model depends on maintaining its image as an independent member of the family of legitimate media outlets. Among other advantages, that posture makes it easier to defend, on First Amendment grounds, the libel suits its brand of journalism is apt to spawn. In the Trump hush money affair, AMI was already exposed as a political actor paying to suppress, not publish, news on behalf of a preferred candidate—hardly a constitutionally protected journalistic activity. If Bezos could show that its publication activities were also driven by partisan affiliation, or worse, money or influence from a murderous foreign government like Saudi Arabia, the damage would be multiplied. Perhaps a chance to prevent such revelations was thought worth the risk.

Finally, it’s too early to know exactly how this arrestingly vulgar scandal fits in the never-ending metastasis of Trump investigations. The Daily Beast reported last week that Bezos’ investigators have looked into the Amazon CEO’s mistress’ brother, Michael Sanchez, who is both a vocal Trump supporter and sometime business associate of Trump-world denizens Roger Stone and Carter Page. In an interview with the Washington Post, Michael Sanchez denied having anything to do with the National Enquirer’s reporting and alleged that “he was told by multiple people at American Media, the Enquirer’s parent company, that the Enquirer set out to do ‘a takedown to make Trump happy.’ ” AMI, for its part, responded by saying that it “emphatically rejects any assertion that its reporting was instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise. End of speculation—and story.” At this point, all we can say for certain is that this is not the end of the story, for AMI and possibly for Donald Trump.