All posts tagged: immigration

Bad Theology, Bad for Democracy

Bad Theology, Bad for Democracy

Published by skeptic

 This week, Dr. Robert P. Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, joins host Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush to discuss the intersection of race, religion, and politics in America, focusing on the rewriting of history regarding the January 6, 2021 attacks, and the impact of shifting demographics and the influence of polarizing figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. We also pay tribute to the late Jimmy Carter. Paul shares excerpts from powerful interviews he conducted with the 39th president of the United States. Robby is the author of several influential books that explore democracy, religion, and race in America. Bringing together rigorous scholarship with in-depth research, he is one of the few experts capable of helping us understand the forces shaping our democracy, and the major political and religious movements that seek to shape it in the future. “For most of our country’s history, we have been on the wrong side of civil rights, the wrong side of slavery, the wrong side of Jim Crow. If we are this far …

The Reunited | Piper French

The Reunited | Piper French

Published by skeptic

When I first spoke to David about the day US government agents took his son Arbi from him, the presidential elections felt a long way off. It was 2022 then, just before Thanksgiving. Sitting in his tiny apartment in San Diego, he cried as he recounted what an official had told him as he was forced onto a deportation flight in 2018: “Forget your son.” After they finally reunited in the US in 2021, it took Arbi months to treat him as a parent again. At first, he hadn’t even wanted to give his father a hug. David and Arbi were separated under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which ramped up criminal prosecutions of adults arriving at the US–Mexico border, leading to thousands of children being split from their parents. To reunite with Arbi, David had to leave his wife and daughters in Guatemala—another separation. That November, he was hoping against hope that one day the family would be whole again. Talking with him over the course of months for a New York Magazine story about …

For avid readers of Yiddish news, print is still king

For avid readers of Yiddish news, print is still king

Published by skeptic

(RNS) — As many local media outlets around the world are struggling, the Yiddish press is experiencing a rebirth, surprising many who not long ago pronounced the Jewish language as doomed after millions of its core speakers died in the Holocaust. “Since 2000, over 30 Yiddish print media have been founded, almost exclusively in the Orthodox Jewish milieu of New York and the surrounding area,” said Bjorn Akstinat, a German media researcher who recently compiled a directory of Yiddish media outlets.  Sparked by technological advances as well as changing social attitudes, the boom has led to a parallel cultural renaissance among Haredi and Hasidic Jewish communities (sometimes called ultra-Orthodox), for whom Yiddish is the native tongue.  An outgrowth of old High German, heavily influenced by Hebrew, Aramaic and Slavic languages, and traditionally written in the Hebrew alphabet, Yiddish was the primary language of Ashkenazi Jews living in central and Eastern Europe for nearly 1,000 years. At the turn of the 20th century, more than 10 million people spoke Yiddish, encouraged by hundreds of newspapers on …

What Could Stop Him? | David Cole

What Could Stop Him? | David Cole

Published by skeptic

Almost like the cycles of grief, Donald Trump’s reelection has provoked shock, outrage, despondency, exhaustion, and despair. And for good reason. Trump’s first term was a four-year disaster, culminating in his effort to foment a riot to overturn the results of a free and fair election. This time around, there are fears that he will, among other things, prosecute his enemies, conduct mass deportations, further restrict access to abortion, censor school curricula, remove civil service protections, impose high tariffs, and strip birthright citizenship from children of immigrants. He threatened as much repeatedly during the campaign, and his first term in office suggests that he does not make idle threats. This time, moreover, he won not just the skewed electoral college but the popular vote (albeit by a very small margin). He will have Republican majorities in both houses of Congress and a 6–3 majority on the Supreme Court, including three of his own appointees. And his cabinet and staff nominees to date—including many people whose only qualification for office is their blind loyalty and extremist …

Death in Nogales | S. C. Cornell

Death in Nogales | S. C. Cornell

Published by skeptic

On January 30, 2023, a forty-eight-year-old Mexican man named Gabriel Cuen Buitimea made his way into the Sonoran desert a few miles east of Nogales, Arizona, where the thirty-foot-high metal beams of the border wall abruptly drop into sawhorses and cattle fencing.1 Around noon Cuen Buitimea and a group of men hopped the sawhorses, set foot in the United States, and ran north. Some time later they heard what sounded like a Border Patrol car and fled in various directions. At 2:30 PM Cuen Buitimea was walking south with a Honduran man named Daniel Ramirez; they intended to return to Mexico and try to cross again later. They were on the Vermilion Mountain Ranch, a 170-acre property owned by Wanda and George Alan Kelly, retirees in their seventies. The border wall was visible on the horizon. The ranch house was 115 yards away, behind a thicket of bare mesquite trees. Ramirez later said he did not notice it, though he did see the Kellys’ skinny red horse in a nearby pasture. As the two men …

The Return of Trump—V | Astra Taylor, Michael Greenberg, Coco Fusco, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Thomas Powers, Anne Enright

The Return of Trump—V | Astra Taylor, Michael Greenberg, Coco Fusco, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Thomas Powers, Anne Enright

Published by skeptic

Astra Taylor • Michael Greenberg • Coco Fusco • Verlyn Klinkenborg • Thomas Powers • Anne Enright Astra Taylor On election night, before Harris’s loss set in, some exit polls showed that “democracy” was a top concern for voters. Many liberals took the result as an auspicious sign. But what is democracy? That was the title of a documentary I made during the 2016 presidential campaign. As I conducted dozens of interviews across the United States over many months, I learned that there was hardly a consensus over the word’s meaning. Ordinary people struggled to define it; a recent college graduate asked me if democracy was when “they tell you what to do.” Others, usually men, scoffed that we actually live in a republic, not a democracy, as though that settled the matter. Still others—many of them—found the American political system exasperatingly corrupt: rigged by special interests, permeated by racism, and almost or already irredeemable. I also spoke to young conservatives and attended Donald Trump’s rallies, where he railed against the War on Terror, Wall …

The Return of Trump—III | Christine Henneberg, John Washington, Suzanne Schneider, Aryeh Neier, E. Tammy Kim, Andrew O’Hagan

The Return of Trump—III | Christine Henneberg, John Washington, Suzanne Schneider, Aryeh Neier, E. Tammy Kim, Andrew O’Hagan

Published by skeptic

Christine Henneberg • John Washington • Suzanne Schneider • Aryeh Neier • E. Tammy Kim • Andrew O’Hagan Christine Henneberg After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, friends asked me whether I was worried for my four-year-old daughter’s future, specifically her access to legal abortion. My answer: not in California, and not with an abortion provider for a mom. In the worst-case scenario, I joked, I could perform her abortion in my garage. The joke is even less funny now as I consider the implications of a second Trump presidency for the future of my work, and for girls’ and women’s reproductive freedoms. If a Trump Justice Department moves to enforce the Comstock Act (an 1873 anti-obscenity law that could be used to prohibit the mailing of abortion-related medications and equipment), or if Trump should go so far as to enshrine fetal personhood in the Constitution (as anti-abortion lobbyists will pressure him to do), doctors in states like California who provide care for women traveling from restricted states will ourselves be severely …

Immigration plan on ballot could worsen worker shortage

Immigration plan on ballot could worsen worker shortage

Published by Sam

PHOENIX — Immigration is a top election issue across the country, but few places feel it more than Arizona, the only swing state along the southern border and home to one of the races that could make or break control of the Senate. Arizona businesses say a shortage of workers is threatening to hold up projects in industries such as construction, hospitality and agriculture — and that without changes to the federal immigration system, the economy could face a devastating hit. About 16.2% of Arizona’s workforce is made up of immigrants, according to a 2022 study by the American Immigration Council. Meanwhile, the state is also facing a job shortage, 197,000 as of June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Monica Villalobos, the president and CEO of the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said the lack of labor is leading to larger economic impacts, such as on housing prices. “We have several members that are in the construction industry that aren’t able to find workers to complete projects,” she said. “And when they can’t …

Elon Musk Could Have US Citizenship Revoked If He Lied on Immigration Forms

Elon Musk Could Have US Citizenship Revoked If He Lied on Immigration Forms

Published by skeptic

These questions, says immigration lawyer Ira Kurzban, are asked to see whether an applicant obtained their residence validly, a prerequisite for citizenship. US immigration authorities have, he says, become “very exacting” on this point over the past 10 years. The US Citizenship and Immigration Service didn’t respond to an inquiry about whether forms used by its predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, asked exactly these questions at the time Musk would have been using them, but experts say he would have been asked substantively similar questions, as the relevant law hasn’t changed. “Those grounds of deportability have been around for decades,” says Yale-Loehr, “and the forms back then probably had similar or identical questions.” An immigrant who makes misrepresentations as part of the naturalization process can also face criminal exposure: Under US federal law, making a false statement to or concealing a material fact from the government carries a potential penalty of five years in prison. Greg Siskind, a leading immigration attorney, doesn’t disagree that the law as written could expose someone who lied …

The Democrats Lurch Right on Immigration | John Washington

The Democrats Lurch Right on Immigration | John Washington

Published by skeptic

Casa de la Misericordia, or the House of Mercy, is one of four migrant shelters in Nogales, a city in Sonora, Mexico. It sits on the top of a hill in the Bella Vista neighborhood, about four miles from the US border. The property is spartan: a series of dorms, huts, and playgrounds; a mess hall, an outdoor kitchen, and a garden. Some 150 people are housed there. That might seem like a big number, but across the city, hundreds more asylum seekers rely on short-term rentals and safe houses run by smugglers. Others sleep on the streets. More arrive each day.  I visited Casa de la Misericordia in August 2023. It was evening, a few hours after dinner. Moths fluttered around the outdoor lights, children ran about, and a handful of adults sat on truck tires, painted in pastels and half-buried in the dirt­ to form a guardrail around the parking lot—as in many migrant shelters, rainbows are the artistic theme. I was there to meet Esme, a Guatemalan woman who, with her sons, …