From the Newburgh Gazaette:
Supreme Court Gives Reprieve to DACA Recipients- But For How Long?
By, Dwayne Harmon - 03/02/18
From NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday
03/03/18
What's Next For DACA and Dreamers
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Lest we forget:
From Vox:
The Right-Wing Effort to Paint DREAMers As A Nightmare
By, Dara Lind - 03/01/18
"President Donald Trump has called DREAMers — the nearly 2 million young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children — “terrific” people. He has said he wants a “bill of love” to keep recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program safe from deportation (though his administration’s actions have fallen far short of that aspiration).
The softer tone makes sense — DREAMers are a sympathetic
group. They were “brought here through no fault of their own,” they’ve
grown up here, and they attended US schools. The common stereotype of
DREAMers is of high school valedictorians and high-achieving
professionals who may not even speak the native language of their home
countries.
But some conservatives, especially in right-wing media,
are happy to go where the White House won’t. Conservative media outlets
have found a way reframe the conversation about DREAMers, arguing that
young undocumented immigrants are a criminal threat to ordinary
Americans — or at least that enough of them might be dangerous that it’s not worth the risk of providing legal protections.
On a recent episode of his show, Tucker Carlson on Fox News reported on the Salvadoran-American gang MS-13. The segment lives online with the title: “MS-13 is now in 22 states, thanks to DACA.”
Another FoxNews.com
story from Monday reported on an undocumented immigrant in Rochester,
New York, who was arrested for making threats toward students at a local
high school. The headline? “DACA recipient, 21, threatened to ‘shoot all of ya b----es’ at NY high school, police say.”
Last month, the right-leaning Washington Examiner featured this headline: “Report: Ex-DACA criminals, gang bangers go free.”
And recently some studies from conservative researchers have come out
to give more substance to the association these stories attempt to make —
that DACA and crime are somehow connected.
What we’re seeing from the right isn’t a policy argument
about DACA or legalizing DREAMers. DACA doesn’t shield immigrants who’ve
committed crimes. Immigrants aren’t eligible for DACA
if they’ve committed a felony or significant misdemeanor, or three
misdemeanors of any kind. DACA recipients who commit crimes can be
stripped of their protections and deported.
Instead, it’s an attempt to undermine the public
narrative that DREAMers, as a generation of immigrants, are already
contributing to American society and that they’re people Americans
should be proud to call their own.
The new studies bolstering the myth of the DACA criminal
Traditionally, the association between unauthorized
immigrants and crime has been logical — people who flout “the rule of
law” to come to the US must not respect it generally. Or it was based on
the understandable misapprehension that it’s a federal crime to live in
the US without papers.
Those implications allow conservative politicians and
media outlets to lift up individual crimes committed by unauthorized
immigrants, and specifically DACA recipients, without saying outright
that they represent deeper criminality.
When DACA was in full effect, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA),
the hawkish chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, used to send out
occasional press releases about individual immigrants with DACA getting
charged with particularly serious crimes, like murder and child molestation. Ostensibly,
Grassley lifted up those cases to ask the federal government why such
immigrants had been approved for DACA to begin with. They also drew a
connection between the “unlawfulness” of DACA itself (an “executive
amnesty”) with lawlessness: a willingness to ignore or tolerate violent
crime.
But anecdotes were all the hawks had to go on. Research
consistently shows that immigrants commit fewer crimes than citizens do;
while there’s less research specifically on unauthorized immigrants,
what information there is suggests they, too, are less likely to commit
crimes than their US-citizen peers.
Due to a pair of recent studies, though, the association between DACA and crime now has some data behind it — or at least, there’s data that can be framed that way.
First, in January, was a study of 33 years of Arizona
jail and prison records from the conservative criminologist John Lott,
who’s best known for a splashy 1997 study called “More Guns, Less Crime” that has since been pretty conclusively debunked (and for inventing an online pseudonym to defend his own work from the criticism).
Over that time, Lott found, immigrants who were
“deportable” made up a disproportionate share of the people who were
convicted of crimes and incarcerated, relative to their share of the
Arizona population as a whole — suggesting that they might, in fact,
commit crimes at higher rates than American citizens. And young
deportable immigrants were the most overrepresented in
Arizona’s prisons: Deportable immigrants “between 15 and 35 make up
2.27% of the total population and 7.94% of convicts,” Lott wrote.
Lott’s core thesis — that unauthorized immigrants are in
fact more likely to commit crimes than other groups — is itself a little
shaky. There are some questions about the reliability of the Arizona
data Lott used. (A small but nonzero number of prisoners show up in the
data as US-born but not US citizens, for example, which is all but
impossible.)
There
are much bigger questions about whether Lott is interpreting that data
accurately. He says his data shows high incarceration among “illegal
immigrants,” but the actual term in the records is “deportable” — a
category that includes both unauthorized immigrants and legal immigrants
who’ve lost their legal status, often because they’ve been convicted of certain crimes.
But when it came to drawing conclusions, Lott and others
didn’t stop at the provocative but shaky thesis about unauthorized
immigrants and crime. They zeroed in on the data about young unauthorized
immigrants — and called them “DACA-aged illegal immigrants,” implying
that DACA was offering cover to large numbers of criminals.
“If the goal of DACA is to give citizenship to a
particularly law-abiding group of undocumented immigrants, it is
accomplishing the opposite of what was intended,” Lott wrote.
The idea picked up steam in the conservative media, and even among some politicians: Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) garbled Lott’s study in a Facebook post, warning that “DACA-aged illegals” commit 30 percent of kidnappings in the state.
The other recent study that’s been used to bolster the link between DACA and crime, a report on MS-13
published last week by the hawkish Center for Immigration Studies
(CIS), barely mentions DACA at all. The report compiles more than 500
cases in which MS-13 members have been indicted for crimes in the US,
and blames lax immigration enforcement for the gang’s recent resurgence —
even though it acknowledges that “a smaller percentage of MS-13 members
is believed to be here illegally” than was the case during the gang’s
last heyday in the mid-2000s. (At least a quarter of the MS-13 members
cited in the CIS report are unauthorized immigrants; many of the others
didn’t have their immigration status specified in news reports.)
But CIS doesn’t claim that those immigrants are DACA
recipients. If anything, it blames the mid-2010s wave of unaccompanied
alien children from Central America — and the Obama administration’s
policies toward those children, which CIS sees as too lax — for
reimporting MS-13 to America. Those immigrants aren’t eligible for DACA at all,
since the program requires applicants to show that they’ve been in the
US since 2007, years before the wave of unaccompanied children began.
CIS reports that more than 100 of the MS-13 members it
found came to the US as unaccompanied children. It doesn’t even bother
to say anything about how many are DACA recipients. The only specific
mention of DACA in the report is of a DACA recipient (and professed
MS-13 member) who claimed he was directed to take advantage of Obama’s
policies to bring fellow gang members in as unaccompanied children.
But even if CIS deliberately steered clear of linking
DACA with MS-13 themselves, conservative media outlets were happy to do
it for them: The Tucker Carlson segment that linked MS-13 to DACA used
the study as the peg and interviewed the study’s author, Jessica
Vaughan.
It’s easy to avoid a tough conversation about integration and opportunity
Most people don’t know the ins and outs of immigration
policy. They don’t know that DACA requires applicants to pass background
checks and show documentation proving they’ve been here since 2007.
They might not even know DACA requires individuals to apply at all. Nor
do they know that, as a matter of policy, DACA has nothing to do with
the MS-13 street gang.
That
haziness about immigration is what the right is seeking to exploit.
Even when Lott’s boosters acknowledge that DACA itself isn’t available
to people who’ve committed crimes, they lean into the idea that no one
really knows whether immigrants have committed crimes or not — turning a
“don’t know” into a “can’t know.”
In National Review, Peter Kirsanow wrote that because
crime in immigrant communities often goes unreported, it’s totally
possible that DACA applicants could have committed crimes that wouldn’t
show up on their records; the inescapable conclusion is that no
background check could possibly root out the criminal element among the
DREAMers.
While the Americans who are skeptical of immigration don’t draw a strong distinction between legal and unauthorized immigrants, the idea that unauthorized immigrants broke the law (or, as the term “sanctuary cities”
implies, are living outside it) makes it easy for immigration hawks to
connect unauthorized immigration in particular to crime. Both DACA and
MS-13 appear in news stories about immigrant young people and
“illegality” — so surely there’s a reason they’re both in the news at
the same time, right?
This is the kind of casual lack of understanding that led, say, NPR’s Terry Gross to ask the New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer (one
of the best US-based journalists on MS-13 and Central American
immigrants), “If DACA is extended or if DACA is totally canceled, what
impact would that have on MS-13?”
The answer, as Blitzer politely pointed out, is: “There is no relationship between DACA and MS-13.”
This isn’t to say that the positive stereotype of the
“valedictorian DREAMer” tells the whole story, or that there aren’t
social problems facing DREAMers and young immigrants (and children of
immigrants). The US-born children — the “second generation” — of
immigrants (specifically black and Latino immigrants) are often less
educated and earn less money than their parents. They’re more likely to
be single parents or have kids young, and they are, in fact, more likely
to commit crimes.
Sociologists call it “negative assimilation.” And there’s
reason to worry about it; the National Academy of Sciences, in its
sweeping 2015 study of immigrants in the US, identified negative
assimilation as one of the biggest concerns for the long-term well-being
of both immigrants and their descendants and America more broadly.
We don’t know what “causes” negative assimilation (and
there almost certainly is more than one cause), and whether it says
something about immigrants, America, or both.
But having a conversation about all this not only means
accepting that the people already living here will stay here — it also
means that America ought to care about them. From the perspective of
immigration hawks, that’s exactly backward. Instead of believing that
spending a certain amount of time in America makes a foreigner American,
they’re concerned about the opposite: that parts of America have been
inhabited by unaccountable foreigners and opaque to law enforcement for
so long that they’ve become foreign enclaves on American soil.
That’s a fear that has long animated the right when it
comes to immigration, and it is a fear that conservative media is all
too eager to inflame."
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( Note to Dara Lind: Trump may very well call the DREAMERs "terrific people" in public, but please I think we all know what he mutters about them under his breath when the cameras aren't rolling.)
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On to the youth gun control movement in the United States which has overtaken the conventional corporate media and Washington D.C., shaking the lawmakers in their boots for the last almost fourteen days and continues to be the catalyst for change in gun laws and solidifying other gun control and anti-NRA groups across the nation, defying elected officials and corporations bought off by the NRA:
While you are here, click topics Parkland Shooting and Gun Control:
From Democracy Now ! 03/01/2018
By, Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan
*****
You didn't really think Trump was actually for gun control, right ?
From Democracy Now ! Headlines 03/02/18:
*****
The NY Times has more.....
NRA Suggests Trump May Retreat From Gun Control
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A current listing of U.S. companies who are severing ties with the NRA:
From Think Progress:
How Corporate Pressure Changed The National Conversation on Gun Control
by, Danielle McLean - 03/03/18
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The February Stats:
Locally of course nothing changes, the news is grim: Frontera reports the official PGJE number for violent deaths/executions for the month of February in Tijuana alone stands at 171 with the YTD total at February's end in Tijuana at 359. You can read each individually here, where just this afternoon a Municipal Police officer was attacked in Villafontana - his condition said to be "delicate". UPDATE: The Police Officer shot is dead.
Frontera Policiaca
Of course,
Zeta - don't miss the one about the man burned alive in Mexicali, they also note one executed in Real Del Mar across from SADM, another in Tecate, more in Ensenada including one this evening of a man shot in front of his family inside a restaurant in El Sauzal. (Noticias del Dia)
Noteworthy, one man shot in the San Ysidro POE lanes going up to the States in February - his condition was reported to be critical.
On the Scenic Hwy, another body located down the road on the Scenic Hwy inside of a vehicle in front of San Marino.
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Next report hopefully will be on the gangs in Tijuana, and the rise and growth of the CJNG nationwide.
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