It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, January 21, 2021
Biden pick for DHS chief says he would not abolish ICE and CBP Tue, January 19, 2021, 11:55 AM
Alejandro Mayorkas, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to head the Department of Homeland Security, said during his Senate confirmation hearing that he would execute Biden’s plan to stop building the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Mayorkas also said that CBP and ICE play “critical roles” in the federal government and that he wouldn’t abolish them.
Video Transcript
SENATOR RICK SCOTT: Thank you, [INAUDIBLE]. So with regard to the wall itself, would you tear down parts of the wall? Would you stop the construction that's going on? How would you deal with the existing plans with regard to the wall?
ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS: Senator Scott, President-elect Biden has committed to stop construction of the border wall. It would be my responsibility to execute that on that commitment. And I have not looked at the question of what we do with respect to the wall that already has been built, and I look forward to studying that question, understanding the costs and benefits of doing so, being open and transparent with you and with all members of this committee, sharing my thoughts and considerations, and working cooperatively with you towards a solution.
SENATOR RICK SCOTT: Thank you, Mr. Mayorkas. We talked about this the other day. Could you repeat your position with regard to funding Border Patrol and ICE, and what do you think we should continue to fund them, or we should abolish them?
ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS: Senator, US customs and Border Protection, US Customs And Immigration Enforcement play critical roles in the federal government, and I would not abolish them.
Israel is warning that a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine is 'less effective than we hoped' against COVID-19, and it could be a blow to the US and UK strategies
Sinéad Baker
Israel's coronavirus chief warned the first Pfizer vaccine dose seems "less effective" than expected.
This may worry the UK and US, which are prioritizing widespread first doses.
Israel has vaccinated a larger share of its population than any other country
The Israeli official leading the country's coronavirus response warned that it is seeing a smaller effect than it hoped after giving a dose of the vaccine.
The nation has had the world's fastest vaccine rollout, and as of January 19 had given a first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to 25.6% of its population, per Our World in Data.
But a note of caution came from Nachman Ash, Israel's coronavirus commissioner, who told Israel's Army Radio that a single dose appeared to be "less effective than we had thought," according to The Guardian.
The vaccine is designed to come in two shots, with the second dose given three weeks after the first in clinical trials. This is how Israel is distributing the vaccine.
Israeli Prime Minister Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gets his second dose of the coronavirus vaccine on January 9, 2021. MIRIAM ALSTER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
But the strategy raises concerns for the UK, which is prioritizing giving people the first dose of the vaccine.Â
This means delaying second doses by as much as 12 weeks so that as many people as possible can get their first dose one. The hope is that partial immunity among many people is better than fuller immunity for fewer people.
And it also could bring concerns for the US, where incoming president Joe Biden plans to release all available vaccine doses to maximise the number of people getting shots, which could result in delays to second doses even though the US plan is to give them all on schedule.
A patient is vaccinated in London, UK, on December 8. Jack Hill - Pool / Getty Images
Pfizer says that a single dose of its vaccine is about 52% effective, while getting a second dose makes it around 95% effective.
According to Israel, the single dose appears to only be around 33% effective, a significant loss.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, told the UK's Sky News that he will look "very carefully" at the level of protection that people are getting.
He did not say that the UK should change its strategy, but that the government would "just need to keep measuring the numbers" as the vaccine is given to people.
Medical assistant April Massaro gives a first dose of Pfizer BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine in California in December 2020. Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Vallance said this week that the real-world rate of effectiveness was always expected to be lower than that, but that he doesn't think it will be "as low" as what Israel has reported.
The first dose of the vaccine is not thought to offer any protection until around 10 days after getting the shot, and including those days when trying to figure out how effective the first dose is would drive the numbers down.
It is important to note that the UK is not only using the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. It is also using the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine, where studies suggest that a spacing out doses could actually provide more protection.
Editorial: A single dose of COVID vaccine may help, but it's not sufficient
The Times Editorial Board
Tue, January 19, 2021
Residents line up Wednesday to receive the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in the Disneyland parking lot in Anaheim. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The all-important push to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19 faces a true dilemma: Two doses are required for the vaccines available right now. But because Americans — like people in many countries — would not refrain from holiday gatherings and keep their masks on, cases are surging higher than they’ve ever been. A single dose of vaccine would provide significant protection, but it’s not enough for long-term immunity.
The federal government had initially held back millions of doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna-National Institutes of Health vaccines to ensure there were enough for second helpings for the initial recipients, who've mainly been healthcare workers and nursing home residents. But it abandoned that strategy in late December and plowed through the reserves, according to the Washington Post — though federal officials didn't share that fact with the states. Instead, they announced last week that they would release the national stockpile of COVID-19 vaccines so that more people could get a first dose, without revealing that the stockpile was empty.
This change of plan was based on officials’ belief that the drugmakers could produce enough vaccine for everyone to receive second doses as recommended, which would be three to four weeks after the first dose. (The vaccines range from fairly effective to very effective after a single shot, at least for a while, depending on which one is used.) It’s a reasonable gambit when so many are falling ill and dying, but it’s not without risks.
If states can't collect and distribute the second doses to their residents in time, we don't know what that might mean for the vaccines' effectiveness. None of the clinical trials included an extended time between doses; in other words, no one knows whether people would be as protected if they had to wait extra weeks for the second dose. Though more spread-out shots work for other viruses, these two vaccines use an entirely novel mechanism. Would the protection last long enough for the second dose and would the two together work as well? Quite possibly. Or not.
There are other concerns if the second doses don’t come through fast. One is that people will be less likely to show up for the follow-up if there’s a longer time period between shots.
“If people do not truly know how protective a vaccine is, there is the potential for harm because they may assume that they are fully protected when they are not, and accordingly, alter their behavior to take unnecessary risks,” the Food and Drug Administration said in a statement this month.
Another possibility: People's trust in the vaccine may erode. Many Americans are still reeling from revised and sometimes contradictory messages that came from federal authorities about masks and other pandemic-related issues; now the message on vaccination is changing as well.
The Pfizer vaccine, which hasn’t been tested for how well it works after just one dose, has been estimated to be a little more than 50% effective at that level — about the same level as many flu vaccines — though some people theorize its actual effectiveness would be much higher. The Moderna vaccine, using the same approach as Pfizer’s, is highly effective, about 85% to 90%, at one dose. Effectiveness is closer to 95% with both doses if they’re given within the recommended window.
Failure to get a second dose, or to get it within a reasonable time, raises another concern among health experts: If the vaccine is effective enough to keep a person from having symptoms but not effective enough to completely fight off the novel coronavirus, partly vaccinated people could act as the incubators for a mutated, vaccine-resistant virus.
Regardless, the current surge left health authorities without much choice. Using all those doses to give one shot to as many Americans as possible represents a real opportunity to save lives now and bring down COVID-19 infection rates for the population as a whole, versus theoretically causing problems down the line.
Getting the vaccines rolling out will require a faster, more effective procedure to distribute the shots than California and most other states have managed so far. But it also means better public education to avoid a situation in which millions of people are walking around only partly vaccinated. The second shot is crucial, and Americans will need to be reminded of this repeatedly.
The first real-world data showed the first dose led to a 33 per cent reduction in cases of coronavirus among people who were vaccinated between 14 and 21 days afterwards.
But that figure is far lower than that predicted by the joint committee on vaccines and immunisation (JCVI), which suggested a single dose would prevent 89 per cent of recipients from getting Covid-19 symptoms.
In a radio interview, Nachman Ash, Israel's vaccine tsar, said a single dose appeared "less effective than we had thought" and also lower than Pfizer had suggested, raising fears that giving only one dose will not be as protective as hoped.
Sir Patrick, the Government's chief scientific adviser, said experts would need to "keep measuring the numbers" but added that better immunity would build over time.
Speaking to Sky News, he said: "We need to look at this very carefully. What we know from clinical studies… is that if you take everything from day zero to day 28, then the overall figure is something like 50 per cent protection.
"But of course you don't expect any protection in the first days because your immune system hasn't had a chance to build up and some people may have been infected before they had the vaccine. If you take it from day 10 up to day 21 and beyond, it looks much more like the 89 per cent figure the JCVI gave."
However, Sir Patrick admitted the efficacy is unlikely to be as high as 89 per cent in practice because real-world rollouts of vaccines are often lower than trial results.
The Israeli data also showed that people who received their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine had a six to 12-fold increase, meaning they had far better protection.
The UK Government has been criticised for making people wait up to 12 weeks for a second dose, and even Pfizer has warned that one dose efficacy is around 52 per cent.
British scientists called for Israeli scientists to publish their data so they could check the results.
Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: "It is vital that advice and policy take into account the latest available data.
"However, the reports that have come from Israel are insufficient to provide any evidence that the current UK policy in regard to delaying the second dose of vaccines is in any way incorrect. The details of the different studies have only been released, it seems, at a press conference, the reasons for which are unclear.
"There is a need for at least a pre-print giving the detailed methods and data to understand and interpret these findings. It is not sensible to compare efficacy derived from an observational study of this type which is subject to many biases, with the efficacy derived from randomised trials."
Experts also warned that protection against picking up Covid may be less important than finding out whether it stops hospitalisation and deaths.
Although most trials were not powered to determine that, the early data suggests that some vaccines offer blanket protection against the kind of severe disease that leads to fatalities.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's departing
message to the US is that multiculturalism is
'not who America is'
NOPE THAT'S CANADA
John Haltiwanger Tue, January 19, 2021,
The outgoing secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, on Tuesday decried multiculturalism as
un-American.
"Our enemies stoke these divisions because they know they make us weaker," he said.
Pompeo was excoriated on Twitter for his comments.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Chappell/AFP via Getty Images
On his last full day as the top US diplomat and just one day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo deemed multiculturalism to be un-American.
"Woke-ism, multiculturalism, all the -isms - they're not who America is. They distort our glorious founding and what this country is all about. Our enemies stoke these divisions because they know they make us weaker," Pompeo said in a tweet.
The US has an extraordinarily diverse population and generally celebrates the hodgepodge of cultures that have helped define it.
Many on Twitter took issue with Pompeo's words, given that multiculturalism is widely viewed as a central tenet of the US.
This is not the first time Pompeo has decried multiculturalism. In 2015, he cited a sermon before the Kansas Legislature that said: "'America had worshipped other Gods and called it multiculturalism. We'd endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.'"
Pompeo, who is thought to have ambitions of running for president in 2024, has been a controversial secretary of state.
In November, Pompeo became the first US diplomat to visit an Israeli settlement, shattering decades of American policy. His hawkish stance toward Iran helped fuel fears that the Trump administration might provoke a new conflict in the Middle East. The departing secretary of state also garnered a reputation as an antagonist of the media, once berating a veteran reporter for questioning him about Ukraine and asking her to point it out on a map.
Pompeo last week abruptly canceled a final trip to Europe because US allies were reportedly too embarrassed to meet with him following the Capitol siege, which was provoked by President Donald Trump.
Biden might succeed in legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants. Here’s why | Opinion
Andres Oppenheimer Wed, January 20, 2021
Under the immigration bill that President Joe Biden is expected to send to Congress, known as the U.S. Citizenship Act, undocumented immigrants would be given an eight-year path to citizenship if they pass background checks and prove they have paid taxes.
That would be anathema for Republican anti-immigration zealots. But here are the reasons why Biden may succeed:
First, Biden will enjoy a big advantage over former President Obama on immigration issues, because public opinion has changed in recent years. Polls show that most Americans may be ready for more pro-immigrant policies.
Perhaps it’s because Americans have grown tired of former President Trump’s and Fox News’ constant demonization of undocumented immigrants. Or maybe enough Americans have been shocked by the Trump administration’s cruelty when they saw pictures of immigrant children kept in cages or learned about the separation of babies from their migrant parents.
At least 34 percent of Americans believe immigration should be increased, and another 36 percent think it should be kept at current levels. That combined pro-immigration stand of 70 percent is larger than at any time since Gallup began asking this question in 1966, the poll shows.
Just in the past four years — during Trump’s term — pro-immigration sentiment in the country rose by 14 percentage points, the Pew study says.
“Trump’s nativism backfired with the majority of the public,” Frank Sharry, head of the America’s Voice pro-immigration advocacy group, told me. “There’s more political space and more political will to legislate and reform immigration policy now.”
Second, the Biden administration plans to use a new strategy to legalize undocumented residents, people familiar with the president’s plan tell me.
Instead of asking Congress to approve Biden’s immigration package as a stand-alone bill, the administration is likely to attach it to a larger COVID-19 or economic-stimulus legislative package.
The administration will argue that millions of undocumented workers — including first responders, hospital workers and waiters — are essential workers who are needed to fight the pandemic and to help revamp the economy.
An estimated 7 million of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country qualify as essential workers or are “DREAMers” — people who were brought to the country as infants by their undocumented parents — or have temporary protected status. Those 7 million would be the first group to be legalized.
Third, Biden will have a greater urgency to pass an immigration bill than Obama did, because he wants to mark a sharp contrast with the Trump administration’s brutality against immigrants.
Biden knows that immigration reform is a pending assignment for the Democrats, and that he may only have two years to get his plan passed by Congress.
Historically, the party that is in the White House tends to lose the midterm elections, so Biden could lose his congressional majority in 2022. For Biden, it will be now or, possibly, never.
It won’t be easy, but Biden may succeed in his plan to legalize many of the estimated 11 million undocumented residents. I’ll be rooting for it.
Don’t miss the “Oppenheimer Presenta” TV show at 8 p.m. E.T. Sunday on CNN en Español. Twitter: @oppenheimera
Biden Launches Effort To Undo Trump's Damage
On Immigration Rowaida Abdelaziz ·Reporter, HuffPost Wed, January 20, 2021,
After years of Donald Trump attacking immigrants, President Joe Biden is beginning his tenure by undoing many of the former president’s policies and overhauling the U.S. immigration system.
The Biden administration has what it calls a comprehensive approach to immigration. In his first few hours as president, Biden plans to propose a new bill that would include a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented people in the country.
In addition, he issued immigration-related executive actions:
He ordered government to halt the construction of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and review whether contracts already issued for it could be diverted to other projects, as well as to end the national emergency declaration for the border. Trump used the declaration to justify taking money slated for other means to fund the wall.
He rescinded Trump’s travel ban, which primarily targeted Muslim-majority countries.
Biden launched an effort to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, also known as DACA, which allows undocumented young people to remain in the U.S. and work legally. The program remains in effect in spite of Trump’s efforts to end it, but is still facing legal challenges.
Biden is also expected to take more actions on immigration:
Biden will reinstate deportation priorities undone by Trump, who encouraged immigration agents to pursue removal for all undocumented people rather than focusing first on criminals and repeat border-crossers.
Biden will reverse Trump’s effort to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census.
The onslaught of immigration reforms signals a new and welcomed era for immigrants, who were among Trump’s favorite scapegoats and targets. Immigration reform advocates and experts applauded Biden’s first-day plans for prioritizing immigration and quickly undoing the damage done by the previous president.
Biden’s ambitious legislative bill, which will be sent to Congress on Wednesday for review, details an eight-year roadmap to citizenship for current immigrants, including approximately 700,000 Dreamers and 400,000 immigrants living with Temporary Protected Status.
Members of those programs, as well as certain farm workers, would qualify for green cards immediately and be eligible for citizenship after three years. Other undocumented immigrants would be eligible for green cards after five years. In all cases, the immigrants would be subjected to background checks and required to pay taxes.
The plan would also reunite families, boost technology at the border, and increase the diversity visa program from 55,000 visas to 80,000 visas per year. Trump attempted to terminate the diversity visa program, as well as DACA and certain TPS programs.
The proposal would set up multiple processing centers abroad to identify and screen refugees, in addition to allotting $4 billion in aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras over four years to address the root cause of migration.
If passed, Biden’s reforms would be the largest legislative overhaul of the U.S. immigration system since Republican President Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s.
However, it may be difficult to get them through Congress. The last immigration overhaul bill passed the Senate in a 68-32 vote in 2013, but the Democratic majority was larger at the time than the 50-50 split Biden will be dealing with. (Vice President Kamala Harris, as president of the Senate, can cast a tie-breaking vote.)
However, it will be an easier lift in the House, where that 2013 bill never got a vote. Democrats control the lower chamber now and are likely to support a comprehensive immigration reform bill.
Biden unveils immigration proposal that offers green cards and overtime pay to farm workers and a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers Wed, January 20, 2021
Over 200,000 temporary agricultural workers come to the United States each year.
Davis/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
President Joe Biden is offering foreign-born farm workers the chance to immediately apply for permanent residency.
Biden's immigration proposal would also give agriculture industry workers the right to overtime pay.
Each year, over 200,000 temporary agricultural workers come to the United States.
President Joe Biden is presenting a sweeping immigration reform bill to Congress on his first day in office, prioritizing a sharp rebuke to the Trump years. It would award permanent residency to farm workers who have kept the country fed throughout the pandemic, offer a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers - giving hope to one son of farm workers and brother of a Dreamer.
Those who receive green cards would also be fast-tracked for citizenship, part of an effort to provide a path to legal status for more than 11 million undocumented people currently in the US.
The bill, which Biden is introducing within hours of his inauguration, will also incorporate the central feature of legislation that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris introduced as a senator, extending overtime pay to all who toil in the agriculture industry.
To receive permanent residency, temporary agricultural workers - who have spent at least 100 days in four of the last five years working in the US as part of the H-2A visa program - would be eligible for residency if they pass a criminal background check. Residency, among other things, would give potentially hundreds of thousands of farm workers the freedom to leave an abusive employer, something effectively denied them under the H-2A program, where visas are tied to a company sponsor (over 200,000 such visas are issued each year, the vast majority to Mexican nationals).
"This bill is fundamentally different than what any other president has ever done in emancipating farm workers so they can escape pervasive fear and behave like free men and women," United Farm Workers President Teresa Romero, a member of Biden's transition team, said in a statement.
A reprieve for Dreamers
As The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, the "centerpiece" of the Biden administration plan is an eight-year path to citizenship for millions of undocumented Americans, providing them temporary status for five years and then a green card for three; those who pass a background check and pay their taxes would ultimately receive citizenship.
In addition to farm workers, those brought to the United States as children, as well as adults who fled natural and human disasters in Central America and elsewhere, would also be eligible to immediately receive permanent residency.
Biden is also poised to issue a slew of executive orders reversing his predecessor's more controversial policies, such as the de facto "Muslim ban" prohibiting travelers from countries such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Somalia. The Post reported that he is also likely to reinstate a program providing temporary legal status to minors from Central America. The real-world impact of Biden's proposal, should it become law
Ruben, an 18-year-old college student in Washington, is one of five children born to farm workers who came to the US from Mexico (Insider is withholding his last name due to parents' undocumented status). He spent summers picking apples and blueberries - backbreaking work that has led him to pursue a career in medicine.
He's relieved that the Trump era is over. Former President Barack Obama may have deported millions, but Ruben said he did not demonize and instill fear in millions quite like his successor did, "stereotyping Latino immigrants and just yelling out whatever he thought."
"My grandma was here and she would watch the news every day, "Ruben said, "and she would just panic. We just told her to stop watching."
Ruben campaigned for Biden, spending over a month in Arizona knocking doors in a state where the Latino vote delivered a knockout to Trump's hopes for a second term. He's hopeful that the stress of the last four years can give way to some optimism, purchased with his contribution to getting out the vote. For him, there's the chance that his family, including an older brother who is a DACA recipient, could stop living in fear.
His parents, however, in the US since 2001, have lived through two rounds of presidents pledging to make the immigration system a little more humane. Still, Biden's proposal, the most liberal in decades - with two houses of Congress to clear before becoming law - is to them no less than a potential godsend.
"They're kind of shocked," Ruben said. "They're pretty religious, so they just have faith in God that this one's going to pass."
Joe Biden's Immigration Bill Aims to Address the Root Causes of Migration. Will it Work? Jasmine Aguilera, TIME Wed, January 20, 2021 Migrants, who arrived in caravan from Honduras to try to make their way to the United States, wait at the border in Vado Hondo, Guatemala, on January 18, 2021. Credit - Photo by Luis Vargas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
On his first day in office, President Joe Biden sent an immigration bill to Congress filled with goals that are a far cry from the Trump Administration’s hardline policies. Along with proposals for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who meet certain qualifications, Biden’s bill plans to address the deeper goal of addressing the root causes of migration, particularly from Central America. However, while it is a loftier in its aims in how to tackle immigration, experts say that it will take a lot more than is being proposed to address the issues that cause immigration from the region.
Biden’s bill comes after a caravan of thousands of Honduran migrants heading north to the U.S. was dissipated by Guatemalan security forces. Biden Administration officials warned migrants not to make the journey to the U.S., but experts believe people from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala will keep attempting to migrate to safer locations such as the U.S. as they have in recent years because of the dire situations they continue to face in their home countries.
Through the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, Biden has put forth a $4 billion four-year plan that aims to decrease violence, corruption and poverty in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the home countries of many of the migrants who have arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum in recent years. The bill would also establish centers throughout Central America for people to pursue refugee resettlement in either the U.S. or other countries.
Though the $4 billion is an increase in investment compared to the Trump and Obama Administrations, Ariel Ruiz Soto, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, says that $4 billion over the course of four years alone will not be enough to tackle the underlying issues. Investment from the U.S. needs to coincide with partnerships with the governments of Central American countries and Mexico, he says, and include special attention to education and jobs for youth, not just emphasis on security and enforcement measures, as was done under Trump and Obama. Improving economies could allow for people to have a stable future in their home countries, causing migration to decrease in the long run, possibly decades from now.
“[$4 billion] is an upgrade, and it will have significant consequences,” Ruiz tells TIME. “But it is only going to be effective if it’s sustainable over decades…it can’t be just four years, it can’t be eight years, it has to be sustained.”
It’s also an effort the U.S. should not undertake alone, Ruiz adds. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador also supports investing in Central America. López Obrador has worked with the U.S. and Canada on similar efforts made to address the root causes of migration in Central America, and in 2018 the U.S. backed Mexico by investing $5.8 billion. However, much of that money was already previously committed, according to The New York Times. “The United States by no means needs to be the only one doing this work,” Ruiz says. “What will make it more successful is if Mexico and the U.S. are speaking with the same voice about investment in the region.”
Any plan for investment should also cater to the specific needs of each country, Ruiz says. For example, 47% of Guatemalan children under the age of five suffer from chronic malnutrition according to the World Bank, and Guatemala ranks ninth in the world for level of risk to the effects of climate change, meanwhile in Honduras, 48% of people live in poverty and there is a high level of violence.
Investment by the U.S. and Mexico also means engaging with the private sector to create job opportunities in the Northern Triangle, Ruiz adds.
“Now that the new president (Biden) is here we are waiting for the answer, all of us immigrants who are here from Honduras,” one Honduran man, 18-year-old Eber Sosa who was in the caravan this week, told the Associated Press. “We are looking to see what the new president says to move forward.”
Violence continues to be high in Honduras and El Salvador, though homicide rates have been decreasing steadily, and Guatemalans face high unemployment, poverty and malnutrition. Hondurans were particularly devastated by hurricanes Eta and Iota in November. The three countries have also suffered economically as a result of COVID-19.
Ian Kysel, visiting assistant clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School and co-director of the Asylum and Convention Against Torture Appellate Clinic, says he sees this effort by Biden as a first step in creating a regional immigration policy grounded in human rights. “Going back decades, the U.S. Government has failed to adequately invest in making rights and human dignity the cornerstone of U.S. policy in the region—on migration or otherwise,” he tells TIME in a statement. “Human rights are key to addressing the major challenges facing migration. Past administrations have heavily invested in deterrence and securitization, forcefully externalizing the U.S. border to the detriment even to those seeking protection from persecution.”
But whether $4 billion does end up being allocated to Central America depends on Congress. On Wednesday, U.S. Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, announced he would be the one to introduce Biden’s bill. Menendez was one of the so-called “Gang of Eight” Senators who led the push for comprehensive immigration reform in 2013, an effort by former President Barack Obama to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants that ultimately failed in the House.
What to know about Joe Biden's pathway
to citizenship immigration plan
MOLLY NAGLE
President-elect Joe Biden will send to Congress an extensive immigration reform bill that includes an eight-year pathway to citizenship on Wednesday, following through on a long-standing campaign pledge to move on immigration on day one of a Biden presidency.
The new details of Biden’s legislation were first reported by The Washington Post, and confirmed by Biden transition officials.
Biden will send to Congress on Wednesday a policy that will include an eight-year pathway to citizenship for immigrants without legal status, and expand admissions for refugees to the country.
He would also take a different approach from the Trump administration’s border wall for enforcement, investing in technology at the border instead.
PHOTO: President-elect Joe Biden speaks during an event at The Queen theater, Jan. 15, 2021, in Wilmington, Del. (Matt Slocum/AP)
Biden, who worked as vice president on addressing the root causes of migration from Central American countries, will seek to do the same with his new legislation, the officials confirmed.
The plan tracks closely with the approach to immigration Biden discussed on the campaign trail, but expands on how Biden will structure the comprehensive overhaul.
For those living in the U.S. without legal status as of Jan. 1, Biden’s planned pathway would allow for five years of temporary status, and the opportunity to earn a green card upon meeting requirements like paying taxes, and passing a background check. Eligibility to apply for citizenship would follow three years later.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris also spoke about the policy in a recent interview, previewing the eight-year pathway to citizenship, along with expanding protections for DREAMers and DACA recipients.
“These are some of the things that we're going to do on our immigration bill, and we believe it is a smarter and a more humane way of approaching immigration,” said Harris in an interview with Univision last week.
Biden had long previewed his plan to send a bill overhauling the immigration system to Congress on the first day of his administration -- a significant move that places a priority on addressing the issue that the Obama administration was criticized for during their time in office.
“[W]e made a mistake. It took too long to get it right,” Biden said of the Obama Administration's record on immigration, during the Oct. 23 presidential debate.
While Democrats will hold a slim majority in both chambers in Congress during the start of Biden’s presidency, the proposal would still need to earn support from some Republicans in the Senate to pass into law -- testing Biden’s campaign trail pitch that he could garner bipartisan support for his legislative efforts as president.
Biden’s immigration push will be introduced as the country continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, and added to the ambitious legislative efforts Biden’s administration is already undertaking to get a handle on the virus.
MORE:Biden seeks early momentum on COVID and more: The Note
Biden unveiled a nearly $2 trillion COVID rescue plan last week to offer immediate relief to families struggling amid the continued economic downturn due to COVID.
Introducing the legislation is just one part of the aggressive start Biden is planning for the beginning of his administration. Over his first 10 days in office, Biden also plans to take executive action on a number of additional policy issues, including climate change, racial inequality and criminal justice reform.
On Inauguration Day alone, Biden will sign executive orders on extending the existing pause on student loan payments and interest, re-join the Paris Climate Agreement, and reverse the Trump administration’s travel “ban” on predominantly Muslim countries, in addition to putting in place a mask mandate on federal property amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made a promise to coal miners at a rally in West Virginia. “For those miners, get ready because you’re going to be working your asses off,” he told them, wearing a white hard hat. “We’ll be winning, winning, winning.”
After four years of the Trump administration, coal has been losing, losing, losing. Not that Trump can take the blame (or the credit). Dismal economics have been inexorably displacing coal as the fuel of choice in the US and around the world. Trump made some attempts to stop the bleeding—easing air pollution laws and propping up ailing plants—and in 2017, falsely claimed those efforts were working. “We are putting the coal miners back to work, just as I promised,” he said.
But, the data tell a different story. The number of people employed by the coal mining industry has fallen 15% since Trump took office in January 2017. Despite job losses that temporarily stabilized during his years in office, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics Data, the trend is continuing. Jobs did not increase, unhelped by Trump’s trade wars and unsuccessful efforts to use the Defense Production Act to prop up coal plants, before the pandemic curtailed coal demand and employment.
Production has followed suit. Despite coal prices remaining stable around $35 per ton over the last decade, production fell during Trump’s years in office to just 706 million short tons, the lowest amount since 1978, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
Coal still generates 38% of global electricity, the largest share of any fuel. But that is falling in many countries as the price of solar, wind, and natural gas dips below coal, cutting into the industry’s profits. During the first half of 2020, global coal capacity fell for the first time since at least the 1950s, reports the nonprofit Global Energy Monitor.
In the US, many coal boilers are now simply too expensive to run. In the last five years, utilities have shut down more than 48 gigawatts of coal-fired generation capacity. The pandemic accelerated that trend: As energy demand dipped, the most expensive sources were taken offline first. In 2021, another 2.7 GW, or 1% of the US coal fleet, is scheduled to be retired. Soon, it will be cheaper to build new solar or wind farms than continue operating old coal plants, accelerating retirements further.
But there remains one bright spot for US coal producers: exports. The rest of the world still has a huge (and in some cases growing) coal fleet. China and India support the industry through heavy state subsidies, and China doubled the pace of new coal permitting last year with least 250 GW of new coal power capacity planned. For now, American coal mines’ only new business is likely to come from overseas.
QZ
PASSION AND POWER
"JUST IS , IS NOT JUST ICE"
INAGURATION POEM
NEW AMERICAN NATIONAL POET LAURETTE AMANDA GORMAN
AWESONE POEM AWESOME DELIVERY,
WATCH THE MAGIC SHE SPINS WITH HER FINGERS
WRITTEN THE NIGHT OF JAN 6
AFTER THE ATTEMPTED INSURRECTION & TRUMP COUP
MY FAVOURITE PART OF THE INAUGURATION
THE OTHER WAS THE EVENING TV SPECIAL
Read the poem that riveted a nation during Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony REUTERS/PATRICK SEMANSKY Brilliant.
By Lila MacLellan Quartz at Work reporter January 20, 2021 The roughly six minutes that belonged to Amanda Gorman, a 22-year-old Black poet from Los Angeles, may become what many Americans remember most vividly about Joe Biden’s inauguration as US president on Jan. 20.
Gorman’s recitation of her work “The Hill We Climb” was a showstopper, her performance as powerful and transformative as her verses.
Gorman has explained that she finished the work late at night on Jan. 6, the day of the violent insurrection at the US Capitol. She references the darkness and trials the country has recently endured, writing of “a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it, would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy” and “nearly succeeded.” But she also delivers an ode to America’s resilience and a call to summon it. In the final line, she writes that “the light that is always there, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
The poet is herself a personification of that light. One section of her work reads: And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it, somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished.
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.
According to NPR, the young poet, like Biden, suffered from a speech impediment as a child. Biden struggled with stuttering, something that he still manages, and Gorman couldn’t pronounce certain sounds. She nevertheless became LA’s first Youth Poet Laureate at age 16 and, while studying three years later at Harvard University, was named the first National Youth Poet Laureate.
She isn’t the first poet invited to read at an inauguration who had to overcome an obstacle to communicating. “Maya Angelou was mute growing up as a child and she grew up to deliver the inaugural poem for president Bill Clinton,” Gorman told NPR. “So I think there is a real history of orators who have had to struggle with a type of imposed voicelessness, you know, having that stage in the inauguration.”
The connection between Gorman and Angelou wasn’t lost on others watching the event:
You can watch a video of Gorman reading “The Hill We Climb” and read the text of the poem, as transcribed by Los Angeles Magazine,
“The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman
When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it, somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished.
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one. And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect, we are striving to forge a union with purpose, to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.
So we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another, we seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: that even as we grieved, we grew, even as we hurt, we hoped, that even as we tired, we tried, that we’ll forever be tied together victorious, not because we will never again know defeat but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one should make them afraid. If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in in all of the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare it because being American is more than a pride we inherit, it’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it. That would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy, and this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can periodically be delayed, but it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith, we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us, this is the era of just redemption we feared in its inception we did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour but within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves, so while once we asked how can we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us.
We will not march back to what was but move to what shall be, a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free, we will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, our blunders become their burden. But one thing is certain: if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left, with every breath from my bronze, pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one, we will rise from the golden hills of the West, we will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution, we will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states, we will rise from the sunbaked South, we will rebuild, reconcile, and recover in every known nook of our nation in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful, when the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.
Read more about Gorman and her forthcoming children’s book, Change Sings (Penguin Random House) on her official site.
