How the T-Mobile-Sprint Merger Legitimizes Monopoly

A federal judge has just deepened America’s corporate concentration crisis.

by Sandeep Vaheesan

February 11, 2020

iStock

Judge Victor Marrero’s Tuesday ruling that let T-Mobile take over Sprint just deepened America’s already dire corporate concentration crisis. By allowing the nation’s third- and fourth-largest wireless carriers to combine, Marrero has dealt a clear blow to competition in the wireless market and empowered all corporations seeking dominance through mergers and acquisitions.

The Obama administration wisely said no to consolidation that would reduce the number of national wireless carriers to just three. Indeed, the deal will effectively create a new carrier with more than 100 million users. As the states in the case argued, that will likely cost subscribers roughly $4.5 billion annually, as the market will effectively be concentrated between just T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration—and now a federal judge—have rejected the Obama-era policy and permitted a dangerous new level of concentration. Tuesday’s decision underscores the need for bright-line rules that deter harmful mergers and acquisitions and instead direct business strategies toward product improvement and investment in new capacity.

Equally disconcerting, the judge’s decision subverts the Clayton Act, the principal federal anti-merger statute. Passed in 1914 and strengthened in 1950, the law expanded the scope of business activities covered by the Sherman Antitrust Act and outlawed mergers that threaten to reduce competition or tend to create a monopoly.

Judge Marrero’s ruling permits otherwise illegal mergers if the merging corporations can establish productive efficiencies or show that one of the corporations involved is a “weakened competitor.”

But the Supreme Court clearly rejected these defenses in a series of rulings in the 1960s because they are contrary to the text and purpose of the Clayton Act. While there is a limited “failing firm defense”—which allows a merger that would create a less competitive market if the company is in danger imminent business failure—Sprint didn’t satisfy its requirements, nor did Marrero purport to apply it. Sprint may not be doing as well as its executives and shareholders would like, but it is not on the verge of collapse or insolvency.

Marrero’s ruling, therefore, leaves it to state attorneys general to keep anti-merger law alive and protect the public. They’re now the best positioned to take a stand and appeal this decision to the Second Circuit—the most important thing they can do. It is critical they send a strong message to all corporations that they will uphold the law. Powerful firms in concentrated markets shouldn’t be allowed to consolidate even further.

Sandeep Vaheesan

Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute, has published widely on the political economy of antitrust law, including its misapplication to workers.

Why Are Farmers Destroying Food While Grocery Stores Are Empty?

Turns out letting “efficient” monopolies control our food supply was a terrible idea.

by Claire Kelloway

April 28, 2020

iSt

For many Americans, grocery shopping has become an intensely stressful experience. To maintain social distancing, people must queue before entering stores. Once inside, they must scramble to find increasingly scarce products, including household staples from milk and eggs to pork and beef. Others can no longer afford to go to grocery stores. Instead, they wait for hours to get goods from food banks that are also running short on supplies.

But in a seeming paradox, farmers are destroying their products—including many of the same goods that stores lack. Dairy Farmers of America, the country’s biggest dairy co-op, has called many of its members and instructed them to dump their milk. The cooperative has estimated that farmers are now dumping up to 3.7 million gallons of milk per day. Sanderson Farms, a chicken processor, smashes 750,000 eggs each week. Farmers have been plowing their produce into the ground.

How is it that Americans can face shortages, and in some cases go hungry, while farmers face a glut so large they’re deliberately wasting food? A number of recent stories have noted that America’s food supply chain has proven unable to adjust to the new COVID reality. In particular, food processors and distributors that serve shut-down commercial customers, like restaurants, aren’t able to retool in order to send food to retail outlets like grocery stores, where demand is high. But that just begs the question: why is the supply chain set up in this now obviously risky way?

Decades of consolidation have made food systems more vulnerable, say experts. Beginning in the 1980s, the federal government allowed more agribusinesses to merge and grow largely without restraint in the name of efficiency—before, antitrust and other policies helped keep these industries decentralized and competitive. Consequently, a small number of giant, often vertically integrated, firms, produce and distribute the bulk of food in the U.S. Their hulking and specialized supply chains are not so efficient in the face of disruption.

Dairy Farmers of America, for example, now controls 30 percent of all raw milk in the United States. (I wrote about consolidation in the dairy industry for the Monthly here). In the meat industry, roughly 50 factories process 98 percent of the nation’s beef. The same holds for pork: Following industry consolidation in the late 1980s and 1990s, the portion of U.S. hogs slaughtered in massive, million-head capacity plants rose from 38 percent to 88 percent in just two decades.

Losing even one of these large plants can rattle entire livestock markets (as ranchers saw when a fire took out a Kansas beef plant this summer).

“The portion of U.S. hogs slaughtered in massive, million-head capacity plants rose from 38 percent to 88 percent in just two decades. Losing even one of these large plants can rattle entire livestock markets.”

Larger plants also concentrate more workers in close quarters, causing some of the largest clusters of COVID-19 outbreaks among workers in the country. At least 15 massive meat-processing plants shut down this month, reducing production capacity by 20 percent for both pork and beef. Experts now predict meat consumer shortages within a month and farmers are euthanizing livestock to deal with a sudden backlog of animals.

“If you pull out one little thing in that specialized, centralized, consolidated chain, then everything crashes,” said Mary Hendrickson, a rural sociology professor at University of Missouri. “Now we have an animal welfare catastrophe, an environmental catastrophe, a farmer catastrophe, and a worker catastrophe altogether, and we can trace a lot of this back to the pursuit of efficiency.”

Hendrickson argued that a more diverse network of both small and regional meat processing plants may have been able to mitigate risks and absorb production from closed facilities. “What if we had regional pack facilities like we used to have? Would we have 20 percent of the pork processing capacity closed because of worker sickness?” she asked. “It would just be less likely.”

But it isn’t just bottlenecks. Consolidation also drives inflexibility. Farmers increasingly raise foods on contract for one dominant buyer that can dictate what they grow and how (Heinz, for instance, has their tomato farmers use Heinz crafted seeds). Large swaths of foods may be raised for one specific plant that serves just one purpose, such as bottling milk for grocery stories or processing cheese for restaurants. While highly specialized products and plants create consistency, these rigid supply chains cannot easily redirect their products to different uses if things go awry.

Take the case of eggs. Farmers such as Kerry Mergen in Minnesota raise laying hens on contract. Mergen’s 61,000-bird operation was specifically designed to supply eggs for pre-cracked fluid-egg mixes, used almost exclusively in food service. Most of what they produced went to one Cargill plant that temporarily shut down this week due to lost restaurant and food-service customers. Even though grocery stores report egg shortages, grading eggs for retail requires special equipment and likely new contracts with a different large buyer. Instead, the corporation that Mergen raised hens for, Daybreak Foods, decided to euthanize his flock and sell the birds to a rendering plant to become pet food.

Shifting entire business models built around serving restaurants or adjusting to sudden systemic labor shortages is no easy task for any system. Some foods are trapped in particular channels because the FDA requires different labeling for consumer-facing goods. And even if all surplus foods could make it to grocery stores, it’s not clear that home cooks’ demand for fresh fruits and vegetables could match that of restaurants. When it comes to storing or donating extra vegetables, government and food bank cold storage is already maxed out, in part because the USDA bought up frozen meats that would have been sold to China, as part of the agency’s trade war relief effort earlier this year.

All this taken into account, experts like Hendrickson still contend that less centralized food systems with a stronger mix of public, nonprofit, and private players could more readily adapt to the COVID-19 crisis. For example, the smallest and most local food providers, such as local farms providing community supported agriculture (CSA) shares, have reacted quickly to the crisis and benefited from a spike in demand for direct food sales. These businesses are not tied to complicated purchasing contracts and often work with multiple buyers and distribution channels, including direct access to consumers.

“If you look at what the small farmers are doing, they’re changing on a dime to online ordering systems and delivery,” said Hendrickson. “Those organizations that have the most flexibility and latitude to change are going to be really important in the future.”

Finally, public food infrastructure could play a critical role in supporting mid-sized producers, responding to shocks, and serving communities cut out of consolidated supply chains. Michelle Miller, the associate director of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, pointed to the critical role that the U.S. Department of Agriculture played in managing disruptions to food systems following the Dust Bowl drought and Great Depression. She also touted the benefit of public food wholesale markets, or food terminals, that provided accessible markets for producers of all sizes to sell their products, even if their normal buyers are no longer accepting their product.

Unfortunately, when the U.S. embraced pro-corporate policies that allowed massive corporate consolidation, it also cut back on programs that help buy up and distribute food to those in need. “There is some basic infrastructure that used to be in place that is no longer, as the food system became privatized and vertically integrated,” said Miller.

Now, as COVID empties grocery shelves and renders many Americans food insecure, the Trump administration is trying to temporarily revive a similar kind of public investment in the agricultural system. After ignoring months of warnings that they should act, warnings that may have helped prevent some of the waste and shortages had they been heeded, the Department of Agriculture now plans to buy up $19 billion in goods to help the sector and provide food to those in need. But the government can’t fix decades of neglect overnight. Before it can have an impact, this money will have to move through a system that’s poorly equipped to handle a crisis.

To prepare for the next disruption, we need a long-term solution. And that means we need not just a better public system for distributing food, but vigorous antitrust enforcement. Otherwise, no amount of money will allow farms to adjust to sudden shocks.

Claire Kelloway

Claire Kelloway is a reporter and researcher with the Open Markets Institute and the primary writer for Food & Power, a website covering corporate concentration in the food system. Her writing on food and agriculture has appeared in ProPublica, Civil Eats, Pacific Standard, and more
.

Why Biden Should Pick Kamala  Harris for VP

She can not only help him win—she can advance the anti-racism agenda.

by Julie Rodin Zebrak

June 25, 2020

POLITICS

Gage Skidmore

 

Joe Biden and his vice-presidential vetting team have their work cut out for them. They bear the responsibility of choosing a running mate who can garner excitement, advance the progressive agenda, help reverse systemic racism, and appeal to independents and moderate Republicans. The stakes are immeasurably high: It’s hard to fathom what four more years of Donald Trump in the White House would do to our country.

As the pandemic and the mass protests over George Floyd’s murder have revealed, the nation is still reeling from centuries of racial injustice and inequities. In this fragile moment, Biden has an incredible opportunity help heal the country through the selection of his running mate.

Of course, Biden has a delicate needle to thread. He needs someone who appeals to the black community and can seize on the momentum surrounding the anti-racism movement. He needs to galvanize support among the liberal army of voters who supported Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. At the same time, he can’t alienate the moderate voters and Never Trumpers who helped carry the 2018 blue wave.

Biden has already committed to picking a woman to join him on the ticket. The good news is, he has an abundance of riches to choose from—whether Elizabeth Warren, Val Demings, Kamala Harris, Susan Rice, or Keisha Lance Bottoms. All of them would serve with honor and distinction as the nation’s first female vice president.

But given the condition of the country—following the brutal killings of not only Floyd but Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks—Biden would be wise to choose a qualified black woman. Such a pick would not only speak directly to the concerns of African Americans who have felt they have not been represented in the halls of power, it could help catapult Biden from his Delaware basement to the Oval Office.

There is one woman who could do this better than the rest: Kamala Harris. (Full disclosure, I helped her presidential campaign, so my support of Harris runs deep.)

Selecting the Black California senator would not just be “symbolic,” as Professor Laurence Tribe suggested this week to the Washington Post after signing a letter recommending the former vice president choose Warren. “I think African Americans above all would be the first to say they are more interested in results than cosmetics,” said Tribe.

What Professor Tribe—and much of the media—seem to miss consistently is that Harris isn’t merely symbolic. She has the receipts. Most recently, she has used her perch as a U.S. Senator to elevate the concerns of minorities and address them with purposeful and data-driven policy solutions. For example:

• Harris introduced with Rand Paul The Pretrial Integrity and Safety Act of 2017, a bipartisan bail reform bill that encourages states to reform or replace the practice of money bail.
• Harris introduced the Water Affordability Act of 2018, legislation that would help low-income families across the country pay for rising sewer and water bills.
• Harris and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal announced the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act, the first ever national legislation ensuring the rights and protections of millions of domestic workers—who are largely persons of color.
• Harris and members of the Black Maternal Health Caucus introduced a historic legislative package to address the United States’ urgent maternal health crisis. The Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2020 seeks to improve maternal health outcomes of Black women, as well as other high-risk populations, including female veterans, incarcerated women, and Native Americans.
• Harris and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley proposed the Saving Our Street Act, a bill designed to benefit local institutions, like bodegas or small cafés, with fewer than ten employees, often which are minority owned.
• Last but not certainly not least, Harris joined top Congressional Democrats in unveiling the Justice in Policing Act of 2020 to address police brutality.

Harris’ tenure in the Senate speaks volumes to her values and priorities. And although progressive legislation like hers has not stood a chance in Trump’s Washington, or with Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader, Harris has proven herself as a leader who can take big ideas and swiftly turn them into legislation ripe for a Democratic majority.

By choosing Harris, Biden would signal that he shares the same concerns of Black Americans and would be committed to advancing equality as president. It would also show that he wants someone by his side who can not only beat Trump, but immediately begin cleaning off the stain of his presidency.

Harris’ lifelong career in public service—from her time as California’s attorney general, and her tenure in the U.S. Senate—render her fully qualified and prepared to serve as vice president. (She’s certainly no less qualified than Biden’s former boss was at the time he became president.) Harris’s race and gender are not what would make her a good number 2; it’s her skills, values, intelligence, and experience. But her race and gender make her even more perfect for the moment.

Still, there are plenty of other reasons to believe a Biden-Harris ticket would be successful.

Biden will have prudently chosen a VP that voters can rely on to hit the ground running. As California’s chief law enforcement officer, Harris ran the second largest justice department in the country. She has significant executive experience running an agency, managing a budget, and making tough decisions. Harris’s readiness appeals to the voters anxious to fix the damage of the Trump administration.

A Biden-Harris ticket also communicates that Biden is comfortable with a fighter. Since joining the Senate in 2017, Harris has leveraged her prosecutorial chops on the Senate Judiciary Committee to take on Brett Kavanaugh, Bill Barr, Michael Horowitz, and a host of Trump’s other unqualified judicial nominees. With her razor-sharp and well-proven debate skills, Harris would eviscerate Mike Pence on the debate stage.

Twenty years Biden’s junior, Harris would bring relative youth and energy to the ticket. For a younger electorate that has only known Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Biden has an uphill battle in inspiring millennials. Choosing someone significantly younger can help reassure voters who are concerned about Biden’s advanced age and want a vice president able to lead in case of an emergency.

Like everyone else on the VP shortlist, Harris doesn’t come without some baggage. Most notably, the progressive coalition has taken issue with her prosecutorial record in California, claiming she was too aggressive in pursuing drug charges and long sentencing.

Recently, however, even some of her most vocal progressive detractors, such as Lara Bazelon and Shaun King, have conceded she would serve Biden well as his vice president. That’s because she’s worked deliberately in the Senate and on the campaign trail to tackle criminal justice reform. In fact, Harris knows the criminal justice system’s flaws intimately and has made that abundantly clear in her media appearances since the national Black Lives Matter protests began. If anything, the last few months have solidified that Harris is a smart and shrewd politician who knows how to seize the moment, connect with voters, and advance an agenda.

Of course, we can’t ignore the fact that Biden choosing a woman of color as his running mate would mark enormous progress for the country. With Harris, we have someone who can not only fill that role, but serve as a damn good vice president.   

Harris would also bring another essential feature to the Biden ticket: She would reflect the diversity of America. She attended and graduated from Howard University, a historically black university, and the University of California, Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. She’s the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father. She talks frequently and lovingly about her own single working-class mother—and the lessons she provided her.

Harris wedded later in life into a biracial marriage with a Jewish entertainment lawyer named Douglas Emhoff. To even the casual observer, it’s clear Harris and Emhoff have a warm, genuine relationship. And though she doesn’t have her own children, she’s a devoted stepmother to Emhoff’s children.

Notably, there’s not a whiff of elitism to Harris, despite her professional accomplishments. She shows ordinary Americans that she is one of us. That’s not nothing: Her warm demeanor can resonate with voters. She has a knack for using social media to connect with them on a more personal level. She loves cooking and even taught Senator Mark Warner how to make a proper tuna melt on Instagram live. In short, she has a unique ability to draw from her no-nonsense prosecutorial background at noon, while welcoming us into her kitchen at night.

Simply put, Harris is uniquely suited to help Biden by leveraging that warmth, relatability, and diversity of experience to win a coalition of the Black, Latinx, and AAPI vote. Not to mention, she can help Biden bring in the college-educated white women Hillary Clinton failed to sway.

As we all know, this is a bizarre election. It’s also the most important of any of our lifetimes. Biden has a slew of great choices in a female running mate. But as the last several weeks of our national crisis have crystalized, America needs him to pick the best possible option.

Kamala Harris will send an unequivocal message to voters that justice and the integrity of our nation are on the ballot this November. Perhaps most importantly, Biden can prove with Kamala by his side that he is ready to govern in a post-Trump era—and committed to making sure this country starts treating black lives like they really do matter

Julie Rodin Zebrak

Julie Rodin Zebrak is the Washington Monthly's director of digital strategy and outreach. She is a veteran attorney with nearly 20 years of experience at the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Justice, and the founder and CEO of Yes Moms Can.

Panama: Fairer chocolate from the forest

Cocoa farmers in Panama are prone to poor working conditions and low pay. Meivis Ortiz is trying to improve their lot through an agroforestry project that pays women farmers a fair price.

Panama: Cocoa growers protecting the jungle

Meivis Ortiz knows just about all there is to know about chocolate and its natural origins. She studied agroforestry in Costa Rica, specializing in cocoa, and spent years advising international NGOs and chocolate producers on growing this prized crop. In 2015, having seen how long it takes to cultivate cocoa, and how poorly paid the work often is, she founded her own chocolate-producing company, Mayamei Cacao.

Ortiz pays a fair price for raw cocoa, grown by women from the Ngöbe indigenous group, and is less concerned with maximizing profits than making a social impact by empowering the women through financial independence.

They grow their crop deep in the forest of the Province Bocas del Toro, a Caribbean archipelago that is home to 90% of Panama's cocoa production.

Instead of monocultural plantations, these women use traditional methods to grow cocoa bushes among giant trees, clambering vines and the rest of the forest's natural biodiversity. This way, they thrive without the use of harmful agricultural chemicals.

Ortiz says that only by working in such close harmony with nature, is it possible to achieve the very finest quality chocolate for her customers.

A film by Anna Marie Goretzki

Coronavirus responses highlight how humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

June 25, 2020 8.18am EDT



Bemoaning uneven individual and state compliance with public health recommendations, top U.S. COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci recently blamed the country’s ineffective pandemic response on an American “anti-science bias.” He called this bias “inconceivable,” because “science is truth.” Fauci compared those discounting the importance of masks and social distancing to “anti-vaxxers” in their “amazing” refusal to listen to science.

It is Fauci’s profession of amazement that amazes me. As well-versed as he is in the science of the coronavirus, he’s overlooking the well-established science of “anti-science bias,” or science denial.

Americans increasingly exist in highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological communities occupying their own information universes.

Within segments of the political blogosphere, global warming is dismissed as either a hoax or so uncertain as to be unworthy of response. Within other geographic or online communities, the science of vaccine safety, fluoridated drinking water and genetically modified foods is distorted or ignored. There is a marked gap in expressed concern over the coronavirus depending on political party affiliation, apparently based in part on partisan disagreements over factual issues like the effectiveness of social distancing or the actual COVID-19 death rate.

In theory, resolving factual disputes should be relatively easy: Just present strong evidence, or evidence of a strong expert consensus. This approach succeeds most of the time, when the issue is, say, the atomic weight of hydrogen.

But things don’t work that way when scientific advice presents a picture that threatens someone’s perceived interests or ideological worldview. In practice, it turns out that one’s political, religious or ethnic identity quite effectively predicts one’s willingness to accept expertise on any given politicized issue.

“Motivated reasoning” is what social scientists call the process of deciding what evidence to accept based on the conclusion one prefers. As I explain in my book, “The Truth About Denial,” this very human tendency applies to all kinds of facts about the physical world, economic history and current events.The same facts will sound different to people depending on what they already believe. AP Photo/John Raoux

Denial doesn’t stem from ignorance

The interdisciplinary study of this phenomenon has made one thing clear: The failure of various groups to acknowledge the truth about, say, climate change, is not explained by a lack of information about the scientific consensus on the subject.

Instead, what strongly predicts denial of expertise on many controversial topics is simply one’s political persuasion.

A 2015 metastudy showed that ideological polarization over the reality of climate change actually increases with respondents’ knowledge of politics, science and/or energy policy. The chances that a conservative is a climate science denier is significantly higher if he or she is college educated. Conservatives scoring highest on tests for cognitive sophistication or quantitative reasoning skills are most susceptible to motivated reasoning about climate science.

Denialism is not just a problem for conservatives. Studies have found liberals are less likely to accept a hypothetical expert consensus on the possibility of safe storage of nuclear waste, or on the effects of concealed-carry gun laws.
Denial is natural

The human talent for rationalization is a product of many hundreds of thousands of years of adaptation. Our ancestors evolved in small groups, where cooperation and persuasion had at least as much to do with reproductive success as holding accurate factual beliefs about the world. Assimilation into one’s tribe required assimilation into the group’s ideological belief system – regardless of whether it was grounded in science or superstition. An instinctive bias in favor of one’s “in-group” and its worldview is deeply ingrained in human psychology.

A human being’s very sense of self is intimately tied up with his or her identity group’s status and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, people respond automatically and defensively to information that threatens the worldview of groups with which they identify. We respond with rationalization and selective assessment of evidence – that is, we engage in “confirmation bias,” giving credit to expert testimony we like while finding reasons to reject the rest.

Unwelcome information can also threaten in other ways. “System justification” theorists like psychologist John Jost have shown how situations that represent a perceived threat to established systems trigger inflexible thinking. For example, populations experiencing economic distress or an external threat have often turned to authoritarian leaders who promise security and stability.

In ideologically charged situations, one’s prejudices end up affecting one’s factual beliefs. Insofar as you define yourself in terms of your cultural affiliations, your attachment to the social or economic status quo, or a combination, information that threatens your belief system – say, about the negative effects of industrial production on the environment – can threaten your sense of identity itself. If trusted political leaders or partisan media are telling you that the COVID-19 crisis is overblown, factual information about a scientific consensus to the contrary can feel like a personal attack.Everyone sees the world through one partisan lens or another, based on their identity and beliefs. Vladyslav Starozhylov/Shutterstock.com

Denial is everywhere

This kind of affect-laden, motivated thinking explains a wide range of examples of an extreme, evidence-resistant rejection of historical fact and scientific consensus.

Have tax cuts been shown to pay for themselves in terms of economic growth? Do communities with high numbers of immigrants have higher rates of violent crime? Did Russia interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election? Predictably, expert opinion regarding such matters is treated by partisan media as though evidence is itself inherently partisan.

Denialist phenomena are many and varied, but the story behind them is, ultimately, quite simple. Human cognition is inseparable from the unconscious emotional responses that go with it. Under the right conditions, universal human traits like in-group favoritism, existential anxiety and a desire for stability and control combine into a toxic, system-justifying identity politics.

Science denial is notoriously resistant to facts because it isn’t about facts in the first place. Science denial is an expression of identity – usually in the face of perceived threats to the social and economic status quo – and it typically manifests in response to elite messaging.

I’d be very surprised if Anthony Fauci is, in fact, actually unaware of the significant impact of politics on COVID-19 attitudes, or of what signals are being sent by Republican state government officials’ statements, partisan mask refusal in Congress, or the recent Trump rally in Tulsa. Effective science communication is critically important because of the profound effects partisan messaging can have on public attitudes. Vaccination, resource depletion, climate and COVID-19 are life-and-death matters. To successfully tackle them, we must not ignore what the science tells us about science denial.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Jan. 31, 2020.
Author

Adrian Bardon
Professor of Philosophy, Wake Forest University
Disclosure statement
Adrian Bardon received funding from the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project at the University of Connecticut.




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Trump’s presidency is a symbol of the last gasp of white supremacy

Published on June 26, 2020 By Sonali Kolhatkar, Independent Media Institute


When President Donald Trump first began talking about ending “chain migration” in 2017, media outlets pointed out that his own parents-in-law had likely obtained lawful permanent residency through their daughter Melania—a naturalized U.S. citizen. At the same time that Trump was ranting on Twitter, “CHAIN MIGRATION must end now! Some people come in, and they bring their whole family with them, who can be truly evil. NOT ACCEPTABLE!” his wife’s parents were in the process of becoming U.S. citizens after five years as so-called “green card” holders.
When the coronavirus pandemic was declared, Trump saw his chance to attack immigration policies that reunite families, and in April 2020 he announced a 60-day ban on green cards that impacted people like his parents-in-law were when they lived in their home country of Slovenia. At the time he announced the ban, I was in the process of applying for my own elderly parents to obtain lawful permanent residency in the United States, just as Melania Trump must have done only a few years ago.

Under existing immigration law, U.S. citizens have been able to sponsor their spouses, children, siblings, and parents, to obtain green cards, or permanent residency. Since his presidency began, Trump has wanted to limit that sponsorship to only spouses and children under 21. To that end, he backed the RAISE Act, which would effectively have done through legislation what his unilateral ban accomplished through executive order under cover of the COVID-19 crisis



When the 60-day ban was up in June 2020, Trump extended it to the end of the year and added a number of other visas to the list, including H-1B visas for foreign workers, to match the outlines of the failed RAISE Act. The White House claims that the ban will keep 525,000 foreign workers out of the country and make those jobs available to U.S. workers at a time of mass unemployment. One immigrant advocacy group pointed out that Trump’s ban is designed to favor immigrants from Western Europe.

The ban is the brainchild of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who entered the White House with Trump and is considered to be the “driving force” behind Trump’s racist anti-immigrant agenda. Miller began his job with a wish list of the types of immigration and immigrants he wanted to ban, both undocumented and legal. He is considered the “architect” of the Trump administration’s most cruel policy—separating parents from their young children after they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Since 2017, he has been the brains behind Trump’s “Muslim ban,” the restrictions of refugee quotas, the cancelation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and more. Today, under cover of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump has been busy deporting young immigrant children in violation of the United States’s own anti-trafficking laws.

Miller’s uncle David Glosser wrote about the hypocrisy of his nephew’s agenda, saying that had the United States adopted Miller’s anti-immigrant wish list when his ancestors were escaping the Nazis, the family would have perished. America’s immigration policies have long served white elites like the first lady, but the rest of us have often been deprived of accessing those same policies.

For all of Trump’s talk about prioritizing American workers, he has already carved out exceptions for “any alien seeking to enter the United States to provide temporary labor or services essential to the United States food supply chain.” In other words, there are some jobs that Americans are too good for and that only low-wage immigrant labor will do. The Washington Post pointed out, “So far this year, the Trump administration is approving H-2A visas at a rate 15 percent faster than last year, and it took steps to make it easier for farmers to hire temporary farmworkers even after the pandemic began.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has decried Trump’s new ban, saying, “Putting up a ‘not welcome’ sign for engineers, executives, IT experts, doctors, nurses and other workers won’t help our country, it will hold us back.” Indeed, at a time when health care workers especially are in short supply, and more than 15 percent of all doctors and nurses nationwide are immigrants, it is unclear how a ban on H-1B visas that limit such workers into the country until December will help Americans. Jobless Americans are hardly going to rush to medical and nursing schools, incur huge debts, fast-track their degrees at an unheard-of rate, and emerge as fully-fledged professionals in time to handle the expected surge of new COVID-19 cases.

It is also unclear how preventing U.S. citizens like me from bringing my retired elderly parents will help American workers. My parents plan to bring their entire life savings with them to spend on private health insurance and other basic needs until the end of their lives, thereby creating jobs and stimulating the U.S. economy. More importantly, they will be able to spend the golden years of their lives with their daughter and family, instead of alone and isolated. But to Trump, my parents do not deserve the same treatment as his in-laws did.

As the immigrant advocacy group Value Our Families declared recently, “Immigration is not just about the economy. Our system is designed to unify family members and is a legal right for many Americans.” Trump has trampled over that right and the rights of so many people over and over since he took office. His trampling of rights is precisely why millions of Americans—comprising a minority, albeit a significant one—voted for him in 2016 and plan to vote for him a second time. Trump did not come into office in spite of demonizing immigrants—he was elected because he repeatedly dehumanized non-Americans, particularly brown-skinned ones. He brought with him Steven Bannon, a man who said he was a fan of The Camp of the Saints, a horrendously racist tome written by the late French author Jean Raspail, that depicted ugly caricatures of Indian immigrant hordes destroying the European way of life.

Trump’s presidency is a clear symbol of the last gasp of white supremacy angrily asserting its power over a country that, in spite of centuries of institutional policies designed to privilege whites, is becoming browner every year. As someone who spent the last 30 years of my life navigating the intricacies and obstacles of the U.S. legal immigration system, I am one of the relatively privileged ones, especially when compared to the traumatized undocumented children who have been separated from their desperate parents, or the refugees fleeing violence whose legal right to seek asylum has been decimated. And yet today, even I remain separated from my parents.

Trump’s unilateral ban on green cards and immigrant work visas upends congressional legislative oversight. California Representative Judy Chu (who happens to be my representative) last year introduced the Reuniting Families Act to streamline legal immigration pathways and make them more humane. So far the bill has 78 sponsors.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court, which far too often tilts rightward, slapped back against the president’s egregious attacks on DACA registrants. In a 5-4 decision on June 18, justices voted to keep the Obama-era program intact, offering some measure of relief to the 650,000 young immigrants who have been able to defer deportation and legally work in the United States. Justice Sonia Sotomayor correctly pointed out that Trump’s decision to cancel DACA was marked by “impermissible discriminatory animus.”

Trump has expressed such “discriminatory animus” to non-white Americans since the beginning of his candidacy and presidential tenure. Through his anti-immigrant policies, he is keeping families like mine separated. He has made no secret that his goal is to preserve white domination in America, and it is for that reason he has enjoyed the fervent, irrational, cult-like following of millions of Americans terrified at the prospect of equality with non-whites.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.