State of Emergency

Hot damn, the government is back open! President Trump has come around, finally, that it was sort of a silly idea all along, and that yes, he will be blamed for suspending nearly 1,000,000 of his employees for no reason. He even seems to be realizing that he will not receive funding for his pie-eyed campaign promise to build a southern border wall (he long ago abandoned the promise that Mexico would pay for it), and reverted again to musing about declaring a State of Emergency to get what he wants.

Now, this is something that has received quite a lot of attention, but we should summarize here: there is no illegal immigration crisis. It is completely invented. Undocumented immigration rates have been steadily declining for a decade. Immigrants do not commit crimes at a higher rate than citizens. Not only do undocumented immigrants pay taxes, they contribute more to federal budgets than they use.

Even if illegal immigration was a problem (it’s not), a border wall would not correct the issue. Most undocumented immigrants enter the country legally as tourists or students and overstay their visas. The vast majority of drug smuggling occurs through ports of entry, and if we were actually serious about stinting the drug trade we would do the only thing that works: legalized and regulated marijuana in the US led to a 70% decrease in drug seizures at the Mexican border from 2013 to 2018.

So we’ll say it again. There is no illegal immigration emergency at the border. And even if there was, a wall wouldn’t fix it.

Now, just because there is no illegal immigration state of emergency, that does not mean that everything is all good. There are a number of emergencies facing the United States (and humanity) right now, and none of them are illegal immigration.

Here’s a short list:

Citizens United and the Decay of News Media Credibility

This is a big one. Generally speaking I like to think that most of us just want everyone to be happy and prosperous and to do the right thing. And, sure, we disagree on how best to do that. That’s what makes this country great! As we sift through this Great American Experiment, it only makes sense that we’ll blow it every once in a while. There are good policies and bad policies, and we can probably be trusted to figure it out and do the right thing, given real information.

That’s the problem with unfettered campaign finance policy, the evisceration of small and medium newspapers, and a relatively recent effort to undermine the credibility of the media (a move made easier by bone-headed reporting in pursuit of The Big Scoop!). These issues are much more problematic than individual policies because they influence how we make decisions about policies. With real information, we humans can probably, usually, come up with something like the right answer. But with cultural and policy missteps that degrade how we get information, we probably can’t be relied on to make the right call. That’s why half you idiots think there’s a state of emergency at the border.

Global Warming

This is another one of those manufactured controversies. Of course what’s manufactured here is that there is any controversy at all. Global warming is not controversial. It is happening. Humans are causing it. Giving up straws is not going to fix it. Driving everywhere all the time in a Prius is not going to fix it. Buying any kind of “green” gadget is not going to fix it. Immediate, dramatic change, both collective and individual, may help. Sorry not sorry.

Wealth Inequality and Widespread Financial Insecurity

The 1% take a lot of flak, and that’s fine, but they don’t get nearly as much shit as Millennials. Good lord. It seems like “kids these days” are ruining everything from macro-brewed beer to terrible restaurants. It’s pretty amazing, really, that all these twenty- and thirty-somethings manage to kill so much and still have time to piece together part time side hustles in the gig economy.

Young people now have more debt, less financial security, and fewer prospects than our parents’ generation. The dream of the American Meritocracy, where those who work hard will succeed, is now a myth, and ours is the first generation in memory that will be worse off than our parents. This is a bummer for us, sure, but it’s bigger than “poor me.” People born after 1980 are not buying houses, which is pretty much how Americans have built wealth since forever, but we’re also much slower to settle down, get married, and have kids. And that will be a problem.

In fact four decades from now this will ruin us, and we can look to Japan, where 20% of the population is older than 70, to see why. Longer, higher-quality lives and historically low birth rates are wreaking havoc as a contracting work force and decreased productivity ripples through economy and social services there.

Runaway wealth inequality and a precarious economy is not about whiney Millennials and avocado toast – it’s about the cannibalization of the American economy and how that will reverberate into the future.

The Anti-Vaxxers

I’m not sure how this needs to be said, but good lord. Did you see that an outbreak of an easily curable disease is ravaging the children in an enclave of people who think vaccines are poison? And that they’re afraid, and don’t know what to do? I wonder if this comes back to how and where people get their information . . .

Shit maybe we’re due for a plague.

Latin American Refugee Crisis

And you know just because there’s not an illegal immigration crisis at the border does not mean there isn’t a humanitarian one. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that of the 700,000 people who overstayed visas in 2017, 20% were from two countries: Venezuela and Brazil, where economic turmoil and right wing governments have made life untenable. We’ve discussed before that pretty much every cultural and economic driver of Latin American human migration has roots in American colonial foreign policy. Whether we were trying to get cheap bananas or make sure those scary communists didn’t get a chance to provide healthcare, there are American fingerprints on the vast majority of coups, death squads, and genocides in Central and South America. We did this, it’s our responsibility, at least, to recognize our role and try to make right what we can.