Let the negotiation pretense begin: Trump floats a deal on immigration to build a wall in exchange for deportation protection and ending the federal shutdown

Jack Doppelt

Feb. 17, 2019

[A version of this article was published as Let the negotiations begin: The President’s made-for-TV offer is as good as the Twitter feed it’s written on on Immigrant Connect]

President Trump’s offer on Saturday is worth negotiating, and I’d like to make my good offices available to shepherd it through. The president’s opening made-for-TV offer, it seems, is $5.7 billion dollars in funding for a wall in exchange for three years of protection from deportation for 700,000 Dreamers and 300,000 TPS holders, with some other elements thrown in. 

If he’s using the same round numbers as I am, of the 700,000 DACA recipients, more than 550,000 are Mexican-Americans; and of the 300,000 TPS holders, 200,000 people came from El Salvador, 50,000 from Honduras and 50,000 from Haiti and have stayed in the U.S. on temporary protected status. 

What the president didn’t say when he touted his offer as “a common-sense compromise both parties should embrace” is that he’s under federal court orders to continue the DACA program and that since October, he’s under a different court order that prohibits his administration from deporting Salvadorans and Haitians on TPS status while a judge looks over email exchanges between Trump administration officials to determine if the decision to deport them is “based on animus against non-white, non-European immigrants.” Sounds like the same scenario that got the Trump administration in a ringer on the census citizenship question. They talk too much and the courts take notice. 

The Supreme Court signaled the other day that it is not going to hear the DACA case this term, so thanks to the courts, much of what Trump is offering for DACA recipients, he has to do anyway…for now. 

Still, let the negotiations begin. They will take time. The Democrats’ answer seems to be that the offer is a non-starter and that they won’t negotiate until Trump releases the federal employee hostages first. 

Democrats, don’t forget that in addition to holding 800,000 federal workers hostage, Trump is also holding hostage 550,000 productive young Mexican-Americans, 200,000 Salvadorans, 50,000 Hondurans and 50,000 Haitians who’ve lived and worked legally in the U.S. for years. 

.

My unsolicited advice to the Democrats is to begin negotiating. Demand that the shutdown end, but if Trump doesn’t end it, at least negotiations will be on the table. He wants $5.7 billion to save face. Ridiculous. But use it. In return, good people who’ve been in the country for years should get a path to citizenship. Sublime. 

Negotiations that run from the sublime to the ridiculous. 

I don’t need to tell anyone that if a deal were to emerge with the president, don’t trust it. Don’t even just verify. Build in irrevocable terms that start immediately. Though the president didn’t actually write the Art of the Deal, he wrote the book on The Art of the Reneged Deal. 

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A Nation of Immigrants at the Hands of Master Propagandists

 

                                     Jack Doppelt

Feb. 28, 2018

[A version of this article was published as How Master Propagandists Linked Immigrants to the Florida School Shooting in Yes! Magazine on Feb. 28, 2018]

Ann Coulter, and the bizarre link between the Parkland, Florida, shooting and America’s missing “promise as a nation of immigrants.”

No, Nikolas Cruz is not an immigrant. But his name has helped people like Ann Coulter stir the xenophobic melting pot.

Beneath the surface of our wrenching national conversation in the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida, is a case study in how propaganda works in the hands of masters to sow demagoguery at the expense of basic humanity. 

After the Valentine’s Day school onslaught that left 17 people dead, conservative pundit Ann Coulter wrote a column. 

Coulter is one of only 45 people whom President Donald Trump follows on Twitter, according to a

Huffington Post piece, “Who Is Ann Coulter And Why Is She So Friendly With Donald Trump?” Coulter and Trump share similar social media ambitions—“stirring up the pot,” as Coulter puts it, and being noticed. As a conservative megaphone, she is Trump’s most vocal supporter who matters. 

At the time Coulter’s book In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! was released in 2016, she warned Trump that she’d be riding him on immigration. She’s kept her promise. 

In response to the Parkland shootings, Trump stirred the pot with fulminations about arming teachers. But Coulter had a different mission. Her column, “Amazing New Breakthrough to Reduce Mass Shootings!” was syndicated widely among conservatives via Breitbart, Townhall, Free Republic, Trapshooters, Fort Bend Herald, Trendolizer, Glock Talk, The Patriot Post, Infowars, and Veterans in Defense of Liberty. 

In it, Coulter identified “16 immigrant mass shootings” since 2000. That’s out of a total of about 34 mass shootings, as she counts them: 47 percent. The number plays into the polarizing characterization of immigrants as a scourge on safe American communities. A fuller characterization is this: Immigrants commit fewer crimes than the population at large and are a driving force of American growth and productivity. Even the Cato Institute, the conservative think tank, knows that.

So who are these immigrants prone to mass shootings? She claims they are first- and second-generation immigrants. 

What’s a second-generation immigrant? It’s an odd, confusing term that seems oxymoronic. It’s a person born in the U.S. I thought we referred to them as Americans. Some have one immigrant parent, some have two, some have naturalized Americans as parents and have immigrant grandparents. 

According to the Pew Research Center, that’s about 20 million adults and another 16 million minors, or 15% of the U.S. population, who apparently aren’t “real” Americans, according to Coulter, and their numbers are growing. They tend to earn more and are better educated than their immigrant parent or parents. They are less likely to live in poverty. 

As Ann Coulter insinuates convincingly to those who see the world as she does, mass shootings would be cut in half and the FBI would not be as incompetent if it weren’t chasing immigrants who should be deported. As it is, the deported just get replaced by others in the perpetual motion immigrant chain. 

I have to admit that all this hits close to home. I’m one of those second-generation immigrants, though I’ve never thought of myself that way. Born in Chicago and all. 

I wonder if it hits close to home for Trump, who is a second-generation immigrant, thanks to his Scottish mom. Or to his wife, Melania, who is a first-generation immigrant. 

I wonder if it hits close to home for Ann Coulter, too. Don’t get me wrong. She doesn’t have immigrant parents to stain her pedigree that on one side goes back to the American Revolution. 

But she did have a father, John Vincent Coulter. So let’s follow her in another equally ridiculous direction. If I get her line of reasoning, a second-generation immigrant is an immigrant (rather than a first-generation American) because he/she/they are one generation removed from an immigrant and live in the same house. 

Coulter is one generation removed from her father, and they lived in the same house, which according to my calculations, makes her, among other identities, a second-generation male. 

I’m no more an immigrant than she is a male. 

The irony, or the mastery, is that Coulter wrote the column in response to the Parkland school killings, which appear to have been perpetrated by Nikolas Cruz. Nikolas? Not a common American name spelled that way. Cruz? Hispanic. Could be Spanish, Portuguese, Mexican, Honduran, Nicaraguan, or American, in that it’s the 12th most common surname in Puerto Rico and the most common surname of all in Guam, according to the lifelong learning site ThoughtCo. 

When the name Nikolas Cruz emerged on Feb. 14 as the perpetrator in the shootings, alarm bells were set off on far-right websites, Twitter feeds, and chat groups. Of course, he’s an immigrant. Some said he was a Dreamer, which means an immigrant with illegal status in the U.S., and that he is a DACA recipient, which means to the far-right that he is being allowed to stay in the U.S. because of a suspect executive order by President Obama. Craig Brittan, the far-right Republican candidate to replace Jeff Flake as U.S. Senator from Arizona, jumped on. 

It turns out that Nikolas Cruz is not a DACA recipient or a Dreamer or an illegal immigrant or an immigrant, even a second-generation immigrant, as far as anyone knows. Cruz was adopted in infancy by the Cruz family, who had recently moved from Long Island to Florida. It is not publicly known who Cruz’s biological parents were before Lynda Cruz and her husband adopted and named him.

Among the accounts of Nikolas Cruz’s social media outbursts are those in the private Instagram chat group Murica, on which Cruz talked about keeping Blacks in chains, cutting their necks, killing Mexicans, and hating gays and Jews, and his affiliation with the Republic of Florida, a White nationalist militia that has advocated for a White-only state in Florida, according to the Associated Press. CNN added that during one of Cruz’s chat group rants, he said, “My real mom was a Jew. I am glad I never met her.” 

No, Nikolas Cruz is not an immigrant, though his name ensures that Coulter, a touchstone for millions of alienated, angry Americans who are few generations removed from their own immigrant forebears, can keep Trump’s feet to the fire by blowing on the Nikolas Cruz dog whistle. The dog whistle works, no matter how off-key it is. 

Long after we’re sapped of mourning, and the urgent voices of both gun control advocates and 2nd Amendment rights defenders have become hoarse in anticipation of another round, masters of propaganda like Coulter will have stretched the web of inhumanity that weaves together illegals, immigrants, second-generation immigrants, chain migrants, terrorists, Muslims, refugees, and troubled 19-year-olds with names like Nikolas Cruz into one xenophobic melting pot. 

I’m being alarmist? 

The mission statement of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is to administer “the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.” It says so right on the agency webpage. 

The page was amended last week, on Feb. 22. Before that, it included the phrase “USCIS secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants …” 

Replaced mission statement above.

New statement, as of Feb. 22, below. 

Is that promise really gone? 

It will be up to this nation of third- and fourth- and fifth- and sixth- and seventh- and eighth-generation immigrants to make sure this “nation of immigrants” is not replaced by “nation of enough immigrants.” 

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T-Rump and the March to Extinction

                                    Jack Doppelt

Feb. 10, 2018

[A version of this article was published in The Satirist.]

The man who’s now President of the United States, with authority to call together two houses of Congress for a State of the Union address, is more aptly seen roaming the earth as a predator whose bite is fierce and who has a keen sense in tracking his prey. That he is the most powerful man who lords over the most powerful nation on earth is testament to his dominance over his species. 

Yet, he’s mocked for having small hands, a big rump, a massive head, and a brain, though itself much more advanced than people want to admit, that contains a cerebrum (associated with thought and higher brain function) that is tiny. 

T-Rex [Photo credit:
Public domain]

That is the textbook description of the Tyrannosaurus, or T-Rex, as we’ve come to call it. 

Other dinosaurs had more complex social behaviors. What made T-Rex so daunting is it would strike hard and fast; get in, take down his prey and get out. 

Though the similarities between T-Rex and T-Rump are uncanny for metaphorical purposes, the world has evolved in 65 million years. 

T-Rump uses the cunning of an evolved species to take down his prey. T-Rex was a dinosaur, after all. T-Rump is a con artist, a much more highly evolved reptile. 

T-Rump marks his prey

T-Rump is driven by four core impulses – power, money, attention, and rubbing the noses of everyone who thinks they’re better than him or smarter than him. They are his prey, and there are enough prey to feed a mammoth appetite. 

Over the years, they were competing real estate moguls, businessmen who boasted of greater wealth, a TV industry and critics that mocked reality shows. T-Rump could claim to make the biggest deals, be richer than the rest, and be the most talked about talent behind the most popular TV show. And he has made those claims. 

But claims are one thing. They’re open to dispute. The louder he claimed the mantles, the more people mocked him. More prey made him salivate. Politics presented an arena teeming with prey who mocked him. Not just any politics but the Presidency where it’s hard to dispute “most powerful man who lords over the most powerful nation on earth.” 

The prey fall into T-Rump's trap

The prey came at him, one at a time and in packs. Democrats, particularly the Clintons and Obama. The GOP establishment who ran against him for President or who awaited him in Congress. Political pundits who keep dissecting what he says and who try to snare him on inconsistencies. Activists who call him “the worst president ever” or “racist.” And the media (news and entertainment) who can’t find a way to find anything right in anything he does or says, even if he lumbers into it. 

All his prey use common sense metrics that just don’t matter to a T-Rump who thrives on power, money, attention, and rubbing the noses of the prey who think they’re better or smarter than him. They act like they don’t know who they’re messing with. 

The first and only time I heard the term T-Rump was in an inspirational rap by Adam Gottlieb, a young Chicago poet and musician. In his poem, This Is The Year, he envisions 2018 as “the year we turn off the reality television show that governs us and start to govern our own reality.” 

Come one, come all: Ultimate Three-card monte is under the Big Top

To do that, we first have to recognize what we’re up against, the roles we’ve played, and the nature of the game. The reality show is The Grand Con, often known as the street hustle: Three-Card Monte. T-Rump has been playing it for years, and now that he has mastered the craft, he is tempting the gods and staking out his claim to the most masterful ever. 

Three-card monte has three key actors: 

The dealer or con. That of course is T-Rump, now as President. 

The marks. They’re the prey who play the game and think they can outsmart the dealer because they can keep their eyes on the one card that matters. They’re the Democrats, the GOP establishment, the pundits, the activists and the media. 

The rest of us are the crowd that gathers around them. We are not key actors. We are bystanders, and we are fascinated by the game. How does the dealer do it? We seem to see every move clearly. They’re right in front of us. 

What goes unnoticed is the work of the shills. The shills are the other key actors. They are situated in the crowd like all of us and they appear to be rooting for us – the people – to beat the dealer at his own game. But the shills are actually working for the dealer, building a false confidence in the marks and distracting attention so the hustler can work his sleight of hand even better. 

Shills traditionally get a take of the action. They do it wittingly. The sheer brilliance of T-Rump’s game at the Presidential level is how he’s gotten the marks to become his shills, wittingly or not, and make no mistake, they are getting a piece of the action. The Democrats, the GOP establishment, the pundits, the activists, and particularly the media get a cut of the attention T-Rump covets and distributes.

                                                     [Image credit: Jack Doppelt, 2018]

Every time the shills rant about the eccentricities T-Rump dangles as bait – calling immigrants people from “shithole countries,” mispronouncing Namibia, hiring and having falling outs with the Bannons, Sessionses, Flynns, Manaforts and Tillersons of the moment, the publication of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” (the “tell-all you could ever want if you’re Trump” book), and fomenting a debate on whether T-Rump is “a racist.” Each tweet beckons: Look over there. No, there. No there. 

Now there’s a memo by Republican Congressman Devin Nunes challenging a FISA court’s decision and putting the FBI in question. The Nunes memo beckons. Look over there. The FBI can’t be trusted, federal judges are patsies, Justice Department officials are biased and should be fired. Listen to the pundits: It defies logic. Not the logic of diversion. It’s textbook. 

Sometimes the distractions are so Freudian that they’re too luscious even for Freud. Before the Nunes affair pulled us away again, we were treated to T-Rump’s boast after a meeting he had on the immigration policy impasse: 

“It was a tremendous meeting, actually it was reported as incredibly good, and my performance, some of them called it a performance, I consider it work. But it got great reviews by everybody other than two networks who were phenomenal for about two hours.” The Grand Con show is hot. 

T-Rump’s son Eric ventured into the “look over there” racist diversion with a comeback on Fox and Friends that his father is not a racist. “My father sees one color, green. That’s all he cares about. He cares about the economy.” 

Power, money, attention, all rolled into the greatest show on earth. 

The public is educable: One way out. Don't play, engage

Don’t we get that framing his actions and statements as “unprecedented” in political terms makes them all the more priceless on the attention spectrum? Don’t we get that even though catching the President on brazen changes in position is needed, to T-Rump, it’s reruns and residuals. If we pay attention to a fulmination the first time, it’s money in the bank. If we replay it as often as the issue stays alive and fresh, it’s an investment in his pulsating notoriety. If we move on, there’s yet another rabbit and another hat. 

Don’t we get that invoking his “unprecedentedly” low favorability rating to make the point that the GOP is at risk in the mid-term 2018 elections is a carcass to a T-Rump who revels in watching the GOP establishment squirm as they try to play him. Don’t we get that distraction, any distraction is music to the hustler. The louder, the better. The fresher, the better. The Nunes noise jolts the nerves. Twitter is the golden goose. The marks-turned shills have no recourse but to take the bait. 

Check out the YouTube video to see how three-card monte works. Remember the invocation at the end: “Don’t gamble. You can’t win. End. These guys just take your money and run.” 

One bright spot is that three-card monte is the classic short-term con. By taking the game to the Presidential level, T-Rump counts on keeping it up long enough to emerge with aspirations intact – to be the most powerful, the wealthiest, and the most talked about human ever. 

If only we bystanders could figure out a way to mobilize the march to T-Rump’s extinction. 

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The foreboding First Hundred Days of Trump's presidency for immigrants and refugees…and counting

    Jack Doppelt

June 20, 2017

[A version of this article was published as The First Hundred Days for immigrants and refugees…and counting on Immigrant Connect]

When Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, the clock began ticking.

For American politics, for the beltway and for mainstream media, the first hundred days of a new Presidency has been used as a benchmark since President Franklin Roosevelt first invoked the term in a radio address in 1933. Eyes train on the nation’s capital to detect the relations between the President, the administration and Congress.

From the moment of his inauguration, Trump seized on the truism that eyes can be deceiving. He challenged the attendance numbers at his inauguration and ever since, the nation’s eyes have flitted around Trump and the beltway, as if they’re lenses on the handheld cameras of the news media. For immigrants, refugees, their families and their communities, the first hundred days have been a blur, hard to trust, out of focus and disorienting.

Trump assumed power after a campaign in which he referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists, bringing drugs and crime; called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on;” advocated a plan for more legal European immigration; pledged to end the H1-B visa because it’s bad for, and unfair to, American workers; estimated that half of the undocumented residents in America are criminals and that there are more than 350,000 criminal illegal aliens in American prisons, not including those whose crime is crossing the border; pledged to restore the Secure Communities Program and expand 287(g) partnerships between ICE and local law enforcement to identify immigrants for deportation; argued that children born in the U.S. of undocumented immigrants should not be considered citizens; and staked out the position that legal immigrants should not enter the U.S. easily, saying, “It’s a long, costly, draining, and often frustrating experience-by design. I say to legal immigrants: Welcome and good luck.”

What were immigrants and refugees in the U.S. and those hoping to come to the U.S. to make of it?

Less than a week after the inauguration, Trump issued an executive order that prioritized deportations for a dizzying array of non-citizens, including those who’ve been convicted of a crime or have a criminal charge pending against them or even have done something for which they could be charged with a crime, and those who in the judgment of an immigration (ICE) officer, pose a risk to public safety. The order called for Homeland Security to hire another 10,000 ICE officers and another 5,000 border patrol officers, empower state and local law enforcement agencies to serve as ICE officers, reinforce the 287(g) program that deputizes state and local law enforcement officers, and provide the immigration status for every person convicted and in jail anywhere in the country.

Immediately thereafter, Trump issued another executive order that temporarily banned entry into the U.S. of any nationals from seven countries - Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen - temporarily stopped the refugee admissions program, cut in half the number of refugees to be admitted if and when the program resumed, and singled out Syrian refugees as being excluded until further notice.

Six weeks later, after federal courts held parts of the executive order unconstitutional, pointing to Trump’s campaign rhetoric about Muslims as the basis for their suspicions about Trump’s intentions, the President issued a revised version that removed Iraqi nationals from the list of blacklisted countries and that narrowed the order to enable some people from the remaining six countries to enter the U.S., for instance, if they were lawful permanent residents of the U.S. or if they had pre-existing visas or significant contacts here.

We chose to look away from all of that, use it mostly as backdrop and context, and train our eyes, attention, interviewing and reporting on the people impacted by those policies, decisions and proclamations.

We connected with immigrants, refugees, their families and their communities as we’ve always done. That is the raison d'être for social justice journalism.

We focused on Syrian, Mexican, Indian, Korean, Chinese, and African communities, and among what we brought to light are these stories:

The future of fleeing religious persecution and finding protection in Trump’s America – The head of Christian Freedom International says the President revoked the executive order just to assuage political opponents, and he’s finding other means to help persecuted Christians.

Winnebago County stands against ICE detention center in Rockford – By this year, there was a different president, a different governor, and a different sheriff for Winnebago County, all Republicans…“The election of President Trump really broke the trust of the immigrant community,” immigration lawyer Sara Dady said. “That’s why it’s so important that local law enforcement work double time to make that up.”

A tale of two school districts’ post-election approaches  – “She couldn’t understand how we teach ‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…’ and then elect a man who is so bent on sending her friends and her family, who escaped tired and poor, away.” said Sophia Perkins of one of her students in a high school history class in Texas. She told another student, “One person can’t build or destroy our country…I explained to her that at the end of it all, we are a country of individuals who take care of each other and grow together no matter how uncomfortable it is.”

Over-policing strains Chicago’s Mexican immigrant communities  – With this story, we explored what it might take to open up conversations between police and Latino communities. It became a frustrating experiment. We called police to request interviews with officers who regularly interact with the Mexican immigrant community, and logged the run-around. 

Mexican immigrants seek protection through sanctuary and civic engagement – Since Chicago officially became a welcoming city in 2012, more and more churches have opened their doors to undocumented immigrants seeking protection. One church is training teams to evaluate each family who has a check-in with ICE in case they become a victim of deportation and to prepare them with options, physical sanctuary being the last.

Hate is tracking in the Korean American community – Two days before the inauguration, Asian Americans Advancing Justice launched standagainsthatred.org, the first-ever website that tracks hate crimes specifically against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders…A Korean American college student says she feels targeted not by what President Trump has said, but by what he’s failed to say to the Korean community. “Being ignored is the most toxic form of racism…He just thinks that we Asians are not gonna do anything anyway.”

Disturbances in the Korean American field with Trump are generational – “The overwhelming majority of the older generation of Koreans think, ‘Trump can do whatever he wants and it doesn’t apply to me because I have my citizenship,’” says Julie Cho of the Korean American Association of Chicago. She says her parents are sympathetic toward Mexican immigrants who are deported, but they feel less understanding of Koreans being deported. “They say, ‘If [undocumented Koreans] have to go back, they have to go back..“They don’t feel bad for them because they know they’ll be okay in Korea.”

Korean-Americans for Trump: Hearing from an emerging minority within a minority - The value of local business to the Korean-American population and Trump’s appeal to business owners are a natural match, says Itak Seo. “The stability of the economy in the Korean community is not in a good state, especially beauty businesses, dry cleaning businesses—those businesses are going down. In Trump, people are expecting some type of improvement in every industry. The Korean community thinks that’s the proper way of managing the country.”

As Trump begins his presidency, Korean businesses in Chicago continue to struggle – With Chicago’s Korean American community migrating in recent decades to the suburbs, leaving behind economically less-successful and culturally less-integrated segments of its population — and as President Trump’s new policies threaten the economic viability of immigrant-owned businesses even more — Albany Park’s so-called Koreatown faces a crises for its remaining Koreans.

Language access for Korean immigrants under President Trump – Brandon Lee, of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Chicago, says he’s glad no “English-only” groundswell has swept across Illinois since the election of President Trump and that no measures have been taken to counteract the fight for language access, but he also acknowledges that the new administration is a roadblock for the organization’s long-term campaign for language access.

Crunch time for Northwestern’s international students stays with them – College life is hard enough. Listen to what it’s like being an international student with limited options finding employment after graduation and with concerns about being allowed to stay in the U.S. in the meantime.

Trump administration policies, though on hold, have Syrians in the U.S. on edge and guessing by – Asylum seekers and refugees have this in common: They are more susceptible to mental health issues and homelessness than others in immigrant communities. Additionally, many say the election of Donald Trump and his often espoused isolationist and anti-immigrant sentiments have increased the stress of the application process.

Hyde Park isn’t just any port in Syria’s civil storm - As Trump was settling into his alien role as President, Hyde Park was extending a welcome to Syrian families who may be among the last clusters of refugees admitted into the U.S. from that part of the world for the foreseeable future. Nadia Khan, of Sirat Chicago, says that ironically the “Muslim ban” that became Trump’s ignominious badge of honor is helping, because it’s bringing people and organizations together to fight it.

At home in Hyde Park: Bridging the divide between home and heart for Syrian refugees – A combination of students and organizations in and around Hyde Park are helping the refugees not only assimilate but also stay connected with their loved ones back in Syria.

Looking for “shalom”: A Syrian refugee family finds a home within Beth Emet community – When Trump’s executive order regarding immigration came down and effectively sought to ban immigrants and refugees from a host of Muslim-majority nations from entering the country, Huda Hidar knew she had to take action. She went to protest downtown with others and was interviewed by reporters. “She said, ‘I wanted people to hear our story.’”

For refugees in the U.S., politics is a luxury – Amal and her family arrived in the U.S.at only three months before Donald Trump was elected President. She knew little of the political drama that put him in office. Her husband, parents, and child died in Syria. She isn’t waiting to be reunited with family members, like many other Syrian refugees are. She’s waiting to live a normal life.

One letter. One number: Indian spouses left wanting and qualified for more – Loss of independence is a common thread that unites the spouses of H-1B visa holders, as is the silence. They are prohibited from working. After Trump became President, he signaled to the Indian community that did not support spouses getting work permits.

Trump administration sparks introspection in Desi communities – The Trump administration has made the choice for the Desi communities. The dial has turned from a quiet sense of safety to an angry sense of injustice. For them, it is disconcerting to sit by and pray that they not be next. In this era, is there the luxury of apolitical stance? Some of the difficulty in organizing is the conflict within the community itself. Histories of anti-black racism and Islamophobia within the South Asian community presents particular challenges and problems that divide Desis and contribute to political silence.

Indians on H1-B visas worry what President Trump might bring – Trump signed a “Buy American, Hire American” presidential order on Apr. 17, which seeks to “ensure that H-1B visas are awarded to the most-skilled or highest-paid petition beneficiaries,” as soon as possible. No official action has been taken against H-1B visa holders or the program, but with Trump’s directives, the writing is on the wall, suggesting the gateway to the country for many would-be immigrants is in jeopardy.

If the H1-B lottery bubble for Indian tech workers bursts, so be it – As Donald Trump has stepped in and shaken up so many different aspects of immigrant communities, the Indian IT sector hasn’t escaped being effected. Trump has pushed severe reform to the H1-B program, and his overall rhetoric, which many have received as anti-immigrant, has stirred fear and anxiety even among young Indian tech workers already living in the United States.

Indian American immigrant families face the need to bring mental health issues out of the closet – Due to the Trump presidency, more undocumented women have been suffering in silence. The prevailing feelings of fear and anxiety around stepping out into the world and getting help during the Trump presidency have harmed the ability of abused women to reach out. “They are aware they don’t have the correct documentation, and they know that they are vulnerable to deportation, so there’s been a decrease in people seeking service,” says Radhika Sharma of Apna Ghar.

Sikh in America: Visibility, violence, and virtue in the era of Trump – Simran Jeet Singh, of the Sikh Coalition, senses that hate incidents have surged recently, based in part on an uptick in the number of xenophobic threats he personally receives online. “What that tells us is these feelings were latent,” Singh says. “They’ve been sanctioned by Mr. Trump and his administration, and I think that is the impetus for what we’re seeing around here.”

Chicago’s Chinese-American community plans, thrives and quietly mobilizes – Improvements along with the expansion of the community southwest into neighborhoods such as Bridgeport and McKinley Park demonstrate how the Chinese-American community is thriving. Still, many in the community feel vulnerable. President Trump’s executive order banning travelers from certain Muslim-majority countries and ICE’s stepped up deportation efforts have chilled the air for members of this bustling community.

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This is another in the continuing partnership linking immigrant and refugee communities with one another through the lens of social justice journalism.

The first illuminated the phenomenon of the American dream for a cluster of extraordinary Chicago-based global immigrants whose dream is even grander than borders. Theirs is of being in two places at once, living here and staking a claim to the future of the country they won’t leave behind. Those stories were published in Dec. 2009 - Chicago’s global immigrants: Beyond the American dream

The second explored the impact of the 2010 U.S. Census count on their communities and were released simultaneously on Jan. 15, 2010, in the city’s ethnic media and on Immigrant Connect. Check out the series here –  Census stories link diverse immigrant communities

The third examined the relationships between immigrants and their children, and discovered that immigrant communities are crossing the generational divide in ways that resonate for one another. They were released in June 2010. That series is here – Immigrant communities cross the generational divide together

The next dealt with the homeland – the place, the memory, the heritage – and the multiple meanings it has for Chicago’s immigrants. They were released in December 2010. That series is here – Home and the homeland: Chicago’s immigrants keep connecting

The next looked into the risks but also the options of health care in immigrant communities. The stories were released in early June 2011. That series is here –  Health care for Chicago’s immigrants: Alternative options and risks

We explored the many challenges immigrant communities face in attending and acclimating to college. The stories were released in December 2011 and January 2012. That series is here – Education dream of immigrants more than an Act

The next series came as immigration wedged its way into the 2012 election cycle, and with it came some misleading shorthand; that immigrants vote Democratic and that immigrants means Latinos. The immigrant landscape is far more nuanced than that, and so is their politics. The stories were released in June 2012. That series is here - Immigrants don’t fall in line for 2012 elections

In 2013, attention turned to young immigrants; the sons and daughter of immigrants, many of whom were in the U.S. without proper authorization, some not even knowing it. In June, 2012, President Obama had issued an executive order that allowed certain young people who entered the country as minors, to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and eligibility for a work permit. We followed up with stories focused on the lives and issues of young immigrant. The series, which you can read here - How immigration policy affects young people - was released in June 2013.

During the tumultuous 2016 Presidential campaign, we returned to a national dialogue that became foreboding – the need for a wall, the impulse to keep Muslims out, the call to deport those living without authorized status, and a Presidential election in which all the marbles were on the table, and then fell haphazardly onto the nation’s floor. The traditional flag waving of candidates who tout their family’s proud immigrant heritage was swallowed whole, with not even a gulp of self-awareness. We spent 10 weeks in six of Chicago’s vibrant immigrant communities to get a sense of some issues immigrants were dealing with on a day to day basis. We focused on issues that were specific to particular immigrant communities and that were also relevant to other immigrant communities. That series ran in June 2016, before the two national parties officially nominated their candidates. It is here - Six Immigrant Communities this Election Year

Over the eight years that we have been doing this work, we have returned regularly to the families and communities of refugees who have sought a home and safety in Chicago, America. Here are the series we’ve produced – Finding Triumph Finding triumph for Chicago’s refugees, A Chicago Welcome to World Refugee Day, and Safe haven from trauma and torture: World’s refugees resettle in Chicago.

This is the only journalist effort of its kind in the U.S. today to connect with immigrants, refugees and their families and communities as far as we know.

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If Trump Makes It One Year Without Impeachment, Then Let’s Talk Supreme Court Nominees

                                      Jack Doppelt

Feb. 10, 2017

[A version of this article was published in Yes! Magazine on Feb. 10, 2017.]

For the sake of our judiciary—and democracy—Congress should slow down and consider a one-year presidential probation.

The Supreme Court matters. It matters who is on the Court, how the Court is chosen, and whether people trust its legitimacy and decisions.

Alexander Hamilton Famously described the judiciary as the "least dangerous branch," yet the election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton suggests otherwise. For those who care deeply about the influence of money in politics, whether abortion is a matter of choice or a matter of life and death, and whether the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to a weapon, The one vacant position on the Supreme Court mattered more than the election for president. Yet of course they were inextricably connected.

The Senate is on the cusp of making a decision that will reveal for generations how much the Court matters.

President Trump has nominated a candidate, Neil Gorsuch, to be the ninth justice on the Court yet almost a year ago in mid-March, then President Obama also nominated a candidate for that vacant position.

Even before Obama made the announcement, Sen. Mitch McConnell pledged to kill the nomination, which, as Republican majority leader he had the power to do. The nominee's qualifications didn't matter. The nominee would not get a hearing.

McConnell justified the brazen move by saying that "the people should be given "a voice in the filling of this vacancy. It was about principal, not the person," he said.

At the rate he's going Donald Trump may well face impeachment or resign within the year.

Photo taken on July 26, 2017
(Photo credit: Ted Eytan under creative commons)

Click on photo to link to the story where it originally appeared

Since "the people" had elected Obama to a second term and the president selects nominees, that didn't make any sense. Eventually McConnell's position was rejiggered to: hearings should not be held during a presidential election campaign (which lasts more than a year) or during a president's final year in office, depending on how one untangled the justification.

Either way, "a year" seems to be key.

Now the pretense has shifted again. With strut in his step, Mitch McConnell again the Senate majority leader, is demanding that the Democrats in the Senate treat Trump's nominee the way Republicans treated Clinton's nominees and Obama's nominees. (His script left out Obama's last nominee, the one in March.)

When pushed to address the obvious he said: "This is the beginning of a four year term (for Trump), not the middle of a presidential election," and he added, "so let's talk about apples and apples, and not apples and oranges."

Let's do that then. Principal matters. Precedent should matter too, but it's easily distorted to fit the moment, and it's the Republican's moment.

Columnist David Brooks portended it days after the election, before there was evidence that could easily substantiate its occurrence. An impeachment campaign, with draft legislation created by attorneys at Free Speech for People, is already underway and in a short time has amassed 800,000 signatures.

One year is more or less the time clock the Republicans set as they announced they would not hold hearings or a vote on Obama's nominee. If Trump were to be impeached or driven to resign within the year, neither Republican nor Democratic Senators nor "the people" who should be given "a voice in the filling of this vacancy" would want Trump to fill it, not in the middle of a fateful impeachment process.

The Senate, including the Republicans, should put the president on one-year probation.

I concede that it is hard to predict with certainty what will emerge as the grounds for the articles of impeachment to trigger bona fide impeachment proceedings against Trump within a year, just as it has been hard to predict the reckless abandon of his executive branch, his tempestuous exchanges with foreign leaders, his unconstitutional, autocratic actions and his yet to be disclosed and purposefully hidden conflicts of interest that have surfaced in less than a month in office.

To put it in terms Trump might appreciate, oddsmakers are giving attractive odds that he will be impeached or resign before his first term is over.

 

The grounds might spring from differences over issues between Trump and the "business as usual Chamber of Commerce agenda" of the Republican establishment, as former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colorado, warned recently in a Breitbart News column.

They might emerge from Trump's instinct to defy court orders if judges dare to stop his excesses of executive authority. What to make of the President's tweet that denounced a "so-called" Republican-appointed federal judge for ruling against the travel ban on people from seven mostly Muslim countries? Hard to predict, even harder to defend for GOP Senator Ben Sasse (NE) who said, "we don't have any so-called judges, we have real judges." Harmless, mindless tweet or a precursor to attacks on an independent judiciary?

Grounds for impeachment are bound to be tied to his clear and continuing flouting of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits the federal officeholders, particularly the president, from receiving payments or benefits from foreign entities who could dangle money to curry favor or otherwise corrupt a president's decision-making.

So here's a proposal: the Senate, with Republican involvement, should put the president on one-year probation, a fitting procedure for an apprentice president.

A wait-and-see year is a no-lose proposition. 

I realize that this may seem like a radical departure from constitutional tradition. But from the perspective of the sanctity of justice, it is a modest proposal. Here's why. What the pundits have failed to account for in concluding that McConnell's brazen power play a year ago to stymie Obama's nomination won the day by having no apparent consequence to a Republican electoral victory in November is that there are latent consequences for the people's trust in the legitimacy of our judicial system.

Young people have only superficial connection with Bush v. Gore, the fiercely divided Supreme Court decision of 17 years ago that contravened principal and precedent along partisan political lines to place George Bush in office over Al Gore. That too appeared at the time to be a cynical power play that won the day with no erosion of our political institutions.

Yet after the Bush-nominated Chief Justice John Roberts ascended to the Court five years later, he took with him the visceral instinct that it was up to him to cast the unexpected, decisive vote to uphold Obama's Affordable Care Act to regain the people's confidence in an independent non-partisan judiciary.

My appeal for the Senate to deny a hearing to Trump's Supreme Court nominee as it did to Obama's Supreme Court nominee a year ago is directed primarily to Republican Senators and their constituents, and to young people who, by a convincing majority, are disheartened by the incivility in American politics.

I am not so naïve to think that GOP Senators will come forward publicly to imply that Trump will no longer be an office in a year. There is a cover for them, though.

Senate procedures require 60 votes to end debate on Supreme Court nominees if the nomination is filibustered. There are only 52 Republican Senators. But McConnell can change those rules to bring a nominee up for vote with only a simple majority, resulting in likely confirmation even over unified Democratic opposition. The question on the floor right now is whether McConnell will change the rules. That is called "the nuclear option" by Beltway politicians and pundits who apparently need hyperbolic euphemisms to justify their importance. All it requires is McConnell and the Republican majority voting to change the rule. Easy to do yet they have the option to not do it. After all, they've acknowledged it's nuclear, and Trump's prompting for them to "go nuclear" should serve as a reminder of the recklessness that needs a probationary year to keep him in check.

A wait-and-see year is a no-lose proposition for Republican Senators and even for their most vocal, doctrinaire constituents. If they keep a leash on Trump in the name of having him act responsibly for a year to avoid impeachment, Trump will be able to have his nominee approved by the Senate. If Trump continues to act so recklessly that Republicans recognize that impeachment or resignation is imminent, then Vice President Pence will replace Trump and appoint the conservative justice that the right elected Trump to appoint.

The Court will need to go another year with eight justices. Not optimal but workable. After all, it was field tested for the last year of Obama's presidency.

The difference will be that the people will trust the Court's legitimacy and decisions, and that's the democracy we depend on.

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Police videos, the cynical art of sacrifice and the need for trust

 

                                    Jack Doppelt

Dec. 2, 2015

[A version of this article was published as Police videos, the cynical art of sacrifice and the need for trust on Social Justice News Nexis (SJNN) on Dec. 2, 2015]

On Nov. 25, in the immediate aftermath of public events relating to the back-to-back murder charges of a gun-happy Chicago cop and the release of a damning and distracting video of Laquan McDonald’s death that had been withheld from the public for more than a year, I wrote this blog. I was enraged as was Curtis Black who wrote in the Chicago Reporter, it sure “looks like [Officer Van Dyke] is being sacrificed in order to protect the system that created him.” 

Another way to put it was the city was cravenly tossing one bad apple to pacify us. And we, in the media particularly, are so mesmerized by the glare of video that we literally lose sight of how this keeps repeating itself with institutional cover. 

Then yesterday, seemingly out of nowhere, as Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy was making the rounds to defend the city and his department, Mayor Emanuel fired McCarthy, announcing that “the public trust in the leadership of the department has been shaken and eroded.” 

Now one bad apple and one official have been offered up under the intense glare of public anger. Is this the accountability the public needs to trust? The mayor has also appointed a task force to review the system. What more is a mayor to do? 

It will of course take time for the task force to review and conclude and offer recommendations. Will relations with Chicago’s residents and communities fester in the interim? How will it not, if some basic questions that do not need months to investigate are not addressed? 

Maybe the first thing the task force can do is to advise the system publicly that to regain the public’s trust, questions like these need to be to answered no matter what the task force comes up with. 

To Mayor Emanuel: You said you did not see the video until after it was publicly released earlier this Thanksgiving week. If we believed you, shouldn’t we be even angrier that you and the city council approved a $5 million last April without taking the trouble to view the video that must have been the smoking gun to settle a case that had not yet even been filed? 

Followup to the city council: What were you told that had you be so willing to pay $5 million in taxpayer money without holding anyone accountable? 

To the Fraternal Order of Police: We expect that your role is to serve and protect fellow police officers. Do you feel any compunction that you are willing to accept whatever story police at the scene conspire to stand by, such as in this case that Laquan McDonald died of a single gunshot to the chest, after he had punctured a squad car’s tires and damaged the front windshield (without ever getting close enough to the vehicle to do either of those acts)? 

To State’s Attorney Alvarez: Should we feel grateful that you filed murder charges against Officer Van Dyke when, as you put it, the time was right and all the evidence was in, which was coincidentally the very day before a court ordered the video to be released? If I were Officer Van Dyke’s defense attorney, am I pleased about that coincidence, maybe just as pleased as Officer Dante Servin’s defense attorney was when you decided not to charge Officer Servin with murder only to have a judge dismiss all charges against him at trial last April, because, as the judge put it, you mischarged Servin with involuntarily manslaughter when he should have actually been charged with intending to kill Rekia Boyd? 

To Chicago police officers: How do you feel when you find out that fellow officers deleted 86 minutes of footage from a security camera at a Burger King restaurant near the scene? Relieved that you are willing to obstruct justice to cover one another’s back, or are you incensed or scared that you could be the one cop hung out to dry when city officials and the state’s attorney choose to duck and let you fall in the line of duty? 

Just a few questions that I think about now that I’ve watched another incriminating video that has me questioning the people we entrust with power.

[Postscripts: 

In March 2016, Anita Alvarez was defeated for re-election as State's Attorney by Kim Foxx, who got 58% of the vote to Alvarez's 29%. 

In Sept. 2018, the week the Van Dyke case was to go to trial, Rahm Emanuel announced that he would not seek re-election for mayor. 

In Jan. 2019, Van Dyke was sentenced to seven years in prison for the second-degree murder of McDonald.]

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Immigrants aren't a unified voting bloc

                                    Jack Doppelt

Aug. 30, 2012

[A version of this article was published as The Complex Picture of America’s New Immigrants on the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (JJIE)]

With President Barack Obama’s mid-June directive that protected certain children of illegal immigrants from deportation, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that invalidated most of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, immigration has finally been yanked onto the front burner. 

With that spotlight has come some misleading shorthand: that immigrant means Latinos and illegal, and that legal immigrants, including immigrant youth, if mobilized to become citizens will vote Democratic. Immigration in the United States today is far more comprehensive than stereotypes and myths can convey, and we owe it to ourselves to understand the nuance of the politics and influence on our country, especially in an election year. 

There are about 40 million immigrants in the United States today, and according to the U.S. Census Bureau, that is more than at any time in U.S. history. Almost two-thirds have arrived during the past 20 years. Immigrants, defined as people born outside the United States and residing here legally or illegally, now comprise about one-eighth or 12.5% of the U.S. population. 

According to Census figures, 11 million of today’s U.S. immigrants were born in Mexico, another 10 million originate from other Latin American countries and the Caribbean. Some 11 million are Asian, primarily from China, India, Philippines, Vietnam and Korea. Five million of today’s U.S. immigrant population originates from Europe, including the former Soviet Union. 

More than half of U.S. immigrants today are between the ages of 18 and 44. They are seldom accounted for in political polling in the run-up to an election, though more than 40 percent of all immigrants are citizens and entitled to vote, according to 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data. 

In a series, “Immigrants don’t fall in line for 2012 elections,” published by Immigrant Connect, an online network for immigrants, refugees, their families and communities in partnership with 12 ethnic media outlets in Chicago, we examined how different immigrant communities are approaching the 2012 election campaigns. 

Among what we discovered are stories of traditionally Democratic strongholds veering away from supporting President Obama – in the Indian community that has become wealthier and a natural reservoir for political fundraising; among Poles who face a quandary between an opportunity for those here illegally and core religious values; for Russian Jewish immigrants who have an instinctive fear of big government and any specter of socialism; and in a surprisingly robust Bulgarian community that hasn’t yet developed an investment in American politics. Immigrants from the former Soviet Union, many of whom only recently reached voting age, often express a visceral allegiance to former Republican President Ronald Reagan for his role in the fall of the Iron Curtain, that carries over as party loyalty for the GOP. 

U.S. immigrants are not a bloc, much less a voting bloc. For immigrants, politics is often a home-grown tradition. Dual citizenship is a convenience and a fact of life in the United States. With every election, both here and back home, many immigrants have options. 

For Lithuanians, for instance, it can get complicated. Younger Lithuanians – those who emigrated after 1990 and became U.S. citizens – can’t vote in Lithuania. Older Lithuanians can vote in both places. Mexican officials were paying attention to the 10 million voting-age Mexicans living in the United States. Though about three-quarters of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. lack U.S. citizenship and can’t vote here, Mexico honors dual citizenship and some 60,000 applied for absentee ballots to vote in the Mexican elections this year. They tend to vote in neither, in part because of a distrust in authorities and the election process, bred in Mexico and reinforced in their new home. 

That has been the case among Pakistani Americans, too. However, upcoming elections in Pakistan have created quite a buzz among Pakistani immigrants living in the United States, who earlier this year were given voting rights for the first time. The campaign of Imran Khan, a cricket star-turned-politician has galvanized young Pakistani-Americans well beyond anything American elections have been able to do. 

“A nation of immigrants” is a term steeped in the rhetoric of American politics, often invoked to harken back to bygone times, and to remind us of our country’s humanity. 

In the Arizona case, Justice Anthony Kennedy referred to illegal immigrants as “human concerns;” Justice Antonin Scalia called it “human realities,” referring to Arizona’s other citizens as feeling under siege by invading immigrants. 

With 40 million immigrants, legal and illegal, being courted to vote and being kept from voting, this should be an election cycle worth engaging in.

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