President Trump is backing the Securing America’s Future (SAF) Act drafted by key House Republicans. The SAF Act is a comprehensive immigration reform bill posing as a DACA fix. It is 414 pages long and touches on every major area of the immigration system—family, employment, and diversity legal immigration, humanitarian programs, workplace enforcement, temporary visas, interior enforcement, border security, criminal penalties, and much else. Comprehensive immigration reform is fine, but this massive, complex bill expands the scope of the debate so far from DACA that it cannot seriously be considered an answer to this relatively small immigration issue. ... Negative Provisions By far the worst aspect of the SAF Act cuts overall legal immigration by 25 percent—some 2.6 million people per decade (pp. 5-21). Given how fiscally and economically positive the average immigrant to the United States is, this is a huge unnecessary blow to the economy. Eliminating the random diversity visa lottery is welcome, but unlike the bipartisan Senate deal—which replaces it with a merit-based system—SAF simply eliminates those green cards. Even ending the other family based categories might be worth swallowing if the bill shifted the numbers to the employment-based side. But the employment-based increase is just 55,000 compared to a reduction of more than 315,000 elsewhere. SAF also changes asylum law to make it more difficult for asylum seekers to apply by greatly increasing the standard of proof to apply for asylum (p. 23). I have previously written about how these changes will make it virtually impossible for asylum seekers who don’t already have attorneys waiting for them and evidence gathered to prove their claims to even apply for asylum. The worst enforcement provision is criminalizing simply being in the United States without status or violating any aspect of civilimmigration law (p. 170). This would turn millions of unauthorized immigrants into criminals overnight. It would also criminalize legal immigrants who fail to update their addresses, carry their green card with them at all times, or otherwise abide by the million inane regulations that Congress imposes on them. Take, for example, the status provided to Dreamers in this bill. It requires them to maintain an annual income of at least 125 percent of the poverty line (p. 396). If they fall below that level for 90 days—not only are they subject to deportation again—they would be criminals. This bill literally criminalizes poverty among Dreamers. This legislation would immediately undo much of the progress that the Feds have made on criminal justice reform and reducing its prison population. Several other security provisions are also problematic. Mandatory E-Verify (p. 87) will impose massive regulatory costs on small businesses, establish a federal national identification system that includes all U.S. workers, and cause hundreds of thousands of Americans to have their jobs delayed or lost entirely due to database errors—all while having a track record of failure in every state that has tried to use it to prevent illegal employment. My detailed comments on this specific E-Verify proposal are here. Biometric exit (p. 356) is a multi-billion dollar boondoggle that would add absolutely nothing to security while imposing huge costs of travelers and intruding into Americans privacy. Increasing the number of Border Patrol agents by 25% at a time when each agent is already catching less than two crossers per month makes no sense (p. 319). Authorizing states to use the National Guard along the border on the U.S. taxpayer dime is another provenwaste of money (p. 286)—even Border Patrol says so. The bill authorizes spending of $124 billion over five years on border security alone (p. 348). The bill makes little effort to find a means to pay for this gargantuan sum. For comparison, the entire Border Patrol budget last year was $3.8 billion. An infeasible trade Republicans are essentially asking Democrats to trade the legalization of 700,000 unauthorized immigrants for the criminalization of all others, banning 2.6 million legal immigrants over the next decade, the elimination of almost all family sponsorship preference categories and the diversity visa lottery, deporting tens of thousands of asylum seekers, huge increases in border security spending, a massive new regulatory program that applies to every employee and employer in the country (“E-Verify”), and so much else. This bill has no chance of becoming law, but it is a remarkable illustration of how far apart the parties are on this issue. https://www.cato.org/blog/securing-americas-future-act-net-negative-immigration-system
LOL. Yeah, reading the green now, poverty needs to be the exclusive province of white red-state voters. That and no healthcare. #MAGA.
The conservatives are into criminalizing poverty for US citizens. Also into depriving poor people of the right to vote. I wonder why? Criminalization of Poverty as a Driver of Poverty in the United States Harvard Criminal Justice Policy Program and Human Rights Watch Submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights ********** EXCERPT:Many jurisdictions motivated by revenue-raising shift the costs of the criminal justice system to the poorest instead of passing politically unpopular tax increases. Unable to pay and confronted by court systems that often seem bent on ignoring that fact, individuals face the real threat of incarceration, often because of minor offenses. Many individuals are then left with damaged credit and in some states are denied the right to vote until their debts are paid. It is no surprise that many individuals rely on their families and communities to help pay their debts, and this reality further expands the circle of people who suffer harm. These systematic failures to protect political and civil rights exacerbate and help entrench poverty in communities across the country, especially minority communities that are targeted by aggressive policing. https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/10/04/criminalization-poverty-driver-poverty-united-states
Yup. Am convinced it's not the gilded age they want now. They're heading for full-on feudalism, a pre-Enlightenment type scene. Humans gonna human.
Not sure what the numbers are now, but the last thing we need is another Republican in office to address poverty. This is from 2019. U.S. rates of poverty are substantially higher and more extreme than those found in the other 25 nations. The overall U.S. rate using this measure stands at 17.8 percent, compared to the 25 country average of 10.7 percent. Looking at the poverty rates for children we see similar patterns. The United States again leads all nations in having the highest rates of child poverty at 20.9 percent, while the overall average stands at 11.7 percent. The United States has far and away the highest overall poverty rate in this group of 26 developed nations. Add in the fact that we don't even have free or affordable healthcare and I'd say the priorities of promoting gun freedom, restricting the votes, and Building The Wall are not going to solve this issue. Chart in article below. https://confrontingpoverty.org/poverty-facts-and-myths/americas-poor-are-worse-off-than-elsewhere/
Statistically trump didn’t do anything to disrupt child poverty rates during his time in office, they fell at a similar rate as the end years of Obama. Covid caused a huge spike in 2020, then an UNREAL drop due to the child tax credit and Covid relief in 2021. Of course, we didn’t continue that child tax credit that took millions of children out of poverty because…
3 countries of interest when I look and poverty are Czech, Slovakia, and Slovenia. These are not countries you'd expect to have amongst the lowest poverty rates in the world, yet they do. All 3 also amongst the lowest income inequality countries in the world. How did these 3 eastern European countries position themselves so well and what can we learn from it?
Republicans don't want to increase wages to a livable wage, don't want to fund free education and training, and don't want to pour money into social services. They sure as hell don't care about free or affordable healthcare. Also big pharmaceutical companies with big donations to politicians ensure that we pay more for prescriptions than almost anywhere else in the world. You wonder how many politicians have stock in those companies. If a program doesn't benefit Republicans directly, then they vote against it. They don't give a damn about anyone but themselves.
He didn't do anything to help address poverty. He uses the excuse that it's communism or socialism. Funny thing is he loves communist rulers.
Both Cares packages did reduce poverty but stimulus packages haven't lived up the bill of "multiplier effects" since Bish. They boost a few quarters after it ends but becomes a headwind as people spend less afterwards and the rolling interest on our debt isn't overcome by true economic growth or activity. I imagine numbers will not be encouraging next year but we're all guessing at that point
The man spits truth. The when is unpredictable (at least with my monkey brain, I don't know how to profit off it) but the numbers are clear.
