Tag: hit&run

When it comes to slamming immigrants, the Trump administration is nothing if not tenacious. It failed to browbeat Congress into cutting back legal immigration—the kind that the Republican Party used to think was swell because these people were playing by the rules—in exchange for legalizing Dreamers or those who have grown up as Americans even though they were brought here as minors without proper authorization. So now it’s trying to reduce legal immigration through administrative means. It has slashed the refugee cap to its lowest level ever, it is making the asylum program unusable, it is taking work authorization away from the wives of high-skilled workers, it is making it far harder for people with H-1Bs visas to hang on to their visas, and so on.

But none of that compares to its “public charge” rule, which was originally leaked in the spring and was finally released on Monday. The final rule turns out to be better than the initial horror. But as expected, the administration is using its executive authority not just to slash legal immigration but to remake the family-based system—the one that conservatives loved when they believed in family values—along lines that Congress has explicitly rejected several times. If President Barack Obama had used his executive power so expansively to allow more immigration, Republicans would have surely gone bonkers.

The administration’s rule will give immigration bureaucrats sweeping powers to deny citizenship, green cards, or visa upgrades to any immigrant it deems a “public charge.” But its definition of public charge has nothing to do with the spirit of the 1891 law that it is invoking. That law was meant—in the frank language of its time—to keep out “idiots, lunatics, convicts” or otherwise indigent or disabled folks who couldn’t earn a living and would therefore become a ward of the state. In 1999, the Clinton administration defined “public charge” as anyone whose cash benefits through programs such as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and SSI (Social Security Income) accounted for 50 percent of their income. In other words, people primarily dependent on welfare.

Trump’s proposal would turn all that on its head.

As Vox‘s Dara Lind explains, the Trump plan breaks down benefits into two different categories. One is benefits that “can be monetized”—i.e., that have a dollar value attached to them—such as TANF, SSI, food stamps, and Section 8 housing benefits. The other is that cannot be monetized: Medicaid, low-income Medicare Part D assistance, and subsidized housing. She explains:

There are three tests, based on these categories, to reach the threshold for reliance on public benefits in a way that could all but disqualify an immigrant from a visa or green card:

1. Individual use of “monetized” benefits over 12 consecutive months that total more than 15 percent of federal poverty guidelines for a single-person household ($1,821 in 2016), or
2. Individual use of “non-monetized” benefits for more than 12 months in any previous 36-month period, or
3. Any individual use of “monetized” benefits plus individual use of “non-monetized” benefits for more than nine months in any previous 36-month period

Under this system, the Cato Institute’s David Bier estimates, if an immigrant with a family of four uses $2.50 per day in cash and/or non-cash benefits, he or she will be denied a visa upgrade.

This is a little bit better than the administration’s original threshold of $1 per day for a single person or 50 cents per person for a family of four. And it won’t count welfare use by the American kids of immigrants against their parents’ visa petitions. Still, it’s pretty bad even from the standpoint of those who say “immigration, yes; welfare, no.” Why? Because instead of walling off the welfare state from immigrants so that more immigrants could be admitted, it is using the welfare pretext to stop immigration. Immigrants already by and large aren’t allowed to use means-tested federal cash benefits unless they are green card holders who’ve been in the country more than five years. This new rule won’t bar them from more welfare—cash or non-cash. It’ll just count its use against their immigration status. It is tantamount to saying “welfare, yes; immigration, no.”

And the administration will not just count the use of past benefits against prospective immigration applications. It will count predicted future use, giving immigration bureaucrats sweeping powers to weigh a “totality of factors.” Having a large family, for example, will be a “negative factor.” So will having a health condition while not having private health insurance, or being under 18, or over 65. On the flipside, having a household income between 125 and 250 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines would be a positive factor in favor of ltetting them in and an income over 250 percent would be a “strongly weighted positive factor.”

The only ones who’ll make it for sure under these rules are young, high-skilled singles making big bucks. Everyone else will be at the mercy of officials wielding those weights as weapons.

The Tump plan’s defenders claim that it is basically trying to emulate Canada’s point system, which gives preference to youth, skills, and linguistic ability. But that’s disingenuous. Canada uses its point system to expeditiously process twice as many immigrants as the United States on a per capita basis. The Trump administration wants to use theirs to restrict immigration.

Furthermore, Congress rejected this approach when it refused to pass the Bush-era comprehensive immigration reform bill. So Trump is basically doing an end-run around Congress—something that drove conservatives berserk when Obama attempted it on a much smaller scale by giving a temporary reprieve from deportation to about half of the country’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants. Indeed, Obama’s programs were a one-time thing for a finite number of immigrants. Trump’s scheme would apply to all future immigrants.

Anyway, Canada’s point system isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. It is better than the U.S. system in many respects, but it has problems of its own; notably, its emphasis on high skills deprives the Canadian economy of the low-skilled workers it also needs. It had to rectify that problem by creating the Provincial Nominee Program, which gives provinces vast latitude to recruit the immigrants—high- or low-skilled—that best suit their economic needs.

Restrictionists have long aspired to slam America’s doors to all but the very selective few. This Trump scheme is a giant step in accomplishing that end. The good news is that in two months, at the conclusion of the notice and comment period, the government will almost certainly be sued to stop it.

Two new shows premiere tonight: Melodramatic, soapy A Million Little Things and kind of fun, kind of dumb comedy Single Parents. Television critic Glenn Garvin reviews them both:

Everybody’s comparing ABC’s new melodrama A Million Little Things to its fellow feel-good-now-feel-bad soap This Is Us. No doubt the success of This Is Us (average weekly viewers: 17.4 million) encouraged ABC to take a shot on form of programming long considered moribund by the network suits.

But for a clue to the real origins of A Million Little Things, listen to ABC’s advertising pitch about a group of friends jolted by tragedy: “They discover that friends may be the one thing to save them from themselves.” If that sounds a bit like “In a cold world, you need your friends to keep you warm,” the advertising catchphrase for the 1983 movie The Big Chill, you’re onto the real inspiration of A Million Little Things.

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Twitter’s leadership announced this morning that it is broadening its bans on “hateful” conduct to try to cut down on “dehumanizing” behavior.

The social media platform already bans (or attempts to ban, anyway) speech that targets an individual on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, and a host of other characteristics. Now it intends to crack down on broader, non-targeted speech that dehumanizes classes of people for these characteristics.

Here’s how the company’s blog post describes the new rules:

You may not dehumanize anyone based on membership in an identifiable group, as this speech can lead to offline harm.

Definitions:

Dehumanization: Language that treats others as less than human. Dehumanization can occur when others are denied of human qualities (animalistic dehumanization) or when others are denied of human nature (mechanistic dehumanization). Examples can include comparing groups to animals and viruses (animalistic), or reducing groups to their genitalia (mechanistic).

Identifiable group: Any group of people that can be distinguished by their shared characteristics such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, serious disease, occupation, political beliefs, location, or social practices.

Directly under that rule, they ask for feedback. If you find this definition vague, you can let them know. They actually ask for examples of how this rule could be misapplied to punish “speech that contributes to a healthy conversation.” Feel free to fill them in.

As a private platform, Twitter can decide that it does not want to make space for speech it finds unacceptable. Newspapers and other media outlets have often declined to run letters to the editor or otherwise provide platforms for speech that uses such “dehumanizing” language. It’s their right to do so.

To the extent that there’s a “but” here, it’s about how toxic the political discussion on Twitter has already become. A large number of people actively try to get other people banned for saying things they don’t like, flopping and shrieking like pro soccer players at every piece of criticism they don’t like in hopes of drawing out a red card from a ref. If you add to the reasons that Twitter will censor tweets and shut down accounts, surely you’ll just increase the volume of people shrieking at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey demanding that he and Twitter do something.

Also, while this new rule is a product of the creepily-named Trust and Safety Council that Twitter organized in 2016, its language echoes the broad anti–hate speech laws of the European Union and United Kingdom. This morning Andrea O’Sullivan noted that the European Union is attempting to regulate what online companies permit and forbid. It’s a lot harder to see what Twitter is doing as a voluntary reaction to consumer pressure when we know that there is additional governmental efforts to try to force them to censor users. And it won’t just be ordinary citizens who use this rule to yell at Twitter and demand they shut down speech they don’t like. Politicians certainly will as well.

Both Twitter’s blog post and Wired‘s coverage of the rule change point to the research of Susan Benesch of The Dangerous Speech Project as an inspiration for the new rule. Yet while one might think an organization that says certain types of speech are actually dangerous would be pro-censorship, that’s not really what the group is about.

While The Dangerous Speech Project does say that “inhibiting” dangerous, dehumanizing speech is one way to prevent the spread of messages meant to encourage violence and hatred toward targeted groups, that’s not what the group is actually encouraging. It says outright that efforts to fight “dangerous” speech “must not infringe upon freedom of speech since that is a fundamental right.” It adds that “when people are prevented from expressing their grievances, they are less likely to resolve them peacefully and more likely to resort to violence.”

The Dangerous Speech Project calls instead for engaging and countering bad speech with good speech. In fact, last year Benesch co-wrote an article specifically warning against online Twitter mobs that attempt to shame or retaliate against people in real life for the things that they’ve said, even when those things are full-on racist. When naming-and-shaming is used as a social tactic to suppress speech, she notes, it often ends up with the majority oppressing minorities. And besides, it doesn’t really work:

Shaming is a familiar strategy for enforcing social norms, but online shaming often goes farther, reaching into a person’s offline life to inflict punishment, such as losing a job. Tempting though it is, identifying and punishing people online should not become the primary method of regulating public discourse, since this can get out of hand in various ways. It can inflict too much pain, sometimes on people who are mistakenly identified—and in all cases it is unlikely to change the targets’ minds favorably.

It’s a little odd to see this group’s work being used to justify suppressing people’s tweets.

While President Donald Trump geared up for his address on Iran at the United Nations Tuesday, his National Security Adviser John Bolton headed to Fox News to preview the talk. In Bolton’s telling, Trump would cover “the continuing threat of Iran, not just on the nuclear side, but in aggressive, militaristic behavior in the region that puts us at risk” of great power conflict in the Middle East.

“We want massive changes in behavior by the regime in Iran,” Bolton said. “And if they don’t undertake that, they will face more consequences, because we will find more sanctions to impose and other ways to put maximum pressure on them.”

Bolton was not the only Trump team member to discuss Iran in the run-up to Trump’s speech—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, and even the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, all weighed in. Collectively, they paint a muddled picture of the administration’s policy toward Tehran—a picture the president’s Tuesday morning speech did not meaningfully clarify—leaving recklessly unsettled the question of whether U.S.-orchestrated regime change is on the Trump agenda, writes Bonnie Kristian in her latest piece at Reason.

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Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and his wife were heckled by protesters as he dined last night at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. If the protesters’ goal was to force Cruz to find somewhere else to eat, then they were successful, though their actions accomplished little else.

A pair of videos posted to Twitter by the group Smash Racism DC shows the protesters loudly chanting “We believe survivors!” In one of the videos, a woman identifying herself as a Cruz constituent and a survivor of sexual assault asks the senator about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who faces allegations of sexual assault. Cruz, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has previously expressed his support for the judge’s nomination.

Responding to the woman’s questions, Cruz simply says: “God bless you, ma’am.” In the other video, Cruz politely asks some of the protesters to move out of the way so he and his wife Heidi can leave the restaurant. He says again: “God bless you.”

Near the end of the latter video, the protesters are heard being told to “leave the premises.” They comply, but not before levying additional verbal attacks on Cruz and Kavanaugh.

If this story sounds familiar, it’s because somewhat similar things have happened before. In June, protesters heckled Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen while she ate at a Mexican restaurant. Later than month, the owner of a Virginia eatery asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave the premises. And in July, White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller was so upset after a bartender followed him out of a restaurant cursing at him that he threw away $80 worth of sushi, according to The Washington Post.

If business owners want to refuse service to officials they dislike, that should be their right (as Reason‘s Robby Soave argued in June). And citizens certainly have the right to call out politicians while they eat. Whether they should is another question. Not every possible protest makes sense. It’s not clear what protesters gained by forcing Ted Cruz and his wife to end dinner early. Their actions were praised by a handful of left-wing figures on Twitter, and that praise was then drowned out by outraged conservatives. The hecklers got the attention they wanted, but it’s unlikely that their actions actually changed anything.

Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D–Texas), who is challenging Cruz for his Senate seat, took the high road this morning and condemned the protesters’ tactic:

Not right that Senator Cruz and his wife Heidi were surrounded and forced to leave a restaurant last night because of protesters. The Cruz family should be treated with respect.

— Beto O’Rourke (@BetoORourke) September 25, 2018

As it turns out, the fate of Puerto Rican statehood potentially rests on President Trump’s personal feelings. Trump butted heads with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz last year in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The president lashed out against Cruz after taking her comments about the United State’s delayed response to Puerto Rico, which is under its federal jurisdiction, personally. The president also recently took issue with the official death toll on the island following the hurricane, publicly denying that nearly 3,000 people died in Puerto Rico in the six months following the hurricane. (The president maintained that the death toll was made up by his opponents in an effort to make him look bad.) The president’s feelings about Puerto Rico and its leaders led him to verbally deny statehood for the territory.

“With the mayor of San Juan as bad as she is and as incompetent as she is, Puerto Rico shouldn’t be talking about statehood until they get some people that really know what they’re doing,” he said in a Monday interview on Geraldo Rivera’s “Geraldo in Cleveland.” The sentiment drew sharp rebuke, including a tweet from Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rossello.

@POTUS said he is not in favor of statehood for the people of Puerto Rico based on a personal feud with a local mayor. This is an insensitive, disrespectful comment to over 3 million Americans who live in the American territory of #PuertoRico.

— Ricardo Rossello (@ricardorossello) September 24, 2018

In two recent non-binding referendums on the island, a majority of the votes supported Puerto Rican statehood. Others were either comfortable with the current arrangement or supported a sovereign state of their own. While Puerto Ricans are considered U.S. citizens, those who support statehood argue that their representation in the federal government is inadequate. Citizens cannot vote in presidential and congressional elections. Puerto Ricans also have a representative of sorts in the U.S. Congress, but that is a non-voting member. Despite this, the U.S. government maintains control over various functions of Puerto Rico’s government, including trade, military affairs, and federal taxation.

The U.S. Congress is ultimately responsible for deciding Puerto Rico’s statehood. According to recent voting history, Puerto Ricans would likely support more Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. Given that, plus Trump’s recent statements, it is difficult to imagine a Republican-led Congress voting in favor of statehood for Puerto Rico anytime soon.

Bonus link: Statehood in Puerto Rico should also come with free market principles.

A puppet technician working on the Broadway production of The Lion King says he was making a 3D-printed gun as a “gift” for his brother. Now 47-year-old Ilya Vett faces a criminal charge.

3D-printed guns have been a hotly debated issue in recent months, though as Reason‘s Nick Gillespie has argued, hysteria over the allegedly untraceable weapons is rooted in technophobia, not reality. While all the facts have yet to come out, Vett’s case appears to be a prime example of how relatively harmless individuals suffer the consequences of that hysteria.

New York Police Department (NYPD) sources tell the New York Daily News that Vett was already about to lose his job as a puppet specialist on the hit musical. Minskoff Theatre security personnel were helping Vett clear out the prop room on Friday when they found a 3D printer, as well as a partially constructed gun.

Human resources then called the cops. When police arrived on the scene, they found the printer with a memory card plugged in. “I observed that the 3D printer was producing a hard black plastic object which, based on my training and experience, is shaped like a revolver,” NYPD Officer James Taylor wrote in a criminal complaint, according to The New York Times.

Vett told police his workshop was “too dusty,” so he brought the printer to the theater “It’s mine…. I was making the gun as a gift to my brother,” Vett said, according to the complaint. “He lives upstate and has a firearms license. There’s a website that has plans for the gun. I downloaded the plans onto the SD card in the printer.”

Police took Vett into custody, though it wasn’t until Saturday night that he was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court, the New York Post reports. Vett was charged with attempted criminal possession of a firearm and released without bail, with his case adjourned until November.

Printing a 3D-printed gun without a license isn’t actually illegal under federal law. But according to a notice from New York State Police, anyone who “possesses an unregistered operable 3-D printed pistol or revolver is committing a felony offense.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) has been among the more outspoken opponents of 3D-printed weapons. In July, the federal government reached a settlement with Defense Distributed, a company that shares blueprints for 3D-printed guns. Cuomo responded by issuing a cease-and-desist letter to Defense Distributed and directing state police to put out the notice regarding all 3D-printed weapons.

What Cuomo and those of like mind don’t understand is that banning 3D-printed guns is a giant overreaction. As Gillespie wrote last month:

3D-printed guns won’t increase crime even if and when (and that’s a Big Bertha-sized if and when) they become something other than a plaything for tech-forward hobbyists. The printing technology to crank out cheap and durable guns is a long time away, criminals already have access to more guns than they can use, and crime has gone down even as the number of weapons in circulation has gone up.

Vett’s story appears to prove Gillespie’s point. Again, we don’t know all the facts about the puppet specialist’s case; but it certainly doesn’t sound like he was a hardened criminal. Vett may have simply been a gun enthusiast. Thanks to New York’s zero-tolerance stance on 3D-printed weapons, however, he’s being treated like a potentially dangerous criminal.

At least 30 Yale law professors cancelled classes Monday to allow students to travel to Washington, D.C. and protest Brett Kavanaugh, a graduate of the law school and President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

More than 100 students took advantage of the opportunity, and others protested on the campus in New Haven, Connecticut. Not all students were happy about this: Yale law student Emily Hall told Campus Reform she disagreed with the professors’ decision to humor the protesters.

“It effectively encourages students to participate in the protests and penalizes those who choose not to by disrupting the class schedule,” she said.

Nicholas Christakis, the former dean of Yale’s Silliman College who was furiously denounced by activists for refusing to humor their demands for intellectual safe spaces, wrote that cancelling classes in this case “seems hard to defend.”

For civil disobedience to be praiseworthy and serious, protestors must be willing to bear the costs of the then-extant sanctions. Cancelling class so that students can protest, and doing so only for one end of political spectrum, seems hard to defend. https://t.co/Ya9P2lqIW6

— Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis) September 25, 2018

Despite so many Yale professors making it easier for students to protest Kavanaugh, this was still not good enough for at least one activist: Dana Bolger, a Yale law student and co-founder of Know Your IX, an advocacy group for sexual assault victims. On Twitter, she accused Yale of institutional “complicity,” presumably because the school’s administration has failed to denounce Kavanaugh.

Heather Gerken, dean of Yale Law School, has refused to take an official position on the nomination—and has maintained this would be inappropriate, given her position—but said she is proud of the Yale community for calling attention to issues of “fair process, the rule of law, and the integrity of the law system.”

The federal government’s flagship affordable housing program lacks basic anti-fraud safeguards, according to a new government watchdog report.

Last week the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released an investigation into the $9 billion a year Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, finding that it lacks the necessary monitoring to prevent contractors, developers, and other program beneficiaries from fraudulently overbilling the system.

This has been a long-running problem for the LIHTC program, which has been wracked in recent years by relavations of large-scale fraud and abuse. In 2016, a group of developers and contractors in Florida pled guilty to defrauding LIHTC of some $36 million in affordable housing funds. That same year, a Los Angeles housing developer was indicted on charges stemming from an effort to defraud the program of some $50 million.

In both cases, developers conspired with contractors to inflate the construction costs of their affordable housing projects, something the complex, poorly monitored LIHTC program does little to guard against.

Unlike other federal housing programs, which are administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), LIHTC is managed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which dolls out tax credits to state housing finance agencies (HFAs) who in turn award these tax credits to affordable housing developers based on the costs of their projects. These affordable housing developers then sell off the tax credits to banks and investors who use them to lower their own tax liability.

The complexity of LIHTC and the fact that it is administered by the IRS all but ensures there is going to be poor monitoring of the money going out the door, says Vanessa Brown Calder, a housing policy expert with the Cato Institute.

“When you have a really complicated program, it requires a lot of monitoring to make sure that abuse isn’t happening, because there are so many pieces moving, so many people involved,” Calder tells Reason. “Building housing is not part of the IRS’s mission. They don’t have the capacity to monitor housing, nor do they have the interest to monitor LIHTC housing costs.”

According to the latest GAO report, the IRS requires only that developers report high-level data on how much they pay contractors working on their projects, which leaves open the “risk of unscrupulous developers, contractors, and subcontractors inflating costs and obtaining excess program resources for personal financial gain.”

The state HFAs also have a watchdog role to play when handing out LIHTC credits to developers, but they too have performed poorly. The latest GAO report looked in depth at twelve state HFAs, finding that only five required additional information on contractor costs over and above the minimal reporting that the IRS requires.

Given that these HFAs are often run by political appointees, or even by partisan elected officials in some states, there is an incentive to use LIHTC funds as a tool of political patronage.

Last year, the Sacramento Bee reported that California treasurer John Chiang—who sits on the three-member board that administers California’s LIHTC funds—had voted to award millions in LIHTC credits to developers that had also given tens of thousands of dollars to his gubernatorial campaign.

A 2016 study of LIHTC found “a modest relationship between partisan loyalty and housing investment,” finding that “Democratic governors steer tax credits to areas of core support, but only where the governor exercises a high level of control over the state’s LIHTC-allocating agency.”

In keeping with its hands-off approach to the program, the IRS has done remarkably little to supervise the activities of these HFAs. A GAO report from 2015 found that of the 56 agencies in the country that award LIHTC credits, the IRS had audited only seven in the 30-year history of the program.

While a skeptic of federal housing aid, Calder suggests that replacing LIHTC with a program that simply gives vouchers to low-income tenants would making monitoring for fraud easier and be more efficient in reducing rents.

The GAO recommendations were more marginal still, suggesting that the IRS require more information about construction costs from contractors, and that Congress appoint a specific agency (potentially HUD) to collect and review data from the LIHTC program.

Even these reforms are unlikely to come to pass. The IRS rejected all GAO recommendations that it step up its monitoring of the LIHTC program. Congress, meanwhile, has done little to increase oversight while voting back in March to increase funding for the program.

Dave Rubin is a popular YouTube host who was once on the left. He worked for The Young Turks TV show.

But Rubin tells John Stossel how he gradually changed his mind and became a classical liberal. For that, Rubin lost friends and gets protested at college campuses.

While many leftists are so angry at Rubin that they will no longer talk to him, conservatives are eager to talk. Rubin says that surprised him because, “I’m pro-choice. Most of them are pro-life. I’m against the death penalty, most of them are for the death penalty.”

Stossel had a similar experience. “When I went from left to libertarian, the right was willing to argue,” he tells Rubin.

Why would that be? Rubin speculates that it comes down to treating people as individuals rather than groups. “If you believe in the individual, then you fundamentally understand that individuals are different. So you are willing to sit down with someone different than you,” he says.

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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

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