Stanford University Press Blog

Why We Need Intersectional Coalition Building

Understanding and combatting the surge of anti-LGBTQ legislation

ERIN MAYO-ADAM

The White House bathed in rainbow lights, 2015. By the White House, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

This year has seen the largest number of anti-LGBTQ bill proposals in several decades. Although anti-LGBTQ proposals have long been a staple of American politics, their breadth has increased tremendously in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the court case that nationalized same-sex marriage. In 2016, immediately following the Obergefell decision, the number of anti-LGBTQ proposals skyrocketed to 175. Since then, the number has steadily increased each year, culminating in over 300 anti-LGBTQ proposals in 2022  as of late April. Why have state and local governments increasingly attacked the LGBTQ population through harmful legislation? What might movement organizations and the public do to help abate these proposals?

The current wave of anti-LGBTQ proposals began to pick up in 2015, when Christian nationalist groups pivoted away from focusing on same-sex marriage and, instead, focused their state-based activism on curtailing the rights of transgender people. For example, in June of 2015, just before the Obergefell decision was announced, the Family Research Council released an issue analysis report that placed the blame for what it called the “assault on the sexes” on three waves of progressive movements: the “modern feminist movement,” “the homosexual movement,” and the “transgender movement.” The report proposed a series of policy solutions targeting the transgender community, including legislation prohibiting governments from allowing gender changes on identity documents, prohibiting insurance companies from covering gender-affirming care, and prohibiting transgender people from using sex-segregated facilities that conform with their gender identities.

Why have state and local governments increasingly attacked the LGBTQ population through harmful legislation? What might movement organizations and the public do to help abate these proposals?

Rethinking Trump’s Refusal to Concede

Perhaps He Really Did Win the 2020 Election

TIMOTHY K. KUHNER

November 26, 2020— President Donald J.Trump on a Thanksgiving video teleconference call to Military  Service Personnel. By The White House from Washington, DC. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons

Prior to November 3, 2020, 35% of Republican voters believed the election was going to be unfair. President Donald Trump had told them so. In July, he claimed that “2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.” And at a Wisconsin campaign event in August, Trump warned his supporters that “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”

These statements coincide with hundreds of others that Trump has made since losing the popular vote (by nearly 3 million votes) to Hillary Clinton. That four-year campaign culminated in Trump’s announcement, at 2 AM on November 4, 2020, that he intended to remain in office regardless of the vote:

 “This is a fraud on the American public,” he stated. “Frankly, we did win this election [and] we want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.” With these words, Trump attempted to stop state election officials from counting lawfully cast ballots within the existing deadlines.

After all the major news networks had called the election for Joe Biden, Trump Tweeted I WON THE ELECTION and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo assured the world, “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” 

By that same time, the percentage of Republicans questioning the fairness of the vote had doubled. According to a Politico/Morning Consult Poll, 70% of Republican voters deny that Biden and Harris won a “free and fair election.” A survey by the Economist and YouGov puts the percentage even higher, at 86%. That figure dovetails with polls indicating that the percentage of conservatives who trust the mainstream media declined to 13% during Trump’s first term.

What William Barr Can Learn from Ramsey Clark

Lonnie Brown on William Barr, Ramsey Clark, and the necessity of independence

LONNIE T. BROWN, JR.

February 2019- William P. Barr being sworn in as Attorney General by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts with the participation of President Donald J. Trump. Public Domain. Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

In light of AG William Barr’s recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee we present Lonnie T. Brown, Jr.’s January 2020 blog post for Defending the Public's Enemy ».

During his confirmation hearing, William Barr touted his ability to distance himself from politics and to safeguard the rule of law, declaring, under oath, that as attorney general he would be “truly independent." To many, Barr’s words provided comfort or at least hope that he would be guided by law and principle, not the president’s political agenda. However, since being confirmed, his actions have revealed the illusory nature of his sworn declaration.

Rather than exhibiting the fairmindedness and objectivity expected of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Barr seems to have established a de facto attorney-client relationship with President Trump, serving as his strident advocate and partisan defender. For example, in March, he zealously made the president’s case for “no collusion” by publicly recasting the substance and tenor of Robert Mueller’s report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

More recently, in a similar vein, the attorney general sharply criticized the findings of the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s investigation into Russian involvement in the president’s 2016 campaign. That report concluded that the FBI had adequate grounds to open the investigation and was not politically motivated. In a rather transparent effort to parrot President Trump’s “witch-hunt” narrative, Barr characterized the FBI’s investigation as having been based on the “thinnest of suspicions” that he personally believed to be “insufficient to justify the steps taken.”

My guess is that a large segment of the electorate, across the political spectrum, sees nothing wrong with or surprising about Attorney General Barr’s alignment with the president, or any attorney general’s close relationship with a president, for that matter. Such a rapport is by no means simply a Republican phenomenon. President Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder, for instance, once referred to himself as the president’s “wingman,” connoting that his job was to have the chief executive’s back.

What William Barr Can Learn from Ramsey Clark

Lonnie Brown on William Barr, Ramsey Clark, and the necessity of independence

LONNIE T. BROWN, JR.

February 2019- William P. Barr being sworn in as Attorney General by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts with the participation of President Donald J. Trump. Public Domain. Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

During his confirmation hearing, William Barr touted his ability to distance himself from politics and to safeguard the rule of law, declaring, under oath, that as attorney general he would be “truly independent." To many, Barr’s words provided comfort or at least hope that he would be guided by law and principle, not the president’s political agenda. However, since being confirmed, his actions have revealed the illusory nature of his sworn declaration.

Rather than exhibiting the fairmindedness and objectivity expected of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Barr seems to have established a de facto attorney-client relationship with President Trump, serving as his strident advocate and partisan defender. For example, in March, he zealously made the president’s case for “no collusion” by publicly recasting the substance and tenor of Robert Mueller’s report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

More recently, in a similar vein, the attorney general sharply criticized the findings of the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s investigation into Russian involvement in the president’s 2016 campaign. That report concluded that the FBI had adequate grounds to open the investigation and was not politically motivated. In a rather transparent effort to parrot President Trump’s “witch-hunt” narrative, Barr characterized the FBI’s investigation as having been based on the “thinnest of suspicions” that he personally believed to be “insufficient to justify the steps taken.”

My guess is that a large segment of the electorate, across the political spectrum, sees nothing wrong with or surprising about Attorney General Barr’s alignment with the president, or any attorney general’s close relationship with a president, for that matter. Such a rapport is by no means simply a Republican phenomenon. President Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder, for instance, once referred to himself as the president’s “wingman,” connoting that his job was to have the chief executive’s back.

Challenging the Myth of Respecting Noncombatant Immunity

Risk management, warfare and the unmeasured gaps.

Yagil Levy

March 2008, Kirkuk, Iraq— U.S. Army Soldiers from the 3^rd Battalion 6th Field Artillery, 10th Mountain Division and Iraqi army soldiers working together. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Samuel Bendet, CC BY 2.0. Via Flickr.

 

Studies show that states expose their own civilians and soldiers and enemy noncombatants to varying levels of risk. The most known is sociologist Martin Shaw's argument that the new Western way of war in the post-Vietnam era is characterized by the transfer of risk from soldiers to enemy noncombatants to reduce the military casualties and, by implication, the political costs stemming from the growing social sensitivity to casualties domestically.¹

However, scholarly gaps still remain. Among them, variations in risk transfer have not been sufficiently measured and therefore conclusions—whether militaries shift or take risks— are largely unsupported empirically.

I tried to partly bridge this and other gaps in my new book, Whose Life Is Worth More?. Using empirical data drawn from the US, Britain, and Israel—democracies involved in prolonged warfare, in which policy-makers confront domestic constraints on the use of force—the book shows how states develop hierarchies of risk and death, an ordered scale of value that they apply to the lives of their soldiers relative to the lives of their civilians and enemy noncombatants. In the most interesting circumstances, states compensate for the aversion to sacrifice by attempting to increase the legitimacy of using aggressive fire to shift risk from their own soldiers onto enemy civilians.

Transfer of risk occurs when forces attack the enemy from a distance by using excessive lethality through artillery, aircraft, drones, and other means, sometimes with limited discrimination between combatants and noncombatants. Alternatively, exercising greater caution to avoid civilian casualties, for example, by adopting more restrictive rules of engagement to better discriminate between combatants and noncombatants, will likely increase the danger to soldiers.

EURASIA’S NEW GEO-ECONOMICS

Why geography matters to the world now.

KENT E. CALDER

December 2013– President Xi Jinping meets with Prime Minister Rutte and Minister Ploumen of The Netherlands. By Minister-president Rutte, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons  

A century ago geography was an avidly followed and debated subject in international relations, but the discipline for many years fell into disrepute. Long associated with fascist expansionism, after World War II it was rendered politically irrelevant by the static bipolarity of the Cold War world. However, with increased global connectivity boundaries have become more fluid and permeable, leading to a quiet but sharp growth in geography’s global importance.

In Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration, I take an in-depth look at how geography, in interaction with economic growth and the structural changes of the early post-Cold War years, has quietly begun to re-shape the world’s largest continent, thereby transforming the face of world affairs. Eurasia, after all, has over one third of the earth’s land area, over 80 percent of its proven natural gas, and almost 60 percent of its proven oil reserves. It includes three of the four most heavily populated nations on earth. Yet as Zbigniew Brzezinski, US National Security Advisor under Jimmy Carter, noted in 1997: “Fortunately for America, Eurasia is too big to be politically one.”

Two decades and more after Brzezinski’s important judgment on Eurasian political geography, it remains true that Eurasia is by no means politically one. Regional rivalries, as between China and Japan, certainly continue. Yet political relations among the continent’s key nations are substantially better, economic interdependence is deeper, and social connectivity is much greater than when Brzezinski wrote. The cumulative effect of these post-Cold War social, economic, and political changes is to transform the geopolitical profile of Eurasia’s fragmented political geography itself, and to raise the specter of a more cohesive Eurasia that yields unprecedented influence in world affairs.

How to Stop Trump from Evading What’s Undeniably Impeachable

Why words alone do not convey all the meaning in Trump's phone call with Zelensky.

ADAM HODGES

July 2019– President Donald J. Trump at a meeting with the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

 

We’ve been through this routine many times before: Trump says something egregious. Critics cry foul. Trump and his supporters respond by invoking plausible deniability. They project the president’s own fault onto his opponents and reframe the conversation in a way that sows enough doubt and distrust across a divided electorate to avoid being held accountable.

This time could be different—if congressional Democrats follow Speaker Pelosi’s lead and effectively counter Trump’s disingenuous language games. But doing so will require understanding some key ideas from sociocultural linguistics on the way meaning unfolds through language use. Holding Trump accountable for his most recent impeachable offense requires communicating to the public why the memo of his call with President Zelensky of Ukraine is so damning. And it has less to do with what he reportedly said—or didn’t say—in so many words (a quid pro quo of US military aid for dirt on a political opponent) than what he did communicate within the context of the call and US foreign relations.

Politicians frequently play the plausible deniability language game by exploiting the gap between semantic and pragmatic meaning. In that other infamous memo of the Trump presidency—the one in which then-FBI director James Comey documented what he took to be the president’s attempt to obstruct justice in the investigation of Michael Flynn—Trump’s defense hinged on the semantics of the word hope (“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go”).

Between Political Economy and Political Theology – Part 2

Martijn Konings and Adam Kotsko Discuss Neoliberalism

by MARTIJN KONINGS and ADAM KOTSKO

CC0 via Pixabay

 

Stanford University Press is proud to present the second part of a conversation between Martijn Konings, author of Capital and Time, and Adam Kotsko, author of Neoliberalism's Demons.

Adam Kotsko:

You mention that “neoliberalism has a unique capacity to roll challenges to its mode of operation into its mode of operation,” which is certainly true. And I think that my theory of neoliberalism, as an extreme vision of the “trap of freedom” that we see in both Christian culture and previous models of capitalism, accounts for why that is possible—there is always a fresh pool of people to blame. Who would have thought, for instance, that pursuing the American Dream of home ownership would turn out to imperil the world economy? But once that happened, the Tea Party movement arose to let us know that those subprime borrowers were to blame for everything and deserved no government assistance of any kind. In that respect, Trump is in perfect harmony with the neoliberal ethos, as his followers come up with all kinds of improbable “you should have thought of that” scenarios to scapegoat people. And these choices are always moralized—I remember one legislator, during the attempted repeal of Obamacare, asking aloud why we should support those “bad people” who were so inattentive to their health.

These moralizing dynamics seem to be absent from your analysis, and I suspect that might be why other dynamics, such as racism, misogyny, and nationalism do not really figure in it. Your book is brilliant on questions of risk and state entanglement in markets, but it all seems very bloodless—as though a figure like Hayek embraces market neoliberalism simply out of a recognition that the world is open-ended and unknowable. But we know that all the great neoliberal figures were in fact deeply socially conservative and that part of the reason they found such ready allies in right-wing parties was that the market was supposed to be an efficient method for reproducing and even entrenching social and political hierarchy—and, in my terms, for finding ways to blame subaltern populations for their own position, which supposedly results from their own “free choice.”

More generally, I get from your work a sense that there was something necessary about the emergence of neoliberalism, as though it simply fits with the way the world is (according to Luhmann, for instance). I don’t see it that way at all—I see it as a very skillful political campaign that took advantage of a crisis within the Keynesian model but did not supply the only possible, or even the most plausible, solution to the unexpected problems that were emerging.

Martijn Konings:

You’re definitely right to say that the sociology of class, race, gender, etc. don’t play a major role in my book. In part that’s a choice to focus on the way capital and neoliberalism work at a more abstract level and to examine them through the register of economic and financial policymaking. But my specific focus is bound up with a specific concern, namely, to understand the driving force behind neoliberalism’s relentless need (and ability) to blame external factors for the damage that it wreaks. To my mind, the issue is not just that there is always a new pool of people to blame; it is what sustains this logic of blaming.

Between Political Economy and Political Theology – Part 1

Martijn Konings and Adam Kotsko Discuss Neoliberalism

MARTIJN KONINGS and ADAM KOTSKO

June 1, 2017 – President Trump delivers a speech to a crowd in the Rose Garden of the White House. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Stanford University Press is proud to present the first part of a conversation between Martijn Konings, author of Capital and Time, and Adam Kotsko, author of Neoliberalism's Demons.

Adam Kotsko:

I have just finished your very interesting book, and I think we have much to discuss. When you suggested this conversation, you mentioned disagreements—and I am sure we will find plenty of those—but my first impression is that there is a certain homology between our projects. Fundamentally, we are both responding to simplistic and ineffective critiques of neoliberalism by trying to discern how neoliberalism makes sense on its own terms.

Martijn Konings:

To kick this off, let me just start with two questions:

I’d first like to ask you to explain a bit more why you feel the Trump presidency is so obviously an expression of neoliberalism’s decline. You rely on Davies’s understanding and periodization of neoliberalism, which I feel over-identifies the essence of neoliberalism with the kind of rationalization of economic governance through things like “new public management” under Third Way regimes and sees the Trump regime as too “irrational” to qualify as neoliberal. To my mind, such a perspective remains too rooted in a concern with rational-discursive legitimation and does not fully register the affective aspect of political mobilization in a deeper way.

I get a lot out of your emphasis on the persistent force of political theology. But to my mind, it leaves a certain ambiguity. Does that persistence mean that political theology should be taken as an explanatory template? Or is the point that we should step up our efforts to criticize the theological from a more committed secular perspective?

Adam Kotsko:

Neoliberalism is not necessarily in decline in practice. Trump's deviation from neoliberal "best practices" have been fairly marginal, and they tend to occur in the areas that Republicans are most willing to push back on. And globally speaking, few of the so-called "populist" leaders seem to have much interest in breaking with the market-based economy or moving toward more state-led models. This fits with what I say about Trump as a parody or heretic within the neoliberal framework rather than a break—and sometimes heresies can become respectable alternate versions! Look what happened with the heresy of Lutheranism within Christianity, for example. I can see what you mean when you say I identify the 90s version of neoliberalism as normative in a typological sense—but it is far from the only version of neoliberalism that has been concerned with discursive legitimation. If anything, the combative neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher were even more concerned with legitimating themselves, simply because they were proposing radical changes. What's so puzzling in our moment, I think, is that the remaining "classic" neoliberals (moderate Democrats, Blairites, etc.) no longer have any real popular purchase, and the right-wing reaction legitimates itself—misleadingly, as usual—by distancing itself from the neoliberal policies it mostly continues to pursue. Neoliberalism as a principle of legitimation is on the decline, then, and I don't know how long it can go on like that. 

The President’s Clout

As we head into Presidents Day Weekend, we are re-posting Presidential Leverage author Daniel E. Ponder’s piece on the importance of approval ratings in the larger context of presidential efficacy.

by DANIEL E. PONDER

Photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Dominique A. Pineiro. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

For a person, indeed a president, so obsessed with “ratings,” Donald Trump must find his approval ratings jarring. While virtually all presidents start their terms with high approval, Trump started low, sank fast, and kept digging. Even George W. Bush, who came to office after a heavily contested election, began with 57 percent approval. Meanwhile, Trump, who is now approaching the milestone one-year mark of his presidency, has languished in the 30s for months, averaging just under 39 percent. To be sure, a few presidents have endured approval levels below his, but they did so in the midst of extraordinary times: Truman during the Korean War, Nixon on the cusp of resignation, Ford following his pardon of Nixon, Carter in the midst of the Iran-Hostage crisis, George H.W. Bush on the brink of losing the presidency to Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush post-Hurricane Katrina all posted lower approval ratings. Even Barack Obama briefly dipped into the 30s in September 2011, during the budget negotiation debacle. But no one has begun so low and fallen so quickly and consistently as Donald Trump.

Presidential approval is arguably the most cited statistic in American politics. Presidents with high approval ratings are likely to be deemed powerful, particularly by the media, whereas presidents with low or middling opinion are seen as weak or ineffective. But is approval all it’s cracked up to be?

Presidential approval is arguably the most cited statistic in American politics—but is it all it's cracked up to be?

The administration of “illegality”

“Illegal” immigrants are universally demonized, but it is exclusionary immigration laws that produce “illegality.”

By ANNA TUCKETT

Matteo Salvini, 2018. Photo by Presidenza della Repubblica, via Wikimedia Commons.

Illiberal immigration policies and the xenophobic rhetoric that accompanies them are on the rise in the Western world. In Trump’s America, children are being prised away from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, making even the President’s Republican colleagues express discomfort. In the U.K., the unlawful detention and deportation of British-Caribbean citizens – the so-called “Windrush scandal” – has revealed the deeply pernicious consequences of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policy for migrants. In mainland Europe, meanwhile, the anti-immigrant nationalist leader Victor Orban achieved a resounding victory in the Hungarian national election in April, while in Italy the formation of a new coalition government has catapulted the anti-immigrant Lega (League) party into the heart of political power. The appointment of Matteo Salvini, the Lega’s leader, as Interior Minister means that a far-right politician is now in charge of Italy’s border control, its policing, and its immigration policy. This has rightly caused alarm: during the recent election campaign, Salvini pledged to deport hundreds of thousands of “illegal” migrants should his party win, and this rhetoric has continued following the Lega’s positive election results. Just weeks after coming into office, the newly appointed minister left 629 migrants stranded when he refused to allow a rescue ship to dock in Italy.

Politicians such as Salvini and Trump revel in whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment with a dramatic focus on the supposed threats to nation-states’ borders, but as my book Rules, Paper, Status shows, they consistently overlook a crucial part of the immigration picture: “illegal” immigration is actually produced inside borders through the implementation of harsh and exclusionary policies that create the very categories which parties like the Lega then rail against. As migration scholars have consistently pointed out, “illegal” immigrants are not merely comprised of those who arrive on the rickety boats that cross the Mediterranean. In fact, the number of migrants who attempt to arrive in Europe “clandestinely” makes up only a tiny fraction of the continent’s migrant population. Many more arrive “legally” on some kind of visa for tourism, work, study, or family purposes.

The Origins of the U.S. Surveillance State

In the U.S., carrying out military interventions abroad has undermined freedom at home.

by CHRISTOPHER J. COYNE and ABIGAIL R. HALL

Photo by Jonathan McIntosh. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal continues to be front-page news. According to current reports Cambridge Analytica obtained private Facebook data, which it used to send pro-Trump material to targeted Facebook users. These reports have been met with outrage in Washington, D.C. The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation and U.S. senators have called for Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, to testify in front of Congress.

Calls by Congress for increased oversight to prevent private companies from surveilling people are extremely ironic given that they themselves recently renewed a section of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which allows for the warrantless surveillance of Americans. Issues regarding the appropriate use of government surveillance are also at the center of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump administration. These headlines provide an excellent opportunity to consider the history of the U.S. government’s surveillance state, which matters for people across the world whose liberties are at stake as government power expands.

The origins of the present-day surveillance state can be traced back to the U.S. government’s military occupation of the Philippines in the late 1890s.

The Dreamers’ Fight

A syllabus for understanding the challenges facing undocumented youth.

Los Angeles March for Immigrant Rights, September 2017. Photo by Molly Adams. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. 

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which granted provisional work permits and protection from deportation to undocumented youth, has been at the center of a maelstrom of political debate. Signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2012 and rescinded by President Donald Trump in 2017, the DACA program and those who are protected under it have been sent into a tailspin of uncertainty as Congress remains gridlocked on long-term immigration reform. This stalemate triggered a government shutdown in January, and though President Trump gave Congress a March 5th deadline to hammer out a new policy, no progress on a legislative solution has yet to be made.

In the meantime, challenges from federal courts in New York and California have issued injunctions against terminating the program, allowing those young immigrants who already have DACA permits to continue applying for renewals. This stay, however, is only temporary. If no long-term solution is reached, hundreds of thousands of young immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States as children could find themselves unable to legally work and eligible for deportation.

For a more detailed look at the recent political and cultural history that brought us to this moment, we’ve gathered below a short syllabus of books that explore the rhetoric, policies, and activism around the present US immigration debate.

Caught in the Political Churn

DACA beneficiaries stand on unstable ground as March 5th deadline passes without action.

by ALEXIS M. SILVER

Demonstrators protest the recission of DACA in Los Angeles, September 5th, 2017. Photo by Molly Adams. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

On September 5th, 2017, the Trump administration announced the rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and set a date of March 5th, 2018 to begin phasing out the program. DACA, implemented under President Obama as an action of prosecutorial discretion in 2012, offers protection from deportation and work permits to approximately 700,000 young immigrants, often referred to as the DREAMers, who were brought to the United States as children. No new applicants were accepted after the September 5th announcement, and beneficiaries began to lose their protections as Congress failed to reach a bipartisan agreement offering a legislative replacement for DACA. However, in January and February of 2018, two separate federal courts in San Francisco and Brooklyn blocked the termination of the program, allowing beneficiaries to renew their protected status under DACA.

Despite widespread public support for DACA beneficiaries across the political spectrum, a legislative fix seems unlikely in the immediate future.

The protections provided by the court decisions offer beneficiaries some breathing room, but they are hardly a long-term solution. When the Supreme Court declined the Trump administration's request to take up the case directly from the lower courts, it ensured that the March 5th expiration date would not mark the definitive end of the policy, but it also foreshadowed a continuing battle over the ultimate fate of DACA. In the meantime, beneficiaries remain in a state of uncertainty as to what their futures may hold: a career and a sense of membership or civic disenfranchisement and the threat of deportation. Depending on where they reside, moreover, beneficiaries already have access to dramatically different opportunities.

Borders and Barriers

Economically anxious countries are tightening borders and imposing trade barriers but to no avail.

by MANLIO GRAZIANO

Mexico-US border wall at Tijuana, Mexico. Photo by Tomás Castelazo. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikipedia.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was hailed as the beginning of the end of all walls and barriers separating individuals and peoples. Yet as of 2007, just eighteen years later, Europe and its Eurasian margins saw the creation of about 16,600 miles of new political borders, which means that for every mile of one dismantled border (the Berlin Wall), 107 miles of new borders have been built.

Why so? Because the new international disorder, precipitated by the dissolution of the Cold War, has led to more wars, more walls, and a more disunited world. It has also accelerated the shift of power from the old industrialized countries to the “emerging” nations: starting in the 1970s, the countries that used to dominate the world witnessed the rise of an increasing number of new international competitors. The top global companies of the Fortune 500 between 2001 and 2017 reveals the trend: the number of North American and European companies that make the cut have declined, while Asian-based companies (from China in particular) have steadily filled the breach.

For growing sectors of the American population and, more generally, the population of the old industrialized countries, this shift of power translates into uncertainty and fear. This is not necessarily because their living standard has worsened; on the contrary, in terms of per capita product, the United States is the ninth richest country in the world—a distinction it held in 1999 at the pinnacle of the economically robust Clinton years. But compared against its performance in 1999, the United States slightly closed the gap between itself and the other eight richest nations in 2016, when it experienced an increase in its per capita product relative to those countries. What these populations feel, fear, and know, however, is that their living standards cannot improve anymore, and that sooner or later they may very well worsen.

Many of those same countries eager to close their borders and expel foreign-born residents could stand to benefit greatly from immigration.