2. READ: Lost Children Archive. A novel by by Valeria Luiselli.
4. READ: There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration. A book by Ali Noorani.
5. READ: What the first 24 hours on U.S. soil looks like for detained immigrants.
6.LOOK: Our 2018 photo essay in the midst of a rally outside the gates of Tornillo, Texas.
This interview with Dan Hopkins, Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
What were the original assumptions in the Constitution about state-level loyalty versus national government loyalty?
It's a good question. The Constitution is now far enough back in our collective memories that I think it's really valuable to start by having some sense of what the U.S. was like at the time. There were some scholars who argued that the Constitution is well understood as a peace treaty between sovereign states about how they were going to govern their affairs.
In 1776 and even in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, the U.S. was a collection of 13 quite different colonies. It took the Georgia delegation six weeks to travel to Philadelphia in order to participate in the Constitutional Convention. Different colonies had very different economies and different religious heritages. This was a quite diverse country and, thus, the Constitution was designed to protect substantial levels of state-level autonomy. I think it is really important to recognize that at the time, many of the people thought of themselves as Americans, but also to a certain extent, as New Yorkers or Virginians or Pennsylvanians.
When do you start to see a shift towards politics in the U.S. becoming more nationalized?
To some degree, it's an ongoing process that has unfolded in fits and starts over our 200-plus year history. I do think that the Civil War is a critical turning point. In the run-up to the Civil War, you see many more implications of state-level identities. I'm a Georgian, I'm a Virginian. And obviously, the Civil War pitted state against state.
It's generally been the case that the Republican party has been more likely to invoke federalism. Of course, the exemplary issue is the issue of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Even in more recent times, the Republican party has advocated for there being less of a role in the federal government asserting itself to protect the rights of African-Americans, especially, but not only in the South. I think it's fair to say that if you've heard a state rights argument in the last 50 years, it's more likely to be coming from the Republican party.
There's also an element in which as power shifts, we see changes. When the Republicans control the federal office, sometimes it's Democrats who say, "Hey, it's important to let California write its own laws with respect to clean energy or car emissions standards." At the same time, the extent to which we see Republican states moving to block sanctuary cities, for instance, is surprising.
If you're a principled federalist, then presumably cities shouldn't be punished for diverging.
In general, I see very few principled federalists in American politics. I think that all too often in contemporary American politics, federalism is just the clothing we use to dress up certain arguments instead of being a principled approach to a range of policy problems.
What factors contribute to a nationalized political landscape?
I actually think there's a relationship between the transformation of campaign finance, the transformation of voting, and the transformation of what's getting covered in our newspapers. There's a unifying element to all of this.
Let's look at campaign finance first. In many of the most competitive 2020 Senate races, large majorities of money came from out-of-state donations. What does that do to the candidates, and how does that affect the way constituents perceive elections?
I think that the nationalization of the campaign finance structure is an example of our nationalized set of divisions. What we're trying to do is refract these highly nationalized divisions through our federalist system. And the result often distorts representation in critical ways. One of the key facts about campaign finance has been that as late as 1992, two-thirds of all donations to federal candidates, to members of Congress, were coming from within the state that they represent. 20 years later in 2012, only one-third of all dollars were coming from the states that people represented.
The danger is that the representatives and senators increasingly have one constituency where they get their votes, but a separate constituency from where they get their money.
That is not how our system was designed to work. It was not designed for members of Congress to spend four hours a day raising money from people who are not their constituents.
And simultaneously, there has been a collapse of local media. I wonder how the decline of local news plays into this landscape?
When the internet first became a sizable presence, there was a hope that it might actually lead to a proliferation of local news. With the internet there are very, very low production costs, so, theoretically, I could put up a newsletter about my neighborhood. But in fact, as you said, the rise of the internet and the rise of cable television led to this dramatic concentration of our attention on a very, very small number of nationalized news sources. Partly that's because the news media would target us based on where we lived. The Philadelphia Inquirer targeted a set of people who wanted to know about life in and around Philadelphia.
But more recently we instead see that the business model for many media companies is to compete based on who voters are and who readers are and who consumers are, rather than where they live.
Rather than providing me with information specific to Philadelphia, they will identify me as someone who likes the National Football League or cares about politics.
That has led to the fragmentation of our media environment. One of the real losers in this has been people's attention to state and local politics. State and local politics have never been on the top of people's priority lists. It used to be that if I were reading the Philadelphia Inquirer, as a by-product of learning what the Eagle's score was, I also learn a little bit about who my mayor was or who my governor was. And nowadays, since I can go right to ESPN or I can go right to Fox News, I can skip over all that state and local information.
In a world where state and local politicians want to be well-known, they're much more likely to attach themselves to a lightning rod federal issue than they are to actually dive into the challenging, complex issues that face their local community.
Which really allows issues to be manipulated. When we focused on immigration, something I found interesting was how much immigration was used as a campaign tool in Ohio or Maine. It’s easy to make a border terrifying when you don’t live near one. Do you feel like campaigning has changed based on the ability to take issues that don't have anything to do with your constituents, but are made to look like they have everything to do with constituents?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the real challenges with a nationalized political environment is that it encourages attention to issues that are evocative and emotionally charged and often have to do with specific groups of people, but ultimately do not have clear policy effects. I think one prominent example of this is not long after President Trump was elected he attacked football players who refused to stand for the National Anthem. I think it's a very instructive case because he wasn't proposing any policy. This was purely about symbols.
I worry that in the nationalized political environment, it's very hard to put together a political coalition that speaks to auto workers and nurses in the suburbs of Detroit, and retirees in Maricopa County. This is a very diverse country. One of the easier ways to knit together a political coalition is to reach for these divisive, identity-oriented issues, even if that's not actually what's going to motivate the policies that you're proposing.
I do think that there's been a real connection between the way in which our politics has nationalized and the way in which our politics has become more identity oriented.
It's these kinds of identity charged issues that can have an intuitive meaning to people in places from Montana to North Carolina.
Has your work clarified your opinion about how national politics should work? What do you advocate for moving forward in terms of policy and campaigning?
I certainly think that voters do better when they have the information that they need, and I think that we are missing an opportunity to really use our federalist system, because there are so many different kinds of issues that face the different communities in our country.
If we are trying to force all of those issues onto a single divide between Democrats and Republicans, we're going to miss a lot of critical issues.
I think some of the disaffection with contemporary politics stems from the fact that many of us deal with problems in our day-to-day lives that are not represented by the Republican-Democrat divide.
I do want to be wary of nostalgia — or suggesting that some earlier period of history was markedly better. Yes. I worry a lot that today's voters just don't know much about state and local politics, but state and local politics wasn't always vibrant and democratic in previous generations, right? As a social scientist, I think part of my job is to lay out trends. I do think that nationalization is something that we should forecast as being a major part of our politics moving forward.
I also think that there are some policy changes on the edges that I would advocate for that I think would help reinforce the connections between places and voters, and to make better use of our current federalist system. For instance, I think campaign finance matching, so that every dollar you get locally is amplified, is a great idea. I think that could encourage politicians to lay down roots in the specific communities they represent and to spend less time trying to raise money from Manhattan or Dallas.
I think we should also do everything in our regulatory capacity to help promote, protect, and foster high-quality, non-partisan coverage of states and localities.
As a country that is hemorrhaging reporters who cover states and localities I do think that given how many important decisions are made at the state and local level, as a society, we have a real stake in the quality of local news media. There are fewer statehouse reporters, there are fewer city hall reporters, and there are fewer people who are tracking state and local politics to hold our politicians accountable. I think that has been underappreciated, and one of the real dangers in contemporary American democracy.
interviews
An Interview with Veronica Escobar
by Veronica Escobar
July 5, 2018
This interview with Veronica Escobar, a two-term El Paso County Judge, current Congressional candidate running in TX16, and proud El Pasoan, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
EL PASO —
Tatti: As someone born and raised here in El Paso, as someone who raised your kids here, and is running for Congress here, what is your experience with immigration on day to day basis?
Veronica: I'll tell you, in the New York Times piece, my original draft was much longer. One of the points I really discussed in depth in my first draft was what we're seeing today, what we're witnessing on the U.S./Mexico border with the separation of children from their families and what has sort of become our moral rock bottom, was a long time coming. You get the sense of that in the piece, I think, but I really drilled down in my original draft on how border security has just been this club...used over and over and over. And some politicians, I think without knowing it, have helped dehumanize the border and dehumanize immigrants. That's what's brought us to this point. When there are huge swaths of the country, of Donald Trump's base, who are perfectly okay with what's going on. They have no compassion for migrants who are fleeing their country and fleeing violence and poverty.
I made the mistake the other day of reading the comments beneath a CNN article and I was stunned. I was absolutely stunned that my country and members of my country could have such little compassion. But the fact of the matter is, it's been decades in the making.
There was a point in time when people in our country were totally okay with a wall. When George Bush introduced the wall and asked Congress for funding, good Democrats voted for that wall and said, "We need border security before we can talk about immigration reform."
There will always be a way for them to up the ante and we're never going to get to comprehensive immigration reform until we have an absolute change in the White House, in the House of Representatives, and in the Senate.
We need to begin to tap into and reconnect to our compassion. Along the way, there's a huge task. We've got to rehumanize the border and rehumanize immigrants.
The one thing that gives me the most fear right now, is that the public will eventually become numb to the inhumanity that's happening at the hands of the Trump administration. Or, that the media and good journalists will move to something else, which inevitably will happen. When the focus and the spotlight is taken off of the horrific way that people are being treated right now, and have been, then we, again, are going to feel alone.
Tatti: One can only feel sad for so long.
Veronica: Right. Like, I've seen the horror. I don't wanna see it over and over again.
Tatti: Yeah, exactly. What’s the reality like? What is it to really live along this border?
Veronica: It's such a beautiful, complex, challenging, infuriating thing. It's beautiful because nowhere else do you get an international feel this way. You know what I mean? There are other parts along the U.S./Mexico border, but this is a massive metroplex. The connectivity is beautiful. The deep roots that go under and through the Rio Grande are beautiful. Familial roots. Economic roots. All of that.
But, the thing that's so complex is that there's so many different types of immigrants. There's those who can very easily come back and forth and have a visa and can attend the university; who live in Juarez and they make our lives richer and they make their peers experience richer. They sometimes have no problem. Their biggest problem is the wait times at the border.
Then, you have folks...like, I'm mentoring this young woman, who shall remain unnamed, but she's a high school graduate. She's waiting to enroll in one of the local colleges and she is a dreamer. Both her parents are undocumented. Her parents are afraid to go places together because of the fear that they will both be deported at the same time. I can't even imagine growing up like that... in fear, that when one of my parents leaves ... because not both of them are gonna leave at the same time... they may not come back. That we may not know where they are or what's happened. That they've been deported. Then, the grueling experience of living in two different countries and not being able to be reunited, then that happens.
She was also the victim of domestic abuse by her boyfriend who knew that she was undocumented and who used it over her. Used it as a weapon. And now, with a president who essentially has said, "We're not gonna allow asylees to claim domestic violence as one of the allowable methods for entry”, what does that say to young women like her? She's survived this horrific relationship, a near death experience, and you have a president who doesn't place a premium on saving her life. Everybody's experience is different, but living here and knowing people like that...And I'm a citizen! I'm a third generation El Pasoan. My family's been here for well over 100 years, so I had the good fortune of being born on the other side of that skinny little river.
All of these experiences really enrich our humanity and our compassion and it's part of what, I think, has made El Pasoans different. And when people who don't have those experiences, and they don't have someone they care about who's afraid that their parents will be deported, it gives them the excuse to be without that compassion. But having grown up here with those very diverse experiences all around me, has made me a better human being. I think it's made my kids better human beings.
Tatti: This conversation becomes very complicated when you begin to conflate Honduran refugees with Mexican economic migrants with Homeland security’s job to deter threats. There are all these different angles and we're just lumping them together.
Veronica: We are. And I'll tell you, I have my own concerns about my own side. Like, people who I'm politically aligned with. With the new calls for abolishing ICE, for example. I just wrote this long essay on my Facebook page, letting people know, in El Paso and on the border, we've been dealing with issues regarding ICE and Customs Border Protection and Border Patrol for a long time. Abolishing ICE doesn't get to the heart of so many other complex issues.
As an example, Border Patrol is now using this weird multiplier effect to document attacks against them. So, if you have five Border Patrol agents and there's three kids who threw two rocks ... Even if those rocks didn't hit any of those agents ... Border Patrol in south Texas is now taking the number of agents ... so, five agents, times the three kids, times the number of rocks. That's happening so they can help ratchet up the fear mongering of the border being unsafe. That's a huge issue. Abolishing ICE doesn't impact that.
As somebody who's grown up here and who has become intimately familiar with a lot of these issues, I get concerned when we try to distill things down to a very simplistic, superficial solution. The other side is already doing that. You know? And this is a huge mess. There are issues that are deeply entrenched in the culture of federal law enforcement that we have to get to.
I just feel that it's important for people to listen to border voices. And to listen to people who've been on the front lines and people who have lived through this, in their own communities, for a long time. Because only then will we really get to the root of the problem. And the root of the problem is, frankly, in terms of ICE...that the Obama administration tripled their budget so that they could quickly deport a lot of people. Many of us on the border were infuriated by that and we raised our voices. And even then, the rest of the country was mostly silent.
Tatti: Listening to border voices is so important. It seems to me that Texan politicians should be leading this conversation, and there feels like a lack of it. If you could prompt the highest elected officials in Texas to answer questions on immigration what would you ask them?
Veronica: One of the things I've been curious about for a long time is how do they define border security? Specifically. What does a secure border look like? Very specifically.
For many of them, they'll dance around it. They'll say, "Oh, we've got such a porous border." And what that tells me, is that they want a border that's completely sealed. And I think they need to be nailed on that. Or, it needs to be sealed to people they deem undesirable. So, tell me who's undesirable? It's mostly brown poor people. That's who's undesirable to them.
We need to drill down with them to expose, I think in many cases, what is policy rooted in bigotry. You're creating a bottleneck to trade and people and you're not even truly catching all the drugs. And then you look at our outdated drug policy. It's too complicated to solve the problem and it's too easy for them to feed in to the bigotry of their anti-immigrant base.