Chris Powell: Immigration-fraud racket in Bridgeport; The sad end of Peanut and Fred

The P.T. Barnum (as in the circus) Museum in Bridgeport.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Having stuffed absentee ballot boxes for Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim and the city’s Democratic machine only to be caught on surveillance video and charged criminally and belatedly fired from her patronage job as official greeter at City Hall, Wanda Geter-Pataky has found what may be a more lucrative racket. 

The New Haven Independent reported this month that Geter-Pataky had become a marriage broker. She was bringing to City Hall in New Haven older foreigners, apparently legal but time-limited visitors, together with much younger U.S. citizens, getting them marriage licenses, and then, as a justice of the peace, performing marriages in the hall outside the office of Mayor Justin Elicker.

Connecticut's Hearst newspapers then reported that Geter-Pataky long had been doing similar business at City Hall in Bridgeport.

How much she has charged for these services is not known.

The couples involved have no obvious connection to their betrothed. According to The Independent, the 114 couples whose marriages Geter-Pataky facilitated in New Haven included many people from India and some from Tajikistan, Georgia, Turkey, Russia, Egypt and Jamaica. 

Geter-Pataky told The Independent that the couples live in New Haven, but the newspaper found that only three included a city resident. When The Independent asked a young woman about to be married if she was being paid to do it, Geter-Pataky told her to say no.

If such a marriage is genuine, the foreigner would be entitled under federal immigration law to stay in the country. And if such a marriage is a fraud for evading immigration law, who in authority in New Haven or state government would care? 

After all, New Haven is a "sanctuary city," Connecticut a "sanctuary state," and a New Haven city clerk who got suspicious about similar marriage licenses early this year and told immigration authorities was suspended for violating the city's "sanctuary" ordinance. (So much for "If you see something, say something.") The clerk retired rather than be fired.

After The Independent discovered Geter-Pataky’s racket in New Haven she moved it back to Bridgeport City Hall. Though she is awaiting trial in connection with the latter racket, she remains vice chairwoman of the city’s Democratic committee.

As The Independent was compiling its report about the racket conducted in the hall outside his office, Mayor Elicker issued a statement lamenting Donald Trump's election as president.  

"Just like when Donald Trump was president before, we will once again come together as a city to stand up for what is right and just," the mayor said. "We will continue to work together to ensure New Haven is a city where all are welcome and where all can thrive." 

By "all" the mayor presumably means even those who contrive and profit from fake marriages to break immigration law. How "right and just"!

Three Republican state senators reacted to the Independent’s story with alarm. (Democratic state legislators seemed to ignore the story.) The Republicans urged state Attorney General William Tong to investigate the matter. Journalists at the state Capitol should press Gov. Ned Lamont about it too. 

But since, like the segregationists of old, the governor and attorney general seem happy to be nullifiers, maybe they will construe Geter-Pataky’s racket as a great new way for Connecticut to boost tourism, as with abortion.

R.I.P., PEANUT AND FRED: People not on government's payroll may say a prayer of thanks for social-media star Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon, the indoor pets of animal rescuer Mark Longo of Pine City, N.Y. As the country prepared to vote for president, Peanut and Fred were seized from Longo’s home in a five-hour raid by six agents of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, killed, and tested for rabies, which they almost surely didn’t have.

Their martyrdom has given the country what I see as a metaphor for its government -- assiduously intervening in trivia while failing catastrophically with its most important responsibilities, such as immigration and public safety. 

Yet some people still wonder where all those votes for Trump came from.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net.)

Chris Powell: New Haven welcomes immigration lawbreakers

Before passports: New Haven as it appeared in a 1786 engraving

Illegal immigration might substantially change the ethnic composition of New Haven.

MANCHESTER, Coon.

For 22 years, ever since the Arab terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have been urged by various government agencies: "If you see something, say something." Having done just that may cost New Haven's registrar of vital statistics her job.

The registrar, Patricia Clark, had been alerting federal immigration authorities to dozens of marriage licenses involving immigrants -- licenses that struck her as questionable -- just as guidance from the state Public Health Department recommended she do, independent of the national policy of reporting things that don't seem right. When her superiors discovered this in November, they suspended Clark with pay pending investigation.

Why? Because New Haven has declared itself a "sanctuary city" and its policy long has been to nullify federal immigration law. 

Mayor Justin Elicker says, "New Haven is a welcoming and safe city for everyone, regardless of background or document status." That is, immigration lawbreakers are welcome in the city. New Haven has gone so far as to issue city identification cards to illegal immigrants to facilitate their remaining in the country illegally.

State government doesn't go quite as far but issues special driver's licenses to illegal immigrants for the same purpose.

The premise of these nullification policies is that the desire of anyone anywhere, whatever his motive, to live in the United States trumps the interest of the United States in remaining a sovereign nation by controlling its borders and judging the admissibility of foreigners and what they intend to do here.

Connecticut and New Haven persist in these policies despite the turmoil lately on display just over the state line in New York City, where, as in other "sanctuary cities," the Biden administration's open-borders policy is bankrupting city government, causing reductions in services to legal residents, driving down the local wage base, driving up housing costs, and worsening the shortage of housing.\

The New Haven registrar is in trouble for being a good citizen and public official in trying to uphold federal law against a city policy that, while dressed up in political correctness and humanitarianism, is essentially treasonous. 

Most illegal immigrants mean no harm. But there must be rules to keep immigration orderly and assimilable and ensure that the country remains democratic, secular, and safe from religious and ethnic fanaticism. Letting people enter or remain in the country illegally, unvetted, in the age of international terrorism is crazy. 

Some illegal immigrants do mean harm. Some have been deported many times and still sneak back in and commit crimes. The hapless immigration system has many repeat offenders, just like Connecticut's criminal-justice system.

At least six of the 9/11 terrorists violated U.S. immigration law, either by overstaying their visas or falsifying their visa applications. If New Haven and other "sanctuary cities" keep having their way -- indeed, if the Biden administration stays in power -- nothing like that may ever be caught before the damage is done.

xxx

Another contradiction of a premise of Connecticut education policy was broadcast throughout the state the other day but wasn't noticed. The study and advocacy group Education Reform Now CT reported that while Connecticut has racially diversified its public school teaching staff in recent years, the increase in teachers from racial minorities has not matched the increase in students from minority races.

Competition for good minority teachers is intense even as state government can't control the racial composition of its student body. So any increase in minority staff is a credit to school administration. Integration and diversity are important objectives.

But learning is a higher objective than racial integration, and ever since the state Supreme Court's decision in the school-integration case of Sheff v. O'Neill in 1996, Connecticut policy has presumed that minority students learn better in a racially integrated environment. So what's the big deal if teaching staffs are, on average, whiter than their classrooms? 

If, as the complaint from Education Reform Now CT suggests, minority kids will learn best in a segregated environment, education in Connecticut has a lot of rethinking to do.      

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net). 

Llewellyn King: We can’t welcome all who want to emigrate here; identity politics threatens America

Illustration from Walter Crane's Columbia's Courtship: A Picture History of the United States in Twelve Emblematic Designs in Color with Accompanying Verses (1893). Back then, most immigrants were expected to assimilate into American culture, learning English, etc. A smaller percentage do now, with the rise of identity politics. and “multiculturalism.’’ Too many immigrants continue to see the countries they came from, as awful as they are, as home.

U.S. Border Patrol agents review documents of individuals suspected of attempted illegal entry from Mexico.

The American head and heart aren’t in alignment on immigration. They are savagely apart.

The head argues that all those people amassing on the U.S.-Mexico border, or living in camps across the English Channel, or trying to get into Turkey from Syria should be sent home. The heart argues that people anywhere denied a reasonable life in the place in which they were born are entitled to find what they seek: freedom from want. It argues, too, that immigrants have made us wealthy down through the centuries.

The head is adamant: Unfettered immigration is conquest one person at a time — one ragged child, one desperate mother, one hopeful man. Immigration is destabilizing much of the Middle East, particularly Jordan and Lebanon. It is threatening Europe and is changing the face of the United States.

Bad governance has an impact beyond the borders of the badly governed country.

Small stretches of sea that separate Malta, Greece, Italy and Spain’s Canary Islands from Africa haven’t deterred migrant crossings. If these migrants are accepted by European countries, they will bring with them their religion, their language, and their loyalty to the culture that they left behind.

Before the jet age and the communications revolution, an immigrant sought to be a new American, a new Briton, or a new Frenchman. Many of today’s immigrants don’t feel compelled to assimilate and can reside in North America or Europe but retain the aims and culture of the country from which they came.

I know Koreans who have lived in the United States for decades and speak no English — and have no need to. All their wants are met in Korean, from banking to television to shopping. I also know U.S.-born Salvadorans who talk about El Salvador as “my country.” The wheels have come off assimilation.

The receiving countries deserve some blame for those who remain alien. The prevailing identity politics doesn’t meld a nation. The “woke” reverence for every culture except its native culture and language is destructive.

The immigrants who flooded the United States in the 19th Century and the first half of the last century came to assimilate, with many refusing to teach their children their native tongues. Now immigrants think and feel as though they are the citizens of other countries. It is easy to do, and “multiculturalism” is the facilitator.

American hearts go out to those who are living in hell on the southern border: Frightened, in need of food, in need of places to sleep and to defecate, often sick, preyed on by criminals in their own number, and believing myths — especially the myth that when Donald Trump lost the presidential election, they would be welcome in the United States.

The heart says immigration is good for us and that we are all immigrants; that our generous inheritance, from the genius of the Founding Fathers to the syncopation of jazz and the blues to the techno-wonders of Elon Musk, is the product of immigration.

But my heart and my head, and those of many Americans, align in believing that we have to stop identity politics, treasure our American identity and explain to the world that the United States isn’t open to all, otherwise all would come.

The Trump administration failed to end illegal immigration with its incompetence, its bluster and its wall. So far, the Biden administration has done worse. It has allowed a myth to circulate around the world that if you get to Latin America, even to faraway Chile, you can get into the United States.

President Biden should demand that Vice President Kamala Harris, who he put in charge of the border, do her job and produce some ideas. Her declaration that she will work to strengthen the countries of Central America so that their people stay home is fantasy.

Even if Harris could do that, she should note that the new flood of migrants is coming from across the world — from Haiti to Pakistan and other parts of Asia. U.S. intelligence has failed, and the vice president fails daily to address this global problem, which will only get worse as the climate changes and the seas rise. The brain reels and the heart bleeds.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: About the border wall: U.S. immigration policy must be ad hoc

Trump stands in front of a section of border wall near Yuma, Ariz., in June 2020

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Going to the border and harrumphing won’t solve the very real immigration problem, which pits our humanity against our sovereign entitlement to say what kind of people we are.

We are not alone in this struggle.

The world is on the move. Untold millions of people who live south of our border with Mexico want to move north. Equally untold millions who live in Africa would like to move to Europe; and millions in eastern Europe want to live in western Europe.

From the Indian subcontinent, millions would like to move to Europe, especially to Britain. Millions of East Asians have their eyes set on Australia.

Within these areas, people also are on the move. Millions from Venezuela have flooded their neighboring countries. Likewise in Africa, where war and famine are ever present, people try and walk to a marginally better future in another country. In the Middle East, Jordan and Lebanon are flooded with refugees first from Palestine, then from Iraq and Syria.

As The Economist pointed out recently, a slum in Spain is incalculably superior to a slum in Kenya.

The drivers for migration are poverty, violence, crop failure and political collapse. And persecution, ethnic and religious; for example, the Rohingya in Myanmar have sought refuge in Bangladesh.

The goal of the migrant is the same worldwide: a better, safer life.

The political price paid by the stable democracies continues to be huge. It played a role in Donald Trump’s election and will play a role in the next presidential election, whether Trump runs or not. It was the great driver for Brexit and Britain’s seeming self-harming. It has driven the move of Hungary, under Viktor Orban, to autocracy.

It is hard to stop people who have nothing to lose from crossing a frontier if they can. But they aren’t the only migrants. Some, a small number, are opportunists. These are the migrants who overstay student visas, manipulate qualifications for residence, and willfully circumvent the law or contract so called green card marriages.

But they aren’t what the border crisis is about -- any more than it is what the overloaded boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea is about. It is the physical manifestation of desperation.  

Because the migration problem is so complex – human problems are almost by definition complex— it isn’t a matter of resolution so much as management. We want, for example, immigrants with high-tech skills, but we are worried about the impact of millions of desperate peasants walking across the deserts.

Now a new driver of migration has opened: global warming. The heat and drought hitting the U.S. West Coast are also hitting Central America and will affect livability.

Adding to the complexity of the immigration conundrum is the labor shortage. Construction depends on immigrant labor, farming on contract labor, and slaughterhouses and chicken processors can’t stay open without immigrants to do the unappealing work.

One small step forward would be a sensible work permit.

It seems to me that the wall -- Trump’s wall – isn’t a bad thing. It is a declaration, a symbol. It won’t deter desperate people and it won’t end smuggling. The latter is going to get worse with drones and even autonomous aircraft that can bring their lethal cargoes deep into the United States.

While there is an insatiable market for drugs here, smuggling will continue and even increase. And while that is so, lawlessness south of the border will accelerate.

Sadly, despite Vice President Kamala Harris’s statements, we aren’t going to repair the countries to our south overnight. But we might look to repairing our drug policy, seeing if that can be adjusted to take the profit out of the trade. Except for the gradual, local legalization of marijuana, we haven’t contemplated drug management, short of prohibition, in a century. A new look is due.

There is no single policy that is going to solve the human misery south of the border which drives so many to risk their lives or, through love, to send their children north.

Therefore immigration policy will never be a total, sweeping thing, but rather an ad hoc affair: We need some immigrants, we don’t want others; we have big hearts, but we fear immigration that is unchecked.

We fear the political, cultural and social change that immigrants will bring, especially if they are of a common language and background. Pain in Central America is political torture in the United States.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Web site: whchronicle.com

In Greater Boston, the intersection of the pandemic and immigration

Cambridge Hospital, part of the Cambridge Health Alliance

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

A year into the global pandemic, we are grappling with the scale of its impact and the conditions that created, permitted and exacerbated it. For those of us in the mental health field, tentative strides toward telepsychiatry pivoted to a sudden semi-permanent virtual health-care delivery system. Questions of efficacy, equity and risk management have been raised, particularly for underserved and immigrant populations. The structures of our work and its pillars (physical proximity, co-regulation, confidentiality, in-person crisis assessment) have shifted, leading to other unexpected proximities and perhaps intimacies—seeing into patients’ homes, seeing how they interact with their children, speaking with patients with their abusive partners in the room, listening to the conversation, and patients seeing into our lives.

As the pandemic crisis morphs, it is unclear if we are at the point to do meaningful reflective work, but for now, I offer some thoughts through the lens of my work at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), an academic health-care system serving about 140,000 patients in the Boston Metro North region.

CHA is a unique system: a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, which operates the Cambridge Public Health Department and articulates as “core to the mission,” health equity and social justice to underserved, medically indigent populations with a special focus on underserved people in our communities. Within the hospital’s Department of Psychiatry, four linguistic minority mental-health teams serve Haitian, Latinx, Portuguese-speaking (including Portugal, Cape Verde and Brazil) and Asian patients.

While we endeavour to gather data on this across CHA, anecdotal evidence from the minority linguistic teams supports the existing research suggesting that immigrant and communities of color are bearing a disappropriate impact of COVID-19 in multiple intersecting and devastating ways: higher burden of disease and mortality rates, poorer care and access to care, overrepresentation in poorly reimbursed and “front-facing” vulnerable jobs such as cleaning services in hospitals and assisted care facilities, personal care attendants and home health aides, and overrepresentation in industries that have been hardest hit by the pandemic such as food service, thereby facing catastrophic loss of income.

These patients also face crowded multigenerational living conditions and unregulated and crowded work conditions. These “collapsing effects” are further exacerbated by reports from our patients that they are also being targeted by hateful rhetoric such as “the China virus” and larger anti-immigrant sentiment stoked by the Trump administration and the accompanying narrative of “economic anxiety” that has masked the racialized targeting of immigrants at their workplaces and beyond.

Telehealth. As we provide services, we have also observed that, despite privacy concerns, access to and use of our care has expanded due to the flexibility of telehealth. Patients tell us that they no longer have to take the day off from work to come to a therapy appointment and have found care more accessible and understanding of the demands of their material lives.

Some immigrant patients report that since they use phone and video applications to stay in touch with family members, using these tools for psychiatric care feels normative and familiar. For deeply traumatized individuals, despite the loss of face-to-face contact, the fact that they do not have to encounter the stresses inherent in being in contact with others out in the world has made it more possible for them to consistently engage in care with reduced fear as relates to their anxiety and/or PTSD. These are interesting observations as we try to tailor care and understand “what works for whom.”

Immigrant service providers. Another theme in the dynamics of care during the pandemic is found in the experiences of immigrant service providers whose work has been stretched in previously unrecognizable ways—and remains often invisible.

Prior to the pandemic, for example, CHA had established the Volunteer Health Advisors program, which trains respected community health workers, often individuals who were healthcare providers in their home country, who have a close understanding of the community they serve. They participate in community events such as health fairs to facilitate health education and access to services and can serve as a trusted link to health and social services and underserved communities.

What we have seen during the pandemic is even greater strain on immigrant and refugee services providers who are often the front line of contact. We have provided various “care for the caregiver” workshops that address secondary or vicarious trauma to such groups such as medical interpreters often in the position of giving grave or devastating news to families about COVID-19-related deaths as well as school liaisons and school personnel, working with children who may have lost multiple family members to the virus, often the primary breadwinners, leaving them in economic peril.

While such supportive efforts are not negligible, a public system like ours is vulnerable to operating within crisis-driven discourse and decision making. With the pandemic exacerbating inequities, organizational scholars have noted in various contexts that a state of crisis can become institutionalized. This can foreclose efforts at equity that includes both patient care as well as care for those providing it. The challenge going forward will involve keeping these issues at the forefront of decisions regarding catalyzing technology and the resulting demands on our workforce.

Diya Kallivayalil , Ph.D., is the director of training at the Victims of Violence Program at the Cambridge Health Alliance and a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Chris Powell: Corrosive, politically correct lawlessness on immigration

Illegal aliens at U.S. border

With his attempt to prevent the U.S. Census from counting illegal immigrants, President Trump has a fair point. Since the Census determines the decennial reapportionment of the U.S. House, its inclusion of illegal immigrants conveys greater representation on the areas in which they live even though they are not citizens, cannot vote, and shouldn't be there.

Counting illegal immigrants for reapportionment purposes creates a system like the one used during the era of slavery, when the U.S. Census credited states for three-fifths of their slave population even though slaves couldn't vote, transferring their political power to their enslavers. Slave states thereby gained advantage over free states in House representation.

Democrats in Connecticut and throughout the country want the census to count illegal immigrants because they concentrate in Democratic areas, which is why Republicans oppose counting them.

But fair as the president's point is, he's absolutely wrong on the law. For while the Constitution did not anticipate as much illegal immigration as the country has today, it requires that the Census count "the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed." The Constitution could have required counting only citizens, or counting everyone while excluding non-citizens from House district apportionment, but it didn't.

Maybe this was an oversight. But with the Fourth, Fifth, and Six Amendments in the Bill of Rights, the Constitution provides basic protections for citizens and non-citizens alike -- protections for "the people" and "persons," not just citizens

Since Trump is so wrong on the law here, states and cities are suing to block his order about the Census. Connecticut is one of the plaintiffs, brought into the case last week by state Atty. Gen. William Tong. But while Tong faulted the president for lawlessness, he overlooked the lawlessness right under his nose on the same issue.

For even as Connecticut joined the Census lawsuit, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker announced that he is strengthening the city's protections for illegal immigrants, protections that forbid police and other city employees from cooperating with federal immigration authorities or asking people about their immigration status. While these policies are not themselves illegal like the president's census order, they are meant to obstruct and nullify federal immigration law, and they do.

Mayor Elicker said he wants New Haven to be a "welcoming city." That's a euphemism for admitting everyone no matter what, including fugitives from justice and foreigners who violate immigration law and even intend harm to the United States. New Haven's longstanding policy, reiterated by the mayor, is that anyone who breaks into the country and reaches New Haven should be above the law.

This is not just a policy of nullification, the practice of Southern secessionists before the Civil War and segregationist Southern governors who defied federal civil-rights law in the 1950s and '60s. It is also a policy of open borders and devaluation of citizenship, the dissolution of the country. Further, while the mayor is inviting more illegal immigrants to New Haven, his city is suffering an explosion of violent crime and social disintegration, with shootings and multiple drug overdoses practically every day along with the erosion of the school system.

Quite without more illegal immigrants, New Haven already can't take care of itself, and its legal residents may feel less welcome. The mayor's posturing about illegal immigrants doesn't improve life in the city. It's a politically correct distraction from decline.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Latest Conn. immigration case reveals subversive goal

With the border wall separating them, to the left lies San Diego, Calif., and on the right Tijuana, Mexico.

Nobody denies that Domar Shearer, a 23-year-old man from Jamaica, is in the United States illegally, having overstayed a visa three years ago. Nobody denies that he was recently arrested in a domestic disturbance with his wife in Ansonia. Nor does anyone deny that he has been working illegally at a restaurant in Bridgeport.

But Shearer is the latest cause celebre of Connecticut's immigration law nullification movement, enjoying support not just from a New Haven-based organization of immigration law obstructors, Unidad Latina en Accion, but also the state Judicial Department, the state public defender's office, a U.S. senator, and newspapers.

Shearer became a cause the other day when federal immigration agents went looking for him at the courthouse in Derby as he arrived to resolve his criminal charges. The public defender's office let him hide there for hours until court closed and the agents left. Then the nullifiers escorted him to a "safe house" in New Haven, home to thousands of other illegal immigrants, many holding identification cards issued by the city to facilitate their lawbreaking.

The nullifiers portray as an injustice the pursuit of illegal immigrants at courthouses. They say it discourages illegals from seeking justice. But then the people being pursued aren't entitled to be in the country in the first place and the immigration agents would not pursue them at courthouses if those weren't good places to find them.

Of course the nullifiers' idea of justice has no room for federal immigration law. Their premise, which has been largely incorporated into Connecticut law, is that anyone who is in the country illegally and makes it to Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law enforcement unless he is a terrorist.

That is, the objective of the nullifiers is open borders, the end of the United States.

Thanks to the Shearer case, at least this objective must be admitted now. One of the newspapers celebrating Shearer's escape to the underground, the New Haven Independent, even published a photo of him with his rescuers holding revealing signs. One reads, "Erase all borders." Shearer himself holds a sign bearing, in Spanish, an obscenity about immigration agents.

Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who issued a statement supporting Shearer against the agents, should contemplate those signs. Legalizing people who long have lived in the country illegally but productively and without committing offenses is a worthy objective of immigration law reform along with securing the borders. Both liberal and conservative presidents, including Ronald Reagan, have supported it. So is legalizing people who were brought into the country illegally as children and know no other home. But in assisting people who want to erase the country's borders and degrade immigration agents, the senator has forgotten his oath of office.

xxx

ABORTION COMES FIRST: The Connecticut Catholic Conference's annual report on abortion in the state, published this month, shows that Connecticut continues to nullify the law in another way.

That is, the report says Connecticut abortion clinics are attracting minors from states that require parental notification for abortions -- this state has no such law -- and that abortion clinics here increasingly violate state law's requirement to report the ages of abortion recipients.

That is, the report is a reminder that Connecticut law considers abortion more compelling than protecting children against rape.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.

Rachel Hodes: What 'abolish ICE' really means

Via OtherWords.org

To most of America, “abolish ICE” is a cry of the far left. Even Americans who dislike Trump’s attacks on undocumented immigrants wouldn’t necessarily tell you that ICE should be abolished; that seems far too radical. ICE stands for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

They’re forgetting that ICE is actually pretty new. It was only created in 2003, replacing the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the same agency responsible for the internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s).

Since its creation, ICE’s budget has almost doubled, and its activity has expanded to triple the number of agents it employs. This expansion is shocking — and unwarranted. All evidence suggests that immigrants are far from the national security threat the Trump administration claims they are. Regardless of status, they’re more law-abiding than native-born citizens.

And time and time again, immigration has been shown to have a net-positive effect on the U.S. economy, from growing tax receipts to increasing wages for native-born residents. In fact, undocumented immigrants typically pay more of their income in taxes than your average millionaire.

More noteworthy than the economics, however, is that the individuals targeted by ICE are people — and all people are entitled to basic conditions of safety and for themselves and their families.

When the majority of these immigrants are fleeing violence with roots in U.S. intervention in Central America, the moral responsibility to offer safe haven becomes even more pressing. When government agencies neglect this responsibility, we all lose some of our humanity.

What calls to abolish ICE actually do is beg the question: Why do we need an immigration system dedicated solely to terrorizing immigrant communities?

Threats of ICE raids prevent undocumented people from going to work or sending their kids to school. Those in detention are denied access to basic hygienic products, subjected to severe overcrowding, and experience all manner of abuse. Several children have died.

We spend about $7 billion a year on ICE. What would happen if we instead invested those funds in resettling asylum-seekers, or hiring more staff to process asylum applications? What if families fleeing violence in Honduras or Guatemala had to wait only a few weeks to find out if they could immigrate legally, as opposed to the current average of almost two years?

The U.S. carried out over a quarter million deportations last year. The $7 billion that funded these actions

could have been used instead to resettle at least that many refugees (over 11 times what the U.S. accepted last year). It could also almost triple the funding of the government office that naturalizes around 700,000 new citizens each year.

Which is more radical: Investing in communities that strengthen our country and honoring basic human decency? Or continuing to fund an agency that’s literally caused the death of children?

As a concerned Jewish American, I believe none of us are safe until we’re all safe. We should be focusing our resources on welcoming new immigrants and helping them access the rights of citizenship — not subjecting them to detention and deportation.

A better world, for immigrants and for everyone, is within our reach. ICE just isn’t a part of it.

Rachel Hodes is a Next Leader at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Llewellyn King: An immigration fix that can be done now

I was once interested in buying a historic mansion in Virginia. It was a classic, but it needed a lot of work. It was being sold by a bank and, for a whole afternoon, my wife and I dreamed of owning it.

It was on the market because the previous owner, who had bought it to restore it, had gone broke. His mistake was that he had tried to do the whole job at once: the wiring, the plumbing, the plastering, the floors. Too much.

Had he done what other restorers would have done in similar situations, gone about restoration piece by piece, he would be the proprietor of a remarkable antebellum home today.

Some big jobs need to be done one thing at a time.

Immigration reform may be such a big job; so big it demands to be done in pieces, fixing what is fixable in the short term while the great issues -- who, from where and how many -- wait for another day and a calmer political climate.

To me, the most fixable is the plight of those who are already here: the 11 million illegal residents, predominantly from Central America.

They are here. They are people who succumbed to the basic human desire to better themselves and provide more for their families. They are illegal but they are not evil. They broke the law to find a better, safer life — the same motivation that brought people from Europe to these shores for five centuries.

Laws are made by people; human need and human aspiration are primal. We, American citizens (except those whose ancestors were transported in slavery), are the product of the same aspiration that has brought most illegal immigrants to live among us: to work hard, to raise families and to live in peace. Statistically, they are slightly more law-abiding than those who would have them gone by deportation. They are a vital new population of artisans -- skilled manual workers.

The Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group (ITIG) and its tireless founder, Mark Jason, a former IRS inspector and Reagan Republican, attracted my attention six years ago because it had a ready answer for those who are illegal but otherwise blameless.

Jason wants illegal immigrants to be given a 10-year, renewable work permit with a special tax provision: There would be a 5 percent tax levied on employers and a 5 percent tax paid by the worker – what Jason calls “five plus five.” The billions of dollars raised by the program would be earmarked for the neighborhoods where the illegals are concentrated to alleviate the burdens they impose on education, health care, policing and other social services.

Notably, his Malibu, Calif.-based group’s program has no amnesty in the usual sense; no path to citizenship, not even an entitlement to lifetime abode.

Jason has poured his personal fortune into a lobbying effort on behalf of the ITIG program, including congressional briefings and information sessions.

To me, the program would solve an immediate problem: It would end the massive deportations — so fundamentally un-American -- which have gone on through four administrations. It would allow families to come out from behind the curtain of fear -- fear in the knowledge that tonight might be their last night of hope, of a united a family and of a livable wage. In the morning (the favored time for arrests), the state could come down on hope and love with the dreaded knock on the door; paradise lost.

The Jason work-permit program is one room in the immigration edifice that could be renovated now, and with benefit rather than cost. The deportations cost in every way: They cost in lives shattered, ICE teams, deportation centers, court hearings, talented labor lost, and finally transportation to places now alien to most of those headed there as deportees – hapless and more or less stateless. There is a fix at hand.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com.

Our 'Banana Republics'

This was a predecessor company of the Boston-based United Fruit Co., which did a lot of business in Central America.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

On the immigration “crisis’’ approaching our southern border, some context: As Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times noted the other day:

“More than 1.4 million foreigners emigrate to the United States each year. If, say, half the caravan { around 5,000 people} reaches the border, and half of those people actually enter the U.S., they would represent less than one-tenth of 1 percent of this year’s immigrants.’’

Despite Trump’s tough-guy approach, unauthorized crossings of our southern border are up slightly this year from last and the number of families crossing together as a unit hit a monthly record last month: more than 16,500 people. That’s how bad things are in much of Central America. (Still, U.S. has about 328 million people.)

The pictures of the desperate marchers are of course dramatic, and being heavily used by the orange man in the Oval Office and his propaganda arm – Fox “News’’.

The Democrats, not being “reality TV’’ experts, are slow on the uptake on the caravan. No, they don’t favor “open borders’’. But mostly because they don’t have the presidency, they lack the opportunity to present a clear position that the public will listen to.

Of course, they should clearly ask the marchers to go back home, but perhaps with the hope for some of them that the U.S. government, which has been controlled by the Republican Party for the majority of time since 2001, might finally come up with a coherent, pragmatic and fair immigration policy that would let them legally enter the country.

Congress, meanwhile, should block Trump threats to cut off aid to Central America, a cutoff that would only increase the lawlessness and poverty that drives these desperate-people north. And they should remind Americans that we are indirectly the cause of much of the trouble. Consider our insatiable demand for drugs, which in turns spawns corruption and gangs in Central America, and that much of the illegal-alien problem can be blamed on U.S. business’s love of cheap labor. A lot of Republican businessmen have loved having low-paid illegal-alien workers.

Also note that many of Central America’s woes can be traced back to the socio-economic-environmental damage done by their past status as heavily exploited economic colonies of the United States. For years such American companies as the old Boston-based United Fruit Co. basically ran these little nations, protected by the U.S. government.

American companies profited from very stratified social classes, a very large impoverished working class and a plutocracy, composed of the business, political and military elites, with whom U.S. firms and government officials worked closely. The dictatorships pushed, in return for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially of course bananas. Thus, “Banana Republics.’’

In any event, the Democrats (and Republicans) should emphasize that the marchers must go through the ordinary orderly process demanded of asylum seekers at our borders. Given the numbers in the current caravan, this will require additional personnel at the southern border, probably including military.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ought to jointly and repeatedly affirm the above.

Robert Kim Bingham Sr.: Herewith a simple path to legal immigration status for millions

"Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World'' (1886) by Edward Moran. Oil on canvas. The J. Clarence Davies Collection, Museum of the City of New York.

NEW LONDON, Conn.
 
As a retired Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyer, I have often asked myself "What should the federal government do about the 11 million undocumented immigrants in America?"
 
The simple answer is to revive a dormant law.
 
While serving in the general counsel's  offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and ICE for 37 years, I observed many long-time undocumented immigrants facing removal proceedings. They were ineligible for relief from deportation under section 249(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (Act) because they had entered the United States after Jan. 1, 1972. Otherwise, they would have been eligible to apply for the benefit of lawful permanent residence status under section 249(a).
 
In fairness to those who have set down deep roots in America, I urge Congress to enact a bill updating 249's outdated entry requirement from Jan. 1, 1972, to Jan. 1, 2005. This would constitute a major, but fair, breakthrough immigration solution that could benefit thousands of persons who have resided here continuously for more than a decade, including many DACA {Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals}  recipients, and who wish to apply for lawful permanent residence.
 
By changing the eligibility date, long-time foreign-born residents who possess good moral character would have a path to legal status. The section's existing legal bars would still block from legal status "inadmissible criminals, procurers, and other immoral persons, subversives, violators of the narcotic laws or smugglers of aliens."
 
Every applicant would continue to bear the burden of proof to establish eligibility. Once the USCIS or immigration court granted lawful permanent residence, the applicant would typically wait five years thereafter to apply for naturalization, or three years if married to a U.S. citizen.
 
This update of the section would amount to a simple statutory fix with enormous consequences that could be supported even by Republicans who can appreciate that a party hero, Ronald Reagan, was the last president to update section 249(a), on Nov. 6, 1986.
 
Experienced immigration practitioners have expressed solid support for this immigration solution.
 
"It would be the easiest solution, of course," said Rita Provatas, a member of the Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). "(Its) beauty is the statute's simplicity."
 
In its March 14, 2017, editorial, The {New London, Conn.} Day said it "likes the suggestion of Robert Kim Bingham Sr., a veteran attorney with ICE."
 
These are but a couple of the many voices from various political persuasions that have expressed support for the proposal.
 
Given that a significant number of the "11 million" group, who have lived here continuously for over a decade could qualify to become lawful permanent residents under section 249(a), if updated accordingly, the time for Congress to move up the entry date to Jan.  1, 2005 is now.
 
 
Robert Kim Bingham Sr. , who lives in the New London area, retired after working 37 years as an ICE lawyer. He can be reached at  rbingham03@snet.net. Thank you to Chris Powell, of the (Manchester, Conn., Journal Inquirer, for notifying New England Diary about this essay.
 


 
 

Chris Powell: Conn. deportation cases rife with cynicism; a portrait to take down

Most of Connecticut's recent heartbreaking deportation cases follow a pattern of cynicism on both sides.

That is, illegal entry for economic reasons is disguised by a claim for refugee status and asylum. There is a failure to appear at an immigration hearing, lest the refugee claim be scrutinized and disproved, a failure later represented as an accident or someone else's fault when it gets in the way of an appeal. There is issuance of a deportation order followed by multiple delays of enforcement over the course of many years as the executive branch of government declines to enforce the law, thereby allowing unskilled foreign labor to drive the national wage base down for the benefit of capital.

Meanwhile illegal immigrants build families in this country, with spouses and children to be used as hostages against enforcement.

Then there is the new national administration's refusal to delay deportation again, the setting of a deportation deadline, and an emergency appeal to an immigration court or the regular federal courts, making a claim of new evidence. At last there is still another stay of the deportation order, or else the illegal immigrant's relocation to a church purporting to provide "sanctuary."

This pattern demonstrates that the entire immigration system has been a racket in which the immigrants have been confident that the U.S. government was unlikely to enforce immigration law against them, and the government, through administrations of both political parties, prior to the current administration, indeed has declined to enforce the law as often as it has enforced it.

Since the government is as culpable as the illegal immigrants here, little good is likely to come from destroying families by deporting a father or mother who would leave citizen children here. But the country won't ever regain immigration law and control of its borders until deportation for illegal entry is swift and sure.


CLEAN UP THE CAUCUS ROOM: Before Connecticut commits itself to the cultural revolution that is toppling Confederate statues in the South, masking or breaking politically incorrect engravings and windows at Yale, and prompting New York City to contemplate renaming Columbus Circle for Hillary Clinton or Sacco and Vanzetti, Democrats in the state Senate might consider a more modest reform.

The walls of the Senate's Democratic caucus room at the state Capitol display portraits of past Democratic lieutenant governors, who presided over the Senate. Among those depicted is T. Frank Hayes, who was simultaneously lieutenant governor and mayor of Waterbury in the 1930s and who, in the latter position, looted the city, was convicted and sent to prison for it, and helped cause the defeat for re-election of his former ticket mate, Gov. Wilbur L. Cross, at once the most erudite and homespun governor the state ever had.

So if the walls of the Democratic Senate caucus room are to be places of honor, why is Hayes's portrait still hanging there?

Surely the Democrats could find a portrait of another prominent Democrat who did not disgrace himself and the state. A painting or poster of the Charter Oak is always appropriate to fill extra space in any official gallery in Connecticut. Hayes's portrait could be removed for storage at the archives at the State Library across the street from the Capitol.

Yes, Hayes didn't wage war against the United States, nor did he own slaves. Connecticut can be glad that, unlike some other states, it has few connections to such profound offenses. But Hayes's offense is bad enough and it shouldn't require a cultural revolution to take him down and replace him with someone or something better.


Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Josh Fitzhugh: Let's pour some cooling reason, please, on the Trump immigration-order hysteria

 I have discovered over a lifetime of living that in a general discussion of a heated topic it is best to let the firebrands speak first and when the emotion has died down, try to raise some sensible facts in a calm voice. That frequently helps resolve the discussion.

 I think that we are at this same place in the uproar/hysteria/chaos over President Trump’s immigration orders of recent days.

 So let’s reiterate some facts.

One. President Trump won the election. He did not receive a majority of the votes cast but he did receive what I will call an “electoral majority,” i.e., a majority of the votes in enough states to become president under our Constitution.  (In my opinion some of the recent protests are less about his post-election policies and more about his victory at the polls.)

Two. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that Trump has moved to restrict immigration, at least temporarily. Controlling our borders was the centerpiece of his campaign. More particularly he said he wanted to tighten the “vetting process” for people entering the country legally from some countries, and to stop the influx of people into the country illegally. The vetting process is already quite rigorous, though made more difficult when refugees come from countries in chaos, like Syria.

Three. Legal immigration to this country (i.e., immigration with the permission of the United States) is at the highest level in 23 years. According to the Pew Research Center, we admitted 85,000 immigrants last fiscal year. Nearly half were Muslims. The Obama administration was on schedule to admit 110,000 people this fiscal year.

Four. Congress has given the president enormous discretion to determine who should be admitted to this country. In fact this is the very same discretion that  President Obama cited as authority for not deporting the children of immigrants who came here illegally.  The courts historically have been extremely reluctant to second-guess the president’s authority, although they have said that Congress could by law restrict it.

Five.  Although Trump in the campaign talked of banning Muslim immigrants, the executive order he signed does not do that. It temporarily restricts immigration from seven, mostly Muslim countries that were already on an Obama watch list, and permanently bans immigration from Syria, another mostly Muslim country.  Many mostly Muslim countries continue to send immigrants to America. To say, as the New York  Times has repeatedly said in editorials, that the order “bans Muslims” is a flagrant misrepresentation that only incites religious intolerance.

Six.  The Trump White House is still getting organized. Many officials have not been confirmed by the Congress and others have not been appointed. The executive order involving immigrants contained some mistakes (extending the ban to those with green cards, for example; not making exceptions for Iraqis who have materially assisted our troops is another) that reflect the inexperience of a new American administration. Time should cure this problem.

 Seven. Those seeking entrance into the United States have no constitutional rights. They are not American citizens nor residents of this country. While it may be “un-American” to bar a foreigner based on their belief in a religion that is not contrary to our Constitution, it is not in violation of that Constitution nor, I believe, a violation of any of our laws.

Eight. While the president’s actions have certainly sent a big “unwelcome” sign over our borders, and have probably disrupted the plans of thousands if not tens of thousands of people across the globe, relatively few people were directly detained or sent home by the order, under a few hundred, I believe. Courts are sorting out some individual cases, as they should.  Ironically, although Trump vowed to pursue “America First” in his inaugural, his family business is very international.

Nine. Many Americans believe that continuing the Obama immigration policies will increase terrorist attacks in our country. Some of our recent mass shootings were conducted by Muslim Americans who had been radicalized overseas. It is unclear whether restricting immigration will reduce the threat of domestic terrorism, and many diplomats overseas think that restricting immigration may in fact increase terrorism. A recent poll showed that 49 percent of Americans support Trump’s executive order.

Ten. The immigration situation across the globe is a mess, and is likely to get worse.  Fighting and political unrest in the Middle East and North Africa have put millions of people on the move to try and save their families. Europe is at the breaking point in its efforts to accommodate refugees. Climate change and population growth are likely to make this trend worse over the coming century. The world needs to find a better way to handle the rising tide of refugees by addressing the problem at its source.

Now I’m sure that others could cite other facts that might lead to other conclusions, but for me these facts lead to this: The president is entitled to some time to carry out the promises of his winning campaign; that a pause in immigration policy is supported by at least half of all Americans; that the effectiveness of the Trump policies in reducing the threat of domestic terrorism is hard to determine; that the courts will protect the interests of those wrongly affected by American policies; and that Congress may if it wishes restrict the discretion of the President in this area.

One final thought, which is opinion, not fact.  It is pretty clear to me that the world will not advance if countries pull back inside their borders. Young people in particular want an international world. At the same time, many Americans are nervous about this internationalism and the economic and social consequences that come with it, and their candidate won the White House. In the long run of American history this appears to be a time when the people want a reset of our foreign engagement before continuing the march toward a single, multicultural nation and world.

John (‘’Josh’’) H. Fitzhugh is a Vermont farmer, retired insurance executive, lawyer and former journalist. He served as chief counsel to two Vermont  governors – Richard Snelling, a Republican, and Howard Dean, a Democrat.

Chris Powell: An immigration policy that might save America

  Pope Francis told Congress last week that the United States should welcome migrants and refugees, as if the country's record in that respect wasn't already infinitely more liberal than that of Vatican City, over which the pope presides.

For while the United States has plenty of immigration law, lately it has had little immigration law enforcement. Most people caught entering the country illegally are given a summons to attend an immigration court proceeding and are waved through.

Of course three-quarters of them never show up in court. Instead in many instances they head for "sanctuary cities" like Hartford and New Haven, where local police are forbidden to assist enforcement of immigration law, and for "sanctuary states" like Connecticut, where illegal immigration is facilitated by the award of driver's licenses, city identification cards, and resident tuition discounts at public colleges.

This is nullification of federal immigration law and the nullifiers include President Obama, Governor Malloy and a majority of Connecticut's state legislators, as well as the people in charge of city government in Hartford and New Haven.

Of course this doesn't make any particular immigrant a bad person, but any country that cannot control its borders and enforce conditions for permanent residency and citizenship will not remain a country for long. Indeed, in New Haven, where the "sanctuary city" movement is an especially ideological one based at Yale University, it is sometimes admitted that the objective is indeed to erase the country's borders. As a practical matter that is treason.

So for the United States the primary question about immigration is whether the country wants to maintain itself as a republic with a distinctly democratic and secular political culture, the more so as immigrants from totalitarian and religiously fanatical cultures, immigrants who have little intention to assimilate into the cultures of their new countries, are extensively penetrating what used to consider itself as the West.

Europe is already fairly mocked as Eurabia, having accepted millions of Arabs who were economic rather than political refugees and who have formed separatist communities seeking to be governed by religious rather than secular law. By the European Union's own statistics, 80 percent of its migrants lately are not as generally imagined, refugees from the civil war in Syria, but economic migrants from throughout Africa and the Middle East. They have run welfare costs up and the wage base down.

In the United States organized labor has pretty much capitulated to uncontrolled immigration, though unlimited immigration here also undermines the wage base and weakens the economy when much of the money earned by immigrants is only sent out of the country to relatives abroad.

Organized labor can take such a position only because it strives to be politically correct and has come to represent mostly government employees, whose jobs and compensation are immune to immigration, rather than private-sector workers, whose jobs and compensation are not immune.

There is probably no compromise between the immigration law nullifiers and the angry and heartless people who want to deport the estimated 11 million illegal aliens in the country, including innocent young people who were brought here by their parents and know no other homeland and whose plight is partly the result of the U.S. government's own negligence with immigration enforcement.

But a political majority might be mustered behind the sort of immigration reform that moderates in Congress have long proposed:

*Strict border control, with no more waving illegals through, but with close tracking and prompt expulsion of visitors who overstay visas.

 *Once strict border control is established to everyone's satisfaction for a year, grant eligibility for permanent residency to those who can demonstrate self-sufficiency, proficiency in English, knowledge of U.S. history, and devotion to a democratic and secular culture, and after five years make them eligible to apply for citizenship.

Such a policy of generous, strict, controlled, careful, and patriotic immigration would safeguard the country and its culture, be generous to its illegal aliens, and advance the country's ideals as the universal nation.

Call it a Lincolnian plan, as it was implied by Lincoln as he campaigned for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in July 1858, just after Independence Day.

We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time, of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it, and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves.

We feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations.

But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it.

Besides these men descended by blood from our ancestors, we have among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men. They are men who have come from Europe -- German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian -- who have come from Europe themselves or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things.

If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none. They cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us.

But when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration -- and so they are.

An immigration policy that offered citizenship to those who wanted not just to live here but to be fully American might give the country a better class of citizens than the native-born, so many of whom are ignorant about their country and take it for granted.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Robert Whitcomb: Immigration, a bridge, 'royalists' and Rockefeller

President Obama is making a big mistake in seeking to protect millions of illegal aliens from prosecution by executive order.

While presidents have considerable legal discretion in individual deportation cases, giving amnesty to whole classes of people who broke the law in entering the U.S. stretches to the breaking point proper presidential powers. And remember that Congress has already debated — but not passed — legislative ideas similar to what the president would do, which also undermines his case.

Yes, Congress has long irresponsibly avoided fixing the immigration mess. No wonder the president is frustrated. Republicans, for their part, are torn between the campaign cash of businesses that love cheap illegal-immigrant labor, much of it at or below minimum wage, and nativist Republicans who feel culturally and economically swamped by the alien hordes. Cheap immigrant labor has helped undermine American wages, by some accounts as much as 8 percent.

Many illegal aliens are doing jobs that used to be considered entry jobs entirely for Americans, especially young Americans — a foot in the door of the economy. Some of these were summer jobs that helped pay a lot of college tuition.

Still, there’s no immediate new crisis in immigration. The numbers of those coming across the Mexican border have been declining lately.

That doesn’t mean that it’s not a very bad problem. But the situation doesn’t justify acting in legally dubious, delegitimizing ways that will tend to give a green light to more people to come here illegally, with economic and national-security implications.

If the president and the new Republican-led Congress cannot agree on immigration reform, then they should put off its resolution until, if necessary, one party controls Congress and the White House. Until then, here’s a simple proposal: More firmly enforce the laws on the books. To be fair, note that the Obama administration has deported record numbers of illegals.

ANOTHER THOUGHT on the mid-term elections: The Democrats’ biggest mistake was, out of fear of offending its big-money backers, it took no strong stand against those whom Franklin Roosevelt called “economic royalists” in pushing for a better deal for the middle class.

This is what happened back when Democrats failed to fight for extending Medicare to everyone, rather than coming up with the labyrinthine (and GOP-inspired!) Affordable Care Act. The Democrats need a clear message. In the last election, the perception was that the Democrats really didn’t stand for anything. The high-voting Republicans clearly stood for something: To block Barack Obama at every turn. The president may be standing for something in his immigration plans, but he’s doing it in the wrong way.

AS A RESIDENT of Brooklyn in the ’70s, when New York City was falling apart, I enjoyed the recent Associated Press article about that borough (“Once mocked, Brooklyn emerges as global symbol”).

It has become a symbol of innovation, renewal, gentrification, locavore restaurants and tech startups, with many young Silicon Valleyish types. (One of my daughters recently left Brooklyn for Los Angeles complaining that she was tired of living in a place “where everyone is 25.”)

Somewhat similar transformations have occurred in other old urban areas, including parts of Providence. And even Detroit may be at the very start of a revival.

When I worked in Lower Manhattan and lived in Brooklyn my co-workers acted as if I were commuting to Outer Mongolia. Now it’s where Wall Street types want to be. Never give up on a city!

IF THERE’S one thing that Republicans and Democrats ought to agree on, it’s the nation’s physical infrastructure, especially transportation. And yet key parts of it are falling apart.

Consider the 100-year-old Portal Bridge, part of the underfunded but very heavily traveled Northeast Corridor of Amtrak and local commuter trains. New Jersey Transit, which runs the Garden State’s commuter trains, says that problems on the old bridge caused more than 200 delays from the start of 2013-through July 2014! And that’s far from the only bottleneck on the Northeast Corridor. The aging system (which also needs more tracks) is also a particular mess around Baltimore, as those awaiting northbound trains in New York’s squalid, claustrophobia-inducing Penn Station can especially confirm.

Now there’s a belated plan to replace the Portal Bridge. But with much of American commerce flowing on the Northeast Corridor, the whole stretch must be rebuilt in the next decades. Even with all its flaws (especially when compared with European service), Northeast Corridor train service is a huge wealth creator. If fixed, it can be a much bigger one.

READ Richard Norton Smith’s “On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller,’’ about the charismatic, dyslexic master builder, arts patron and would-be president, who was decisive about many things but not about how to run for president. Rockefeller once said: "I'm not bright. I'm imaginative.'' But he was very bright sometimes, and usually very imaginative -- sometimes too much so.

For years, he represented the  GOP's "Eastern Establishment,'' but his party moved south and west on him. By 1964, when asked by backers to call in the “Eastern Establishment,”   he replied: “You’re looking at it, buddy. I’m all that’s left.”

Robert Whitcomb oversees New England Diary.