Sanctuary Cities – Their impact on
– Immigration
– Local economies
– Legal system
– Law enforcement
Discussion leader: Bob Baker
Resources:
Sanctuary Cities in Vermont
http://digital.vpr.net/post/sanctuary-cities-vermont#stream/0
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/sanctuary-cities/
Campus Politics in the Age of Trump – The New York Times “sanctuary”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/opinion/campus-politics-in-the-age-of-trump.html?
_r=0
Here’s a recent editorial by the WSJ’s Jason Riley, I thought you might find interesting.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/seeking-their-own-refuge-sanctuary-cities-go-to-court-1487116166
https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/news/2015/jul/26/procon-should-there-be-sanctuary-cities/
Connecticut Governor Sends Immigrant Enforcement Recommendations To Police Chiefs, School Superintendents – Darien, CT Patch
This shows potential conflict between governor and law enforcement officials in CT.
I (Charles Salmans) am from Garden City, a small town in Western Kansas that had a population of 5,000 when I was growing up in the 1950s. Today, in contrast to towns that have become ghost towns across the prairie Midwest, Garden City has a population of 26,000. Our big high school rival, Dodge City, Kansas, has remained at around 5,000. Many towns have simply disappeared. The influence of immigration on Garden City was profiled last week on NPR.
What a shock! I’ve never had my hometown profiled anywhere nationally.
I think linking the growth to immigration alone is overly simplistic. The key reason is the vertical integration of agriculture. First, in the 1970s came a beef packing plant and today to serve meat packing, 140,000 head of cattle are being raised in feedlots at any given time. Farmers shifted from wheat to feed corn from cattle. Then came an ethanol plant. And huge “unit trains” take grain to the coast (much like the unit coal trains). Now they are diversifying into vertically integrated dairy farming by building the world’s largest plant to dehydrate milk.
But working in beef packing, which started it all, is one of the most dangerous, least desirable jobs in America. It’s extremely difficult to get people to work in the plant and there is a long tradition of recruiting immigrants. There is a large Vietnamese population (boat people of the 1970s) as well as those of Mexican ancestry and other backgrounds, who work in the meat packing plant and other difficult jobs and many, I am sure, are illegals.
I’m simply offering this up for one of the discussion points, as it doesn’t “prove” one side of the sanctuary argument or the other in my opinion. Here are the two (of two) NPR segments:
Segment 1
http://www.npr.org/2017/02/18/515849383/a-tale-of-two-kansas-towns-one-thrives-as-another-struggles
Segment 2
http://www.npr.org/2017/02/19/516016940/a-thriving-rural-towns-winning-formula-faces-new-threats-under-trump-administrat
How can the federal government motivate states to enforce federal laws??
http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2013/12/28/states-dont-have-to-comply-the-anti-comandeering-doctrine/
ACLU Immigration Detainers
https://www.aclu.org/issues/immigrants-rights/ice-and-border-patrol-abuses/immigration-detainers
Editorial in WSJ today, (March 13) ” Crime and Immigration” gives factors relating to “Sanctuary Cities”
List of sanctuary cities:
http://www.ajc.com/news/national/what-are-sanctuary-cities-here-list-sanctuary-cities-counties-states/Y452wnIOx2hemgKx8T4gIP/
Sanctuary cities protect 11,800 criminal aliens.
http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/no-deportation-sanctuary-cities-protect-11800-criminal-aliens/
Our state’s one of only a few where illegal immigration is up | The Seattle Times
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/our-states-one-of-a-few-where-illegal-immigration-is-up-and-half-is-from-asia/
Murder – Page 2 – United States Illegal Alien Crime Report
http://www.illegalaliencrimereport.com/category/murder/page/2/
Discussion Guide:
Sanctuary Cities “SC”
(more than 300 sanctuary “entities”)
Basic Facts
1. No legal definition of “sanctuary” cities or states or colleges. No legal procedure for their establishment
Can be formal (policies written), or informal (all policies are implied)
2. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is a federal responsibility
The US government cannot force states to enforce federal laws
But states may voluntarily assist in enforcement
Formal state “sanctuaries” cannot force municipalities to comply with policies
3. Perception of justification of “sanctuaries” probably influenced by attitudes:
“The US welcomes immigrants and they deserve protection” or
“The US needs to enforce immigration laws and deport illegal immigrants”
(These are not mutually exclusive but create differences on policy)
What are motivations of states, cities, universities to establish SCs?
Are the SCs providing “sanctuaries” only for immigrants not convicted of felonies, or to protect undocumented immigrants which may be subject to deportation?
Legal obligation under warrants, detainer requests
Enforcement mechanisms if perceived violations
Is there a humanitarian argument for “sanctuaries”?
Conn. (Gov. Malloy) announced the state is a SC, what are our views and options?
(the first, fourth and tenth amendments have been cited in arguments for/against SCs)
Related issue—“Kates Law”
Mainstream journalists today are being subjected to disintermediation. Anyone with access to the Internet can post most anything posing as “news” on Facebook, Google, YouTube, and a variety of other websites. Journalism as practiced in the 1960s is a distant memory, as when Walter Cronkite of CBS declared that the Vietnam war could not be won and President Lyndon Johnson lamented, “If I have lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
Finally, Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams started a series today in which the dumb pointy-haired boss has re-tweeted a racist conspiracy theory. We’ll see where he takes that in the coming days and whether it could be an amusing addition to what we have pulled together. Too soon to tell. Here’s the first panel:
WINNER OF THE 2016 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NONFICTION
Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? In his masterly saga, Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page. This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It’s also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative. For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators shows how.
If you enjoy researching and discussing current affairs then you should join the DMA Current Affairs Discussion Group.
We will be walking Greenwich Point Park on Thursday, December1 at 10.30 am. Note that this is an hour later than our usual start time of 9.30 am.
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
“We’re living in a sensitive age, Cuke, and I’m not altogether sure you’re fully attuned to it.” So says Irish-American politician Frank Skeffington—a cynical, corrupt 1950s mayor, and also an old-school gentleman who looks after the constituents of his New England city and enjoys their unwavering loyalty in return. But in our age of dynasties, mercurial social sensitivities, and politicians making love to the camera, Skeffington might as well be talking to us.
The extraordinary New York Times bestselling account of James Garfield’s rise from poverty to the American presidency, and the dramatic history of his assassination and legacy, from bestselling author of The River of Doubt, Candice Millard.