Saturday, June 30, 2018
Clarity About News-Unreliability of Fox - Heather Cox Richardson
If someone is repeating a story that seems crazy - it probably is, and you would be crazy to believe it.
The full article is available here
Friday, June 22, 2018
Illegal Immigration Does Not Increase Violent Crime, 4 Studies Show - NPR
4 academic studies show that illegal immigration does not increase the prevalence of violent crime or drug or alcohol use.
Michael Light, a criminologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, looked at whether the soaring increase in illegal immigration over the last three decades caused a commensurate jump in violent crimes: murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.
"Increased undocumented immigration since 1990 has not increased violent crime over that same time period," Light said
The full article is available here
Friday, June 1, 2018
The Tired Trope of Blaming Trump on ‘Liberal Smugness’ - Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
In an attempt to understand the coalition that gave Trump his narrow 2016 election victory, for the past year and a half the press has spun a whole new subgenre of stilted, tautological feature reporting on how Trump supporters support Trump.
They have routinely given platforms to those who claim, with little to no firm evidence, that Trump’s election and his steady (though historically low) popularity (as well as his predicted eventual reelection) are all partly if not wholly the fault of liberal smugness and left-wing political correctness run amok.
The proof presented in these arguments is routinely shot through with logical holes that go unaddressed. Rather than acknowledging that sexism and racism remain very real and pernicious phenomena in our society, these op-eds typically treat the words as mere insults that the left manipulatively and indiscriminately lobs at conservatives for almost every little thing they do.
Might “liberal condescension” just be a convenient fig leaf for hardened, motivated reasoning from an older, white demographic that is already heavily predisposed to like Trump, regardless of what liberals say? You won’t find any answers to legitimate questions like that here or elsewhere in these feckless claims.
Time and again, any underlying racism or discriminatory policies cited by liberals are treated as mere pretense to stigmatize those on the right. This manifests itself in almost absurdly reductive ways.
A University of Maryland working paper that studied reactions to the 2016 election cast doubt on the premise of liberal shaming driving conservatives further toward the right. As it noted, there was no statistically significant evidence of a backlash by conservative voters when confronted with liberal critiques of Trump being racist.
In fact, the paper found that conservative racial animus in response to liberal election messaging was rooted in pre-existing biases, which is why those same conservatives also rejected claims of Trump’s racism that came from Republicans.
The full article is available here
What To Know About Families Separated By New Trump "Zero Tolerance" Policy - World Relief's Matthew Soerens
The Trump administration is not taking into account the effect of such prosecutions on vulnerable children. So children who arrived with one or both parents are being classified as “unaccompanied” once their parents are charged and detained. They are then processed in the same way as a child who arrives at the border without any parent.
On May 7, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new “zero tolerance” policy to criminally charge anyone caught seeking to enter the United States without proper documentation—even in cases when the individual or families are seeking asylum.
In every other administration, the Department of Justice has exercised prosecutorial discretion, criminally charging those entering improperly in some cases, but also taking into account the effect of such prosecutions on vulnerable children. Chief of Staff John Kelly has said this new policy of separating children is designed to serve as a deterrent from those who would consider coming to the US.
Since children cannot be criminally charged when their parents are, this policy inherently means that children—even very small children—are being taken from their parents. According to recent testimony from an official with US Customs and Border Protection, during just the first two weeks of this new policy, 638 parents were prosecuted, affecting 658 children. While children and parents have sometimes been separated under past administrations, this new policy is dramatically increasing these instances.
These children, who arrived with one or both parents, are then classified as “unaccompanied” once their parents are charged and detained. They are then processed in the same way as a child who arrives at the border without any parent.
The new “zero tolerance” policy, which is leading to children being separated from their parents and classified as “unaccompanied,” will likely mean a significant increase in the number of children being transferred to the custody of Health and Human Services and in need of a sponsor. This increases the possibility for unintentional trauma for children who are already fleeing violence or the threat of violence in their home countries.
Under the Trump Administration, the US Refugee Resettlement Program has dramatically reduced the admission of refugees to the US from almost all countries. In 2018, the U.S. is on track to receive only about 22% as many individual as in 2016. Arrivals from almost all countries of origin, including those from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, are down significantly. And the Central American Migrant parole program has been terminated altogether.
With far less hope of a safe, legal option to seek refuge, more desperate families facing threats of violence in their home country feel there is no choice but to seek to arrive unlawfully—only to be separated from their family if they make it.
The full article is available here
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