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Op-Ed: The Militarization of the Border, Criminalization of Migration, and Policing of Poverty

Madison Sweitzer & Ben Blevins | September 9, 2020

Topics: black lives matter, border wall, Colonialism, Highland Support Project, ICE, income inequality, Muna Hijazi, settler states

For Madison Sweitzer and Ben Blevins of the Highland Support Project, buildup of militarized border protections, overpolicing of poor and minority populations, and massive wealth inequality all have a common root: the US’s colonialist settler-state mentality.

The United States is a settler state. Settlers enter into the territory and make it their own, in contrast with immigrants, who assimilate into their new home’s laws and customs. This situation is not unique to the United States. This same dynamic is found in Israeli settlers displacing Palestinians, the Spanish conquest of Indigenous lands in Guatemala, and the forced assimilation of the Uyghurs in China. In all of these cases, the settler-state status has led to aggressive and malicious attempts to eliminate or forcefully assimilate the Indigenous populations.

Today in the United States, the settler state dynamic continues to manifest itself by pushing out unwanted populations through the militarization of borders, the criminalization of migration, and the policing of poverty. These tactics correlate with the increasing wealth gap, and will only be further exacerbated by climate change. 

The militarized US border was fueled last year by President Trump’s $11 billion investment, according to NPR. The border is a major economic enterprise, with private military companies such as General Dynamics successfully lobbying for $113 million, according to Yes! Magazine. This massive influx in funding is what allows the current militarization: prisons are being converted into large-scale detention centers that are trapping migrants en masse, with more than 50,000 people held in ICE facilities, 20,000 held in customs and border protection facilities, and more than 11,000 children in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, according to The Atlantic. The incredible amount of funding for the border will only continue to shape it into a violent and aggressive militarized zone.

This imprisonment of individuals and families at the border has also criminalized the action of migration. Asylum laws state that migrants escaping conflict should qualify as refugees and receive a protected status upon arrival, but this is not the reality. According to the Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention, the enactment of the Secure Border Initiative in 2005 pushed the Department Of Homeland Security to shift from a “catch and release” to “catch and return” tactic, where detention and deportation have become the norm with little regard given to the possibility of valid asylum claims. Attempting to migrate to the US means nearly guaranteed imprisonment in a detention facility with limited freedom and poor access to healthcare, education, and proper conditions for children. 

As military forces at the borders control unwanted populations, police officers around the country are on a similar track with their control over populations in poverty. The book Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter explains that as police take on zero tolerance crime policies, they can drive out unwanted populations from a community. With zero-tolerance policing, officers use stop and search, a key tactic of zero-tolerance policing that enables them to target impoverished and minority populations. The racism of these practices means that 1 in 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by the police in their lifetime, compared to 1 in 2,000 for all men and 1 in 33,000 for all women, according to the PNAS.

Photo by Pablo Lara on Unsplash

Meanwhile, wealth inequality is growing exponentially. The average household income of the top 1 percent rose 226 percent from 1979 to 2016, while the income for the majority of the population grew just 47 percent over the same period, according to The Council on Foreign Relations. The same study revealed that considering race makes the disparities even harsher, with the median wealth of white households tripling since 1960, while the wealth of Black households has barely increased. Reallocating spending toward social protection and infrastructure is associated with reduced income inequality in stable countries, particularly when it is financed through cuts in defense spending, such as the massive budget used for border control, according to an IMF study. However, if the US government only continues to channel funds into militarizing the border and its police force, there is little left for improving social services.

Our world’s environmental status will only increase migration and the “othering” of populations. Global climate change is exacerbating migration as people become climate refugees and flee areas plagued by flooding, agricultural insecurity, drought, extreme weather patterns, unpredictable crop markets, etc. Climate-related migration is worldwide, affecting the United States and Israel as settler states, and well as sending migrants out of Central America. Still, it creates an especially unjust dynamic in the United States, where they will likely continue to turn away migrants who are fleeing the impact of a crisis that the US is largely to blame for.

The concept of a settler state, and the mentality and actions that result from it, have always been and will continue to be dangerous and discriminatory. Hopefully, as movements such as Black Lives Matter grow in strength and support, this dynamic will shift.

Highland Support Project (HSP), based in Richmond, Virginia, seeks to support Indigenous communities and their right to be with their culture and community and on their land. On Sunday, September 27th, Ben Blevins, the director of HSP, will be engaging in a virtual discussion with Muna Hijazi about increasing global migration and militarization. Muna Hijazi is a progressive organizer who currently works for the Arizona Advocacy Network and is the CEO and founder of Moon Sun Mountains Consulting. Muna will bring her expertise from connecting Middle Eastern immigrants and indigenous American communities, as well as her personal experiences as a Palestinian-American.

Note: Op-Eds are contributions from guest writers and do not reflect editorial policy.

Top Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Van Hollen, Beyer Propose Surtax On Millionaires

VCU CNS | November 20, 2019

Topics: Bernie Sanders, Chris Van Hollen, Don Beyer, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren, income inequality, Joe Biden, Sherrod Brown, wealth tax

As income inequality grows, a number of candidates for president have proposed taxes on wealthy Americans. Now VA Congressman Don Beyer and Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen are using legislation to pursue that goal.

The richest 1 percent of Americans control more wealth than the entire middle class combined, according to the Brookings Institution – a striking sign of income inequality that has accelerated since the Great Recession.

A bill introduced last week by Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, and Rep. Don Beyer, D-Virginia, aims to narrow the wealth gap by adding a surtax on millionaires.

Under the proposal, a 10 percent surtax would be levied on households that earn more than $2 million annually, and on individuals that make more than $1 million. The tax would generate an estimated $635 billion in revenue over ten years, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

“The point here is to ask the very wealthiest Americans to do more to invest in the success of the rest of the country,” Van Hollen said in a Nov. 7 MSNBC interview. “Ninety-nine-point-eight percent of taxpayers will not pay an additional dime.”

The tax would apply to all forms of income, including salaries, investment income, and long-term capital gains, giving the measure a degree of comprehensiveness that Van Hollen said is essential to a successful tax on the wealthy.

“Right now, very wealthy people make a lot money off their money, and we don’t see any reason why people who earn a paycheck should be penalized relative to them,” he said.

Van Hollen’s bill, which also is co-sponsored by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, comes amidst a slew of plans to tax the rich from 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls.

Joe Biden, the former vice president and centrist frontrunner, has a plan to raise the income tax on capital gains from 20 percent to 39.6 percent for those earning more than $1 million annually.

Sens. Bernie Sanders, D-Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, have made their plans to radically alter the tax structure central tenets of their campaigns, billed as ways to pay for their ambitious social programs.

Warren would increase taxes on households earning $50 million or more, which is roughly 75,000 households, according to her campaign. The senator’s plan is to tax each dollar of income above the $50 million threshold at 2 percent. Billionaires would pay an additional 3 percent tax.

“A thinner and thinner slice of the top has taken a massive amount of wealth while America’s middle class has been hollowed out,” Warren tweeted Tuesday. “We need a… big, structural change so that our economy and our government works for everyone.”

Sanders’s plan taxes the so-called “super rich” even more aggressively. He proposes a progressive tax structure, starting at 1 percent for earners with $32 million or more in income, and going up to 8 percent on incomes over $10 billion.

Sanders, a Democratic socialist, has stated bluntly that billionaires should not exist in the United States.

“We cannot afford to continue this level of wealth and income inequality and we cannot afford a billionaire class whose greed and corruption has been at war with the working families of this country for 45 years,” he said in an October Democratic debate.

Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman from the University of California-Berkeley, who helped the candidates draw up their plans, estimate that Warren’s tax plan would generate $2.75 trillion over a decade, and Sanders’s plan $4.35 trillion, though other leading economists have disputed those figures.

Depending on who is asked, higher taxes on the rich are either the solution to an ever-expanding wealth gap and a way to pay for a stronger social safety net, or a strain on the economy that hampers growth and kills the motivation of individuals to become millionaires and billionaires.

“You’re going to completely disincentivize capital investment, which is going to be very, very bad for economic growth,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a September interview with The New York Times. “Taxing capital is not a good thing for creating economic growth, and if anything we should be looking at how we create more incentives for economic growth.”

According to an analysis by Saez and Zucman, if Warren’s and Sanders’s tax plans had been implemented in 1982, the combined wealth of the 15 richest Americans today would be cut by 54 percent and 79 percent, respectively.

Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest person in the world, is worth approximately $160 billion, but would be worth $86.8 billion today if Warren’s tax plan were in place for the last 37 years. Under Sanders’s plan, he would be worth $43 billion.

Skeptics of a wealth tax point to Europe, where several nations have abandoned a tax on extreme wealth. In 1990, 12 European countries had wealth taxes, but now it’s down to four: Belgium, Norway, Spain and Switzerland.

Americans for Tax Reform, led by the highly influential conservative tax policy advocate Grover Norquist, called Warren’s wealth tax, “a nightmare to administer, would double the size of the IRS, would fail to generate revenue that supporters claim, and has failed every time it has been tried in the past.”

Saez and Zucman argued in a recent Washington Post op-ed that the failure of any tax is not the fault of the tax itself, but the fault of government to allow the tax to succeed.

“Governments can choose to make them work or allow them to fail, and European governments made wrong choices, letting tax avoidance fester,” they wrote.

A poll by Politico and Morning Consult earlier this year found that more than three-quarters of Americans favor raising taxes on the rich.

The marginal tax rate for the wealthiest Americans reached 91 percent in 1944, according to the Tax Foundation, but has steadily declined since then. In 2017, the Republican-controlled Congress and White House cut taxes on the top earners by more than 2 percent to 37 percent, which will exacerbate income inequality, according to the Tax Policy Center.

“Trump’s Tax Scam helped the rich and left workers behind,” Van Hollen tweeted Nov. 7.

But his, or any other Democratic plan to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans will require bipartisanship, at least as long as Republicans control the Senate.

The 2017 cuts led by President Donald Trump and former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, passed without a single Democratic vote.

Written by Dan Novak, Capital News Service. Top Image: Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) and Congressman Don Beyer (D-Virginia), via Wikimedia

The Disappeared: A Richmond Rabbi Takes On Human Rights In Guatemala

Rabbi Michael Knopf | February 12, 2019

Topics: government shutdown, Guatemala, income inequality, RVA Global, The Torah

The history of Guatemala’s secret abductions reminds us how important the principle of universal equality really is — and points out how far from that principle the United States has gone.

On a recent trip to Guatemala with rabbinic colleagues from around the country, I learned the story of a boy named Marco Antonio Molina Theissen. Marco Antonio reminded me so much of my own son: He loved to draw and write so much that even when he couldn’t find a pencil or paper, he would draw pictures with his finger in the air; he loved outdoor sports, bike riding, and Star Wars.

Tragically, that’s where Marco Antonio’s story ceased to be normal. In the early 1980’s, at the height of Guatemala’s Internal Armed Conflict (1960-1996), Marco Antonio’s older sister, Emma Guadalupe, became involved in student-led protests for democratic reforms and human rights. One day, she was kidnapped outside of her school by members of the Guatemalan army, presumably as a punishment for her activism. They took her to a military zone, where she was repeatedly tortured and raped. Despite this, after nine days, she managed to escape and return home.

The army set up an intelligence operation to find Emma Guadalupe. Within days, agents had tracked her down. They stormed the family’s house, but Emma wasn’t home. Unwilling to leave empty-handed, the agents took Marco Antonio while his mother looked on, powerless to stop them. He was never heard from again. He was disappeared. He was 14 years old.

Before traveling to Guatemala on a trip organized by American Jewish World Service, I had never heard the terms “to be disappeared” or “to disappear someone.” It was a usage of the verb “disappear” I had simply never encountered. In Guatemala, meeting with human rights advocates and victims of state-sponsored abuses, I heard these terms repeatedly. It turns out that “to be disappeared” or “to disappear someone” is a common term in the world of human rights, although the more proper term is an “enforced disappearance.”

An enforced disappearance is the secret abduction of an individual by the state or its agents. To disappear someone is to make someone vanish indefinitely without a trace, telling no one about where they were taken and what has happened to them. This is different than kidnapping someone, or even imprisoning or murdering them; in those circumstances, the status of the person apprehended is generally known. When someone is disappeared, the objective is the uncertainty; the point is for the victim to go missing and for no one to know what has happened.

Guatemala has a history of extrajudicial forced disappearances. Forced disappearances were a deliberate and systematic government strategy during the period of the Internal Armed Conflict, designed to psychologically torture and terrorize segments of the population into submission. As of 2013, there are 45,000 people who were documented as disappeared during the conflict era. And given the fact that many conflict-era war criminals still populate Guatemala’s ruling and political class and that corruption and repression remains widespread, the tactic continues as a strategy of the security and intelligence services — often with impunity — to this day.

Marco Antonio is one of those 45,000 disappeared Guatemalans. Still today, nearly 40 years after his disappearance, and over 20 years since the end of the Guatemalan Civil War, his family has never been told what happened to him, and no one involved in his disappearance has even been charged with a crime, much less brought to justice.

The establishment of a just society is the indisputable theme of my tradition’s sacred scripture, which Jews call the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). For instance, the Torah demands the death penalty for the perpetrators of crimes like the forced disappearance of Marco Antonio: “He who kidnaps a man — whether he has sold him or is still holding him — shall be put to death” (Exodus 21:16). That law is but one of many expressions of the famous biblical perception of justice: “you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise” (21:23-25).

Contemporary commentators sometimes criticize this biblical approach to justice as brutal, violent, and unnecessarily harsh. The ancient Jewish rabbis, too, were somewhat uncomfortable with the practical application of this biblical law of retaliation, substituting where they could monetary damages: an eye for the monetary equivalent of an eye, a foot for the monetary equivalent of a foot, and so forth. And yet while the rabbis may have been squeamish about actually cutting off the hand of a violent perpetrator, and while they correctly pointed out that, in effect even if not intent, this kind of retaliatory justice can result in injustice, they did not challenge the basic moral assertion embedded in this biblical teaching.

The basic moral assertion of the Torah’s legal system is that all lives have equal value, that everyone must be treated as equals under the law. The life of a noble and the life of a peasant are legally equivalent — their eyes have the same value, their hands have the same value, their feet have the same value, their bodily integrity and dignity are equally worthy.

Astonishingly for a Bronze Age text, the Torah even goes so far as to extend this equality of status to foreigners, people who otherwise in the ancient world would have never been considered social equals with citizens. Yet the Torah says “you shall have one law” for citizen and stranger alike (Leviticus 24:22), that the foreigner is to be considered legally equal to the native-born, and even goes so far as to enshrine special protections to the alien to ensure their fair treatment.

The Torah, while admittedly imperfect, was a revolution of values in its time, and advances a core principle that we have yet to fully realize even in our time. It thus challenges us, in every place and in every age, to advance societies in which all people are considered and treated as equals, in which no life is treated as more important than another, and in which no life is treated as less worthy than another.

When I reflected on what I witnessed and learned while in Guatemala, this was the principle to which I kept returning. Guatemala today remains a country of profound inequality: Nearly 60% of the country is impoverished, and about a quarter of the population lives on less than $1 per day. About half of all Guatemalan children under the age of 5 are chronically malnourished. All of these inequities and more disproportionately impact Guatemala’s large Mayan population, the country’s indigenous inhabitants. Corruption and impunity remain rampant. If you are wealthy or well-connected, if you possess political or economic power or enjoy proximity to the powerful, you benefit from legal and extralegal privileges unimaginable to the poor and weak majority.

There seemed to be a direct line between centuries of colonization and exploitation (including American-orchestrated overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically-elected leader in 1954) and the wholesale slaughter of native communities during the conflict period to the discrimination, poverty, and oppression rampant today. The legacy of considering some Guatemalan lives as more valuable than others keeps a select few wealthy and powerful while preventing the majority of the population from rising.

It is why, for example, whole communities can have their lands confiscated by the state with no just cause or fair compensation, and be forced to live in makeshift tent villages in the wilderness with inadequate access to food, water, and healthcare, while fighting years-long battles in the courts that they are likely to lose. It is why human rights activists and journalists are routinely threatened, harassed, imprisoned, and even murdered or disappeared with impunity by the same people they are protesting or trying to expose as corrupt or criminal. It is why very few perpetrators of atrocities during the conflict era have been prosecuted for their crimes. These were the people I met in Guatemala. This is what a society looks like when the lives of some are considered more valuable than the lives of others.

More troubling still, I could not help but hear in all of this echoes of my own country’s history and present realities. As I encountered past and present injustice in Guatemala, the longest government shutdown in American history dragged on. Hundreds of thousands of government workers had been furloughed without pay for weeks over a demand, leveled by some of the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals, that we treat some people — namely, asylum seekers and migrants from Central America — as less deserving of dignity and opportunity as others.

The shutdown, of course, merely compounded cruelty upon cruelty. Even without a wall, current immigration policy perfectly illustrates how we today treat some lives as inferior to others. What, after all, was happening at the border over the past year if not the forced disappearances of hundreds of migrant children, some of whom died in our custody? Why are those fleeing violence and poverty from places like Guatemala less worthy of dignity and opportunity than anyone else?

It increasingly dawned on me that, similar to Guatemala, the U.S. was built upon a foundation of plunder, exploitation, and brutality; our history replete with legally ordained inequality and judicially enforced discrimination. One can draw a straight line from those historic injustices to the facts that, today, roughly one in every five American children live in poverty, more than two million Americans are incarcerated, and our rate of income inequality is greater than any other democracy in the developed world. And every single one of those inequities disproportionately impacts Americans of color.

It was painful to consider whether my own society’s injustices were differences of degree, rather than kind; that even in America, in practice if not in theory, some people’s lives matter more than others. What, I wondered, will become of us if we remain on this path?

If all lives have intrinsic and equal value then we yet have considerable work to do at home. And, if we accept this core principle of justice, then the inequities in a faraway place like Guatemala must also concern us. We should care about a foreign government disappearing a child before his parent’s eyes, because if all lives have equal value, no parent anywhere deserves to fear such a horror any more than you or I do. If all lives are equally precious, than the systematic murder of an entire population should matter to us whether it is happening to our own people or to people halfway around the world. The principle is universal. It transcends borders and applies across national, ethnic, and religious divides. And it calls us to attention and to action at home, in Central America, and, indeed, everywhere.

The biblical tradition insists that all lives have equal value. Moreover, it demands not just that we cherish this principle but also that we build a society, and ultimately a world, that enshrines and ensures the equal worth of every human being.

Photos by Christine Han Photography

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