A bipartisan immigration reform bill has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Dignity Act, HR4393, is sponsored by Republican Maria Salazar (FL) and Democrat Veronica Escobar (TX) and currently has 21 cosponsors — 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats.
The bill would provide resources for border security, employment verification, and asylum reform while also providing legal status for "dreamers" (unauthorized immigrants who arrived as children) and provide a path to legal status for some undocumented immigrants who meet a number of requirements, including a fine. You can read the full bill here or a longer summary here.
The Dignity Act has the support of a broad range of groups from across the political spectrum, including the US Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Evangelicals, World Relief, US Conference of Catholic Bishops, National Latino Evangelical Coalition, Evangelical Immigration Table, Third Way, Asian American Christian Collaborative, and Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.
Even with this strong bipartisan and cross-ideological support, passage is in no way guaranteed. But given all the inhumane craziness taking place on the immigration front this year, it's heartening to find legislators seeking a more just solution.
To communicate your support for The Dignity Act to your members of Congress, World Relief has a page that will help you do that here.
What We’re Reading
CATO: “ICE Has Diverted Over 25,000 Officers from Their Jobs”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is diverting criminal law enforcement agents away from their investigations and enforcement responsibilities to conduct civil immigration enforcement operations on a massive scale. New data highlight how widespread this misuse of government personnel and resources is. Congress should prevent this diversion of appropriated funds in the next government spending bill.
According to ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) records given by ERO to someone outside the agency who shared it with Cato, ICE is receiving assistance from nearly 17,000 non-ERO agents, including 14,500 federal criminal law enforcement officers. Separately, the DHS revealed in a now-deleted post yesterday that ICE has already trained and unleashed 8,501 state and local police as 287(g) Task Force Officers who can independently conduct ICE arrests. It states that it has over 2,000 more in training.
The Atlantic: “The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler”
Why does a potent portion of the American right seek to rehabilitate Hitler? The Nazi apologetics are partly an attention-seeking attempt at provocation—an effort to signal iconoclasm by transgressing one of society’s few remaining taboos. But there is more to the story than that. Carlson and his fellow travelers on the far right correctly identify the Second World War as a pivot point in America’s understanding of itself and its attitude toward its Jewish citizens. The country learned hard lessons from the Nazi Holocaust about the catastrophic consequences of conspiratorial prejudice. Today, a growing constituency on the right wants the nation to unlearn them.
The Hill: “MAGA is destroying Madisonian democracy”
From a Madisonian perspective, American democracy is at present spiraling headlong in the wrong direction. In the words of famed Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, Trump has established and demonstrated his position as “sovereign” by repeatedly “deciding” unilaterally on “exceptions” to the constitutional order, then designating for punishment political “enemies” he sees as obstacles to the exercise of his sovereign will.
NYT: “He Plagiarized and Promoted Falsehoods. The White House Embraces Him.”
Since taking office, Mr. Trump and his aides have routinely excoriated traditional news outlets for what they call misleading and dishonest reporting about the administration. But the White House has had no such reservations about right-leaning influencers, figures such as Mr. Johnson, who have a documented history of playing fast and loose with the facts.
These new media personalities enjoy rare access and support from the administration. They, in turn, give the White House unwavering cheerleading for the administration’s agenda, blasted out to millions of followers on social media.
The Fulcrum: “Shared Psychosis or Political Pathology? Experts Debate Mental Health Narratives Around MAGA Movement”
Let’s be clear: emotional intensity is not a diagnosis. Distrust in government is not a disorder. And political passion—however misinformed or misdirected—is not proof of psychosis. To label millions of Americans as mentally ill because they support a controversial figure is to abandon the hard work of civic engagement in favor of clinical shorthand.
PsyPost: “People who believe in conspiracy theories process information differently at the neural level”
“The most important takeaway is that conspiracy beliefs are not simply a matter of being more gullible or less intelligent,” Zhao said. “Instead, our results show that people with high levels of conspiracy belief process information through different neural pathways compared to those with low levels.”
…
“Taken together, these findings suggest that conspiracy beliefs persist not just because of what people believe, but because of how their brains evaluate and sustain certain types of information. This helps explain why conspiracy theories can be so resistant to counterevidence and why they often thrive during times of social crisis.”
What We’re Watching
 | A guest post by
|