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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) talks to reporters after surviving a vote to remove him from the Speaker’s position, Washington, DC, May 8, 2024. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced a motion to vacate the Speaker’s office, which was defeated by a motion to table the issue immediately afterward.
Vibes-based lawmaking isn’t helping us!
With so many problems in the world right now, it seems odd to spend time trying to solve ones that don’t exist.
But that’s exactly what happened this week when House Speaker Mike Johnson proposed a new law to crack down on non-citizens voting in US federal elections.
The legislation, known as the SAVE Act, would outlaw non-citizen voting – which is already illegal – and require proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.
Now, some people, mostly Republicans, say it’s not unreasonable to expect adults to produce ID before making a decision about who should lead the “free world.” Others, mostly Democrats, point to evidence that voter ID requirements – particularly for passports or birth certificates – tend to suppress eligible voter turnout, particularly for minority voters. There are fair arguments on both sides.
The Supreme Court, for its part, has struck down a state-led requirement for citizenship documents, and a North Carolina court is weighing the issue of voter ID more broadly as we speak.
But leave all that aside for a moment. There’s a more fundamental problem with Johnson’s bill. It’s aimed at ghosts.
Asked about the scale of the problem of non-citizen voting, Johnson said:
“The answer is that it’s unanswerable.”
“We all know intuitively,” he explained, “that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.”
This vibes-based intuition parrots a longstanding talking point of GOP boss Donald Trump, who has complained – falsely – that voter fraud cost him the popular vote in 2016 and the election itself in 2020. With just six months until his rematch with Joe Biden, Trump and his allies are keen to seed the idea that voter fraud – particularly among the rapidly rising undocumented migrant population – will decide the outcome. With 60% of Republicans worried about the credibility of the electoral system, Trump knows his audience.
But the question for Johnson is not unanswerable. The answer is that there is, in fact, no evidence for these claims.
In 2017, for example, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU looked closely at the 2016 election, a contest in which Donald Trump claimed he had lost the popular vote because 3-5 million illegal immigrants had voted for Hillary Clinton.
After reviewing 23 million voter names, in 42 precincts, in 12 states, how many instances of non-citizen voting did the Brennan study find?
Thirty. That’s 0.0001% of the votes.
It turns out non-citizens, in perpetual danger of deportation, aren’t eager to write their names down on a voting register, leaving indelible evidence of a federal crime.
This tracks with other studies of voter fraud, nearly all of which show that it’s exceedingly rare. The state of Georgia, for example, conducted a review of its voter rolls in 2022 and found that of the four million votes cast by Georgians in the midterms of that year, there were 17 instances of voter fraud.
That’s not to say there aren’t real concerns about the election. How might AI distort voter perceptions of the candidates? Will foreign powers try to sway voters’ choices? Will election workers be safe? Nearly 40% of them say they have experienced threats, violence, or harassment, in part by people riled up with false narratives about fraud.
But instead of addressing those serious worries, the Speaker of the House is proposing to Make Illegal Things Illegal Again™, based on information he does not have, about a phenomenon that doesn’t exist.
This kind of vibes-based lawmaking isn’t going to SAVE us from anything.
A US-Canada border crossing and monument.
The United States has another border crisis – with Canada
Former Republican nominee hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy was mocked for his proposal during one GOP debate to build border walls with Mexico and Canada.
The problems at the southern border are well-documented. In January, US Border Patrol reported 124,200 encounters with migrants trying to enter the country illegally – and that is a 50% drop from previous months. It is an issue that may cost Joe Biden the election: A Pew Research poll suggested 80% of those surveyed think he is doing a bad job at handling the migrant influx.
Less well-known is that northern border states like Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire are reporting their highest rates of illegal migration in years. Canada is seen as a stepping stone to the US by human smuggling organizations – and it has the added benefit of no border walls or razor wire.
In 2023, roughly 7,000 migrants were arrested for illegally entering the US from Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick – a number higher than the last 12 years combined.
Chief Patrol Agent Robert Garcia, who patrols the Swanton sector, the 295-mile section of rough border terrain that separates New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire from Canada, tweeted that between April 28 and May 4 there were 492 apprehensions – the same as the whole of 2021.
Erik Lavallee, a US Border Patrol Agent, told CBS News that multiple organizations are using Canada to smuggle individuals to the U.S. Those arrested come from 66 different countries, including India, Haiti, Venezuela, and Mexico.
While less dangerous than the southern crossing – Biden is expected to tighten access to asylum there with new regulations as soon as today – the northern border is not without its perils. Ten migrants died from drowning and hypothermia coming through the Swanton sector.
Lawmakers seem to have been caught flat-footed by the explosion in numbers.
When Biden visited Ottawa in spring 2023, he signed a deal with Justin Trudeau to update the Safe Third Country Agreement that allowed either country to turn back asylum-seekers at unofficial border crossings, on the basis that Canada and the US are “safe” countries for refugees and they should apply where they land. However, this was designed to close a loophole that saw 40,000 migrants a year cross from the States into Canada at the infamous and unofficial Roxham Road crossing in Quebec and hand themselves over to the first border agent.
Policymakers do not yet appear to have woken up to this latest surge of illegal migrants heading in the other direction.
“Everything is political” is personal: the NYC migrant crisis
“Do you know,”
Jhon asked me, shivering slightly in the lengthening afternoon shadows of New York’s Penn Station, “do you know if we can stay here – in America?”
Jhon is a wiry 42-year-old construction worker who fled Ecuador a month ago with his wife and four children. The recent surge of narco-violence there had gotten so bad, he said, that the local school switched to virtual classes for the safety of the students and their parents.
Now, after a trying journey by foot, boat, bus, and train, he was standing in the middle of New York City, bewildered but hopeful.
“I just want to work,” he told me. “I don’t want anyone to take care of me or to rely on anyone else. I just want to be able to work.”
But in those early moments, Jhon and his family did need help – to find their way to New York’s intake center for migrants seeking shelter, to learn to navigate the city’s byzantine health and legal systems, to stay on track with their asylum applications.
In that way, he is like many of the more than 170,000 undocumented migrants who have arrived in New York City over the past two years, most of them on buses from Texas.
The city government says it’s struggling to deal with the influx. Mayor Eric Adams has warned that providing services to the migrants will “destroy this city” and cost more than $12 billion. But a small group of grassroots non-profits has stepped up to welcome, orient, and support the new arrivals.
I met Jhon while shadowing Power Malu, an Afro-Puerto Rican activist from New York’s Lower East Side, whose Artists Athletes Activists organization is one of the subjects of a new report I’ve been working on for our TV show “GZERO World with Ian Bremmer.”
Nearly every day and night for almost two years, Power’s been at Gotham’s various bus and train stations, welcoming migrants like Jhon, giving a guiding hand to people who arrive in a city of millions after a journey of months and simply don’t know whom to trust or where to go.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve spent many hours with Power and other activists in New York – like Adama Bah, a formerly undocumented migrant from Guinea who has built the largest Black-oriented migrant services network in the city (a big deal given that migrants from Haiti or West Africa are chronically underserved by systems geared mainly towards Latinos), and Ilze Thielmann, who started a free “store” that gives clothing, strollers, and toiletries to recent migrants.
Along the way, we met people like Igor, a refugee from violence in Burundi who left behind a cushy job as an IT manager and traveled through Mexico on foot with his pregnant wife to get to the US. He finally got asylum several weeks ago.
Or Brandon, from Venezuela, who braved the treacherous Darién Gap and the constant gauntlets of extortion, kidnapping, and violence in Mexico on his journey to New York, and who now works with Power to welcome others who followed the same route.
Why did my producer Molly Rubin and I pick this subject? Migration is now the top political issue in America. A recent poll showed close to three in 10 voters say border policy is their primary concern, topping the list for the first time since 2019, and outstripping other perennial contenders like “the economy,” “inflation,” or the always exciting “crime.”
But when it comes to the crisis at the southern border and its impact on Northern cities, the gigantic numbers can dull your sense of what is actually happening here: A story about “millions” of migrants crossing the border, or the “billions” of dollars it will cost, is still a story about individual human beings, with names, who have lived stories of tremendous suffering, perseverance, and dedication.
“Everything is political,” we often say at GZERO. And that’s true. But everything political is ultimately personal too. If it’s not, why would it matter at all?
This is one story that Molly and I hope will drive that home. You can check it out here, and let us know what you think.
Learn more about the organizations mentioned in this report:
Sabah faces problem of undocumented migrants
KOTA KINABALU - In 1970, Sabah's 636,431 population accounted for 6.1 per cent of Malaysia's 10.4 million.
Malaysia deports Bangladeshi who criticised treatment of migrants
KUALA LUMPUR • Malaysia has deported a Bangladeshi worker who criticised the government's treatment of migrants in a documentary made by broadcaster Al Jazeera, the country's director general of immigration confirmed yesterday.
KL looking out for boats after Rohingya found on beach
KUALA LUMPUR • The Malaysian authorities were yesterday on the lookout for boats believed to be carrying up to 200 Rohingya Muslims after dozens of migrants were found near a beach in the country's northern state of Perlis.