Kevin Drum

It has become an article of faith on the right that the huge number of immigrants flooding our borders is a direct result of Joe Biden refusing to enforce the law. What's more, he's doing it deliberately. His reasons for this act of obvious political suicide vary depending on who you listen to, and mostly range from the absurd (more Democratic voters a decade or two from now!) to the merely implausible (he's soft-hearted).

Reasons aside, though, I've finally gotten curious enough about this to wonder just which immigration laws Biden is supposed to be flouting. I've found a few.

Exhibit A is the "Mayorkas memo," which outlines immigration enforcement priorities. It focuses on felons and other lawbreakers, but one of the targeted groups is those who "are apprehended in the United States after unlawfully entering after November 1, 2020." That may let longstanding residents off the hook, but it pretty obviously includes everyone currently crossing the border. So that can't be the cause of the border surge.

Another popular theory is that Biden has slowed down deportations and other removals. But the evidence here is pretty thin:

Conventional removals:

• Gradually fell under Barack Obama.
• Ticked up and then ticked back down under Donald Trump.
• Ticked down and then back up under Biden.

Removals in 2022 under Biden were only slightly lower than the beginning and ending of Trump's presidency.

But if you include those removed under Title 42, the emergency pandemic authority begun by Trump, Biden has the most aggressive removal numbers of any recent president. To the dismay of his supporters, he initially insisted on keeping it in place—hardly the act of a president who actively wants to flood the border with illegal immigrants. In 2022 he tried to end it, but it was kept in place by the courts until May of this year, when it was finally lifted because the pandemic emergency was over. Nonetheless, Title 42 was in place during all of 2021 and 2022, and encounters at the border were high that entire time and haven't changed much since it was halted.

What else? There's Biden's parole program, of course, which has admitted about 200,000 immigrants this year. However, immigrants are only admitted if they have a sponsoring family, and whatever else you think about this, it relieves pressure on the border.

There's also detention. Critics point to the fact that Biden allows most illegal immigrants to stay in the country until they're seen by a court, rather than detaining them. This is called catch-and-release. But for all his big talk, along with his performative separation of families, detentions were never very high even under Trump:

Detentions ticked up under Trump and then ticked down. The detention level under Biden is lower than the historical average, but not by an awful lot. The truth is that we've always had limited detention capacity, and that limits the number of immigrants who can be held.

As a caveat, I admit these figures are sometimes tricky. It's possible I'm missing something. But I don't think so. If you squint hard, you can make a case that Biden's border policy has been slightly more lenient than Trump's, but only by a smidgen. It's nowhere near different enough to explain the huge number of people crossing the border.

The explanation rather obviously lies elsewhere: the enormous growth in border crossers who are claiming asylum. Like it or not, this triggers legal accountability that just doesn't exist for ordinary illegal immigrants. By law, asylum claims have to be adjudicated, and our enormous backlog of cases guarantees that lots of asylum seekers will be allowed free for years until their cases are heard. There are fixes for this—mainly stricter rules and more judges—but in the meantime lots of people are streaming to the border because they know about asylum and there's not a lot anyone can do about it.

Beyond that, I'd suggest Republicans look to their own masters: the corporate interests who want more immigrants, both legal and illegal. They probably have more influence on this than the ACLU and every bleeding-heart lefty combined.

For what it's worth, I want to point out that it's not all that unusual for a popular politician to retain a loyal following regardless of criminal indictments or even convictions. Marion Barry was back on the DC city council almost the instant he was released from prison. Bill Clinton got impeached and emerged more popular than ever. Adam Clayton Powell, by the end of his career, was pretty obviously crooked (and had a criminal contempt conviction to his name) but his constituents didn't care. Hell, Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, the mayor of Providence, kidnapped his ex-wife’s boyfriend and burned him with a cigarette and a hot log from a fire in front of a police officer and a judge, but was reelected a few years later anyway.

In other words, Donald Trump is just the latest in a long line of politicians who have successfully cast criminal prosecutions as proof that they—and their followers—are being persecuted by their political enemies. Not a lot of politicos can get away with this, but it's hardly uncommon either.

We've all heard about the replication crisis, right? It turns out that lots of well-known results in the social sciences are the result of crappy, small experiments that fail when researchers try to reproduce them.

But that's social science. An article in Nature a few months ago says we have the same problem in clinical medicine, even in supposedly gold-standard randomized controlled trials. But the problem isn't sloppiness. It's outright fraud:

“If you search for all randomized trials on a topic, about a third of the trials will be fabricated,” asserts Ian Roberts, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

....Ben Mol, who specializes in obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, argues that as many as 20–30% of the RCTs included in systematic reviews in women’s health are suspect.

....A 2022 update of a Cochrane review argued that more than 40% of [ivermectin] RCTs were untrustworthy.

The good news, if there is any, is that much of the problem comes from "paper mill" studies in underdeveloped countries. These typically have small sample sizes and are manipulated to support earlier findings. That attracts less attention, you see.

In practice, then, the real problem isn't quite as dramatic as "a third are fabricated." But it's still pretty bad. Just generally speaking, it sure seems like science needs to get its house in order.

Happy winter solstice! This is the mesa after which Mesa Verde National Park is named.

The Washington Post says it's unlikely Hamas used the tunnel network under Al-Shifa hospital to direct its attacks against Israel:

The evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center, according to a Washington Post analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery and all of the publicly released IDF materials.... The Post’s analysis shows:

• The rooms connected to the tunnel network discovered by IDF troops showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas.
• None of the five hospital buildings identified by Hagari appeared to be connected to the tunnel network.
• There is no evidence that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.

This has obvious implications for the quality of Israeli intelligence as well as for its brutal attack on the hospital. It also raises the tunnel question again.

Israel has lately announced that it has discovered lots of Hamas tunnels, including one big enough to drive a car through. This continues to strike me as peculiar: were they discovered all at once? Or have they been discovered all along but Israel just didn't tell us? Neither seems quite plausible.

But put that aside. The big question is what these tunnels were used for. As with the Al-Shifa tunnels, there's apparently nothing there. No food, no fuel, no weapons, no people. Is Hamas clearing them out without the IDF catching them? All of them? That seems very unlikely, doesn't it?

So I continue to wonder just what the real deal is with the Vast Labyrinth™ of tunnels under Gaza. Obviously I don't doubt that they exist to some degree or another, but they seem to be (a) a lot less vast than we thought, and (b) mostly abandoned. What's really going on here?

Here's the latest chatter inside the beltway:

The Biden administration is discussing raising tariffs on some Chinese goods, including electric vehicles, in an attempt to bolster the U.S. clean-energy industry against cheaper Chinese exports, people familiar with the matter said.

What's the point of this? We already have 25% tariffs on Chinese EVs, which means that no Chinese EVs are sold in the US and thus no tariffs are collected. We could raise tariffs to 50%, but 50% of zero is still zero, so why bother?

Yeah, I know, gotta get tough on China. It's an election-year evergreen.

Of course, car folks say that Chinese EVs are getting so cheap and efficient that they might be able to crash the US market even with a 25% headwind. If that's the case, I say we should just take their money. If American and Japanese and Korean carmakers can't compete even with a 25% headstart then something is wrong that no amount of tariffs can fix.

Anyway, you know what Biden should really do? Bring back Cash 4 Clunkers. That was a great program! As policy it was pointless, but it was fairly cheap and did no real harm—and boy, did people love it. That's the kind of thing you need in an election year. There must be some way to do it via an executive order so that Republicans are stuck screaming about how lawless this super popular program is.

This is pretty brutal:

JUST IN: Judge HOWELL has ordered immediate enforcement of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss’ judgment against Rudy Giuliani, contending they have ample reason to doubt he will make good on it. pic.twitter.com/C9Hl1gePNE

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) December 20, 2023

The jury in Rudy's case was instructed to assume that he was intentionally trying to hide his true wealth. They did, and decided he could afford a $148 million judgment. So now the judge has ordered him to pay up, fully and immediately.

Between this and the Fox/Dominion case, it almost makes me hopeful that we're coming to the end of an era. Is it possible that conservatives are no longer allowed to angrily spew anything they want, no matter how reckless and damaging, with no consequences?

Hold on a second:

As dawn broke at a frigid Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday morning, workers using a crane and harnesses began to take down a controversial statue that had stood there for more than a century.

Hours earlier, a federal judge had ruled an effort to halt the removal of the towering Confederate Memorial had no merit, and the contractors hired by the cemetery moved quickly to get the statue down and into custom-built wooden crates.

Last week the Post reported that taking down the statue would cost $3 million. But once they started, it was down and into its packing crates in a few hours. So what's the other $2.95 million for?

This is a.......yellow flower of some kind. It seems like it should be easy to identify, but I tried a couple of flower ID sites and they didn't help. Any ideas? I took the picture in southern Colorado.

For the record, I'm not keen on the Colorado Supreme Court's decision that the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment bars Donald Trump from office. My reason is simpler than most: unless you were an officer of the Confederacy, I think the 14th Amendment should apply only if you've been convicted of some insurrection-like act. Trump hasn't—not yet, anyway.

A few days ago the Washington Post ran an instructive piece on the history of the clause. Outside of its original purpose of barring Confederates from office, it's been used a grand total of twice. The first was a congressman convicted of disloyalty during World War I and the second was last year: a county commissioner convicted of personally participating in the January 6 assault on the Capitol.

The WWI case was bogus, but nonetheless there was a conviction. And Jack Smith has every hope of convicting Trump of insurrectionish activity sometime soon. But he hasn't yet, and until then Trump should be allowed to run. Outside of the Civil War, "self evident" insurrection just isn't good enough. Our country's long history of hysterically abusing supposedly self evident beliefs should be enough to give us all pause, even if Donald Trump is the beneficiary.