American president Joe Biden has stopped sending migrants back to Mexico under Title 42. His Republican predecessor, Donald Trump, invoked this public-health statute during COVID-19 to close the southern border for immigration.
The repeal has triggered an increase in border crossings, prompting Biden to send troops.
But it isn’t the only reason immigration has increased since Biden took over from Trump in 2021. The Democrat relaxed more policies, and toughened others. (more…)
Immigrants who enter the United States illegally may soon be disqualified from applying for asylum.
President Joe Biden proposed the change after a record illegal border crossings were counted in the fiscal year that ended in September: 2.4 million, up from 1.7 million a year earlier.
By refusing asylum to some immigrants altogether, Biden would go further than his Republican predecessor. Donald Trump returned applicants to Mexico, where they had to wait for months or even years while their asylum request was reviewed.
Biden would also speed up deportations of illegal aliens who have not applied for asylum.
Unlike Trump, the Democrat is at the same time making it easier for specific groups of refugees to come to America. (more…)
President Joe Biden would make the same mistake as the Netherlands in regulating independent work.
In 2015, the European country required employers to put freelancers on an open-ended contract after two years of work.
In an attempt to bring more workers into regular employment, a coalition government of the center-left Labor Party and center-right liberals also made it costlier and more time-consuming for companies to fire employees, and it increased severance pay.
The reforms didn’t cause a shift from freelancing to salaried employment. They did destroy some 77,000 — mostly part-time — jobs in child care, hospitality, nursing and other industries, according to an analysis by ABN Amro bank.
After Labor lost the election in 2017, the liberals formed a government with center parties and repealed the reforms. They made it cheaper for companies to hire, and easier to fire, employees. Freelancers were allowed three contracts per employer every three years.
Employment rose. There are more Dutch people in work than ever before. Almost every industry, from construction to schools to the national railway, struggles to fill vacancies. (more…)
Joe Biden has unveiled five new policies to alleviate America’s housing shortage.
Two are related to financing, which I’m not qualified to assess. The goal is to make it easier for low-income Americans to build and buy homes. I just hope that doesn’t lead to a repeat of the subprime mortgage crisis, which was at least partly caused by the federal government underwriting mortgage loans homeowners could not afford.
A third seeks to make it more difficult for investors to buy family homes. I don’t know if that’s worth the tradeoff, but there is one. The left-wing city government of Amsterdam has done the same, arguing all investors do is buy properties, renovate them and raise rents. But that renovation part is important! Maintaining buildings that are centuries old is expensive. Investors raise rents to recuperate the costs, but at least they can spread out those costs over multiple renters and multiple years. Banning property investment could cause monumental buildings to either become unaffordable to all but the wealthy or fall into disrepair, which happened in Amsterdam during the 1930s and 40s, and is why entire neighborhoods, like the Jewish Quarter, were demolished after the Second World War.
Biden’s last two policies are the most interesting to me: ending discrimination against prefabricated and modular homes and encouraging local zoning reform. (more…)
There’s not much elected politicians can do about high inflation. They might have inadvertently caused it with massive COVID-19 rescue and recovery programs, which saved businesses and jobs but also put money in the hands of consumers at a time when supply chains were strained. When producers can’t meet demand, prices rise.
Central banks have the strongest tools to fight inflation, but there is something governments can do: cut tariffs and regulatory barriers to trade. More and cheaper imports would reduce costs for consumers. (more…)
A year ago, I wrote that the child benefits Joe Biden snuck into his $1.9 trillion coronavirus recovery program might outlive the pandemic. Once American parents had accustomed to receiving monthly cheques of $250 or $300 per child, I figured it would be hard for Congress to let the program lapse.
But that’s what they did. (more…)
Earlier this week, I argued the media consensus about Joe Biden is too negative; that the first year of his presidency has been more successful than the headlines suggest.
But Biden is also unpopular. Just 42 percent of Americans believe he’s doing a good job, down from 53 percent when he started. His party is projected to lose the midterm elections in November.
Two things can be true:
One year into Joe Biden’s presidency, the media consensus is that he is failing.
The Financial Times reports that the Democrat is trying to “reboot” his “faltering” presidency. The Washington Post believes he is “stumbling”. The Wall Street Journal calls it “flailing”.
Foreign journalists agree. Britain’s The Guardian newspaper writes that Biden is historically unpopular and “much of his domestic agenda is stalled on Capitol Hill.” Here in the Netherlands, EW Magazine wonders if anyone is still happy with the president while RTL reports that he has “blundered” abroad and “broken” his election promises. (more…)
During last year’s presidential election, Joe Biden promised to end America’s “artificial trade war” with Europe. His predecessor, Donald Trump, had imposed $7.5 billion worth of tariffs on European aluminum and steel.
Biden has relaxed the tariffs, but not abolished them. The EU has completely pulled down its retaliatory tariffs on bourbon whisky and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
If anyone deserves credit for ending the trade war, it’s the EU. (more…)
European leaders are “weak”, the American president is “bold”. It’s a trope so old, at this point it tells us more about the people who perpetuate it than about elected officials on either side of the Atlantic.
Romano Prodi was “weak“. José María Aznar was “weak“. François Mitterrand was “weak“. His successor, Jacques Chirac, lacked “gravitas“.
A year before the election of Donald Trump, Robert Kaplan disparaged the “grey, insipid ciphers” who wandered Europe’s halls of power. An article in Foreign Affairs accused the continent’s “cowardly” leadership of rendering the EU “irrelevant”. A 2005 op-ed in The New York Times lamented the “weakness” of European leaders at the very time President George W. Bush called for a “renewal” in transatlantic relations. (The same George W. Bush who two years earlier had created the deepest crisis in transatlantic relations since the end of the Cold War by invading Iraq.)
Here we go again. Jef Poortmans, a commentator for Belgium’s Knack magazine, compares Joe Biden’s “zeal” with Europe’s “washed out” leadership. Timothy Garton Ash, whose expectations the EU has never met, argues the bloc faces “one of the biggest challenges of its life” (again). Philip Stephens contrasts Biden’s “ambition”, “audacity”, “energy” and “resolve” with the “defensive incrementalism” of his European counterparts, in particular Angela Merkel.
The “real significance” of Biden’s agenda, writes Stephens in the Financial Times — a $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue program and a $3 trillion education and infrastructure bill — “lies in a bold reassertion of the responsibilities of government.”
His mistake is to assume America and Europe are starting from the same point. (more…)
The United States Senate has approved President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus recovery plan, more than twice the size of Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus.
With the exception of a $15 hourly minimum wage, the soon-to-be-law includes nearly all the provisions Biden had called for, including additional spending on health care, extended unemployment insurance (if cut by $100 per week from the original version) and rental assistance. For detail, check out my post about the bill from January.
The part I want to focus on here is a child allowance that ranges from $250 to $300 per month per child. (more…)
The appointment of Jake Sullivan as Joe Biden’s national security advisor is a strong hint that the new president’s focus on domestic issues — COVID-19, the economy, racial equity — will influence American foreign policy in the next four years.
While at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace during the Trump Administration, Sullivan co-authored a report that argued American foreign policy had failed the American middle class. As Biden’s closest foreign-policy advisor, he can push for the return to Obama-style multilateralism, but this time with a laser focus on the interests of middle America.
Here’s what that could mean for the top items on Biden’s foreign-policy agenda: Afghanistan, China and Europe. (more…)
Charles de Gaulle’s great accomplishment, to paraphrase his British biographer, Julian Jackson, was that he reconciled the French left to patriotism and the French right to democracy.
The history of France since 1789 has been a consistent struggle between a universalist left and the conservative right; between republic and monarchy; the Enlightenment and Catholicism; labor and capital; Paris and La France profonde.
History hasn’t ended. Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen embody opposite visions of France today. But de Gaulle narrowed the divide and helped Frenchmen and -women think of each other as opponents rather than enemies.
That America could use a whiff of Gaullism isn’t my idea. Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist of The New York Times, called for an American de Gaulle two years ago.
I suspect he envisaged an authority figure on the right. Instead we have Joe Biden. Can he play the same role? (more…)
Joe Biden plans to ask Congress for $1.9 trillion in the first weeks of his presidency to cope with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.
Matthew Yglesias and Punchbowl News, a new Capitol Hill-focused newsletter, have the details:
Joe Biden’s priority as president will be alleviating the COVID-19 pandemic, which the outgoing president, Donald Trump, has mismanaged. 350,000 Americans are dead. Nearly 11 million are unemployed. Republicans were slow to approve the latest stimulus, which Trump, seemingly without consulting lawmakers of his own party, threatened to veto and then signed anyway.
But the Democrat’s first-term goal must be to revitalize the American Dream, which is out of reach for most.
In the 47 years Biden has been in Washington, first as a senator, then as vice president, social mobility has declined to the point where Europeans are now more likely to grow out of poverty than Americans. Real incomes have been stagnant for everyone but the wealthy. Traditional middle-income jobs have been outsourced or made redundant by automation. Most job growth comes from established businesses, not startups, suggesting a decline in entrepreneurship. Housing is unaffordable in the very metro areas where those jobs are. There are fewer opportunities for workers without a college degree, and the cost of higher education has outpaced income growth. So have the costs of child care and health care, making it harder for families to combine childrearing and work.
America could learn from Nordic countries and the Netherlands, which combine competitive, free-market economies with generous social protections for the middle and working class.
Many of Biden’s policies would move America in that direction.
Here’s where I would start. (more…)
