Sadia Khatri is determined to change the lives of women and girls in Pakistan—one tea-sipping, snacking, strolling, bicycle-riding excursion at a time.  The story of Sadia, a native of Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous city, and her activism began with her decision to go to college in America. Sadia landed at Mount Holyoke, a prestigious, all-women’s college in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Sadia’s American experience changed her life. It seems possible that the sense of empowerment brought back to Pakistan by this one young woman might end up changing the lives of thousands of women and girls in cities across Pakistan.

Sadia’s epiphany came to her after she returned to Karachi and realized that the lifestyle she’d enjoyed as a woman in America, particularly the freedom to go out alone with no purpose other than to enjoy being out in a public space, shed a harsh light on the constrained lives of women and girls in her hometown. As Sadia explains, male-dominated traditions, misperceptions about safety for women, and both subtle and overt social mores dictated that females have a male companion or chaperone accompany them in public spaces—whether that be a male friend, a father, or a brother. As a budding feminist and a young woman who had experienced the unfettered freedom of women in America, Sadia was seized with a passion for change.

Fueled by a new sense of self-confidence and a belief in the collective organizing they’d discovered in America, in 2015 Sadia and Atiya Abbas, a friend who had also observed on her own travels the contrast between the freedoms of women living abroad and the cramped lives of women in Pakistan, founded the feminist collective Girls at Dhabas.

The framework for their public protest is simple but brilliant and effective. Dhabas, which are popular, casual roadside cafes for locals and truckers, are places where men traditionally gather to drink tea, snack, and socialize. These are public spaces where the lone woman or girl traditionally was not welcomed. Girls at Dhabas encourages women to venture out alone to interact with public spaces, like the dhabas, in order to erase the fear of being out alone and to build a level of comfort with utilizing the public spaces in their cities.

Relying on personal narratives, storytelling, and social media, the Girls at Dhabas movement has created connections and strengthened the resolve of women to reclaim their right to public spaces in cities across Pakistan. The collective has either inspired or helped young women in other cities reclaim public spaces by staging their own actions, like organizing all-women cricket matches and collective bicycle rides.

Humay Waseem, a bicyclist participating in a group inspired by Girls at Dhabas called Islamabad Girls on Bikes, explained her new-found feelings of freedom to a Western news service: “I drive on these roads all the time but this was maybe the first time I got to experience them while biking … I loved the feeling of freedom with the breeze in my hair.”

As Sadia explains in the video below, the transformation of the perception of public space and who has permission to be there is freeing not just for women but for men as well. As she says, “the more we step out and the more we start getting comfortable in these spaces—not just for us does it get normalizing but also for the men.”

American influence

In this upside-down era of Trumpism where intolerance has been elevated to the highest levels of government, it’s easy to forget about the value of encouraging artists, academics, scientists, and students, like Sadia, to come to the U.S. and soak up the influence of America’s cultural and intellectual diversity. Think about how just one young woman’s experience of being in America has inspired thousands of women to find the courage to embrace a new definition of their rights as women in a place more than eight thousand miles away. Sadia’s experience and the fervor she developed for women’s rights is a shining example of the best of America and what the projection of American values and influence used to look like on the international stage.

What America is losing

How many more smart, motivated men and women, like Sadia, are out there? Given the opportunity, how many more will carry back to their countries the values of democracy, free speech, equal rights, and an open and diverse society that represent the best of the American experiment?  Sadly, we may never find out. The current harsh rhetoric and restrictive policies and intentional delays on immigration and visa allocation have cast a shadow over the numbers of individuals seeking to attend, do research, or teach at American institutions of higher learning.

The facts are telling an irrefutable story of America’s loss. Following years of significant growth, the number of international students attending colleges and universities in the U.S. has declined precipitously. According to data from the U.S. State Department, the total number of F-1 visas—the visas that enable international students to attend school full time anywhere in the U.S.—declined from approximately 644,000 in 2015 to 394,000 in 2017.

The economic loss is significant as well. During the 2017-2018 academic year, international students attending American institutions of higher learning in states across the country contributed approximately $39 billion to the economy as a whole, helped to support the challenged budgets of colleges and universities from coast to coast, and contributed to supporting more than 455,000 jobs.

Loss of influence. Loss of dollars and jobs. Loss of access to the international brain bank. Loss of opportunity to influence the next generation of organizers and leaders like Sadia. This is not what winning looks like.

The post Changing Pakistani women’s lives, one sip of tea, one bike ride at a time appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s been a long and contentious eighteen years since the first Dream Act was introduced in Congress in 2001. The issue of providing a path to legal status for the undocumented youth who were brought to this country as children and grew up here has become one of Washington’s most enduring stalemates. For some of the 1.8 million Dreamers, who have grown up in the shadow of uncertainty and the emotional strain of often over-heated—and sometimes ugly—political sparring, the waiting and hoping has become a burden too heavy to bear.

Many have given up hope. One of the untold stories of this failure to acknowledge the value of these young people and their contribution to American society is that it’s estimated that, since 2005, as many as 500,000 Dreamers between the ages of 18 to 35 have given up, left their families, their homes, and their American dream and returned to Mexico. Remember presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s musings about “self-deportation”? Sadly, those musings seem to be coming true.

To understand the pressures of living with the uncertainties of the vagaries of this political game of now-you-have-it-now-you-don’t, it’s important to take a look back to recall how hopes have been buoyed and then shattered in an unending cycle of dashed dreams. In 2001, even with the support of then-president George W. Bush, the Republican majority in Congress blocked relief for the Dreamers. In 2006, Democrats took back control of the House and Senate. Even with the support of George W. Bush, the Dream Act came up short. In 2010, a version of the Dream Act passed in the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate, with just five votes short of the necessary sixty votes to allow the bill to proceed to a vote.

In 2012, President Obama, his hopes dashed for a bill he could sign to definitively end the burden these young people had been forced to live with, created the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. DACA granted qualifying undocumented youth temporary permission—for renewable two-year periods—to remain legally in the U.S. and to legally be employed. 800,000 young people came out of the shadows and signed on.

In July 2017, another version of the Dream Act was introduced in the Senate by Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Richard Durbin (D-IL) and in the House by Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) and Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL). Let’s be clear. The reason the Dream Act and its various versions have been introduced as legislation so many times over the years is because the concept of granting legal status to Dreamers is supported by the overwhelming majority of American voters. Still, in September of 2017, Donald Trump—in yet another gut punch to majority opinion—announced that his administration was ending the DACA program.

Obama speaks out

Former President Obama couldn’t remain silent in the face of this latest in a long line of cruel reversals. Obama issued a stark and passionate rebuke to Trump’s spurious targeting of young people—young people who contribute to their communities, serve in the military, and prove through the lives they’re living that they have earned a path to legal status.

Here was Obama’s plea:

“These Dreamers are Americans in their hearts, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper. They were brought to this country by their parents, sometimes even as infants. They may not know a country besides ours. They may not even know a language besides English. They often have no idea they’re undocumented until they apply for a job, or college, or a driver’s license.

Over the years, politicians of both parties have worked together to write legislation that would have told these young people—our young people—that if your parents brought you here as a child, if you’ve been here a certain number of years, and if you’re willing to go to college or serve in our military, then you’ll get a chance to stay and earn your citizenship. And for years while I was President, I asked Congress to send me such a bill.

That bill never came. And because it made no sense to expel talented, driven, patriotic young people from the only country they know solely because of the actions of their parents, my administration acted to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people, so that they could continue to contribute to our communities and our country. . . Some 800,000 young people stepped forward, met rigorous requirements, and went through background checks. And America grew stronger as a result.

But today, that shadow has been cast over some of our best and brightest young people once again. To target these young people is wrong — because they have done nothing wrong. It is self-defeating—because they want to start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military, and otherwise contribute to the country we love.”

Reflecting the views of the majority of Americans toward the Dreamers, Obama called on Americans to reaffirm their patriotic sense of decency:

“Ultimately, this is about basic decency. This is about whether we are a people who kick hopeful young strivers out of America, or whether we treat them the way we’d want our own kids to be treated. It’s about who we are as a people — and who we want to be.”

What Dreamers say

In the video below, we meet Dreamers who speak honestly about their sense of loss, their frustration, and their deep reluctance to give up on their American dreams. You’ll meet Joshua Casillas, an accomplished student who dreamed of becoming a doctor in his hometown of Houston, Texas, but instead left home to study medicine at a university in Mexico. For Joshua, the constant stress of the threat of deportation had become too much to bear. As he says, “the future I dreamed of was over.”

We also meet Daniel Arenas, who grew up in South Carolina but, at the age of eighteen, returned to Mexico and founded a non-profit to help other Dreamers pursue their education and find job opportunities.

We also meet Paola Morales, an honors student who reluctantly left her friends and family to go to college in Mexico.

When Dreamers like Joshua, Daniel, and Paola—young people with extraordinary talent, intelligence, drive, and ambition—leave America behind, they are not the losers. America is.

The post Going Back: The Untold Story of Dreamers Returning to Mexico appeared first on Occasional Planet.

On December 8, 2018, seven-year-old Jakeli Caal, a Guatemalan refugee who endured a grueling journey with her father to seek asylum in the U.S., died at a children’s hospital in El Paso after awaiting transport by bus to a border-patrol station in New Mexico.  Sixteen days later, on Christmas eve, eight-year-old Felipe Gomez Alonzo died while in U.S. custody after displaying flu-like symptoms and being held for observation for just ninety minutes at a local hospital. Jakeli and Felipe—and the unimaginable grief and trauma their families have suffered–have become tragic symbols for the legions of refugees who continue every day to suffer the indignities and cruelty of Donald Trump’s morally indefensible zero-tolerance immigration policy.

Does anyone believe that the deaths of Jakeli and Felipe were inevitable? I certainly do not. I have no doubt that their deaths could have been prevented—if only. If only the system had not been stretched to the limit by a policy designed to punish rather than aid. If only there had been better training of border employees or more medical staff on the ground. If only there had been more empathy among those charged with the daily management of the facilities where refugees are being held. If only there had been more respect for the humanity of desperate families unfairly maligned and demonized as criminals by government officials at the highest levels.

There may be uncertainty and unanswered questions about the deaths of Jakeli and Felipe. There should be no uncertainty about who is responsible for the tragedy. It is certainly not the families, whom Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had the audacity to blame for embarking on their desperate journeys to save the lives of their children from violence and poverty. The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the cynical architects of the policy—Donald Trump, former attorney general Jeff Sessions, and Trump whisperer Stephen Miller.

Sadly, zero-tolerance and the separation of refugee children from their families are not one-off examples of the cruelty and harm this administration is inflicting. There are a host of other Trump-era policies that seem intentionally designed to create a climate of uncertainty and fear across the country—and even across the world. Consider these:

• the partial Muslim travel ban that denies the reunification of families and prevents deserving students, business people, and artists from contributing their talents and experience to enrich our society
• the reinstatement of the global gag rule that denies the neediest women in developing nations the reproductive health services they so desperately need, resulting in unnecessary injury and death
• the signing of a law that weakens the firearms background- check system and undermines enforcement of the law that prohibits individuals with serious mental illness from possessing firearms
• the reinterpretation of a law that now makes it easier for fugitives to purchase and possess firearms
• the blocking of commonsense policy for legalizing the status of 800,000 Dreamers
• the thirty-five-day federal government shut down that caused untold financial hardship for 800,000 federal workers
• the cancellation of support for the United Nations Palestinian fund, which provided funds for secular education
• the holding back of funds specifically intended to publicize the Affordable Care Act and the resulting decrease in the numbers of insured.
• the halting of rules limiting power plants from dumping toxins in waterways and the resultant health risks
• the threat of immigration enforcement in Latino communities and the dissemination of anti-immigrant rhetoric that make immigrant survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault fearful of contacting law enforcement for help. 

As citizens of what we hope is a just society, isn’t it our duty to speak out and to declare zero tolerance for the policies and conditions that led to the deaths of Jakeli and Felipe? When will we say “no more” to the suffering inflicted on so many nameless and innocent people by a host of Trump-era policies and executive orders?

We are better than this. It is time to declare that we will no longer be silent as our government perpetrates trauma and fear in our name.

When Cruelty Is the Message

In this video, reporter Adam Serwer posits that for Donald Trump and his base “cruelty is the point” and that it’s Trump’s penchant for reveling in insults and cruelty toward those his supporters hate and fear that sustains the unbreakable bond between the president and his most ardent supporters.

“Trump Thrives on Cruelty” is part of The Atlantic’s ongoing, provocative video series called “The Atlantic Argument.”

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Nearly one million federal workers are either furloughed or not getting paid because of gridlock in Washington, DC. But this is not normal gridlock where Democrats and Republicans are deeply divided. It is essentially a crisis created by one man, Donald Trump, who refuses to listen to cooler heads in both major parties. He seems to think that he is personally suffering because he sacrificed his holiday vacation to Mar-a-Lago. At the same time, he expresses no understanding that hundreds of thousands of federal workers and many additional federal contractors have seen their economic conditions deteriorate from stable to uncertain to crisis.

How do we know that he does not care about this suffering? Because not once in his more than thirteen-minute speech on Saturday, January 19 did he mention a word about the federal government being shut down and civil servants being out of work. Some among us might have predicted that he would have overlooked what federal workers were experiencing, but it’s doubtful that many would have predicted that one of our major news outlets would have failed to point this out. That is precisely what NBC News did with its Nightly News several hours after Trump’s speech. What’s more, they dedicated a good portion of their newscast to a frivolous story that would have made some of their storied anchors such as Chet Huntley, David Brinkley and Tim Russert turn over in their graves.

The newscast began with several minutes on the weather, and in this case, it was warranted. A major winter storm was crawling its way from the Midwest to the East Coast. Next came the report on Trump’s speech. As I watched, I figured that what he said, and what he did not say, would be put in context because veteran and knowledgeable White House Reporter Kelly O’Donnell was on weekend duty. She has a strong record of not falling for Trump’s distortions.

But between his words and the work of her editor, it seemed as if Trump had made a reasonable proposal and the next step was for he and other Republicans to work out a suitable deal with Democrats. What was not mentioned was that (a) the extension of legal status for an estimated seven hundred thousand young undocumented immigrants and another three hundred thousand refugees would only be temporary, and (b) that Trump not only did not express empathy for federal workers, he did not even acknowledge their existence.

Those gaping holes made an unreasonable man seem almost logical and caring. The bottom line is that there was little or no context to the report. O’Donnell also made mention of what Trump calls the “radical left” without any effort to describe what this largely non-existent and imaginary entity is. To make matters worse, she immediately segued from “radical left” to Nancy Pelosi.

The ultimate transgression was that nearly two minutes of the broadcast was spent on a silly story about how a man in Arizona had been accidentally invited to a bachelor party in Vermont, and the so-called hilarity of the fact that he attended. Was this what the viewing audience needed to hear when there were major omissions in the explanation of the main story?

It seemed as if the network nightly news was imitating a local news program. We’re going in the wrong direction, and we all pay the price.

The post NBC Nightly News Goes Trivial when the nation needs Insight appeared first on Occasional Planet.

We all know that Donald Trump neither wrote “The Art of the Deal” nor has much of an idea about how to really negotiate. He may know how to bully, but that won’t work when dealing with strong Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

In the current government shutdown standoff, Pelosi seems to be taking the position that Trump and other Republicans must fully concede, and then the Democrats will join Trump and others on negotiations about a “wall” and other immigration-related issues.

Democrats have traditionally been willing to negotiate, recognizing that to gain something you have to give something. You may not want to give anything away, but it is generally the price of reaching an agreement. In the case of negotiating with Donald Trump, it’s possible that they would have to give very little because (a) he is rarely locked into positions, and (b) he is becoming more and more desperate as his popularity falls, now down to 40% and sliding precipitously.

It can be very difficult to make Donald Trump look good to reasonable people, but Nancy Pelosi may be trying to do so. If she portrays the Democrats as the party of intransigence and inflexibility, she is giving Trump a gift that he neither deserves nor could ever earn. Rather than locking herself in a position of “no negotiations until ….,” she could offer something to Trump, just to put negotiations in motion. Suppose that she offered the following:

1. Two billion dollars for a wall, with the proviso that it be made entirely out of recyclable materials.
2. An Immediate re-opening of all government agencies, based on bills passed by the House in 2019 and the Senate in 2018.
3. An agreement to work on comprehensive immigration reform in 2019, with commitments by Senate Majority Leader and Pelosi to permit up-or-down votes in their respective chambers on all provisions of the proposed changes.

Trump may not agree to this, but he would be put on the defensive and it would clearly give her the high ground. He has a weak position to defend and that might wear and tear on him. If he doesn’t budge, what is the big deal of Pelosi changes her sweetener from two billion to three billion, and in return she gets something meaningful in return such as a start to an infrastructure deal.

There are many directions in which to go, but Pelosi is making it seems as though she is locked into only one. She is far wise and savvier than I am about the internal politics of Congress, but that does not mean that she can’t have a brain cramp at a particular moment.

Here’s hoping that she gives peace, er negotiations, a chance.

The post Madam Speaker, please negotiate. It’s good policy and it gives you the high ground appeared first on Occasional Planet.

At a recent town hall meeting in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a tough question about Canada’s immigration policies. Trudeau’s low-key and respectful reply to the obvious anti-Muslim bias of the questioner’s comments was a deeply depressing lesson in the contrast between the hysterical and factually deprived rantings of the Trump administration on immigrants and immigration and the intelligent tenor of the discussion by our neighbors to the north.

To say that Trudeau’s off-the-cuff erudition and informed grasp of the nuances of immigration policy are light years away from the dumbed-down, factual deprivation of Donald Trump would be a gross understatement. Frankly, it’s hard to believe that these two heads of state even exist in the same space or time. One is thoughtful and informed, broadcasting a message of tolerance and shared interests. The other is factually challenged and blustering, cynically playing on our worst instincts of bias, prejudice, and fear.

After listening to Trudeau school his audience about the social, cultural, and economic benefits of welcoming immigrants, and his pride in Canada’s making good on its humanitarian goal of integrating 40,000 Syrian refugees, I could feel a familiar sense of anger and shame welling up inside of me. Anger because Trump has cynically steered American discourse, particularly on immigrants, toward a dark, ugly, and dangerous place. Shame because nearly 50% of my fellow Americans continue to be either silent or complicit in this march toward xenophobia and racial scapegoating.

Frankly, it all makes me wish I could join a caravan and beat a path to the northern border—and beyond. But if that’s not realistic—and it’s not—then, please, just offer me an American politician in 2020 who can muster even just a little bit of what Justin’s got.

The post Justin Trudeau trumps Trump’s dumbed-down view of immigration appeared first on Occasional Planet.

As with so many issues that confront the nation, we are divided by party, by culture and by our sense of what is logical and reasonable. Nothing could reflect this more than Donald Trump’s idea of a wall to separate the United States from Mexico.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi looks at it as a moral issue; how could a civilized nation use a Medieval form of separation to define the border between the United States and Mexico? But Donald Trump seems to reject any alternative way monitor the border, claiming that he knows more about drone technology than anyone else in the world.

All of this is being fought in the context of re-opening the federal government. Trump invited this to happen, claimed to own it, and then walked away from responsibility when he saw that his moves did nothing positive for his popularity.

Compromise has been a vanishing concept in Washington. The spirit of bi-partisan cooperation has become more difficult as the Republican Party has become more and more locked into positions frequently defined by fear and hate.

But Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have some leverage now, and if they play to Trump’s vanity (not too difficult to do), they can possibly fashion a compromise that gives Trump what he wants at not too great a cost to America and what might be built along the border. So as to not scare anyone too much, let’s call it a revocable compromise.

Suppose that you could build a wall made of materials that were any combination of reusable, recyclable and sustainable? Start building the damn wall to satisfy Trump for the time-being. But soon enough, cooler heads will prevail, and it will become apparent that there are more effective ways to monitor and even control a border than with a presumably impenetrable wall. Trump has floated all kinds of ideas as to what the wall could be made of or look like, so parlay that notion into something that can be as readily dissembled and/or utilized for other purposes as it could be constructed. Neither of these tasks would be easy, but it is a way to try to make something out of nothing at not too great a cost.

After meeting with leaders of Congress today, Trump said that Democrats wanted any wall to be made of steel since that would help the domestic steel industry. Whether or not that is the way in which it actually went down is unclear, but if it was built with steel, it would be much more reusable and recyclable than concrete.

For most of us, there is no apparent impact from the government shutdown. For many, it is a minor inconvenience. But for millions it is a matter of not having a paycheck, and in the case of some, there will never be reimbursement. This is all difficult for Trump to understand. But most Democrats do. Why not explore a compromise that is as close to revocable as possible? Just something to think about.

The post Revocable Compromise: A creative way for Dems to compromise on “The Wall” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Seven days a week, at eleven in the morning, Imad Khachan opens the door of his Greenwich Village chess shop. Chess Forum is the last of the old-style chess parlors in New York City—a holdout in the Big Apple’s rapidly homogenizing retail scene. It’s a place where grandmasters, beginners, celebrities, students, seniors, kindergartners, subway train engineers, policemen, and firemen rub elbows at the well-worn tables. At Chess Forum, $5 an hour gets you a spot for a game of pickup chess or backgammon. If you’re a senior, you’ll get your board time discounted for $1 an hour. And true to Mr. Khachan’s commitment to families and his hope that one day he’ll be lucky enough to help mentor the next big chess champ, kids play free.

Most days, it’s midnight when Mr. Khachan closes up shop. Sometimes, if the competition gets intense, Mr Khachan keeps the lights on until dawn—or at least until the last of the most indefatigable and determined of his regulars have exhausted either their game strategies or their caffeine-induced wakefulness.

Mr. Khachan, a Palestinian immigrant from Lebanon with an abiding love of the written word, emigrated to America with the intention of earning a PhD in literature. Instead, he became a shopkeeper and a chess vendor with writers’ portraits and quotes lovingly arrayed across his shop’s walls. It’s a display that not only seems to broadcast Mr. Khachan’s lifelong commitment to writing and writers but also serves as a gentle nudge to his patrons to take some time out from the game and the daily grind to reflect on some of life’s lessons as illuminated by the writings of some of the greatest of America’s wordsmiths.

In the bittersweet video below, directed by Molly Brass and Stephen Tyler and featured on The Atlantic’s online video series, we get a glimpse into the life of the extraordinary Mr. Khachan.  The portrait of this warm and reflective gentleman is deeply moving. As we get to know Mr. Khachan, it seems inevitable to be reminded of how little many of us know about the distinctive life stories of the millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal, living amongst us as our neighbors or working alongside us or for us. After watching the video, I was struck by how important it is not just to listen to the stories of immigrants but also to actively seek out and share those stories as the most powerful antidote to the corrosive and false anti-immigrant rhetoric bandied about by Trump and others. If the intention of Molly Brass, Stephen Tyler, and Imad Khachan was to encourage us to question   stereotypes and to always be reminded of the distinctiveness of each individual’s life experience, then they have succeeded in that and more.

Immigrants’ economic contribution to society

There is another dimension, too, to Mr. Khachan’s story that goes beyond a single individual’s life story. There is the much larger narrative of how essential immigrants like Mr. Khachan are to the economic life of their adopted homes—whether that’s New York City or cities, towns, and villages across the country.

And how essential to New York’s powerhouse economy are individuals like Mr. Khachan and others who make up the city’s immigrant communities? The answer is unequivocally that immigrants are an irreplaceable part in the engine that powers the city’s economy. The numbers are simply staggering. The facts are nothing less than a deep rebuke to the false narrative that paints the immigrant as a burden to society.

Here are the facts—not the spin—according to the New York City Comptroller’s Office:

• 3 million workers, or 46% of workers, in New York City are immigrants.
• There are 83,000 immigrant business owners, representing 51% of all New York City businesses.
• Immigrants account for $100 billion in earned income in New York City, or 32% of the city’s total earnings.

Watch the video here:

The post Getting to know the lives of immigrants appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The misinformation about legal immigration peddled by the Trump administration is going to get up close and personal for many of us rather quickly. Unfortunately, Trump and the anti-immigrant faction in the White House, led by Stephen Miller and the former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has prevailed in their nativist project to grant fewer visas and approve fewer numbers of refugees. These mostly under-the-radar measures ultimately will trickle down to our health care system’s ability to provide adequate staffing and timely access to medical care.

We know that the Trump administration is, to put it mildly, fact challenged. But no matter what Trump and his merry band of alternate-reality enablers claim, objective facts about immigrants and their essential role in keeping the American health care system staffed is right before our eyes. You don’t have to go looking online, or search for the data, or Google the facts. Just take a moment to look around your local hospital, your local doctors’ offices, or your local walk-in clinics, dental offices, or urgent-care facilities. You’ll find foreign-born and educated doctors, surgeons, technicians, dentists and dental assistants, nurses, nurses’ assistants, and home health aids from across the globe who are laboring on the frontlines of delivering quality care across the country.

Facts

The numbers belie the claims that foreign-born workers, particularly in the health care industry, are taking away jobs from Americans.

• Foreign-born and foreign-educated health care professionals have actually become an essential part of America’s health care delivery system, particularly in smaller cities, rural areas, and underserved low-income communities shunned by American-educated health care workers chasing the highest wages in specialty practices in urban centers.

In a letter written to the Department of Homeland Security in 2017—during the time when the fever of executive orders banning individuals from Muslim countries was at its highest—the American Medical Association sounded the alarm about the negative impacts to America’s health care system of limiting or curtailing immigration numbers.

“To date, one our of every four physicians practicing in the United States is an international medical graduate. . . .They are more likely to practice in underserved and poor communities, and to fill training positions in primary care and other specialties that face significant workforce shortages [editor’s emphasis].”

• Internationally trained health care workers’ role in U.S. health care has steadily grown over recent decades. The foreign-born share of health care workers jumped as high as 30 percent in the 1990s, up from 5 percent in the 1960s, according to a 2014 study from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. Studies have found that the health care industry now has the largest percentage of foreign-born and foreign-trained workers of any industry in the country – beating out even the tech industry.
• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 2006 and 2010, the number of foreign-born health care workers increased from 1.5 million to 1.8 million. Those numbers are staggering and should be setting off alarm bells for what might happen to the health care industry and Americans’ health if the Trump/Miller immigration model prevails.
• More than one-quarter of physicians and surgeons, or 27%, were born outside the U.S. and more than one out of every five, or 22%, of individuals working in support jobs like nursing, psychiatric, home health, and janitorial services also are foreign born.

Facts are facts. Contrary to Trump and his administration’s claims that the U.S. would be better off with fewer legal immigrants, in the health care sector the reality is that Americans’ access to medical care depends on immigrants.

The post Fact: American health care depends on foreign-born-and-trained professionals appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Something monumental, and not in a good way, is going on in Venezuela. You might need to get out a map of South America for this one. Suffice it to say that we have never had a refugee crisis of this magnitude in the Americas before.

Just imagine for a minute that you are living in Venezuela right now, a country where the International Monetary Fund Is estimating a 1,000,000% inflation rate by  December. Is that even possible to imagine? A loaf of bread that today might cost 50 cents, if you’re lucky enough to find bread, will by the end of this year cost $5,000.

Cash has disappeared, doctors have fled, medicines are scant, children are dying, poverty and malnutrition are skyrocketing, crime is spiraling, electricity is intermittent (just last week residents of some neighborhoods in Caracas went 36 to 40 hours without power) and the ability of citizens to obtain a Venezuelan passport – the most essential document increasingly required to enter a neighboring country – has evaporated. By the end of the year, how on earth will you come up with $5,000 to buy a loaf of bread?

You can’t. And you won’t.

And now just for another minute, imagine that you also have aging parents who need medicines that are more and more difficult to find. You decide to cross the border with the meager pay that you have scraped together working two or three makeshift jobs, driving a taxi, working a lunch shift at a restaurant where basic ingredients are hard to come by, or standing in endless lines just to be able to buy something as basic as rice as proxy for someone who is somehow better off than you, someone who can pay you something minimal, and we are talking about cents not dollars – money most likely wired home from family abroad.

You cross the border to Cúcuta in Colombia only to find that your money has no value. Zero.

30 pills of the generic version of a common hypertension drug, Losartan, are available in Colombia for $15,500 Colombian Pesos, approximately $5 US, or for about a $1 if you have the most basic Colombian health care coverage. Arriving in Colombia last month and attempting to buy this drug for your Venezuelan parents and paying with the Colombian exchange rate for your hard-earned Venezuelan Bolivars, you would have found that 30 Losartan pills would cost you the equivalent of 15,500,000 Bolivars, or 1,085 times the average monthly salary in Venezuela, an untenable amount of money that you just don’t have.

The situation is unconscionable.

Unable to buy 30 pills of Losartan, only one among various other medications that you were hoping to purchase in Colombia, you give up. You head home to Venezuela to the expectant hopes and needs of your mother and father with not one pill to offer.

You are beginning to think that President Maduro, the former bus driver leader-in-chief now in charge of your country, might just be in charge of the genocide of his own people. And after a pause to let that sink in, you might just begin to believe that you are right.

Wikipedia defines genocide as the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group.

Venezuelans as a national group fall within this definition, and Venezuelans are being systematically decimated by the policies of Maduro and his cohorts. There is a deliberate and systematic destruction of the Venezuelan people afoot at the behest of Maduro. And remember that Venezuela is a country just over 1,600 miles south of Key West, well within the historic umbrella of US interest and responsibility.

Venezuela is our neighbor just as Canada is.

In this unfathomable fall from grace for Venezuela, a fall from what was once the richest country in Latin America and a country still sitting on the largest petroleum reserves on the planet to 1,000,000% inflation by December, what makes sense? Damn little.

Despite US sanctions on Maduro’s honchos, and despite reports that Trump was gung-ho to invade Venezuela last August, the United States continues to import oil from Venezuela and thus still provides the money that keeps Maduro’s regime afloat.

Even now when the UN is estimating that more than 2.5 million Venezuelans will decide to, have to or need to leave their country by the end of this year. Colombia is already home to well more than 1 million fleeing Venezuelans. Right now, on pretty much every Bogotá articulated bus of its extensive Transmilenio system of transport, you are going to hear Venezuelans singing, begging, soliciting and asking for humanitarian help. Every day. On every bus.

Up to now, just this year, Ecuador has admitted more than 500,000 Venezuelans. And the situation just got more complex, with both Peru and Ecuador now admitting only those Venezuelans entering their countries holding the Holy Grail, a Venezuelan passport. A passport is a luxury item in Venezuela. Because of corruption and a so-called paper shortage within SAIME, the Venezuelan entity in charge of issuing passports, your passport may cost you, through pay-offs of up to $2,000 – money that you absolutely don’t have – and may take up to 2 or 3 years to process, and ultimately may never arrive. This is money and years to survive that you as a Venezuelan don’t have at your disposal.

And just as a matter of interest, how many Venezuelan refugees has the US admitted this year? Zero.

No passport. No money. No medicine. No food. No pretty much nada. Imagining yourself as a Venezuela citizen right now, how are you feeling about yourself, your prospects and your future? Pretty much screwed, I think.

As a Venezuelan, you are perfectly within your rights to think of doing whatever you can to leave this corrupt, disgraced, inhumane dictatorship that you live under. But what about your incapacitated parents? What’s to happen to them? Can you leave them and just go? Of course not.

What to do? Keep that map out. Many Venezuelans are now walking the length of Colombia and Ecuador to reach Peru, where they feel their prospects might be better. The journey can take months on foot. Venezuelans are camped out in parks and football fields in towns and cities along the way causing increasing xenophobic tensions in all of the countries affected by the Venezuelan exodus. Just last week, in Pacaraima, a Brazilian border town, makeshift Venezuelan encampments were attacked and destroyed. Venezuelans were chased back across the border. Days later, the numbers of Venezuelans arriving had increased three-fold.

Hunger will make you do terrible things. Hunger will make you take your chances – even where you are not wanted. But with aging dependents in Venezuela, you can’t even attempt the arduous journey to Peru, and then possibly on to Chile, where you might be able to sell Chiclets on street corners to send money home to your family. Chiclet money is real money in Venezuela.

The post Imagine yourself in the nightmare that is Venezuela today appeared first on Occasional Planet.