The American economy is expected by optimists to grow 2% during 2016 while to the south, Mexico’s economy is projected to grow 2.4%. During the first
quarter of 2016, Arizona’s exporters shipped merchandise valued at $2.04 billion to Mexico. This amount is below the $2.40 billion that went to Mexico during the first quarter of 2015. If the export pace set in the first quarter holds for the entire year of 2016, Arizona’s exports to Mexico will fall far short of the $9.16 billion shipped in 2015.
Immigration
Federal Judge rules that crazy Uncle Joe Arpaio is guilty of civil contempt
While we’re on the topic of the decades-long GOP culture of corruption in Arizona, how can we not mention its poster boy, the “most corrupt sheriff in America,” crazy Uncle Joe Arpaio?
The Arizona Republic has a breakdown of how much the latest illegal racial profiling case has cost the nativist and racist residents of th state of Maricopa who keep reelecting Arpaio to office. Arpaio profiling case costs taxpayers another $13M:
Taxpayers in metro Phoenix will have to pick up an additional $13 million over the next year to cover the costs of a racial profiling case that has proven to be the thorniest legal entanglement faced by Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Maricopa County, which has already shelled out $41 million during the past eight years in the case, must keep covering those legal costs until Arpaio’s office is released from the supervision of the case judge — a resolution that is years away.
County officials are expected to tentatively approve the additional spending on Monday. A final vote is set for late June.
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The $41 million spending so far includes $10 million in attorney fees and $5 million for the monitoring staff. It represents only a part of the county’s heavy legal costs over Arpaio’s 23-year tenure.
The county has had to pay an additional $79 million in legal costs related to Arpaio’s office. That figure includes judgments, settlements and legal fees involving things such as lawsuits over jail deaths and the lawman’s failed investigations of political enemies.
Arpaio, who earns $100,000 a year as sheriff and owns more than $2 million in commercial real estate, has never had to pull money from his own pocket to pay for legal costs directly tied to his work as sheriff.
But wait, there’s more!
SCOTUS to hear Obama immigration executive orders arguments on Monday
On Monday the Court will hear argument in United States v. Texas, in which Texas and twenty-five other states are challenging the Obama administration’s initiatives deferring removal of millions of unauthorized immigrants.
Simon Lazarus, Senior Counsel to the Constitutional Accountability Center, argues at The New Republic that the challenge by Texas and other states “faces a host of heavyweight conservative authorities, of recent as well as long-established vintage, strongly supporting President Barack Obama’s position that deferring removal for parents of citizens and permanent residents for three years, subject to individual exceptions on a case-by-case basis, fits within the ample enforcement discretion prescribed by immigration statutes and the Constitution.” Even Conservatives Agree on Obama’s Immigration Powers. Will the Supreme Court?
I recently testified . . . at the request of the Democratic minority on the House Judiciary Committee, at a poorly attended March 15 hearing before the committee’s Task Force on Executive Overreach. Iowa Representative Steve King, the task force’s chairman, railed against the “abuse of executive power.” But as the hearing wore on, Republican members merely perfunctorily pushed back against Democrats’ citations of the breadth of discretionary enforcement authority, as in the 2002 Homeland Security Act—signed by President George W. Bush and enacted by lopsided House and Senate majorities (including Republican members in the hearing room). In terms as direct as it is possible to draft, the act commands DHS to “establish immigration enforcement policies and priorities.” After contrasting this and other Republican-supported provisions with “overheated rhetoric” condemning “the president’s immigration actions,” California Democrat Zoe Lofgren observed, “If you don’t like what’s happening, look in the mirror. It’s what we asked him to do.” To this, Raul Labrador, an Idaho Republican and anti-immigration hard-liner, candidly responded, “I completely agree that sometimes Congress has punted and has given the executive too much authority. … It’s just we don’t want to write precise laws, so we write these broad laws and then we give the executive all this power, all this authority.”
The science it out: It is about race
Thanks to this concise tweet by Salon‘s Amanda Marcotte
https://t.co/flPc1A77w9 Trump’s supporters aren’t one pamphlet on democratic socialism away from feeling the Bern.
— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) March 22, 2016
For alerting me to the piece by her fellow Salon writers Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel on how it truly has been racism, and not economic angst as so many believe, that has fueled the rise of Donald Trump.
The American National Election Studies 2016 Pilot Study, a presidential primary extension of a long-running election survey, asked 1,200 eligible voters about the election, and their views on race, from Jan. 22 – 28, 2016. The poll had a number of questions designed to measure racial animus.
Trends influencing Arizona’s border region
Between 1990 and 2007, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States more than tripled to 12.2 million. According to a recent study the
trend is reversing, the illegal immigrant population has fallen to 10.9 million. About six million of the total originated from Mexico. A combination of factors including tighter border controls, the Great Recession, improving economic conditions in Mexico and a declining Mexican birth rate contributed to the change. Arizona’s undocumented population dropped seven percent between 2010 and 2014 to approximately 277,000.
In the muddled realm of immigration law enforcement, it appears that the major contribution made by Arizona’s SB 1070 law was to tarnish the state’s reputation. Despite the continual calls for improved border security and immigration reform, Congress has managed to artfully dodge the issue. In June 2013, the U.S. Senate passed a massive comprehensive immigration reform bill that included additional border security measures (Senators McCain and Flake voted for it) and sent it to House of Representatives. The obstinate House conservatives failed to act, preferring to let the matter become another victim of congressional gridlock.