Ainsley for the New York Times: A Progressive Future Depends on National Identity

When Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain stepped before a lectern at 10 Downing Street last month, he made clear how misguided he thought the country’s immigration policies had been. He described its recent approach as a “one-nation experiment in open borders” that Britons never voted for. In its place, he announced a slew of measures to toughen border controls, raise skill requirements for immigrants and effectively end mass migration.

All this is coming from Britain’s center-left Labour Party, which long favored openness toward migrants. That reflected Labour’s modern base of urban progressive voters. Higher immigration was economically advantageous for them, in particular by holding down prices, and it was consistent with their humanitarian worldview.

The trouble is, these views tend to be at odds with the views of many working-class voters. Those less affluent voters have questioned the impact of mass migration for years, worried about its impact on housing, public services, wages and communities. The response of urban progressives in Britain, as in other parts of Europe and the United States, has often been to denounce working-class voters as narrow-minded or racist. It should hardly be surprising that voters responded by switching their political allegiances. Immigration, more than any other issue, symbolizes the wedge between center-left parties and their traditional class base.

Keep reading in The New York Times. 

Marshall in Politico: ‘It’s a winner for him’: Dems work to turn LA debate from immigration to Trump’s executive powers

For Democrats, it’s a concern rooted in Trump’s historic strength on immigration with voters not in Los Angeles, but watching on social media and TV in swing states and districts across the country.

“There’s a background and a history, and so that limits the sympathy of lots of fair-minded Americans watching this spectacle unfold,” said Will Marshall, founder of Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left think tank.

Read the full article in Politico.

Ainsley in The Times: Harris’s border talk is textbook Starmer

Pete Kavanaugh, deputy campaign director to Biden in 2020; Muthoni Wambu Kraal, who built a winning electoral coalition at the grass roots that year; Amy Dacey, once chief executive of the Democratic National Convention — these are the kinds of people who remain in constant conversation with Labour on how exactly the left defies stereotype and fights the right on the ground it usually owns.

This is a shared project with a shared infrastructure. Claire Ainsley, once director of policy for Starmer, has made much of this transatlantic traffic happen from her post at the Progressive Policy Institute, the favoured think tank of the White House. And next week Labour is sending its own delegation to the Democratic convention in Chicago, led by its victorious general secretary David Evans, and Jon Ashworth, whose failure to retain his Leicester South seat has obscured the extent of his influence over an otherwise successful campaign.

The challenge now is to keep speaking the same language. Recession looms over America. Starmer may yet end up on the wrong side of Britain’s fraught debate on migration. And party strategists are not their parties, whose habits are harder to shift. “The jury is still out,” frets one influential Labour MP. Some fear that “wet and self-important” Labour backbenchers, as well as West Coast liberals, will revert to type rather than adopt this new lingua franca. For the time being, though, Harris and Starmer are protagonists created by the same writers’ room.

Read more in The Times.

Ainsley in The New York Times: Britain’s Anti-Immigrant Riots Pose Critical Test for Starmer

Those close to Mr. Starmer say he is getting a grip on the disorder, drawing on his experience as a chief prosecutor in 2011, when riots took place in London and he pushed to get those responsible tried, sentenced and jailed swiftly to deter others.

“He has a detailed knowledge of how to do this, and he understands how you prosecute and convict quickly, and you do so visibly in a way that sends a message to anybody who is thinking about participating in one of these riots,” said Claire Ainsley, a former policy director for Mr. Starmer.

But ensuring that such violence does not recur is harder, she said.

“We have had the far right with us in good economic times and in bad economic times,” said Ms. Ainsley, who now works in Britain for the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington-based research institute.

“But it is much harder for them to have any kind of influence when you are in better economic times,” she added. “That means people’s living standards rising and people starting to feel they are better off and that they are part of a system that is working — and that isn’t a description of Britain today.”

Ms. Ainsley pointed to the role of social media in spreading misinformation and stoking tensions, and cautioned against making a direct link between the riots and immigration. She noted that, alongside extremists, some of the rioters may be looters and other opportunists.

It is, she added, “wrong to assume that all of the people participating in these riots are politically motivated by immigration.”

Read more in The New York Times.

Paying for Progress: A Blueprint to Cut Costs, Boost Growth, and Expand American Opportunity

The next administration must confront the consequences that the American people are finally facing from more than two decades of fiscal mismanagement in Washington. Annual deficits in excess of $2 trillion during a time when the unemployment rate hovers near a historically low 4% have put upward pressure on prices and strained family budgets. Annual interest payments on the national debt, now the highest they’ve ever been in history, are crowding out public investments into our collective future, which have fallen near historic lows. Working families face a future with lower incomes and diminished opportunities if we continue on our current path.

The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) believes that the best way to promote opportunity for all Americans and tackle the nation’s many problems is to reorient our public budgets away from subsidizing short-term consumption and towards investments that lay the foundation for long-term economic abundance. Rather than eviscerating government in the name of fiscal probity, as many on the right seek to do, our “Paying for Progress” Blueprint offers a visionary framework for a fairer and more prosperous society.

Our blueprint would raise enough revenue to fund our government through a tax code that is simpler, more progressive, and more pro-growth than current policy. We offer innovative ideas to modernize our nation’s health-care and retirement programs so they better reflect the needs of our aging population. We would invest in the engines of American innovation and expand access to affordable housing, education, and child care to cut the cost of living for working families. And we propose changes to rationalize federal programs and institutions so that our government spends smarter rather than merely spending more.

Many of these transformative policies are politically popular — the kind of bold, aspirational ideas a presidential candidate could build a campaign around — while others are more controversial because they would require some sacrifice from politically influential constituencies. But the reality is that both kinds of policies must be on the table, because public programs can only work if the vast majority of Americans that benefit from them are willing to contribute to them. Unlike many on the left, we recognize that progressive policies must be fiscally sound and grounded in economic pragmatism to make government work for working Americans now and in the future.

If fully enacted during the first year of the next president’s administration, the recommendations in this report would put the federal budget on a path to balance within 20 years. But we do not see actually balancing the budget as a necessary end. Rather, PPI seeks to put the budget on a healthy trajectory so that future policymakers have the fiscal freedom to address emergencies and other unforeseen needs. Moreover, because PPI’s blueprint meets such an ambitious fiscal target, we ensure that adopting even half of our recommended savings would be enough to stabilize the debt as a percent of GDP. Thus, our proposals to cut costs, boost growth, and expand American opportunity will remain a strong menu of options for policymakers to draw upon for years to come, even if they are unlikely to be enacted in their entirety any time soon.

The roughly six dozen federal policy recommendations in this report are organized into 12 overarching priorities:

I. Replace Taxes on Work with Taxes on Consumption and Unearned Income
II. Make the Individual Income Tax Code Simpler and More Progressive
III. Reform the Business Tax Code to Promote Growth and International Competitiveness
IV. Secure America’s Global Leadership
V. Strengthen Social Security’s Intergenerational Compact
VI. Modernize Medicare
VII. Cut Health-Care Costs and Improve Outcomes
VIII. Support Working Families and Economic Opportunity
IX. Make Housing Affordable for All
X. Rationalize Safety-Net Programs
XI. Improve Public Administration
XII. Manage Public Debt Responsibly

Read the full Blueprint. 

Read the Summary of Recommendations.

Read the PPI press release.

See how PPI’s Blueprint compares to six alternatives. 

Media Mentions:

Marshall for The Hill: After fumbling border security, the immigration crisis is on Republicans

By Will Marshall

President Biden must feel like he can’t catch a break. Even as the nation’s cost-of-living crisis seems to be abating, another is rising to take its place: A record-breaking surge of illegal immigrants across America’s southern border.

Recent polls show that immigration has either edged out inflation as U.S. voters’ top concern or is running a close second. The last thing President Biden and Democrats need is a chaotic border taking center stage in the 2024 presidential campaign.

The spike has overwhelmed border and customs officials, flooded immigration courts and detention shelters and imposed heavy economic costs on border communities. It’s also sparking a backlash in big “sanctuary cities” like Chicago, Denver and New York, where Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been busing migrants.

The public consequently gives Biden low marks for handling immigration. That’s especially true in key swing states, where by hefty margins voters trust Donald Trump more than Biden to manage the situation on the border.

But if immigration is a political headache for Biden and his party, it’s turning into a debacle for the Republican Party. Yesterday, in a stunning display of hypocrisy and cowardice, Republican congressional leaders torpedoed a tough national and border security bill designed to drastically curtail illegal immigration.

Keep reading in The Hill.

Marshall for The Hill: Biden Gets Real on Immigration

By Will Marshall, President of PPI

No issue better illuminates America’s debilitating political stalemate than immigration. Everyone knows there’s a mounting humanitarian and law enforcement crisis on our southern border, but our political leaders find it safer to appease their most militant partisans than to work together to forge pragmatic solutions.

That may be changing. After ignoring an unprecedented surge of migrants for two years, President Biden has announced some modest steps toward restoring order. His reward for taking on this combustible issue is a fusillade of criticism from rightwing nativists who say he’s not serious, and leftwing activists worried that he is.

During Biden’s first visit to the border earlier this month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott handed him a churlish letter blaming him for the whole mess. “This chaos is the direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted,” it charged.

Read more in The Hill.

Biden Needs New Deal for Immigration

This piece was also published on Medium.

Opportunity for Biden Administration to Boost Jobs and Economic Growth is Hiding in Plain Sight

WASHINGTON, D.C.A new report co-authored by the Progressive Policy Institute’s Caleb Watney and Doug Rand and Lindsay Milliken of the Federation of American Scientists, highlights a significant opportunity for the Biden Administration to boost entrepreneurship and create up to a million new jobs through a little-known immigration rule.

For the United States in particular, foreign-born entrepreneurs have made up an extraordinary share of our most successful companies and technological achievements. To encourage the vitally important flow of immigrant entrepreneurs, and to accommodate the growing need for an entrepreneur-specific pathway into the country, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) adopted the International Entrepreneur Rule (IER) in early 2017.

The rule was quickly put on hold by the incoming Trump Administration but was never removed from the Code of Federal Regulations. According to the new report, with support from the Biden Administration, the IER could quickly become an essential pathway to attract and retain foreign-born entrepreneurs who seek to build their businesses within the United States.

KEY PROPOSALS INCLUDE

  • Publicize the International Entrepreneur Rule and credibly signal to stakeholders that the IER will receive agency attention and resources
  • Issue new guidance documents to agency adjudicators to clarify evidentiary standards and make it reasonably straightforward for investors to prove they meet qualifying criteria
  • Issue new guidance directing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to grant beneficiaries the full initial 30 months of parole, absent extraordinary circumstances
  • Issue future rulemaking to improve the IER based on feedback from stakeholder groups
  • Pursue a long-term legislative solution to stabilize immigration pathways for entrepreneurs

Co-author Caleb Watney, the director of innovation policy at PPI, had this to say about the findings and key proposals: “Countries all over the world are competing to attract the best talent to their shores. Unlike Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, the United States has no statutory immigration pathway designed for entrepreneurs. The International Entrepreneur Rule is a powerful tool to help solve this gap and should be embraced by the Biden Administration to increase U.S. dynamism, economic growth, and job creation. Now is the time to build back better and ensure the United States’ place as the best place to start a new business and to welcome brilliant entrepreneurs from across the globe.”

Shift to “Demand Driven” Immigration

The COVID-19 crisis initially affected the U.S. immigration system by prompting the shutdown of immigration courts and suspension of routine visa processing services. These actions were more or less in line with broader economic shutdowns and closures. The Trump administration, however, has seized on the COVID-19 crisis as a fresh pretext for enacting a cruel and radically restrictive immigration agenda that slows economic recovery, hurts the United States in the long-term, and is out of step with what Americans support.

In June, for example, President Trump announced an extension, through the end of the year, of his “temporary” ban on new work visas. This includes high-skilled workers, executives, and seasonal workers who are critical to U.S. innovation and growth. While small modifications to the order have been made—and lawsuits have been brought—it still places serious limitations on America’s ability to act as a magnet for talent. Immigrant workers already in the country have also faced disproportionate exposure to the pandemic at, for example, meatpacking plants, thanks to the administration’s lax approach to occupational safety.

The administration’s actions are bad policy at any time; today they make life even more difficult for immigrants and dig the pandemic-created economic hole even deeper. They also follow three years of immigration policymaking that has made our labor markets less flexible and our economy less dynamic and less innovative.

Yet it must also be said that America’s immigration system was not in the best shape even before the Trump administration’s detour into nativism and wall-building. Despite some progress made by President Obama, U.S. immigration policy had been growing misaligned with the nation’s changing economic needs. For progressives, the challenge is not merely to undo what Trump has done, but to make our economy more dynamic and resilient by bringing our immigration laws into the 21st century.

The key change is to make U.S. immigration laws more “demand-driven” and responsive to labor market needs as America ages, our workforce grows more slowly, and labor shortages hamper production from agriculture to high tech.

Two-thirds of green cards issued each year are for family reunification, with about one in six being employment-based. A large share of employment-based green cards, moreover, are issued to family members of workers. While family reunification is the broad superhighway by which most legal immigrants enter the United States, we also have an alphabet soup of visa programs which offer certain workers narrow routes of entry. There are, for example, nearly two dozen different types of visas for “temporary nonimmigrant workers.” Some of these programs function fairly well but taken as a whole they make work-based immigration unduly fragmented and complex, and subject to industry capture.

Family reunification should remain an important goal for U.S. immigration policy. Our country has a proud tradition of welcoming migrants and refugees as families as well as individuals. Many economically successful first- and second-generation immigrants that we celebrate—such as Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs—came here as children or students.

Nonetheless, the time has come to adjust the balance and widen channels for work-based immigration, making sure they more closely match employer demand and economic need. To shift our policies in this direction, PPI proposes to replace the welter of narrow visa programs with a new Willing Worker Visa that admits people regardless of the kind of skills they have as long as they have a valid job offer from a U.S. employer. In order to be valid, employers would have to show they could not meet their labor needs with native workers alone.

In addition to expanding the supply of legal workers and dramatically simplifying our immigration laws, our approach would crack down on employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. The Trump administration has focused instead on penalizing workers while letting employers off the hook—echoing the president’s own record of using illegal workers in his businesses.

Key elements of the Willing Worker Visa would include:

  • Simplification and consolidation of existing visa programs to make entry and certification processes far smoother.
  • Contingency on job offers from U.S. employers, just as many employment-based visas are now.
  • Expanded pathways for temporary and nonimmigrants workers to become citizens, in part to discourage and reduce illegal border-crossing.
  • Tying visas for willing workers to areas of demonstrated skill gaps and labor shortages.
  • Tougher penalties on employers who knowingly hire illegal workers, fail to check documentation, or ignore immigration law.

It may seem incongruous to argue for more employment-based immigration as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread across the United States. Much of our economy is still locked down, we have double-digit unemployment, and there’s deep uncertainty about how long it will take the economy to recover.

Current projections are that unemployment rates will remain over 10 percent well into 2021. We know, however, that even at the height of the economic expansion in 2019, the U.S. economy faced severe skill shortages, with more than seven million jobs unfilled.

Moreover, Trump’s claim that he wants to restrict immigration to preserve U.S. jobs for
U.S. workers stems from a faulty, zero-sum understanding of how labor markets work. In
a dynamic market economy, the number of jobs is never fixed but grows with labor supply. We have a compelling national interest in opening America’s doors to willing workers from elsewhere who can help us close skills gaps and fill labor shortages.

The challenge is to ensure that unemployed native workers are successfully reabsorbed into the labor force while also ensuring a strong supply of willing foreign workers who help make the U.S. economy more productive and innovative.

Marshall for Medium: “Will Conservatives Protect our Children?”

Watching the nation’s political leaders tie themselves in knots over minor changes in gun laws, I can’t help but wonder if America hasn’t become the “pitiful, helpless giant” Richard Nixon warned about decades ago.

Nixon conjured up this arresting image to rally public support for his unpopular plan to invade Cambodia. But it seems more apt today, as Washington fails to stem the growing scourge of mass shootings.

The blunt truth is, the Republican Party is chiefly responsible for this paralysis of national will. Even as our children are slaughtered in classrooms, Republicans shrug and offer nothing more than “thoughts and prayers.” Sorry, they tell us, the U.S. Constitution bars us from taking effective action to protect our children from killers wielding weapons of war.

Read PPI President Will Marshall’s full piece on Medium by clicking here.

Marshall for Medium: “Will the Senate Defend Our Constitution?”

By declaring a national emergency to build a border wall, President Trump has crossed the Rubicon. He has turned a cheap partisan stunt into a bona fide Constitutional crisis.

Congress this week declined to give Trump all the money he demanded to wall off Mexico from the United States. The president has declared an emergency explicitly to defy the will of Congress and usurp its Constitutional power to raise and spend public money. In his contempt for democratic norms, Trump makes no effort to conceal the fact that the alleged ‘emergency’ on the border is a political contrivance to assert his will. Having failed to extort wall funding from Congress through the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, he is willing to violate the Constitution to get a political ‘win.’

 

Read the full piece on Medium by clicking here.

Press Release: Will the Senate Defend Our Constitution?

WASHINGTON—Will Marshall, President of the Progressive Policy Institute, today released the followed statement after President Trump declared a national emergency to fund the border wall:

“By declaring a national emergency to build a border wall, President Trump has crossed the Rubicon. He has turned a cheap partisan stunt into a bona fide Constitutional crisis.

“Congress this week declined to give Trump all the money he demanded to wall off Mexico from the United States. The president has declared an emergency explicitly to defy the will of Congress and usurp its Constitutional power to raise and spend public money. In his contempt for democratic norms, Trump makes no effort to conceal the fact that the alleged ’emergency’ on the border is a political contrivance to assert his will. Having failed to extort wall funding from Congress through the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, he is willing to violate the Constitution to get a political ‘win.’

“This is a clear and cynical abuse of presidential power. Trump seems not to understand or care that U.S. presidents aren’t medieval monarchs, who can demand money from parliaments. Now he’s willing to politicize and trivialize presidential authority to declare national emergencies to fulfill a demagogic campaign promise. The White House will now seek to shift funds Congress has appropriated for national defense and other legitimate purposes to finance a stupid ‘solution’ to a non-existent problem.

“All friends of American democracy, regardless of outlook or party, must rally to the defense of the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers. Shamefully, Senate Republicans have yet to stand up for the Constitution they’ve sworn to defend. Their supine unwillingness to put patriotism above partisanship means that Americans must trust to the courts to stop a rogue president.

“Trump’s power grab will no doubt give fresh impetus to efforts to impeach him. That’s understandable, but for now the wiser course for progressives is to keep the pressure on the Senate to defend its Constitutional powers and institutional prerogatives, and to use all legal means to prevent Trump from spending public money without Congressional authority. We need to keep the public focused clearly on how deeply Trump is damaging not just our political system, but now also the Constitutional framework that has enabled American democracy to endure through genuine national emergencies.”

###

Populism Watch: Immigration Propels France in World Cup, But Splits Europe

France erupted into celebration following their victory in the World Cup. The success of the multicultural soccer team offered a moment to reflect on the benefits of international migration. The win was also a fulfillment of Macron’s call for more heroes to unify the country. Amid division sowed by populists and nationalists, Macron communicated this call at the funeral of nationally exalted (and half-Belgian) singer Johnny Hallyday last year. Within France’s soccer team, 15 out of a total of 22 players came from families which had recently arrived from non-EU countries. These countries included the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Morocco, Angola, and Algeria. The multi-faith team also included muslim players such as Paul Pogba, Ousmane Dembele, N’Golo Kante, Adil Rami, Djibril Sidibe, Benjamin Mendy and Nabil Fekir. The win was a bright spot in an otherwise turbulent time for the EU, engendered by anti-immigrant agendas.

Immigration continues to roil transatlantic politics. While the U.S. fixated on Trump’s child separation policy, the EU dealt with immigration challenges of its own. In a counter to the EU system, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini proposed a union made up of nationalist, populist, and anti-immigrant parties across Europe. He described the network as“a League of the Leagues of Europe, bringing together all the free and sovereign movements that want to defend their people and their borders.”These leaders would include France’s National Front leader Marine Le Pen, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, Nigel Farage, who lobbied for the referendum that resulted in Britain leaving the union, and others. Not to be accused of only protecting the borders, Salvini set his sights inward. Locals reported authorities had cleared out an official Roma camp, and cited concern for the future of the Roma population in Italy.

The EU summit, held June 28th-29th, focused on reducing the immigration challenges which form a prominent platform for populist parties. The summit, held June 28th-29th, focused on redistributing and lessening the flows of migrants arriving by boat to the EU’s southernmost countries. Populist and nationalist parties which run on anti-immigrant platforms include Italy’s 5Star / the League Coalition, Germany’s Christian Social Union, and France’s National Rally (previously the National Front).

At the summit, EU leaders agreed to:

  • Share the responsibility of refugees arriving in the bloc on a newly voluntary basis,
  • Increase financing to Turkey, Morocco and other North African countries to prevent migration to Europe,
  • Support the development of regional disembarkation platforms for people saved at sea, aimed at “rapidly and safely”distinguishing between economic migrants and asylum seekers.

EU leaders also discussed the creation of an external migration management facility to be included under the next EU long-term budget. The plan would need sign-off from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as well as the International Organization for Migration. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel called specifically for alignment with all international legal standards regarding the facility. In 2016, Merkel led the creation of a similar program, in which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğanagreed to take back migrants who had reached Europe in exchange for billions in euros to cover basics for Syrian refugee in Turkey. Germany also took in some Syrian refugees. In its first year of operation, Doctors Without Borders highlighted the “devastating human consequences of this strategy on the lives and health”of those sent to Turkey. Other examples of offshore immigrant processing facilities, such as the Australian detention centers on the islands of Nauru and Manus, have been sites of human rights concerns,hunger strikes, and other challenges.

On the last day of the EU Summit, the impact of these immigration challenges on human life was made clear. The Libyan Coast Guard reported a boat filled with migrants bound for Europe had sunk. One hundred people were missing, and the bodies of three infants were recovered.

Populism Watch: In the U.S. and EU, Battles For Human Rights at the Border

The entire transatlantic world is embroiled in heated debates over the treatment of immigrants and refugees. Trump’s decision to revoke his own family separation policy, after it sparked outrage across the country and drew scrutiny by members of both parties in Congress, put a spotlight on just how inhumane the treatment of migrants, including asylum-seekers, can be. In Europe, Italy and Malta refused to let a Doctors Without Borders boat carrying nearly 700 migrants to dock, prompting Spain to offer its ports. To the north, German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed to seek stricter measures on migrants in Germany. Below, what to follow on immigration in the coming weeks.

United States: What impact will Congress have on the separation of families at the southern border?

Trump signed an executive order on June 20th to halt the separation of families at the southern border. The policy had resulted in children and babies taken from their parents and held in cage-like structures. Many prominent Republicans, including Maine Sen. Susan Collins, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, and CNN National Security Analyst and previous NSA director Michael Hayden spoke out against the policy. Sen. Collins stated that the policy was “traumatizing to the children who are innocent victims, and it is contrary to our values in this country.” However, a recent Quinnipiac poll suggests the family separation policy is supported by 55 percent of her fellow Republicans.

As Trump’s executive order could be short-term, Congress is still moving forward on a number of bills. Senate Democrats introduced the Keep Families Together Act on June 7th. New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler introduced a bill in the House to limit separation at or near ports of entry on June 19th. The bills had 48 and 194 co-sponsors, respectively, as of June 21st. Republicans have put forth both a hardline approach by Virginia rep. Bob Goodlatte, and a so-called “compromise” bill that would end the separation policy and provide deportation protections and a path to citizenship for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, while allocating $25 billion in funding for Trump’s border wall, limiting authorized and unauthorized immigration, and continuing to detain asylum-seekers. Goodlatte’s bill failed on the House floor June 21st, and voting on the “compromise” bill was delayed.

Europe: How will the EU hold up amid refusals to let refugee boats dock?

Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini and Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat played a game of “not it” when a boat carrying 692 rescued migrants attempted to dock in their countries. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez allowed the migrants to dock at his ports on June 17th, ending the impasse. As the boat was first spotted by the Italian coast-guard, Italy was obligated to take in the migrants until their asylum requests would have been decided, per EU policy. The ability of EU supporters to hold the union together amid these divisions could impact its future stability, and the state of intra-European relations. European leaders plan to meet Sunday to discuss this and other migration challenges.

Amid threats to the coalition between German Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and right-of-center Christian Social Union, Merkel has agreed to seek stricter immigration measures ahead of an end-of-the-month EU summit. In response to the immigration challenges arising in Germany, Trump tweeted: “The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!” His statement is incorrect (crime in Germany at a 25 year low), ill-considered, and needlessly alienates a key European ally.

Given the continuing advance of populist, anti-immigrant sentiment across the Western democracies, we can expect fresh controversies to arise at national borders. Every country has a right to determine who it admits, and on what terms, and to enforce its immigration laws. But that right doesn’t relieve any country of the moral duty to treat immigrants – even unwanted ones – humanely and with some concern for their reasons for coming. That’s a lesson President Trump keeps learning, the hard way.

Happy Holidays from PPI

It’s been a surreal political year, but PPI has much to celebrate this holiday season. Throughout 2017, we expanded our productive capacity and the scope of our political and media outreach significantly. For example, PPI organized 150 meetings with prominent elected officials; visited 10 state capitals and 10 foreign capitals, published an influential book and more than 40 original research papers, and hosted nearly 30 private salon dinners on a variety of topical issues.
Best of all, we saw PPI’s research, analysis, and innovative ideas breaking through the political static and changing the way people think about some critical issues, including how to revive U.S. economic dynamism, spread innovation and jobs to people and places left behind by economic growth, and modernize the ways we prepare young people for work and citizenship.
Let me give you some highlights:
  • This fall, David Osborne’s new book, Reinventing America’s Schools, was published on the 25th anniversary of the nation’s first charter school in Minnesota. David, who heads PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools project, documents the emergence of a new “21st Century” model for organizing and modernizing our public school system around the principles of school autonomy, accountability, choice, and diversity. David is just winding up a remarkable 20-city book tour that drew wide attention from education, political, and civic leaders, as well as the media. Because David is a great storyteller, as well as analyst, it’s a highly readable book that offers a cogent picture of a K-12 school system geared to the demands of the knowledge economy. It makes a great holiday gift!
  • Dr. Michael Mandel’s pioneering research on e-commerce and job creation also upended conventional wisdom and caught the attention of top economic commentators. Dr. Mandel, PPI’s chief economic strategist, found that online commerce has actually created more jobs in retail than it destroys, and that these new jobs (many in fulfillment centers in outlying areas) pay considerably better than traditional ones. His research buttresses the main premise of PPI’s progressive pro-growth agenda: that spreading digital innovation to the physical economy will create new jobs and businesses, raise labor productivity, and reduce inequality.
  • PPI challenged the dubious panacea of “free college” and proposed a progressive alternative – a robust system of post-secondary learning and credentials for the roughly 70 percent of young Americans who don’t get college degrees. PPI Senior Fellow Harry Holzer developed a creative menu of ways to create more “hybrid learning” opportunities combining work-based and classroom instruction. And PPI Senior Fellow Anne Kim highlighted the inequity of current government policies that subsidize college-bound youth (e.g., Pell Grants), but provide no help for people earning credentials certifying skills that employers value.
  • Building on last year’s opening of a PPI office in Brussels, we expanded our overseas work considerably in 2017. In January, I endeavored to explain the outcome of the U.S. election to shell-shocked audiences in London, Brussels, and Berlin. In April, we led our annual Congressional senior staff delegation to Paris, Brussels, and Berlin to engage European policymakers on the French presidential election and other U.S-E.U. issues, including international taxation, competition policy, and trade. PPI also took its message of data-driven innovation and growth to Australia, Brazil, Japan and a number of other countries.
Other 2017 highlights included a strategy retreat in February with two dozen top elected leaders to explore ideas for a new, radically pragmatic agenda for progressives; a Washington conference with our longtime friend Janet Napolitano (now President of the University of California system) on how to update and preserve NAFTA; public forums in Washington on pricing carbon, infrastructure, tax reform, and other pressing issues; creative policy reports on varied subjects; and a robust output of articles, op-eds, blogs, and social media activity.
I’m also happy to report many terrific additions to PPI in 2017. Rob Keast joined to manage our external relations and new policy development; Paul Bledsoe assumed a new role as Strategic Adviser as well as guiding our work on energy and climate policy; and Emily Langhorne joined as Education Policy Analyst. We will also be adding a fiscal project next year.
All this leaves us poised for a high-impact year in 2018. In this midterm-election year, our top priority will be crafting and building support for a new progressive platform — a radically pragmatic alternative to the political tribalism throttling America’s progress. That starts with new and better ideas for solving peoples’ problems that look forward, not backward, and that speak to their hopes and aspirations, not their anger and mistrust.
It’s a tall order, and we cannot succeed without your help and support. Thanks for all you have done over past years, and we look forward to working with you in 2018.
Happy holidays and New Year!