COLUMNS

Will Biden Be Radical Enough?

ROBERT KUTTNER

We can all celebrate President Biden’s first hundred days. His appointments have been mostly better than feared. He is dreaming big on everything from COVID relief and recovery to a large-scale infrastructure program. His $1.9 trillion rescue program achieves goals that have long eluded progressives, most notably a much enlarged temporary child tax credit, which will be difficult to terminate next year once experienced by so many Americans. Activist government is back, and it’s broadly popular. And the deficit hawks have been banished from the temple.

He, and we, also benefit from the kind of splits in the Republican Party of which Democrats only dream. Biden’s program is far more popular with Republican voters than with Republican politicians. Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump are at each other’s throats.

The Republican schisms bode well for 2022. Normally, Democrats would lose seats in a new president’s first midterm. Another 10 to 15 Democratic House seats are at risk from redistricting. However, this loss could be offset by Republican fratricide. If center-right Republicans in swing districts are ousted in primaries by farright Trumpers, Democrats could pick up those seats.

The amazing on-the-ground efforts of 2017–2018 helped the Democrats pick up 41 House seats in 2018. That upsurge of organizing was short-circuited by the pandemic in 2020, while Trump went right on with live, infectious campaigning. But Trump will not be on the ballot in 2022.

With the GOP fractured, Democratic turnout could easily exceed Republican. The Senate also looks good, with more vulnerable Republican seats than Democratic ones. As I reported in a feature piece in our last issue, the Democrats now have a party chair in Jaime Harrison who believes in local partybuilding and long-term organizing, Howard Dean style.

Economic tailwinds, and the massive relief of the pandemic being over, will also help the Democrats hold their own, maybe even make gains. Analysts expect the economy to grow as much as 7 percent this year.

All that said, the challenges go much deeper than Democratic prospects for the midterms. The big risk is that Biden will not be able to transform the American political economy, Roosevelt fashion, in a fashion that transforms life chances for working people. And if that is the case, despite Biden’s popularity the grievances that helped propel the Tea Party and Trump will remain to reinfect the polity.

THE NEW DEAL did three big, extraordinary things. First, it imposed a salutary straitjacket on capital. Second, it empowered labor. And third, it used government in visible and dramatic ways to help regular people.

Due to the historical accident of World War II, the 1940s did even more of this than the 1930s. By the time war broke out, Roosevelt had pretty well purged abuses from the big banks and brokerage houses. The war buildup required a great deal of public capital, as well as income surtaxes as high as 93 percent on the wealthy. The need for wartime debt financing put speculative capital markets on hold, and pegged interest rates on government bonds. This further tilted the balance against concentrated private wealth.

The war buildup also produced overfull employment. Wages were controlled, but companies bid for scarce workers with good health and pension benefits. The wartime no-strike pledge required government to redouble its alliance with organized labor. Defense contractors—every large corporation that mattered—were required to recognize unions. The big wage gains, built on these structural changes, came in the postwar period.

By the time the war ended, the relationship between capital, labor, and government had been transformed. Ordinary people could live a middle-class lifestyle on one income. The power of unions meant that rising productivity translated into regularly rising earnings, well beyond the minimum wage (which was far higher in real terms then than now).

Most jobs were regular payroll jobs. Temp work was rare, and gig work hadn’t been invented. The tax system remained steeply progressive through the late 1970s. In the three prosperous postwar decades, the distribution of income and wealth became more equal.

Some of the economic security of the working middle class was a one-time happy convergence. Cheap farmland could be converted to affordable housing within commuting distance of large cities. It was possible for people to attend public university for free, without too much toll on the public treasury, because far fewer went to college. Trade was simply not an issue, because there wasn’t much.

Yet attributing the good package of jobs, housing, and education to a one-time lucky convergence of events lets politics off the hook too easily. Much of the postwar social contract was the result of deliberate policies, which in turn transformed power relations. Government intervened on the side of labor, against capital. Speculative transnational movements of money were prohibited. Public universities were tuition-free as a matter of state policy. The GI Bill even paid living stipends as well as covering college tuition, public or private. Those interventions were not happy accidents. They reflected a profound power shift.

This basic social compact continued through the 1970s, when the combination of stagflation, globalization, and the resurgence of corporate power set in motion its reversal. The erosion became more explicit

with the advent of Reaganism, and then with the Democratic me-too embrace of a lot of the neoliberal formula.

A shift back to the power relations of the era that spanned FDR through Johnson will require a transformation as revolutionary as that of the New Deal, in far less auspicious circumstances. Prospect co-editor Paul Starr has given us the concept of entrenchment—the tendency of politics and policies to be self-reinforcing. The New Deal revolution stayed entrenched for more than a generation. It changed norms as well as laws, reinforcing the entrenchment. But now the Reagan Revolution has been entrenched for longer than FDR’s, with aid and comfort from Wall Street Democrats. And it will be a bear to reverse.

BIDEN, MERCIFULLY, has broken with many of the neoliberal shibboleths that characterized the Clinton and Obama presidencies. He supports massive public investment, and rethinking orthodox trade and fiscal policy. That’s a promising start.

But what would Biden’s administration have to do in order to restore anything like the Roosevelt-Johnson era’s distribution of income, wealth, power, and life chances? The grotesque inequality and insecurity of today’s economy operates at both the bottom and the top. Let’s start with the liberation of capital.

The wreckage of the New Deal regulatory model has allowed the hyperconcentration of finance, with proliferation of business models such as hedge funds and private equity that do little to help the real economy but allow astronomical incomes at the top as well as intensified turbulence for ordinary companies and workers. The financial collapse provided both a reason and an occasion for the Obama administration to perform Roosevelt-style surgery on Wall Street. But Obama’s team settled for tinkering around the edges. High incomes are more highly concentrated than ever.

Another source of grotesque income concentration is the evisceration of antitrust. Many of the world’s wealthiest people are tech monopolists.

Getting serious about competition policy is necessary to moderate these supernormal profits. The abuse of patent, trademark, and copyright laws also promotes income extremes at the top, most dramatically in pharma and tech but elsewhere as well.

To seriously undertake these reforms, Biden would need to declare war on the excesses of concentrated capital, much as FDR did. But despite the COVID economic crisis, Biden doesn’t have Roosevelt’s sort of national emergency or Roosevelt’s large working majority in Congress. And he is chummier with Wall Street donors than Roosevelt was. He doesn’t welcome their hatred.

Biden is spending money to combat the crisis, but is not shaking the dominance of capital. These opportunities to drastically constrain the excesses of capitalism come once or twice in a century. FDR met his rendezvous with destiny. Obama missed his.

There is a similar story at the middle and bottom of the income scale. To restore anything like the living standards and life prospects for ordinary people of the postwar boom, government would need to radically intervene on the side of labor, starting with the labor movement. John L. Lewis could say, with only slight poetic license, “President Roosevelt wants you to join the union.” Biden finally got around to saying that, indirectly, he supports the organizing drive at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama. He needs to go further.

A $15 minimum wage, still a long shot, is a bare beginning. Given the cost of living, it should be at least $20. Beyond that, government policy should make it illegal or at least uneconomic for corporations to convert payroll jobs to gigs. And government would need to supplement all that with massive job creation at good wages, such as making every human-service job a middle-class profession, as well as income supports. The good news is that the pandemic’s emergency measures took some steps toward a universal basic income, and opened the door to bolder experimentation, one of Roosevelt’s favorite concepts.

Lasting gains on the worker income and security front will require a massive revival of the labor movement. Strong unions are a direct source of worker power. They are a constituency for a progressive, worker-focused Democratic Party; and a source of worker education about how capitalism really works, and thus a partial inoculation against the false allure of Trumpism. Even with a supportive Biden administration, building back labor will be trench warfare.

HERE IS THE practical litmus: How much would have to change about the workaday economy and government’s role in it for Trump voters to give progressive populism a second look? One would have to be a giddy optimist to expect a Rooseveltian transformation by 2022 or 2024. But perhaps some plausible steps in that direction can give voters confidence that more are on the way?

On top of all this is the challenge of race. The New Deal social contract, disgracefully, could get the necessary legislative support of Dixiecrats who controlled key congressional committees only by doubling down on Jim Crow. The New Deal not only denied nearly all Blacks the protections of Social Security and the Wagner Act, by excluding such occupations as farmworker and domestic worker. It deliberately introduced racial segregation to places that had been integrated in the North, via racially separate public housing and racially restricted covenants mandated by the Federal Housing Administration.

Today, the long-deferred demand for racial justice is due and payable. So Biden will not only need to take radical steps to rebalance labor, capital, and government. He will need to succeed in a project whose success eluded Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson—creating a durable transracial political coalition. Heather McGhee’s superb new book, The Sum of Us, reviewed in these pages, points to a hopeful if paradoxical strategy of anti-racism as coalition: to remind whites of all the ways that racism hurts them too, by denying them policies of common class uplift.

If that strategy could ever succeed, Trumpism is finished. But for it to prevail, the other economic transformations must prevail as well. In short, to succeed as a liberal, Biden must govern as a radical.

The campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren gave us a taste of what progressive populism looks like. In 2016, Sanders did succeed in peeling off some voters who eventually defected to Trump.

Biden is not Sanders. Neither, of course, is Biden FDR. However, even FDR, who began as an advocate of budget balance, got radicalized in office. To some extent, events make the president. One has to hope that pressure from the party left, combined with the political logic of the situation and Biden’s own growing boldness, will keep pushing his administration deeper in the direction of progressive populism.

Even so, just about everything will have to break right— in a fateful race between a radically transformed economy and the next incarnation of Donald Trump. n

A Year of Border Lockdown, and Counting

How Biden is defending a Trump-era immigration policy

BY MARCIA BROWN

IN MARCH 2020, AS the pandemic raged around the world, America closed its doors. The Trump administration used a 1940s public-health ordinance to turn away virtually all immigrants, even blocking wouldbe asylum seekers that international law requires the U.S. to admit. Even Trump’s meager and unnecessarily cruel immigration entry policies were shut down by this order. Nearly all metering lists, which limit the number of people who can request asylum per day at a port of entry, were shut down. Few were added to the “Remain in Mexico,” or MPP, program, which required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearing.

One year later, the Biden administration is peeling back the layers that block asylum. Biden in January stopped all additions to the MPP program. In February, he began to slowly process and admit at least 29,000 asylum seekers with open cases in the Remain in Mexico program. But President Biden has left that key Trump border closure policy in place. Its endurance means that there is still virtually no asylum at the border for anyone who has arrived since March 2020.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) order Trump invoked, known as Title 42 after the section of U.S. Code dealing with public health, allows for temporary entry suspensions, which U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has used to expel any migrant, without screening for human trafficking or fear of return. An agreement with Mexico’s government allows the U.S. to expel Mexicans and Central Americans across the border, but other nationals are immediately deported to their country of origin. Those with humanitarian visas or residency in Mexico are also sent to Mexico.

Combined with the Remain in Mexico program, this led to thousands of migrants waiting at the border throughout 2020. Human Rights First tracked at least 816 reports of murder, torture, rape, kidnapping, and other violent attacks on migrants and asylum seekers returned to Mexico in MPP’s first year.

Biden has kept the Title 42 order in place. CBP recorded more than 400,000 Title 42 expulsions in fiscal year 2020. To date, CBP has carried out nearly 300,000 expulsions in fiscal year 2021, which began October 1, 2020. The data does not disaggregate recidivism, but immigration advocates say that many of these expulsions are people who, in desperation, try to cross repeatedly. Most people expelled are single adult men, but some are families, too.

Some of the deportation flights carried out by the new administration have also included those expelled under Title 42. Although not everyone attempting to cross the border is an asylum seeker, for those who are seeking protection, the Title 42 ban is creating desperation—with no end in sight.

“There is no right to seek asylum. There is no process to seek asylum for anybody who doesn’t have an open MPP case,” said Alex Mensing, an organizer with Pueblos Sin Fronteras, a human rights group. “The only information is ‘Wait.’ That’s the only message and that’s just not good enough for people who have been waiting in really horrible conditions for years.”

Most public-health experts say that Title 42 is a bogus health order that does little to stop the spread of COVID-19. While asylum seekers are expelled and deported at the border, millions of Americans have been able to cross into other countries and back freely. Even CDC officials have long objected to the policy. One former CDC official told CBS News, “We were forced to do it.” The Associated Press reported that Vice President Mike Pence overruled a top CDC doctor in order to close the borders.

Since its implementation, advocates have sought to enjoin the policy. In November 2020, a district court issued a nationwide order blocking the administration from deporting unaccompanied children under Title 42, but a federal court in January overturned this. Last month, the ACLU of Massachusetts announced a new challenge to the Title 42 ban, arguing that the government’s expulsions did not adhere to U.S. immigration law.

The main difference in Biden’s implementation is that border officials are no longer deporting unaccompanied children under Title 42. That decision, combined with confusion about Biden’s border policies among migrants, has led to a dramatic increase in the number of unaccompanied children taken into custody, transferred to the refugee office, and placed with a sponsor. In February, shelters received more than 7,000 unaccompanied children, double the number accepted in February 2020.

But this was not what immigrant rights’ advocates and public-health experts sought when Biden took office; they urged a quick reversal of the entire order. A February 2 letter asked Biden to keep his campaign promises and end “inhumane Trump administration border policies.” Public-health experts added to the chorus.

“Our letter really was seeking to pull the fig leaf off of [the publichealth] argument,” said Michele Heisler, medical director for Physicians for Human Rights. “It was always an ideologically oriented, politically motivated effort to deter asylum seekers, against international law, against national law, against our values.”

But in a press briefing on March 1, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defended the order. “If families come, if single adults come to the border, we are obligated to, in the service of public health, including the health of the very people who are thinking of coming, to impose the travel restrictions under the CDC’s Title 42 authorities and return them to Mexico,” he said. A week later, Ambassador Roberta Jacobson, who is the coordinator for the southern border, directly said at a White House press briefing, in

Spanish, “The border is closed.”

The administration’s public statements on Title 42 have put the administration in the bizarre position of defending a public-health order they know to be bogus. Even their own processing of unaccompanied children and of asylum seekers in the MPP program belies their public-health rationale; those admitted are COVID-19 tested and placed in quarantine if they test positive. (Very few test positive at all.)

Indeed, the Title 42 order appears to be an excuse, an effort to buy the administration time to untangle the web of Trump border restrictions. But it’s also creating the very border chaos Biden has publicly vowed to stop.

THIS IS HARDLY THE first time the U.S. has turned would-be migrants away under a health rationale; migration control policies date back to before America was a country. The Immigration Act of 1891 banned entry to anyone “suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease.” This was a more common scenario at the time. “It was business as usual to have some kind of epidemic,” said David FitzGerald, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies migration controls.

European immigrants traveling by boat in the 19th century experienced medical screening, but the degree of scrutiny varied from steerage to first class. The opening scene of The Godfather Part II depicts a young Don Corleone, fleeing violence in Sicily, forced to quarantine on Ellis Island, a common practice but applied almost exclusively to poor immigrants.

At European ports of departure, FitzGerald explained, even shipping companies hired doctors to examine emigrants before they boarded boats to America, because if someone was turned away at Ellis Island, the shipping company was liable for returning that person to Europe. In some countries, the U.S. government stationed government doctors abroad for health examinations. Using “buffer” countries for screening and quarantine is also a long-standing practice. Some European immigrants arrived via Halifax or Quebec, where they quarantined before entering other parts of Canada or the U.S.

But the Title 42 order stands out. “What’s different about it is the way that it’s been used,” said FitzGerald. “I’m not aware of other precedents of that, the way that asylum seekers have been expelled back into Mexico.”

Immigration rights advocates say that enforcing the Title 42 ban is a violation of non-refoulement, an

The U.S. is allowing over 29,000 asylum seekers with open cases under the Migrant Protection Protocols to cross the border. But no one new has been added to the program since last March.

international principle of the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention banning governments from deporting people to countries where they may be persecuted. “Under the Trump administration, it absolutely was refoulement,” Heisler said. It’s unclear, as of publication, how it’s any different under the Biden administration; in Reynosa, a border city in Mexico, new asylum seekers and migrants are expelled every day and linger in a plaza near the port of entry. Reynosa volunteers who spoke to the Prospect described the situation as cyclical, explaining that they bring food and supplies to new people every day. Nearby migrant shelters are full.

When the order was initially signed, one stated concern of the Trump administration was that migrants would be detained in congregate settings, a petri dish for the spread of COVID-19. But advocates point out that there’s no law requiring the government to detain asylum seekers. The government can parole migrants with a hearing date and connect them with family and sponsors in the U.S. The state of California has budgeted for hotel rooms for asylum seekers admitted in the MPP program to quarantine before traveling to their final destination.

Advocates are skeptical that the administration can’t do more because of pandemic-related restrictions. “The administration is saying they can’t process a handful of asylum seekers a day at some of the largest ports of entry in the world,” said Kennji Kizuka, a policy analyst for Human Rights First. “Just boggles the mind that they can’t find ways to do that safely.”

Tom Cartwright, a volunteer who tracks deportations for Witness at the Border, said that given Biden’s focus on COVID-19 safety, anything that even looks like it could be a risk will be heavily scrutinized. He added, “I think that there is an innate fear, mostly fueled by the right wing, of a surge, a crisis, all of these inflammatory words about people coming to the border, and that they won’t be able to handle them in a humane way.” Mainstream news outlets have been reporting high numbers of Border Patrol apprehensions, but often leaving out a big part of the story. It’s true there are high numbers of new arrivals at the border, hoping the new administration with more humane rhetoric might allow them to cross, but it’s also true that many of the apprehensions are people who are trying to cross three, four, five times and are summarily returned.

As of early March, the administration was only processing asylum seekers at three ports of entry at a rate of roughly 25 people per port per day. There are 29,000 open MPP cases that are eligible for admission, according to the administration’s plans for phase one. At this rate, it will take months to process them. Then there are another 40,000 people whose cases have been closed, but for whom the administration has expressed support for allowing to appeal. And these are the historical cases. Since March 2020, only those who cannot be deported under Title 42—mostly individuals whose governments refused to accept deportees—have been added to the MPP program. With no guidelines for those expelled under Title 42, thousands of asylum seekers still on preCOVID metering lists and those who have approached the border since the program’s end are in limbo, with no status, no place in line, and no communication from the administration except to wait without indication of for how long.

On the campaign trail and since the inauguration, Biden has taken pains to emphasize that his immigration policies will be more humane than Trump’s, or even President Obama’s. But his administration has maintained a virtual ban on asylum. The border is still closed, officials say repeatedly.

That message isn’t getting through, however, and new migrants and asylum seekers arrive daily, hoping Biden’s tone might be reflected in his border policies. Instead, the Title 42 health order appears to be a tool for the Biden administration to create an artificial pause in migration, perhaps to allow for reconstruction of a system dismantled by Trump. But instead of achieving that, the order has contributed to confusion and suffering, forcing migrants back into treacherous Mexican border towns.

The administration has applied a “tourniquet” to the border, said Cartwright. “It has essentially destroyed any ability of migrants to assert their legal right to protection in the United States.” n

Migrants gather at the border in Tijuana. The Biden administration’s use of Title 42 is creating an artificial pause in migration.