Sunday School 9/18/22

We're talking immigration this week, starting with your Sunday School and ABC's This Week classroom. Jon Karl was in the host's chair, and talked first with Oscar Leeser, El Paso's mayor. 

Karl asked him to describe what's happening in his city, with 1300 migrants a day arriving there. Leeser said it's more than that - north of 1500, nearly 2000 in recent days and some 80% are Venezuelans. 

Leeser said he's got a good working relationship with the Border Patrol, and that

our goal, and it will continue to be our goal, is never to drop anybody off in the streets of El Paso and make sure that no one’s homeless, no one’s hungry. So, we have our NGOs, which is non-governmental organizations that really have opened up their doors and we’ve gotten hotels. And in the last few days we’ve not had any people released into the streets of El Paso...

Karl asked Leeser to explain what he does when he arranges for migrants to move north, which is different than what Gov. Greg Abbott is doing by dropping them in front of the Vice President's residence. 

Leeser made a great point in his response.

...if you look at -- the people are not coming to El Paso, they're coming to America, and that's something that's really important.

While (in my words, not the mayor's), Abbott shoves people on a bus and sends them to a political target, Leeser and NGOs in El Paso try to get them where they want to go, where they have people they know. In the past, around 95% of asylum seekers and migrants had sponsors - family or friends who have arranged transportation, and who are waiting for the person to arrive. And now?

So, we have about 50% of the people today that do not have a sponsor, they don’t have money. So, we're helping and working to get them to where they want to go. So, that's been really important that we don't send anyone where they don't want to go. We make sure we help them and we put human beings and, you know, and we put them on buses with food and make sure they get to their destination where -- and make sure that we always continue to treat people like human beings.

NYC Eric Adams was up next; I'll have a longer interview with him in your Extra Credit, so I'll keep his remarks here brief. Adams said he's been working with New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, as well as with the Biden administration, 

to talk about how do we coordinate and their goal is to make sure that we get the resources and the coordination that’s needed, as the mayor of El Paso stated. These migrants and asylum seekers are not coming to any particular city. They're coming to America. This is an American crisis that we need to face, the humanitarian crisis that were made by human hands by some of the governors in our southern states.

He said there's no coordination with the childish governors Abbott and now DeSantis. He reached out to Abbott and his team, asking for coordination but that's not what they got.

They took the call and stated that they would coordinate... and they did not coordinate at all because I don’t think it was politically expedient for them to coordinate. It was more to do this basically political gamesmanship that you're seeing now.

And, finally, he's committed to New York City remaining a sanctuary city, echoing Mayor Leeser's thoughts.

Let's be clear here, we've all come from somewhere. Our lineage came from a location and the pursuit of the American dream is what we’ve all fought for... And I will always believe that this is a country where people want to pursue the American dream, and there are ways it can be done correctly.

So, having heard from a sender, and a receiver, it's time to hear from the panel: Marc Short, former chief of staff to VP Mike Pence; former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp; Mariana Sotomayor (WaPo), and Alex Burns (Politico). Here are a few highlights.

• Heitkamp said that the 'stunts' perpetrated by Abbott and DeSantis aren't working. She also said that some of what's happening now was predictable, and there was a "lack of preparation" which she blames on both the current and previous administrations. She also said there's a difference between how we treat Cubans and Venezuelans, even though both are "fleeing the same kind of dictatorial, communist regime. And finally, Biden should sit down with Abbott and DeSantis now and figure something out.

• Short said none of this was happening under the previous administration because it "actually secured the border." He also talked about the "hypocrisy and...in many cases, fake outrage" by folks on the left and in the media. And, he said, migrants in Florida aren't walking there themselves, the Biden administration is flying them in - and it's not just Florida. How's that OK, he asked, but it's wrong for governors to ship them to "one of the wealthiest communities in America..."

• Sotomayor said there doesn't seem to be much of a strategy from the administration or from Capitol Hill. It might be a topic this week, what with the Martha's Vineyard shenanigans, but this close to the midterms, no one's apt to want to talk about it, other than the Rs - but they're not talking about legislative solutions; they've "tried and tried and tried again and there's just no discussion right now about whether to actually engage in any changes."

• Burns said the governors are "playing to gallery on the right in their own parties and in their own states, ahead of re-election votes that both of them are highly, highly likely to prevail in and then, maybe, turn around and run for president." He said that we have a "generational, bipartisan policy failure" on immigration, but Abbott and DeSantis aren't doing anything that serious from a policy perspective.

• Karl noted that "the administration is not putting forward anything" either.

I agree with Jon Karl on that point, the Vice President's comments last week about our "secure" border notwithstanding.

I'll close with perhaps the oddest comment from the classroom, which came from Marc Short, who said

... if we were really concerned about the humanitarian crisis, Jon, then actually what we would be doing is we'd be stopping the crisis at the border, where there's 200,000 migrants every month. And they estimate 50 percent of the young women are either raped or sexually molested making that long journey from Peru and Colombia up there. If we actually had a policy in place that returned migrants to Mexico while they waited for their asylum appeals, as happened in the Trump-Pence administration, you wouldn't have the same humanitarian crisis we have today.

What on earth is he trying to say here? That the women who are raped or sexually assaulted on the way here would be better off if they were kept in Mexico? Or is it that he couldn't care less about what happens to them on the trip, as long as we don't get stuck with them?

Pretty sure we all know the answer to that question.

See you around campus.

Sunday School 3/13/22: Extra Credit

 As promised, I'm doing some paneling for your Extra Credit this week. The gang on This Week - Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-SD); WaPo columnist George Will, Jane Coaston, of the NY Times, and Mary Bruce of ABC News joined Jon Karl to chat about Ukraine and more.

George Will gave the best explanation I've heard for us not establishing a no-fly zone; his explanation is simple.

The second use of nuclear weapons was three days after the first in Nagasaki. There hasn't been one since. It's an amazing human achievement and we really don't want Putin to erase that line.

Jon Karl wondered if there was more we could be doing, and he suggested that taking something off the table without drawing a red line in the sand over something - Putin using chemical or biological weapons for example - doesn't make sense. 

Heitkamp pointed out that we did draw a red line: it's NATO territory - that's our obligation under NATO's Article 5 commitment, but she noted some people think we should be doing more.

So, this idea that there is no -- you know, we're not going to provoke World War III, they believe we're already there and that we're simply capitulating for no good reason when we could be stopping it right here.

Mary Bruce was upset that no one in the administration would tell her specifically what they'd do if Putin used chemical or biological weapons. We've already done layers of sanctions.

So, what is still left, if Putin does take this step? And I do think it is notable, while the president has said over and over again, "There will not be any direct engagement between American forces and the Russians," when asked what would happen if Putin did use chemical weapons, he didn't give a definitive answer...

Coaston echoed Will's thoughts on the no-fly zone: it sounds good, which is why over 70% of Americans support it, but at the same time, we're just out of a 20-year war. 

 ...I think that this is a really complicated issue because, on the one hand, you have the optics concerns here, but if you're this administration, you're thinking, if Russia hits a NATO country, if Russia engages in nuclear proliferation, that -- that's a calculus they have not yet begun to contemplate.

Moving to gas prices (anyone with a microphone must mention this at least once a day), Karl referenced some polling showing we think it's OK to "ban Russian oil even if it means higher prices, but we're going to blame Biden." 

Heitkamp said the party in power always gets blamed, but she also pointed out that Biden folks haven't been pushing back effectively on the red herrings, like 

"It's because you didn't build the Keystone XL Pipeline." And I remind them, one of the first things Donald Trump did was give the permit. And in four years the pipeline didn't get built. Why not? Because it wasn't -- it wasn't economical to build that pipeline in those price points.

She also deflated the inflation argument, pointing out that "it was the Trump administration that overspent and drove up inflation." When Karl pointed to the "shocking increase" since February, Heitkamp said it's because we started at "an artificially low price," and "we're shocked because we got used to $2 gas. And that's the problem." 

The best part was when Coaston chimed in.

I also think it's worth recognizing -- and there was a great Fox News piece from 2008 -- that noted that the president has markedly little control of what gas prices are. There is no big "cheap gas" button in the Oval Office. And if there were, somebody would have pushed it.

There was much laughter about her "great Fox News piece" intro, but it's true: there may have been a Diet Coke button, but there's no cheap gas button. 

Karl and Mary Bruce spent some air time patting Trump patsy Kevin McCarthy (R-Cali-largo) on the back for being critical of the people who support Putin. Here's Bruce, saying "that's a lot" for Kevin McCarthy,

who has gone to some lengths to maintain a relationship with Donald Trump. I think you are seeing not just Kevin McCarthy but also Mitch McConnell come out and make clear where they stand on Vladimir Putin. They haven't gone as far though as to directly call out Trump.

McCarthy won't, for sure. The last time he did that, he immediately tucked tail and crawled to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the club championship trophy or a fake Time Man of the Year cover or something. 

I can't decide whether to leave the last word to George Will, or to Sen. Heitkamp; you can decide which you'll carry with you longer.

First, here's Will:

...Putin, like some of the acolytes in this country, is a weak person's idea of a strong person. Strength, you hear all the time, it’s sort of chest beating, dime-store Mussolini kind of toughness and I don't think it goes much deeper than that.

And, here's Heitkamp:

... right now, brave people within Russia are risking their lives to tell the truth about what's happening in Ukraine, to tell the truth about Putin... trying to get rid of disinformation, and we have useful idiots here in this country and, you know, I’m not going to call the whole Republican Party but they own some of this, right? ...people are risking their lives in Russia today to get... the correct information. And ...the propaganda machine in Russia is using these useful idiots in Congress.

Will's right, and so is Heitkamp. The question is, will anyone listen to them? 

See you around campus.