A story in The Hill about the forces preventing adoption of new taxes on super-rich Americans quoted Public Policy chair Martin Gilens. Polls show that a majority of voters — both Democrats and Republicans — believe the country’s billionaires should pay more in taxes. Democrats in the White House and Congress have put forth several proposals for progressive taxation on the wealthy, but their chances are “slim to none in the short term and even perhaps the medium term,” said Gilens, co-author of a 2014 study showing the outsize influence of rich people and trade groups on U.S. government policies. Elected representatives spend an enormous amount of time with wealthy constituents or potential donors, and this “creates a sense of distortion about both what the public wants and what seems reasonable,” he said. “Whether taxing wealth seems like a reasonable thing to do might depend on whether you spend a lot of time hanging out with wealthy people.”
Associate Professor of Public Policy Sarah Reber co-authored a new working paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research assessing the federal relief bills created for schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper, a joint project by Reber and Nora Gordon, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, explored whether federal COVID relief funds for schools were sufficient. Congress responded to the disruptions caused by the pandemic by distributing $200 billion in federal aid for schools through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds. While this amount is about 12 times more than the typical level of funding distributed through Title I, Reber noted that the amount of per-pupil federal aid that schools received varied considerably across districts. For example, some districts in Detroit received $6,000 per pupil while districts like nearby Bloomfield Hills received less than $100 per pupil. The authors pointed out that different districts faced different costs for COVID-19 mitigation and recovery. Reber and Gordon estimated the net fiscal impact of COVID-19 and the federal relief by taking into consideration how much COVID-19 affected costs for schools, how those costs depend on child poverty rates, and the effect of the pandemic on state aid to school districts. Federal aid was distributed based on Title I proportions, sending more money per pupil to higher-poverty districts. “Low-poverty districts are therefore projected to face some budgetary shortfalls, while many higher-poverty districts are projected to have excess funds, which they could direct towards long-standing challenges,” Reber explained. — Zoe Day
The New York Times spoke to Jody Heymann, a UCLA distinguished professor of public health, public policy and medicine, about access to family and medical leave. Congressional Democrats are proposing four weeks of paid leave, down from 12 weeks initially sought in their spending plan. If the plan becomes law, the United States will no longer be one of six countries in the world without any form of national paid leave. However, it would still be an outlier. Of the 174 countries that offer paid leave for a personal health problem, just 26 offer four weeks or fewer, according to data from UCLA’s World Policy Analysis Center, which Heymann directs. “When you look at other countries, there is evidence of what people need and what’s feasible,” Heymann said. “And by both of those measures, 12 weeks is a modest amount, and anything less is grossly inadequate. The rest of the world, including low-income countries, has found a way to do this.”
Professor of Urban Planning Vinit Mukhija spoke to the New York Times about the failures of the federal housing relief packages created during the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to the economic devastation caused by the pandemic, Congress created a $46.5 billion fund for emergency rental assistance, one of the biggest infusions in federal housing aid in generations. However, resistance from landlords and difficulties navigating the informal housing market made it difficult for residents to access aid packages, and much of the aid is unspent. The relief package did not account for informal and un-permitted housing arrangements, including subletters and roommates whose claim to their space often isn’t documented. “There’s a completely hidden story about how do we access millions of tenants that are in un-permitted units,” Mukhija said. In Los Angeles County, there are an estimated 200,000 illegal housing units, highlighting the contrast between the low-income rental market and the rest of the housing market.
Director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge Paul Ong was featured in the Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and Long Beach Post discussing the results of the 2020 Census and its impact on communities of color. Accurate census counts are crucial for the distribution of federal aid and congressional representation, but Ong’s analysis of the census data suggests that Hispanic and Black populations may have been undercounted more than other groups. “There is strong evidence that undercounts in the 2020 census are worse than in past decades,” he said. Ong noted that renters, undocumented immigrants and low-income households were also undercounted, partially due to the disruption caused by the pandemic and the Trump administration’s attempt to include a citizenship question. “The big-picture implication is it will skew the redistricting process, our undercounted neighborhoods will be underrepresented, and populations that are undercounted will be shortchanged when it comes to the allocation of federal spending,” Ong concluded.
The Washington Post was one of several media outlets reporting on a statement of concern about threats facing American democracy, signed by Public Policy Chair Martin Gilens and over 100 other scholars. The statement was a response to efforts by GOP-led state legislatures to restrict voting, which President Joe Biden referred to as an “assault on democracy … aimed at Black and brown Americans.” The statement, published by the public policy think tank New America, highlighted Republican efforts threatening the fundamental principles of democracy and urged Democrats in Congress to reform or end the filibuster to pass sweeping voting rights protections. The authors called for federal protections to ensure the neutral and fair administration of elections and guarantee that all voters can freely exercise their right to vote. “Our entire democracy is now at risk,” they wrote. “History will judge what we do at this moment.” The Hill, Business Insider, Forbes and other news organizations also covered the statement.
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas sees Democrats in power in Washington, D.C., and thinks the time may finally have arrived for comprehensive reform of U.S. immigration policy.
“It’s not very often that Democrats have control of the presidency and both chambers of the Congress,” Castro said during a May 4 webinar hosted by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative. “There’s a real opportunity here to pass comprehensive immigration reform and put 11 million undocumented folks — many of whom are ‘Dreamers’ or others, like their parents, who have been here for generations — on a path to citizenship.”
Castro, who introduced one of four immigration-related bills currently making their way through the political process in Washington, knows it won’t be easy, given the narrow Democratic majorities in both houses and longstanding GOP opposition to immigration reform that includes citizenship. Still, waiting too long could doom the effort.
As the 2022 midterm elections draw closer, elected officials will become “very cautious about the votes that they take,” Castro noted. “So, there’s got to be a lot of momentum and a big push to get immigration reform done this year.”
Castro’s comments came during a 10-minute live interview with webinar moderator Russell Contreras, a justice and race reporter at Axios, that set the tone for a panel discussion with scholars and political experts focusing on the challenges and opportunities for U.S. immigration reform.
During the interview, Castro spoke about why immigration policy reform is so important to him. He represents a district in the San Antonio area that is home to many Mexican Americans like himself.
“In our community, there’s an incredible sense of fairness, there’s obviously an incredible sense of family,” said Castro, whose mother is a renowned community activist and whose twin brother is former presidential candidate Julian Castro.
“There is a permanent class of conservative politicians … who want to use the immigration issue as a way to scare Americans and make them think that there is a lot of brown people who are going to come into the country and harm them,” Castro said. “But you see Mexican American communities being very favorable toward giving immigrants a path to citizenship because they understand that experience. To them, [an immigrant] was their parent or their grandparent. So, when they hear all of the fear-mongering, most of the time, they don’t buy into that.”
Castro said he hopes an umbrella bill that includes comprehensive immigration reform can be passed during this session of Congress, although it has not yet come to a vote. He noted that two other immigration bills have already made it through the House, however, and he urged the U.S. Senate to move forward with that legislation.
Cecilia Menjívar, a professor of sociology at UCLA who is an expert on immigration issues, argued that such piecemeal reform probably has a greater chance of success. Although the current social and political environment is unlike any in recent history, she said systemic barriers are likely to continue to impede sweeping immigration reform efforts.
Joining Menjívar on the virtual panel were Angélica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, Los Angeles (CHIRLA), and Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute. All the speakers agreed that the national stance must recognize the complexities of the issue beyond border security and militarization.
Immigration reform is deeply interconnected with labor rights, access to education, health care and violence in other countries, they noted.
“You can legalize the people in the U.S., but if you don’t deal with the system that keeps us out and kicks us out, then you are not doing service to our community,” Salas said.
The so-called border crisis is actually a regional international policy problem, Selee said. “If you have lots of people coming in an irregular fashion, we need to rethink how we facilitate a legal path to immigration.”
Salas called for an urgent change in enforcement. “The detention system is a for-profit system,” she said. “Too many corporations [make] money off of the detention of our people.”
U.S. immigration policy also needs to account for the economic contributions made by the millions of undocumented workers throughout the country, Selee said.
Menjívar cautioned that immigrants should be recognized in a manner that avoids “reducing them to a dollar sign,” noting the many “social and cultural contributions [immigrants] have made to this country over decades.”
Selee pointed out that almost half of immigrants today have college degrees, representing potential talent that can help catalyze economic recovery in the wake of COVID-19.
“Unlock that potential, [and] it would fit in really well in a moment where we are trying to recover economically,” he said.
Director of the Los Angeles Initiative Zev Yaroslavsky spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the significance of recent Republican victories in Congress. In November, California Republicans recaptured four of the seven congressional seats that had flipped to Democrats two years earlier. All four winning congressional candidates are from immigrant backgrounds, illustrating that the Republican Party can achieve voter support by avoiding political extremes and appealing to diverse communities. The four congressional districts that flipped back to Republicans still chose Democrat Joe Biden over President Donald Trump, indicating voter desires for moderation instead of extremism. Yaroslavsky expects these districts to be highly competitive for years to come. “For Republicans to be a viable party, they’re going to have to expand their base,” he said. “They can’t just rely on white voters, because that number is dropping. As we’ve seen, the trend is a more purple 50-50 split in these areas.”
Voting rights experts from around the country gathered at a UCLA conference to brainstorm ways to protect Americans’ access to the ballot box, even as votes cast in the 2020 election continued to be challenged in court.
Elected officials on the front lines of the civil rights fight joined legal scholars, policy analysts, attorneys and advocates at the Dec. 8–9 virtual seminar. The event was hosted by the Voting Rights Project, a division of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at UCLA Luskin.
The seminar’s organizers intend to turn the attendees’ shared wisdom into a report to Congress that could help shape comprehensive national legislation to safeguard the right to vote.
Among the topics that guided the conversation: voter suppression and intimidation during this year’s election cycle and the Supreme Court’s 2013 rollback of core provisions of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“This is what we get when we have elections without the full protection of the federal Voting Rights Act that stood and served well for more than 50 years,” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said. “It has unleashed the floodgates for a lot of the voter suppression measures that we’ve seen in the last seven years and we saw in full display in the 2020 election.”
Texas Rep. Marc Veasey, who co-founded the Congressional Voting Rights Caucus, said the country is witnessing “egregious stories that you would think we wouldn’t be seeing in modern-day America.”
In his state, he said, officials have attempted to require people registering to vote to first produce a birth certificate or passport. Another proposal, seen as an invitation to voter intimidation, would have permitted cellphone recordings of citizens casting their ballots as a way to document “fraud.”
“We’re revisiting a very dark time in U.S. history where people just absolutely have no regrets at all about rolling back the rights of people to be able to vote, particularly people of color,” he said.
For example, Padilla noted, during the Georgia primaries, the wait time to vote in Black neighborhoods averaged 51 minutes, compared with six minutes in white neighborhoods.
While some state and local jurisdictions are pushing for rules that chip away at the freedom to vote, others are lighting the way for federal reforms, the speakers stressed.
Padilla and Rhode Island Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea spoke of changes in their states that have made it easier for citizens to register and vote — changes that were accelerated because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“What made this cycle different is that the pandemic focused us to reexamine how people vote,” Gorbea said. “And in many of our states we adapted our democracy to provide easier and safer access to the ballot box, which meant that people could vote while still taking care of their health.”
The seminar included workshops that zeroed in on specific facets of the voting rights movement, including fair redistricting, equal access for low-income and minority communities, planning for the next public health crisis, and overcoming procedural hurdles that have blocked past efforts to bring change.
Panelists and participants in the audience weighed in on the strengths and omissions of legislation already in the pipeline, including HR1, the For the People Act, and HR4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Panelists represented several organizations with long histories of championing voting rights, including the ACLU, Campaign Legal Center, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Southern Coalition for Social Justice, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
The discussion took place amid persistent efforts by President Donald Trump and some of his supporters to discredit the results of the 2020 presidential election. Padilla said those efforts have been fueled by “baseless conspiracy theories that have been spewed that seek to question the legitimacy of votes cast by Black voters and Latino voters, among others.”
The seminar capped a hectic electoral season for the Voting Rights Project, whose members conducted research, wrote policy reports and appeared in court to battle efforts to disenfranchise voters.
Tye Rush, a UCLA political science doctoral student, said a reinvigorated Voting Rights Act for the 21st century would eliminate the need for piecemeal litigation of civil rights violations.
“We’re looking to get something in front of Congress that can be signed and that will protect against the onslaught of voting rights–related rollbacks that we’re seeing in this era,” said Rush, a research fellow at the Voting Rights Project.
Public Policy Professor Mark Peterson spoke to Elite Daily about a post-election scenario that has raised concerns: What would happen if President Trump lost reelection but refused to give up power? Trump has made multiple comments suggesting that he would not commit to stepping down if he lost the election. According to Peterson, this scenario is highly unlikely. Election results are verified through the Electoral College and then declared by Congress, he explained. An incumbent president who fails to win a second term yet refuses to leave the White House may be escorted off the premises by the newly elected president’s Secret Service detail once power changes hands on Inauguration Day. Peterson added that Trump’s claims of voter fraud are baseless and “undermine the confidence that people have in our institutions and in our elected officials.” And he expressed concern about potential violence from informal right-wing militias who might be triggered into action by a Trump loss.
