BPR Fall 2020 Issue 1

FALL 2020

ISSUE 01 SPECIAL FEATURE

HOME

Fall 2020, Issue 01

The Home Issue

Editors’ Note

What does “home” mean to you? Maybe it is your house, or apartment, or neighborhood or nation. It could be a place or person dear to you, or even something completely intangible. Perhaps you don’t feel like you have a home at all. For many people this year, home and all its meanings have been recontextualized amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Lawmakers and public health officials have sought to keep their communities safe from the disease through travel restrictions, stay-athome orders, and other efforts. The pandemic itself has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and jeopardized millions more. In this issue of BPR, our reflections on the meaning of home have been unavoidably colored by these events. Still, we hope that our examination of home, and how some have lost, found, defined, or redefined theirs, will resonate beyond our current moment.

As you read on, you will hear our authors share their insights into the politics of home.

Advocating for public investment in shelters for Indigenous women, Renny Jiang considers the reality facing a group of people who have been systemically deprived of a home for generations. Indigo Funk contemplates the plight of lovers separated by pandemic travel bans.

Sarah Roberts digs into the bureaucracy of the United States immigration system, arguing that individuals who want to make a home

in this nation should have easier access to visas and permanent residency. Audrey Kim spotlights the shame and stigmatization of unmarried women who give up their children for adoption in South Korea. Finally, Emily Teng discusses the decolonization of museums, and how various communities see their experiences depicted through art and curation. These pieces highlight the idea of home as, variously, a place, person, nation, family, and cultural history.

Due to the complications and challenges of the pandemic, this is BPR’s only issue of the semester. Our staff, and all the faculty and students of Brown University, are scattered around the world, taking classes from childhood bedrooms, dorm rooms, off-campus apartments, or not taking classes at all. Though we may or may not feel at home this fall, we hope our readers will find new ways to consider the importance of home in the pages ahead.

— Zander & Peter BPR Editors in Chief

Brown Political Review EXECUTIVE BOARD

CONTENT BOARD

EDITORS IN CHIEF Zander Blitzer Peter Lees

SENIOR MANAGING WEB EDITOR Jackson Segal

CHIEFS OF STAFF Emma Blake Kate Dario

ASSOCIATE SENIOR MANAGING WEB EDITORS Ellie Papapanou Tarana Sable

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Xiaoyu Huang SENIOR MANAGING WEB EDITOR Jackson Segal MANAGING WEB EDITORS Ellie Papapanou Tarana Sable SENIOR MANAGING MAGAZINE EDITOR Hannah Severyns CHIEF COPY EDITORS Gabriela Tenario Peter Zubagio INTERVIEWS DIRECTOR Amelia Spalter DATA DIRECTOR Emilia Ruzicka BUSINESS DIRECTOR Xiaoyu Huang CREATIVE DIRECTORS Jeff Katz Stephanie Wu Nina Yuchi MEDIA DIRECTORS Anson Shyu Griffin McLaughlin PODCAST DIRECTORS Henry Peebles-Capin Isabel Astrachan

Masthead CREATIVE CREATIVE DIRECTORS Jeff Katz Stephanie Wu Nina Yuchi ART DIRECTORS Pearl Au-Yeung Georgina Bronheim Jesse Hogan Kern Lee

US SENIOR EDITOR Molly Cook

WORLD SENIOR EDITOR Carlie Houser

EDITORS Meghan Murphy Matthew Bailey

EDITORS Matt Walsh Morgan McCordick

STAFF WRITERS Siena Capone Natalia Ibarra Chaelin Jung Jillian Lederman Jack Malamud Gabby Smith Jack Tajmajer Shane Tomaino Ricky Zhong

STAFF WRITERS Natalie Fredman Indigo Funk Daniel Halpert Charlie Key Morgan McCordick Jack Otero Ria Panjwani Aicha Sama Isabella Yepes

ECONOMY SENIOR EDITOR Noah Pirani

GRAPHIC DESIGN DIRECTORS Madi Ko Daniel Navratil GRAPHIC DESIGNERS Jiahua Chen Amy Lim

STAFF WRITERS Simon Giordano Ariana Haji Annabelle Hutchinson Jackson Kelley Matthew Lichtblau Tom O’Neill Nicholas Sawicki Akhil Saxena Sally Zhang

MEDIA BOARD

DATA DIRECTOR Emilia Ruzicka

MEDIA DIRECTORS Griffin McLaughlin Anson Shyu ASSOCIATES Mary Bibbey Muskaan Garg Mira Gupta Mina Kao Aila Kassandra Rodriguez John Liu Varun Senthil Nathan Irene Sung Autumn-Jade Stoner

PODCAST BOARD

LEAD WEB DEVELOPER Raymond Cao

EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS Henry Peebles-Capin Isabel Astrachan

EDITORIAL BOARD

COPY EDITORIAL BOARD

INTERVIEWS BOARD

SENIOR MANAGING MAGAZINE EDITOR Hannah Severyns

CHIEF COPY EDITORS Gabriela Tenorio Peter Zubagio

INTERVIEWS DIRECTOR Amelia Spalter

MANAGING EDITORS Eunice Chong Gabriel Merkel Henry Peebles-Capin

COPY EDITORS Caleigh Aviv Ben Cunningham Meehir Dixit Patrick Gilfillan Bridget Griswold Eric Guo Zeke Hertz Claire Hodges Elias Kaul Caleb Lazar Catherine McClenahan Jessa Mellea Malini Naidu Cynthia Ng Anna Park Eleanor Peters Kelly Raymond Amelia Wyckoff Claire Zeller

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Dalia Bresnick Hyun Choi Justen Joffe Chris Kobel Annabelle Liu Steven Long Sarah Roberts Krishi Saripalli Ben Singer Maia Vasaturo-Kolodner Rachel Yan

COVER ARTIST Angie Kang

DATA BOARD DATA ASSOCIATES Erika Bussmann Jiahua Chen Kevin Du William Jurayj Filip Kierzenka Michelle Liu Nathaniel Ostrer Ryan Simpson

EDITORS Milo Douglas Clare Longergan

CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATORS Hannah Chang Jinghong Chen Nicholas Edwards Katie Fliegel Sophia Foulkes Connor Gewirtz Jesse Hogan Joanna Kim Nadia Kossman Felipe Ortiz Brenda Rodriguez Jocelyn Salim Helena Suh Madison Tom

INTERVIEWS ASSOCIATES Augustus Bayard Alisa Caira Alex Fasseas Ryan Frant Alice Jo Haley Joyce Charlie Key Sam Kolitch Izzy Lazenby Shinyoung Lee Neha Mukherjee Hai Ning Ng Luke Redden Shilpa Sajja Neil Sehgal Zach Stern Tucker Wilke Anik Willig

HOSTS Rachel Lim Annika Sigfstead PODCAST ASSOCIATES Dalia Bresnick Casey Chan Kate Dario Ethan Drake Alice Jo Olywn Kells Izzy Lazenby

BUSINESS BOARD BUSINESS DIRECTOR Xiaoyu Huang ASSOCIATE BUSINESS DIRECTOR Patrick Gilfillan ASSOCIATES Carmen Bebbington Auden Elliot Nadeen Kablawi Richi Shen Juno Tantipipatpong Flora Tsui

PODCAST ASSOCIATES (cont.)

Lisa Li Geireann Lindfeld Roberts Ali Martinez Jesse Maurier Lara Mikhail Chantal Moawad Catherine Nelli Michael Seoane Emery Shelley Kolya Sheilds Autumn-Jade Stoner Ellie Thomson Auria Zhang

TECH DEVELOPMENT BOARD LEAD WEB DEVELOPER Raymond Cao WEB DEVELOPERS Nick Young Melissa Zhang

From Liberia to America What was life in Liberia like before the war?

We were enjoying [life], actually more than I am right now in America. My kids were either just starting school or beginning to start going in the town we lived in.

I did not have the best house, but my house was decent. I had a huge garden in my backyard that was given to me.

I had peppers, potatoes, eggplants, cassava leaf—I have everything in that garden. Instead of going to the farm on Saturdays, I would just go to the garden behind my house.

My upstairs bedroom was filled with rice. I had someone to bring me rice, I had someone to wash my clothes, my kids will be helping me with all of that.

Back then in Liberia before the war, the place was beautiful. The country was on fire, the old people will be sleeping and ever yone else will be outside dancing, no one will be fighting.

by Abenda Sohn RISD ’22

When the war started, what did you do?

When the war started, we did not take it seriously. We heard the news from people and we all in the town said we are not running away from our homes. I did not want to leave, I had so many fine things at my house, everything in my house was new.

As time progressed a year later, they reach to us and people ran away.

The rebels were chasing us to other towns and burning them down and killing people. They were killing anyone who could not run fast enough to escape.

I never knew the main reason for the war; all I knew was one tribe was attacking the tribe I am in, I was old at the time of it all.We ran to Ivory Coast and that is where we escaped the rebels.

I lived there for five years, it was hard there. The United Nations will bring food and they will divide it among families. Then I went to Ghana for seven more years. Ghana was hard too, the water system was crazy; if you did not have the money you did not drink water.

After that, we got into a program that brought us to the United States. Back in Africa, you had to run around all day in order to eat.

Over here there is plenty of food. I like it here, you can sit and eat. People over here take care of the elderly very well and help them.

Table of Contents

Brown Political Review World Cadbury, Cocoa, and Colonialism in West Africa

by Krishi Saripalli

8

10

Interview with Glenn Loury

by Glenn Yu 16

Drill, Baby, Drill

by Noah Pirani

12

15

22

Interview with Suraj Patel

by Neil Sehgal

6

18

Stuck in the Middle without UBI

by Gabriel Blanc

Special Feature: Home 26

Combining Cultures

by Mathilda Silbiger

Sculpting Our Institutions

by Emily Teng

20

A Low-Carbon Behemoth

by Daniel Halpert

Interview with Desmond Meade

by Sam Kolitch 29

Love in the time of Coronavirus

by Indigo Funk

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Fall 2020, Issue 01 United States 40

38

34

30

Uncapped Potential

by Sarah Roberts

46

The Doctor is In

by Nick Sawicki

51

Motherland

by Audrey Kim

A Safe Place to Land

by Renny Jiang

Big Brother’s Rude Awakening

by Gabe Merkel

48

Interview with Robert Jervis

by Shilpa Sajja

32

An Act of God

by Xiaoyu Huang

Bordering on Extinction

by Hannah Severyns

Interview with Keith Beauchamp

by Gabby Smith

35

42

Interview with Rachel A. Pickens

by Amelia Spalter

52

55

The Donkey in the Room

by Ben Lipson and Max Pushkin

Interview with Edwin Meese

by Alex Fasseas and Ryan Frant

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WORLD

Cadbury, Cocoa, and Colonialism in West Africa A tale of the economic exploitation behind the chocolate industry

by Krishi Saripalli ’24, an intended Applied Math-Economics concentrator and an Associate Editor for BPR illustration by Jocelyn Salim ’23

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Before his chance encounter with a Dutch reporter in 2014, Ivorian cocoa farmer N’Da Alphonse was unaware of the fate of the beans he harvested and sold, beyond their eventual use as a food additive somewhere far away from his village. When the reporter’s news crew offered him a chocolate bar, Alphonse examined the bar and proceeded to take a shy nibble, positing that its pleasant sweetness is the reason “why white people are so healthy!”

In a region that accounts for a third of the world’s cocoa, West African farmers, like Alphonse, have remained far removed from the finished products—and profits—of their labor.

Nestlé, Cadbury, and other corporations satisfying the world’s continued craving for cocoa derivatives are well aware of the economic inequity needed to keep their operations profitable. Their spokespeople insist that the sourcing for cheap cocoa is accompanied by a mission towards “balanc[ing] forest protection and communities’ livelihoods;” however, the $9.40 daily income that Alphonse uses to support his family of 15 puts forth evidence of systemic and sustained exploitation.

Hundreds of years before Alphonse started farming cocoa, European colonization laid the groundwork for today’s raw deal between farms and chocolate giants, a deal through which

farmers are separated from the lucrative outcomes of their labor. Under this system, resource-based wealth is siloed off from those responsible for its continued generation, lest they demand to be fairly included in the profits. The legacy of colonial brutality in West Africa is still manifest today as an unchecked European economic presence in the cocoa industry.

The cocoa plant first arrived in the 19th century on the island of São Tomé and Príncipe by way of Portuguese traders seeking to expand a booming plantation model from the Americas.

Africans were forcibly taken from the mainland continent to fuel the race to satisfy Europe’s demand for cocoa, and this atrocious practice reportedly extended past the Second World War. For a brief period, resistance against foreign economic power was successful in some countries.

While much of West Africa continued to operate under the control of the colonial powers, Ghana, for one, successfully established a communal farming system relatively free of European influence. But within 50 years, Nestlé, Cadbury, and the Mars Corporation ended this period of autonomy.

Today, West African farmers operate under a system that descends from this aggressive capitalist race to seize and sell cocoa, a system maintained by a lack of transparency and regulation

in the industry. Alphonse’s obliviousness is characteristic of the estimated 1.5 to 2 million cocoa farmers located in the Ivory Coast and West African tropics who are similarly disconnected from the end product of their labor. As corporate Europe struggles to shed its colonial image, its commitment to mending its history of abuse should continue to be tested through pressure from world governments.

Efforts to bring justice and equity to cocoa farming so far have not been particularly effective. The Harkin-Engel Protocol, a corporate pact designed to rid chocolate supply chains of child labor by 2005, was extended into 2019 with no explanation of how companies operating in Africa plan to make child-labor-free chocolate a reality. In some encouraging news, concessions from corporations point to a retreat from vague sustainability reports and public relations statements. Notably, Mondelez, the parent company of Cadbury, has moved away from posturing, even going so far as to ask governmental agencies to intervene. In a joint statement urging action, they wrote that “the situation remains, despite some progress with a multitude of initiatives over past decades.”

While they may seem promising, such public statements provide little insight into the actual operations of European corporations in Africa.

“In a region that accounts for a third of the world’s cocoa, West African farmers, like Alphonse, have remained far removed from the finished products —and profits— of their labor.”

Instead, the European countries that house the world’s cocoa giants must implement regulations with the immediate goal of fair compensation for cocoa farmers. The freedom to self-report the status of workers' wages and labor conditions incentivizes corporations to remain vague to maintain deniability. The United Nations, the European Union, and other international bodies must independently inspect the production processes of corporations to ensure adherence to basic equality measures. Above all, cocoa farmers and laborers deserve a minimum wage commensurate with their production, a standard that can only be upheld by the collective action of governments and corporations.

Alphonse and his peers have yet to fully realize the significance of their harvests to Big Chocolate. Until governments become proactive in guaranteeing farmers the bare minimum for their labor, the cycle of exploitation will continue into the coming decades and up until the last bar of chocolate is produced.

THE HOME ISSUE

9

Interview with

Glenn Loury

by Glenn Yu ’20 illustrator Nicholas Edwards ’23

Glenn Cartman Loury is an economist, academic, and author. In 1982, at the age of 33, he became the first Black tenured Professor of Economics in the history of Harvard University. He is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, and currently hosts a podcast called “The Glenn Show” on bloggingheads.tv.

Glenn Yu: I find myself in the awkward position of being uncomfortable with the liberal stance on race that seemingly denies the disturbing underlying cultural realities of the Black experience today while also being uncomfortable with the conservative stance that, in its willful acceptance of this reality, seemingly confers no meaningful solutions to it. Beyond these first-order confusions, however, what I’m most confused about is whether it’s even my place to talk about these issues at all.

Glenn Loury: If we were going to try to be systematic and rigorous in developing a theory—an epistemology, or a theory of knowledge—to know what it would mean to know something, we would have to develop a theory about the question of experience, the authority of experience, and the personalization of it. I happen to take a rather strict view that regards with suspicion the assertion of authority in the realm of knowledge based upon identity or based upon Blackness.

Let’s take this example: Were the actions we’ve all seen of the police officer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, expressions of racial hatred? I think that we have no reason to suppose that about him, absent further evidence. There are plenty of alternative accounts that could be given, from negligence to him just being a mean son of a bitch. Sure, we could project motive onto him, onto the expression on his face, onto his smirk; we could feed thoughts into his head that make

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him symbolically emblematic of a certain trauma or sickness in American society, and this all may or may not be true. You may or may not have an opinion about that, but suppose the question were to arise in the dorm room late at night. Suppose you have the view that you’re not sure it’s racism, and then someone challenges you, saying you’re not Black. They say, you’ve never been rousted by the police. You don’t know what it’s like to live in fear. How much authority should that identitarian move have on our search for the truth? What are we talking about here? What is Blackness? What do we mean? Do we mean that his skin is brown?

Or, do we mean that he’s had a certain set of social class-based experiences like growing up in a housing project? Well, white people can grow up in a housing project too.

I think it’s extremely dangerous that people accept without criticism this argumentative authority move when it’s played. It’s an ad hominem move. We’re supposed to impute authority to people because of their racial identity?

I want you to think about that for a minute. Were you to flip the script on that you might begin to see the problem. What experiences are Black people unable to appreciate by virtue of their Blackness?

If they have so much insight, maybe they also have blind spots. Maybe a Black person could never understand something because they’re so full of rage about being Black. Think about how awful it would be to make that move in an argument.

How unreasonable. Suppose someone, a white guy, is arguing about affirmative action with me. Suppose they think that affirmative action

"I think it's extremely dangerous that people accept without criticism this argumentative authority move when it’s played."

"So, I object."

is undignified because they think that positions should be earned, not given, but they don’t expect me to understand that argument because I’m Black. That would be terribly unreasonable—even racist. It would certainly be very pernicious, yet I’m hard-pressed to see the difference.

Many people are protesting the policing system, as well as broader issues having to do with the structure of society. On June 1, 2020, President Christina Paxson wrote a letter indicting the structures of racism and prejudice that most on the left claim to be at the basis of American life. You published a challenge to this letter. Why? If my dear colleague, Christina Paxson, Professor of Economics, as well as president of this university, were simply to have said, “dear colleagues, I have been pondering the events of the last few days and weeks, and it has brought me to a set of conclusions that I want to share with you from my heart,” and then she proceeded to do so, I would not have written to my friend, nor would I have made public what I wrote, which was printed in the City Journal.

I wouldn’t have done it because she’s entitled to her opinion. But that’s not what happened. What

happened was a letter signed by the president and cosigned by the provost. It was signed by the Senior Vice President for Administration, by the Senior Vice President for Finance, by the person in charge of Advancement and Development for the University. It was signed by the University’s General Counsel, by the Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, and by every other functionary all the way down the line to the Dean of the School of Public Health. They signed a political letter.

The letter is surely political. These events don’t speak for themselves. Americans disagree about Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter is not axiomatic. They represent a particular thrust in American politics. I’m not without sympathy for the struggle for racial justice, but I have severe disputes with people when it comes to interpreting what’s going on in American cities. The letter doesn’t mention the fact that it’s dangerous on the streets of many inner-city neighborhoods where police have to operate every day, that there are a lot of weapons out there, or that the homicide rate is extraordinarily high and that most of the people committing the homicides are Black. Now, imagine that I wrote not a left letter, but a right letter. “I think the Blacks are complaining too much.” Suppose I wrote that letter and I had everybody in the administration sign it. So, it’s a political statement. It may be a very sympathetic and a very persuasive statement,

but it’s political! Universities ought not to be political in this sense. When I got that letter signed by everybody on the payroll of this university who gets paid above $400,000 a year, I thought: This is thought-policing. They’re telling us what to think.

They’re saying that this is what “Brown values” require one to think. They’re speaking about a “We” with a capital W, and it’s including everybody. Well, actually, it didn’t include me! So, I object. I object to the very soft tyranny of having political postures put forward as self-evident truths to which every decent member of this community should subscribe. I object to that. That’s the last thing that a university should be doing. It’s malpractice. It is administrative malpractice of this precious institution for it to be swept along by political fad and fancy, and then have the assent of every administrator in lockstep, without any dispute among themselves. This is horrible, I thought. It was trying to tell me what to think. It was telling me what I can and cannot write, what I can and cannot pronounce in my public statements if I wish to remain a member in good standing in this community. That is an outrage, in my opinion.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

THE HOME ISSUE

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WORLD

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An environmentalist case for deep sea mining

by Noah Pirani ’23, an Economics and International and Public Affairs (Development Track) concentrator and Senior Editor for BPR's Economy and Finance Section illustration by Jeff Katz ’21

DRILL, BABY, DRILL Unlikely as it may seem in our current moment of political paralysis, consider the following thought experiment: A rare tide of reason sweeps across the United Nations at next year’s Convention on Climate Change’s Conference of the Parties. Delegates from every member state sign legally binding commitments to rapidly reduce annual global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from their current level of 35 gigatons to below five gigatons by 2050. The existential task of keeping global temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius suddenly appears within reach.

Greta Thunberg becomes Secretary General. Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, and Gazprom sign a moratorium on all fossil fuel production. Tesla stock soars again.

Still, this decarbonization fantasy fails to address a critical problem. If we were to continue procuring base metals for batteries the way we currently do, we would effectively just shift the environmental and social cost of fossil fuel extraction to the mining industry. What’s the alternative? Enter deep-sea polymetallic nodules: potato-sized mineral formations found in concentrated deposits across the ocean floor. They contain all the nickel, cobalt, manganese, and other base metals needed to power a global fleet of electric vehicles several times over, at a fraction of the ecological cost of terrestrial mining. If we are to have any shot at electrifying the transportation industry in a socially just and sustainable way, we must rapidly mobilize the political will and capital needed to scale the supply chain for mining deep-sea nodules.

To put things in perspective, there are currently 1.3 billion passenger vehicles on the road.

Together, they contribute to about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. To replace all one billion gas-fueled engines with electric vehicles, each fitted with a standard 75 kWh battery, we would need 85 million tons of copper, 56 million tons of nickel, seven million tons of manganese, and seven million tons of cobalt. Given

the trend towards electrification, the World Bank forecasts that the demand for nickel, manganese, lithium, cobalt, and aluminum will increase by greater than 1,000 percent in the coming decades.

While we should applaud—even accelerate— the shift towards electric vehicles, we should also be very concerned with how we currently obtain all that metal. Ideally, car manufacturers would procure the necessary base metals by simply recycling what has already been extracted, since 95 to 99 percent of the metals used in electric vehicle batteries are recyclable. Doing so would vastly reduce the energy requirements of battery production, decreasing CO2 emissions, toxicity, acidification, and other environmental indicators by 70 to 95 percent. Unfortunately, experts estimate that even in the highly idealistic case in which we achieve a 100 percent recycle rate in our supply chains, we would still need anywhere from 3 to 10 times more base metals than are currently in circulation to meet the future demand from car manufacturers alone. It’s no wonder that during Tesla’s quarter three earnings call for the fiscal year 2020, CEO Elon Musk pleaded to “any mining companies out there, please mine more nickel… efficiently and in an environmentally friendly way.” If only it were so easy.

Extracting all of the base metals needed to power one billion electric vehicles via today’s terrestrial mining processes would spell unquestionable disaster for our planetary ecosystem. Doing so would generate 350 billion tons of waste, leak toxic elements into our food and water supplies, emit 1.45 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere, clear 156,000 kilometers of land, and endanger 568 million tons of biomass. For comparison, the entire human species comprises only about 100 million tons of biomass.

There are also profound humanitarian risks associated with procuring base metals through terrestrial mining processes. These risks made headlines in September of 2020 when Rio Tinto, the second-largest mining conglomerate in the THE HOME ISSUE

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WORLD

“While only one percent of extracted terrestrial ores can be used to supply base metals, the rest being wasted, nearly 100 percent of a polymetallic nodule is composed of usable material.” world, demolished a 46,000-year-old sacred aboriginal site in Australia. This wasn’t an isolated event; exploitative land and labor practices run deep in the metal mining industry. Cobalt extraction, 60 percent of which takes place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is an industry rife with child labor abuses. In Brazil, federal prosecutors are still seeking $27 billion in damages from BHP and Vale, two of the world’s largest mining companies, after the 2015 collapse of one of their mining sites left 19 dead and contaminated rural water reservoirs. Vale is also liable for the 2019 Brumadinho Dam collapse, which killed 270 people, despite management’s knowledge of structural integrity issues at the dam. Nonetheless, such checkered humanitarian track records have not deterred Tesla executives from meeting with both BHP and Vale to discuss potential nickel supply contracts. Other car companies adding to their lineup of electric vehicles—such as Volkswagen and BMW—are likely to follow suit.

Fortunately, deep-sea polymetallic nodules have the potential to save us from such an utterly irresponsible and unsustainable supply chain.

While only one percent of extracted terrestrial ores can be used to supply base metals, the rest being wasted, nearly 100 percent of a polymetallic nodule is composed of usable material. Compared to terrestrial mining, deep-sea mining produces 75 percent less carbon and releases 99 percent less toxic waste. Moreover, deep sea-mining comes with little to no risk of endangering forests, Indigenous communities, or freshwater reserves.

If any one company is best positioned to supply the world’s demand for battery base metals via seafloor nodules, it’s DeepGreen. Founded in 2011, the Canadian start-up has received 30-year licenses from the International Seabed Authority (ISA) to explore deposits located 3,800 to 5,500 meters below the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the South Pacific Ocean.

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The CCZ is officially designated as international waters and is therefore included in the “common heritage of mankind,” as per the United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea. As a result, international law demands that any commercial activities taking place in their vicinity be sponsored by a UN designated Small Island Developing State and spur sustainable economic development for said state’s citizens. So far, the island nations of Nauru, Kiribati, and Tonga have all sponsored DeepGreen’s mining permits in the CCZ. International law also requires contractors to conduct environmental impact assessments with respect to their future mining operations, something DeepGreen is in the process of doing.

Meanwhile, the ISA is finalizing a regulatory framework that, if completed by the end of 2020 as expected, would promptly permit commercial scale mining activities to commence.

However, not everybody is rooting for team DeepGreen. In 2019, Greenpeace, a reputable conservation nongovernmental organization, advocated for an immediate moratorium on all deep-sea mining. Some environmental activists are concerned about the potential impact that mining could have on deep-sea marine life. Specifically, they worry that massive sediment plumes created by mining equipment may result in habitat loss, putting the many corals, sponges, and other filter feeders that inhabit the ocean floors at risk of extinction.

Greenpeace and others’ objections miss the bigger picture. Greenpeace’s mission statement includes a commitment to “promote solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future.”

Yes, we should be concerned about the potential impact that seafloor mining could have on deep sea marine life. But, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s annual report argues, the electrification of our transportation system is an indispensable part of any plan to limit warming

to 1.5 degrees Celsius. There are two ways to do this: by extracting base metals in the same, irresponsible way that we have been for decades past, or by sourcing them using polymetallic nodules.

And we know that the latter option exacts an incomparably smaller toll on our atmosphere, our biodiversity, and the safety of Indigenous and historically marginalized communities. The costs of inaction—mass human displacement, heat waves, forest fires, crop failures, droughts, flooding, and hurricanes, all with greater frequency and intensity—are existential threats far too great to ignore.

“The costs of inaction— mass human displacement, heat waves, forest fires, crop failures, droughts, flooding, and hurricanes, all with greater frequency and intensity—are existential threats far too great to ignore.”

Interview with Suraj Patel Suraj Patel, an attorney and adjunct professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, unsuccessfully ran for election to the US House of Representatives to represent New York’s 12th Congressional District in 2018 and 2020. Patel’s June 2020 primary election was marred by extensive delays and errors, with one in five ballots disqualified and results not certified until August 4, six weeks after the election. In July, Patel filed a federal lawsuit against Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Board of Elections over the invalidation of the uncounted ballots, before conceding the race on August 27.

by Neil Sehgal ’21 illustrator Nicholas Edwards ’23 Neil Sehgal: More than one in five ballots were discarded in your district. The few votes that you were able to get counted through your lawsuit saw you leading by a wide margin. And the federal judge in your case explicitly welcomed campaigns to petition for additional votes to be counted.

Why concede?

Suraj Patel: Honestly, we realized that the finality of the election and proximity to the November election put us in a really bad position to keep fighting. It’s really disappointing that democracy didn’t work in our district, but this was always bigger than one campaign and one candidate. Donald Trump is an existential threat to our democracy. Thousands of New Yorkers didn’t have their voices heard. I think they’re angry and they will continue to be, and they know who sided with them.

President Trump had suggested that there be a do-over for your primary. Had more actors been on board, would a fresh election have been a solution?

I honestly can’t speculate. Obviously there’s no way my opponent was going to be on board with anything like that. And I didn’t want to share common cause with Donald Trump and give him a precedent in November.

You participated in the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. What is the role of inside work (e.g. electoral politics) as opposed to outside work (e.g. street protests) in creating positive change?

I am a massive proponent of the Black Lives Matter movement and of the street protests because they are a catalyst for legislative change.

One thing I always said during this race was this time had to be different. This time the aspirations of the millions of people that are marching across the streets had to be turned into laws through new legislation. At the end of the day, that’s the ultimate goal of the movement: legislation. And the folks who had their hand in making the laws that we are now protesting cannot be trusted to undo them with new ones.

During your campaign you branded

yourself as a progressive anti-establishment candidate and an Obama Democrat.

Many on the left would claim that Obama represents the establishment. How do you resolve the conflicting labels?

When I joined the Obama campaign in 2008, we were in a primary against the establishment.

Hillary Clinton at that point had locked up the entire party machinery. So when I say anti-establishment, it is running against a status quo that isn’t delivering. When we ran that campaign and when we governed the country with President Obama, there was a unifying element. And that’s the kind of positive campaign we ran, with a message of bringing more people in and building a big tent. So that puts me in that sort of Obama lens. At the same time, I’m running against the establishment and am significantly more progressive than the current office holder in the district.

How do you explain the dissonance between Obama’s startlingly high popularity among Democrats and the fact that the majority of 2020 presidential candidates, including Biden, ran far to his left?

Obama governed where he could at the time.

Let’s not forget Obamacare was a massive expansion of the healthcare system, and let’s not forget that he pushed hard for a public option that was torpedoed by Joe Lieberman. I think that the idea that Obama wasn’t progressive enough has to be viewed through the lens of the times.

As an Asian American, do you think you faced unique challenges in running for Congress?

One hundred percent. I think that there’s a significant problem in the establishment party apparatus specifically in New York, and in media coverage of Asian American and South Asian candidates. There are a lot of assumptions made about the type of background and candidacy you have. The proof is very simply put in the fact that there are no South Asians in office in the entire city of New York. Not a single one—not in city council, not in any state, local or federally

elected position. For a city that is as diverse as it is, its political machinery is anything but. There is no home base and that’s a problem we’re going to have to keep fighting head-on.

Before choosing Harris, Biden had already made a public promise to choose a woman as his vice president. When does representation become tokenism?

I don’t think that Biden’s promise amounts to tokenism. It amounts to recognizing that it’s 2020. It’s essential for the Democratic Party, if it really wants to be the party of diversity, to elevate voices that aren’t the historical ones that have been.

You’ve had a pretty successful professional career, but after Trump’s election in 2016, you became a full-time organizer. Does the careerist culture in today’s universities worry you?

People should be entitled to do what they want.

I don’t have umbrage at young 22-year-olds graduating and entering professions that will allow them to pay their debt back. We have an astronomical student debt load and astronomical tuition rates in this country. But you are seeing that even within those professions, they are entering these big firms with a pretty different mindset that looks at the world, the community, and the stakeholders as parts of business. We can’t abandon business if we’re progressives because commerce happens to be 85 percent of our economy. If we leave that to a certain set of folks, then I think we’re doing ourselves a major disservice.

What advice would you give to young people who want to get involved in politics?

I honestly can tell you that the best decision I made in my life was to leave law school in 2008 to join the Obama campaign because I was inspired by it. Find a cause, find a campaign, and at some point in your young life fully dedicate yourself to it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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WORLD

Combining Cultures

Grappling with efforts to Germanize Islam

by Mathilda Silbiger ’24, an International and Public Affairs concentrator illustration by Brenda Rodriguez ’21

The German government’s historical record of integrating Muslim migrants is less than stellar. The 867,000 mostly Turkish-Muslim “guest workers” who arrived in Germany during the postWorld War II economic boom were originally only permitted to stay for two-year periods. Even after the two-year restriction was overturned, the government’s failure to integrate these workers and their families into German society led to residential clustering, lower educational and labor outcomes, and low levels of German language fluency.

Today, between 4.4 and 4.7 million Muslims live in Germany. Most are descendants of Turkish guest workers and have lived in the country for generations. However, about 25 percent—1.2 million immigrants, most of them from the Middle East—came to Germany between 2011 and 2015 alone. Decades of failed attempts at integrating Muslim guest workers and their families into German society has led the German government to blame Islam itself, rather than ineffective German policies, as a barrier to integration. For this reason, the German government has in recent 16

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years toyed with the idea of “Germanizing” Islam: creating a version of Islam “for and by Germany.”

This entails policies including training imams in Germany, requiring that religious services be conducted in German, and mandating close cooperation between Muslim religious institutions and the German government. While some of the proposed policy changes are necessary to preserve national security, others are steeped in Islamophobia.

The underlying assumption in “German Islam” policies is that the version of Islam currently practiced by millions of Muslims in Germany is at odds with the values of German society and Western democracy as a whole. This imagined incompatibility between Western democracy and Islam is, at its core, a form of liberal Islamophobia.

By extension, the government’s belief that there is a need for a reformed Islam is an endorsement of the stereotypes that have fed harmful anti-Muslim hostility across the political spectrum for years— that Muslims are resistant to change, loyal to their countries of origin rather than to Germany, and don’t believe in democracy, gender equality, or the freedom of speech.

The reality is quite different: A 2017 Bertelsmann Foundation study showed that Muslims feel slightly more connected to Germany than the average German and support democracy as a form of government at a slightly higher rate.

Moreover, Muslims born in Germany disagreed with traditional gender roles at a similar rate to Catholics and Protestants. Clearly, other forms of discrimination like sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism are not inherent to Islam, and it is blatantly Islamophobic for politicians or the media to assume that they are.

The underlying Islamophobia in the move to Germanize Islam reveals the anti-Islam hostilities that permeate the highest ranks of the German government. In 2018, Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer provoked widespread outrage

“This imagined incompatibility between Western democracy and Islam is, at its core, a form of liberal Islamophobia.”

by claiming that “Islam is not part of Germany.”

Disturbingly, Seehofer oversees several initiatives to improve the integration of Muslims into German society, including the German Islam Conference, a joint forum of federal and state politicians as well as Muslim religious leaders.

However, anti-Muslim hostilities in Germany are not limited to politicians: 49 percent of German Christians are uncomfortable with the idea of a Muslim marrying into their family and 52 percent of all non-Muslim German citizens view Islam as a threat. Thus, when politicians make the Muslim “other” less visible and therefore more palatable for their constituents, they are following a recipe for electoral success. In light of this political dynamic, it unfortunately comes as no surprise that major political parties like the Christian Democratic Union and the center-left Social Democratic Party support bans on hijabs, some of the most recognizable symbols of the Muslim faith. To maintain the cover that the policy’s goal is secularism and state neutrality towards religion, hijab bans are often entwined with more general

restrictions for public servants on carrying or wearing religious symbols. However, these same restrictions usually include leeway for Christians: For example, the Hessian Law on Civil Servants states that “the Western Christian tradition of Hesse is to be adequately accommodated.” The law’s proponents argue that this double standard takes into account the long history of Christianity in Germany. In reality, this reflects the belief held by key figures in the German government (and by many German citizens) that Christianity is a legitimate part of German society while Islam is not.

One of the less controversial goals of Germanizing Islam is reducing the influence of foreign regimes and extremist actors in domestic Muslim organizations. Currently, the largest Sunni organization in Germany, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), receives funding and directives from Diyanet, a Turkish religious institution with direct ties to the administration of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The majority of imams in German DITIB mosques are sent from Turkey by Diyanet for a limited time period, meaning that they rarely speak German and are typically not integrated into German society. In 2016, the Erdoğan administration confirmed accusations that 19 DITIB imams were Turkish spies, and the organization maintains close connections to the Turkish intelligence

agency, MIT. Similarly, one of the largest German Shia religious institutions, the Islamic Center Hamburg (IZH), maintains a strong connection to the Iranian government, and its leader is considered the Iranian revolutionary regime’s primary representative in Europe.

Organizations like DITIB and the IZH clearly threaten Germany’s national security, and in these sorts of cases, government involvement in Islamic institutions should be welcomed. If any of the imams provided by these groups have ties to Turkey and Iran, then it is common sense that the German government should promote the training of imams domestically rather than ban these organizations outright. Since they provide religious services, language lessons, and religious education for many Muslims, these institutions, with even further government involvement, could serve as a tool to encourage Muslim integration

into German society. In the long term, though, these organizations’ potential as partners for integration can only be fully realized when they are no longer connected to foreign actors.

Despite the Islamophobic motives that often inform the policy discussion, involvement in Islam by the German government is necessary in cases where the alternative compromises German national security and the inclusiveness of German society. Initiatives such as deradicalizing organizations like the IZH and DITIB and expanding Muslim religious education in public schools are especially important. However, Muslims should not be entirely responsible for their own integration. Education in interreligious tolerance is key to prevent right-wing groups from spreading Islamophobia into the mainstream. At the end of the day, Islam should be seen as an enrichment, not a threat, to German society.

“A 2017 Bertelsmann Foundation study showed that Muslims feel slightly more connected to Germany than the average German and support democracy as a form of government at a slightly higher rate.”

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WORLD

A LOW-CARBON BEHEMOTH What China’s renewable energy apparatus means for global energy politics

by Daniel Halpert ’23.5, an International and Public Affairs concentrator and a Staff Writer for BPR's World Section infographics by Ryan Simpson ’23 and Daniel Navratil ’23

In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced to the United Nations General Assembly that China would achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. His announcement sets up a comprehensive shift for the Chinese economy, which is currently both the world’s largest coal consumer and the world’s leading producer of renewable energy.

Xi’s climate commitment and the country’s early investment in renewables puts China in a position to coordinate global climate cooperation, even as some leaders in the United States refuse to acknowledge that a climate crisis exists. China currently has a formidable commercial advantage in the renewable energy sector, but other countries—especially the United States and members of the European Union (EU)—are likely to start to invest heavily in their own renewable energy capacities as well as burgeoning sources of renewable energy. As these countries play catch-up, the

geopolitical benefits from the race for renewable energy are unlikely to remain solely in China’s hands.

Over the past 20 years, Chinese companies have moved to the forefront of all stages of the renewable energy supply chain. China now controls 46 percent of global onshore wind capacity, manufactures 70 percent of all solar panels, and owns 77 percent of all lithium-ion battery cell capacity. The country’s renewable energy sector has been supported by tariffs, aggressive government investment, and European demand for Chinese-supplied raw materials. Chinese companies also control the mining of rare earth minerals that are necessary to produce the hardware that harnesses and stores renewable energy, like solar panels and wind turbines. They have invested in mines in Chile, Australia, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and they own the majority of the world’s lithium refinery capacity, as well as roughly 75 percent of all cobalt capacity. Although the materials needed to produce renewable energy are not actually rare, they are difficult to bring to market at the scale

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that the global energy transition requires. The rapid demand increase for these materials in the coming years will give China a key commercial advantage as other countries are forced to depend on China for supply.

Nonetheless, China’s commercial lead in the field does not signal a return to complete energy dependence for the US and the EU. Jason Bordoff, Director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, argues that the nature of renewable energy is such that reliance on one exporter is likely less geopolitically hazardous than reliance on one oil or natural gas source.

Unlike with renewable energy, where dominant countries serve as intermediaries in the supply chain, countries rich in oil and natural gas directly control the energy supply. For example, if an oil supplier cuts off exports, the lack of energy could cripple importing countries. However, if China restricted rare earth minerals, it could cause delays or price increases, but it would not have the same immediate effect as cutting off oil or natural gas supplies. The market would likely give importers time to find alternative, commercially viable sources, given their relatively large supply in nature.

Similarly, restrictions on components necessary for harnessing and storing wind and solar energy might lead to price increases, but as these renewable energies can be produced anywhere where there is sun or wind, industries in other countries could ramp up accordingly. Renewable energy products are all pieces of the energy supply chain or components of energy production rather than an energy source in and of themselves.

Although China stands to benefit commercially from its substantial head start, its renewable markets are unlikely to produce overwhelmingly dominant geopolitical power over states that import Chinese renewable energy products.

Furthermore, although the US and the EU will continue to invest in solar and wind products to meet their energy needs, they are likely to also turn toward green hydrogen to establish market independence and gain commercial advantages in a crucial emerging sector in which China does not yet lead. Green hydrogen is a clean source of energy produced using electrolysis and is most attractive for heating and fuel-cell technology in vehicles. Although clean hydrogen is not yet price competitive with fossil fuels or other renewable energy sources, electrolysis hardware prices have dropped 40 percentage points over the past five years and hydrogen is projected to play a crucial role in a decarbonized global economy.

It may take until 2050 for green hydrogen to be economically viable, but once it is, the geopolitical implications will be formidable. Most importantly, it can theoretically be produced anywhere in the world, unlike solar and wind power, which require specific weather conditions. Hydrogen

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This could allow the EU, which is currently highly dependent on Chinese solar panels and rare earth minerals, to circumvent Chinese-controlled supply chains for part of its renewable energy supply. Similarly, with adequate government support, hydrogen could provide 14 percent of the US’s energy by 2050. The industry is expected to support 3.4 million US jobs by 2050 and to generate $750 billion in annual revenue. China is spending in this area as well, but because hydrogen needs at least a decade to become economically viable, the EU

and the US have the opportunity to establish themselves as leaders in the field. The world powers that secure commercial advantages in hydrogen stand to mitigate the potential leverage China derives from its existing market share of other renewable sources of energy.

Ultimately, climate change has sped up the transition to renewable energy, but global power dynamics may kick it into high gear. Chinese economies of scale have made solar photovoltaics and onshore wind installations price competitive with fossil fuels. Solar energy is now the most affordable form of electricity for twothirds of the global population. The race for clean hydrogen leadership could similarly accelerate its adoption into the global energy mix. Thus, the complex fight for dominance in renewable energy—a sector which, realistically, is bound to have multiple key actors—may very well be the driver of the innovation we need to push towards a zero-carbon global economy.

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Interview with

Desmond Meade

by Sam Kolitch ’23 illustration by Nicholas Edwards ’23

Desmond Meade is a voting rights activist and the President of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC). In 2018, he led the FRRC to a historic triumph with the passage of Amendment 4—a ballot initiative that restored voting rights to over 1.4 million Floridians with prior felony convictions. In 2019, Meade was recognized by Time as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World and was named Floridian of the Year. He is the author of “Let My People Vote,” which details the movement he led to enfranchise fellow “returning citizens” (a term his organization uses for individuals with previous felony convictions).

Sam Kolitch: This was your first time voting in a presidential election. What was going through your head as you cast your ballot?

Desmond Meade: When I was approaching the polling location with my family, my mind was on two sets of people. It was on my ancestors, who were basically murdered through state-sanctioned violence—they were hung, burned alive, beaten, or bitten by dogs and sprayed with fire hoses—just so people like me would be able to have the right to vote. My mind also went to the returning citizens—people with prior felony convictions. At that time, there were about 774,000 of them who were not able to vote because they had outstanding fines and fees. I was thinking about how they were not going to get the opportunity to vote.

Amendment 4 sought to override Florida’s clemency process, which requires returning citizens to appeal for the restoration of their civil rights. What is wrong with this process?

In Florida, four politicians decide which citizens get to vote and which don't get to vote. That was way too much power for any politician to have, whether they're a Democrat or a Republican, 20

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because they leave room for partisan politics to play a role in making that determination. The voting booth is the greatest equalizer that we have in our democracy. Yet, the governor can deny you for any reason or no reason at all. The decision to determine who has access to that is a very powerful and very important decision and it should not be arbitrary.

Speaking of Amendment 4, one of the remarkable things about its passage was the broad coalition that supported it. What enabled that, despite all the partisanship in our country?

The framework for building that broad coalition was making personal connections and letting love be the driving force—not fear, not anger. This allowed us to have conversations with so many folks. After the first petition for Amendment 4 came off the press, I went straight into a conservative county and approached people who I knew were conservative. I was surprised by the amount of people who were impacted by felon disenfranchisement that didn't look like me. Driving around made me realize that there was a much broader scope of folks that were impacted. I used to try to talk to anybody and everybody about felon

“The framework for building that broad coalition was making personal connections and letting love be the driving force—not fear, not anger.”

“If your vote doesn't matter, then why are there so many people trying so hard to stop you from voting?”

disenfranchisement. There were just so many folks who had a loved one or a good friend who was directly impacted and who could not vote because of a felony conviction.

You write about working with voter psychologists to develop a message around Amendment 4 that would be most palatable to Floridians. What were some of the realizations you came to, particularly about language that would trigger racial anxiety in voters?

When we first started talking about the ballot initiative, we consulted with a voter psychologist, Dr. Phyllis Watts, and she said something that stuck with me: that certain messages and images can trigger what she called a “primal response.” Jimmy Kimmel, on his late night show, went out onto the street and he asked folks how they felt about Obamacare. You had folks say, “I hate Obamacare. They need to get rid of it.” Then Jimmy would say, “What do you think about the Affordable Care Act?” And their response was, “Oh my god, I love it. We need to expand it.” That shows that when they associated something with the reported “enemy” or Black people or whatever, they were totally against it.

If you reframe it, they're totally for it. I did not want the campaign for Amendment 4 to be categorized as a Black issue or a Democratic issue.

Along those lines, you suggest in your book that we racialize too many issues that aren't uniquely racial. Why do you believe that this is the case?

I think there's blame that can be shared on both sides. On the more progressive side, race is what they magnify. Sometimes I chuckle, because there are instances, and I've seen it, when you have white people getting mad about something that happens to a Black person quicker than a Black person is getting mad. Part of that could be a symptom of white guilt: “I will over-exert myself to show that I'm a champion for Black people.” In doing so, it really overemphasizes race. Progressives sometimes can't see the forest, because a tree is blocking their entire view.

On the other side, I think that racism has a lot to do with creating false racial narratives. I think

racism is mainly a symptom of ignorance. Your circle informs you. It helps shape your beliefs and your ideologies. If there's no diversity in your friend group, then you're really looking at the world from a very limited point of view, which increases the likelihood of your comments being ignorant.

As a voting rights activist, though, is it difficult to stay nonpartisan? I think it's pretty well established that one party, the Republican Party, has overwhelmingly suppressed voters—particularly people of color.

It's not, Sam. When we did our campaign for Amendment 4, we were fighting just as hard for that person that wanted to vote for Donald Trump as that person that wished they could vote for Barack Obama. The reason why is because the minute your advocacy is based solely on how you think people will vote, are you really engaging in something that expands our democracy? Are you really working within the spirit of democracy? I say that you're not.

I'm not relieving the Republican Party of any responsibility, because they do engage in that. What I'm saying is that when you have the conversation about voter suppression, then you got to be real with it. The Democratic Party is quick to say, "Oh, it's the Republicans that are racist,” but let me tell you something: Racism has no party. It doesn't.

What do you say to people who say that their vote doesn’t matter?

If your vote doesn't matter, then why are there so many people trying so hard to stop you from voting? You have to respect your vote. You respect the fact that somebody in your lineage made some type of sacrifice so you can have a better future, so you can have the opportunity to vote. When you don't vote, it's almost like you spit in their face and say, "You wasted your time fighting for me. You wasted your time dying for me." You have to honor that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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WORLD

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITHOUT UBI

The Canadian political system's barriers to creating change

by Gabriel Blanc ’23, an intended History or Sociology concentrator illustration by Jinghong Chen ’23

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Canadian politics have been weird lately.

Always overshadowed by the circus to the south, Canadian politics tend to be tame, even boring.

But 2020 had other plans for Canada, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suspending Parliament for more than five weeks amidst both an ethics investigation and a global pandemic. During that chaos, pandemic relief efforts have made many hopeful for many progressive policies such as a universal basic income (UBI). Some have even lauded the Canada Economic Recovery Benefit (CERB) as the world’s first national UBI program.

A UBI is a guaranteed income for all adults, provided without a means test or work requirement. It is most succinctly—albeit

simplistically—described as “free money for all.”

Now, when more and more people are self-employed, working in the gig economy, or considered unemployable due to automation and a rapidly evolving labor market, proponents of a UBI argue that current welfare measures, which do not include workers like these, are insufficient. The idea of a UBI is broadly popular in Canada, drawing support from nearly 75 percent of Canadians, compared to only 43 percent of Americans.

The federal government passed the CERB to help those who lost their jobs due to Covid-19. The CERB was recently replaced by the Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) with a unanimous vote, which provides for similar provisions into 2021. Though

many have called it a UBI, the CRB is not “free money for all,” and it is meant to complement rather than replace existing welfare provisions.

Still, it is a step towards a working UBI, as it both tests the necessary infrastructure and normalizes the idea.

But, before anyone gets too excited about a lasting UBI in a post-pandemic world, a few words of caution are due: Canada’s political system is not built for bold change. The obstacles that proponents of a UBI will face are indicative of the root causes of the nation’s fundamental centrism: the federal-provincial power dynamic, the first-pastthe-post voting system, and the “Americanization” of the Canadian Constitution.

In comparison to the federal government, Canadian provinces have extensive powers over healthcare, education, and commerce. Thus, bold policies implemented at the national level often face provincial reversals. In a 2018 example of this phenomenon, Conservative Premier Doug Ford removed Ontario from the federal government’s carbon pricing plan, meaning that within three years of its passage, a significant step forward for Canada on climate policy was overturned by its largest province.

This tension between provincial and federal governments, as well as Premier Ford’s conservative track record, does not bode well for a UBI. Within a year of taking office, Premier Ford canceled a UBI experiment in Ontario, claiming it was too expensive. If he frets over the cost of giving a few Ontarians money to see what it would do to their productivity, he must shiver at the thought of “free money for all.” While Ford is particularly contrarian, and particularly conservative, this animosity between federal and provincial governments is not a new barrier to government productivity. Of the 30 years since 1990, only six have seen an Ontario premier and a Canadian prime minister from the same party.

Canada’s electoral system, which privileges centrism, also complicates a UBI’s chances of passing. Duverger’s Law is a theory that suggests that all first-past-the-post democracies, including both Canada and the US, tend towards two parties: one on the left and one on the right, and both very close to the center. This happens as citizens vote strategically for the political party that they deem

“But, before anyone gets too excited about a lasting UBI in a postpandemic world, a few words of caution are due: Canada’s political system is not built for bold change.” viable, which people generally see as closer to the center.

While Duverger’s Law is contentious among political scientists, the effects of strategic voting on Canadian politics are clear. It has brought political parties on both sides of the spectrum closer to the center and has homogenized the left. For instance, even the federal parties that included a UBI in their 2019 platforms, such as the Green Party and the New Democratic Party, have been increasingly focused on avoiding fiscal risks in a bid for viability. This restricts the possibility of proposing legislation which truly breaks boundaries, forcing political parties away from bold policies such as a UBI and closer to their centrist analogues.

Plurality voting is not the only impediment to progressive change that Canada shares with the United States. Constitutional Scholar Michael Mandel also argues that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1982 has been “Americanized,” or influenced by the American Constitution in ways that do not reflect Canadian values. In particular, the Charter lacks a focus on “positive” rights. A positive right is the right to have something, such as the explicit rights to education or healthcare provided in many European countries.

Instead, the Charter focuses more on “negative” rights, or the right to not have certain liberties taken away, such as freedom of assembly.

While Canadians do have many of these unwritten rights in practice, inscribing social rights into the Charter would set a legal precedent for new progressive policies, such as free

college or a UBI, and guarantee that they would be enforced once passed. Spain is modeling this scenario already: While the country has already implemented a proto-UBI as a form of Covid-19 relief, the policy may well become permanent given that Spain’s Constitution asserts a right to social welfare provisions. By adding a provision to its Charter, Canada might find itself in a similar situation.

It’s not impossible for Canada to overcome its unique obstacles to create a political environment where it would be possible to adopt progressive policies, including popular ones such as a UBI. The Charter can be amended, and fewer than half of Canadian citizens say they completely support the current first-past-the-post electoral system.

While the power of the provinces is unlikely to change, progressive policies such as universal healthcare have had success when implemented from the bottom up. Perhaps a similar future awaits a UBI. The implementation of a UBI is still possible without major constitutional or electoral changes.

But despite the broad popularity of a universal basic income, Canadians may have to wait significantly longer than those in countries, such as Spain, which lack Canada’s structural impediments to bold change. Rather than being the “first in the world” to implement a UBI, Canada may end up with the title it has often taken instead: “first in North America.”

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Sculpting our Institutions

A Safe Place to Land

EMILY TENG

RENNY JIANG

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Love in the Time of Coronavirus INDIGO FUNK

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Motherland AUDREY KIM

INTERVIEW

Robert Jervis SHILPA SAJJA

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Uncapped Potential SARAH ROBERTS

INTERVIEW

Keith Beauchamp GABBY SMITH

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Sculpting Our Institutions Artists’ role in decolonizing museums

by Emily Teng ’22, an International Relations and Applied Math concentrator illustration by Madison Tom ’23

Museums are often seen as celebrations of culture and collective memory, but their colonialist histories and racist practices are seldom discussed. A wave of movements to “decolonize museums” has gained traction in recent years, sweeping through various institutions in the Americas, Europe, and Australia in an effort to reform and rewrite the stories recounted in gallery spaces. Despite sharing this overarching goal, activists and museums disagree on what decolonization means and what it should entail.

One method of decolonization is diversifying a museum’s collections by removing and selling certain pieces in a process known as deaccession. The Baltimore Museum recently tried this approach. The museum had plans to sell three paintings by Brice Marden, Clyfford Still, and Andy Warhol in order to make room for female and POC artists, but the effort has since been paused due to critical backlash. While these failed plans may seem like a worthy attempt at decolonization, in reality, deaccession itself is a one-off effort that does not guarantee long-term investment in the diversity of museums’ collections.

Other institutions, such as the New Walk Museum in Leicester, UK, have chosen to reach out to local communities to aid in their decolonization efforts. In 2018, the museum organized a project in which they invited local refugees to rewrite the labels of artifacts from their home

countries. Collaborations like these between museums and refugees can be constructive, but any inadequate compensation of refugees’ work poses the risk of further exploiting these groups and reinforcing the institutions’ power.

Whether museums turn to internal reform, deaccession, or community engagement in their efforts at decolonization, these initiatives tend to turn out poorly because they are solely determined and led by the museums themselves. The many bureaucratic layers coupled with the lack of transparency within these institutions make it difficult to measure actual changes beyond the superficial statements listed on museum websites. With these types of initiatives, institutional critique becomes institutionalized critique; museums can invite reform, knowing that they can decline any changes they deem too drastic, costly, or difficult.

Museums are not, in fact, “microcosms of the world,” as Alice Proctor writes in her book “The Whole Picture.” For centuries, museums have erected pedestals primarily for white voices. Personal voices—of artists, community members, and minority groups—must be the driving force to dismantle these pedestals. This is because artists are both outsiders and insiders of museums.

According to Proctor, “they are allowed to speak but not scripted or constrained.” Thus, by displaying their work, artists have the ability to critique museums without being affiliated with the institutions, and are given the unique opportunity to actually make change from the inside.

Rayyane Tabet’s “Alien Property,” an exhibition currently displayed in the gallery space of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, offers a testament to the role that artists play in institutional reform. In investigating his familial history, Tabet discovered that his grandfather worked for German diplomat and amateur archeologist Max Von

Oppenheim at Tell Halaf, an ancient archeological site located in northeastern Syria. Through Tabet’s contemporary artwork, his family heirlooms, and objects from the site of Tell Halaf, the exhibition retells the history of key artifacts and their missing elements. For example, the Venus, a stone figure originally uncovered at Tell Halaf, sits in the center of one of the department’s galleries as part of this exhibition. This artifact has a rich history; Von Oppenheim transferred it from Tell Halaf to his museum in Berlin and, in 1943, when the Allied British forces dropped a phosphorus bomb on the museum, it shattered the statue along with all other artifacts in the building. Although a restored version of the Syrian sculpture now sits in the Met, the Venus’ fragmented body reminds viewers of both the intentional and collateral destruction of ancient

“With these types of initiatives, institutional critique becomes institutionalized critique; museums can invite reform, knowing that they can decline any changes they deem too drastic, costly, or difficult.”

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SPECIAL FEATURE | HOME

objects perpetrated throughout history by multiple actors, including the Western powers.

Another important part of the exhibition is a collection of Tabet’s charcoal rubbings of orthostats—square stone slabs that once adorned the lower portion of the Neo-Hittite palace. Once excavated from the site of Tell Halaf, these orthostats were dispersed to several major Western museums. In 2016, Tabet contacted those museums to request permission to make charcoal rubbings over the orthostats. Curator-in-charge of the Met’s Ancient Near Eastern art department Kim Benzel, in addition to accepting Tabet’s request, suggested taking his work a step further with an exhibition at the Met that offers a critical look at the 20th century history of the site, uncovering stories of these ancient objects in a contemporary world. Through collaboration between artist and curator, they organically started an unknown and often hidden conversation about the site of Tell Halaf.

The exhibition, “Alien Property,” features Tabet’s 32 charcoal rubbings lining the walls of the gallery. Printed above them are the texts that describe all 194 original orthostats, a majority of which have disappeared or have been destroyed.

The contemporary artwork is juxtaposed with fragments of the Assyrian relief slabs in the adjacent gallery space and the pieced-together Venus.

Rather than attempting to construct a complete narrative, this exhibition highlights the absence of orthostats, and the losses caused by Western intervention. While Western nations and museums rushed in as saviors to reconstruct the ruins in the Middle East, Tabet’s exhibition offers a counter-story, suggesting that the relics would have been safest in their original home in Syria.

Tabet is not the only artist who has used his work to challenge the institutional status quo. In fact, some have been unraveling the imperial narratives within museums for decades. Performance artist Andrea Fraser’s entire career has centered on institutional critique. In her most notable work, “Museum Highlight: A Gallery Talk” (1989), she impersonates a museum guide leading a tour, verbalizing the unspoken assumptions and gaps in the gallery spaces of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In another example, Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz highlights the problematic acquisitions of Western Museums through memories of the Iraqi community’s diaspora. In his

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project “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist,” Rakowitz recreates “7,000 objects looted from the National Museum of Iraq following the US-led invasion in 2003.”

But even artists like Fraser, Rakowitz and Tabet have to walk a fine line between using their voices to change museums and becoming tokens of the institutions themselves. Tabet emphasized that the idea of the “Alien Property” exhibition did not solely come from him. Instead, the interaction between him and curators at the Met was “truly collaborative.” He hopes that this exhibition will start a conversation, because “the art is not the institutional critique, but the start of forming a dialogue on it.” The museum recently hosted a conversation to review the impact of “Alien Property” on the one-year anniversary of its debut in the

Met. The exhibition, which was originally planned to come down in January, is still open for visitors until an indefinite close date, a testament to its power and its appeal to viewers. Museums ought to include more exhibitions like this, which insert a contemporary voice inside otherwise archaic institutions, highlight essential cultural heritages, and bring to life glass-cased artifacts that once seemed foreign and cold.

“Artists have the ability to critique museums without being affiliated with the institutions, and are given the unique opportunity to actually make change from the inside.”

Love in the time of Coronavirus How travel restrictions are disproportionally hurting international couples

by Indigo Funk ’23, an intended International and Public Affairs concentrator and a Staff Writer for BPR’s World Section illustration by Hannah Chang ’23

Aimee Joe Mathew, an Indian citizen, has not seen her American boyfriend in over six months.

Residing in different countries when Covid-19 travel restrictions were imposed, Mathew and her boyfriend are stuck more than 8,000 miles apart and are legally prohibited from reuniting.

Their situation may seem unique, yet they are among thousands of unmarried couples separated from each other by government-mandated travel restrictions.

While there are exemptions from travel restrictions for relationships that transcend borders, most countries require a couple to be legally married in order to qualify. This policy has left many unmarried and binational couples separated for upwards of seven months, forcing some to postpone a planned wedding or even to miss the birth of a child.

Given the immense distress that strict travel restrictions have caused, some nations are enacting changes to aid couples in this situation. In August, the European Commission asked members of the European Union (EU) to allow unmarried couples to reunite; 12 countries complied and Canada recently followed suit.

However, the issue is far

from resolved. More countries must acknowledge that even though travel restrictions are necessary, the benefits of granting unmarried international couples an exception far outweigh the public health risks.

Since travel restrictions were put in place, an international grassroots movement using the hashtag #LoveIsNotTourism has advocated for these exemptions. However, outside of the EU, most countries have been hesitant to address the movement’s demands, citing a desire to slow the spread of Covid-19. This claim is questionable, as even the most restrictive countries have allowed exemptions for student and business travel. If business and higher education have been deemed essential enough to be permitted an exception, surely the love between separated couples is essential too.

Legal marriage remains an arbitrary criterion for determining whether two people deserve to reunite. Marriage does not inherently demonstrate any more emotional attachment than that between a couple who is living together or engaged. Moreover, this policy completely ignores

“If business and higher education have been deemed essential enough… surely the love between separated couples is essential too.” many LGBTQ couples who may not be legally permitted to marry in their home nations.

Governments only grant exemptions to married couples to ease the fear of relationship fraud.

Theoretically, this line of reasoning argues that anyone could claim to have a significant other in a different country in order to gain entry.

However, this has not been an issue in practice. Most of the countries offering exemptions for unmarried couples ask for proof, such as pictures, joint bank accounts, or mortgages, showing that an unmarried couple has been in a well-established relationship for at least one year. Even countries that do not require any proof,

such as Denmark, have not seen significant abuse of their system.

Most importantly, travel exemptions for unmarried couples would not pose a significant risk of spreading Covid-19 due to the small number of couples who apply. France, for example, received only 600 requests for this type of exemption since it was created, an insignificant number compared to the over 250,000 international students that they welcomed this year. Especially in countries with the resources to enforce testing, contact tracing, and quarantine requirements, health experts tend to agree that the risk is minimal. Marc Van Ranst, a prominent Dutch virologist, recently tweeted on behalf of himself and his colleagues in support of #LoveIsNotTourism.

Binational couples are substantially dependent on grassroots advocacy because they are not equipped with the resources of international students and business travelers, who have powerful institutions to advocate on their behalf. Given this lack of economic and political capital, the most effective advocacy on behalf of this small, diverse, and scattered group has been the stories of separated couples. For example, Canadian officials mentioned the story of Sarah Campbell and her British fiancé when they finally introduced a travel exemption for unmarried couples. Not only did the couple have to postpone their June wedding, but when Campbell was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in July, her fiancé was unable to be by her side during her surgery and radiation therapy. Campbell described the experience as “heartbreaking and devastating,” encouraging officials to make meaningful changes to their nations’ policies.

A country’s response to Covid-19 should not intentionally disadvantage binational couples if harm can be safely avoided. In truth, the symbolic implications of defending love go far beyond the individuals in this situation. Even in the midst of a pandemic, if the international community can choose one human tradition to protect, there are few more important than being physically present with the one you love.

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SPECIAL FEATURE | HOME

A Safe Place to Land Advocating for the construction of native women’s shelters

by Renny Jiang ’24, an intended Gender and Sexuality Studies concentrator illustration by Felipe Ortiz ’22

On the outskirts of the Flathead Reservation, in a hunting cabin in Bigfork, Montana, a Native woman peers out at the morning fog through a cabin window as she recounts the heartbreaking story of losing her niece, “Clare.” When Clare first went missing, her family called the police, as is common in most missing persons cases. From there, however, the case took a horrifying turn.

The police refused to look for Clare, claiming that she was probably drunk and had run off. The family had to conduct their own search for her, walking dozens of miles in the heavy snow and desperately searching for her without any idea of what had happened or where she might be. Devastatingly, her family eventually found her body themselves.

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Clare’s story matches a pattern often referred to as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) epidemic, and her death is a painful reminder of how the United States has continuously failed Indigenous women by leaving them with no place to go when they leave home. Since this country’s founding, the US government has systematically devalued Native lives. Even in recent decades, Native people have endured forced relocation to federally mandated reservations and forced assimilation to American cultural norms. With their communities and traditions stripped from them, Indigenous people are more likely to suffer from mental illness, including severe depression and substance abuse disorders. For Indigenous women, the situation is even more dire; ncreased rates of mental illness and addiction on reservations are accompanied by dangerously high rates of domestic violence and sexual assault.

Unsurprisingly, the United States’ failure to address its abuse of Indigenous people has led to widespread distrust of government agencies and institutions within Indigenous communities. As a result, Native people often avoid seeking help from government institutions, including government-funded, non-Native shelters where their cultural needs are not addressed and where they’re

often subject to high rates of violence by non-Natives. Exacerbating the situation, hundreds of thousands of Native women suffer from violence and homelessness, but there are only 55 existing tribal women’s shelters in the United States. To resolve this crisis, the state and federal governments in the United States, in conjunction with tribal authorities, must prioritize building and funding tribal women’s shelters on federally recognized reservations. The lives of Native women depend on it.

Of all the ethnic groups in the United States, Native women suffer from the highest rates of domestic violence and physical assault in the

“When Native women go to battered women’s shelters, they should also have access to their specific cultural traditions and people in their communities so that they do not feel isolated and misunderstood during their period of healing.”

“Clare’s story... is a painful reminder of how the United States has continuously failed Indigenous women by leaving them with no place to go when they leave home.” home. Indeed, a shocking 55.5 percent of Native American women have experienced violence and 15.9 percent have been raped by their intimate partners. Still, non-Natives are the most common perpetrators of trauma and abuse against Native women. A whopping 96 percent of Native women who experience sexual violence are assaulted by non-Native perpetrators and 89 percent of Indigenous women have been stalked by non-Natives.

For this reason, Native tribal shelters are particularly crucial in helping Indigenous women escape and recover from abusers. Not only do they offer physical protection for Native women wary of leaving their reservations, but they also offer cultural safety. Indigenous groups who reside on reservations have traditions, practices, and institutions that differ from those of non-Native American society. When Native women go to battered women’s shelters, they should also have access to their specific cultural traditions and people in their communities so that they do not feel isolated and misunderstood during their period of healing. A study conducted by the University of Calgary found that Indigenous people feel culturally safe in environments with seven key aspects: respect and trust, awareness and understanding of Native people, non-judgmental attitudes, access to Elders and other cultural support, equality of

access to services and inclusion, and consistency of services and staff. The only way for the government to create a safe environment for Native women is to build shelters by and for Indigenous people that emphasize cultural sensitivity while adhering to these strict standards.

Because tribal shelters are the only spaces where Native women can enjoy both physical and cultural safety, state and federal governments should work closely with tribal governments and Native citizens to build tribal women’s shelters on reservations. Though the government should provide the funding for these shelters, it is imperative that Native people residing on the reservations oversee the construction, management, and security of the shelters themselves, as well as the implementation of other services, like transportation and childcare. Importantly, tribal governments should prioritize hiring Native women on their reservations to decide on the programs and amenities that the shelter would offer and to manage the day-to-day operations. Not only would this create employment opportunities for Native women, but it would also ensure that victims of domestic violence receive adequate care from individuals who understand their experiences.

Though this initiative might seem costly, state and federal governments are well-equipped

with resources to fund it, and tribes must have access to these resources. The Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA) and Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) both set aside federal grants for victims, though these funds are not often easily accessible to Native tribes. Both state and federal governments should prioritize making these existing funds more accessible, so that the hundreds of thousands of dollars directed towards Native people are actually utilized to help Native communities.

For centuries, the federal government has legally and institutionally devalued Native women and left them vulnerable to violence and abuse in their own homes. Given this history, the US government has a social and moral obligation to provide funding and support to Native people. Tribes must now take initiative to use state and federal funding to create culturally, mentally, and physically safe spaces for the women of their community. Native women deserve to have a home to stay in—one that makes them feel comfortable and safe as they heal from their past trauma. Clare’s story might have ended differently if she had had a Native women’s shelter near her. Although Clare and her family would still have faced suffering, Clare might at least have been able to survive and, eventually, heal.

“I encountered Clare’s story while interning at a nonprofit organization in Montana doing research on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women epidemic. While I am not part of the Native community myself, this experience inspired the ideas I cover in this piece.” —Renny Jiang THE HOME ISSUE

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SPECIAL FEATURE | HOME

Motherland The stigmatization of single mothers and Korean adoptees

by Audrey Kim ’21, an English and Public Policy concentrator illustration by Joanne Kim ’23

Kara Bos, who was adopted by American parents as a child, has gone to great lengths to learn about her biological family; she has posted flyers, made multiple trips to South Korea, and followed DNA leads. Finally, one DNA test identified her biological father, an 85-year-old Korean man who refused to meet her. Desperate to find her biological mother, Bos resorted to filing a lawsuit against her birth father to prove her family status and force him to disclose information about her mother’s whereabouts.

Finally, on June 12, 2020, the Seoul Family Court formally acknowledged that Bos had family status with her biological father. The court’s decision represents a shifting attitude towards Korean adoptees’ right to access information about the circumstances of their birth. For the over 200,000 South Korean adoptees around the world, the ruling in Bos’ lawsuit was a landmark victory.

Upon closer examination, the specifics of the case reveal dark, enduring social stigmas at play.

The fact that Bos had to sue her biological father in order to obtain more information about her origins reflects the shame cast upon adoptees and birth parents in South Korea, who have long been socially ostracized by a conservative society that insists on traditional family structures.

If South Korean legislators and courts are truly and firmly on the side of adoptees and economically disadvantaged children—as they claim to be—they must do more than simply support adoptees’ right to information. To confront the stigma that has shaped South Korea’s relationship with international adoption thus far, the South Korean government must take action to combat its long history of discrimination against women — especially single mothers — on a larger scale.

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began to encourage international adoption in the aftermath of the Korean War, which ended in an armistice in 1953 and left the South Korean government and society in shambles. Not only was Korea the first nation to send adoptees to adoptive families abroad, but it is also the country that has sent the highest number of adoptees to foreign families to date.

Under the authoritarian leadership of President Syngman Rhee, the Korean government sought to emphasize the importance of racial and national homogeneity. This ostracized biracial children, most of whom had Korean mothers and US soldiers or United Nations employees as fathers. Because missionaries facilitated early adoptions from South Korea to the United States, many of these children were adopted into predominantly white, often religious families. By 1966, the government enacted a policy that aided four main adoption agencies to expedite adoption processes.

This arrangement was mutually beneficial to the government and the adoption agencies, as international adoptions brought in millions to South Korea’s economy.

International adoption rates continued to climb throughout the 1960s and the 1970s as a result of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and a consequential spike in childbirth out of wedlock. By the 1980s, as many as 24 Korean children on average were leaving the country each day to meet adoptive parents in other countries.

In a culture that is preoccupied with bloodlines and conventional family structures, these trends resulted in increasingly widespread disdain towards single mothers. Some adoption agencies even put pressure on single women to give up their children by convincing them that their child would have a better, more comfortable life elsewhere. Even recently, 90 percent of women who have given up their children for adoption in Korea have been single mothers.

The government’s unbridled enthusiasm for international adoption only began to change in the late 1980s, when its reputation as “the leading baby exporter in the world” began to clash with South Korea’s projected façade.

With its burgeoning cityscape, Seoul, South Korea had made quite an impression on international spectators when it hosted the 1988 Olympics. Yet, South Korea’s history of international adoption did not quite fit into its intended image as a rapidly developing, advanced economy.

To codify this shift in perspective, legislators made amendments to South Korea’s Special Adoption Law in 2012 that created barriers to international adoption at the expense of biological mothers, most of whom are unmarried. This law mandates that mothers must wait seven days before choosing to give their

“Even recently, 90 percent of women who have given up their children for adoption in Korea have been single mothers.”

“South Korea has the widest gender pay gap in the entire...OECD with men making a whopping 37 percent more than their female peers.”

children to adoption agencies, and that they must officially register their adoptions with the state.

Though the law has resulted in a decrease in international adoptions, as intended, it has also led to an increased number of abandoned children. The government has only added to the hardships of adoption for struggling mothers while failing to provide the support that they need. The amendments reflect the myopic nature of the Korean government’s outlook on family welfare and show how much work is left to be done to protect single mothers.

Uprooting the social and economic discrimination against single mothers and nontraditional family structures is a crucial step forward for adoption policies. South Korea has the widest gender pay gap in the entire Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with men making a whopping 37 percent more than their female peers. Such discrimination impedes single mothers’ ability to support their children, and government policies clearly have a hand in perpetuating such inequality. The Korean Unwed Mothers’ Families Association notes that the government provides a disproportionately small amount of child support to single parents per month—less than half of what a foster care family might receive to support a child—which they can only access after proving that they fall under the poverty line.

This also reflects the exclusion of working mothers in a society committed to traditional ideals of gender and family.

Familial bloodlines are woven into the fabric of South Korean society, and challenging such deep-seated social conventions is no easy task.

However, the government cannot claim to support adoptees while discriminating against single mothers and perpetuating stigmas around adoption. These harmful dynamics constrain true progress towards family welfare and adoptees’ rights, and government policies absolutely must address this reality.

While Kara Bos’ courtroom victory brings her one step closer to the answers that she seeks, there may be further barriers that keep her from learning about her past and her birth mother. Her birth father’s reticence shows just how much cultural progress needs to be made in order to expel the deep shame that South Korean international adoption laws have perpetuated. Without confronting the inadequacies of South Korea’s adoption laws, welfare policies, and attitude towards gender equality, adoptees and their families will continue to face obstacles in finding answers and societal acceptance.

“By the 1980s, as many as 24 Korean children were leaving the country each day to meet adoptive parents in other countries.”

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Interview with Robert Jervis Robert Jervis is a professor of international politics at Columbia University. He studies the intersection of psychology and international relations. His work challenges popular notions about nuclear deterrence by noting the complexities that perception and misperception introduce to deterrence and foreign relations as a whole.

by Shilpa Sajja ’23 illustration by Nicholas Edwards ’23 Shilpa Sajja: For readers who may not know about your work with decision making, could you give a brief summary of how something like deterrence can be impacted by decision making heuristics?

Robert Jervis: The basic problem [with deterrence] is that standard deterrence theory assumes that the two countries—let’s just make it two for simplicity—see the world the same way, that they are playing the same game. But when you start looking at the psychology involved and looking at cases, you find that they are often not playing the same game. There are very different perceptual worlds. I sum it up by saying that people studying international relations know that the game of chess is a bad analogy [for international politics] because all the players are out in the open. However, bluffing and deception are an important part of [international relations].

[In the Cold War, for example, leaders] saw the moves differently, they thought the game started at different places, they interpreted each other’s behavior very differently. In some ways that doesn’t take a lot of fancy psychology [to see], but it’s an important lesson that you must not assume that the other side is understanding the world the way you understand it.

How would you recommend policy makers and our politicians be more cognizant of different cultures and their own perceptions of different nations?

Some presidents have done quite well. To be bipartisan, I think Obama and President Eisenhower both lived outside the country for significant periods. That helped them realize that perceptions of worldviews tend to be parochial, and that they had to learn that others might see the world differently. Whereas, for Trump, who is of course very self-centered, this multiplies the effect [of misperception]. It becomes very hard for him to see how others might really see differently, and so that’s partly why when he meets Kim Jong Un, he thinks, “Oh, Kim is going to do what I want him to do.” He interprets Kim’s remarks in ways very favorable to him and then when he gets rebuffed, as he did in Hanoi, he’s just totally flummoxed. So, having had a wide variety of experience certainly helps. No guarantee, but it certainly helps. And others who haven’t, if they are just intellectually sophisticated, will know that they need to talk to people with quite different views and to escape

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from the bubble and the echo chamber. It’s hard to do that because the bubble is very comfortable, but good people will do it.

To go back to your work with deterrence during the Cold War, how does the multipolar world system now complicate the Cold War theories of deterrence and misperception?

[In the Cold War], deterrence was essentially a two actor system. What do we do with multiple adversaries and also multiple audiences, including allies that can be very important? The audiences may interpret your behavior differently and sometimes that can work in your favor, but often it does not work in your favor and you have to try to take into account how you think each audience will see your behavior. Today, with multiple adversaries that are sort of similar you have that problem even more, where what we do with North Korea is presumably being watched by Iran and maybe

by Venezuela. And again, what we do or don’t do in Venezuela may have some impact on what North Korea says. The North Koreans have public statements which show no reason to doubt that when they saw us overthrow Qaddafi in Libya and also invade Iraq, the obvious lesson was that the US will overthrow or push around countries that don’t have nuclear weapons and that, they’ll say, increased their incentives to get nuclear weapons.

It’s quite plausible that Iran reasoned the same way.

How have you seen perception play into domestic politics, particularly with the upcoming election?

American politics and mass opinion has become much more like an echo chamber than it was.

I’m not an expert in American public opinion, but there is data showing that people used to have many more friends in opposite parties, and people’s views of the opposite political parties have grown much, much more negative over the past 20 years. That’s related to the fact that people with one party affiliation are likely not to know or talk to many people in the other party. So, you’ve got this greater self-reinforcing cycle domestically.

From the standpoint of leaders, this is good and bad. It’s bad for the country, but it can increase a leader’s hold over his base. I mean, we’ve seen this with Trump—perfect case of playing to the base and doing well. More broadly, what political

leaders do [is] try to appeal to audiences, and that does require knowing quite a bit about what others like, how they’re thinking, and how they’ll see the world.

Could you touch on how the increasing domestic polarization we’ve seen has the potential to impact our international policies?

The main thing is the parties have polarized more on foreign policy and on a wide range of foreign policy issues which makes continuity much harder. When Bush came into the office his policy was ABC—“anything but Clinton.” When Trump came in, we saw the policy become “anything but Obama.” Why did Trump renounce the nuclear deal with Iran? Well, because it was Obama’s deal. And if Trump loses in November, the next Democratic president will reject Trump’s policies wholesale. I personally think there are a lot of things there that should be rejected, but you really do want to look with some care at these. So, the domestic polarization means just a blank renunciation, so you may not get as careful consideration of what was good or bad and what the international constraints are.

What are some tactics that future politicians could use to go between the aisle more?

Well, it’s really hard. I fear that Paul Krugman, who I think is very good generally, is right that it is not a symmetrical problem. Yes, the Democrats, of course, are hostile. But most of the Democratic politicians, senators, congressmen, will listen to reasonable proposals, even if they come from Republicans. But really, even before Trump, Republicans have been unwilling to compromise.

And, of course, now it’s even worse. I think things have to get worse before they get better. I think the Republicans have to not only lose the presidency but suffer quite a major defeat in Congress. I think that’s necessary before we get a decent degree of bipartisanship.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Uncapped Potential

A case for ending country-based green card quotas

by Sarah Roberts ’24, an intended Philosophy concentrator and an Associate Editor of the magazine at BPR infographic by Jiahua Chen ’24 and Madi Ko ’21

In 2016, John Doe, an Indian national who earned a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University, founded a US-based computer vision company. For three years straight, Doe participated in the United States temporary work visa lottery while pursuing permanent residence. Doe’s lottery entries were unsuccessful, and the delays in the green card process prompted Doe to leave the United States for his home country and take his company with him, resulting in the layoff of 20 American employees.

Today, millions of high-skilled immigrants are stuck in this frustrating limbo, waiting years to become “green card holders,” or permanent residents of the United States. Currently, there are annual limits and per-country green card quotas based on the applicant’s “state of chargeability,” which is most commonly their country of birth.

These quotas create enormous backlogs that bring uncertainty about immigrants’ future status and discourage many international students, professionals, and entrepreneurs—some of the United States’ most talented immigrants—from building a career and a life in America. Failure to solve this problem threatens the competitiveness of many domestic companies and undermines US innovation, resulting in preventable economic losses. Moreover, the inequitable distribution of per-country green card quotas for highly educated immigrants is blatantly discriminatory, as it privileges nationality over merit. Congress must reevaluate its green card limits based on state of chargeability, especially as the demand for green cards continues to soar.

In the US, applying for a green card is a multistep process. First, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) approves an employment-based immigrant petition. The beneficiary of this petition can then apply for a green card only if the quota set for their state of chargeability has not already been reached for the year.

If the quota has been filled, the applicant enters

the green card waitlist, where they are stuck in limbo until a green card becomes available. In a supposed attempt to democratize the share of green cards, the US prevents immigrants from any individual birthplace from receiving more than seven percent of issued green cards in a year. As a result, the backlog consists almost entirely of immigrants from countries with the largest number of petitioners, such as India and China. Indian immigrants have the largest backlog, making up 75 percent of the total waitlist, with a hopeless wait of up to 50 years for talented (and often US-educated) professionals and entrepreneurs. At the current rate of increase, the US’s total green card backlog will surpass 2.4 million people by 2030.

The US’s current green card system generates both overt and hidden economic losses. Many immigrants waiting to become permanent residents have skills in short supply in the US labor market, particularly in STEM fields. The largest number of backlogged applications for Indian and Chinese immigrants occur in the EB-2 and EB-3 green card categories, which are the primary green

cards given to foreign doctors, skilled workers, and other professionals with undergraduate and graduate degrees. On average, Indian and Chinese immigrants receive wage offers that are about 30 percent higher than the average offer for other EB-2 and EB-3 petition beneficiaries. Clearly, these individuals are in high demand in the labor market and are filling much-needed positions.

There is no sound economic reason to uphold policies that make these higher-paid immigrants wait longer for green cards because of their birthplace.

It is also worth noting that over 92 percent of EB-2 and EB-3 individuals from India who receive green cards are already in the United States working with temporary status, mainly under the H-1B work visa or F-1 student visas. Unlike green cards, H-1B work visas and F-1 student visas are issued without regard to nationality, with the former only having an overall annual cap instead of a per-country cap.

H-1B workers can renew their visas indefinitely as long as they remain on the green card waitlist, which underscores the arbitrary nature of the state of chargeability rule.

“Currently, there are annual limits and per-country green card quotas based on the applicant’s ‘state of chargeability,’ which is most commonly their country of birth.”

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Although these individuals can continue to work in the United States while they move toward the front of the line, there are many restrictions during the wait that prevent them from fully contributing to the economy and society as a whole.

Primarily, H-1B workers waiting for their green cards cannot easily change positions or employers. If an H-1B holder changes jobs, their new employer needs to restart the green card process from scratch, something many employers—and employees—are reluctant to do. There is also the potential for the new petition to be denied, causing these immigrants to hesitate to change jobs regardless of what this new opportunity may entail. If H-1B employers go out of business or downsize during the waiting period, the visa holder needs to find a new position within 60 days to remain in the US and the green card queue. It is also extremely challenging for these visa holders to start their own businesses, which limits their potential to innovate and create more jobs within the US. Another harm of the green card process is that the US loses many skilled immigrants to other countries. The H-1B restrictions and the absurd wait times drive billions of dollars in investment and thousands of skilled workers abroad to countries with more open employment-based immigration policies, such as Canada. In 2017, the number of skilled workers in STEM fields that received an opportunity for permanent residence from the

Canadian government exploded, with accepted applications from Indian citizens increasing from 9,584 in 2016 to 26,340 in 2018. Recognizing the flow of immigrants from the US, the Canadian government has said it will grant permanent residence to 195,800 economic migrants in 2020.

Beyond the economic impact, these per-country quotas are fundamentally inconsistent with America’s stated values of equal opportunity.

Though those who support these quotas claim to support giving a fair shot to immigrants from every country, the hard cap of seven percent of issued green cards does not account for the variations in population of foreign nations. As previously stated, this disproportionately affects immigrants from India and China. It is a basic American principle that hiring decisions cannot be based on race, religion, or nationality.

However, these policies and quotas allow the US government to filter the workforce based on nationality rather than merit. Although diversity is often a motivation for the inclusion of people with different backgrounds, in this case, the same argument is used to discriminate against people from certain countries.

In many ways, the most effective solution to this problem is simple: removing per-country caps. With the current system, immigrants in similar employment situations end up with wait times that diverge wildly for no reason other than their country of birth. Removing the per-country cap

would balance out the wait times for immigrants, making the average time to process everyone in the EB-2 and EB-3 categories approximately six years. A caveat is the possibility of increased wait times for people from smaller countries, though these would not compare to the current decadeslong wait for Indian nationals. This reform would allow for a flood of immigrants from India and, to a lesser degree, China, at the expense of moderately long wait times for everyone in line, which is something all Americans should reasonably support. This change should also be coupled with an increase in the annual green card quota. Congress should link employment-based immigration quotas to economic growth, as rigid caps make little to no sense in the dynamic economy of the United States.

Congress must reevaluate and increase the green card limits based on birthplace due to the inequitable distribution of immigrant beneficiaries in the backlog. It is important to remember that this issue has existed throughout American history, and the American response has consistently been discriminatory. This issue is not simply about fairness; immigrants have been and continue to be the engine of the American economy, and the government should facilitate their entry into the US workforce rather than prevent it.

“Though those who support these quotas claim to support giving a fair shot to immigrants from every country, the hard cap of seven percent of issued green cards does not account for the variations in population of foreign nations.”

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Interview with

Keith Beauchamp

by Gabby Smith ’23 illustration by Nicholas Edwards ’23

Keith Beauchamp is a civil rights activist, filmmaker, and criminal investigator. When he was just 10 years old, he saw Emmett Till’s battered face while looking through Jet magazine. Determined to continue sharing Till’s story with the world, he released his groundbreaking Emmynominated documentary, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, in 2005. His film not only launched Till’s story back into the national spotlight, but also spurred a reopening of the case by the Department of Justice over 50 years later. Beauchamp is now the executive producer and host of Investigation Discovery’s reality crime series, The Injustice Files, and a producer of the upcoming feature film Till.

Gabby Smith: How did you get into filmmaking?

Keith Beauchamp: If it were not for the death of Emmett Till, there would not be a Keith Beauchamp filmmaker. The thing about my whole life and career was that it was all unintentional. I thought I would be a civil rights attorney. I’m not an entertainer; I’m not one of those filmmakers who produces stuff to entertain. Filmmaking is my activism tool. I won’t touch a project unless I’m able to make change through it. After I was able to see the power that an individual can have with just a simple tool of a camera, the whole world changed for me. I learned with Till that there is a way to get justice for these families.

When families who lost loved ones to racist violence during the civil rights movement come to you to tell their story, what kind of justice are they looking for?

When I started off, I used to be bloodthirsty. It was all about putting people in jail and frying them.

There’s a quote that I like that I feel captures it well: “There’s no justice in America, but it is 38

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the pursuit of justice that sustains you.” Even if you had courtroom justice, you would never be able to bring the victim back. There is no justice in America. That’s what drives me every day. Oftentimes when a family contacts me it is because they have exhausted every other avenue.

In many of these unsolved cases, you will never really see courtroom justice. The families know that already. Many of them don’t even know what happened to their loved ones, and that’s where I come in. All these families want is a platform to tell their loved ones’ stories, as well as find out what happened to them. That’s very important towards the healing process. People want justice, and not just courtroom justice, but truth. Till helped me do that: He gave me the ability to help other families and I am forever grateful for that.

What role did Emmett play in your life after that point?

When I got to high school I began interracially dating. I went to a predominantly white school. The first thing my parents would tell me before I left the house at night was, “Don’t let

“There is no justice in America.

That’s what drives me every day.”

“In order for us to understand how to fight the enemy, racism, we must understand how we fought it the first time. There’s no other movement in our history that’s been as successful as the civil rights movement.” what happened to Emmett Till happen to you.”

Emmett’s story became a tool to teach me about the racism that still continues in this country today. But it wasn’t until two weeks before my high school graduation that I really had my wake-up call. I was at a pre-graduation party for the high schools in my area. At the party, I saw three white girls, classmates of mine. One of the girls told me to come over to dance with them. We were having a good time, no issues whatsoever, until all of a sudden I was pushed hard from behind. I turned around and discovered it was a bouncer at the club.

He said, “N*****, mess with your own kind” and continued pushing me. Of course I was enraged and pushed him back, and we started fighting on the floor.

The bouncer made a gesture to someone on the side, and he started running over and throwing punches at me. I threw punches back, and my best friend joined in. The next thing I know, two uniformed officers come in, grab me, and begin to pull me out of the establishment.

The second guy throwing punches at me ran outside and began attacking me again, hitting me with an iron keychain. I fell to the ground as the uniformed officers took me to a secluded office in the back of the nightclub. They handcuffed me to a chair and walked out. One of my attackers, who turned out to be an undercover cop, came in and kicked over my chair and kicked me in the chest and face. I was defenseless. But I wasn’t thinking about the pain. All I thought of was Emmett Till and what my mom had said. The officers tried to charge me with assault and battery on a police officer. I was sitting there trying to figure this out, extremely angry because I knew why I was attacked. I explained what the bouncer said to me and how he started attacking me, but they were trying to convince me it wasn’t about race. That was my wake-up call—I realized then I had to do something with my life. It was at that point that I said to myself: “I gotta put myself in a position of power to never let anything like this happen to a person of color ever again.”

again been brought back to the national spotlight as the country faces a new racial reckoning in the wake of murders at the hands of police. Do you see the legacy of Emmett Till reflected in current calls for justice?

I feel like a lot of people have gotten their wake-up call like I had mine. With George Floyd’s case, for instance, when I first saw that video it brought me back to when I was 10 years old. The whole symbolic aspect of a white man’s knee on his neck—that’s a metaphor that we often use when we talk about living in American as Black men. To visually see something like that touched me, but even more so when I found out that he was screaming for his mother. When I heard that, the only thing I could think about was Emmett, because Emmett did the same thing. I know that for a lot of people, that was their Emmett Till moment.

I believe that there are really some people out there doing the work right now, or trying to do it. But I don’t want people to have this illusion that things change overnight, because they don’t. Emmett Till’s murder wasn’t a fluke, it wasn’t an accident. The movement was carefully planned and we don’t realize [it] today. My mentors, many of them civil rights activists in Mississippi, helped me understand the importance of not just moving towards the future hastily, but understanding the past so that we won’t repeat it. When we come to this point, with the Black Lives Matter movement—I love the movement, it’s needed, I support it—in order for us to understand how to fight the enemy, racism, we must understand how we fought it the first time. There’s no other movement in our history that’s been as successful as the civil rights movement. Every generation is obligated to fight the good fight. That’s the only way change is going to happen.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Bordering on Extinction Protecting the biodiversity of our border regions

by Hannah Severyns ’23.5, an intended English concentrator and Senior Managing Editor of the BPR magazine illustration by Brenda Rodriguez ’21

In California, just miles from the United States-Mexico border, a Quino checkerspot butterfly rests on the stem of a low-growing shrub.

The butterfly opens itself to the sun, tilting the red, black, and cream checkers decorating its wings skyward. Once, millions of these well-adorned insects could be found dotting California’s southern border. Nowadays, even within 50 miles of the US-Mexico border—an area that contains 64.6 percent of the species’ critical habitat—the Quino checkerspot butterfly is hard to find. While the butterfly once paid no mind to the geopolitical boundaries between the US and Mexico, today much of the border is composed of bulky infrastructure that the Quino checkerspot, with an aversion to flying over objects taller than six to eight feet, cannot cross.

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Quino checkerspots, the federal government has listed this butterfly as an endangered species since 1997. As biodiversity decreases at accelerating rates, “transboundary frontiers”—areas surrounding a geopolitical border—have been deemed an “emerging priority” for conservationists as they often overlap with biodiversity hotspots that contain the habitats of thousands of species.

The Quino checkerspots are, unfortunately, not the only inhabitants of a transboundary frontier whose population has been threatened in recent years. Yet, in politicians’ talk of border security, environmental concerns are consistently put on the back burner.

The US-Mexico border is a prime example of this. During Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he mentioned a border wall over 200 times and upon taking office, he issued an executive order calling for the immediate construction of such a wall. In doing so, Trump actively ignored experts’ warnings that a border wall could threaten the wellbeing of about 10,000 species, including plants, fish, and invertebrates. Trump’s

administration is not the first—and, without change, is unlikely to be the last—to sacrifice biodiversity in the name of border security. The 2005 Real ID Act, which US officials have been exploiting for nearly 15 years to bypass environmental laws, is largely to blame for the unregulated destruction of biodiversity at the US-Mexico border. Thus, to preserve already weakened biodiversity at this essential transboundary frontier, the historical exploitation of the 2005 Real ID Act must be declared an unchecked abuse of executive power and its use in circumventing environmental regulations must be permanently put to rest.

The most serious environmental threat posed by the Real ID Act stems from a provision that grants unprecedented power to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to waive any local, state, or federal law that might inhibit the construction of infrastructure at the US’s southern border. With the War on Terror in full swing, bipartisan support for an act prioritizing “national security” was not hard to come by, and border construction quickly followed the

“In politicians’ talk of border security, environmental concerns are consistently put on the back burner.”

Real ID Act’s passage. During George W. Bush’s presidency alone, over 35 environmental laws were bypassed by DHS using the Real ID Act in order to begin construction mandated by Bush’s Secure Fence Act. Before Bush’s administration, only about 150 miles of the southern border were fenced or walled; by the end, nearly 650 miles were covered, almost none of which were constructed in line with environmental laws.

During President Obama’s administration, border construction continued following Bush’s guidelines, but DHS proposed no significant plans for new border infrastructure. Still, border security remained a hot political issue, eventually forming a major part of President Trump’s platform. In the time between the Bush and Trump presidencies, the Real ID Act’s DHS provision largely remained intact, undisputed even by Democrats and ready to be utilized by any administration willing to prioritize border infrastructure over environmental protections.

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s anti-immigration and anti-environmentalist stances encouraged members of his administration to abuse the Real ID Act. Throughout the past four years, the Trump administration has invoked the Real ID Act in every US state along the US-Mexico border and waived over 45 environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act and the Wilderness Act. Since then, the state of biodiversity at the border has become even more precarious; more and more border construction is dividing cross border species, destroying their habitats, and placing their populations at severe risk. Conservationists warn that if environmental laws are not heeded soon,

“While the butterfly once paid no mind to the geopolitical boundaries between the US and Mexico, today much of the border is composed of bulky infrastructure that the Quino checkerspot... cannot cross.”

93 at-risk species could be pushed further toward the brink of extinction. Meanwhile, experts warn that more infrastructure at the border will not necessarily stop undocumented immigrants from entering the US, meaning border construction is both extremely costly and terribly ineffective.

Thanks to its vague language, the Real ID Act effectively puts the Secretary of Homeland Security, unchecked and uncheckable, completely above environmental laws. It is clear from departmental actions under the Bush and Trump administrations that DHS is incapable of moderating itself in the exercise of its law waiving powers, thereby failing to protect the border and its fragile ecosystems. To account for this failure, Congress must declare the Real ID Act an abuse of power by DHS and repeal it; the species at our border and the balance of power in our government depend on it.

While politicians rarely talk about environmental justice at the border, conservationists have consistently been active in the fight against the Real ID Act. The Center for Biological Diversity has led several lawsuits against the Trump administration for its abuse of the Real ID Act, demanding

that the rule of law once again be applied to DHS and that the environmental damage already done at the border be evaluated. Still, little has come of these lawsuits so far; besides, targeting Trump, rather than the Real ID Act itself, doesn’t prevent other administrations from abusing the law.

The conversation surrounding security at the US-Mexico border is certain to continue, whether the Real ID Act remains in place or not.

By bringing the Real ID Act into question, conservationists raise important concerns about how to balance border security with environmental justice. Concrete walls, steel fences, and border patrollers certainly don’t belong at a green border, nor at a humane one, either. By repealing the provision that awards DHS unchecked power to waive any environmental regulations, conservationists are seeking to ensure that no actor, whether it be DHS, those working in the name of national security, or the president, is above the law. In doing so, they invite an essential conversation on sustainable development, environmental collaboration, biodiversity conservation, and, overall, a greener US-Mexico border into American political discourse.

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AN ACT OF GOD By the end of the year, the words “unprecedented,” “unusual,” and “difficult” will probably no longer mean much in our public parlance.

We Americans have already run out of ways to describe the pandemic, though its economic and psychological ramifications are not likely to be fully understood for many decades.

What Americans do know, however, is that the coronavirus pandemic is pulling the rug out from underneath the American economy. According to a recent study conducted by McKinsey and Company, 64 percent of US businesses with $500 million or less in annual revenue are expecting minimal or negative growth in the coming fiscal year. Small firms like these employ nearly half of the American workforce and form the backbone of the nation’s economy, yet many of them do not have the savings or resources to adjust to the prolonged pandemic. The upfront costs of personal protective equipment (PPE) and workspace readjustments, as well as the fact that small businesses are disproportionately service-based and therefore reliant on in-person transactions, burden small businesses far more than Fortune 500 conglomerates, ultimately leading to lowered competitiveness with large firms.

To make matters worse, even where small businesses survive this disadvantageous pandemic market structure, many are folding due to pre-pandemic legal obligations. Signees to contracts whose terms were violated due to pandemic-related reasons are rushing to the courts, looking to cut financial losses through jury verdicts. The most common defense against these breach-of-contract allegations is the doctrine of

How pandemic-era judicial inconsistencies are harming small businesses

by Xiaoyu Huang ’21, an English, Public Policy, and Music Performance concentrator and Chief Operating Officer for BPR illustration by Sophie Foulkes ’22

force majeure. The doctrine often appears when an event beyond the reasonable control of a party occurs and impacts the party’s performance in the form of contractual provisions that foreclose penalties for non-performance, or failure to satisfy contractual obligations. Such events are often classified, in contract jargon, as “acts of God.” Regrettably, force majeure defenses hold up poorly in court. In many rulings since the pandemic, Covid-19 has not been ruled as a qualifying event. Meanwhile, the shifting meaning of “reasonable” also tends to disadvantage parties sued for breach of contract, since in the pleading stage facts are construed favorably to the plaintiff. Therefore, to level the playing field and protect small-business defendants, the

federal government must declare Covid-19 an “act of God.” An emblematic failure of the force majeure defense recently occurred in the Southern District of Florida. In the early September case Palm Springs Mile Associates v. Kirkland’s Stores, Inc., a federal judge rejected a motion to dismiss a real estate firm’s allegation that the defendant’s store, in failing to pay its rent since April, was liable for breach of contract. The defendant, Kirkland’s Stores, Inc., had relied on a force majeure defense in its motion to dismiss. This approach failed, according to District Judge Robert Scola, who wrote that Kirkland did not “point to factual allegations… that show the government regulations themselves actually prevented Kirkland from making rent payments.” This is despite Mayor Carlos Giménez’s March 12 emergency stay-athome order preventing in-person operations of brick-and-mortar stores in Miami-Dade County, where Kirkland is situated. Kirkland will likely file for bankruptcy.

While the Palm Springs decision is not binding in other courts, it is significant as an early attempt at a force majeure defense. The decision also gives two harrowing insights. First, judges may set an unreachable bar for the defendant to show the nexus between Covid-related exigencies and inability to perform duties. In the case of Kirkland, a local directive banning in-person business operations was not even enough. Second, judges are content to let force majeure cases go to trial, inflicting massive expenses on the defendant.

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“According to a recent study conducted by McKinsey and Company, 64 percent of US businesses with $500 million or less in annual revenue are expecting minimal or negative growth in the coming fiscal year.”

often seal the economic fate of the defendant, as small businesses simultaneously scramble to finance court battles and stay afloat during the worst pandemic in a century.

In other districts, defendants have occasionally made successful force majeure defenses, but these partial victories have been dependent on specific circumstances and therefore offer little help to litigants facing anything short of identical circumstances. These decisions often apply the law differently. An Illinois court’s ruling this summer, in a case pertaining to Hitz restaurant group, adopted the opposite logic of Palm Springs.

Hitz had also failed to pay rent, and the contracts of both Kirkland and Hitz include a force majeure clause. But here, a bankruptcy judge found that force majeure was “unambiguously” triggered

by Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s stay-at-home order, which includes a ban on in-restaurant dining. As a result, Hitz was absolved of paying its full commercial rent. But the court narrowly construed Covid-19’s “reasonable” impact. In response to Hitz’ concession that it “could [have] used” up to 25 percent of its square footage to offer take-out services, the court ordered Hitz to pay 25 percent of its rent obligation, even though the plaintiffs did not plead that Hitz could have converted to take-out, and it was not obvious that the high-end eatery could have done so.

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Legal commentator Paul Mirr of JD Supra has characterized this decision as “extremely alarming… and [amounting] to yet another in a growing list of tenant-friendly COVID-era decisions.” But the Hitz case is far from tenantfriendly, and for courts to presume so is dangerous for small businesses. It takes a barely supported assumption that a restaurant is able to reinvent its business on the fly and turns that assumption into a costly recovery. While views like Mirr’s largely circulate within defense counsel circles and legal news sites, they point to the more dangerous assumption held by some that contracts are contracts, force majeure or not, no matter the economic and social cost of their satisfaction.

A look at recent decisions suggests that the majority of jurisdictions are following the corporation-friendly dicta of the New York district courts in which failure to perform is only excused when payment is “rendered impossible by an unforeseen event” (In re Cablevision Consumer Litigation, E.D.N.Y. 2012). “Impossibility,” the point at which “reasonable” performance ends, relies on a subjective finding that differs from judge to judge. Yet the force majeure doctrine has never required that performance be “impossible;” it simply requires that an unforeseen event sufficiently impedes performance. As

“As things stand, the cards are stacked against the businesses.”

things stand, the cards are stacked against the businesses.

Part of the issue is that courts are relying on dicta, where a judge includes their opinion on issues that do not directly relate to a case, and therefore are not binding to guide Covid-era decisions. Covid-19, however, is without precedent, and the level of impediment to non-performing businesses varies wildly. The subjectivity inherent to these decisions has led the Palm Springs and Hitz courts to almost diametrically opposing conclusions. Judge Scola wrote that Covid-19 and local shutdowns are not “proximate causes” of non-performance. What exactly qualifies as “proximate” in the Southern District of Florida is anybody’s guess; predicting these force majeure outcomes in other jurisdictions is nearly impossible.

If courts find in favor of the plaintiffs, there is little recourse for the defendants. The SARS pandemic of 2003 has discouraged insurance providers and underwriters from including pandemics in their policy language. It is also unlikely that a relief bill will pass through the Senate as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has adjourned the body after a frantic rush to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett. In the meantime, courts around the country are delivering inconsistent rulings and requiring defendant businesses to make crippling compensatory payments. In any case, the delay allows cases to wind through the courts, incurring

litigation expenses on all sides and further damaging defendant businesses.

The solution may actually be very easy. President Donald Trump could immediately issue an executive order or Attorney General William Barr could issue a Department of Justice (DOJ) guidance document, proclaiming that Covid-19 is within the meaning of an “act of God” or any other emergencies or events within force majeure clauses. Separation of powers ensures that these documents will not bind federal courts, and there is little precedent on the legal ramifications of a judge ruling in contravention to either an Executive Order or a guidance document. However, a statement from the President or the DOJ can guide judges, should they ever find themselves teetering on the conceptual fine line when deciding whether Covid-19 is proximate enough to qualify as an unforeseen exigency. Of course, these inquiries should remain fact-dependent and rigorous.

But there will invariably be cases with facts that are more ambiguous, and to the extent that judges can be helped in these difficult litigations, the federal government should not hesitate to draw a clearer line.

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The Doctor is In Applications of telehealth for rural populations

by Nick Sawicki ’23, an Economics and Biology concentrator in the Program in Liberal Medical Education illustration by Katie Fliegel ’21

For most Americans in suburban or urban areas, a trip to the doctor is usually as innocuous as a quick 20-minute car ride. But for 20 percent (60 million) of Americans who live in rural communities, where hospitals and the health care professionals needed to staff them are scarce, accessing basic medical care poses a much greater challenge.

The shortage of doctors and closure of hospitals in rural communities can be largely attributed to a generation of rising physicians who are unwilling to practice medicine in sparsely populated communities. A 2019 Merritt Hawkins survey found that only one percent of fourth year medical residents were willing to work in communities with less than 10,000 residents. As a result, 119 hospitals that once served rural communities have closed their doors since 2010, a record-breaking 18 of which closed in 2019 alone. In places such as Wheeler County, Oregon, community members have to travel over 70 miles to their nearest hospital to meet with a physician. Such an inconvenience ultimately means that these Americans often defer visits to the doctor until their medical situation becomes absolutely dire, a practice that leads to higher rates of obesity, cancer, diabetes, infant mortality, and death from preventable disease.

When Covid-19 struck in late March, forcing doctor’s offices and hospitals to admit only patients with emergency medical conditions in both rural and urban areas, the medical community was quick to take up a solution that had previously seen only limited use: telehealth. While not previously covered by Medicare or private insurance, virtual visits quickly became the norm as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services temporarily expanded coverage to include 46

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“In places such as Wheeler County, Oregon, community members have to travel over 70 miles to their nearest hospital to meet with a physician.” telehealth appointments, with private insurance plans quickly following suit. Now, total telehealth visits are slated to surpass one billion in number by the end of 2020.

Although the adoption of telehealth is only meant to be a temporary solution while social distancing and other public health measures remain in effect, this shift in the healthcare delivery paradigm has incidentally increased healthcare accessibility for many segments of the population. For rural communities in particular, these virtual visits may very well be the key to breaking

“While there are certainly limitations to telehealth, this newfound access to healthcare for patients in rural areas may very well end up being a silver lining of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

down geographic barriers to healthcare by connecting patients to healthcare providers without the time commitment or costs of traveling to their nearest hospital.

Dr. Jay Zaslow of Brewster, New York is a family physician at a federally qualified health facility where 80 percent of his patients fall under the national poverty line and can’t always afford a visit to the doctor. He expressed that when a person makes “$200 a week cleaning homes” or “has to work multiple shifts at McDonalds,” they can’t always afford the $20 taxi fare to transport themselves to the doctor’s office, let alone take time off work. Virtual visits provide patients with greater flexibility to see a doctor on their own time while also avoiding unnecessary transportation costs.

When virtual visits ballooned from five percent of his visits before Covid-19 to over 95 percent of visits as infection rates peaked in New York, Dr. Zaslow concluded that for “select problems, you could absolutely replace in-person visits with virtual ones.” While we have yet to reach the point of performing, say, a virtual rectal exam, Dr. Zaslow suggested that virtual medicine can serve to “complement” more traditional, in-person visits, increasing efficiency and elevating the quality of delivery.

If telehealth can practically be used to supplement healthcare in Brewster, with a population of under 3,000, perhaps telehealth should be more seriously considered as a way to supplement the shortage of healthcare services in other rural communities. Dr. Timothy Empkie, retired Associate Dean of Medicine at Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School, once practiced medicine in Linton, North Dakota, a county larger than the entire state of Rhode Island but with a population of less than 6,000 people during the 1970s. He recalls that even back then, a rudimentary “virtual” line of communication existed between the primary hospital in Bismarck, North Dakota and the county’s health clinic. This link permitted the county to erect a miniature critical care unit to treat patients with mild heart attacks and facilitated life-saving care for patients who needed immediate attention.

Dr. Empkie believes that this same concept can be applied to allow patients in rural communities to receive medical consults from specialists anywhere in the country. Patients could choose to either receive consults from the comfort of their homes or from their local generalist’s office.

While there are certainly limitations to telehealth, this newfound access to healthcare for patients in rural areas may very well end up being a silver lining of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Big Brother’s Rude Awakening How data ought to be protected in the age of the internet

by Gabe Merkel ’23, an intended Political Science concentrator and a Managing Editor at BPR infographics by Erika Bussman ’22 and Madi Ko ’21

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Americans have prized individual liberty since the nation’s founding. Naturally, many people are suspicious of the government collecting their data. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, a majority of Americans disapprove of the US government’s collection of telephone and internet data, and over 90 percent of Americans “say it is important to control who can get their information, as well as what information about them is collected.”

However, there is a force in American life that threatens data privacy as much as the government

does: tech companies. Though Americans are concerned about tech companies’ collection of data, which can be tied to a relentless pursuit of profit, almost nothing has been done to curtail this phenomenon. Google and Facebook record every website their users go to, every photo they look at (and for how long), and much more.

However, rather than storing and recalling taped phone conversations only in instances where, say, national security is threatened, as the NSA claims to do, these companies immediately put the data to work to help target ads and suggest content—a

“However, rather than storing and recalling taped phone conversations only in instances where, say, national security is threatened, as the NSA claims to do, these companies immediately put the data to work to help target ads and suggest content—a practice which has become essential to their business model and their profits.” practice which has become essential to their business model and their profits.

Tech companies like these know more about users than most people realize, from the kind of toothpaste they use to their sexual orientation.

The use of this data can easily become problematic. For example, a person who is recovering from an addiction to alcohol may get an ad for a special deal on their favorite whiskey brand or see suggested videos of celebrities having fun at a bar because they have expressed interest in alcohol in the past. Google Maps might even tell them when they are close to a liquor store. These kinds of digital suggestions and reminders are not only detrimental to a person’s recovery and wellbeing, but they compromise the consumer’s privacy.

No single entity should have this much knowledge and power, especially not trillion-dollar corporations with few obligations beyond appeasing their shareholders and maximizing their profits.

With the current landscape of ineffective mediation and sparse government action, a federal “data tax” on tech companies’ collection of user data is necessary to curtail these companies’ mass data collection and protect the fundamental liberties of Americans.

A data tax is not a novel idea. Politicians, particularly from local governments, have been proposing the solution for years. Similar taxes, including severance taxes, are already in use in some states and provide a basic model for how a data tax might function. A severance tax is a tax on non-renewable resources and is most often implemented as a measure to gradually disincentivize natural gas and oil extraction. These taxes— which normally range from one to six percent of

the value of the goods—generated nine billion dollars in revenue in 2017. While severance taxes were mostly created to raise state revenue, they have also slightly reduced oil and gas extraction in certain states. Economists estimate that the “elasticity of oil drilling with respect to severance taxes is between -.3 and -.4”, meaning that a “one percent increase in the severance tax rate would reduce drilling by about 0.3 to 0.4 percent.” So, while they are bad news for oil companies, severance taxes have been successful in raising revenue and slowing down the extraction of pollutive natural resources. A data tax would have a similar goal: to raise tax revenue while decreasing data collection by tech companies.

There is good reason to believe that a data tax could be even more effective at curtailing data collection than severance taxes have been for reducing drilling. First, data collection is likely to be more sensitive to changes in price compared to oil drilling, given that oil is a commodity with a relatively stable price. The value of data, on the other hand, is tougher to quantify. A data tax would force companies to carefully consider which consumer data is most valuable and only collect that, cutting back on the accumulation of other, less lucrative user information. Second, while severance taxes usually charge a flat rate for each barrel of oil or ton of coal, the data tax could operate using a tiered model. Companies should be permitted to collect some data on their users as a means of upholding their legal right to generate revenue

“With the current landscape of ineffective mediation and sparse government action, a federal ‘data tax’ on tech companies’ collection of user data is necessary to curtail these companies’ mass data collection and protect the fundamental liberties of Americans.”

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“As more of our lives shift online, the market for data will continue to grow and the algorithms that extract and use our data will become increasingly sophisticated. We need to start thinking of these companies’ mass collection of data as a true existential threat.” from consumers’ use of digital products. However, when a firm begins to collect data over a certain predetermined threshold, they would be subject to a data tax levied at a proportional rate. This taxation model would operate similarly to the progressive tax system in the US. The more data over the threshold a company collects, the more that data is taxed. Under this system, companies will be able to collect the data they need, but not all the data they want.

With billions of dollars at stake, tech giants like Google and Facebook would not accept these newly imposed taxes without a fight. Any lawmaker who proposes a data tax can expect companies to do all they can to derail the legislation. Tech companies are capable of spending massive sums on lobbying to influence politicians and impact 50

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potential legislation. Over the past decade, the seven largest tech companies in the US—including Facebook and Google—have spent over half a billion dollars on lobbying and advocacy. It is also conceivable, and even probable, that tech companies affected by the data tax would challenge its constitutionality, similar to how severance taxes have been challenged. Yet, severance taxes were still found constitutional, as a data tax might be, in the Supreme Court. Given that a data tax could meaningfully decrease these company’s profits, there is no question that they will be willing to spend as much as it takes to stomp out the idea.

Aside from these challenges posed by tech companies’ inevitable resistance, there would still be implementation issues to address. Fundamentally, there is the question of how to record

the amount of data being collected by companies.

Should the federal government allow companies to self-report their data collection practices or does that just open the door for fraud and tax evasion? If the government decides to monitor the companies’ data collection themselves, do they even have the necessary technology to do so?

Also, how does the government measure data in order to tax it? While current technological and legal analyses fail to provide certain answers to these questions, they should not stand in the way of something as important and necessary as a data tax. Once the logistics have been worked out, the tax will be well worth it.

A data tax is a big idea. It would drastically reshape the tech industry. It would alienate some of the wealthiest people in the world and infuriate prominent conservative politicians, but it is necessary. At a time when every state in the US is experiencing a decline in tax revenue and unemployment is coming off record-high levels, the billions of dollars in proceeds from this tax could be put to good use. As more of our lives shift online, the market for data will continue to grow and the algorithms that extract and use our data will become increasingly sophisticated. We need to start thinking of these companies’ mass collection of data as a true existential threat. Considering these stakes, a data tax is not an extreme idea at all.

Interview with Rachel A. Pickens Rachel A. Pickens is a civil rights attorney and Executive Director of the National Police Accountability Project (NPAP), a nonprofit project of the National Lawyers Guild, which was founded in 1937 as the first racially integrated US bar association. The central mission of the NPAP is to promote the accountability of law enforcement officers and their employers for violations of the Constitution and the laws of the United States.

by Amelia Spalter ’21 illustration by Nicholas Edwards ’23

Amelia Spalter: When you meet someone who says something like, “I support police reform, but I’m hesitant to abolish them altogether because my ex-boyfriend is abusive and if he violates the restraining order, I need someone to call,” what do you tell them?

Rachel A. Pickens: That discussion has been the one I’ve been chewing on most because, while the conversation on abolition has been around since the 1940s, for probably 99 percent of Americans, the word abolition with reference to the police is brand-new. There are still some weighty questions about abolition, especially when juxtaposed [with] police reform. When we juxtapose abolition [with] reform, it sounds hasty and completely unfathomable. But I’m glad the discussion is happening, because when you really dive deep, abolition contains multitudes. This includes defunding the police, which means reallocation of resources from police departments to other entities that have been underfunded for decades. It’s re-examining ineffective structures to reshape the future of policing 10 years from now, 20 years from now.

If the word “abolition” by itself scares someone off, then I think that person is losing out on some really important concepts about reimagining everything that makes policing the way it is.

I would also say that we all know that education, food security, job security, and physical and mental health all factor into how a community interacts within itself. If those things are taken care of, and if we refocus on what policing is actually good for, that means police officers would no longer be the ones who respond to distress calls. Police should not be first responders for probably 90 percent of the calls they receive, but, because there’s no alternative, they’re what we get.

I can absolutely see why people fear an absence of police, but I hope that they push through that fear and realize that there are some things within the abolition concept that are just as important as those within reform.

Can people who are in favor of abolishing the police also be in favor of reforming the current system?

Abolition is, again, a heavy, strong word, and in regard to a policing system that’s been around

since the 1870s, it’s like a monument just being gone. But here we go, monuments are being taken down as we speak, and with good reason.

[That being said,] reform and abolition are going to be living in the same space. The road to abolition is long. I don’t think abolition will be happening countrywide in my lifetime. It could happen in pockets. So meanwhile, while there is a vision for abolition, it’s okay to also look at the reform and figure out, “Okay if we can’t do abolition now, are there things we can pull from reform now?” For example, the stripping of the strength of police unions and things that will affect their day-to-day movements. Not just antibias training or de-escalation training, because clearly that alone won’t work. The officer who killed Rayshard Brooks had just had anti-bias training and de-escalation training two months prior, so that clearly did nothing.

The way NPAP is trying to go [is] towards reform; actual reform, not just the toothless reform that Minneapolis’ police department had. Actual reform is about [offending] officers facing consequences. Not just in a distant report that no one can ever see, [but] transparent, where the community will have access to it.

So, right now, I’m not asking people to make a choice between abolition and reform, because I see this as a “both.” You have to make room for both conversations, because each one benefits from the other.

Were any mainstream politicians vocal proponents of police accountability before the murder of George Floyd?

Julián Castro was, even back when there were more than 25 Democratic presidential candidates.

I won’t say he’s the only one, but he has probably always had the strongest voice about police accountability. The thing is, police unions have such a stranglehold politically. They’re issue-based, they will support candidates regardless of whether they’re Republican, Democrat or Independent.

Julián Castro is one of the only ones who really intentionally brings these issues up.

What steps would you recommend people take to continue driving forward momentum on this issue?

For those who want to continue to help, voting is going to have to be one of the steps, and not just because it controls the whole presidency. Starting locally, voting will be really important. I know a lot of people, myself included, are tired of hearing that, because voting is critically important, but it’s not the end-all be-all. [As] we’ve seen, whomever you vote for, you’ve got to actively push people to really hear you. Some other things also include supporting any local criminal justice grassroots activism, because while a lot of nonprofits like ours have been overwhelmed with support, we know that things will be quieter than they are now.

Protesting is also still very important. I don’t doubt that there will be other police killings in the future.

Protesting is something that has tremendous value and always sets a pace for everything else.

How do you recommend police brutality activists keep from getting burned out during this historic surge of awareness of their cause?

This has been professionally and personally very difficult for me. The way I have been able to move through these past [months] has been the support of others. Not just attorneys, but the first responders on the front lines, the protesters. I know all this can be overwhelming, especially for those who are new to this conversation. So it’s okay to, A) not know everything, B) ask more questions and provide answers—but don’t ask your Black and Brown friends—do the work on your own, Google is free.

And C), take a little break. Because movements can be everlasting, and with movement work, there is always going to be a need for sustainability. I know that this work isn’t going to end for a very long time.

For those who want to join, you’re always welcome, and for those who were in it long before I was, thank you. I hope that they will take care of themselves in this time and reflect on how important it is that people are coming out and doing this work during a pandemic. It’s astounding. Nothing is going to be the same after this.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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The Donkey in the Room How the DSCC is undermining the democratic process

by Ben Lipson ’22.5, a Political Science concentrator and Max Pushkin ’22.5, an International and Public Affairs concentrator illustration by Nadia Kossman-Newcomb ’22

On a cloudy June morning in the state of Kentucky, voters lined up across the state to cast their ballots in the 2020 Democratic Primary.

While voters sought to make their voices heard, the outcome of the day’s most important race was already a foregone conclusion. Former Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath and State Representative Charles Booker were competing to become Kentucky’s Democratic nominee for the United States Senate. Weeks before the election, polling showed momentum favoring Booker. The idea of electing a young progressive speaking out against rampant societal injustices appealed to many, but not to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). In response to Booker’s surge, the DSCC endorsed Amy McGrath and pumped tens of millions of dollars into her campaign, figures that dwarfed Booker’s grassroots fundraising totals.

After Booker lost by fewer than three percentage points, progressives decried the DSCC’s actions as an unfair intervention into the race.

The dynamics of Booker’s race were not anomalous. For decades, the DSCC has hijacked primary races to boost their handpicked candidates and used large donations to impede anyone seeking to

challenge its stranglehold on the primary process.

The DSCC is a comprehensive national political action committee (PAC) run by Senate Democrats with the sole purpose of electing Democrats to the Senate. While this stated mission is a noble goal and a necessary one, the DSCC’s involvement in primaries is undemocratic and eliminates choice for voters by endowing establishment candidates with millions of dollars’ worth of Super PAC campaign contributions.

In the 2020 Senate primaries, the DSCC made 18 endorsements; 17 of these candidates won their primary races. The DSCC wields its power by spending hundreds of millions of dollars in primaries, using its considerable resources to control which candidates voters are exposed to. The DSCC strongly favors moderate, establishment politicians, as evidenced by its centrist leadership: The DSCC is currently chaired by Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and has previously been chaired by other establishment Democrats such as Chuck Schumer. Thus, establishment Democrats, rather than the electorate, are allocating millions to determine the Senate’s newest members. In the words of Charles Booker, “The

Democratic Party shouldn’t be in the business of interfering in primaries before voters have had a chance to make their voices heard.”

Booker is right. The DSCC’s actions are undemocratic. The DSCC’s complement on the House side, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, does not endorse in open primaries and allows voters to choose who will represent the party before putting money into the race. The DSCC, however, does not grant voters that luxury.

A prime example of the DSCC’s corrosive approach to Democratic politics is the 2020 North Carolina Senate primary. Progressive Erica Smith announced her candidacy for the United States Senate in January 2019, over a year before the primary date. If elected, she would have become the state’s first ever person of color to serve in the Senate. The DSCC, however, had other plans. Smith met with the DSCC in June and again in August, but Democratic party leadership remained noncommittal. Democratic strategists even reportedly attempted to persuade other candidates to enter the race for months. Weeks before Cal Cunningham announced his run for Senate, Smith saw the writing on the wall, saying, “I know the DSCC was

“If political power is supposed to be derived from the people, campaigns need to be centered on local issues and struggles within communities. A top-down approach from the DSCC damages the fabric of our democracy and contorts this mission.”

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“Politics functions on the notion that anyone seeking to improve their community can run for public office. This ideal means nothing if the DSCC continues to engage in inherently undemocratic practices that manipulate primary results.” looking for someone with a bigger name or bigger pockets, and my response is: The DSCC needs to look at someone with a big heart and a big record of service.” Finally, in June 2019, Cunningham announced his run for Senate. Ultimately, like Amy McGrath in Kentucky, Cunningham lost in the general election, conceding the race to incumbent Republican Senator Thom Tillis in November 2020.

While the DSCC waited until October 2019 to endorse Cunningham, the endorsement was all but guaranteed from the start. In July 2019, three months prior to the DSCC endorsement, DSCC Deputy Executive Director Devan Barber was hired to be Cunningham’s campaign manager. In the second quarter of 2019, Chuck Schumer directed over 50 of his donors to max out their donations to Cal Cunningham’s campaign. Due to her statewide grassroots efforts, Erica Smith ended up securing 35 percent of the vote to Cunningham’s 57 percent—a remarkable feat, considering Cunningham’s massive fundraising advantage.

This election cycle, the DSCC has spent over $200 million in Senate races. Another subversion of the democratic process is the fact that most of this money is completely untraceable, due to the DSCC’s status as an independent expenditure committee, or Super PAC. Since the 2010 landmark Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), Super PACs have held a vice-like grip over our political system. On both sides of the aisle, money is everything.

Super PACs are antithetical to the concept of free and fair elections. They allow special interest groups, corporations, and parties to spend unlimited funds on elections without requiring reports on individual donors. The only caveat is that the committees must operate “independently” of the campaigns they are supporting, but in our political system, the independence clause means next to nothing. Coordination between Super PACs and campaigns runs rampant, and there is no stopping it. Organizations like the DSCC use loopholes in our campaign finance system to spend millions of dollars in primary races without disclosing any data. As a result, these Super PACs can be funded by large corporations, Wall Street executives, and any other special interest group imaginable without the public knowing anything at all. While the 54

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DSCC spends the bulk of their millions on consultants and media companies that inundate Senate races with ads supporting their handpicked primary candidates, candidates that embrace grassroots fundraising do not have the access or funds to do the same.

If political power is supposed to be derived from the people, campaigns need to be centered on local issues and struggles within communities.

A top-down approach from the DSCC damages the fabric of our democracy and contorts this mission.

Politics functions on the notion that anyone seeking to improve their community can run for public office. This ideal means nothing if the DSCC continues to engage in inherently undemocratic practices that manipulate primary results. For the sake of our democracy, the DSCC must stop endorsing and bankrolling candidates in open primaries, and opt instead to fund candidates only in the general election. Our politicians should stand for their constituents, not for an endorsement from the DSCC. Max Pushkin ’22.5 and Ben Lipson ’22.5 are two of the co-founders of Make Room, a grassroots political action committee.

“...the DSCC’s involvement in primaries is undemocratic and eliminates choice for voters by endowing establishment candidates with millions of dollars’ worth of Super PAC campaign contributions.”

Interview with Edwin Meese Edwin Meese III served as the US Attorney General under Ronald Reagan (1985-1988) and is one of the contemporary founders of originalism. In 2019, President Trump awarded Meese the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

by Alex Fasseas ’23 and Ryan Frant ’23 illustration by Nicholas Edwards ’23 Alex Fasseas and Ryan Frant: Is originalism a relatively new theory in Constitutional interpretation?

Edwin Meese: Originalism actually goes all the way back to the time of the Founders. They expected that the language of the Constitution would be interpreted as written and that judges would remain within the Constitution in the decision of cases.

Could you briefly explain your philosophy of “original intent”?

Yes, although it is probably better expressed as original understanding. In other words, the theory interprets the Constitution by asking how the society at the time of ratification reasonably understood what the provision meant. Critics have misinterpreted my theory by claiming that it requires knowledge of the writers’ intentions, but when I use the phrase original intent, I am looking at the actual words in the Constitution— not whatever the Founders had in their minds.

Therefore, I encourage judges to interpret the Constitution as they would interpret any other legal document, like a will or a contract. By sticking to the Constitution, the theory prevents judges from having their own personal biases or policy preferences.

Does democracy require an originalist understanding of the Constitution?

Yes, it does. Under our democratic system, the laws have the democratic consent of the people through the legislative process. Thus, the resulting laws—as they are written—are the outcome of the democratic will. Think of the alternative: if judges could go beyond what the text permits, then the third branch, which is not directly responsible to the people, would make new laws that were not approved by the people. Originalism, then, protects democracy by ensuring that the government is held accountable by the public.

In your mind, what is a prominent Supreme Court case that was decided wrongly?

Roe v. Wade. It was wrong on two counts. On one hand, the majority fabricated things that were not in the Constitution; on the other, the Court took a topic—namely matters pertaining to family and marriage—which had never before been within the province of federal law. The issue was already being solved by the different states in their different ways, but the Court gave the federal government this power instead. Opinions

on local matters, such as family life and reproductive rights, were never meant to be handled by the federal government. Roe v. Wade was a serious violation of this concept.

Given the either-or nature of the abortion debate, should there be a general national consensus or moral agreement on the issue before deciding the legality of abortion?

There are a lot of moral issues that do not have national consensus. For example, some states allow for capital punishment; other states don’t. If you disagree with your state’s laws, you have two remedies at your disposal: You can either move to another state or you can organize with other people who share your views to try to change your state’s law. In contrast, it’s much harder to change laws at a national level, particularly when people from different states have dissimilar views. Thus, a state’s freedom to choose is actually a strength of democracy.

Are there any contemporary issues (e.g., the development of complex artificial intelligence) that the Constitution does not give any guidance for dealing with? What should originalism do when there is no text at hand?

The Constitution is meant to set forth basic principles that are then adapted to specific situations by legislative bodies. When you have developments like artificial intelligence, something unimaginable to the Founders, the Constitution still has principles for the legislative bodies to abide by.

The best example of this is wiretapping. Obviously, the telephone was unknown to the Founders, but when the Court had to decide whether wiretapping without a warrant is a legitimate act of law enforcement, the Court applied the Fourth Amendment, which deals with improper searches and seizures. This principle applies to telephone conversations with the same ease that it had applied to more direct individual situations in the 1700s.

Ever since the failed appointment of Judge Robert Bork, the confirmation process has become increasingly partisan. Because this is a lifetime position with immense political consequences, do you think this politicization is justified as a democratic check on the Court?

No, I don’t think it’s justified because the judicial was the one branch of government that was deemed not to be democratic. Justices on the

Court are separate from politics; hence, their decisions should be nonpolitical. That is why they have lifetime tenure.

If you go back before Bork, most confirmation processes centered around the qualifications of the candidates, and it was, for the most part, a nonpartisan proceeding. In the 1930s, William O. Douglas, who was probably the most liberal judge ever nominated to the Supreme Court at the time, wasn’t even asked to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing. And actually, in most cases, they didn’t ask questions at all. Even Ronald Reagan’s appointment of Justice Scalia, right before Bork, was approved unanimously.

Was it Judge Bork’s originalist philosophy that made him so controversial, or were there other political factors* at play?

Well it was a combination of factors. The Senate had just changed hands from Republican to Democratic leadership, which created some pretty strong tensions between the two parties. In addition, many left-wing legal groups, like People For the American Way and Alliance For Justice, sought to politicize the appointment process in order to forestall the confirmation of originalist judges. All of these elements converged on Bork’s nomination, leading to his unfortunate rejection.

In recent months the idea of expanding the Court has entered the national spotlight.

Indeed, many Americans see the Court as an undemocratic institution in need of reform.

What would you say to these Americans?

I would say that the Court is not a democratic institution by the design of the Founders. They wanted a nonpolitical group of people to interpret the Constitution as written and to render a nonpolitical judgment. The Court is not undemocratic but nondemocratic, in other words, nonpartisan. If we decide to change the size of the Court every time a different party gains power it will manipulate the size and composition of the Court to render a political judgment. We would lose a fair and nonpartisan judiciary.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. *Political factors widely accepted to have influenced Bork’s confirmation process include Senate Democrats’ efforts to condemn Bork for his personal political views and Bork’s firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox fifteen years prior at the behest of then-President Richard Nixon.

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