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https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/03/school-segregation-is-not-a-myth/555614/

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Skeptics claim that concerns over racially divided schools are false alarms-but they're missing the full picture.

Is school segregation getting worse?

Plenty of people say yes, including scholars, journalists, and civil-rights advocates. For the first time in years, there's something approximating a consensus: Racially divided schools are a major and intensifying problem for American education-maybe even a crisis.

There's seemingly compelling numerical evidence, too. According to my analysis of data from the National Center on Education Statistics, the number of segregated schools (defined in this analysis as those schools where less than 40 percent of students are white), has approximately doubled between 1996 and 2016. In that same span, the percentage of children of color attending such a school rose from 59 to 66 percent. For black students, the percentage in segregated schools rose even faster, from 59 to 71 percent.

But not everyone is on board. In the eyes of some writers, the warning signs of segregation are all a false alarm-little more than a statistical mirage. The National Review writer Robert VerBruggen recently made this case, attacking what he called the "resegregation myth." VerBruggen and other skeptics contend that methods meant to identify school segregation are instead detecting something much more benign: The growing diversity of the American population.

This is possible because many measures of school segregation are narrow, focusing only on a single symptom. For instance, one common research technique is to count the number of schools above a certain demographic cutoff (for instance, more than 90 percent nonwhite). Another is to focus on "exposure," or how common it is for white and nonwhite students to encounter each other in the education system.

Doubters like VerBruggen argue that people using these metrics have been fooled by demographic change. The past several decades have seen a precipitous increase in the racial diversity of U.S. schoolchildren. For example, since 1996, the share of Hispanic and Asian students in public schools has grown from 17 to 31 percent. As a result, across the board, schools have tended to become less white.

When diversity increases, some measures of segregation are likely to get worse, more or less by default. For instance, if an integrated school is growing, but most of the new students are Hispanic, at some point, it'll tip over and become segregated. If white students become a smaller share of the American population overall, all else equal, "exposure" to white students will probably decline.

VerBruggen claims that this shift, and little else, is responsible for the perceived crisis. "The rise in 'segregation' disappears when one measures segregation properly," he asserts. He and others say that, with slim evidence of increasing segregation, policies designed to proactively integrate schools are an obsolete form of social engineering.

It's a simple case. Too simple: There is plenty of evidence that resegregation is urgently real.

School segregation seems like it would be easy to gauge: Just add up the number of segregated schools, and see whether that number is going up or down over time. But the reality, unfortunately, is a lot more complicated.

The core problem is that the nation's schools are evolving in many ways at once. Student populations undergo slow shifts; new schools are constantly opening and closing; attendance boundaries are drawn and redrawn. As a result, the effects of large-scale demographic change and those of local school policy get tangled up with one another. It can be hard for researchers to separate one factor from the other.

Making things even tougher, increased national diversity tends to generate mixed signals about whether segregation is happening. As skeptics like Verbruggen point out, some measures of segregation, especially those that focus on the prevalence of white students, tend to look worse when student diversity increases. But other measures tend to look better. For example, one statistic known as a "dissimilarity index" calculates how many people would have to swap places to achieve demographic balance. When diversity increases evenly, dissimilarity indexes will improve -because the share of minority students in the least-integrated schools will grow, making fewer swaps necessary.

Contrary to the assertions of VerBruggen and others, there is broad statistical evidence of new racial stratification in schools. A recent (and helpfully illustrated) piece in Vox runs through some of that evidence, focusing on the changing role of attendance boundaries. The short version: Entire school districts are becoming more racially distinct from each other, even while racial diversity within those districts may be increasing.

In addition, while sweeping statistical indices have their uses, they tend to overlook some lower-level trends, like school openings and closures. That's a major blind spot when talking about the causes of new segregation. According to my analysis of the most recently available federal data, closures are about three times as common among segregated schools, and new schools account for a substantial share of current segregation. In 2016, 38 percent of all segregated schools had opened within the last two decades, compared to 20 percent of predominantly white and integrated schools. In at least this sense, nearly four-tenths of educational segregation is the result of students being shuffled into newly opened schools.

And there are other numbers that suggest a worsening trend. Almost everybody agrees that economic segregation is growing in schools, and many of those dubious about racial segregation like to advance this idea as a competing, alternative theory for educational inequality. But while income segregation can be simpler to measure than race, race and income are closely interwoven. The poorest schoolchildren are very disproportionately nonwhite; the poorest schools are usually racially segregated. The existence of economic segregation does not contradict evidence of racial segregation-it helps confirm it. It shows that, underneath the confounding effects of growing diversity, American schoolchildren are still being divided on the basis of social caste.

While resegregation skeptics are relying on oversimplified statistical evidence, there are even larger holes in their argument. One major reason civil-rights advocates fear resegregation is because they've directly observed changes to school policy that seem likely to contribute to racial isolation. Changes like this won't necessarily show up in statistical measures of student demographics-at least, not right away-but they're still important.

For example, most researchers believe that court-ordered integration plans, maintained by many school districts throughout the 1970s and 80s, were effective at reducing segregation. But since the turn of the century, hundreds of court orders have been terminated, and virtually no new ones have been created.

In places where segregation is already firmly established, government action can have the effect of "locking in" those racial lines. Here, an analogy might help: Imagine a housing subdivision where almost everyone is white, surrounded by neighborhoods that are heavily nonwhite. Now, imagine that the subdivision builds a large wall, hires a security guard for the entrance, and refuses to sell houses to anyone new. You'd be hard-pressed to argue these changes weren't segregative, even if, for the time being, everyone continues to live in the same place.

In American schools, metaphorical walls are going up all over the place. For instance, school districts in the south are traditionally larger than elsewhere in the country, often including entire counties. As a practical matter, this makes southern districts easier to integrate: Their wide expanse means they contain many white and nonwhite students alike. But in recent years, southern districts have begun to fragment. Sometimes this is caused by white neighborhoods and cities that attempt to "secede" and form their own, all-white districts. In other places, fragmentation is driven by statewide political forces, such as in North Carolina, where a conservative legislature is currently weighing breaking up large districts. No matter the cause, the ongoing splintering of districts places integration further out of reach.

In Memphis, Tennessee, for example, new racial lines are being drawn around the area's schools. In 2013 the majority-black Memphis city school district merged with the schools of the surrounding county, which were majority-white. At first blush, this was a move that promised integration. That is, until the next year, when six cities seceded from the merged district. Five of the six new districts are even whiter than the original county district had been-a new geography of segregation, freshly imposed.

And there are other ways to raise barriers to integration. In many big-city school districts, policymakers have spurred the growth of new charter schools to compete with traditional public schools. But because charters usually operate independently of the district they're in, students transferring into them can't be as easily included in a district's integration plans. This is another form of fragmentation, with charters acting as islands, administratively detached from the district around them. Perhaps not coincidentally, charters are also usually highly segregated, with students often sorted into distinct racial groups. Legal barriers are still barriers; this, too, is resegregation.

Underneath all of this is a deeper question: How much does the cause of segregation matter?

Imagine if a landlord, confronted with a leaking roof, responded by saying that the real problem is just too much rain. It's true that, in some sense, rain causes leaks-but only because there was something wrong with the roof in the first place. And at the end of the day, the leaks are still a problem that needs to be fixed.

Likewise, it's true that diversity in schools is increasing. But it's only making segregation worse because of flaws that already existed in the education system. The fundamental defect in American schools-the hole in the roof, if you will-is that they have long exhibited patterns of racial concentration, mostly due to housing segregation and decades of discriminatory education policy. If schools were already integrated to begin with, you'd expect increasing diversity to raise all boats relatively evenly. Most schools would get less white, but few would find themselves truly segregated. Instead, in a long-segregated system, the effects of increased diversity are inevitably lopsided. Schools already suffering from a relatively high degree of segregation have found themselves completely isolated.

Because of this, demographic changes are not experienced evenly. Because black students were already overrepresented in segregated schools, they often bear the brunt of an increase in racial isolation, whatever the proximate cause of those increases. That's why the share of black students in segregated schools has increased by 11 percent nationwide in the last two decades, faster than the share of either white students or nonwhite students overall, both of which have risen by about 6 percent, according to my analysis.

And, ultimately, there's just not much reason to think that identifying the exact cause of resegregation will ameliorate its harms. The vast majority of research into school segregation does not focus on its causes, but rather on the costs of attending a racially isolated school. There are many. They include reduced academic achievement, increased exposure to the criminal justice system, and significantly worsened professional and educational outcomes. Children in integrated schools find it easier to live and work in diverse environments; children in segregated schools are more prone to hold racially prejudiced views later in life. Racial isolation also tends to deprive children of color of what are sometimes obliquely called "networks of opportunity"-in plain language, the day-to-day connections most people rely on to get a job or get into college.

And of course, there's another reason to worry about school segregation, regardless of its cause: the problem of second-class citizenship. Ironically, this problem generates less discussion than wonky, technocratic concerns about test scores and income mobility. But it was pivotal in propelling the school-integration push of the 1960s and 70s, and for good reason. Civil-rights advocates are not wrong to worry that, beyond any set of individual outcomes, it is not healthy nor sustainable for a society to effectively consign most children of color to an alternative system of schools. Doing so helps construct or reinforce ideas about racial caste in the minds of Americans-and, worst of all, in the minds of the children themselves.

None of these ills will heal themselves so long as segregated schools exist, or grow in number. And right now, such schools are growing in number, for reasons ranging from the benign to the nefarious. Dedicated advocates and smart policymakers can thwart school resegregation, and eventually reverse it. But it will not reverse itself.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Skeptics claim that concerns over racially divided schools are false alarms-but they're missing the full picture. Is school segregation getting worse? Plenty of people say yes, including scholars, journalists, and civil-rights advocates. For the first time in years, there's something approximating a consensus: Racially divided schools are a major and intensifying problem for American education-maybe even a crisis.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Skeptics claim that concerns over racially divided schools are false alarms-but they're missing the full picture.

Is school segregation getting worse?

Plenty of people say yes, including scholars, journalists, and civil-rights advocates. For the first time in years, there's something approximating a consensus: Racially divided schools are a major and intensifying problem for American education-maybe even a crisis.

There's seemingly compelling numerical evidence, too. According to my analysis of data from the National Center on Education Statistics, the number of segregated schools (defined in this analysis as those schools where less than 40 percent of students are white), has approximately doubled between 1996 and 2016. In that same span, the percentage of children of color attending such a school rose from 59 to 66 percent. For black students, the percentage in segregated schools rose even faster, from 59 to 71 percent.

But not everyone is on board. In the eyes of some writers, the warning signs of segregation are all a false alarm-little more than a statistical mirage. The National Review writer Robert VerBruggen recently made this case, attacking what he called the "resegregation myth." VerBruggen and other skeptics contend that methods meant to identify school segregation are instead detecting something much more benign: The growing diversity of the American population.

This is possible because many measures of school segregation are narrow, focusing only on a single symptom. For instance, one common research technique is to count the number of schools above a certain demographic cutoff (for instance, more than 90 percent nonwhite). Another is to focus on "exposure," or how common it is for white and nonwhite students to encounter each other in the education system.

Doubters like VerBruggen argue that people using these metrics have been fooled by demographic change. The past several decades have seen a precipitous increase in the racial diversity of U.S. schoolchildren. For example, since 1996, the share of Hispanic and Asian students in public schools has grown from 17 to 31 percent. As a result, across the board, schools have tended to become less white.

When diversity increases, some measures of segregation are likely to get worse, more or less by default. For instance, if an integrated school is growing, but most of the new students are Hispanic, at some point, it'll tip over and become segregated. If white students become a smaller share of the American population overall, all else equal, "exposure" to white students will probably decline.

VerBruggen claims that this shift, and little else, is responsible for the perceived crisis. "The rise in 'segregation' disappears when one measures segregation properly," he asserts. He and others say that, with slim evidence of increasing segregation, policies designed to proactively integrate schools are an obsolete form of social engineering.

It's a simple case. Too simple: There is plenty of evidence that resegregation is urgently real.

School segregation seems like it would be easy to gauge: Just add up the number of segregated schools, and see whether that number is going up or down over time. But the reality, unfortunately, is a lot more complicated.

The core problem is that the nation's schools are evolving in many ways at once. Student populations undergo slow shifts; new schools are constantly opening and closing; attendance boundaries are drawn and redrawn. As a result, the effects of large-scale demographic change and those of local school policy get tangled up with one another. It can be hard for researchers to separate one factor from the other.

Making things even tougher, increased national diversity tends to generate mixed signals about whether segregation is happening. As skeptics like Verbruggen point out, some measures of segregation, especially those that focus on the prevalence of white students, tend to look worse when student diversity increases. But other measures tend to look better. For example, one statistic known as a "dissimilarity index" calculates how many people would have to swap places to achieve demographic balance. When diversity increases evenly, dissimilarity indexes will improve -because the share of minority students in the least-integrated schools will grow, making fewer swaps necessary.

Contrary to the assertions of VerBruggen and others, there is broad statistical evidence of new racial stratification in schools. A recent (and helpfully illustrated) piece in Vox runs through some of that evidence, focusing on the changing role of attendance boundaries. The short version: Entire school districts are becoming more racially distinct from each other, even while racial diversity within those districts may be increasing.

In addition, while sweeping statistical indices have their uses, they tend to overlook some lower-level trends, like school openings and closures. That's a major blind spot when talking about the causes of new segregation. According to my analysis of the most recently available federal data, closures are about three times as common among segregated schools, and new schools account for a substantial share of current segregation. In 2016, 38 percent of all segregated schools had opened within the last two decades, compared to 20 percent of predominantly white and integrated schools. In at least this sense, nearly four-tenths of educational segregation is the result of students being shuffled into newly opened schools.

And there are other numbers that suggest a worsening trend. Almost everybody agrees that economic segregation is growing in schools, and many of those dubious about racial segregation like to advance this idea as a competing, alternative theory for educational inequality. But while income segregation can be simpler to measure than race, race and income are closely interwoven. The poorest schoolchildren are very disproportionately nonwhite; the poorest schools are usually racially segregated. The existence of economic segregation does not contradict evidence of racial segregation-it helps confirm it. It shows that, underneath the confounding effects of growing diversity, American schoolchildren are still being divided on the basis of social caste.

While resegregation skeptics are relying on oversimplified statistical evidence, there are even larger holes in their argument. One major reason civil-rights advocates fear resegregation is because they've directly observed changes to school policy that seem likely to contribute to racial isolation. Changes like this won't necessarily show up in statistical measures of student demographics-at least, not right away-but they're still important.

For example, most researchers believe that court-ordered integration plans, maintained by many school districts throughout the 1970s and 80s, were effective at reducing segregation. But since the turn of the century, hundreds of court orders have been terminated, and virtually no new ones have been created.

In places where segregation is already firmly established, government action can have the effect of "locking in" those racial lines. Here, an analogy might help: Imagine a housing subdivision where almost everyone is white, surrounded by neighborhoods that are heavily nonwhite. Now, imagine that the subdivision builds a large wall, hires a security guard for the entrance, and refuses to sell houses to anyone new. You'd be hard-pressed to argue these changes weren't segregative, even if, for the time being, everyone continues to live in the same place.

In American schools, metaphorical walls are going up all over the place. For instance, school districts in the south are traditionally larger than elsewhere in the country, often including entire counties. As a practical matter, this makes southern districts easier to integrate: Their wide expanse means they contain many white and nonwhite students alike. But in recent years, southern districts have begun to fragment. Sometimes this is caused by white neighborhoods and cities that attempt to "secede" and form their own, all-white districts. In other places, fragmentation is driven by statewide political forces, such as in North Carolina, where a conservative legislature is currently weighing breaking up large districts. No matter the cause, the ongoing splintering of districts places integration further out of reach.

In Memphis, Tennessee, for example, new racial lines are being drawn around the area's schools. In 2013 the majority-black Memphis city school district merged with the schools of the surrounding county, which were majority-white. At first blush, this was a move that promised integration. That is, until the next year, when six cities seceded from the merged district. Five of the six new districts are even whiter than the original county district had been-a new geography of segregation, freshly imposed.

And there are other ways to raise barriers to integration. In many big-city school districts, policymakers have spurred the growth of new charter schools to compete with traditional public schools. But because charters usually operate independently of the district they're in, students transferring into them can't be as easily included in a district's integration plans. This is another form of fragmentation, with charters acting as islands, administratively detached from the district around them. Perhaps not coincidentally, charters are also usually highly segregated, with students often sorted into distinct racial groups. Legal barriers are still barriers; this, too, is resegregation.

Underneath all of this is a deeper question: How much does the cause of segregation matter?

Imagine if a landlord, confronted with a leaking roof, responded by saying that the real problem is just too much rain. It's true that, in some sense, rain causes leaks-but only because there was something wrong with the roof in the first place. And at the end of the day, the leaks are still a problem that needs to be fixed.

Likewise, it's true that diversity in schools is increasing. But it's only making segregation worse because of flaws that already existed in the education system. The fundamental defect in American schools-the hole in the roof, if you will-is that they have long exhibited patterns of racial concentration, mostly due to housing segregation and decades of discriminatory education policy. If schools were already integrated to begin with, you'd expect increasing diversity to raise all boats relatively evenly. Most schools would get less white, but few would find themselves truly segregated. Instead, in a long-segregated system, the effects of increased diversity are inevitably lopsided. Schools already suffering from a relatively high degree of segregation have found themselves completely isolated.

Because of this, demographic changes are not experienced evenly. Because black students were already overrepresented in segregated schools, they often bear the brunt of an increase in racial isolation, whatever the proximate cause of those increases. That's why the share of black students in segregated schools has increased by 11 percent nationwide in the last two decades, faster than the share of either white students or nonwhite students overall, both of which have risen by about 6 percent, according to my analysis.

And, ultimately, there's just not much reason to think that identifying the exact cause of resegregation will ameliorate its harms. The vast majority of research into school segregation does not focus on its causes, but rather on the costs of attending a racially isolated school. There are many. They include reduced academic achievement, increased exposure to the criminal justice system, and significantly worsened professional and educational outcomes. Children in integrated schools find it easier to live and work in diverse environments; children in segregated schools are more prone to hold racially prejudiced views later in life. Racial isolation also tends to deprive children of color of what are sometimes obliquely called "networks of opportunity"-in plain language, the day-to-day connections most people rely on to get a job or get into college.

And of course, there's another reason to worry about school segregation, regardless of its cause: the problem of second-class citizenship. Ironically, this problem generates less discussion than wonky, technocratic concerns about test scores and income mobility. But it was pivotal in propelling the school-integration push of the 1960s and 70s, and for good reason. Civil-rights advocates are not wrong to worry that, beyond any set of individual outcomes, it is not healthy nor sustainable for a society to effectively consign most children of color to an alternative system of schools. Doing so helps construct or reinforce ideas about racial caste in the minds of Americans-and, worst of all, in the minds of the children themselves.

None of these ills will heal themselves so long as segregated schools exist, or grow in number. And right now, such schools are growing in number, for reasons ranging from the benign to the nefarious. Dedicated advocates and smart policymakers can thwart school resegregation, and eventually reverse it. But it will not reverse itself.

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Skeptics claim that concerns over racially divided schools are false alarms-but they're missing the full picture. Is school segregation getting worse? Plenty of people say yes, including scholars, journalists, and civil-rights advocates. For the first time in years, there's something approximating a consensus: Racially divided schools are a major and intensifying problem for American education-maybe even a crisis.

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https://padlet.com/danielbergerson/thenewgildedage

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When black students marched nervously to their new classrooms during the first days of integrated public schools in the 1950s, the constitutional imperative of Brown v. Board of Education was fully behind them. But six decades on, public schools across the country seem to be marching backwards, and the Trump administration looks poised to claw them further back to the days of Jim Crow.

Even before Trump took office, the nation's schools were backsliding toward resegregation, despite, or even because, of the formal abolition of segregation through the courts. Last year, an audit by the Government Accountability Office on educational segregation patterns revealed dramatic growth in segregated schools nationwide-defined as having three-quarters of their students in poverty and of black and Latino descent-since 2000, with racial polarization of schools rising under both Bush and Obama from 9 percent to 16 percent of schools in 2014.

"The new bill would help private citizens resist a pattern of corporatization of education policy in recent years."

The resegregation trends spurred some progressive lawmakers to seek to reverse the erosion of Brown through the Equity and Inclusion Enforcement Act (EIEA). Recently reintroduced by Representatives John Conyers of Michigan and Bobby Scott of Virginia, the legislation would modify the Civil Rights Act to enable communities to resist resegregation in the same arena where Brown was won: the courtroom. The bill would create a private right of action for individual families to take schools and policymakers to court over funding decisions that result in discrimination by race, ethnicity, or national origin-particularly in "denial or exclusion of services; decreased, poor, or low quality services; unsafe services; and the denial of the opportunity to participate as a member of a planning or advisory body." The bill would also establish civil-rights monitors to "ensure that every school has at least one employee to specifically carry out the responsibilities of the law," backed by a special position in the Education Department "to coordinate and promote Title VI enforcement of equity and inclusion in education."

Altogether, the proposal would counter a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, Alexander v. Sandoval, that effectively stripped citizens of their right to bring civil suits against local funding policies that inflicted "disparate impact" based on race or ethnicity. The decision overturned longstanding equity-based statutes and left communities locked out of essential legal recourse against discrimination in school budgeting, transportation policy, and environmental regulations.

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When black students marched nervously to their new classrooms during the first days of integrated public schools in the 1950s, the constitutional imperative of Brown v. Board of Education was fully behind them. But six decades on, public schools across the country seem to be marching backwards, and the Trump administration looks poised to claw them further back to the days of Jim Crow.

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How Trump is hastening the resegregation of Southern schools

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How Trump is hastening the resegregation of Southern schools

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https://www.facingsouth.org/2018/05/how-trump-hastening-resegregation-southern-schools

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Infuriatingly, we've known about the deleterious effects of racial segregation for decades. In the aftermath of nationwide civil unrest - including the 1965 Watts Rebellion, triggered by racially biased policing practices, as well as 1967 uprisings in Detroit, Michigan and Newark, New Jersey - President Lyndon B. Johnson charged a panel of civic leaders with investigating the genesis of racial inequities in the United States. The Kerner Commission, chaired by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, released a chilling report.

"Our nation is moving toward two societies," the report stated, "one black, one white - separate and unequal." It concluded, "Equality cannot be achieved under conditions of nearly complete separation."

Fast forward five decades, however, and this unequal separation continues to exist. Such "conditions" are, of course, not happenstance but rather the result of policies that have systematically favored the social well-being of white people at the expense of people of color.

In a recent interview, Richard Rothstein, author of "The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America," discussed "the long history of federal, state and local policies that generated the residential segregation found across the country today." He laid out the nation's many racially biased policies, from the first segregated public housing built under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Federal Housing Administration and its mortgage underwriting program, to the 1949 Housing Act that encouraged white flight to the suburbs, to redlining - the unconstitutional racial zoning ordinances passed by city governments that became popular throughout the middle of the 20th century.

"The current state of the American city," Rothstein said, "is the direct result of unconstitutional, state-sanctioned racial discrimination."

Today, the very practices that the Kerner Commission pilloried back in 1968 are proliferating anew. If our nation really is committed to ensuring that racial segregation is relegated to the dustbin of history, we must focus on racial justice. Understanding that today's inequalities and disparities have their roots in state-sponsored segregation - and are exacerbated by increasing resegregation - represents a crucial step in the right direction.
Christopher Petrella is a lecturer in American cultural studies at Bates College, who focuses on the cultural politics of race. He is writing a book on the history of white supremacy in 20th-century New England.

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Opinion | The quiet resegregation of America constitutes a national crisis

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Infuriatingly, we've known about the deleterious effects of racial segregation for decades. In the aftermath of nationwide civil unrest - including the 1965 Watts Rebellion, triggered by racially biased policing practices, as well as 1967 uprisings in Detroit, Michigan and Newark, New Jersey - President Lyndon B.

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Donald Trump and 'the people'

Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics and the founding director of the History of Political Thought Project at the University Center for Human Values. His book What is Populism? was published last year. This article draws on that book and on an essay published Oct. 26, 2016, in the Boston Review.

President Trump constantly invokes "the people." In his inauguration address, he claimed that his assumption of the office was equivalent to transferring power back to "you, the people." He also explained that it did not matter which party controls the government, but that the people control the government - and that, with his inauguration, the people ruled again. Does this demonstrate conclusively that Trump is a populist? Or is he by definition not a populist because he is so obviously himself part of a particular elite? Just what is it that defines populism?

Everywhere, or so much news coverage suggests, "the people" are rising up against "the establishment." According to Nigel Farage, former leader of the U.K. Independence Party, Brexit and the election of Trump are part of a populist "tsunami" rolling across the West. But this picture is misleading. It distorts our understanding of today's political reality in two ways: First, it equates legitimate protest against elites and specific policies with populism. After all, any civics textbook would instruct us that we, as citizens, should be critical and vigilant when it comes to the powerful - it cannot be that all of a sudden such a stance is automatically dismissed as "populism." At the same time, the tsunami image propounded by Farage leads us to underestimate the dangers posed by actual populists. The latter do not just criticize elites; they posit that there is one true, fully unified people and that they are its only legitimate representatives, or as Trump implied in his inauguration speech: When he rules, the people rule. In a diverse democracy containing many interests and identities, this idea opens the path to excluding entire groups - and possibly to authoritarianism.

Populists always claim that they - and they alone - properly represent the people, or what they frequently call "the real people" or "the silent majority." This initially innocuous-sounding rhetoric has two consequences that are detrimental for democracy. First, all other political contenders are condemned by populists as part of a self-serving corrupt elite. This kind of populist talk is never just a matter of disagreeing about policy - which is completely normal in a democracy, of course. Rather, populists always make it personal: Their competitors are bad, crooked characters who betray the people's interests (think of how Trump's inauguration speech opposed a self-serving establishment, enriching itself in Washington, to a hard-working people). Second, citizens who do not share the populists' conception of the "real people" - and hence do not support the populists politically - will have their status as properly belonging to the people put into doubt. Every populist operates with a symbolic and ultimately moral distinction between the "real people" and those who don't belong (think back to how Farage celebrated Brexit as a "victory for real people" - with the implication that the 48 percent of Britons who sought to stay in the EU weren't quite real). All U.S. populists - think of George C. Wallace in the 1960s - have deployed the pregnant phrase "real Americans."

Trump has said so many deeply offensive and demonstrably false things that a sentence that revealed him as a proper populist went virtually unnoticed. In May Trump declared at a rally: "The only important thing is the unification of the people - because the other people don't mean anything." Trump's politics are about exclusion. The specifics of who exactly gets excluded and how can vary from day to day: Sometimes he sounds nicer about Mexicans, Muslims, or African Americans; the next day he doesn't. But the logic is always the same: There is a real America, as identified by Trump, and whoever does not agree cannot be a real American (and is also implicitly opposed to "making America great again"). Hence Trump's seemingly conciliatory speeches and tweets after the election ("We will unite, and we will win, win, win!") are not really liberal democratic promises of accepting pluralism; rather, everyone has to unite on the populist's terms.

Trump's infamous leadership of the birther movement was not just a historical footnote. President Obama literally embodied two groups who in the eyes of right-wing populists don't belong to the real America: liberal elites and African Americans. It was consistent that Trump was so prominent in trying to prove that Obama was not just symbolically an illegitimate president but plainly an illegal one - an "un-American" figure who had usurped the nation's highest office.

It should be clear, then, that the lazy equation of Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders - "a populist of the right and a populist of the left," as they are often portrayed - is deeply mistaken, even if it seems plausible in light of the historical understanding of the word "populism" in the United States (as in: the People's Party representing the downtrodden against Wall Street in the late 19th century). One might think of Sanders' policy ideas as naïve or in some other form undesirable - but clearly Sanders never claimed that he is the only representative of the real America. Only Trump is a genuine anti-pluralist. What matters is not whether the populist himself could be said to be part of an elite - his promise is not that he is like any ordinary citizen. Rather, the claim is that he and he alone will execute the people's real will (as discerned by him).

This kind of anti-pluralism has adverse consequences for any democracy, even when populists do not succeed in winning office. Since "the real people" is a myth conjured up by populists, actual election outcomes or opinion polls always can be questioned in its name. If the populist does not win, it is not because he is not as popular as he thought - it is because the "silent majority," shorthand for "real people," has not yet spoken, or, even worse, has been prevented from expressing itself. In other words, the populist delegitimizes existing democratic systems as somehow "rigged." Now, there is nothing wrong with citizens criticizing election rules or other aspects of a particular democracy - any civics textbook would encourage such an engaged stance. What one cannot do is to say, as populists do: "Because we don't win, it's not really democracy."

Why have populists become so prominent? Their rise has to do with a fundamental political conflict that has increased in importance in many Western democracies. This conflict is not meaningfully described as one of "ordinary people versus the establishment." In Britain, Boris Johnson, one of the main faces of the Brexit campaign, is about as establishment as one can get there; Trump is hardly the authentic representative of Main Street. Rather, on one side of the conflict are those who advocate more openness: This means engaging with the world on the outside (both economically and culturally), but it is also about openness toward their own nations' sexual, ethnic, and religious minorities. So yes, the rise of populism has something to do with "globalization" in the widest sense, but it is not just an expression of the discontent of the supposed "losers of globalization." When the likes of Farage, Trump, and French populist leader Marine Le Pen call for "the people" to rule, they want to close their nations off by shutting borders and thereby, or so they promise, take back control; but they also want to preserve the traditional hierarchies that have come under threat on the inside.

How should other politicians address this form of identity politics? Those fighting populists should not pretend that their opponents are politicians like all others, just with more fiery rhetoric or bad manners. But they end up contradicting themselves if they demonize the demonizers or effectively end up saying: "Because you exclude, we exclude you." It's the trap that Hillary Clinton fell into when she criticized Trump voters as "deplorables." In Europe it has been a common strategy to shut populists out of TV discussions or to refuse to engage with them in parliaments. This is a mistake. Talking with populists is not the same as talking like populists. One can take the policy issues they bring up seriously without accepting the way they frame them. In the 1980s, the French National Front propounded the slogan "1 million unemployed, 1 million immigrants." It was perfectly possible to admit that people being jobless was a serious challenge, without accepting the all-too-simplistic equation offered - just as it is perfectly possible now to have a hard-nosed discussion about who really benefits from trade agreements without demonizing some shadowy establishment of "globalists."

Yet it is also naïve to think that populists can be defeated just by setting facts straight or lecturing citizens that their economic interests are ill-served by following demagogic promises. Hardly any facts speak for themselves; they are always part of a larger political narrative. In the case of populists, we are dealing with a narrative about the "real people" and their proper identity. Simply saying that whoever finds that narrative attractive is deplorable or full of resentment is bound to backfire. For one thing, this dismissive attitude confirms populists in what they have been telling their supporters all along about what elites are really like: uncaring and ultimately alien, or at least alienated from citizens' daily problems. So what to do instead? Rather than comment on their supporters, one should call out populist politicians directly and precisely on their pernicious exclusions and their habitual conspiracy theories. There is no guarantee that this will have an effect on populists' supporters. But if such counterattacks are part of a narrative about nationally shared democratic ideals, they just might work. One might do well to remember how the question "Have you no decency left?" started the undoing of Sen. Joe McCarthy, a figure comparable to Trump in his divisiveness and bullying.

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Donald Trump and 'the people' Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics and the founding director of the History of Political Thought Project at the University Center for Human Values. His book What is Populism? was published last year. This article draws on that book and on an essay published Oct.

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President Trump's ability to ride a global wave of right-wing populism - xenophobic, authoritarian, protectionist and (white) nationalistic - into office was a fluke. As we've learned from Michael Wolff's and others' accounts, even in Trump's own mind, he wasn't supposed to win. It was a gambit, a play for attention and fame, another Trump marketing ploy. But it is not a governing philosophy - and it's a problem that, in large part, is dragging Trump and his fellow Republicans under.

The entire "America First" strategy has proven largely unworkable. Rather than heightening respect for America, Trump has driven America's standing in the world into the gutter. Gallup reports: "Median approval of U.S. leadership across 134 countries and areas stands at a new low of 30%. . . . [That] is down 18 percentage points from the 48% approval rating in the last year of President Barack Obama's administration, and is four points lower than the previous low of 34% in the last year of President George W. Bush's administration."

Pulling out of the Paris climate accord, insulting European leaders and decertifying the Iran nuclear deal (also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) haven't gotten Trump anywhere. In fact, he had to cancel a trip to London (with a nonsense excuse about the embassy). On a larger scale, he's gotten no support from the Europeans on his JCPOA lark - or for citing Iran's repression of demonstrators. We lack a coherent plan for Syria (and hence, for Iran), have backed ourselves into a corner on North Korea, and have diminished our influence in the Middle East.

At the same time, in writing the National Defense Strategy, his top advisers crafted language that bears little resemblance to "America First" - or to Trump's bluster. The strategy amounts to a plea to defend globalization and post-World War II international architecture: "Failure to meet our defense objectives will result in decreasing U.S. global influence, eroding cohesion among allies and partners, and reduced access to markets that will contribute to a decline in our prosperity and standard of living. . . . Although this system has evolved since the end of the Cold War, our network of alliances and partnerships remain the backbone of global security."

On the domestic front, Trump's one big "success" was a tax cuts bill tilted heavily toward corporations and the rich. His attempts to cut Medicaid and repeal Obamacare (with no better alternative) flopped. His anti-regulatory jag often amounts to very anti-populist ends (e.g. allowing employers to take food servers' tips, protecting big banks from regulations).

When he has turned to populist issues, he has largely failed to get traction. His own advisers have, for now, steered him away from pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. His border wall is hugely unpopular, while protections for "dreamers" are exceptionally popular. In lieu of populist results, he spews anti-immigrant rhetoric - which drives his own approval down. When he's tried to throw a bone to white nationalists (e.g. Charlottesville) the backlash has been fierce.

His support for a measure to slash legal immigration in half has gone nowhere, and has raised the ire of the business community, which knows all too well that immigration is, according to Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, "as close to a free lunch as there is for America."

Kashkari, in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, wrote:

"Our welcoming culture provides us an unfair competitive advantage most countries would love to have. . . . If Congress and the administration can deliver reforms that boost legal immigration by one million people a year and tailor the policy to prioritize workers who meet the needs of our economy, the Minneapolis Fed estimates growth would increase by at least 0.5 percentage point a year under the most conservative assumptions, with no corresponding increase in the deficit."

In sum, populism (or at least in Trump's incarnation) has not worked. He's either run from it or, when pursued, has found its implementation would have grave negative effects. And populism is not popular, to boot. The president's own approval ratings are historically low. Consider this, from an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll: "Fifty-seven percent disapprove of Trump's job, including a majority of respondents - 51 percent - who now say they strongly disapprove, which is a record high for Trump in the survey. That's compared with 26 percent of Americans who strongly approve of the president's job."

The Republican-controlled Congress is faring no better. The latest Pew poll found that, if the House elections were held now, 53 percent of registered voters would either vote for the Democratic candidate or lean Democratic. Only 39 percent would favor or lean toward the Republican candidate. That's in line with other surveys as well.

Populism's unworkability shouldn't come as a surprise, especially in a diverse country with a globalized economy. If we were to reverse or undo those realities - it is doubtful it could even be accomplished - we would only hurt ourselves. That doesn't mean an agenda aimed at the working and middle classes isn't possible. On the contrary, a centrist plan that focused on infrastructure, worker training and research and development, along with an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, an expansion of trade while protecting displaced workers, and reform of the student loan system could pay handsome dividends. It behooves Democrats, and any practical Republicans that remain untainted by Trumpism, to craft such an approach. These and other policy initiatives might actually address wage stagnation and income inequality, which have driven much of the populist anger.

In the meantime, Trump has done a fine job of discrediting right-wing populism as a governing approach for a dynamic, diverse and prosperous country such as ours.

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Opinion | Populism is no way to govern, and Trump is proving it

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President Trump's ability to ride a global wave of right-wing populism - xenophobic, authoritarian, protectionist and (white) nationalistic - into office was a fluke. As we've learned from Michael Wolff's and others' accounts, even in Trump's own mind, he wasn't supposed to win. It was a gambit, a play for attention and fame, another Trump marketing ploy.

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/23/thomas-frank-trump-populism-books

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Donald Trump won in 2016 because he convinced enough people in the right states for an electoral victory that he alone spoke for them. He told the "forgotten men and women" that elites sneered at them and put the interests of illegal immigrants, China and criminals (remember the fictional crime wave he dreamed up?) above his voters.

His appeal was not unique. Autocrats around the globe present themselves as the true interpreters of the people; their opponents are thereby cast as liars (fake news) or enemies of the people.

Trump, among his other woes, made the error after he was elected of ignoring the needs of his base, just what he had skewered elites for doing. President Trump championed tax cuts for the rich, tried to cut Medicaid, and puts farmers and consumers at risk with the threat of tariffs. He may fancy himself as transmitting the will of the people, but his connection is staticky.

The latest evidence of Trump's disconnect comes from a Quinnipiac University poll, which finds:

A trade war with China would be bad for the U.S. economy, American voters say 68 - 22 percent in a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today. Every party, gender, education, age and racial group says a trade war would be bad. ...

American voters oppose 57 - 40 percent building a wall along the border with Mexico. ...

American voters say 77 - 18 percent, including 59 - 35 percent among Republicans, that undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children - the so-called Dreamers - should be allowed to stay in the U.S. and eventually apply for citizenship. Support for Dreamers is strong in every listed group. Voters disapprove 57 - 35 percent of the way Trump is handling the dreamers and say all parties in Washington are exploiting this issue.

More broadly, Americans are not buying into his demonization of illegal immigrants: "Undocumented immigrants do not take jobs from American citizens, voters say 59 - 37 percent. Undocumented immigrants are not more likely than American citizens to commit crimes, voters say 71 - 22 percent." (That said, Americans do support sending National Guard forces to help at the border.)

Trump doesn't speak for the country as a whole when it comes to guns, either. Americans back tougher gun laws, 56 percent to 39 percent.

Another poll suggests Trump doesn't even speak for the reddest part of America. An NBC News-SurveyMonkey poll finds Trump is underwater in the South: 51 percent disapprove, 48 percent approve. Trump's immigration views don't attract support in the Deep South:

69 percent in the South think migrants should be given a chance at attaining legal status, while 28 percent said they should be deported. In the states polled individually -Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee - at least six-in-10 adults said they favored giving migrants a chance to attain legal status before deportation.

Southerners have also discovered there are more important things than cutting taxes. The poll finds: "On education, 57 percent of Southerners - including as high as 60 percent in Mississippi - said they would pay higher taxes to improve public schools, compared to 55 percent of all Americans. The numbers were virtually identical when it came to taxes for infrastructure spending, with 62 percent of Mississippians agreeing."

How then can a populist president like Trump maintain the notion that he and he alone is the voice of the people? He can't, at least for very long. He might be the voice for Sean Hannity (and vice versa), but, I hate to break it to the Trumpkins, Hannity isn't America. And here, I think, is where the Trump nativist, protectionist brand of populism breaks down: Americans just don't agree with its main tenets. We as a rule are not hateful, don't fear the world and don't want government to shrivel up.

It's hard to be the populist cult leader who delegitimizes opponents when your base shrinks to a fraction of a minority party. The forgotten men and women aren't forgotten, but they may be ready to kick Trump to the curb.

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Opinion | Trump's populism is very unpopular

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Donald Trump won in 2016 because he convinced enough people in the right states for an electoral victory that he alone spoke for them. He told the "forgotten men and women" that elites sneered at them and put the interests of illegal immigrants, China and criminals (remember the fictional crime wave he dreamed up?)

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In 2011, the year Donald Trump became the standard-bearer for the racist campaign to challenge Barack Obama's citizenship, he didn't just lob conspiracies about the President's birthplace; he also questioned how Obama gained admission to two Ivy League universities. "I heard he was a terrible student, terrible," Trump remarked, to the Associated Press. "How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I'm thinking about it. I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records." Coming just two days before Obama released his long-form birth certificate, the attack on the President's educational background tipped Trump's hand. He was not simply intent on delegitimizing the first black Presidency but also the processes that made one possible in the first place.

This broader theme was easy to miss in the scrum of last year's campaign, as duelling perspectives debated whether "economic anxiety" or populist racism was the more active ingredient in Trumpism. Trump likely understood that this was always a false dichotomy. The dominant theme in the history of American populism, from the days of Tom Watson through those of George Wallace, is that resentful whites understand their economic status not in absolute terms but relative to the blacks whom they perceive as the true barometer of their standing. The question is not whether C.E.O.s have salaries hundreds of times larger than their own but whether black people have salaries comparable to theirs. The forces that have ravaged the American working classes were set loose four decades ago and were turbocharged by the end of the Cold War, but it took two terms of a black Presidency for much of this public to recognize that its fortunes were in a tailspin. Until 2008, this group had lacked a static landmark against which to measure whether it was moving backward or forward. Obama became that.

Thus Barack Obama and Donald Trump don't simply represent successive Presidencies; they personify rival genealogies of our current moment, warring claims to history. Where Obama built a movement to shake off the dead hand of history, Trump was hoping to reanimate that hand and clench it into a fist.

These are the tea leaves that foretold Tuesday night's leak of the Department of Justice memo announcing its plan to mount a legal challenge to affirmative action in university admissions. Politically, the leak of the memo has the possibly intentional effect of reminding conservatives why they should defend Jeff Sessions from Trump's attempts to replace him as Attorney General. But its significance extends beyond the factional G.O.P. infighting. The memo became public one day before Trump's endorsement of a Senate bill that would curb legal immigration to the United States. (At a press briefing, Stephen Miller explained the move in terms that recalled the language of the racialist Immigration Act of 1924.) These two initiatives, along with the constant talk of building a border wall and the Administration's fulminations about trade deficits, point to an over-all endeavor to create a kind of racial protectionism, to socially engineer a world in which whites-the unheralded disadvantaged class in America-once again have a deck stacked in their own favor. The logical yield of this week's news is fewer students who are the children of immigrants and fewer black students, whose presence deprives whites of warranted opportunities.

Fisher v. University of Texas, the most recent challenge to affirmative action in higher education to reach the Supreme Court, provides significant context for this week's developments. By 2013, when the Court first ruled on Fisher's legal challenge to the University of Texas at Austin's admissions process, sizable minorities of whites had begun to describe themselves, in public-opinion polls, as the most disadvantaged group in American society. African-Americans constituted more than eleven per cent of the population of Texas but just 4.5 per cent of the university population. Fisher's suit relied on the fact that African-Americans with lower grades than hers had been admitted to U.T. while she had not. But this grievance overlooked the university's broad formula of factors for admission; in fact, of the forty-seven students admitted to U.T. with lower grades and test scores than Fisher's, forty-two were white. Last year, after taking up the Fisher case again, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld universities' right to use race as one factor among many in their admissions processes.

As Sherrilyn Ifill, the director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, pointed out, officials at the Justice Department are "attempting to use the resources of the executive branch to achieve what they have not been able to do at the Supreme Court." Although Trump questioned the basis for Obama's presence at two Ivy League schools, in absolute terms, blacks remain a marginal presence at the nation's flagship institutions. Last year, African-Americans constituted just five per cent of the students at élite universities, with a large portion of that minority coming from abroad. In the hands of the Trump Administration, that number could, conceivably, grow smaller, not just at élite universities but across higher education. (Incidentally, Trump suggested earlier this year that historically black colleges might be discriminatory against white students.)

Trump has never possessed any capacity for discretion. But this is the week that the relationship between seemingly disparate pieces of his resentment agenda became clearer. Barring additional retirements at the Supreme Court, the Justice Department's affirmative-action initiative will face obstacles, and any plan to cut immigration in half stands little chance of gaining momentum in Congress. But this week was not about practicalities. It was about throwing red meat to a restless base that has already witnessed the debacle of the failed Obamacare repeal and the internecine brawling in the executive branch. Trump and his allies can't deliver on their promises yet. They're requesting patience until they figure out the politics that will.

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In Trump's World, Whites Are the Only Disadvantaged Class

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In 2011, the year Donald Trump became the standard-bearer for the racist campaign to challenge Barack Obama's citizenship, he didn't just lob conspiracies about the President's birthplace; he also questioned how Obama gained admission to two Ivy League universities. "I heard he was a terrible student, terrible," Trump remarked, to the Associated Press.

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https://qz.com/906533/trumps-populism-is-not-the-same-as-jacksons-populism-but-the-comparison-is-worth-making/

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https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.google.com/url?q%3Dhttps://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-immigration-debate-0%26amp;sa%3DD%26amp;ust%3D1537538784174000&sa=D&ust=1537538784181000&usg=AFQjCNHA8t5q58VDtYkynZXpJ7UK739Jug

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https://www.eurail.com/en/get-inspired/trains-europe/high-speed-trains

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http://fortune.com/2018/07/05/trump-tariffs-us-layoffs/

http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/overview#1

http://www.cesnur.org/2018/usc_galindo.htm

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https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2018-07-13/trump-stands-by-culture-criticism-of-european-immigration

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Why are these people fleeing the US for Canada?

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Each day hundreds of migrants are crossing the border illegally following tips on Facebook and YouTube.

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/north-carolina-teachers-march-for-more-education-funding.html

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/technology/personaltech/new-apple-iphones-save-upgrade.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FiPhone&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection

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http://www.fbae.org/2009/FBAE/website/important-publications_modern-day-agriculture.html

.http://time.com/5400051/undocumented-immigrant-🤬-jose-antonio-vargas-book/

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Australia's prime minister has condemned a fringe party lawmaker who called for a return to racially based immigration policies and invoked the term "final solution" in a speech before Parliament.

Malcolm Turnbull, who faces voters next year, joined all of Australia's major parties in rejecting the remarks by Queensland Sen. Fraser Anning, who is the only member of the federal Senate from the far-right Katter's Australian Party.

Anning, in his first speech to Parliament, called for a return to the country's historic "White Australia" policy that explicitly favored immigration by Europeans over Asians and Pacific islanders. Those policies were dismantled over decades and the last vestiges disappeared in the 1970s.

In the speech, Anning lamented the demise of "our predominately European identity" and called for a "drastic" cut to immigration and a return to racially discriminatory preferences.

"Diversity should be managed to remain compatible with social cohesion and national identity," he said. "We as a nation are entitled to insist that those who are allowed to come here predominantly reflect the historic European-Christian composition of Australian society."

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Anning labeled Muslims criminals and "welfare-bludgers" and spoke of "black African Muslim gangs terrorising Melbourne."

"While all Muslims are not terrorists, certainly all terrorists these days are Muslims, so why would anyone want to bring more of them here?" he asked.

"The final solution to the immigration problem, of course, is a popular vote," Anning said, invoking the infamous term used by leaders of Nazi Germany to refer to the Holocaust.

Speaking to reporters later, Anning said he had "always been a big supporter of the Jewish community and they know that." Asked if he should apologize for the remark, Anning said: "No, I don't apologize for anything I say."

The speech has sparked outrage across the political spectrum.

"We reject, we condemn racism in any form, and the remarks by Sen. Anning are justly condemned and rejected by us all," Turnbull told Australia's parliament.

In Parliament, Muslim Sen. Anne Aly delivered an emotional response, saying "I'm tired of fighting. I'm tired of having to stand up against hate, against vilification, time and time again."

Many compared the speech to one given in 1996 by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson in which she declared Australia was "in danger of being swamped by Asians."

Anning is a former member of One Nation and won his seat in Parliament after the removal of One Nation Sen. Malcolm Roberts, who was deemed ineligible due to his citizenship status. The two small parties share a similar ideology. Even so, Hanson joined in the chorus of condemnation of Anning's speech. "We are a multi-racial society and I have always advocated you do not have to be white to be Australian," she said.

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Australian Lawmaker Refers To 'Final Solution' In Push For Muslim Immigration Ban

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Australia's prime minister has condemned a fringe party lawmaker who called for a return to racially based immigration policies and invoked the term "final solution" in a speech before Parliament. Malcolm Turnbull, who faces voters next year, joined all of Australia's major parties in rejecting the remarks by Queensland Sen.

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The Department of Justice today (Aug. 30) came down decisively in favor of the many Indian-American and Asian-American students and parents, as well as organizations that have alleged Harvard was discriminating against them in the admissions process.

The Department filed a Statement of Interest arguing that Harvard College has failed to show that it does not unlawfully discriminate against Asian Americans including Indian-Americans during the admissions process and asserts that the plaintiffs who include Indian-American parents and students have provided "compelling evidence" to support their case against the Ivy League institution.

The Department opened a Title VI investigation into Harvard's admissions process in 2017 based upon a complaint filed by more than 60 Asian-American organizations, including a number of Indian-American organizations.

Now the Justice Department has come out clearly on the side of the plaintiffs in the case of Students For Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President And Fellows Of Harvard College in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

Students For Fair Admissions, an organization of students and parents, alleges that Harvard College intentionally discriminates against Asian-American applicants when making admissions decisions.

The SFFA's brief seeks relief from Harvard's alleged discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a cornerstone civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance.

Several news reports have contended that Harvard may be using different benchmarks for Indian-American and East Asian students during the admissions process, in a way that results in a quota system that prevents more Asian students from qualifying for admissions despite their grades.

As a condition [1] of receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer funding every year, Harvard specifically agrees to not discriminate on the basis of race in its admissions decisions, the Justice Department notes.

"However, the students and parents who brought this suit have presented compelling evidence that Harvard's use of race unlawfully discriminates against Asian Americans. In today's filing, the United States urges the court to grant the plaintiffs the opportunity to prove these claims at trial.

"No American should be denied admission to school because of their race. As a recipient of taxpayer dollars, Harvard has a responsibility to conduct its admissions policy without racial discrimination by using meaningful admissions criteria that meet lawful requirements," Attorney General Jeff Sessions is quoted saying in a statement. "The Department of Justice has the responsibility to protect the civil rights of the American people. This case is significant because the admissions policies at our colleges and universities are important and must be conducted lawfully," Sessions added.

"Harvard admits that it uses race to decide whether to admit certain applicants to the college. Under Supreme Court precedent, Harvard must demonstrate that its use of race does not result in illegal discrimination," said the Justice Department in its press release, concluding, that Harvard had failed to do so, and that the plaintiffs should be allowed to proceed to a trial.

"While Harvard admits to using race in its admissions process, it has failed to provide any meaningful criteria to explain how it weighs race against other factors in a candidate's application (e.g., test scores and extracurricular activities), and how it limits its use of race to ensure that no illegal discrimination occurs. Supreme Court precedent requires Harvard to provide such an explanation, which it has failed to do in this case," the Justice Department said.

Further, the evidence shows that Harvard uses a "personal rating" that may be biased against Asian Americans, the press release notes. "Based solely on a review of the applicant's file, Harvard scores its applicants based on "subjective" factors such as "likability" and being a "good person" with "human qualities." Harvard admits that, on average, it scores Asian-American applicants lower on this "personal rating" than applicants of other races," the Justice Department points out in the press release.

"Substantial evidence also demonstrates that Harvard admissions officers and committees consistently monitor and manipulate the racial makeup of incoming classes, which has resulted in stable racial demographics in Harvard's admitted classes from year to year," the Justice Department said, adding that the Supreme Court had ruled that such efforts to "racially balance" the makeup of a student body is "patently unconstitutional."

"Finally, the Justice Department has determined that Harvard-while using race to make admissions decisions for more than 45 years-has never seriously considered alternative, race-neutral ways to compile a diverse student body, which it is required to do under existing law," the Statement of Interest says, according to the press release.

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Justice Department decisively moves in favor of Indian-American, Asian-American complaints of alleged discrimination by Harvard

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The Department of Justice today (Aug. 30) came down decisively in favor of the many Indian-American and Asian-American students and parents, as well as organizations that have alleged Harvard was discriminating against them in the admissions process.

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To hear Donald Trump tell it, China is giddily prospering from America's economic misery.

In his eyes, Beijing and amoral US conglomerates are entangled in a plot to vacuum up American jobs and sprinkle them across China. "Look at what China is doing to our country in terms of making our products," Trump said at Monday's presidential debate with Hillary Clinton.

"They're using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China," Trump said. "We have to stop our jobs from being stolen from us."

This might play well in American towns bled dry by the manufacturing exodus. But to many Chinese factory owners, it will sound bizarre and out of date.

China's manufacturing sector is currently staggering. Even Beijing's heavily censored, state-run press is reporting grim scenes from Chinese manufacturing hubs: factory bosses "unable to feed their workers" and plants shuttered thanks to "soaring" wages.

Like America before it, China is now reeling from its own exodus of low-skill factory jobs. Just as America's economy evolved beyond child labor and true starvation wages, China's labor force is no longer defined by its destitute peasantry.

Yes, a Shenzhen factory worker's life is still bleak by US standards. Factories in Ohio or North Carolina don't house employees in dorms filled with creaky bunkbeds as they do in China's industrial hubs. But Chinese factory workers do expect more cash than they once did.

Ten years ago, the average manufacturer in China got away with paying $1 per hour. Today, the minimum wage in various parts of China is double or triple that amount.

That's way too high for many US-headquartered global conglomerates - and they'll abandon Guangdong just as fast as they will Michigan.

These days, the pursuit of ever-poorer countries is driving US corporations to look outside of China. Many haven't gone too far, however, as there are plenty of nations with feeble labor laws right in China's backyard.

This phenomenon is best observed in the garment sector, the so-called " first rung " that societies cling to when climbing beyond a farming economy.

China still stitches plenty of American hoodies and jeans. In fact, nearly 40 percent of US clothing imports come from China. But a growing number of American brands - including Gap Inc., Nike and even the Donald J. Trump Collection - are made in impoverished countries nearby.

These are a few of the nations that, in Trump's parlance, have "stolen" jobs from China:

There's Bangladesh, where stitching clothes for wealthier nations (namely the US) has become a pillar of the economy. Its garment workers endure famously deplorable conditions for $17 per week.

There's also Cambodia, where clothing makers earning 50 cents per hour are frequently berated and scammed, according to Human Rights Watch. In districts that churn out jeans and sneakers for American malls, factory workers have protested over pay - only to get violently subdued by Cambodian government forces.

And there's Vietnam, perhaps the biggest winner from China's rising wages. It's now the second-largest source of imported US clothing.

Vietnam is favored by Nike, a corporation proclaiming a passion for helping young women of color. Still, according to an expose by journalist Maria Hengeveld, female Vietnamese workers who stitch its products are often "belittled and underpaid."

When Trump portrays American corporations as merciless offshorers, he's on to something. US clothing conglomerates have no misgivings about building factories in corrupt dictatorships. That keeps labor costs low enough for US malls to fill shelves with $25 hoodies.

But Trump's targeting of China is a bit dated. As one China-focused consultant explained to the New York Times, presidential candidates who bemoan jobs fleeing to China are "screaming about yesterday's problems."

Meanwhile, in Beijing, officials are sizing up America's political character. An op-ed published in the Global Times, a Communist Party mouthpiece, says these anti-China screeds reveal an "inclination toward populism or nativism."

Americans are drawn to this rhetoric, the op-ed says, because they're stricken with "dissatisfaction, uneasiness, anger and fear."

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Trump says US jobs get 'stolen' by China. Well, here are the countries 'stealing' Chinese jobs.

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To hear Donald Trump tell it, China is giddily prospering from America's economic misery. In his eyes, Beijing and amoral US conglomerates are entangled in a plot to vacuum up American jobs and sprinkle them across China. "Look at what China is doing to our country in terms of making our products," Trump said at Monday's presidential debate with Hillary Clinton.

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The Latest on wildfires burning in California (all times local):

7:10 a.m.

Fire officials say a wildfire roaring through timber and brush on both sides of a Northern California highway tripled in size overnight, prompting mandatory evacuations.

The U.S. Forest Service said Thursday the blaze burning along Interstate 5 near Redding had grown to 23 square miles (60 square kilometers). It was 8 square miles (21 square kilometers) on Wednesday.

Officials did not immediately say how many people the evacuation order affected. The fire is in a rural area with scattered homes.

Officials said the blaze was human-caused but they didn't indicate whether it was arson or accident.

Truckers abandoned their vehicles as flames roared up hillsides. Officials say about 17 big-rigs were abandoned and at least four caught fire.

A wildfire nearby that was only contained last week left neighborhoods in ruins and killed eight people.

___

12:00 a.m.

Abandoned trucks are scattered along a section of a major California freeway, which closed after a wildfire exploded near Redding.

The fire erupted Wednesday and has roared through timber and brush on both sides of Interstate 5 near the Oregon state line.

Fire officials say the blaze was human-caused, shut down about 45 miles (72 kilometers) of the freeway and there's no word when it will reopen.

California Highway Patrol Lt. Cmdr. Kyle Foster tells the Los Angeles Times that truckers abandoned 17 big-rigs as flame raged next to the freeway, and at least four rigs caught fire.

Evacuations were ordered for scattered homes and cabins in and around the Shasta-Trinity National Forest.

But while the fire was moving rapidly, fire officials say it doesn't immediately threaten any large towns.

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The Latest: Northern California wildfire triples in size

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The Latest on wildfires burning in California (all times local): 7:10 a.m. Fire officials say a wildfire roaring through timber and brush on both sides of a Northern California highway tripled in size overnight, prompting mandatory evacuations. The U.S. Forest Service said Thursday the blaze burning along Interstate 5 near Redding had grown to 23 square miles (60 square kilometers).

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ALBUQUERQUE, NM - For generations, Native American women have been victimized at astonishing rates, with federal figures showing that more than half have encountered sexual and domestic violence at some point during their lives - even amid a wave of efforts aimed at reducing such crimes.

The statistics reinforce arguments that the criminal justice system still fails to protect these women and its shortcomings again are being exposed as another crisis gains attention: the disappearances of hundreds of Native American and Alaska Native women and girls from across the United States.

In the past decade, Congress responded to the problem of violence against Native American women with intensely debated legislation seeking to close legal loopholes, improve data collection and increase funding for training of tribal police. Those efforts have proven severely limited, however, prompting advocates to again push for more reforms.

"I think the reason that Native women may go missing at higher rates than other groups of people is very similar to the reason that they are at higher risk for domestic violence and sexual assault," said Sarah Deer, a University of Kansas professor, member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and author of a book on sexual violence in Indian Country. "The legal system is simply not functioning properly (to prevent) these types of things from happening."

At the end of 2017, the FBI's National Crime Information Center database had 633 open missing person cases for Native American women, who comprise 0.4 percent of the US population but 0.7 percent of cases in the figures obtained by The Associated Press. African-American women were the only other group to be overrepresented in the caseload compared to their proportion of the population. The numbers are considered an undercount, however, given reporting is largely voluntary and some tribes only gained full access to the database under a Justice Department program launched in 2015.

Just 47 of the nation's more than 570 federally recognized tribes are part of DOJ's Tribal Access Program, which allows them to exchange data with national crime information systems for civil and criminal purposes. The Justice Department has gradually allocated funding to bring more tribes on board and up to 25 are expected to join the program in the next year, officials said. Other tribes have limited access via state, federal or local law enforcement agencies.

"We think that's an important way of ensuring that tribes have the ability to directly deal with the issues on the ground that their families and their community are dealing with," said Tracy Toulou, head of the Justice Department's Office of Tribal Justice.

That program was one of many crime-fighting measures in the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010, which gave tribes authority to hand down longer sentences while mandating that federal officials do more to train tribal police on evidence collection and provide an annual report on Indian Country crime statistics.

Years later, those data collection and reporting efforts are still in development, funding for law enforcement training remains limited and the Justice Department's assistance with public safety on reservations - a role referenced in multiple treaties with tribes - has fallen short of officials' expressed commitment to Indian Country, according to the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General.

In a 2017 report, the Inspector General also highlighted US attorneys' uneven track record with prosecuting serious violent crimes on reservations, citing data that must be collected under the 2010 law to help improve those prosecution rates.

Before the law, the US Government Accountability Office found, US attorneys declined to prosecute half of cases on reservations, leading to concerns that the practice was creating a safe haven for criminals on tribal lands. The latest figures from 2016 show US attorneys declined to prosecute 46 percent of reservation cases, marking only marginal improvement. That included rejecting more than 550 assault and sexual assault cases - more than any other type of crime. (Domestic violence cases typically fall under assault.) Prosecutors blamed the vast majority of rejections on insufficient evidence.

A few weeks ago, at an annual meeting between tribal and federal officials about violence against Native women, Jesse Panuccio, the Justice Department's acting associate attorney general, identified domestic violence and sex trafficking as two underlying issues that may be linked to disappearances of women in Indian Country. He said improving law enforcement's response to those crimes could help.

"Many tribal leaders have testified that the disappearance and deaths of American Indian and Alaska Native women are not taken seriously enough and that increased awareness and a stronger law enforcement response are critical to saving Native women's lives," Panuccio said.

Some tribal leaders and victims' families contend authorities too often are unwilling to help search for missing loved ones or even file a report.

In Alaska, state authorities - who handle criminal investigations in more than 200 Alaska Native villages - have been accused of classifying fatalities as suicides when families feel certain their loved ones died from a homicide, according to representatives from the Akiak, Emmonak and Tetlin communities. The state, which has the highest percentage of Native residents in the US, also has some of the biggest crime disparities in the nation, including the highest rate of women murdered by men.

A 2013 report found that at least 75 Alaska Native communities had no law enforcement presence and Alaska Native officials spoke candidly in a federal report last year about barriers victims face in seeking justice. Some victims needing a sexual assault forensic exam must take a boat or plane to an urban area, according to Michelle Demmert, chief justice for the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes.

As a result of complaints over police response nationwide, proposals have begun to emerge to address how officers respond, with calls for the Justice Department to establish standardized protocols.

One of those proposals, included in draft legislation to renew and broaden the Violence Against Women Act, would expand tribal jurisdiction over a range of crimes. For example, tribal police would be able to arrest non-Native Americans suspected of selling women for sex or running trafficking rings.

An earlier version of the Violence Against Women Act gave tribal authorities the ability to prosecute non-Indians in domestic violence cases. However, only 18 tribes have met the mandates to do so, the National Congress of American Indians reported in March. Those mandates include requiring tribes to provide an attorney to suspects who cannot afford one - a costly ask for cash-strapped nations.

"We can't guarantee that because we don't have the funding to guarantee it," said Robert LaFountain, a prosecutor on Montana's Crow Reservation, where the per capita annual income of roughly $15,000 is about half the national average. "The funding is always difficult."

Another measure included in the VAWA reauthorization calls for annual reports on the number of missing and murdered Native Americans, one of multiple federal proposals aimed at measuring the full scope of the problem.

The Violence Against Women Act expires this fall and prospects for passing any new changes are uncertain. There are no Republicans co-sponsors and the US Justice Department has not signaled its support for amendments. As a senator, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions opposed the legislation in 2013 over his objection to expanding tribes' authority over non-Indians and other provisions.

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Native American women still facing high rates of crime

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ALBUQUERQUE, NM - For generations, Native American women have been victimized at astonishing rates, with federal figures showing that more than half have encountered sexual and domestic violence at some point during their lives - even amid a wave of efforts aimed at reducing such crimes.

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A wildfire that's shuttered dozens of miles of a major interstate highway in California exploded overnight, tripling in size as it left behind charred remains of abandoned vehicles behind, officials said Thursday.

The Delta Fire has now exploded to 15,294 acres near the Oregon state line as of 11:30 a.m. ET, prompting mandatory evacuations and showing "extreme fire behavior," the U.S. Forest Service said in a statement.

The blaze was human-caused, according to fire officials, who didn't indicate whether it was arson or accident.

Officials told the Redding Record Searchlight newspaper that the area under the evacuation order was rural with scattered residences adjacent to Interstate 5 from Lakehead to the Oregon border.

As the blaze broke out on Wednesday, truckers abandoned their vehicles along Interstate 5. In a video, a passenger in a vehicle can be heard screaming: "Oh my God, I want to go!" as trees burst into flames and sheets of fire roiled on the side of the roadway.
TRUCKS ABANDONED AS CALIFORNIA WILDFIRE SHUTS DOWN I-5
About 17 big-rigs were abandoned and at least four caught fire, Lt. Cmdr. Kyle Foster of the California Highway Patrol's Mount Shasta office told the Los Angeles Times. U.S. Forest Service workers helped the driver of one flaming truck to safety and other truckers, firefighters and others aided other drivers, he said.

"There's vehicles scattered all over," Brandon Vaccaro with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection told the Record Searchlight. "Whatever occurred here was probably pretty ugly for a while."

Shasta-Trinity National Forest spokeswoman Carol Underhill told the paper that she wasn't aware of any injuries, but that one man was hurt when he fell off his truck while trying to put out the fire when it first started.

"That is our main focus on this, is firefighter and public safety," Underhill said.
PILOT SHORTAGE GROUNDS AIR TANKERS USED TO BATTLE CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES FROM THE SKY
About 45 miles of the I-5 were closed in both directions, and the fire also delayed Amtrak's Coast Starlight train service between Sacramento and Oregon. The city of Dunsmuir, with about 1,500 people, was about 15 miles from the fire. Residents were issued an evacuation warning, urging them to be prepared to leave if the fire threatened to come closer.

The newest blaze to hit the Golden State comes a month after a nearby fire in the Redding area, the Carr Fire burned some 1,100 homes and killed eight people before only being fully contained last week. Cal Fire has also had to deal with staffing shortages, which have caused air tankers used to fight the flames have been grounded.

Cal Fire officials say that pilot ranks have been thinned recently due to a combination of retirements, private companies poaching talent, and the need to rest after extended fire seasons, causing the agency to rework how they stage crews to attack fires from air.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Travis Fedschun is a reporter for FoxNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @travfed

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Explosive Delta Fire in California triples in size, human-caused, officials say

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A wildfire that's shuttered dozens of miles of a major interstate highway in California exploded overnight, tripling in size as it left behind charred remains of abandoned vehicles behind, officials said Thursday. The Delta Fire has now exploded to 15,294 acres near the Oregon state line as of 11:30 a.m.

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Do immigrants "steal" jobs from American workers?

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A motivating factor behind Trump's proposed policies-including the construction of a new U.S.- Mexico border wall, more border patrol agents, and stricter deportation policies--is his belief that immigrants are stealing job opportunities from American workers. As he said in July 2015, "They're takin

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Nearly two years into his presidency, President Trump has not been able to muster the congressional support and funding to deliver on his key campaign promise to build a physical wall on the United States' border with Mexico. However, the President's nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court looks set to dramatically shore up the "invisible wall" that has sprung up, and is arguably doing far more to restrict US immigration than any border wall ever will.

Although the border wall captured much of the early focus, the Trump administration has been busily bypassing Congress and focusing on the far-reaching changes in policies and procedures through the use of executive powers that have made up the "invisible wall". While invisible, it is a very real phenomenon, however, keeping out even legal immigrants and making the processes of obtaining visas, migrating to or remaining in the US slower, less reliable and more difficult.

In pictures: Chaos and fury at Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing

Like the president's travel ban executive order earlier this year, parts of this "invisible wall" are being legally challenged and more cases may ultimately reach the Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to replace the retired Justice Kennedy, who was often a swing vote in close or politically sensitive cases, becomes critical - in part explaining the controversy surrounding his Senate confirmation hearings which began this week. If confirmed, Kavanaugh appears likely to serve as a reliable vote to uphold the Trump administration's immigration policies against any legal challenges that may come before it.

Due to media scrutiny, the wider public is aware of some of the Trump administration's most egregious actions against immigrants, such as the travel ban, the family separation border policy, and the decision to rescind DACA (an Obama-era policy aimed at preventing the deportation of undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children). Other changes, however, have flown under the radar despite having caused substantial changes to the legal immigration system.

These include the president's "Buy American and Hire American" executive order signed in April 2017, which now requires US consular officers to consider whether the "economic interests" of American workers are threatened when adjudicating visa applications in five of the most common professional work visa categories. The new requirement - which has no statutory basis - has led to an increase in arbitrary visa denials for otherwise qualified applicants. This is harming the US employers whose businesses benefit from those workers, as well as the interests of UK and other foreign workers needing to travel to the US for work or business. Likewise, an October 2017 decision rescinded a longstanding policy of giving deference to prior approvals for many work visa extensions. This means that professional foreign workers can be told they no longer qualify under their visa category, despite multiple previous approvals and years of working in the same position for the same employer in the US. Further, the administration's "extreme vetting" of certain visa applicants abroad has resulted in applications being placed in an "administrative processing" queue, delayed for weeks, months, or longer, without ever disclosing the underlying reason for the delay or providing an estimated timeline.

Kavanaugh's views on presidential authority and immigration, as reflected in his judicial record, suggest he will side with the Trump administration should immigration policy challenges reach the Supreme Court.

In a 2014 case stemming from a visa petition denial, Kavanaugh wrote a dissenting opinion concluding that a specially trained churrasqueiro chef did not qualify for a specialised knowledge visa to work at US-based Brazilian steakhouse chain Fogo de Chao. Focusing on the contention that Americans were being displaced by cheaper Brazilian labour, and that American workers could learn to do the job, Kavanaugh concluded that "mere economic expediency does not authorise an employer to displace American workers for foreign workers." This approach is in line with the spirit and intent behind President Trump's "Buy American and Hire American" executive order, and suggests the White House will be able to count on Kavanaugh's vote against a challenge to that order.

Trump's Supreme Court pick snubs father of Parkland shooting victim

Kavanaugh also signalled a conservative approach to immigration matters in a 2008 case regarding whether the votes of undocumented immigrant workers could be included in an election to form a labour union. In another dissenting opinion, Kavanaugh agreed with the employer that undocumented workers could not be deemed "employees" under the relevant labour relations law, referring to the union election as having been "tainted" and "diluted" by the votes of the immigrant workers.

There are legal challenges working their way through the courts against a number of the Trump administration's immigration policies and decisions, including the rescission of DACA, the "extreme vetting" program, the termination of Temporary Protected Status for those fleeing unsafe conditions in countries such as Haiti, El Salvador and Honduras, and the termination of work authorisation for spouses of some professional workers. If Kavanaugh becomes a Supreme Court justice, he will likely be a key, if not deciding vote, on whether those legal challenges succeed or fail.

Based on an analysis of his decisions and other writings, legal scholars have concluded that Kavanaugh has a particularly broad view of the constitutional limits on presidential power and executive authority, giving deference to actions taken by a sitting president. Given that the Trump administration's changes to immigration policies and procedures have been instituted by the executive branch rather than through legislation, Kavanaugh's view on executive authority coupled with his judicial record on immigration provide a reliable indication that, when faced with challenges to immigration policies, he could ultimately help provide the lasting structural integrity for Trump's "invisible wall".
Karnig Dukmajian is a US immigration attorney at Laura Devine Solicitors in London

The Independent has launched its #FinalSay campaign to demand that voters are given a voice on the final Brexit deal.

Sign our petition here

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'Be warned, if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to the US Supreme Court, he will only strengthen Trump's invisible border wall'

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Nearly two years into his presidency, President Trump has not been able to muster the congressional support and funding to deliver on his key campaign promise to build a physical wall on the United States' border with Mexico.

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https://www.skeptic.ca/Native_Subjugation_in_the_West.htm

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https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/10/07/us-immigrant-injustice

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Australia's prime minister has condemned a fringe party lawmaker who called for a return to racially based immigration policies and invoked the term "final solution" in a speech before Parliament.

Malcolm Turnbull, who faces voters next year, joined all of Australia's major parties in rejecting the remarks by Queensland Sen. Fraser Anning, who is the only member of the federal Senate from the far-right Katter's Australian Party.

Anning, in his first speech to Parliament, called for a return to the country's historic "White Australia" policy that explicitly favored immigration by Europeans over Asians and Pacific islanders. Those policies were dismantled over decades and the last vestiges disappeared in the 1970s.

In the speech, Anning lamented the demise of "our predominately European identity" and called for a "drastic" cut to immigration and a return to racially discriminatory preferences.

"Diversity should be managed to remain compatible with social cohesion and national identity," he said. "We as a nation are entitled to insist that those who are allowed to come here predominantly reflect the historic European-Christian composition of Australian society."

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Anning labeled Muslims criminals and "welfare-bludgers" and spoke of "black African Muslim gangs terrorising Melbourne."

"While all Muslims are not terrorists, certainly all terrorists these days are Muslims, so why would anyone want to bring more of them here?" he asked.

"The final solution to the immigration problem, of course, is a popular vote," Anning said, invoking the infamous term used by leaders of Nazi Germany to refer to the Holocaust.

Speaking to reporters later, Anning said he had "always been a big supporter of the Jewish community and they know that." Asked if he should apologize for the remark, Anning said: "No, I don't apologize for anything I say."

The speech has sparked outrage across the political spectrum.

"We reject, we condemn racism in any form, and the remarks by Sen. Anning are justly condemned and rejected by us all," Turnbull told Australia's parliament.

In Parliament, Muslim Sen. Anne Aly delivered an emotional response, saying "I'm tired of fighting. I'm tired of having to stand up against hate, against vilification, time and time again."

Many compared the speech to one given in 1996 by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson in which she declared Australia was "in danger of being swamped by Asians."

Anning is a former member of One Nation and won his seat in Parliament after the removal of One Nation Sen. Malcolm Roberts, who was deemed ineligible due to his citizenship status. The two small parties share a similar ideology. Even so, Hanson joined in the chorus of condemnation of Anning's speech. "We are a multi-racial society and I have always advocated you do not have to be white to be Australian," she said.

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Australian Lawmaker Refers To 'Final Solution' In Push For Muslim Immigration Ban

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Australia's prime minister has condemned a fringe party lawmaker who called for a return to racially based immigration policies and invoked the term "final solution" in a speech before Parliament. Malcolm Turnbull, who faces voters next year, joined all of Australia's major parties in rejecting the remarks by Queensland Sen.