Joe Arpaio, America’s most controversial sheriff, talks to ‘Off Message’ about what he taught Donald Trump about politics.
.. They share a boot-on-throat rhetorical style, a focus on kicking out illegal immigrants and kicking the ass of America’s enemies, and both love bashing the whiny “political correctness” of minority groups. Arpaio hit on the formula first — adding a Korean War veteran’s fondness for accumulating .50-caliber machine guns and other military ordnance — but he is too media-smart to walk into the trap I set by suggesting Trump is stealing his shtick.
.. In Arpaio’s view, controversy is a useful tool, a way of elevating the causes he cares about (guns, law and order, immigration, the epidemic of wimp-ism), but it’s also not just a means but an end, the only way to grab the attention of a national media and political establishment that would otherwise ignore him. “I’m controversial,” he added with a shrug. “You wouldn’t be here talking to me if I was a nothing, I don’t think.”
.. In 2013, the county board of supervisors paid $3.75 million to a pair of New Times editors who said they were falsely imprisoned after writing about the sheriff’s real estate transactions.
.. the mob had its own ethics too. … They will never kill a child or a cop, OK?
.. Arpaio pushed the idea — thus far alien to law enforcement officials probing the muddled motives of the shooter — that Omar Mateen may have gunned down 49 people in an anti-Latino frenzy.
..Joe Arpaio is literally a poor man’s Donald Trump — same approach, different bank account
.. Arpaio, even his enemies concede, is an engaging guy with an intuitive sense of seizing the moment — and he thinks Trump, responding to a stagnant economy and a widespread sense that the immigration problem is out of control — has the same knack. “Timing is perfect right now for a guy like him,” he told me. “Timing is everything, and he hit on the right timing.”
.. But local analysts noted a telling shift — support had slipped among educated whites who had previously backed him but were now turned off by his stridency and age.
.. “When they can’t get you for anything else, it’s a famous word, ‘racist,’” he said. “Do you think it bothers me? It doesn’t really bother me. I know in my heart what I am, so they can call me anything they want. … [I’m] probably one guy that really doesn’t [discriminate], you know, and I’m not going to say my best friend is black. … No, no, no. And even in my family, I have a black and I have Mexican. I got all these family — but I’m not going to say that. I guess you could still have that and say you’re a racist, you know, but no. I know what I am. Come on.”
In effect, we have pressured and bribed Mexico to do our dirty work, detaining and deporting people fleeing gangs in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. This solved a political crisis that Obama faced with refugees in 2014, but it betrays some of the world’s most vulnerable people.
The American-Mexican collusion began in 2014 after a surge of Central Americans crossed into the U.S., including 50,000 unaccompanied children. Obama spoke with Peña Nieto “to develop concrete proposals” to address the flow. This turned out to be a plan to intercept Central Americans near Mexico’s southern border and send them home.
.. So what should the U.S. do? Most important, it must work at the highest levels with Honduras and El Salvador to address the chaos in those countries, particularly because the U.S. bears some responsibility for the problems: The Central American street gangs were born in the United States and traveled with deportees to countries like El Salvador.
With the exceptions of London, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, every major region of the U.K. voted to exit the E.U.
.. One of the best predictors of how people voted was their education level. Those with college degrees tended to opt for Remain, while people without them tended to opt for Leave.
.. The older and poorer you are, the more likely you were to vote Leave. The younger and richer you are, the more likely you were to vote Remain.
.. The Leave side went up in the polls after it managed to shift the debate away from the likely economic impact of Brexit and onto immigration and issues of national sovereignty. Although much of the immigration into the U.K. comes from outside of the E.U., the Leave forces were able to focus attention on the freedom of movement for workers, which is one of the founding principles of the E.U.
.. economic anxieties and resentments underpinned the political anger that fuelled the Leave vote. Demagogues such as Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, were able to exploit these economic worries, directing them against immigrants and other easy targets.
.. the best predictor of voting patterns wasn’t income or education levels but attitudes toward the death penalty, which are a proxy for authoritarian attitudes more generally.
.. “Wealthy people who back capital punishment back Brexit. Poor folk who oppose the death penalty support Remain.”
.. “The legacy of increased national inequality in the 1980s, the heavy concentration of those costs in certain areas, and our collective failure to address it has more to say about what happened last night than shorter term considerations from the financial crisis or changed migration flows.”
.. the Remain vote was consistently stronger in prosperous areas. Economics matters.
.. he pledged to hold a referendum at some point before 2017. At the time, this was an easy promise to make: Cameron believed he couldn’t deliver on it.
.. Rather than accentuating the positive, Cameron and George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, sought to scare the electorate into voting their way, arguing that a vote for Leave would plunge the U.K. economy into a recession and cost the average household about sixty-two hundred dollars a year.
.. Almost all economists agree that the E.U. has been good to Britain. But the sixty-two-hundred-a-year figure was so large, and so specific, that many people didn’t believe it.
.. the negative campaign, which was dubbed Project Fear, had backfired.
.. Rather than winning people over, it alienated many voters who had legitimate concerns about the E.U. “People have expressed real anger at being ignored by the system, and I think this is at the heart” of what happened, Hilton said.
.. the fate of the Remain campaign should serve as a reminder of the limits of negative campaigning—a reminder that Hillary Clinton would do well to take note of as she goes up against Donald Trump. In confronting populist demagoguery, it isn’t enough to attack its promulgators. To get people to turn out and vote in your favor, you also have to give them something positive to rally behind.
.. It claimed that liberating Britain from the shackles of the E.U. would enable it to reclaim its former glory. The Remain side argued, in effect, that while the E.U. isn’t great, Britain would be even worse off without it. That turned out to be a losing story.
Canada’s new immigration system reveals a different set of priorities—and a different way of thinking about immigration.
The best way to describe Canada’s new application system for skilled immigrants is to compare it to online dating. Foreigners around the world who want to emigrate to Canada fill out online profiles with their age, resume, language skills, education, and much more.
.. Potential immigrants with high rankings are invited to apply for permanent residency. No quotas, no caps, just the federal government skimming off the top every two-to-three weeks. People without enough points to make it to the top of the candidate pool can stay in the database for a year, and employers searching for foreign talent can find them, knowing that they have already been pre-screened by the federal government and therefore can likely have them start working within six months.
.. At one point, Canada banned black immigrants from the United States.) That began to change during the civil rights era and the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which opened the United States to more immigrants from non-Western-European countries. Canada passed a similar law in 1962.
.. Skilled workers in the United States are waiting anywhere from five to 11 years to get green cards. Canada is now averaging about six months.