There are currently 5 Republicans competing to be the 2022
candidate for governor in Arizona.
They are Kari Lake, Scott Neely, Matt Salmon, Karrin Taylor
Robson, and Paola Tilliani Zen.
The highlighted portions of their bios show why they would be
poor choices for governor.
Former television anchor Kari
Lake has jumped into politics. After 22 years at FOX 10, Lake left the
Phoenix station in March 2021, bashing the media on her way out for what she
described as a lack of balanced coverage. Even before departing the
station, Lake showed signs of delving into the far-right movement of the
Republican Party, including an incident when she
shared a debunked video about COVID-19. She’s since aligned herself with members of
the Stop the Steal movement and QAnon. She’s earned the endorsement of Donald
Trump for her fervent support of claims the 2020 election was stolen from the
former president.
Valley business owner Scott
Neely is considered a longshot candidate in the race
for governor. He’s the owner of Action Concrete Pumping Supply in Mesa, and
plays up his blue-color aesthetic online as the candidate for all people, “from
the dirt to the boardroom.” Like other GOP candidates, Neely has
praised the so-called audit of Maricopa County elections led by Senate
Republicans and raised suspicions about the 2020 election.
Former U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon is
running for governor for the second time — he narrowly lost a race 18 years ago
to Democrat Janet Napolitano. Salmon served in the Arizona Legislature before
winning three terms in Congress in the 1990s. Salmon ended his congressional
tenure to follow a pledge that he would serve only three terms. He went on to
run for governor in 2002, worked as a lobbyist and served two more terms in
Congress from 2013 through 2016. In a video announcing his entry
into the governor’s race, Salmon touted his conservative views, such as supporting gun rights and
strong border security and opposing critical race theory and tax hikes.
I’d give Salmon a quadruple bogie
for the following reasons:
1)
Any politician that
still does not believe in stronger gun laws should not be in office.
2)
Anyone who is opposed
to students learning ALL of our history should not be in office
3)
Anyone concerned
about the “border crisis” is not serious about immigration reform
4)
In you examine tax
cuts going back to at least the Reagan era, you’ll discover that tax cuts DO
NOT generate economic growth as well as other programs
Karrin Taylor Robson identifies
herself as a conservative leader and successful business leader — and she’s the
preferred candidate of establishment Republicans in Arizona. She’s committed
to protecting Arizona from the “radical left,” she
said on her website. Taylor
Robson also plans to focus on building and sustaining a dynamic and diverse
economy, protecting property values and supporting the military. Though
considered a more centrist candidate due to her political allies in the GOP, Taylor
Robson hasn’t shied away from aspersions of the 2020 election, as she recently
told the New York Times the election “wasn’t fair” despite President Joe Biden’s clear
victory.
Another longshot bid for
governor, Paola “Z.” Tulliani Zen can’t be ignored thanks to a
well-financed — and mostly self-financed — campaign. She’s put nearly $1.2
million towards her candidacy through a political action committee, Z for
Arizona. Tulliani Zen, the former owner of La Dolce Vita biscotti
company, vows to “embrace bold
traditional values of ingenuity and common sense.”
Here's Brennan’s law of common sense:
Any candidate that is still claiming that the 2020 election
was stolen should be automatically excluded from consideration for the
governor’s office. In addition, those who think that we are having a crisis at
the border should also be automatically excluded from the governor’s race.
All of the people above have that view, and Karrin Taylor
Robson vows to “complete the border wall”.
https://kjzz.org/content/1684307/2022-arizona-governors-race-candidates
What
all these “Christians” forget about is what the Bible says about immigration.
“When
a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You
shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you
shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am
the Lord your God.
Leviticus
19:33-34
What Does the Bible Say about Immigration?
(and How Should Christians Respond) - (christianity.com)
So, why do so many people from “south of the border” want to
come here?
Here’s the answer:
Just
as Pope Francis' trip to Cyprus and Greece shone a light on the humanitarian crisis
unfolding in the Mediterranean Sea, the good people at the Hope Border
Institute have issued a report entitled "No Queda de Otra" on the root causes of immigration that
shines a light on the humanitarian crisis at our southern border. "What
led you to leave your home?" was the question posed to 51 migrants in
Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and the answers provide the basis of the report.
The
study found that Central Americans tend to migrate for a variety of reasons
such as poverty, gang violence or domestic violence. Among the Mexicans they
surveyed, violence and threats were the primary reason given for choosing
to leave their homes, especially the forced conscription of young men into
gangs run by drug cartels. Virtually all those interviewed said that
"their income in their country of origin was insufficient to cover basic
needs." The twin hurricanes, Eta and Iota, in November 2020 pushed those
struggling already into desperation. Sixty percent of migrants were traveling
with their families. Hovering over all these phenomena in the past two years
was the specter of COVID-19 and the economic dislocation it occasioned.
The
report contextualized the survey responses with important data points. Despite
progress in recent years lifting people out of extreme poverty, in 2020, 4.7
million people in Latin America and the Caribbean were "pushed out of the
middle class into poverty." They found that in Honduras, one country where
migration is the most pronounced, only 25% of the population was fully
vaccinated, and in Guatemala that number dropped to 16%.
The most shocking data point was this: “Nearly 70% of our
interviewees were extorted or threatened by a criminal organization or gang at
some point in their life. Despite having few resources to hand over, gangs pursued them
with an incredible degree of persistence and violence.” We in the U.S. are
right to worry about the health of our democracy, but perhaps helping these
failing states to our south would be one way to recognize anew the preciousness
of living under the rule of law. Our police and legal systems have their
problems, to be sure, but we are not a failed state.
The
report looks at the impact of climate change on the region and notes we can
expect additional migration due to it. Especially in agricultural regions, the
cycles of increased drought and heavy rain are destroying a way of life that
goes back to the time before the Conquista. Hurricanes have long been a threat
to the region, but they are now more frequent and of greater intensity than
they were even a few years back. The people most affected, who work the land in
the poorer regions of Central America, were not the ones adding greenhouse
gases to the atmosphere, yet they have already begun to pay the environmental
cost of our industrial revolutions.
Statistics
are important, but they are dry and do not capture the uniqueness of each
person's story, so the report includes accounts of some of the individuals they
interviewed, changing the names to protect their anonymity. Some of the stories
are heartbreaking:
For
example, Luz, a woman from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, had a degree in marketing,
a good job at a bank and a home in a gated community where she was raising two
sons as a single mother. When the pandemic began, her salary at the bank was
cut by 65% and she took out a $5,000 lempira (approximately $200 USD) cash loan
to cover basic expenses. The lenders began extorting her after she had paid off
the loan and forced her to pay them over $70,000 lempiras (approximately $3,000
USD) as they stalked her, photographed her coming and going to work and made
death threats. She tried to report the crime at two separate police stations
but was told at both to keep paying. While family support helped her cope with
the greatest dangers, it was not enough to stop the extortion. Several months
later in Ciudad Juárez, she was still suffering sadness, depression and guilt
from having left one son in hiding in Honduras because she could not pay to
travel with both.
This woman went from a good job to refugee status in a matter of
months due to some bad actors and a police force unable to enforce the law. No
wonder she fled.
Luz’s
story is one you wish everyone could learn. The next time you hear an
anti-immigrant blowhard on Fox News or in the church hall after Mass, tell her
story. Do they not admire her motherly protective instincts in fleeing a
situation that compromised her ability to raise her children? Do they think
this woman would not find ways to contribute to America? In what possible
understanding of the term is this woman not a refugee? Why did the interview
have to occur in Mexico rather than Texas?
Another
woman who started poor found herself completely devastated by the hurricanes:
Sara,
a 43 year-old woman from a small community in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, lived
in a home made of earth with a tin roof. She made 15 quetzales (about $2 USD)
per day doing laundry and cutting wood in the absence of more steady work,
hauled water from outside her home and struggled to manage her colic and
gastritis. She noted that drought in the summer and heavy flooding during
hurricane season had become a feature of life. This precarity came full circle
when the hurricanes destroyed her home entirely.
One
wonders how she found the wherewithal to make it to Ciudad Juárez? When people
refer to someone like Sara as "illegal," what law decreed she must be
consigned to extreme poverty because climate change had made major storms more
frequent and more devastating? Is it a crime to live in the path of a
hurricane?
The
report finishes with some recommendations. I would put reducing gang violence
and strengthening the criminal justice system at the top of the list: Until the
rule of law is in place, no other changes are going to improve the lives of
people in the countries of origin. The other items are important too: providing
economic development support; making “climate change mitigation and adaptation
a central pillar of development efforts and root causes policy”; and getting
COVID vaccines to the people.
The
report also makes recommendations to humanize our immigration policy. I fear
that the Biden administration has not been able to conceptualize a political
path forward on these issues, let alone flesh out such humanization into
specific policies that could pass through Congress. I wish we could foresee the
day when the administration would revoke the Title
42 expulsion
policy, which denies entry to people from a country where a communicable disease
was present — that is to say every country now — but we can't.
Our friends at Hope Border
continue their splendid work of advocacy and, with this report, strengthen that
work with research. Their findings will not melt the cold hearts of too many
Americans, and they won't convince the people at Fox News that the humanitarian
crisis south of the border creates a moral crisis on our side of that same
border. At this time, both crises are at fever pitch and, on our side, there is
nothing but shame.
The most cost-effective way to
reduce the number of people crossing our border is provide enough financial
assistance so that they can safely stay in their own country, and earn enough
income to pay for their basic expenses.
https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/migrants-were-asked-why-did-you-leave-your-home-heres-what-they-said
Congress has passed bi-partisan legislation to provide aid to
Central America. In fiscal year 2017, the amount pledged was $180 million. For fiscal
year 2018, the amount approved was $370 million.
On June 17, 2019, the Trump administration cut all those
funds.
Lawmakers, including some of
Trump’s fellow Republicans as well as Democrats, have chafed against the
president’s repeated decisions to disregard spending bills passed by Congress,
some of which he has signed into law himself.
Lawmakers who opposed the
plan said it was cruel to cut off aid to countries grappling with hunger and
crime and that the move would be counterproductive because it would more likely
increase the number of migrants than decrease it.
“As feared, a presidential
tantrum will limit our nation’s ability to actually help address the challenges
forcing people to flee to the U.S.,” Democratic Senator Bob Menendez said on
Twitter.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-trump-idUSKCN1TI2C7
According to CBP data provided
to FactCheck.org, the Trump administration secured a total of $15 billion
during his presidency for wall construction. Some of it was appropriated in
annual budgets by Congress, and some was diverted by Trump from
counternarcotics and military construction funding. But it has all been borne
by American taxpayers.
Back in August of 2020, when Trump was accepting the Republican
nomination, he boasted: “The wall will soon be
complete, and it is working beyond our wildest expectations.”
Most of the wall constructed to date has been
replacement for existing dilapidated or inadequate fencing, despite earlier
plans to build new barriers where none existed before. In 2018, an
administration official testified that his agency would build 316 miles of new
pedestrian barriers “in addition to what is there now.” But to date only about
40 miles of such new fencing have been built.
Other border experts warn not to minimize the
impact of the replacement fencing. In some cases, the new barriers erected
replaced fencing made from Vietnam-era landing mats. U.S. Customs and Border
Protection also has replaced nearly 200 miles of vehicle barriers — the type
that people could walk right through — with 30-foot-high steel bollards,
lighting and other technology.
That’s a dramatic change. Below are
before-and-after photos of vehicle barriers replaced by fencing in Organ
Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona. The first was taken
in April 2019, the second in January 2020:
But it may be years before we are able to tell how effective the
wall has been at stopping illegal immigration. Many factors that have nothing
to do with the wall — COVID-19, the economy, civil unrest — all play a role in
attempted illegal border crossings.
Experts use figures on border apprehensions to gauge the level
of illegal border crossings. The data from CBP present a mixed bag when it
comes to making Trump’s case.
Border apprehensions spiked in fiscal year 2019, and then fell by about half in fiscal 2020, which
ended on Sept. 30. It is impossible to tease out how much of that drop may be
as a result of the new barriers constructed under Trump, but a Pew Research
Center report documenting the decline attributed it mostly to a worldwide
decrease in the movement of migrants due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and governments
fully or partially closing their borders as a result.
Most immigrants who cross into the U.S. illegally come from
Mexico and Central American countries that have passed measures restricting the
movements of their residents due to COVID-19.
During the time period that money was being spent on the wall,
infections from COVI skyrocketed, and over 1,000,000 Americans have died, in
part because the Trump administration downplayed the severity of the pandemic,
and also did not allocate adequate funding for vaccinations.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/12/trumps-border-wall-where-does-it-stand/
So, what’s the REAL cause of the border crisis?
Donald Trump.
Remember that in November.
