The Nation Oct-20-14

ICE Age
 As alarming as the dragnet tactics of ICE might be, and as heartbreaking as the disruption to immigrant families, none of this should be a surprise to Zoë Carpenter [“ICE’s Widening Net,” Sept. 22], or anyone. So long as neighboring countries with insufficient resources encourage birth rates higher than they can sustain and provide a level of education inadequate to change the situation, there will be desperate people pouring over the borders. Accompanying them will be the predictable, often politically motivated reactions of individuals and government agencies, many of which reflect shamefully on civil society and its members. 
 If progressives want to do anything about any of this, they need to direct their energies to identifying and resolving the root causes of this tragedy rather than decrying…

As the nation’s first black attorney general, Eric Holder built a legacy as a tough defender of civil rights and racial justice. Recognizing that the crisis of mass incarceration is the most urgent civil rights issue of our time—that “the path we are currently on is far from sustainable,” as he put it in 2013—Holder rolled back some of the criminal justice system’s worst features, including mandatory-minimum drug sentences and disparate penalties for crack and powder cocaine, while investigating police misconduct and pushing alternatives to incarceration. The same week that he revealed his impending departure, Holder had another announcement: for the first time since 1980, the US prison population is on the decline, falling by nearly 5,000 this past year and set to drop by another 12,000 in the next…

The headlines immediately following the “Republican Wave” election of 2010 focused on Congress, where Democrats lost control of the House. But attention quickly shifted to the states, where a new class of Republican governors, often working with allied legislative majorities, began implementing agendas far more extreme than those of their compatriots in gridlocked Washington. 
 That extremism has made many of these Republican Wave governors vulnerable in 2014—so vulnerable that billionaire campaign donors and business interests are scrambling to save them. Recent revelations of secret meetings organized by the Koch brothers and secret donations to groups like the Republican Governors Public Policy Committee confirm the connections—and the sense of urgency. But even a massive spending spree may not keep these governors in office. 
 That’s because what’s good for campaign…

It is the best of times; it is the best of times. 
 Deploying life in New York City today as a symbol of what he takes to be the improvement of almost everything everywhere, New York Times columnist David Brooks explains: “There has never been a time when there were so many interesting places to visit, shop and eat, when the rivers and the parks were so beautiful, when there were so many vibrant neighborhoods across all boroughs, with immigrants and hipsters and new businesses and experimental schools.”
 This description is accurate if you’re David Brooks (or me, for that matter). It may be true for as many as half of the city’s 8.4 million inhabitants. But what Brooks appears not to know is that in recent decades, New…

Yvonne Montoya, a sophomore at Santa Monica College (SMC), spent part of 2011 homeless. Hoping a degree would help her escape her situation, Montoya returned to college in 2012.
 It wasn’t easy: her only local access to food was a nearby CVS that accepted food stamps. Ultimately, thanks to her own determination and the support of a professor, she was able to secure stable housing.
 Montoya, a public policy major, is now president of the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network chapter at SMC. RICN allows students to promote policy change within their own communities, and Montoya jumped at the chance to help SMC’s more than 400 homeless students. She’s leading an effort to get the school to start accepting food stamps, and hopes to help students at other schools to do…

Sometimes it feels like we’re living in an era in which information has finally become “free”—unlimited media access, twenty-four-hour wellness tracking, endless dating possibilities. But there’s nothing inherently progressive about Big Data. A new report shows that when Big Data creeps into our workplaces and our financial lives, it may simply create new ways of reinforcing old racial and economic injustices. 
 The report, “Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future,” by the think tank Robinson + Yu, notes that technological advances, the declining cost of data storage, and the intensified surveillance climate of post-9/11 America have spurred massive data collection. This accumulation of private information by corporations and government has created troubling new issues in the areas of labor rights, privacy and ethics. Consider the influence of Big…