Summer Reading, Part 1
U.S. Politics: Immigration and More Generally
Today's post and next week's post will consist largely of reading recommendations: recent articles in the press and on the Internet that resonate with the themes we've been exploring here at Political Economy Watch since we started in March 2023. While not exactly beach reading, each of these articles is good enough that I have read them at least twice. Topically organized and including links to our own past posts on these topics. Provide your thoughts in the Comments section below or by sending email to politicaleconomywatch at gmail dot com.
The Politics of Immigration in the United States
• "They Saw Their Neighbors Taken Away by ICE. Then They Made a Plan.", Michelle Goldberg, July 30 2025. I've had ample occasion to knock the New York Times's framing of issues like the national debt. So let me cite one article that was quite well done. It focuses on grass-roots resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terror in Los Angeles.
• "NYC Mayor Eric Adams in Cahoots With ICE? Sudden Surge in Courthouse Arrests With Failure to Act on Illegal Detentions", Naked Capitalism, August 12 2025. This post is a reblogging and extension of reporting from "NYC Is the Nation’s Capital of Immigration Courthouse Arrests, New Data Analysis Shows", by Haidee Chu and Gwynne Hogan, August 11 2025. Imagine how Kafkaesque, how terrifying it must be to risk arrest and deportation merely by showing up at a court date.
• "Laying Siege to Sanctuary Cities", James Baratta, August 12 2025. When I first heard of the concept of sanctuary city in the 1980s, it was clearly a radical concept: Have American municipalities declare that they would not facilitate cooperation between their local police forces and federal immigration authorities -- at that time known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) -- who were looking to deport refugees from Central American countries where resistance to U.S.-backed dictatorships were causing domestic upheaval. The concept became a reality when those local police forces realized that if they were seen as cooperating with "La Migra," they would be unable to get any cooperation from local residents without legal status in everyday police crime-fighting efforts. As Baratta writes,
"Sanctuary policies are designed to encourage people who may not be citizens to report crimes to the police. Such policies make both American citizens and immigrant communities—who are otherwise vulnerable to predatory crime—safer. Conversely, partnership agreements between ICE and local law enforcement can undermine public trust while detracting from crime prevention and resolution, as immigrant victims of violent or hate-motivated crimes are less likely to step forward due to fear of retribution."
Now the Trump administration is trying to demolish the Sanctuary City concept and mandate local police cooperation with ICE agents. Problem for Trump and Stephen Miller: this violates the "anti-commandeering" doctrine upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in two decisions from the 1990s. "The precedent, derived from the Tenth Amendment, holds that state and local governments cannot have their resources usurped to enforce federal law."1 The attacks on sanctuary cities should be seen in light of Trump's predilections for dispatching federal troops to cities on the trumped-up claims of rampant crime.
• Political Economy Watch: past posts on immigration
U.S. Politics More Generally
• "The Democrats Were Designed For An America That No Longer Exists" Max Moran and the Revolving Door Project, August 11 2005. Some of the articles I'm recommending to you today and next week are the work of people in their seventies or eighties. Here's one that's not. From his staff photo, Max Moran looks to be well under forty. Moran argues,
"For decades, Democrats have clung to the fantasy that after one more election, one more vote, one more scandal, the Republican “fever” will break and their “friends across the aisle” will snap back to the postwar liberal-democratic consensus that Democrats treat as America’s natural state."
Moran argues that the Democratic party has yet to wrap its head around the degree to which U.S. politics have changed. "[J]ust re-establishing the old “three branches of government” Constitutional framework would require sweeping amendments and court reform unseen since the New Deal." Do we really expect a Chuck Schumer or a Gavin Newsome to be up for that?
• "The Museum of the Trump Resistance" Robert Kuttner, August 12 2025. When I came to New York City for college in 1969, Robert Kuttner was general manager of the chaotic, left-wing Pacifica radio station WBAI-FM. I assumed that he must have been a generation older than I was; I was wrong. He went on to work at the Village Voice, New Republic and Washington Post and to start American Prospect magazine (and the website where the Laying Siege to Sanctuary Cities article discussed above was published). While I can never imagine him as losing hope that the Democratic Party might one day come to its senses, I find much to admire in his moral sensibilities. This essay imagines the future day when we can celebrate the heroes of the resistance to Trump authoritarianism. Spoiler alert: It' doubtful that we'll get to that day.
• "The Sad But Unsurprising US Political Narrative: Ignoring and Whitewashing the End of the Rule of Law ", Neil H. Buchanan, Jul 15 2025.
"Treating Trump's Abuse of Power as a Spectator Sport", Neil H. Buchanan, Jul 18 2025.
Two back-to-back posts by the same author. Buchanan is a constitutional law scholar who gave up a tenured position at the University of Florida Law School when Florida governor Ron DeSantis started to play politics with university governance. He has since worked expat in Canada and now Ireland, but continues to be a long-time contributor to the "Dorf on Law" blog. The first criticizes the way the mainstream media -- in the form of the New York Times and Jon Stewart -- evaluated the first six months of Trump's presidency by counting up "wins and losses."
"Yes, Trump is getting his way these days on almost everything. He surely views that as winning, but that is no reason for anyone else -- most definitely not the world's most prestigious media organization's news side (that is, not the editorial page) -- to treat this as anything but the rotten fruit of poisoned trees. Why would anyone go to such lengths to pretend that what is happening is somehow legitimate (though possibly-maybe unwelcome)?"
Read on to see what Buchanan has to say about "leopards eating human faces."
• "One City at a Time: Trump Sends National Guard Into D.C.", Waleed Shahid, August 11 2005. The subhead of this article is even more indicative of its content than its title: "Lessons from the 1850s abolitionist fight against federal overreach." Two citations will demonstrate why you should read this article.
"The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a cornerstone of the Compromise of 1850, required Northern states to assist in capturing escaped enslaved people and returning them to bondage. It criminalized those who resisted, compelled ordinary citizens to act as slave catchers, and stripped the accused of the right to testify in their own defense. For the South, this was a non-negotiable assertion of property rights. For many Northerners, it was a profound moral trespass. The act’s enforcement became a running series of confrontations between federal marshals and abolitionist civil society."
"What is worth remembering are the structures of power and the strategies of enforcement and resistance. In the 1850s, federal officials used “law and order” to justify targeted interventions in defiant cities, seeking to isolate each episode and break opposition before it could organize. Abolitionists and their allies learned to recognize these interventions as part of a larger campaign and to mobilize public opinion against them through politics, organizing, and media."
• Political Economy Watch: past posts on U.S. politics
On my own reading TODO list: "Sanctuary Policies in a Federal System ", Ilya Somin, April 4 2025.