Immigration has propelled the U.S. job market further than just about anyone expected, helping cement the country’s economicrebound from the pandemic as the most robust in the world.
That
momentum picked up aggressively over the past year. About 50 percent of
the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born
workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic
Policy Institute analysis of federal data. And even before that, by the
middle of 2022, the foreign-born labor force had grown so fast that it
closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
Immigrant
workers also recovered much faster than native-born workers from the
pandemic’s disruptions, and many saw some of the largest wage gains in
industries eager to hire. Economists and labor experts say the surge in
employment was ultimately key to solving unprecedented gaps in the
economy that threatened the country’s ability to recover from prolonged
shutdowns.
“Immigration
has not slowed. It has just been absolutely astronomical,” said Pia
Orrenius, vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve
Bank of Dallas. “And that’s been instrumental. You can’t grow like this
with just the native workforce. It’s not possible.”
Yet immigration remains an intensely polarizing issue in American politics. Fresh survey data
from Gallup showed Americans now cite immigration as the country’s top
problem, surpassing inflation, the economy and issues with government. A
record number of migrants have crossed the southern border since President Biden
took office, with apprehensions topping 2 million for the second
straight year in fiscal 2023, among the highest in U.S. history. Cities
like New York, Chicago and Denver have struggled to keep up with
busloads of immigrants sent from Texas who are overwhelming local
shelters.
Washington is deadlocked on a solution to the crisis. Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats voted down
a sweeping $118 billion national security package that included changes
to the nation’s asylum system and a way to effectively close the border
to most migrants when crossings are particularly high. House Republican
leadership called the legislation “dead on arrival,” which seemed all
but guaranteed after former president Donald Trump came out strongly in opposition.
Opinion
polls show that voters widely disapprove of Biden’s handling of the
border, and Trump, who is closing in on the Republican nomination, is
touting plans for aggressive deportation policies if he wins in
November. Republicans have increasingly campaigned on the idea that
immigrants have hurt the economy and taken Americans’ jobs. But the
economic record largely shows the opposite.
There isn’t much data on how many of the new immigrants in recent years were documented vs. undocumented. But estimates
from the Pew Research Center last fall showed that undocumented
immigrants made up 22 percent of the total foreign-born U.S. population
in 2021. That’s down compared with previous decades: Between 2007 and
2021, the undocumented population fell by 14 percent, Pew found.
Meanwhile, the legal immigrant population grew by 29 percent.
Whoever
wins the election will take the helm of an economy that immigrant
workers are supporting tremendously — and likely will keep powering for
years to come.
Fresh estimates
from the Congressional Budget Office this month said the U.S. labor
force will have grown by 5.2 million people by 2033, thanks especially
to net immigration. The economy is projected to grow by $7 trillion more
over the next decade than it would have without new influxes of
immigrants, according to the CBO.
Alexander Santander, 49, is among those immigrants.Santander
trekked for two months with his family, including two young children,
from Venezuela to the Texas border last fall to seek asylum. He said it
was a “very, very traumatic” journeythat involved many nights sleeping on cardboard in the jungle.
For Santander, who is on humanitarian parole as he waits for his asylum
case to be processed, the decision to uproot his life in Venezuela,
where he worked as an operating room nurse, was difficult but necessary,
he said. His family had faced years of food shortages and, more
recently, threats for protesting the government.
“Thank
God we made it here,” Santander, who now works in manufacturing in
Denver, said in Spanish. “We have many more opportunities and already a
better quality of life.”
‘The biggest pull’
Research broadly shows that immigration has long helped the U.S. economy grow. But today’s snapshot still represents a stark turnaround from just a short time ago.
The
flow of migrants to the United States started slowing during the Trump
administration, when officials took hundreds of executive actions
designed to restrict migration.
Then the coronavirus hit, restricting border crossings even further. Right before the pandemic, there were about 1.5 million
fewer working-age immigrants in the United States than pre-2017 trends
would have predicted, according to the San Francisco Fed. By the end of
2021, that shortfall had widened to about 2 million, researchers at the
Global Migration Center at the University of California at Davis have shown.
But
the economy overall wound up rebounding aggressively from the sudden,
widespread closures of 2020, bolstered by historic government stimulus
and vaccines that debuted faster than expected.
The
sudden snapback in demand sent inflation soaring. Supply chain issues
were a main reason prices rose quickly. But labor shortages posed a
problem, too, and economists feared that rising wages — as employers
scrambled to find workers — would keep price increases dangerously high.
That’s
because the labor force that emerged as the pandemic ebbed was smaller
than it had been: Millions of people retired early, stayed home to take
over child care oravoid getting sick, or decided to look for new jobs entirely.In
the span of a year or so, employers went from having businesses crater
to sprinting to hire enough staff to keep restaurants, hotels, retail
stores and construction sites going. Wages for the lowest earners rose
at the fastest pace.
About
the same time, the path was widening for migrants to cross the southern
border, particularly as the new Biden administration rolled back
Trump-era restrictions.
In normal economic times, some analysts note, new immigrants can drag
down wages, especially if employers decide to hire them over native-born
workers. Undocumented workers, who don’t have as much leverage to push
for higher pay, could lower average wages even more.
But
the past few years were extremely abnormal because companies were
desperate to hire. Plus, it would be exceedingly difficult for
immigration to affect the wages of enormous swaths of the labor force,
said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy
studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.
“What
it can do is lower the wages of a specific occupation in a specific
area, but American workers aren’t stupid. They change jobs. They change
what they specialize in,” Nowrasteh said. “So that’s part of the reason
why wages don’t go down.”
Experts
argue that the strength of the U.S. economy has benefited American
workers and foreign-born workers alike. Each group accounts for roughly
half of the labor market’s impressive year-over-year growth since
January 2023, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis that
used three-month rolling averages in labor force participation to
account for data volatility.
“More
than any immigration policy per se, the biggest pull for migrants is
the strength of the labor market,” said Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, an
economics professor at the University of California at Merced. “More
than any enforcement policy, any immigration policy, at the end of the
day.”
‘A much better job’
Upon
arriving in Denver in October, Santander hadn’t acquired a work permit
but needed to feed his small children. Even without authorization, he
found a job as a roofer for a contractor that ultimately pocketed his
earnings, then one cleaning industrial refrigerators on the overnight
shift for $12 an hour. Since receiving his work permit in January,
Santander has started “a much better job” at a wood accessories
manufacturer making $20 an hour.
But
for the vast majority of migrants who arrive in the United States
without prior approval, including asylum seekers and those who come for
economic reasons, getting a work permit isn’t easy.
Particularly
for immigrants fleeing poorer countries, the booming U.S. job market
and the promise of higher wages continue to be an enormous draw.
“More
than any immigration policy per se, the biggest pull for migrants is
the strength of the labor market,” said Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, an
economics professor at the University of California at Merced. “More
than any enforcement policy, any immigration policy, at the end of the
day.”
‘A much better job’
Upon
arriving in Denver in October, Santander hadn’t acquired a work permit
but needed to feed his small children. Even without authorization, he
found a job as a roofer for a contractor that ultimately pocketed his
earnings, then one cleaning industrial refrigerators on the overnight
shift for $12 an hour. Since receiving his work permit in January,
Santander has started “a much better job” at a wood accessories
manufacturer making $20 an hour.
But
for the vast majority of migrants who arrive in the United States
without prior approval, including asylum seekers and those who come for
economic reasons, getting a work permit isn’t easy.
Federal
law requires migrants to wait nearly six months to receive a work
permit after filing for asylum. Wait times can stretch for additional
months because of a backlog in cases. While they wait, many migrants
find off-the-books work as day laborers or street vendors, advocates
say. Others get jobs using falsified documents, including many teenagers who came into the country as unaccompanied minors.
Still,
many migrants miss the year-long window to apply for asylum — a process
that can cost thousands of dollars — leaving them with few pathways to
work authorization, advocates say. Those who can’t apply for asylum
often end up working without official permission in low-wage industries
where they are susceptible to exploitation.
That includes many of the migrants coming to the United States to escape
economic hardship, which alone does not qualify as a valid reason to
seek asylum or qualify for a work permit.
One
such worker — who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of
reprisal due to his immigration status — said he left his remote village
in Mexico in 2022 because he had no hope of ever being able to afford
to build a house with his income as a civil servant.
He
said it was easy to find his current job in Chicago — scouring a
tortilla factory on the overnight shift for $16.75 an hour. But the city
is vast and hard to navigate without a car, he said.
“My
dream is to save enough money to build a house on my land in Mexico to
return to,” he said in Spanish. “Then if for some reason I get deported
to Mexico, at least I’ll have somewhere that’s mine to live.”
In
Dalton, Ga. — known as the “Carpet Capital of the World” — Jan Pourquoi
said the entire economy would collapse without immigrant workers.
Pourquoi owns a rug company with a warehouse near the city’s railroad
tracks and pays $11 an hour for jobs like cutting and sewing door and
bathroom mats. He said that he doesn’t question anyone’s paperwork, and
that he knows workers will reliably line up at his door looking for
openings every morning.
Pourquoi emigrated from Belgium37
years ago and said he understands his workers’ desire for more job
security. But he also said that more needs to be done to stop the flow
of immigration at the southern border, and that the government is
responsible for opening pathways to citizenship that would make economic
security more certain. As for his business, if stricter immigration
policiesslashed his workforce and he had to raise wages to $15
an hour, he wouldn’t be able to compete against foreign firms with
cheaper wholesale prices.
“If
I was a poor Mexican, I would be the first one to cross the Rio Grande
illegally myself,” he said. “I don’t blame these people. I blame our
politicians and our government for letting it happen.”
Sheila Wagoner is not a fan of the wind farm overlooking Keyser, West Virginia.
"I
really don't care for those windmills," the 71-year-old says. "I guess I
wasn't brought up with that kind of society. Like 50 of 'em together?
Who likes all that?"
It's not just the visual contrast that
Wagoner finds bothersome. She is from one of many families in Keyser —
and throughout West Virginia — that relied on the coal industry for
generations. Her late father worked as a railway engineer for coal
trains that used to run non-stop through Keyser.
Today, those trains are an increasingly rare sight.\
As Wagoner speaks, one of the few remaining coal trains passes
through the town of just under 5,000 people. Watching it rumble by, she
gets a little emotional.
"That reminds me of my dad. When I see a train, my dad's there," she says. "Those memories are good memories."
There is a popular perception in West Virginia that renewable energy
has been killing the coal industry. However, that narrative is
incomplete. Jobs in coal had been in decline decades before the wind
turbines came to Keyser in 2012.
Still, the turbines are a
clear — and for some, bitter — sign that times have changed. As they
slowly spin in the breeze, they stir up mixed feelings.
Pride and politics
Some residents of Keyser say coming home covered in coal dust is something to be proud of. A sign of a hard day's work.
"It's
part of that Appalachian Mountain thing. I think people are very proud
of who they are and where they're from," says Keyser's Mayor Damon
Tillman. "Energy is huge in this town and without it, we wouldn't have
much."
Today, the shift from fossil fuels to renewables is accelerating.
In 2022, the country's first major climate policy, known as the
Inflation Reduction Act, passed with the promise to speed up that
transition, offering at least $4 billion to boost development of
renewable projects like the Pinnacle Wind Farm in Keyser.
That
law passed with the key vote of West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe
Manchin, but Tillman is skeptical that those benefits will reach Keyser.
"I like Joe. I talk to him a good bit. But the thing is a
city like Keyser [doesn't] ever see any of that money," says Tillman.
"That money all goes to bigger cities – Morgantown, Jefferson County,
Charleston. So it doesn't do us any good."
The mayor's sentiments echo what is being felt more broadly across
the state, says Hoppy Kercheval. He hosts the daily radio program Talkline on West Virginia MetroNews and has been on the air for nearly 50 years.
If anyone has a read on how people in this state are feeling, it's him.
"Manchin [is seen as] selling out to Biden and his fellow Democrats, and politically that hurt him," says Kercheval.
"But
at the same time, there's all this green energy money that's coming to
West Virginia and the last two years has seen more economic development
announcements than I can remember in this state."
Those
"green energy" dollars funneling into a predominantly conservative state
with a historic connection to coal have created political dynamics that
Kercheval describes as paradoxical.
So on one hand you have political leaders and community leaders who
are more than willing to be at the groundbreaking and the ribbon
cutting," Kercheval explains. "But [they also] politically denounce or
[are] critical of the Inflation Reduction Act because it was seen as a
Biden-Democrat plan in a deeply red state."
Despite the complex
politics unfolding in the state and around the nation, Kercheval says
that general acceptance is setting in that coal will not surge back to
the way it once was.
Mayor Tillman agrees: "It's gone. I mean, the coal industry is about phased out."
Where did the jobs go?
There's a misconception that renewables contributed to the decline in coal. But renewables had little to do with it.
After peaking in the 1920s, jobs in the coal industry have been disappearing.
With factors like automation beginning in the 1980s — and a decades-long shift towards natural gas through the late 2010s-- the coal industry was already a fragment of what it had been by the time the Keyser Wind Farm was completed in 2012.
There used to be more than 800K coal miners in the U.S. Now there are66K
The peak of coal-mining employment in the U.S. was a century ago,
when the industry employed more than 800,000 people. Since then, that
number has decreased by more than90%.
The Biden Administration often talks about what it calls a "just
transition." It's a new name to an old promise that for people moving
out of work in fossil fuels, there will be opportunities to find work in
renewables.
One example of that is Doug Vance, site manager of the Pinnacle Wind Farm.
"My
whole family worked in coal," Vance says. "I was in the fuel
preparation plant, and we prepared coal for fuel-fired power plants,
coal-fired power plants, and that's where I worked for quite a number of
years."
Vance now spends his workdays in a homey cabin-turned-office for Clearway Energy, the company that owns the Pinnacle Wind Farm.
However,
Vance's jump from coal to wind isn't the reality for the vast majority
of people who have lost coal jobs in West Virginia. Renewables like wind
and solar are not as hands-on as coal processing, and can't offer up
the same number of jobs.
"We have six full-time employees [at the Pinnacle Wind Farm]," Vance says, a number that he acknowledges is small.
So while Vance might represent the country's shift from fossil fuels
to renewables, he doesn't represent the workforce. He's the lucky
exception who got a job in wind.
Economist Mark Curtis at Wake Forest University in North Carolina has studied this shift in the workforce.
"We found that of workers that were leaving fossil fuel jobs, less
than 2% ended up in a renewable energy job," he says. "In a place like
West Virginia, it was even smaller than that. Approximately a quarter
per cent of workers that left fossil fuel jobs were going to renewable
energy jobs."
Researcher Eleanor Krause, who studies labor in the renewables sector, points out another challenge.
"Coal
mining employment happens where coal mines exist," she explains. "These
coal mines aren't necessarily the same places where the wind blows and
the sun shines the brightest, and so it's not necessarily the case that
we can just replace coal mines with wind turbines or solar panels."
Preparing a new workforce
The
science is clear. If humans hope to avoid the most catastrophic effects
of climate change, the switch from carbon-emitting fossil fuels that
warm the planet to renewable energy like wind and solar must happen
quickly.
But even though a disproportionate amount of federal
renewable investment funding has gone to red states like West Virginia,
those dollars have not gone very far in making good on Biden's promise
for a "just transition," says Krause.
Coal consumption has dropped over the past decade as renewables continue torise
Coal consumption in the U.S. is less than half what it was at its
peak in the late 2000s. Consumption from renewable energy sources has
nearly doubled since 2000, now matching consumption from nuclearsources.
The problem, Krause suspects, is a lack of focus on workforce development over tax credits.
She
says that investment in training programs in state and local colleges
is key to revitalizing the workforce and livelihoods for the communities
like Keyser.
Still, there are some programs trying to prepare a new workforce.
West
Virginia native Josh Bowes, 31, is a participant at the Advanced
Technology/Wind Energy Program at Eastern West Virginia Community and
Technical College, in Moorefield.
Bowes decided to change
careers from contracting and construction. He commutes two hours each
way from his home in Morgantown. He's in his last semester of the
two-year program at the college, where he's learning to be a wind
turbine technician.
"I want to stay here, and I want to see our state move forward," he
says. "We have to modernize. We have to do what's best for our state,
the country, the world, you know?"
Some of his classmates take a less idealistic approach.
For
fellow student Dakota Swick, 28, the decision to enroll in the turbine
technician program was practical, one he hopes will offer stability and a
living wage.
"I've been working paycheck to paycheck ...
working for this guy and that guy just to make maybe $200 or $300 a
week," says Swick. "I'm hoping this will be the career — either the
career job or the path to the job — that I'm going to stick with."
"I guess the best way I can put it is [that] my feelings don't matter
that much. What matters is price. If you can give people power that's
cheaper and cleaner, why would they pay more money for coal," Smith says
bluntly.
For him, the tensions in the transition to renewables — in West Virginia and elsewhere — boil down to one thing.
"We're kind of past the point of feelings. It comes down to money, which, as you know, kind of runs the world."
The pro-gun group’s former leader used the organization’s funds to
enrich himself and those close to him. But the deception went much
deeper.
In
early January, Wayne LaPierre, the longtime head of the National Rifle
Association, and Donald Trump were one floor apart in the civil branch
of the New York State Supreme Court, each on trial for a range of
financial misdeeds. There was an uncanny symmetry to the occasion. LaPierre
had, for more than thirty years, positioned himself as the leader of a
warrior tribe in a fight against imminent cultural extinction. He
invoked violent imagery, inflamed partisan tensions, stoked outrage, and
exploited fear and paranoia. He channelled those emotions in the
service of profit and power, tapping into the country’s darkest impulses
at the expense of civil society. Before Trump, he was the warmup act
that primed the audience. “Do you trust this government to protect you?”
he once asked in a speech, and then answered, “We are on our own.”
This
notion of rugged individual responsibility ran counter to the case laid
out by the office of the New York attorney general, which accused
LaPierre of rampant self-dealing and a deliberate disregard for
oversight. Lavish travel expenses—luxury hotels, private jets—went
through the N.R.A.’s public-relations firm, which then billed the
organization with nondescript invoices, preventing scrutiny. LaPierre
repeatedly vacationed with his family on a yacht,
in the Bahamas, that belonged to an N.R.A. vender. He and his wife,
Susan, went to Greece and India on the same vender’s dime. In court, a
photograph of LaPierre smiling in front of the Taj Mahal was projected
for the jury, which learned that he had not disclosed these excursions
in a corporate questionnaire that asked about accepting gifts that posed
a potential conflict of interest. The jury then viewed the vender’s
contract extensions, signed by LaPierre, for more and more money. The
problematic arrangements piled up. Custom suits, millions spent on
private jets, exorbitant costs associated with Susan’s hair and makeup.
LaPierre
defended himself by portraying the N.R.A. as a heavily scripted
production—a kind of long-running political drama in which he was paid
to arouse passions and build a devoted, dues-paying audience. He was, as
Kent Correll, his lawyer, said, “the face and voice of the
organization”—the star, the leading man. He had given the role
everything he had, but he had only been playing a character. The trial
had required him to tell the truth, leaving him unmasked. On February
23rd, the jury found LaPierre liable for improperly enriching himself
and those close to him, and required him to pay more than $4.3 million
back to the N.R.A. By then, he had already stepped down from the
organization, citing a diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease. The act was
over.
LaPierre
was not a seething populist or a born fighter. In college, Correll
said, LaPierre had been “fascinated” with politics and political
science. “He thought he was going to become a professor,” the attorney
explained during his opening statement. “He was a scholar; he was
bookish; he was shy; he was a devout Catholic.” LaPierre’s career, it
seems, was a matter of happenstance. He volunteered for the Presidential
campaign of George McGovern, a progressive Democrat, in 1972, then took
a job in Virginia with a Democratic state delegate who was interested
in gun rights. By the late seventies, he was working for the N.R.A. as a
regional lobbyist. He rose through the organization. In 1991, the
position of executive vice-president—the top job—came open. “They asked
if he would take the job,” his attorney said. “He did not want it.”
LaPierre preferred lobbying and policymaking, activities better suited
to a cerebral man who was uncomfortable in the spotlight. But there was
no one else, so he “stepped into” a public life.
LaPierre the man and LaPierre the character were
distinct. “People said, ‘Well, you’ve got to go on TV and talk.’ ”
Correll told the court. “And this is something he had never done before,
so he had to be trained by people who knew how to do that.” LaPierre
did not naturally possess the qualities Americans usually associate with
leadership: charisma, fortitude, decisiveness. So the N.R.A.’s
public-relations firm, Ackerman McQueen, rebuilt him in the image of
John Wayne—a man of individual responsibility striding through the tall
corn and taking matters into his own hands. “The only thing that stops a
bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he famously said, after
the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Somewhat
improbably, LaPierre was good for politics. Elected officials endowed
him with tremendous power. For Republicans, his organization’s money and
endorsements signalled they were on the right side of the culture war.
For Democrats, he was a convenient foil when the legislative process
failed, one mass shooting after another. LaPierre provided the public
with a cathartic outlet, serving as either a hero or a villain. But
anyone paying close attention to him could see that he was not the
person he purported to be—not authentically truculent, like Trump, or a
natural on the stage, like the N.R.A.’s former president, Charlton
Heston, who was an actual actor. Behind the scenes, professionals penned
his speeches and fund-raising e-mails. When LaPierre spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars on custom suits and accessories at the Zegna
boutique, in Beverly Hills, it was because Ackerman McQueen forced him
to “get wardrobe at this store,” LaPierre testified. When he flew on
private jets, it was because N.R.A. security told him to do so. When he shot an elephant on camera—multiple
times at close range—it wasn’t because he wanted to; it was because it
was his job. He wasn’t a gun guy—he could barely handle a firearm.
The
LaPierre production was a never-ending affair, requiring constant
maintenance. On a series of African hunting trips, for instance,
handlers and staff managed almost every aspect of his performance so
that, later, the material could be hammered into narratives of masculine
heroism for an N.R.A.-sponsored television show. On a 2003 trip to
Botswana, footage shows him sitting on the edge of his bed in a spacious
tent, chin resting on his hand, staring out at a view of tall trees.
He’s dressed in khaki-and-green safari gear. A rifle and a box of
ammunition sit on an adjacent bed.
“This is a nice shot of Wayne just kind of thinking to himself,” the cameraman says.
He
instructs LaPierre to put on his boots, and cues his wife, Susan, who
strides through the entrance of the tent, wearing an immaculate white
shirt, her blond hair appearing freshly blown out. She’s holding a
safari hat and has binoculars hanging around her neck. LaPierre remarks
that he wants to “get back into those kudu”—a species of antelope—as
Susan reminds him to pack sunscreen and bug spray. LaPierre grabs his
rifle, and the two head into the wilderness. But then Susan is sent back
inside for another shot. She’s directed to pick up LaPierre’s hat on
the way out.
Susan calls to LaPierre, “Do you want your hat, honey?”
The
footage is a testament to the N.R.A.’s meticulous construction of an
alternate reality—a vision calculated to align with a sentimental,
conservative world view. Gender hierarchy is unshakable. LaPierre is the
taciturn man. He is in charge. He thinks deep thoughts. His wife, the
helpmeet, reminds him not to forget the sunscreen.
On
another trip to Botswana, in 2009, a cameraman films LaPierre setting
out to hunt buffalo. He appears out of character, an actor who has not
had enough time to prepare for his role. He is passive, uncertain, and
compliant, looking out through his glasses on the arid, windswept
plains. Two companions—Chris Cox, then the N.R.A.’s top lobbyist, and a
hunting guide—instruct him on what to do. In one scene, LaPierre rests
on the ground as the guide sets up a tripod. “Wayne,” the guide says, to
no response. “Wayne!” LaPierre scrambles to his feet and balances his
rifle on the tripod. “You see the bull second from the right?” the guide
asks. “Just shoot him in the chest. Shoot him straight in the chest.”
LaPierre fires and the herd takes off. The guide starts moving, and
LaPierre, bewildered, follows him. He turns to the cameraman and asks,
“Did I miss?” Cox reassures him with a pat on the back.
The
animal comes into focus. It’s down. LaPierre rests his rifle on the
tripod. “Just remember,” the guide says, “don’t shoot too high.”
LaPierre fires, the buffalo’s body jumps, and then he shoots it again.
“All right,” LaPierre says. “You better believe it.” He shakes hands with the guide and asks, “Is he down for good?”
The cameraman intrudes: “Just do that handshake again, would you?”
LaPierre
does the handshake again. “It always feels good when they’re down, I’ll
tell ya that,” he says. “That’s a good feeling to have him down, I’ll
tell ya that.”
During the trial, LaPierre’s
testimony about the purpose of the trips provided the most revealing
moment of the proceedings. “I needed to build a rep and be seen as a
hunter,” he said. “I needed to develop the street cred if I was going to
do the job.” He went on, “I would never take a shot without it being on
camera.”
The Wayne LaPierre production was a powerful tool,
and the N.R.A. used it to transform the country. Permits to carry
concealed handguns, once extraordinarily difficult to obtain, became
easy to get; today, most states don’t require a permit to carry at all.
Stand Your Ground laws swept the nation. Firearms continued their
encroachment into public spaces. The AR-15
and its relatives proliferated; more than twenty million of them are
now in the hands of Americans. The federal government enacted a law that
protected the gun industry from most liability lawsuits, let the assault-weapons ban lapse, and failed to expand background checks to all gun sales. The Supreme Court affirmed
the individual right to own a firearm, and directed lower courts to
ignore public-safety considerations when reviewing regulations. Mass
shootings became commonplace. Republicans, en masse, took an absolutist
position on the Second Amendment, transforming the issue of guns into a
political purity test.
In 2016, the N.R.A. spent
more than thirty million dollars in support of Trump’s bid for the White
House. That year, I saw Trump address a packed arena at the N.R.A.’s
annual meeting, in Louisville, Kentucky. When the candidate was
introduced, a man sitting in front of me raised his fists in the air and
screamed, “Save us, Donald!” It was one of the most fervent expressions
of emotion I’d ever witnessed. “My sons have been members of the N.R.A.
for many, many years,” Trump said. “And they’re incredible. They have
so many rifles and so many guns.” The candidate had already begun to
eclipse LaPierre, insuring that the show would go on with or without
him. ♦
We think of humour as a distinctly human emotion, but some animals may also use it to strengthen their bonds.
When
you think about what sets our species apart from other animals, a good
sense of humour probably features fairly high up on the list.
We
love to laugh – so much so, that an appreciation of comedy seems almost
ingrained into our species. Babies as young as three months old giggle
and find it hilarious when their parents pull funny faces. By eight
months, infants have learned how to use their own faces, bodies and
voices to make grown-ups laugh.
Soon after, parents may notice that their child has turned into a
full-time comedian, deliberately playing with things they know they
shouldn't with a cheeky grin on their face.
However, a new study
shows that humans may not be alone in their love of playing practical
jokes. Animals can tease each other too. Together with colleagues,
Isabelle Laumer, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of
California Los Angeles (UCLA), watched over 75 hours of videos of great
apes interacting with each other. Great apes are our closest living
relatives, and include orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas.
The apes in the study all lived in zoos, and were filmed attending to
their daily routines.
Members
of all four species were observed teasing one another. The researchers
identified 18 distinct teasing behaviours, with the top five including
poking, hitting, hindering the movement of a fellow ape, body slamming,
and pulling on a body part. Some apes repeatedly waved body parts or
objects in front of their fellow apes' faces, or, in the case of
orangutans, pulled each other's hair.
"What
we saw often was that a juvenile would sneak up behind an adult that
was busy grooming another ape, and proceed to poke them or hit them on
the back, sometimes even surprising them," says Laumer, first author of
the study.
"They'd
then wait and watch for the adult's response. Usually, the target would
just ignore them, and so they'd persist in their teasing, making the
behaviour more and more elaborate and difficult to ignore, until they
sometimes ended up slamming the adult with their entire body."
The
teasing behaviour was similar to that adopted by young human children,
according to the researchers, in that it was intentional, provocative,
persistent and included elements of surprise, play and checking for the
recipient’s response. The human equivalent might be sticking your tongue
out at someone and then running away to gauge their reaction.
Many scientists believe that humour is far more widespread amongst the animal kingdom
This
style of teasing could even form the foundation for more complicated
forms of humour. "Joking in humans requires quite complex cognitive
abilities," says Laumer. "You need theory of mind (the ability to
imagine the world from someone else's perspective), knowledge of social
norms, the ability to anticipate others' responses and to appreciate the
violation of other's expectations," she says.
As
all four great ape species are capable of playful teasing, it suggests
that a sense of humour may have been present in our last common
ancestor, who lived 13 million years ago.
However,
many scientists believe that humour is far more widespread amongst the
animal kingdom than this. For example, in his book The Descent of Man,
biologist Charles Darwin suggests that dogs may have a sense of humour,
writing:
"If
a bit of stick or other such object be thrown to one, he will often
carry it away for a short distance; and then squatting down with it on
the ground close before him, will wait until his master comes quite
close to take it away. The dog will then seize it and rush away in
triumph, repeating the same manoeuvre, and evidently enjoying the
practical joke."
Anyone
who owns a dog may have also noticed that during play, they produce a
sort of breathy snorting sound that almost sounds like laughter. In a
2005 study,
animal behaviourist Patricia Simonet played the sound to dogs at a
rescue shelter. She found that listening to dog "laughter" made the
shelter dogs less stressed out.
Marc
Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the
University of Colorado, Boulder, says he has collected decades worth of
data showing dogs engage in teasing behaviour similar to that shown by Laumer and her colleagues.
For
example, when trying to get an otherwise reluctant dog to play, one dog
may approach another with a loose gambolling gait before running away.
"I've seen this in dogs, foxes, wild coyotes and wild wolves," says Bekoff.
In
fact, Bekoff says that during his career he has heard stories about
many species who act like stand-up comedians and jokesters, including
horses, Asian black bears and the scarlet macaw.
Meanwhile, other researchers have noted that dolphins appear to produce sounds of joy while they are play-fighting, and elephants trumpet in excitement
when playing. Some parrots have been known to tease other animals for
fun, for example by whistling at and confusing the family dog.
There's
even evidence that rats enjoy a good laugh. For the last decade or so,
Jeffrey Burgdorf, research associate professor at Northwestern
University in the US, has been tickling rats for a living. When the rats
are tickled, they squeak joyfully in a high-pitched noise similar to a
giggle. They come back again and again for more, and can even be taught
to play hide and seek
for a "tickling reward", according to work done by a separate group at
the Humboldt University of Berlin. Now Burgdorf and his team are using
their findings to inform treatments for depression.
"What we've been learning is that the animals are most attentive when they are making these vocalisations," says Burgdorf.
My
supervisor [neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp] would always say play is the
fertiliser for the brain, and it's true. Their brains are connecting.
They're making new synapses and new neural connections. And so I think
that tells us that when we're in those playful humorous moods, we're
actually performing at our best and we are being our best selves," says
Burgdorf.
However,
while rats clearly love being tickled, is their high-pitched giggle
really evidence that they have a sense of humour? Most of the evidence
for animals having a sense of humour is predominantly anecdotal, as few
large-scale studies have been conducted. It's also difficult to know why
an animal engages in a certain behaviour. Are the apes in Laumer's
study simply playing a practical joke, or are they trying to defuse
tension, initiate play, or even just get attention?
What better way to make friends, after all, than to share a good joke?
"Do I think that animals have a sense of humour? Yes, I think they do, but it's difficult to prove," admits Bekoff.
"For
example, I've come across households with two dogs, where at feeding
time one dog runs to the front door and barks. The other dog then runs
to see who's there, while the first dog runs back and eats their food.
So, you could say that's showing a sense of humour, but the first dog
may have just learned that that's how they get more food," says Bekoff.
There's
also the question of what evolutionary purpose humour could serve in
animals. In humans, it's thought that laughter evolved as a way of help
individuals bond. What better way to make friends, after all, than to
share a good joke?
Is it possible that humour serves the same role in animals?
"In
humans, humour can serve as like an ice-breaker, removing social
barriers and strengthening relationships," says Laumer. "We don't know
if it's the same in apes or other animals, but it's possible. To know
for sure we would need to test and observe more groups of primates and
other species," she says.
As a scholar of broadcast propaganda,
I believe Carlson’s work provides an opportunity for public education
in distinguishing between propaganda and journalism. Some Americans,
primarily Carlson’s fans, will view the videos as accurate reportage.
Others, primarily Carlson’s detractors, will reject them as mendacious
propaganda.
But closely considering these categories, and evaluating Carlson’s work
in context, might deepen public understanding of the distinction between
journalism and propaganda in the American context.
Promoting authoritarians
Carlson’s ability to secure the Putin interview was commendable. Interviewing dictators – even the most murderous ones, such as Cambodia’s Pol Pot – can represent a significant journalistic achievement.
Producing a travelogue, Carlson toured Moscow and made videos
extolling the glories of Russian society, culture and governance. The
Moscow subway impressed him, while the low prices in a Russian
supermarket “radicalized” him “against our American leaders.”
‘Classic case of propaganda’
There are numerous ways to evaluate the truthfulness of Carlson’s reports.
For example, if things are as copacetic in Russia as Carlson claims,
then emigration out of the country should be minimal, or at least
normal. Yet, since the 2022 Ukraine war mobilization, Russians have fled their country in historically high numbers.
But research shows that fact-checking Carlson’s claims is not likely to change
many people’s opinions. We know most people don’t appreciate being told
their preferred information is inaccurate, and when untruthful reports
accord with their perception of reality, they’ll believe them.
Instead of categorizing Carlson’s Russia videos as “reporting,”
“journalism,” “information” or “fake news,” we could define it instead
as a classic case of propaganda.
Propaganda is communication designed to bypass critical and rational
examination in order to provoke intended emotional, attitudinal or
behavioral responses from an audience.
Public understanding of propaganda usually links it to lying, but
that’s not quite correct. While some propaganda is mendacious, the most
effective propaganda will interlace carefully selected verifiable facts
with emotional appeals.
For an average American, those Russian supermarket prices really were
cheap. But that’s a selected truth presented without context essential
for understanding.
Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once described propaganda in a democracy as “emotionally potent oversimplifications” peddled to the masses, and that’s precisely what Carlson’s videos seem to provide.
That Carlson has evolved into a propagandist is not surprising. In
2022, The New York Times analyzed his Fox News broadcasts between 2016
and 2021. The paper concluded that Carlson’s program became far less interested in rational dialogue and critical exchange – by interviewing people who disagreed with him – as it evolved into a monologue-driven format in which Carlson preached often factually dubious assertions to his audience.
At one time, early in his career, Carlson demonstrated significant journalistic talent, especially in magazine feature writing. But his dedication to accuracy – and even basic truth-telling – was exposed as a sham when his texts from the Dominion voting machine lawsuit were revealed and illustrated his mendacity.
The New York Times’ Walter Duranty infamously ignored
the Stalin dictatorship’s horrific starvation of millions of Ukrainians
in the 1930s. The Times’ Berlin correspondent Guido Enderis specialized
in “puffy profiles of leading Nazis” while whitewashing the regime’s more evil aspects in the mid-1930s.
More recently, correspondent Peter Arnett was fired from NBC News for appearing on state-controlled Iraqi TV in 2003 and praising the success of “Iraqi resistance”
at the outset of the U.S.-Iraq war. Although Arnett’s comments did not
originally appear on NBC, they were rebroadcast widely.
But what makes Carlson’s actions particularly galling to some was
that his propaganda appeared while Wall Street Journal reporter Evan
Gershkovich remains imprisoned by Putin’s regime for alleged spying, but
which was really accurate reporting from Russia. When Carlson
questioned Putin about Gershkovich, the dictator replied that a prisoner exchange might be negotiated.
Ultimately, the distinction between journalism and propaganda is the difference between Gershkovich and Carlson.
Gershkovich sits in a Russian prison for investigating the truth
about Putin’s Russia in service to the American public and his employer.
Carlson flies around the world praising authoritarian leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, while “rooting” for dictators like Vladimir Putin when they attack their neighbors. “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am,” he said in 2019 about the Ukraine-Russian conflict.
To expose abusive governmental power and hold it accountable “to the opinions of mankind”
is literally written in America’s Declaration of Independence. To
travel abroad praising dictatorships for their subways and cheeseburgers
while ignoring their murderousness, and to return “radicalized …
against our leaders” because foreign supermarket prices are low, is
certainly not journalism. It is propaganda.
Carlson’s videos may have one beneficial result: If enough Americans
learn from them how to detect propaganda and distinguish it from ethical
and professional reporting, then perhaps Carlson unintentionally
provided a valuable media literacy service to the nation.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed an executive order
on Feb. 21, 2024, removing school boards’ veto power over corporate
property tax breaks that take money away from schools. It also did away
with a requirement that projects granted the tax breaks create jobs and
retain jobs.
Now, companies that apply for Louisiana’s Industrial Tax Exemption
Program, which can grant property tax breaks of 80% over 10 years, will
go to a local industrial board, then a state industrial board, for
approval. If the local and state boards disagree on whether to grant a
tax break, the governor will be the tiebreaker.
The order nullified a previous governor’s 2016 order allowing schools
to have more of a say in approving tax breaks that could harm their
students.
We are a group of researchers who wrote for The Conversation about the billions of dollars students and schools lose out on yearly when cities and states grant corporate property tax abatements.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed an executive order
on Feb. 21, 2024, removing school boards’ veto power over corporate
property tax breaks that take money away from schools. It also did away
with a requirement that projects granted the tax breaks create jobs and
retain jobs.
Now, companies that apply for Louisiana’s Industrial Tax Exemption
Program, which can grant property tax breaks of 80% over 10 years, will
go to a local industrial board, then a state industrial board, for
approval. If the local and state boards disagree on whether to grant a
tax break, the governor will be the tiebreaker.
The order nullified a previous governor’s 2016 order allowing schools
to have more of a say in approving tax breaks that could harm their
students.
We are a group of researchers who wrote for The Conversation about the billions of dollars students and schools lose out on yearly when cities and states grant corporate property tax abatements.
Text with us for something interesting every day
Tax abatement programs have long been controversial, and their economic value is at best unclear: Studies show most companies would have made the same location decisions
without these taxpayer subsidies. Meanwhile, schools make up the
largest cost item in these communities, meaning they suffer most when
companies are granted breaks in property taxes.
One of the areas we focused on was East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, which is facing budgetary woes including shortages of bus drivers and teachers.
Former Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards signed the 2016 executive order
that gave local taxing bodies – such as school boards, sheriffs and
parish or city councils – the ability to vote on their own individual
portions of the tax exemptions.
In 2019, the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board exercised its power
to vote down an abatement. In 2022, a year where ExxonMobil made a
record $55.7 billion in profit, the company asked for a tax break from
the cash-starved East Baton Rouge school district. After a lively debate, including comments from 49 citizens, the board voted to grant the tax rate
East Baton Rouge Parish Schools – Funds lost to property tax breaks
Throughout the U.S., school boards’ power over the tax abatements
that affect their budgets vary, and in some states, including Georgia,
Kansas, Nevada, New Jersey and South Carolina, school boards lack any
formal ability to vote or comment on tax abatement deals that affect
them.
Landry’s recent order added Louisiana to the list.
BY Christine Wen, Danielle McLean, Kevin Welner and Nathan Jensen
Built in 1910, James Elementary is a three-story brick school in
Kansas City, Missouri’s historic Northeast neighborhood, with a bright
blue front door framed by a sand-colored stone arch adorned with a
gargoyle. As bustling students and teachers negotiate a maze of gray
stairs with worn wooden handrails, Marjorie Mayes, the school’s
principal, escorts a visitor across uneven blue tile floors on the
ground floor to a classroom with exposed brick walls and pipes. Bubbling
paint mars some walls, evidence of the water leaks spreading inside the
aging building.
“It’s living history,” said Mayes during a mid-September tour of the building. “Not the kind of living history we want.”
The district would like to tackle the US$400 million in deferred
maintenance needed to create a 21st century learning environment at its
35 schools – including James Elementary – but it can’t. It doesn’t have
the money.
Property tax redirect
The lack of funds is a direct result of the property tax breaks that
Kansas City lavishes on companies and developers that do business there.
The program is supposed to bring in new jobs and business but instead
has ended up draining civic coffers and starving schools. Between 2017
and 2023, the Kansas City school district lost $237.3 million through
tax abatements.
Built in 1910, James Elementary is a three-story brick school in
Kansas City, Missouri’s historic Northeast neighborhood, with a bright
blue front door framed by a sand-colored stone arch adorned with a
gargoyle. As bustling students and teachers negotiate a maze of gray
stairs with worn wooden handrails, Marjorie Mayes, the school’s
principal, escorts a visitor across uneven blue tile floors on the
ground floor to a classroom with exposed brick walls and pipes. Bubbling
paint mars some walls, evidence of the water leaks spreading inside the
aging building.
“It’s living history,” said Mayes during a mid-September tour of the building. “Not the kind of living history we want.”
The district would like to tackle the US$400 million in deferred
maintenance needed to create a 21st century learning environment at its
35 schools – including James Elementary – but it can’t. It doesn’t have
the money.
Property tax redirect
The lack of funds is a direct result of the property tax breaks that
Kansas City lavishes on companies and developers that do business there.
The program is supposed to bring in new jobs and business but instead
has ended up draining civic coffers and starving schools. Between 2017
and 2023, the Kansas City school district lost $237.3 million through
tax abatements.
Kansas City is hardly an anomaly. An estimated 95%
of U.S. cities provide economic development tax incentives to woo
corporate investors. The upshot is that billions have been diverted from
large urban school districts and from a growing number of small
suburban and rural districts. The impact is seen in districts as diverse
as Chicago and Cleveland, Hillsboro, Oregon, and Storey County, Nevada.
The result? A 2021 review of 2,498 financial statements
from school districts across 27 states revealed that, in 2019 alone, at
least $2.4 billion was diverted to fund tax incentives. Yet that
substantial figure still downplays the magnitude of the problem, because
three-quarters of the 10,370 districts analyzed did not provide any
information on tax abatement agreements.
Tax abatement programs have long been controversial, pitting states
and communities against one another in beggar-thy-neighbor contests.
Their economic value is also, at best, unclear: Studies show most
companies would have made the same location decision
without taxpayer subsidies. Meanwhile, schools make up the largest cost
item in these communities, meaning they suffer most when companies are
granted breaks in property taxes.
A three-month investigation by The Conversation and three scholars with expertise in economic development, tax laws and education policy
shows that the cash drain from these programs is not equally shared by
schools in the same communities. At the local level, tax abatements and
exemptions often come at the cost of critical funding for school districts that disproportionately serve
students from low-income households and who are racial minorities.
The funding gaps produced by abated money often force schools to delay needed maintenance, increase class sizes, lay off teachers and support staff and even close outright. Schools also struggle to update or replace
outdated technology, books and other educational resources. And, amid a
nationwide teacher shortage, schools under financial pressures
sometimes turn to inexperienced teachers who are not fully certified or rely too heavily on recruits from overseas who have been given special visa status.
Lost funding also prevents teachers and staff, who often feed, clothe
and otherwise go above and beyond to help students in need, from earning a living wage. All told, tax abatements can end up harming a community’s value, with constant funding shortfalls creating a cycle of decline.
Incentives, payoffs and guarantees
Perversely, some of the largest beneficiaries of tax abatements are
the politicians who publicly boast of handing out the breaks despite the
harm to poorer communities. Incumbent governors have used the
incentives as a means of taking credit for job creation, even when the jobs were coming anyway.
“We know that subsidies don’t work,” said Elizabeth Marcello,
a doctoral lecturer at Hunter College who studies governmental planning
and policy and the interactions between state and local governments.
“But they are good political stories, and I think that’s why politicians
love them so much.”
While some voters may celebrate abatements, parents can recognize the
disparities between school districts that are created by the tax
breaks. Fairleigh Jackson pointed out that her daughter’s East Baton
Rouge third grade class lacks access to playground equipment.
The class is attending school in a temporary building while their elementary school undergoes a two-year renovation.
The temporary site has some grass and a cement slab where kids can
play, but no playground equipment, Jackson said. And parents needed to
set up an Amazon wish list to purchase basic equipment such as balls,
jump ropes and chalk for students to use. The district told parents
there would be no playground equipment due to a lack of funds, then
promised to install equipment, Jackson said, but months later, there is
none.
Jackson said it’s hard to complain when other schools in the district
don’t even have needed security measures in place. “When I think about
playground equipment, I think that’s a necessary piece of child
development,” Jackson said. “Do we even advocate for something that
should be a daily part of our kids’ experience when kids’ safety isn’t
being funded?”
Meanwhile, the challenges facing administrators 500-odd miles away at
Atlanta Public Schools are nothing if not formidable: The district is
dealing with chronic absenteeism among half of its Black students, many students are experiencing homelessness, and it’s facing a teacher shortage.
At the same time, Atlanta is showering corporations with tax breaks.
The city has two bodies that dole them out: the Development Authority of
Fulton County, or DAFC, and Invest Atlanta, the city’s economic
development agency. The deals handed out by the two agencies have
drained $103.8 million from schools from fiscal 2017 to 2022, according
to Atlanta school system financial statements.
Atlanta Public Schools – funds lost to property tax breaks
What exactly Atlanta and other cities and states are accomplishing with tax abatement programs is hard to discern. Fewer than a quarter
of companies that receive breaks in the U.S. needed an incentive to
invest, according to a 2018 study by the Upjohn Institute for Employment
Research, a nonprofit research organization.
This means that at least 75% of companies received tax abatements
when they’re not needed – with communities paying a heavy price for
economic development that sometimes provides little benefit.
In Kansas City, for example, there’s no guarantee that the businesses
that do set up shop after receiving a tax abatement will remain there
long term. That’s significant considering the historic border war
between the Missouri and Kansas sides of Kansas City – a competition to
be the most generous to the businesses, said Jason Roberts, president of
the Kansas City Federation of Teachers and School-Related Personnel.
Kansas City, Missouri, has a 1% income tax on people who work in the city, so it competes for as many workers as possible to secure that earnings tax, Roberts said.
Under city and state tax abatement programs, companies that used to
be in Kansas City have since relocated. The AMC Theaters headquarters,
for example, moved from the city’s downtown to Leawood, Kansas, about a decade ago, garnering some $40 million in Promoting Employment Across Kansas tax incentives.
Roberts said that when one side’s financial largesse runs out,
companies often move across the state line – until both states decided
in 2019 that enough was enough and declared a cease-fire.
But tax breaks for other businesses continue. “Our mission is to grow
the economy of Kansas City, and application of tools such as tax
exemptions are vital to achieving that mission, said Jon Stephens,
president and CEO of Port KC, the Kansas City Port Authority. The
incentives speed development, and providing them "has resulted in growth
choosing KC versus other markets,” he added.
In Atlanta, those tax breaks are not going
to projects in neighborhoods that need help attracting development.
They have largely been handed out to projects that are in high demand
areas of the city, said Julian Bene, who served on Invest Atlanta’s
board from 2010 to 2018. In 2019, for instance, the Fulton County
development authority approved a 10-year, $16 million tax abatement for a 410-foot-tall, 27,000-square-foot tower in Atlanta’s vibrant Midtown business district. The project included hotel space, retail space and office space that is now occupied by Google and Invesco.
In 2021, a developer in Atlanta pulled its request
for an $8 million tax break to expand its new massive, mixed-use Ponce
City Market development in the trendy Beltline neighborhood with an
office tower and apartment building. Because of community pushback, the
developer knew it likely did not have enough votes from the commission
for approval, Bene said. After a second try for $5 million in lower
taxes was also rejected, the developer went ahead and built the project anyway.
Invest Atlanta has also turned down projects in the past, Bene said.
Oftentimes, after getting rejected, the developer goes back to the
landowner and asks for a better price to buy the property to make their
numbers work, because it was overvalued at the start.
Trouble in Philadelphia
Americans also ask public schools to accomplish Herculean tasks that go far beyond the education basics,
as many parents discovered at the onset of the pandemic when schools
closed and their support for families largely disappeared.
A school serving students who endure housing and food insecurity must
dedicate resources toward children’s basic needs and trauma. But
districts serving more low-income students spend less per student on average, and almost half the states have regressive funding structures.
Facing dwindling resources for schools, several cities have begun to rethink their tax exemption programs.
The Philadelphia City Council recently passed a scale-back on a 10-year property tax abatement
by decreasing the percentage of the subsidy over that time. But even
with that change, millions will be lost to tax exemptions that could
instead be invested in cash-depleted schools. “We could make major
changes in our schools’ infrastructure, curriculum, staffing, staffing
ratios, support staff, social workers, school psychologists – take your
pick,” Brooks said.
Other cities looking to reform tax abatement programs are taking a
different approach. In Riverhead, New York, on Long Island, developers
or project owners can be granted exemptions on their property tax and
allowed instead to shell out a far smaller “payment in lieu of taxes,”
or PILOT. When the abatement ends, most commonly after 10 years, the
businesses then will pay full property taxes.
At least, that’s the idea, but the system is far from perfect.
Beneficiaries of the PILOT program have failed to pay on time, leaving
the school board struggling to fill a budget hole. Also, the payments are not equal
to the amount they would receive for property taxes, with millions of
dollars in potential revenue over a decade being cut to as little as a
few hundred thousand. On the back end, if a business that’s subsidized
with tax breaks fails after 10 years, the projected benefits never
emerge.
And when the time came to start paying taxes, developers have
returned to the city’s Industrial Development Agency with hat in hand,
asking for more tax breaks. A local for-profit aquarium,
for example, was granted a 10-year PILOT program break by Riverhead in
1999; it has received so many extensions that it is not scheduled to
start paying full taxes until 2031 – 22 years after originally planned.
Kansas City border politics
Like many cities, Kansas City has a long history of segregation,
white flight and racial redlining, said Kathleen Pointer, senior policy
strategist for Kansas City Public Schools.
Troost Avenue, where the Kansas City Public Schools administrative office is located, serves as the city’s historic racial dividing line,
with wealthier white families living in the west and more economically
disadvantaged people of color in the east. Most of the district’s
schools are located east of Troost, not west.
Students on the west side “pretty much automatically funnel into the
college preparatory middle school and high schools,” said The Federation
of Teachers’ Roberts. Those schools are considered signature schools
that are selective and are better taken care of than the typical
neighborhood schools, he added.
The school district’s tax levy was set by voters in 1969 at 3.75%.
But successive attempts over the next few decades to increase the levy
at the ballot box failed. During a decadeslong desegregation lawsuit
that was eventually resolved through a settlement agreement in the
1990s, a court raised the district’s levy rate to 4.96% without voter
approval. The levy has remained at the same 4.96% rate since.
Meanwhile, Kansas City is still distributing 20-year tax abatements
to companies and developers for projects. The district calculated that
about 92% of the money that was abated within the school district’s
boundaries was for projects within the whiter west side of the city,
Pointer said.
“Unfortunately, we can’t pick or choose where developers build,” said
Meredith Hoenes, director of communications for Port KC. “We aren’t
planning and zoning. Developers typically have plans in place when they
knock on our door.”
In Kansas City, several agencies administer tax incentives,
allowing developers to shop around to different bodies to receive one.
Pointer said he believes the Port Authority is popular because they
don’t do a third-party financial analysis to prove that the developers
need the amount that they say they do.
With 20-year abatements, a child will start pre-K and graduate high
school before seeing the benefits of a property being fully on the tax
rolls, Pointer said. Developers, meanwhile, routinely threaten to build
somewhere else if they don’t get the incentive, she said.
In 2020, BlueScope Construction, a company that had received tax
incentives for nearly 20 years and was about to roll off its abatement,
asked for another 13 years and threatened to move
to another state if it didn’t get it. At the time, the U.S. was
grappling with a racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd,
who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer.
“That was a moment for Kansas City Public Schools where we really
drew a line in the sand and talked about incentives as an equity issue,”
Pointer said.
After the district raised the issue – tying the incentives to systemic racism
– the City Council rejected BlueScope’s bid and, three years later,
it’s still in Kansas City, fully on the tax rolls, she said. BlueScope
did not return multiple requests for comment.
Recently, a multifamily housing project was approved for a 20-year tax abatement
by the Port Authority of Kansas City at Country Club Plaza, an outdoor
shopping center in an affluent part of the city. The housing project
included no affordable units. “This project was approved without any
independent financial analysis proving that it needed that subsidy,”
Pointer said.
All told, the Kansas City Public Schools district faces several
shortfalls beyond the $400 million in deferred maintenance,
Superintendent Jennifer Collier said. There are staffing shortages at
all positions: teachers, paraprofessionals and support staff. As in much
of the U.S., the cost of housing is surging. New developments that are
being built do not include affordable housing, or when they do, the
units are still out of reach for teachers.
That’s making it harder for a district that already loses about 1 in 5
of its teachers each year to keep or recruit new ones, who earn an average of only $46,150 their first year on the job, Collier said.
East Baton Rouge and the industrial corridor
It’s impossible to miss the tanks, towers, pipes and industrial
structures that incongruously line Baton Rouge’s Scenic Highway
landscape. They’re part of Exxon Mobil Corp.’s campus, home of the oil
giant’s refinery in addition to chemical and plastics plants.
Sitting along the Mississippi River, the campus
has been a staple of Louisiana’s capital for over 100 years. It’s where
6,000 employees and contractors who collectively earn over $400 million
annually produce 522,000 barrels of crude oil per day when at full capacity, as well as the annual production and manufacture of 3 billion pounds of high-density polyethylene and polypropylene and 6.6 billion pounds of petrochemical products. The company posted a record-breaking$55.7 billion in profits in 2022 and $36 billion in 2023.
Across the street are empty fields and roads leading into
neighborhoods that have been designated by the U.S. Department of
Agriculture as a low-income food desert.
A mile drive down the street to Route 67 is a Dollar General, fast-food
restaurants, and tiny, rundown food stores. A Hi Nabor Supermarket is 4
miles away.
East Baton Rouge Parish’s McKinley High School, a 12-minute drive
from the refinery, serves a student body that is about 80% Black and 85%
poor. The school, which boasts famous alums such as rapper Kevin Gates,
former NBA player Tyrus Thomas and Presidential Medal of Freedom
recipient Gardner C. Taylor, holds a special place in the community, but
it has been beset by violence and tragedy lately. Its football team
quarterback, who was killed days before graduation in 2017, was among at least four of McKinley’s students who have been shotor murderedover the past six years.
The experience is starkly different at some of the district’s more
advantaged schools, including its magnet programs open to
high-performing students.
Baton Rouge is a tale of two cities, with some of the worst outcomes
in the state for education, income and mortality, and some of the best
outcomes. “It was only separated by sometimes a few blocks,” said Edgar
Cage, the lead organizer for the advocacy group Together Baton Rouge.
Cage, who grew up in the city when it was segregated by Jim Crow laws,
said the root cause of that disparity was racism.
“Underserved kids don’t have a path forward” in East Baton Rouge public schools, Cage said.
A 2019 report
from the Urban League of Louisiana found that economically
disadvantaged African American and Hispanic students are not provided
equitable access to high-quality education opportunities. That has
contributed to those students underperforming on standardized state
assessments, such as the LEAP exam, being unprepared to advance to
higher grades and being excluded from high-quality curricula and
instruction, as well as the highest-performing schools and magnet
schools.
“Baton Rouge is home to some of the highest performing schools in the
state,” according to the report. “Yet the highest performing schools
and schools that have selective admissions policies often exclude
disadvantaged students and African American and Hispanic students.”
Dawn Collins, who served on the district’s school board from 2016 to
2022, said that with more funding, the district could provide more
targeted interventions for students who were struggling academically or
additional support to staff so they can better assist students with
greater needs.
But for decades, Louisiana’s Industrial Ad Valorem Tax ExemptionProgram,
or ITEP, allowed for 100% property tax exemptions for industrial
manufacturing facilities, said Erin Hansen, the statewide policy analyst
at Together Louisiana, a network of 250 religious and civic
organizations across the state that advocates for grassroots issues,
including tax fairness.
The ITEP program was created in the 1930s through a state
constitutional amendment, allowing companies to bypass a public vote and
get approval for the exemption through the governor-appointed Board of Commerce and Industry, Hansen said. For over 80 years, that board approved nearly all applications that it received, she said.
A few efforts to reform the program over the years have largely failed. But in 2016, Gov. John Bel Edwards signed an executive order
that slightly but importantly tweaked the system. On top of the state
board vote, the order gave local taxing bodies – such as school boards,
sheriffs and parish or city councils – the ability to vote on their own
individual portions of the tax exemptions. And in 2019 the East Baton
Rouge Parish School Board exercised its power to vote down an abatement.
Throughout the U.S., school boards’ power over the tax abatements
that affect their budgets vary, and in some states, including Georgia,
Kansas, Nevada, New Jersey and South Carolina, school boards lack any
formal ability to vote or comment on tax abatement deals that affect
them.
Edwards’ executive order also capped the maximum exemption at 80% and
tightened the rules so routine capital investments and maintenance were
no longer eligible, Hansen said. A requirement concerning job creation
was also put in place.
Concerned residents and activists, led by Together Louisiana and
sister group Together Baton Rouge, rallied around the new rules and pushed back
against the billion-dollar corporation taking more tax money from the
schools. In 2019, the campaign worked: the school board rejected a $2.9
million property tax break bid by Exxon Mobil.
After the decision, Exxon Mobil reportedly described the city as “unpredictable.”
However, members of the business community have continued to lobby
for the tax breaks, and they have pushed back against further
rejections. In fact, according to Hansen, loopholes were created during
the rulemaking process around the governor’s executive order that
allowed companies to weaken its effectiveness.
In total, 223 Exxon Mobil projects worth nearly $580 million in tax abatements have been granted in the state of Louisiana under the ITEP program since 2000.
“ITEP is needed to compete with other states – and, in ExxonMobil’s
case, other countries,” according to Exxon Mobil spokesperson Lauren
Kight.
She pointed out that Exxon Mobil is the largest property taxpayer for
the EBR school system, paying more than $46 million in property taxes
in EBR parish in 2022 and another $34 million in sales taxes.
A new ITEP contract won’t decrease this existing tax revenue, Kight added. “Losing out on future projects absolutely will.”
The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board has continued to approve
Exxon Mobil abatements, passing $46.9 million between 2020 and 2022.
Between 2017 and 2023, the school district has lost $96.3 million.
Taxes are highest when industrial buildings are first built. Industrial property comes onto the tax rolls at 40% to 50% of its original value in Louisiana after the initial 10-year exemption, according to the Ascension Economic Development Corp.
Exxon Mobil received its latest tax exemption, $8.6 million over 10
years – an 80% break – in October 2023 for $250 million to install
facilities at the Baton Rouge complex that purify isopropyl alcohol for
microchip production and that create a new advanced recycling facility,
allowing the company to address plastic waste. The project created zero new jobs.
“Does it make sense for Louisiana and other economically
disadvantaged states to kind of compete with each other by providing tax
incentives to mega corporations like Exxon Mobil?” said EBR School
Board Vice President Patrick Martin, who voted for the abatement.
“Probably, in a macro sense, it does not make a lot of sense. But it is
the program that we have.”
Obviously, Exxon Mobil benefits, he said. “The company gets a benefit
in reducing the property taxes that they would otherwise pay on their
industrial activity that adds value to that property.” But the community
benefits from the 20% of the property taxes that are not exempted, he
said.
“I believe if we don’t pass it, over time the investments will not
come and our district as a whole will have less money,” he added.
In 2022, a year when Exxon
Mobil made a record $55.7 billion, the company asked for a 10-year, 80%
property tax break from the cash-starved East Baton Rouge Parish school
district. A lively debate ensued.
Meanwhile, the district’s budgetary woes are coming to a head. Bus
drivers staged a sickout at the start of the school year, refusing to
pick up students – in protest of low pay and not having buses equipped
with air conditioning amid a heat wave. The district was forced to
release students early, leaving kids stranded without a ride to school,
before it acquiesced and provided the drivers and other staff one-time stipends and purchased new buses with air conditioning.
The district also agreed to reestablish transfer points as a
temporary response to the shortages. But that transfer-point plan has
historically resulted in students riding on the bus for hours and
occasionally missing breakfast when the bus arrives late, according to
Angela Reams-Brown, president of the East Baton Rouge Federation of
Teachers. The district plans to purchase or lease over 160 buses and
solve its bus driver shortage next year, but the plan could lead to a budget crisis.
A teacher shortage looms as well, because the district is paying teachers below the regional average. At the school board meeting, Laverne Simoneaux,
an ELL specialist at East Baton Rouge’s Woodlawn Elementary, said she
was informed that her job was not guaranteed next year since she’s being
paid through federal COVID-19 relief funds. By receiving tax
exemptions, Exxon Mobil was taking money from her salary to deepen their
pockets, she said.
A young student in the district told the school board that the money
could provide better internet access or be used to hire someone to pick
up the glass and barbed wire in the playground. But at least they have a
playground – Hayden Crockett, a seventh grader at Sherwood Middle
Academic Magnet School, noted that his sister’s elementary school lacked
one.
“If it wasn’t in the budget to fund playground equipment, how can it
also be in the budget to give one of the most powerful corporations in
the world a tax break?” Crockett said. “The math just ain’t mathing.”
