Rus­sel Pearce: the con­tem­po­rary eugeni­cist:

TPM Livewire
Ari­zona GOP­er: Women On Wel­fare Should Be Ster­il­ized

By Daniel Strauss Pub­lished
Sep­tem­ber 15, 2014, 7:00 AM EDT

For­mer Ari­zona state Sen. Rus­sell Pearce ® resigned his posi­tion as first vice chair­man of the Ari­zona Repub­li­can Par­ty on Sun­day amid crit­i­cism by promi­nent Repub­li­can can­di­dates of Pearce’s recent com­ments on ster­il­iza­tion and poor women.

Accord­ing to the Ari­zona Repub­lic, the res­ig­na­tion fol­lows the Ari­zona Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty high­light­ing Pearce say­ing on his radio talk pro­gram that if he were in charge of Ari­zon­a’s pub­lic assis­tance pro­grams “the first thing I’d do is get Nor­plant, birth con­trol implants, or tubal ligations…Then we’ll test recip­i­ents for drugs and alco­hol, and if you want [to repro­duce] or use drugs or alco­hol, then get a job.”

The Ari­zona GOP announced that Pearce had stepped down late Sun­day, fol­low­ing a num­ber of can­di­dates denounc­ing Pearce’s remarks.

Pearce said the com­ments were a mis­tak­en that had been twist­ed by the media. He said that dur­ing his radio show on Sept. 9 there was “a dis­cus­sion about the abus­es to our wel­fare sys­tem” and he high­light­ed “com­ments writ­ten by some­one else and failed to attribute them to the author.”

...

Pearce served as the Ari­zona Sen­ate pres­i­dent and was the chief spon­sor of the state’s harsh immi­gra­tion law. He was thrown out of office in a recall in 2011, but then was cho­sen as the first vice chair­man of the Ari­zona GOP the fol­low­ing year.

Oh great, look who’s super excit­ed about Don­ald Trump:

PRI’s The World

The white suprema­cists lin­ing up behind Trump

This sto­ry is a part of
Glob­al Nation

August 21, 2015 · 3:30 PM EDT
By James Edwards

The Dai­ly Stormer, a Neo-Nazi and white nation­al­ist news web­site, is throw­ing its sup­port behind Don­ald Trump.
Cred­it:

[Screen­shot from Dai­ly Stormer web­site]

The dev­il can, indeed, be in the details. And in the case of broth­ers Scott and Steve Leader of Boston, the details are dis­turb­ing.

Mass­a­chu­setts State Police arrest­ed the broth­ers on Wednes­day, alleg­ing they uri­nat­ed on and beat up a home­less man while he was sleep­ing out­side a Boston sub­way sta­tion. The man suf­fered a bro­ken nose and a large bruise across his tor­so. Police believe the Lead­ers tar­get­ed the man because he was His­pan­ic.

Accord­ing to the police report, while in cus­tody, Scott Leader told offi­cers, “Don­ald Trump was right, all these ille­gals need to be deport­ed.”

A state troop­er also wrote that Scott Leader told police since the vic­tim was His­pan­ic and home­less, it was all right to attack him.

Leader Broth­ers Arrest Report

Respond­ing to the attack, Trump, who has ignit­ed a storm of con­tro­ver­sy due to his com­ments on undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants, told the Boston Globe:

“It would be a shame…I will say that peo­ple who are fol­low­ing me are very pas­sion­ate. They love this coun­try and they want this coun­try to be great again. They are pas­sion­ate.”

Trump lat­er soft­ened his tone on Twit­ter, dis­tanc­ing him­self from the attack:

Don­ald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

Boston inci­dent is ter­ri­ble. We need ener­gy and pas­sion, but we must treat each oth­er with respect. I would nev­er con­done vio­lence.
11:35 AM — 21 Aug 2015

But sup­port­ers like the Leader broth­ers aren’t an excep­tion. Some of those “pas­sion­ate” back­ers sup­port­ing Trump also include a num­ber of white suprema­cists.

Craig Cobb, a white suprema­cist who in 2013 failed to start a whites-only com­mu­ni­ty in Lei­th, North Dako­ta, recent­ly made an unsuc­cess­ful attempt to buy prop­er­ty in the North Dako­ta town of Antler, not far from the US-Cana­da bor­der. Accord­ing to Fargo’s WDAY-TV, Cobb want­ed to name the town in hon­or of Trump – either “Trump Cre­ativ­i­ty” or “Cre­ativ­i­ty Trump.” The “Cre­ativ­i­ty” refers to the Cre­ativ­i­ty Move­ment, a racist reli­gion that teach­es the supe­ri­or­i­ty of the white race.

The South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter has tracked a num­ber of oth­er white nation­al­ists who have been throw­ing their sup­port behind The Don­ald. They include:

* Gre­go­ry Hood, a writer who penned an essay in sup­port of Trump for the white nation­al­ist blog Radix. Hood wrote:

Trump is worth sup­port­ing. He is worth sup­port­ing because we need a troll. We need some­one who can expose the sys­tem that rules us as the malev­o­lent and worth­less enti­ty it is. We need some­one who can break open pub­lic debate. We need some­one who can expose and height­en the con­tra­dic­tions with­in the sys­tem. And we need some­one who can call out the press, the politi­cians, and the pseu­do-intel­lec­tu­als as the emp­ty shells they are.

* Brad Grif­fin, founder of the Occi­den­tal Dis­sent, a web­site that describes itself as “Pro-White, Pro-South, Pro-Inde­p­dence.” On Trump, Grif­fin recent­ly wrote:

Don­ald Trump isn’t a con­ser­v­a­tive or a racial­ist by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion, but he is a tor­na­do that can inflict a lot of dam­age upon the two-par­ty sys­tem.

* Jared Tay­lor, con­sid­ered one of the lead­ing intel­lec­tu­al voic­es of the white nation­al­ist move­ment, praised Trump’s com­ments about Mex­i­can immi­grants in a video post­ed on the web­site of his Amer­i­can Renais­sance jour­nal:

Amer­i­cans, real Amer­i­cans have been dream­ing of a can­di­date who says the obvi­ous, that ille­gal immi­grants from Mex­i­co are a low-rent bunch that includes rapists and mur­ders.

* Richard Spencer, pres­i­dent of the Nation­al Pol­i­cy Insti­tute, a white nation­al­ist think tank, called Trump’s crit­i­cism of Sen­a­tor John McCain’s war hero­ism “rev­e­la­to­ry:”

Trump is ‘divi­sive’ in that he forces his oppo­nents and rivals to take sides. In this case, he demon­strat­ed that the oth­er GOP can­di­dates are inter­change­able cow­ards and con­formists. As an added bonus, he asso­ci­at­ed them all with an unpop­u­lar failed pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and immi­gra­tion enthu­si­ast.

The White Geno­cide Project, a group whose mis­sion is to raise aware­ness of the “geno­cide” of the white race, launched a White House peition demand­ing Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma to hon­or Trump for “oppos­ing white geno­cide.” The peti­tion only gath­ered 243 sig­na­tures and was closed for not reach­ing the sig­na­ture require­ments.
The Dai­ly Stormer, a Neo-Nazi news and com­men­tary web­site, endorsed Trump for pres­i­dent, writ­ing:

He is cer­tain­ly going to be a pos­i­tive influ­ence on the Repub­li­can debates, as the mod­ern Fox News Repub­li­can has basi­cal­ly accept­ed the idea that there is no going back from mass immi­gra­tion, and Trump is will­ing to say what most Amer­i­cans think: it’s time to deport these peo­ple. He is also will­ing to call them out as crim­i­nal rapists, mur­der­ers and drug deal­ers.

Mark Potok, a senior fel­low at the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter, says Trump’s words and their poten­tial con­se­quences will get worse before it gets bet­ter.

“We have seen repeat­ed­ly how this kind of lan­guage leads to crim­i­nal vio­lence,” Potok says.

He adds that a fig­ure of author­i­ty like Trump mak­ing such com­ments is akin to “per­mis­sion giv­ing” to sup­port­ers like the Leader broth­ers.

...

Well, that was shock­ing­ly unsur­pris­ing. And as Mark Potok points out, “We have seen repeat­ed­ly how this kind of lan­guage leads to crim­i­nal vio­lence,” which, of course, means there’s prob­a­bly some more shock­ing­ly unsur­pris­ing behav­ior on the way. Per­haps a lot more:

Rolling Stone
Don­ald Trump Just Stopped Being Fun­ny
Win or lose, Trump’s cam­paign threat­ens to unleash the Great Amer­i­can Stu­pid
By Matt Taib­bi August 21, 2015

So two yahoos from Southie in my home­town of Boston severe­ly beat up a His­pan­ic home­less guy ear­li­er this week. While being arrest­ed, one of the broth­ers report­ed­ly told police that “Don­ald Trump was right, all of these ille­gals need to be deport­ed.”

When reporters con­front­ed Trump, he had­n’t yet heard about the inci­dent. At first, he said, “That would be a shame.” But right after, he went on:

“I will say, the peo­ple that are fol­low­ing me are very pas­sion­ate. They love this coun­try. They want this coun­try to be great again. But they are very pas­sion­ate. I will say that.”

This is the moment when Don­ald Trump offi­cial­ly stopped being fun­ny.

The thing is, even as Don­ald Trump said and did hor­ri­ble things dur­ing this year’s incred­i­ble run at the White House, most sane peo­ple took solace in the fact that he could nev­er win. (Although new polls are show­ing that Hillary’s recent spi­ral puts this reas­sur­ing thought into jeop­ardy.)

In fact, most vet­er­an polit­i­cal observers fig­ured that the con­crete impact of Trump’s can­di­da­cy would be lim­it­ed in the worst case to destroy­ing the Repub­li­can Par­ty as a main­stream polit­i­cal force.

That made Trump’s run fun­ny, campy even, like a naughty piece of porno­graph­ic per­for­mance art. After all, what’s more obscene than piss­ing on the pres­i­den­cy? It seemed even more like camp because the whole shtick was front­ed by a vet­er­an real­i­ty TV star who might even be in on the joke, although of course the con­cept was fun­nier if he was­n’t.

Trump had the whole coun­try rub­ber­neck­ing as this pre­pos­ter­ous Spauld­ing Smails car­i­ca­ture of a spoiled rich kid drove the fam­i­ly Rolls (our illus­tri­ous elec­toral process in this metaphor) off the road into a ditch. It was bril­liant the­ater for a while, but the ugli­ness fac­tor has got­ten out of con­trol.

Trump is prob­a­bly too dumb to real­ize it, or maybe he isn’t, but he does­n’t need to win any­thing to become the most dan­ger­ous per­son in Amer­i­ca. He can do plen­ty of dam­age just by encour­ag­ing peo­ple to be as unin­hib­it­ed in their stu­pid­i­ty as he is..=

Trump is strik­ing a chord with peo­ple who are feel­ing the squeeze in a less secure world and want to blame some­one – the gov­ern­ment, immi­grants, polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, “incom­pe­tents,” “dum­mies,” Meg­yn Kel­ly, who­ev­er – for their prob­lems.

Karl Rove and his acolytes mined a lot of the same resent­ments to get Repub­li­cans elect­ed over the years, but the dif­fer­ence is that Trump’s polit­i­cal style encour­ages peo­ple to do more to express their anger than just vote. The key to his suc­cess is a tit­il­lat­ing mes­sage that those musty old rules about being polite and “say­ing the right thing” are for losers who lack the heart, courage and Trumpi­tude to just be who they are.

His sig­na­ture moment in a cam­paign full of them was his exchange in the first debate with Fox’s Kel­ly. She asked him how any­one with a his­to­ry of call­ing women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and dis­gust­ing ani­mals” could win a gen­er­al elec­tion against a female can­di­date like Hillary Clin­ton.

“I’ve been chal­lenged by so many peo­ple,” Trump answered. “I frankly don’t have time for polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness. And to be hon­est with you, the coun­try does­n’t have time either….We don’t win any­more. We lose to Chi­na. We lose to Mexico….We lose to every­body.”

On the sur­face, Kel­ly was just doing her job as a jour­nal­ist, throw­ing Trump’s most out­ra­geous com­ments back at him and demand­ing an expla­na­tion.

But on anoth­er lev­el, she was try­ing to bring Trump to heel. The extrac­tion of the humil­i­at­ing pub­lic apol­o­gy is one of the medi­a’s most pow­er­ful weapons. Some­one becomes famous, we dig up dirt on the per­son, we rub it in his or her nose, and then we demand that the per­son get down on bend­ed knee and beg for­give­ness.

The Clin­tons’ 1992 joint inter­view on 60 Min­utes was a clas­sic exam­ple, as was Antho­ny Wein­er’s pros­tra­tion before Andrew Bre­it­bart and Chris Christie’s 107-minute marathon apolo­gia after Bridge­gate. The sub­text is always the same: If you want pow­er in this coun­try, you must accept the pri­ma­cy of the press. It’s like pay­ing the cov­er at the door of the world’s most exclu­sive club.

Trump would­n’t pay the tab. Not only was he not wrong for say­ing those things, he explained, but hold­ing in thoughts like that is bad for Amer­i­ca. That’s why we don’t win any­more, why we lose to Chi­na and to Mex­i­co (how are we los­ing to Mex­i­co again?). He was say­ing that hid­ing for­bid­den thoughts about women or immi­grants or who­ev­er isn’t just annoy­ing, but bad for Amer­i­ca.

It’s not exact­ly telling peo­ple to get out there and beat peo­ple with met­al rods. But when your response to news that a cou­ple of jack­ass­es just invoked your name when they beat the crap out of a home­less guy is to salute your “pas­sion­ate” fol­low­ers who “love this coun­try,” you’ve gone next-lev­el.

The polit­i­cal right in Amer­i­ca has been flirt­ing with dan­ger­ous ideas for a while now, par­tic­u­lar­ly on issues involv­ing immi­grants and minori­ties. But in the last few years the rhetoric has got­ten par­tic­u­lar­ly crazy.

...

Why there’s sud­den­ly this surge of hatred for immi­grants is sort of a mys­tery. Why Don­ald Trump, who’s prob­a­bly nev­er even inter­act­ed with an undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grant in a non-com­mer­cial capac­i­ty, in par­tic­u­lar should care so much about this issue is even more obscure. (Did he trip over an immi­grant on his way to the Cincin­nati hous­ing devel­op­ment his father gave him as a young man?)

Most like­ly, immi­grants are just col­lat­er­al dam­age in Trump’s per­for­mance art rou­tine, which is an absurd rit­u­al­is­tic cel­e­bra­tion of the coiffed hot­shot end­less­ly tri­umph­ing over dirty losers and weak­lings.

Trump isn’t real­ly a politi­cian, of course. He’s a strong­man act, a ridicu­lous par­o­dy of a Niet­zschean super­man. His fol­low­ers get off on watch­ing this guy with (alleged­ly) $10 bil­lion and a busty mute broad on his arm defy every polit­i­cal and social con­ven­tion and get away with it.

Peo­ple are tired of rules and tired of hav­ing to pay lip ser­vice to deco­rum. They want to stop hav­ing to watch what they say and think and just get “crazy,” as Thomas Fried­man would put it.

Trump’s cam­paign is giv­ing peo­ple per­mis­sion to do just that. It’s hard to say this word in con­junc­tion with such a sex­u­al­ly unap­peal­ing per­son, but his mes­sage is a pow­er­ful aphro­disi­ac. Fu ck every­thing, fu ck every­one. Fu ck immi­grants and fu ck their filthy lice-rid­den kids. And fu ck you if you don’t like me say­ing so.

Those of us who think polls and pri­maries and debates are any match for that are pret­ty naive. Amer­i­ca has been trend­ing stu­pid for a long time. Now the stu­pid wants out of its cage, and Trump is urg­ing it on. There are a lot of ways this can go wrong, no mat­ter who wins in 2016.

“I will say, the peo­ple that are fol­low­ing me are very pas­sion­ate. They love this coun­try. They want this coun­try to be great again. But they are very pas­sion­ate. I will say that.”

With the Don­ald Trump phe­nom­e­na show­ing now signs of abat­ing, it might be tempt­ing to assume that ille­gal immi­gra­tion is basi­cal­ly guar­an­teed to be a top tier elec­toral issue in the 2016 elec­tions. And that’s like­ly the case if Don­ald Trump does indeed end up being the GOP nom­i­nee since he’s made build­ing “The Trump Wall” along the US/Mexican bor­der and mass depor­ta­tions a top theme of his cam­paign.

But it’s worth not­ing that, accord­ing to a poll con­duct­ed last month, immi­gra­tion was­n’t even remote­ly the top issue for GOP pri­ma­ry vot­ers, let alone Amer­i­cans in gen­er­al. Instead, based on the pol­l’s results, it’s pret­ty clear that the GOP’s expect­ed 2016 cam­paign of fear is going to have to rely on more than just fear of undoc­u­ment­ed Mex­i­can immi­grants. Undoc­u­ment­ed Mex­i­can immi­grants that hap­pen to be mem­bers of ISIS and infect­ed with Ebo­la are prob­a­bly what we should expect. Not that we should actu­al­ly expect­ed Ebo­la-infect­ed Mex­i­can ISIS mem­bers to actu­al­ly cross the bor­der, but we should still prob­a­bly expect fre­quent dire warn­ings that they could:

Moth­er jones
Sor­ry Don­ald, Most Repub­li­cans Don’t Actu­al­ly Care That Much About Ille­gal Immi­gra­tion

—By Kevin Drum
| Mon Jul. 27, 2015 5:32 PM EDT

Greg Sar­gent has an item today not­ing that by a 63–34 per­cent mar­gin in a new CNN poll, Repub­li­cans believe the main focus of immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy should be stop­ping the flow of ille­gal immi­gra­tion and deport­ing the ille­gal immi­grants who are already here. No big sur­prise there. But when I clicked over to the poll itself I found a cou­ple of things relat­ed to immi­gra­tion that were kind of inter­est­ing.

First, CNN asked “Just your best guess, do you think the num­ber of immi­grants com­ing to the Unit­ed States ille­gal­ly has increased or decreased in the last few years?” Among Repub­li­cans, 83 per­cent thought it had increased. Grant­ed, ask­ing about the “last few years” is a lit­tle ambigu­ous, but if you assume at a min­i­mum that it means less than a decade, then 83 per­cent of Repub­li­cans are woe­ful­ly mis­in­formed. As you can see from the Pew data on the right, the ille­gal immi­grant pop­u­la­tion dropped con­sid­er­ably in 2008 and 2009 and has been basi­cal­ly flat ever since.

(By the way, among Democ­rats 61 per­cent think immi­gra­tion has increased. That’s a lit­tle bet­ter, but still not exact­ly a proud moment in vot­er aware­ness. It isn’t just Fox News that’s keep­ing us all mis­in­formed.)

The sec­ond inter­est­ing ques­tion was one that asked about which issues were most impor­tant. This kind of thing always has to be tak­en with a grain of salt, but even so it’s a lit­tle sur­pris­ing how lit­tle Repub­li­cans actu­al­ly care about immi­gra­tion. For all the atten­tion it’s got­ten from Don­ald Trump, only 9 per­cent said it was their most impor­tant issue, the low­est show­ing of any of the issues CNN asked about. The econ­o­my and terrorism/foreign pol­i­cy were far and away the biggest wor­ries among Repub­li­cans. Also sur­pris­ing­ly, health care did­n’t reg­is­ter very high either. The tea par­ty may be yelling end­less­ly about the need to repeal the worst law since the Fugi­tive Slave Act, but among all Repub­li­cans, only a few rate it as a crit­i­cal issue.

So....immigration and Oba­macare prob­a­bly aren’t going to be gigan­tic issues this year among Republicans—or in the gen­er­al elec­tion. As usu­al, the econ­o­my will be #1, and #2 will prob­a­bly be ter­ror­ism and for­eign pol­i­cy in gen­er­al.

“For all the atten­tion it’s got­ten from Don­ald Trump, only 9 per­cent said it was their most impor­tant issue, the low­est show­ing of any of the issues CNN asked about. The econ­o­my and terrorism/foreign pol­i­cy were far and away the biggest wor­ries among Repub­li­cans”
Ebo­la ISIS anchor babies here we come! Again! Even if the immi­grants them­selves aren’t actu­al­ly com­ing any­more.

And while undoc­u­ment­ed immi­gra­tion has basi­cal­ly been flat for years, it is worth not­ing that there real­ly is a rather mas­sive, and grow­ing, risk out there that tru­ly could cause a mas­sive surge in immi­gra­tion into places like the US not just from Mex­i­co but basi­cal­ly any­where. It’s not an imme­di­ate risk, but in anoth­er few decades or so it real­ly could be. And thanks to our cur­rent poli­cies, it’s less of a “risk” and more of an “inevitabil­i­ty”.

But it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly unavoid­able, with much depend­ing on the deci­sions we make today and in the com­ing years. So it’s a top­ic that could be quite a potent polit­i­cal cud­gel for any politi­cian schem­ing to turn bor­der secu­ri­ty into polit­i­cal gold. Will Don­ald Trump or any of his fel­low GOP­ers embrace this risk as a nation­al chal­lenge worth fac­ing and over­com­ing in order to ward off future floods of des­per­ate impov­er­ished immi­grants with noth­ing to lose? Hmmm...:

Los Ange­les Times
Cli­mate change linked to pos­si­ble mass Mex­i­can migra­tion to U.S.
Low­er crop yields and agri­cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion could dri­ve as many as 6.7 mil­lion across the bor­der by 2080, a study finds.

July 26, 2010|By Anna Gor­man,

Climb­ing tem­per­a­tures are expect­ed to raise sea lev­els and increase droughts, floods, heat waves and wild­fires.

Now, sci­en­tists are pre­dict­ing anoth­er con­se­quence of cli­mate change: mass migra­tion to the Unit­ed States.

Between 1.4 mil­lion and 6.7 mil­lion Mex­i­cans could migrate to the U.S. by 2080 as cli­mate change reduces crop yields and agri­cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion in Mex­i­co, accord­ing to a study pub­lished online this week in the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences. The num­ber could amount to 10% of the cur­rent pop­u­la­tion of Mex­i­cans ages 15 to 65.

“Assum­ing that the cli­mate pro­jec­tions are cor­rect, grad­u­al­ly over the next sev­er­al decades head­ing toward the end of the cen­tu­ry, it becomes one of the more impor­tant fac­tors in dri­ving Mex­i­cans across the bor­der, all oth­er things being equal,” said study author Michael Oppen­heimer, pro­fes­sor of geo­sciences and inter­na­tion­al affairs at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.

Of course, Oppen­heimer acknowl­edged, all things will not remain equal. Changes could occur in U.S. immi­gra­tion and bor­der pol­i­cy or in Mex­i­co’s econ­o­my and its reliance on agri­cul­ture. But he said this was a sim­pli­fied first step in study­ing the effect of glob­al warm­ing on migra­tion.

“Our pri­ma­ry objec­tives were, No. 1, to give pol­i­cy­mak­ers some­thing to think about and, No. 2, to give researchers a spur to start answer­ing some of the more com­pli­cat­ed ques­tions,” Oppen­heimer said.

Oppen­heimer teamed up with two econ­o­mists, Alan B. Krueger and Shuaizhang Feng, to study the con­nec­tion between agri­cul­tur­al decline and migra­tion. They looked at Mex­i­can emi­gra­tion, crop yield and cli­mate data from 1995 to 2005 to make esti­mates about the next 70 years.

In the past, Oppen­heimer said, Mex­i­can farm­ers from rur­al areas fled to the Unit­ed States when they could no longer grow their crops. If the ris­ing tem­per­a­tures dry out the land and reduce yield as expect­ed, many more farm­ers could do the same.

Philip Mar­tin, an expert in agri­cul­tur­al eco­nom­ics at UC Davis, said that he had­n’t read the study but that mak­ing esti­mates based sole­ly on cli­mate change was vir­tu­al­ly impos­si­ble.

“It is just awful­ly hard to sep­a­rate cli­mate change from the many, many oth­er fac­tors that affect peo­ple’s deci­sions whether to stay in agri­cul­ture or move,” he said.

...

Accord­ing to the study, oth­er coun­tries and regions depen­dent on agri­cul­ture could also see a sim­i­lar exo­dus. Among the areas men­tioned are much of Africa, India, Bangladesh and Latin Amer­i­ca.

But Massey expressed skep­ti­cism about gen­er­al­iz­ing to oth­er coun­tries, because Mex­i­co and the U.S. have a 60-year migrant his­to­ry and share a 2,000-mile bor­der. Mex­i­co is also well con­nect­ed to the U.S. labor demand through social net­works.

“When eco­nom­ic shocks like cli­mate change hit oth­er devel­op­ing coun­tries … dis­place­ments from the coun­try­side may hap­pen, but they are not like­ly to pro­duce so many inter­na­tion­al migrants,” Massey said.

So at least based on that 2010 study, if Mex­i­co is fried to a crisp peo­ple might seek life else­where. Seems rea­son­able. Although, as the many skep­ti­cal com­ments from oth­er researchers sug­gest­ed, extrap­o­lat­ing mass migra­tion move­ments 70 years from now based on cli­mate pro­jec­tions isn’t exact­ly easy to do. After all, it’s just one study. But, of course, it was­n’t the only study to find a link between cli­mate change and mass migra­tions and some of those oth­er stud­ies aren’t sim­ply pro­ject­ing cli­mate change-induced mass human migra­tion near the end of the 21st cen­tu­ry. Accord­ing to a report pub­lished last year in Nature Cli­mate Change, in some parts of the world it’s already hap­pen­ing:

Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine
Cli­mate Change Is Already Caus­ing Mass Human Migra­tion
When tem­per­a­tures are high, Pak­istani men are 11 times more like­ly to move out of town

By Col­in Schultz
smithsonian.com
Jan­u­ary 29, 2014

There are a lot of rea­sons peo­ple move: for work, for love, for the draw of the big city or the qui­et of nature. But as the world con­tin­ues to warm, it’s expect­ed that glob­al cli­mate change will become anoth­er fac­tor dri­ving peo­ple to move: to dodge coastal ero­sion and sea lev­el rise, to fol­low changes in rain­fall, to avoid strength­en­ing storms. Cli­mate change is already induc­ing marine ani­mals to migrate, and accord­ing to a new study pub­lished in the jour­nal Nature Cli­mate Change, it’s start­ing to make peo­ple move, too.

For the past 21 years, researchers have been study­ing the migra­tion pat­terns of peo­ple in Pak­istan. (Sim­i­lar stud­ies are done in Amer­i­ca—that’s how we know that most emi­grants from New York are going to Flori­da.) Migra­tion data in hand, the sci­en­tists, led by the Inter­na­tion­al Food Pol­i­cy Research Insti­tute’s Valerie Mueller, mea­sured the rela­tion­ship between Pak­ista­nis’ move­ments and changes in a hand­ful of envi­ron­men­tal vari­ables, from the quan­ti­ty and tim­ing of rain­fall, to tem­per­a­ture, the strength of the annu­al mon­soon and the occur­rence of floods.

“This approach reveals a com­plex migra­to­ry response that is not ful­ly con­sis­tent with com­mon nar­ra­tives of cli­mate-induced migra­tion,” the sci­en­tists wrote in their report.

Tra­di­tion­al­ly, sci­en­tists have assumed that it is big, cat­a­stroph­ic nat­ur­al dis­as­ters that dri­ve peo­ple to pack up and leave. But as with those who hun­ker down in Tor­na­do Alley, the researchers found that even though Pak­istan is prone to extreme floods, like the dev­as­tat­ing 2010 floods that affect­ed 20 mil­lion peo­ple and forced 14 mil­lion to move tem­porar­i­ly, flood­ing in gen­er­al has lit­tle effect on where peo­ple chose to live long-term.

Instead, they found, high tem­per­a­tures, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing the spring and win­ter farm­ing sea­son, were the dom­i­nant dri­ver of mass migra­tion. It’s not that it sud­den­ly became too hot for peo­ple to live. But as tem­per­a­ture and weath­er pat­terns change, pre­vi­ous­ly pro­duc­tive ground may become uneco­nom­i­cal to work. High heat wipes out the farm­ing econ­o­my, the researchers sug­gest, caus­ing Pak­istani men to pack up and leave for green­er pas­tures.

“Thus, we are left with an over­all pic­ture that heat stress—not high rain­fall, flood­ing, or moisture—is most strong­ly asso­ci­at­ed with migra­tion. The risk of a male, non-migrant mov­ing out of the vil­lage is 11 times more like­ly when exposed to tem­per­a­ture val­ues in the fourth quar­tile,” they wrote.

...

Yes, it appears that humans, known for our prover­bial ‘frog in boil­ing pot of water’ abil­i­ty to adjust to steadi­ly wors­en­ing con­di­tions, real­ly will jump out of the pot if it gets too hot:

Tra­di­tion­al­ly, sci­en­tists have assumed that it is big, cat­a­stroph­ic nat­ur­al dis­as­ters that dri­ve peo­ple to pack up and leave....

Instead, they found, high tem­per­a­tures, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing the spring and win­ter farm­ing sea­son, were the dom­i­nant dri­ver of mass migra­tion. It’s not that it sud­den­ly became too hot for peo­ple to live. But as tem­per­a­ture and weath­er pat­terns change, pre­vi­ous­ly pro­duc­tive ground may become uneco­nom­i­cal to work. High heat wipes out the farm­ing econ­o­my, the researchers sug­gest, caus­ing Pak­istani men to pack up and leave for green­er pas­tures.

And while none of this should be sur­pris­ing, you pret­ty much nev­er hear politi­cians any­where sug­gest­ing that we’re prob­a­bly head­ing into an era where mass migra­tions involv­ing total­ly des­per­ate cli­mate refugees are just going to be part of the New Nor­mal. A bro­ken cli­mate isn’t exact­ly the type of thing that ‘regime change’ can fix (we should prob­a­bly add that to the list).

So with all that in mind, per­haps it might be worth let­ting Mr. Trump know that there’s anoth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty for him to do his now-sig­na­ture blend­ing of far-right and “Old school” pol­i­cy-pre­scrip­tions in man­ner that would very much be in keep­ing with his “I’m real­ly going to stick it to the Mex­i­cans, and I’m not like all those oth­er politicians”-campaign theme. After all, if Trump can lead nation­al GOP polls the way he does despite call­ing for high­er tax­es on the rich and uni­ver­sal health­care sim­ply by cater­ing to the GOP base’s intense xeno­pho­bia, who knows what else he can do.

So here’s what Trump needs to do: If he’s going to ded­i­cate his cam­paign to build­ing a wall with Mex­i­co, ok, it’s still a crazy, hor­ri­ble plan, but let’s make it a use­ful crazy plan so maybe it’s a lit­tle less hor­ri­ble and might actu­al­ly help Mex­i­co. And every­one else. Let’s Build the Trump Wall...out of the CO2 in the atmos­phere that’s going to be caus­ing all those mass migra­tions:

MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review
Researcher Demon­strates How to Suck Car­bon from the Air, Make Stuff from It

A nov­el elec­tro­chem­i­cal process sequesters car­bon in the form of a ver­sa­tile build­ing mate­r­i­al.

By Mike Orcutt on August 19, 2015

A new method for tak­ing car­bon diox­ide direct­ly from the air and con­vert­ing it to oxy­gen and nanoscale fibers made of car­bon could lead to an inex­pen­sive way to make a valu­able build­ing material—and may even serve as a weapon against cli­mate change.

Car­bon fibers are increas­ing­ly being used as a struc­tur­al mate­r­i­al by indus­tries like aero­space and auto­mo­tive, which val­ue its strength and light weight. The use­ful attrib­ut­es of car­bon fibers, which also include elec­tri­cal con­duc­tiv­i­ty, are enhanced at the nanoscale, says Stu­art Licht, a pro­fes­sor of chem­istry at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty. The prob­lem is that it’s very expen­sive to make car­bon fibers, much less nanofibers. Licht says his group’s new­ly demon­strat­ed tech­nol­o­gy, which both cap­tures the car­bon diox­ide from the air and employs an elec­tro­chem­i­cal process to con­vert it to car­bon nanofibers and oxy­gen, is more effi­cient and poten­tial­ly a lot cheap­er than exist­ing meth­ods.

But it’s more than just a sim­pler, less expen­sive way of mak­ing a high val­ue prod­uct. It’s also a “means of stor­ing and seques­ter­ing car­bon diox­ide in a use­ful man­ner, a sta­ble man­ner, and in a com­pact man­ner,” says Licht. He points out that if the process is pow­ered by renew­able ener­gy, the result is a net removal of car­bon diox­ide from the atmos­phere. In a recent demon­stra­tion, his group used a unique con­cen­trat­ed solar pow­er sys­tem, which makes use of infrared sun­light as well as vis­i­ble light to gen­er­ate the large amount of heat need­ed to run the desired reac­tion.

...

The researchers demon­strat­ed the abil­i­ty to make a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent nanofiber shapes and diam­e­ters by adjust­ing spe­cif­ic growth con­di­tions, such as the amount of cur­rent applied at spe­cif­ic points of time, and the com­po­si­tion of the var­i­ous ingre­di­ents used in the process. They also showed they could make very uni­form fibers. Licht says the mech­a­nisms under­ly­ing the for­ma­tion of the fibers still need to be bet­ter under­stood, and says he’s con­fi­dent the group can keep devel­op­ing a greater degree of con­trol over the nature of the fibers it makes.

As for the technology’s emis­sions-cut­ting poten­tial, the researchers are opti­mistic. They cal­cu­late that giv­en an area less than 10 per­cent of the size of the Sahara Desert, the method could remove enough car­bon diox­ide to make glob­al atmos­pher­ic lev­els return to prein­dus­tri­al lev­els with­in 10 years, even if we keep emit­ting the green­house gas at a high rate dur­ing that peri­od.

Of course this would require a huge increase in demand for car­bon nanofibers. Licht believes the material’s prop­er­ties, espe­cial­ly the fact that it is so light­weight and also very strong, will spur greater and greater use as the cost comes down, and he thinks his new process can help with that. Imag­ine that car­bon fiber com­pos­ites even­tu­al­ly replace steel, alu­minum, and even con­crete as a build­ing mate­r­i­al, he says. “At that point, there could be suf­fi­cient use of this that it’s actu­al­ly act­ing as a sig­nif­i­cant repos­i­to­ry of car­bon.”

“As for the technology’s emis­sions-cut­ting poten­tial, the researchers are opti­mistic. They cal­cu­late that giv­en an area less than 10 per­cent of the size of the Sahara Desert, the method could remove enough car­bon diox­ide to make glob­al atmos­pher­ic lev­els return to prein­dus­tri­al lev­els with­in 10 years, even if we keep emit­ting the green­house gas at a high rate dur­ing that peri­od.”
Ok, so that was pret­ty damn awe­some. At least, it might be awe­some if the tech­nol­o­gy actu­al­ly ends up work­ing as promised. And if it this done pan out, the whole damn plan­et could be in store for a new field of man­u­fac­tur­ing where, instead of dig­ging up the ground for min­ing mate­ri­als, we just suck it out of the atmos­phere.

Now here’s the kick­er: Who bet­ter to lead this rev­o­lu­tion than Don­ald Trump? Ok, lots of peo­ple are actu­al­ly more qual­i­fied, but with­in the con­tem­po­rary GOP and US polit­i­cal cli­mate, is ANYONE more qual­i­fied than Don­ald Trump to lead the nation into embrace CO2-suck­ing tech­nol­o­gy? Sure, he would have to admit that man-made cli­mate change and ele­vat­ed atmos­pher­ic CO2 lev­els are a real issue, which could be prob­lem for some­one in the midst of a GOP pri­ma­ry, but is ANYONE less vul­ner­a­ble than Trump to the blow­back the comes with break­ing GOP taboos? He’s pret­ty much been doing that with impuni­ty and it has­n’t hurt him so far.

Who knows, while we should all real­ly be hop­ing that some­thing as sense­less as “The Great Trump Wall” does­n’t actu­al­ly hap­pen, if Don­ald Trump actu­al­ly made the car­bon nanofiber CO2-suck­ing tech­nol­o­gy part of his cam­paign plat­form and got the GOP base on board with actu­al­ly embrac­ing green-tech­nol­o­gy as part of the econ­o­my of tomor­row, he might actu­al­ly end up doing Mex­i­co, and the whole world, a bit of a favor.

Grant­ed, it might not be pos­si­ble to get Trump to acknowl­edge the real­i­ties of cli­mate change, but what if he could repack­age it as part of his War on Mex­i­co cam­paign? Would that work? These are the guys of bizarre ques­tions we get to ask now that a real­i­ty TV star/billionaire has cap­ture the hearts and minds of the GOP base and almost imme­di­ate­ly starts defy­ing the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom of what is polit­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble.
When some­thing like the Trump phe­nom­e­na hap­pens, some sort of GOP realign­ment and rebrand­ing isn’t entire­ly out of the ques­tion. Could a Trump help the GOP rebrand itself as a par­ty of green future-tech and sci­ence? Prob­a­bly not, but it’s pos­si­ble. We’ll see.