How hateful rhetoric connects to real-world violence |
- Biden’s misstep in India
- Inequalities in housing hardship declined because everybody is now worse off
- Do transition readiness assessment tools inform donor transitions in health care?
- Do immigrants harm native students academically?
| Posted: 30 Apr 2021 01:01 PM PDT By Thomas Wright The Biden administration's announcement on Monday that it would soon export tens of millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine completed a dramatic policy U-turn. It came after a tumultuous week in which the administration's carefully constructed pandemic-diplomacy plan fell apart as the COVID-19 crisis in India worsened. The Biden administration needs to learn from this misstep and demonstrate a more agile approach in managing the pandemic globally and in navigating the domestic politics of foreign policy. President Joe Biden's foreign-policy team supports India and is unambiguously internationalist in its instincts, especially on matters of public health. It was horrified by the Trump administration's failure to lead a global response in the early stages of the pandemic. However, key elements of Biden's domestic-policy team, including his political advisers and the coronavirus task force, favored achieving herd immunity in the United States before sending vaccines or related materials overseas. It wanted to demonstrate to the American people that they were laser-focused on fighting the pandemic at home. The administration settled on a policy to reconcile these different impulses. It would keep Donald Trump's executive orders preventing exports of vaccines and related raw materials, but once the domestic vaccination program was largely complete, it would pivot to play a global leadership role in the pandemic. All going according to plan, this moment would come before the G7 summit in the United Kingdom on June 11, which would allow the president to act boldly with other world leaders. The U.S.'s initial protectionism would likely then be quickly forgotten. In early April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken appointed Gayle Smith, a highly respected former administrator of USAID, to head up the administration's vaccine-diplomacy efforts. Biden also announced the Quad Vaccine Partnership, which promised to finance, manufacture, and deliver 1 billion vaccines for the Indo-Pacific region by the end of 2022. The production would be centered in India. In the meantime, when asked by the press about its export restrictions, administration spokespeople would point out that when Biden took office, the United States had the highest cases of infection and deaths on the planet, so the rest of the world had a stake in the success of its vaccination program. For a while, this two-step plan looked like it would work. Multiple officials from U.S. allies and multilateral organizations, speaking on condition of anonymity so as to discuss the issue freely, told me that they understood the domestic political constraints Biden was operating under, and they all desperately wanted him to succeed. They would make some remarks calling for less protectionism, but they did not press too much. Biden's plan was reasonable and might have worked had the world escaped a massive surge of COVID-19 this spring. The problem is that the world is not a static place—the coronavirus gets a vote. By mid-April, India's coronavirus cases were rising exponentially, fueled by reportedly double- and even triple-mutation strains and a number of political and religious super-spreader events. This tragedy totally changed the context of the president's plan. On April 16, Adar Poonawalla, the CEO of the Serum Institute of India, the world's largest vaccine manufacturer, tweeted at Biden: “Respected @POTUS, if we are to truly unite in beating this virus, on behalf of the vaccine industry outside the U.S., I humbly request you to lift the embargo of raw material exports out of the U.S. so that vaccine production can ramp up. Your administration has the details.” The situation was not quite as Poonawalla described it. The raw materials he was requesting were largely for the Novavax vaccine, which will not be distributed until September, but the tweet had a major impact on the public discourse. In the week that followed, India's COVID-19 crisis reached epic proportions. The number of daily cases exceeded 300,000, surpassing the previous record set in the United States, and hospitals reported shortages of oxygen as they tried to care for the growing number of patients. Many governments offered to help, including India's geopolitical adversaries China and Pakistan. The Biden administration, which was in constant contact with Indian officials, was strangely silent in public. Last Wednesday, the press asked Ned Price, the spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, about U.S. export restrictions. The administration, he said, has "a special responsibility to the American people," who have "been hit harder than any other country around the world … It is not only in our interest to see Americans vaccinated; it's in the interests of the rest of the world to see Americans vaccinated." Price said only what the administration had been saying for months, but his comments landed very differently at a time when America's COVID-19 problem was rapidly improving and India's was careening out of control. The remarks sparked a firestorm of criticism in the Indian press, on social media, and on messaging apps. India's leadership understood the political constraints on the Biden administration and did not criticize the United States. But as India's health situation deteriorated, its political leaders lost hold of the narrative. The public understandably had little patience with the political limitations of another government, especially one that seemed well positioned to help. An Indian official would later tell The Wall Street Journal, "What took us by surprise was the slow response by the U.S. It created some misgivings in the public opinion, and that sometimes creates complications." That frustration was compounded by the fact that much of India's elite had little sympathy for Biden to begin with. This past summer, the Center for Strategic and International Studies conducted a survey of thought leaders from 16 U.S. allies in Europe and Asia. India and Vietnam were the only countries that thought Trump would do a better job than Biden on China. Indians also remember that Trump sent ventilators to India as part of a deal in which President Narendra Modi lifted restrictions on exports of hydroxychloroquine to the United States. The Biden administration had put cooperation with India at the heart of its foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific, but by the weekend, U.S.-India relations were facing a crisis. Chinese embassies tweeted details of their assistance to India, including its delivery of oxygen concentrators. Chinese state media ran stories blaming the United States for India's predicament and gloating about how American inaction would affect Indian public opinion. Beijing clearly hoped to drive a wedge between India and the United States, perhaps fatally undermining Biden's Asia policy. Biden's foreign-policy team grew more and more concerned that Indians could rally around the notion that America was absent in their hour of need and reinforce perceptions that the United States is not a reliable partner. Late last week, that team won the argument inside the administration. Late on Saturday night, the U.S. conducted a full-court press. Blinken tweeted a message of solidarity with the Indian people "in the midst of the horrific COVID-19 outbreak" and promised additional support in the fight against the virus. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan followed up on Sunday with a phone call to his Indian counterpart and then announced a number of concrete steps to help the country, including sending raw materials for vaccines. On Sunday, Biden weighed in on the unfolding crisis, adroitly noting that India had helped the United States in its own hour of need, as did Vice President Kamala Harris, USAID Administrator Samantha Power, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The mistake the administration made was not the original compromise to prioritize the domestic vaccine program, but the failure to adapt the plan ahead of schedule in light of changing circumstances. The White House now appears to fully understand this, albeit belatedly, and this realization explains why we are likely to see deep engagement with the Indian crisis in the coming days and weeks. Its delay is unlikely to be forgotten, but it may be forgiven. An editorial in the Hindustan Times reflected:
The Biden administration will face many more dilemmas concerning its COVID-19 diplomacy. One of the most difficult was whether to export excess doses of vaccines. The United States has more than 100 million unused doses, a number that is likely to grow. The decision on AstraZeneca will buy some time, but the administration still needs to decide how to distribute them—should they go to wealthy allies who were left short by AstraZeneca or to COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX), the partnership for vaccine distribution, which would likely send them to the developing world? The administration is also under pressure from Democratic senators, progressives, NGOs, and an alliance of 175 former world leaders and Nobel laureates to waive intellectual-property protections to allow other countries to produce vaccines themselves. The pharmaceutical industry insists that such a waiver would prove counterproductive and could unintentionally damage global production efforts. The relative silence of the Biden administration in explaining any trade-offs and offering a framework for a speedy compromise is creating a vacuum that is quickly being filled by its critics. More broadly, this misstep on India also shows how haunted the Biden team is by Trump and his nationalistic rhetoric. This episode and Biden's recent attempt to maintain Trump's cap on refugee numbers (a decision that was quickly reversed following an outcry among Democrats) suggest that the administration is worried that Trump will use any international assistance against them as a political weapon to bash Democratic globalists. It is not wrong to be concerned. Even after a failed insurrection, Trump seems unassailable in the Republican Party. The 2024 nomination appears to be his for the taking if he wants it. But the Biden team will need a way of denying Trump a political advantage in 2024, while remaining true to its values and without committing a major foreign-policy mistake. One way to do that is to try to enlist top Republicans in backing controversial actions. That sounds implausible, but Republicans are closely aligned with India geopolitically. One wonders if Biden could have gotten top cover from GOP senators or from Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. On the refugee decision, the administration could have allocated part of a significant increase for residents of Hong Kong or those who may suffer after the United States withdraws from Afghanistan. The administration should not wait until the G7 summit to take on an international leadership role. Italy is the chair of the G20. Biden should ask Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi to convene an emergency virtual summit of the G20 to address the global COVID-19 crisis. The G20's strength is that it includes non-Western countries, but its weakness is that it is full of geopolitical rivalries. Biden will find the G7 more amenable to bold action on the pandemic and much else throughout his term, but a G20 summit would be an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with the developing world in particular. During a pandemic, time works differently. In 2020, battles against the virus were won or, more often, lost over weeks or even days. Those who acted quickest fared the best. The U.S. knows this all too well, given the catastrophic consequences of time lost at the beginning of the pandemic. This is why the delay matters and may not be forgotten. The Biden administration now seems committed to doing everything possible to help India, but new emergencies surely lie ahead. The U.S. must be ready to act rapidly and confidently next time around.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Inequalities in housing hardship declined because everybody is now worse off Posted: 30 Apr 2021 11:44 AM PDT By Yung Chun, Michal Grinstein-Weiss Through the course of the pandemic, we have investigated the disproportionate pandemic impacts on U.S. families. In June, we reported that Black and Hispanic Americans faced higher rates of housing hardship than white Americans, and we emphasized the importance of identifying a long-term rather than a “Band-Aid” solution. In November, we found that housing inequality had gotten worse as the COVID-19 pandemic stretched onward. Now, almost a year after the pandemic’s onset, with COVID-19 vaccines distributed, we explore how housing inequality has changed over the course of the pandemic. Over the recent months, we find that the disproportionate experiences of housing hardship have lessened, but only because everyone became worse off. We also observe that Black families have become “long-haulers” when it comes to their experience of housing hardship. Both housing-related hardship experiences and related inequality have been alleviatedWe first explore how housing-related hardship experiences have changed through the pandemic with respect to eviction/foreclosure (Figure 1), rent/mortgage payment delay (Figure 2), and utility bill payment delay (Figure 3). As previously reported, housing inequality worsened during the first six months after the pandemic. As of June 2020, 9 percent of Black and 7 percent of Hispanic respondents had experienced eviction/foreclosure, which was significantly higher than white respondents (5 percent) even after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic attributes. Likewise, in the same period, minority respondents were significantly more likely to experience rent/mortgage and utility payment delays compared to white respondents—rent/mortgage: 15 percent (Black), 13 percent (Hispanic), and 9 percent (white); Utility: 21 percent (Black), 20 percent (Hispanic), and 14 percent (white). Housing inequality has since declined after its peak in August. This trend is, however, not because minority groups’ housing situations have become significantly more stable. Instead, white respondents are increasingly experiencing housing instability. For instance, between August and November, the eviction/foreclosure risks for Black and Hispanic respondents decreased by less than 10 percent (from an eviction rate of 8.8 percent to 7.9 percent for Black respondents and from 7.4 percent to 7.5 percent for Hispanic respondents). In the same period, however, white respondents’ eviction/foreclosure risk increased by 23 percent (from an eviction rate of 5.3 percent to 6.6 percent). Similarly, in November, we observe reduced inequality gaps in delayed payment of rent/mortgage and utility bills mainly due to the delayed peak of white respondents. The outlooks are becoming positive however, as we observe that both housing instability levels and inequality have decreased in March and April of 2021 compared to the previous survey in November 2020.
Black families have been more likely to be housing hardship long-haulersIn addition to the housing instability, we also explore the incidence of housing hardships and how households have experienced differences in prolonged hardship by race and ethnicity. Similarly to the way the physical symptoms of COVID-19 can stay with the body and lead some individuals to become COVID-19 “long-haulers,” housing hardship has stayed with some households from one survey wave to the next. We looked specifically at families who experienced housing hardships (i.e., eviction/foreclosure, delayed rent/mortgage payments, and delayed utility bill payments) during the previous survey (three months prior to the present survey) and estimated how many of them still experienced these hardships three months later. For robust estimations, we controlled for both demographic and socioeconomic attributes. Figure 4 reports how the incidence of living as a housing hardship long-hauler changed over the course of the pandemic. Of all respondents, 61 percent experienced housing hardship long-hauling at some time during the pandemic. This means that at two consecutive survey dates (each three months apart from each other) they reported experiencing housing hardship within the prior three months. In November, the proportion of long-haulers peaked with over two-thirds of respondents reporting that they had experienced housing hardship through at least two survey periods. Figure 5 deconstructs the proportion of housing hardship long-haulers by race/ethnic groups. Throughout the pandemic, Black respondents (69 percent) have more commonly endured housing hardship long-hauling than white and Hispanic respondents (58 percent and 62 percent respectively). This discrepancy was particularly pronounced at the beginning of the pandemic. In August, Black respondents were 1.5 times more likely than white respondents to keep experiencing housing hardships for two consecutive survey periods, this gap being statistically significant at p<.01 even after keeping other socioeconomic factors constant. However, similarly to the previous analysis, this disparity lessened in November due to more white respondents becoming housing hardship long-haulers.
ConclusionThrough a year of surveys, we’ve learned that minority groups, especially Black families, have been much vulnerable to the pandemic's shocks. However, we also observe that hardships on minority families have been soon transmitted to everyone, including white households. Similarly, while a greater proportion of Black households are housing hardship long-haulers, more Hispanic and white households have joined that group in experiencing the long-term impacts of COVID-19 on their financial and residential stability. Lingering housing hardship demonstrates the continued need for relief for both renters and homeowners with mortgages. The shrinking inequities between households of different races coupled with the slow crawl toward recovery shows that widespread financial relief is still needed across the country. Economic impact payments would be of little help, particularly for housing hardships long haulers who are already a couple of months behind in housing/utility bill payments. Rather, as our previous blog claimed, more proactive and sustainable remedies, such as a universal housing voucher, are needed. Some people may argue that such proactive remedies are too expensive. For instance, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2015 that it would cost an additional $29 billion if the housing voucher were to cover those earning 30 percent of area median income (AMI) or less. Yet, infection and eviction are interlinked. Even though the expenditure seems huge, the cost of infections far outweighs the cost of supporting housing. Throughout the pandemic, social distancing has been key to minimizing COVID-19's impacts by reducing the frequency and duration of contact individuals have with one another. The most powerful and effective way to keep social distancing is, obviously, to have people stay home.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Do transition readiness assessment tools inform donor transitions in health care? Posted: 30 Apr 2021 05:37 AM PDT By Wenhui Mao, Kaci Kennedy McDade, Heather Hille, Mackenzie Zepeda As economies grow from low- to middle-income and countries improve health outcomes, they are expected to transition away from health aid—external sources of health sector funding. It is a complex and challenging process. If mismanaged, the potential for backsliding (i.e., disease resurgence and reversal of health gains) is sizeable. To help middle-income countries manage their transitions to domestically funded health systems, in recent years, various transition readiness assessment tools (TRAs) have been developed. TRAs can be used to determine: (1) whether a country is ready to graduate from donor support; (2) how transition will affect various aspects of the health, economic, and political system of the country; (3) where donor funds may need to be spent to bring a country closer to being transition-ready; and (4) whether the country's progress will be sustained after transition from donor aid. To understand the benefits and limitations of TRAs, we analyzed existing tools to provide insight into the current landscape of TRAs and opportunities for guiding transition planning and supporting the sustainability of health programs and systems (Table 1). Table 1. Basic description of TRAs included in our analysis
What we foundAll eight health-sector TRAs were introduced after 2015, suggesting that there is growing demand for transition planning support and assessment instruments. TRAs have helped the transition planning and preparedness process in several ways:
Figure 1. Funders, developers, and diseases targeted by TRAs
Source: Transitioning from Health Aid: A Scoping Review of Transition Readiness Assessment Tools Figure 2. Frequency of indicators and measurements used by TRAs to assess transition readiness
Source: Transitioning from Health Aid: A Scoping Review of Transition Readiness Assessment Tools We also found some limitations in existing TRA tools:
Making transitions betterThere are clear opportunities for improving existing TRAs including recommendations for the development of new tools designed to address some of the critical gaps previously mentioned.
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| Do immigrants harm native students academically? Posted: 30 Apr 2021 05:00 AM PDT By David Figlio, Paola Giuliano, Riccardo Marchingiglio, Umut Özek, Paola Sapienza Over the past 50 years, the United States has experienced the second-largest wave of immigration in its history. As a result, the share of recent immigrants (either foreign-born or children of foreign-born) in public schools reached 23% in 2015, with concentrations over 70% in several school districts in high-immigration states. These trends have generated a policy debate about the effects of immigration on public education and the perceived costs that immigrants may impose on public schools, local governments, and educational outcomes of the U.S.-born student population. Better understanding the causal effects of immigrants on native students is therefore critical to inform these policy debates, yet there are two factors that complicate any effort to reveal this link. First, immigrant students are not randomly assigned to schools, and are more likely to enroll in schools educating students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Second, U.S.-born students, especially those from comparatively affluent families, may decide to leave when a large share of immigrant students move into their school district—a phenomenon commonly referred to as "native flight." Both factors imply that simple correlations between immigrant exposure and native student outcomes will likely yield a more negative relationship than the true causal effect of immigrant exposure. In a recent paper, we show how immigrant exposure affects the academic achievement of U.S.-born students. We do this with an analytical strategy that addresses both concerns above. We make use of rich, longitudinal education and health microdata from Florida. These data are exceptionally detailed. For example, they identify students' siblings in school records, which enables us to use the within-family, across-sibling variation in immigrant exposure to study the effects of immigrants. In other words, we can compare the learning of U.S.-born siblings when one of those siblings happened to have more immigrants in their school cohort than the other sibling(s). Figure 1, illustrating our main result, shows the relationship between immigrant exposure and native student math scores, and how this relationship changes when one accounts for native flight. We present the results for all U.S.-born students (black bars), along with the results for white (green bars) and Black students (blue bars) to demonstrate the effects for different student groups.
The results on the left of the figure are from a common model that accounts for the non-random sorting of immigrants (by comparing U.S.-born students with their peers in the same school), yet does not address native flight. (That is, we compare the academic performance of native students with their peers in the same school who have different levels of exposure to immigrants because they are enrolled in different grades.) On the right of the figure, we present the results from our preferred model where we rely on sibling comparisons. Several findings are worth highlighting. First, when we move from our baseline model to sibling comparisons that account for native flight, we see that the relationship between immigrant exposure and U.S.-born student test scores changes from negative to positive. Second, we find that this trend is entirely driven by students from more advantaged backgrounds. For example, for white students, we find a negative relationship between immigrant exposure and math achievement in models that fail to account for native flight compared to a sizable positive relationship in our preferred model. In contrast, for Black students, the positive effect of immigrant exposure remains virtually unchanged between the two models. This is consistent with the expectation that native flight is a bigger issue when examining the effects of immigrants on students from more advantaged backgrounds who can afford alternative schooling options in the wake of an immigrant influx. In summary, we find no adverse effects of immigrant students on the academic achievement of U.S.-born students. This is true even when the immigrants' academic achievement is lower than the U.S.-born students. In fact, we find significant benefits of having immigrant peers on the test scores of native students, especially among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. This does not necessarily mean that immigrant students do not require public resources initially as they acquire English proficiency and get accustomed to the school system and life in a new country, which could have adverse effects on native students in the short-term—especially in the aftermath of large migrant inflows. That said, our findings suggest that, in the long run, the benefits of exposure to recent-immigrant peers, who are typically higher performing academically and have higher educational aspirations compared to more established immigrant generations, likely outweigh these potential short-term adverse effects.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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