Sarah Trumble and Nathan Kasai for Third Way: Only one-third of the land on which the southern border is located is owned by the federal government or Native American tribes. The rest is largely state property or farmland owned by individual ranchers.
Sixty-six percent of the total land on the border is owned by states or individuals, most of which is along the Rio Grande River in Texas. That means to build any structures there, the federal government must receive permission from each individual landowner whose property will be affected or must exercise its powers of eminent domain to take possession of the land.
Eminent domain law allows the government to forcibly take privately owned land for public use, even over the objections of the owners, so long as they are reimbursed for the fair value of the land.
While the federal government has the power to use eminent domain for public projects, it is extremely unpopular both in Congress and with the public, and court challenges from landowners can stall the process for years and cost the government millions of dollars in legal costs.
The last time the federal government undertook construction of a fence on the southern border, hundreds of lawsuits were filed by private landowners. And in many cases, once the land had been seized and fencing built, farmers saw their crops torn out, and they ended up living in a “no-man’s land” south of the existing fence.
Historically black colleges do a good job
Richard Reeves and Nathan Yoo for the Brookings Institution: Historically black colleges and universities serve just 0.1 percent of the overall student population, but account for 20 percent of black students who complete bachelor’s degrees. The performance of these institutions is often questioned, given that they have graduation rates about 21 percentage points lower than other schools, as well as debt levels that often exceed those reported by students at predominantly white institutions.
The schools also have faced questions over their capacity to generate consistent and positive earnings gains for their graduates.
The claim of historically black colleges to be engines of upward mobility can now, however, be tested more directly. New administrative data with a study from researchers at the Equal Opportunity Project shows that the schools actually have a better track record at fostering mobility than many thought.
Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner and Danny Yagan have gone back to their treasure trove of data from tax records to see where students from different income backgrounds go to college and how they fare economically by the time they reach their 30s. …
Historically black colleges are doing a better job than the average postsecondary institution in terms of vaulting lowest-income kids into the top quintile as adults. Of those black colleges that the researchers were able to collect data for, more than 85 percent had a higher “mobility score” than the average across all institutions in the U.S.
No, immigrants don’t use public benefits
Samuel Hammond for the Niskanen Center: The notion that immigrants come to the United States to access public programs has become something of a popular myth. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, better known as welfare reform, introduced a five-year ban on lawful immigrants using public benefits with very few exceptions, such as refugees and asylum seekers.
This helps ensure new immigrants are net fiscal contributors to the U.S. Treasury, a fact that empirical studies consistently confirm. Illegal immigrants are ineligible for public benefits.
Yet some myths are harder to correct than others. Indeed, members of the current White House appear to hold the same misconceptions, as revealed most recently in a draft executive order last month that says “households headed by aliens are much more likely than those headed by citizens to use federal means-tested public benefits.” No citation is provided.
In a new report, my colleague Robert Orr and I demonstrate that low-income immigrants are less likely to access public benefits than their native-born counterparts. This is even true when they are otherwise fully eligible. For example, under current rules for food stamps, noncitizens can bypass the five-year ban if they have children under the age of 18, are blind or disabled, have a military connection or have worked for 40 qualifying quarters.
Nevertheless, only 35.1 percent of low-income, noncitizen children are members of a low-income household receiving food stamps, compared to 46.8 percent for the native-born. Citizen children of noncitizen parents also tend to participate in the food stamp program at a lower rate.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
