What we mean when we say there’s a border crisis.
Republicans tried and failed to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday as part of their plan to use the southern border as a cudgel against President Joe Biden in 2024.
A lot of this is just political posturing. Republicans have every interest in making it seem as though Biden’s immigration policies (despite not being particularly permissive to migrants arriving at the border) have led to unmitigated chaos and that returning to the restrictionist agenda of former President Donald Trump is the answer.
Trump made this clear when he reportedly urged Republicans in Congress to turn against the bipartisan Senate border security bill scheduled for a vote Wednesday so that he could keep the issue alive through the presidential election. His supporters have largely fallen in line.
But that Republican maneuvering aside, there’s a deeper question: Is there actually a border crisis?
I would say yes, but not in the way that Republicans would describe it.
What Republican rhetoric on the border gets wrong
If there’s a single word that dominates Republican rhetoric on the border, it’s “invasion.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott invoked it in court when defending the concertina wire he has illegally strung along the border in Eagle Pass. So has Trump at his campaign rallies: “This is like a military invasion. Drugs, criminals, gang members, and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. … They’re taking over our cities,” he said at an event in Nevada in December.
The word conjures vivid imagery of the US under threat from a foreign adversary, and that’s a deliberate misrepresentation of what’s happening at the border. Russia invaded Ukraine. Migrants are not invading the US under any similar understanding of the word. But Republicans have long demanded further militarization of the US border, and an “invasion” would seem to demand such a military solution.
“Invasion” rhetoric also serves to otherize migrants, many of whom are fleeing difficult and dangerous circumstances in their home countries in search of safety or economic opportunity. It echoes the way that Trump’s immigration policies often not so subtly played into white fear about the increasing diversification of the US population. Their chief architect, Stephen Miller, has promoted white nationalist writings, and Trump himself has a long history of enabling white supremacy.
Something they do get right
Republicans may be incendiary in the way that they describe what’s happening on the border. But there’s no question that the situation is dire: The number of times US immigration agents intercepted migrants attempting to cross the border exceeded 300,000 in December, up from about 250,000 in the same month last year. That’s more than has been recorded in a given month in over two decades.
Those numbers are largely driven by migrants coming from Central and South America, the Caribbean, Cuba, and Haiti, though Chinese migrants are the fastest-growing group of arrivals.
There are signs that migrant arrivals slowed in January, though US immigration officials have yet to release the official count for the month. Daily totals had just about halved by the end of January from their peak in December. But such a decline is typical over the winter months.
Cities are struggling to absorb migrants
Texas alone has sent over 100,000 migrants to blue cities including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, since 2022. Though these cities have always welcomed immigrants with “sanctuary” policies, they’re now struggling to absorb them in the numbers currently arriving.
A big concern is sheltering people, especially in the colder winter months. Chicago, for example, has resorted to warming them in idling buses, and watchdogs have raised concerns about the conditions in the shelters after a 5-year-old resident recently died.
It has left Democratic mayors calling for Congress to take action that likely won’t come given the polarized political environment.
The legal system is deeply broken
Migrants have a legal right, enshrined in US and international law, to seek asylum and are entitled to a fair hearing, the same as any citizen. But the legal system for evaluating whether migrants arriving at the border qualify for asylum or other humanitarian protections is deeply broken.
The immigration courts, which evaluate asylum and humanitarian claims, are chronically underfunded and have a backlog of more than 2 million cases. In 2023, resolving those cases took more than two years on average, during which time migrants may be detained or released into the US.
This reality doesn’t just arguably incentivize more migrants to seek to cross the border. It also shirks the US’s legal and moral obligations to asylum seekers. Many migrants are forced to navigate the process themselves: Unlike in the criminal court system, there is no guarantee of legal representation, even though immigration law is notorious for being second in complexity only to the US tax code, and some migrants may not even speak English.
This is untenable. But as I recently argued, the bill under consideration in the Senate doesn’t meaningfully address those problems, instead relying on a broad authority to turn away migrants at times of high demand. Any reforms would have to balance the US’s commitment to ensuring that migrants are not sent away to danger, as is required by law, with streamlining the process.
To start, the government could surge resources to the various steps of this process in the interest of speeding it up. That could include hiring and sending to the border more non-law enforcement personnel who are trained to evaluate asylum claims, as well as more immigration judges and court staff. And offering legal representation to migrants can make the proceedings smoother for all involved.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as though Congress is willing to entertain any such solutions right now.
This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.
A fully funded IRS would bring in twice as much money as they previously thought, a Treasury report finds.
In 2021, Americans owed about $625 billion in taxes that they never paid. This number, called the “tax gap,” represented some 13.7 percent of all taxes due, and, had it been collected, it would have reduced the deficit by nearly one-quarter.
Getting more of that number collected is naturally an obsession of many tax and budget experts. It represents a way to fund government programs without raising taxes, adding to the deficit, or making other cuts. Deals like that can feel as rare as unicorns in the tax world. Funding the IRS in an effort to reduce the tax gap was one of the key ways Democrats funded their climate subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022.
The question is what share of that $625 billion could be realistically recovered. Even a perfectly resourced Internal Revenue Service would, after all, miss some tax evasion and misreporting. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the IRS funding in the IRA would raise an average of $20.3 billion a year over 10 years, a small fraction of the $625 billion gap. For years, though, some economists have been vocally arguing that better enforcement could raise much, much more than that.
A new report released by the Treasury Department on Tuesday argues that those economists had a point, that we have been understating the revenue this new IRS funding will bring in. They argue that it will bring in over $170 billion more than they previously thought over an 11-year window and that, if Congress extends this funding for the IRS, the ultimate revenue gain could be more than double initial estimates.
The takeaway is that investing in the IRS could, if this study is accurate, be a better deal than we thought.
Why Treasury thinks it underestimated revenue from IRS funding
The increased revenue projected comes from a few different sources. One of the biggest is that Treasury is finding that marginal audits in recent years have been bringing in more money than anticipated. They had assumed that additional audits would bring in less and less revenue, on the grounds that the most profitable audits are already taking place — the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, in other words.
But the new report argues this isn’t as true as they had assumed. Recent IRS examinations, it writes, have shown “much greater revenue potential than is reflected in previous estimates of the impact of marginal work.”
The report also incorporates money the IRS anticipates getting due to “specific deterrence.” That’s a fancy term for a simple idea: If you audit a taxpayer in one year, they are less likely to hide income from the IRS in the next few years because now they are more worried about getting caught. This finding is based on a study released last year by economists Will Boning, Nathaniel Hendren, Ben Sprung-Keyser, and Ellen Stuart. While Boning is at the Treasury Department, the rest are independent academic researchers. The academic paper estimated the “returns” on spending on IRS audits: How much money does $1 spent on audits yield in new revenue?
The finding was that this spending pays for itself many times over and that the return is higher the wealthier the audited person is. Audits of low-income taxpayers bring in $5 for each $1 spent, while audits of high-income taxpayers bring in $12 per $1 spent. Much of that return, they find, comes from deterrence causing audited individuals to report more money in ensuing years. The Treasury paper takes the Boning et al paper’s estimates of increased revenue from deterrence and uses them to adjust upward Treasury’s previous estimates of how much revenue the audits funded by the IRA money will raise directly.
Finally, Treasury assumes that investment in better taxpayer services (like shorter wait times for calls, simpler reporting methods, and nudges/reminders to pay estimated taxes) and in better IT systems will result in still further revenue increases.
Prior to this paper, Treasury estimated that over the 11 years from 2024-2034, and if extended past 2029 when the IRA funding is due to run out, a fully funded IRS would bring in $390.3 billion in revenue directly from audits.
- $497 billion in revenue once you add in the specific deterrence and greater efficiency effects
- $851 billion once you include better IT and taxpayer services.
That final number is more than double the initial $390.3 billion estimate.
Should we believe this?
The methodology of the Treasury report is straightforward, and the Boning et al. research is from very respected, careful researchers who I find credible. But it’s always worth being a little skeptical of releases like this. For one thing, the Treasury oversees the IRS, and so is effectively putting out research arguing that it and its subsidiary institutions should get more money. They may very well be right, but they’re hardly a disinterested party.
Secondly, the difference between even the initial $390.3 billion estimate of revenue from Treasury and the CBO’s $203.7 billion estimate gives me a little pause. The difference between the CBO estimate and the massive $851 billion number gives me still more (though, in fairness, the CBO is not modeling the IT and other effects in the Treasury paper). Some of the discrepancy is explained by the former being an 11-year estimate and the latter being a 10-year one; another difference is the CBO estimate starts in 2022, not 2024, so the Treasury number will naturally be a little bigger because of inflation in those two years.
But there’s still a big gap after adjusting for those factors. In latter years, Treasury is projecting much more revenue, even before these new deterrent effects, than CBO did. In 2031, for instance, CBO estimates $35.3 billion in new revenue from the IRS funding, while Treasury’s prior estimate was $57.1 billion, before all the increases it’s implementing now. The baseline Treasury estimate that year being over 60 percent higher than that of Congress’s impartial budget arbiter raises some red flags for me. A Treasury official explained that the CBO assumes lower returns on audits than Treasury has, and that this disagreement predates the new report. But that still doesn’t mean Treasury has the correct side of that argument.
All that said, the core idea of the report — that deterrence effects mean that increased numbers of audits could greatly increase revenue from funding the IRS — seems sound. It’s particularly relevant because the cost of the clean energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act appears to be much higher than estimated when the bill was based: about 65 percent higher, per the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT, the CBO’s partner that estimates tax provisions).
That’s largely due to more people and businesses wanting to invest in clean energy than initially estimated. For instance, the JCT has increased its estimate of what the US will spend subsidizing electric cars by more than fivefold because of surging demand for the cars. If you like these subsidies, this is a good thing: They’re doing their job and driving demand up.
But it raises the question of whether these provisions will actually be paid for by the revenue provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. The new Treasury report is, in effect, an argument that the IRS funding could be up to the challenge of paying for all this unexpected clean energy spending.
Humans are literally changing the color of the planet. Scientists are worried.
Maybe you’ve heard: Earth, our planet, is not doing great. Tropical forests are getting cut down. Parking lots are replacing bird-filled grasslands. Climate change is fueling forest-razing wildfires. On the whole, natural, plant-filled habitats, seem to be disappearing.
Despite this destruction, scientists keep coming to an odd conclusion: The Earth is growing greener. Not green in the metaphorical “sustainable” sense, but in the literal color green.
In the last four decades, the extent of green vegetation — i.e., the amount of leaves in a given area — has substantially increased across the planet, according to a number of recent scientific studies based on satellite data. There’s actually more green space today, not less. And this “global greening” phenomenon is not just occurring on land. Large parts of the oceans are getting greener, too, research shows. Our blue planet, it seems, is increasingly a green planet.
Understanding Earth’s color is key to understanding Earth and our future on it. “Greenness” often corresponds to the planet’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas that drives climate change. The more leaves, the more photosynthesis, a chemical reaction that gobbles up CO2. That’s the good news in global greening: It’s helping offset some of the impacts of climate change.
But there’s more to greening than meets the eye. The changing color isn’t so much a sign that forests and other ecosystems are regrowing but that humans are altering the environment on a truly planetary scale — often, with dire consequences.
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NASA
Why Earth is getting greener
Much of what we know about our planet on a global scale comes from satellites. Some of them are equipped with high-tech sensors that measure different wavelengths of light. With help from computer models, these sensors can roughly approximate the amount of leaves in a given area on the ground. More “greening” means the ground has more leaves, typically because it has more plants, or those plants have more (or larger) leaves on them.
The global greening effect, which dates back to the 1980s or earlier, is measurable. In one 2019 study published in the journal Nature, scientists found that the Earth had increased its green leaf area (i.e., the amount of leaves) by 5 percent in the last two decades. A more recent paper, meanwhile, found that the world is not only leafier, but the rate of greening is actually accelerating across more than half of its land.
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Chen et al./Nature Sustainability
These results are somewhat counterintuitive. In an age of deforestation, you might expect Earth to get browner or more gray, as satellites see stumps in place of trees and runways in place of wetlands. Where is all this green color coming from?
One explanation is air pollution. Carbon dioxide is not only a pollutant but a fertilizer — a key ingredient in photosynthesis that helps plants grow. Some farmers inject CO2 into their greenhouses to accelerate plant growth. But now we’re fertilizing plants on a global scale: In the last two centuries, NASA reports, humans have increased the CO2 content in the air by roughly 50 percent. All that extra CO2 is accelerating leaf growth, and satellites can see it.
Humans are also just growing more plants. The 2019 Nature study found that the dominant driver of recent global greening is a combination of more farming and, to a lesser extent, more tree planting. People are growing more crops on the same amount of land and turning barren patches of soil into verdant farms.
These trends are especially prominent in China and India. Together, these two countries account for roughly one-third of all greening, the study found.
“The intensification of agriculture that’s been happening in India over the past four decades is stunning,” said Joshua Gray, a geospatial scientist at North Carolina State University, who was not affiliated with the 2019 paper.
China, meanwhile, has planted tens of billions of trees, often in plots with just one species, over the last four decades, according to the country’s government. The idea behind this massive tree-planting campaign is, among other goals, to stop land from drying out, reduce erosion, and provide people with a source of income from timber.
Green can be good
Broadly speaking, a leafier planet can help the climate. Our oceans and lands, including forests, absorb more than half of the CO2 that countries spew into the air. These “carbon sinks” keep global warming from getting worse than it already is, and at least on land, they have been growing for several decades.
Global greening, Gray said, is one reason why the land sink has ballooned.
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NASA
In the ocean, however, greening is far more mysterious; it’s not clear why the sea is getting greener or what that means for the climate. The observed shift in color is likely caused by phytoplankton, a tiny plant-like organism that, like plants, absorbs CO2. Greener seas might mean there’s simply more phytoplankton in some areas. Alternatively, there could be a shift in the phytoplankton community toward species that produce more green pigment, according to B.B. Cael, a scientist at the National Oceanography Centre who has studied ocean greening. The difference matters because it determines how much carbon the oceans can absorb.
Better satellite data will help figure some of this out. That’s one reason why NASA is expected to launch a satellite called PACE, which will measure ocean color to better understand how plankton communities influence Earth’s climate.
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NASA
The big problems behind the green sheen
There’s a lot that color alone leaves out, such as what that “green” is made of.
To sensors on a satellite, a rainforest in Indonesia and a nearby monoculture of coffee or rubber trees look similar. They both appear green. Yet these two landscapes are dramatically different: The rainforest is home to orangutans and rare plants and helps regulate the local climate, whereas the plantation is relatively devoid of life. Measurements of color alone fail to capture these important differences.
More than that, they can mask ecosystem destruction, said Robin Chazdon, a tropical ecologist and part-time scientist at the World Resources Institute, an environmental group. Companies commonly tear up native forests to plant commercial crops. Satellite data alone struggles to capture these changes in land use.
“It’s glossing over the reality of what’s actually happened,” Chazdon said of global greening measurements.
Greening caused by tree planting — common in China and India — can also be problematic, she said. Planted forests often comprise just one or two tree species and don’t offer much in the way of biodiversity or other benefits, like erosion control, she said. In some cases, the trees eventually die.
The growth in green farmland, similarly, has some pretty serious consequences. Industrial farms not only replace native ecosystems but require huge amounts of water and chemicals, such as fertilizers and pesticides (which are known to harm humans and ecosystems). Consider the Imperial Valley of Southern California. Once a desert, it’s now covered in vast stretches of farmland. Those farms have turned the region green — and it’s visible from space — yet they’ve done so, in part, by draining the Colorado River and fueling a water war in the West.
What’s more is that while plants absorb carbon, industrial cropland typically produces more carbon emissions than it absorbs over the long term. Making nitrogen fertilizer and other agrochemicals requires a huge amount of energy, which typically comes from fossil fuels. Plus, much of the carbon absorbed by plants on a farm gets reemitted into the environment after they’re harvested.
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NASA
The other problem: While CO2 fertilization can make some crops grow faster, research has also found that it can decrease their nutritional value — such as the concentration of protein, and minerals like calcium and magnesium — for a number of complicated reasons. So pumping CO2 into the air means more but often less-nutritious vegetation (and globally, more than 2 billion people are nutrient-deficient).
So, yes, greening is complicated. It’s not inherently good. Sometimes it’s very bad. Context, it turns out, matters a lot.
If there’s anything we can glean from color alone it’s the scale of human impact. It’s not that nature is healing — that forests are growing back because we left them alone — but that we have drastically changed the atmosphere, the ground, and the ocean. We have changed the very look of our planet, and it’s visible from space.