Canceling student loans might not be as big of a midterms boost for Democrats as they’d hoped.
Seven weeks out from the midterm elections, Democrats are facing better prospects than when they entered the summer of 2022. Inflation has improved, gas prices are dropping, and as they go back home, congressional Democrats can claim a host of accomplishments from their time in DC.
But there’s one “win” some Democrats are concerned may be more of a liability than an asset: the Biden administration’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student loans.
Before the plan became a reality, the country was split in its support of debt forgiveness: Republicans largely opposed it, but it had long been a hit among a large subset of younger voters, according to progressive pollsters. Now, polling shows a stark partisan split in support for the plan, and concerningly for Democrats in tight races, soft support among independents.
Timed curiously after a score of legislative wins and a few months before elections, the announcement sparked outrage among conservatives who thought the bailout was unfair to those who did not seek a college education or had already paid off their loans. At the same time, the policy announcement landed as President Joe Biden saw a rebound in support, especially among younger Americans. But on the campaign trail, the plan hasn’t made the positive electoral impact that many proponents had touted as one of the political advantages of forgiving student debt. And it’s providing fodder to Republican candidates wholly opposed to Biden’s economic agenda.
That’s part of the reason a handful of vulnerable Democratic incumbents (and challengers) criticized the policy when the White House announced it. Some of those campaigns have since told me that they either aren’t making it an issue in their races or simply aren’t hearing much about it from Democratic voters.
Negative blowback to the policy hasn’t yet registered in polling on what’s motivating voters, but there’s still time for either side to make it an issue. If Republicans are successful in doing so, some Democrats worry the policy could cost them badly needed support in swing states and races, and could eat away at their chances of keeping a Senate majority while limiting losses in the House.
Biden faced a lot of pressure to relieve student loans. The benefits might not be as large as promised.
Biden had already extended the moratorium on student loan payments four times ahead of his August 24 announcement and had been hesitant to commit to loan cancellation for most of his first year in office. He’d faced criticism from progressives in his party and from advocacy groups, including the charge that he was breaking a campaign promise (even though he never committed to full loan cancellation). In response, he gave himself a September deadline and promised a decision on debt relief or another extension of the moratorium.
This year’s spring and summer, however, delivered devastating approval numbers for Biden, driven in large part by high inflation. The president and his party were shedding support from young voters and liberal Democrats — and his numbers with independents were underwater. Many progressive advocacy groups and student loan relief activists argued that erasing student debt would be one easy, major way to stop the bleeding.
Polling leading up to the decision showed a divided country. Nationally, more than six in 10 Americans supported some kind of student loan forgiveness in a February Data for Progress poll that student loan relief champions used as evidence of popularity. But complete loan forgiveness had the support of only a quarter of respondents. Broken down by party and age, a majority of Republicans and a plurality of older Americans opposed any action, while half of Democrats and a plurality of young Americans and independents backed some, but not all, debt cancellation.
That partisan split still exists. The country is divided nearly in half in support and opposition to Biden’s policy, and it’s unpopular with independent and Republican voters, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll taken immediately after the announcement. Support from independents remains roughly equally divided, while Republicans have grown more opposed to it.
Why hide taxpayer-funded research behind paywalls? It’s complicated.
Right now, the majority of published scientific findings — and the vast majority of prestigious new research — is hidden behind paywalls. Most of the top scientific publications charge readers high fees for access, with prices that are rising faster than inflation. An annual membership with Nature costs $199, Science starts at $79 per year, and The Lancet charges $227. And these are only a few of the hundreds of journals where new research appears.
This money goes to publishers, not to the academics who actually write scientific papers. And while some top journals do give researchers the option to make their submission free to read, they do this by reversing their fee structure, putting the burden on the author instead.
Nature, for example, charges authors not affiliated with institutions roughly $9,500 to display a paper without the paywall. Given that grant-funded research is already far from profitable for the researchers themselves, this is a significant hurdle that disproportionately hits junior academics and those from lower-income countries.
But in a bid to tear down the paywall and make science more accessible to all, the White House last month announced new guidelines requiring that all taxpayer-funded research, including data used for a study, be made public at no cost by the end of 2025.
The Biden plan is one of the biggest wins yet for the “open science” movement. In practice, it often refers to publishing the papers that describe new scientific findings immediately and without paywalls. It can also include publicly sharing full datasets and code used for analysis.
The movement toward transparency and open-access science began with 1990s activism, and reached the White House in 2013 during the Obama administration, having been a force in US politics as early as 2007. Biden’s interest in open science predates his presidency; in 2016, he remarked that “taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research every year, but once it’s published, nearly all of that taxpayer-funded research sits behind walls.”
There’s a straightforward argument behind making publicly funded research available: Taxpayers are already paying to fund a study, so why should they also have to pay a fee to a journal to see the results? The hope is that making the latest data and research findings freely available will let scientists and entrepreneurs build more quickly on new discoveries, and members of the public will have a more accurate sense of the state of scientific knowledge.
But despite decades of advocacy for “open science,” the idea is far from universally accepted — and there isn’t even a consistent definition of what it means.
The origins of “open science”
The push for open science — and the pushback — didn’t begin with the US, and past international efforts can hint at how the new guidelines are likely to play out.
In 2018, Robert-Jan Smits, who was then a senior adviser for open access and innovation at the European Political Strategy Centre, founded a movement to open up access to science, taking advantage of growing support in Europe. He recruited a number of influential funders to require that grant recipients make their research public, even though it was a radical departure from the previous paywall-based European standards for academic publication.
In their recently published, free-to-download book, Plan S for Shock, Smits and co-author Rachael Pells argue that science will be more successful as an international, collaborative effort, but that currently, scientists in poorer countries are shut out by high access fees. For society to reap the full benefit of new discoveries, the results need to be available to everyone, not just academics.
While open-access papers show a small if inconsistent increase in citations from other scientists, compared to paywalled research, this massively understates the real impact: A Dutch survey by Springer Nature found that 40% of visitors to their open-access site weren’t academics, and simply had personal or professional interest in a topic.
Under Plan S, which went into effect in 2021 in 12 European countries, scientists receiving grant money from an affiliated funder would, as a condition of that funding, make their findings open access. They could post to a free public repository, like Zenodo and arXiv, or pay a fee to a conventional journal. Universities would often negotiate deals directly with publishers to cover these fees, while some funders introduced their own programs to cover submission fees for research they funded.
Biden’s new plan will have similar requirements, but applied to the huge number of researchers and universities that receive funding from the US federal government, which covers almost 400 different organizations and agencies. The transition is set to be complete by the end of 2025.
Why some want science closed
Freeing research largely paid for by taxpayer money can seem like a no-brainer, but over time, the potential downsides of open science efforts like the Plan S mandate have become more apparent. While pay-to-publish but free-to-read platforms bring more research to the public, they can add barriers for researchers and worsen some existing inequalities in academia. Scientific publishing will remain a for-profit industry and a highly lucrative one for publishers. Shifting the fees onto authors doesn’t change this.
Many of the newly founded open-access journals drop the fees entirely, but even if they’re not trying to make a profit, they still need to cover their operating costs. They fall back on ad revenue, individual donations or philanthropic grants, corporate sponsorship, and even crowdfunding.
But open-access platforms often lack the prestige of well-known top journals like Nature. Scientists early in their careers — as well as those at less wealthy universities in low-income countries — often rely on precarious, short-term grant funding to carry out their research. Their career depends on putting out an impressive publication record, which is already an uphill battle.
The established journals are reluctant to commit to open access, since submission fees may deter potential researchers from sending in their work. And if journals don’t charge submission fees or reader subscriptions, they’ll have to turn to other sources of income, which may be unsustainable in the long run.
There are other ways that the open science movement might fail to live up to the optimistic claims of its advocates. So far, the movement is focused on publicly funded science; corporate R&D and privately funded research are exempt from the mandate. While supporting commercial innovation and entrepreneurship is one of the Biden administration’s explicit goals, some groups are concerned that the “commercialization” of science will actually reduce transparency, and that financial conflicts of interest in commercially funded research will lead to biased studies.
The open science movement’s influence is growing thanks to projects like Plan S, but exactly how far it reaches now is hard to measure. Their coalition of funders backed 200,000 new studies in 2020, making up 12% of articles in the most-cited journals.
The White House guidelines will massively boost adoption — the US government funded 195,000 to 263,000 studies in 2020 — but likely won’t be enough to shift the world of scientific publishing toward a new, more accessible paradigm. If science is really meant to serve the public interest, it should be in the public interest to make it available.
A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!
Migrants boarded the flights after being given questionable information about what awaited them.
Dozens of migrants to the US, most of them traveling from Venezuela, were transported via private jet from San Antonio, Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who vowed on Friday to send even more people from states like Florida and Texas to sanctuary cities and states.
Fifty people arrived via two chartered planes in Martha’s Vineyard, a wealthy coastal enclave, on Wednesday after many reported being lured into the trip with promises of jobs and assistance with rent. The migrants were led to believe that they were headed to Boston; instead, they arrived at the end of the tourist season in a community which often hosts the vacationing rich and powerful — including politicians and presidents.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has called for a DOJ investigation into DeSantis’ plan, and US Attorney for Massachusetts Rachael Rollins said in a press conference that her office is seeking the DOJ’s input on the matter. According to Rachel Self, an attorney assisting the newly arrived migrants, a representative for the Department of Justice is at Joint Base Cape Cod, where the migrants are being sheltered; the DOJ declined to comment on the matter.
In a press conference in Daytona Beach Friday, as CNN reported, DeSantis defended his plan, telling reporters that profilers have “been in Texas, identifying people that are trying to come to Florida and then offering them free transportation to sanctuary jurisdictions. And so they went from Texas to Florida, to Martha’s Vineyard in the flight.” DeSantis also defended approaching migrants in Texas and moving them elsewhere because, he claimed “40 percent of them say they want to go to Florida.” However, the $12 million program within the Florida Department of Transportation, approved with bipartisan support by the state legislature, is supposed to be used to move people specifically from the state of Florida — unlike the migrants who were in San Antonio, Texas before landing in Massachusetts.
Florida CBS affiliate CBS 8 found records showing that on September 8 the Department of Transportation had paid $615,000 to an Oregon aviation vendor operating in Destin, FL, under the line item “Grants and aids — Relocation program of unauthorized aliens.” Fenske did not answer Vox’s emailed question regarding the cost of the flights.
DeSantis’s decision to charter the flights is a high-profile addition to the series of stunts politicians like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) have pulled using migrant populations since April. Abbott, using taxpayer funds, and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) sent more than 7,000 migrants from Texas and Arizona to New York City and Washington, DC as of August, Reuters reported at the time.
Not to be outdone, Abbott himself on Thursday sent buses carrying as many as 100 people to the Naval Observatory, Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence, apparently in retaliation for her claims on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the southern border is secure. “She’s the border czar,” Abbott told Lubbock, Texas radio station KFYO in an interview. “And we felt that if she won’t come down to see the border, if President [Joe] Biden will not come down and see the border, we will make sure they see it firsthand. … And listen, there’s more where that came from.”
Wednesday’s planes and Thursday’s buses are part of a pattern
This week’s actions by DeSantis and Abbott are highly visible escalations in a pattern of Republican politicians moving large numbers of migrants to Democrat-run cities and states identifying as sanctuary jurisdictions — generally speaking, places where undocumented immigrants will be protected from deportation if they have not committed a serious crime.
Many of the migrants are technically traveling of their own volition, immigration attorney Camille Mackler told Vox. “From what we’re hearing, they’re choosing to get on the bus,” she said. “Whether they understand that they have other options, that’s one of the questions that we’ve been wondering. It depends on the individual as much as anything else, but they’re not getting rounded up by law enforcement on the street and put onto transport.”
Vox met a busload of migrants in Washington, DC, earlier in September and spoke to volunteers assisting them as they disembarked near the Capitol. According to one volunteer named Jessica, “We never know exactly how many people will come because they’re allowed to get off once they leave the state of Texas, and so they can get off at different spots,” making it a challenge to coordinate supplies and hot meals for new arrivals. “The frustrating thing is, it’s like the design of this is that they won’t tell us officially. And so that is not an accident. They’re trying to create chaos here to prove a political point. So we get a little bit of information fed to us, but not through official channels.”
In the case of DeSantis’ flights from Texas to Massachusetts, though, it’s not clear that the people were told the truth about where they were going and what to expect when they arrived. According to reporting from the Texas Tribune, corroborated elsewhere, the people who arrived in Martha’s Vineyard this week were approached in San Antonio by a woman offering them a free trip to Boston, where they would be provided with jobs and assistance with rent. The person gave the migrants a folder with a rudimentary map of Martha’s Vineyard showing the location of the airport; a pamphlet with information about refugee services, and a piece of paper with their name on it, Elizabeth Folcarelli, the head of local charity Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, told the Associated Press. Vox asked DeSantis’ press secretary, Taryn Fenske, whether the person who approached the migrants in San Antonio worked for the state of Florida, but Fenske deferred to statements previously sent by her office.
“These are individuals who are crossing the border who are in deep, rural, desert Texas and they’re left alone, to their own devices,” Mackler said. “They get brought to these respite centers that are set up by nonprofits, that aren’t places that you can even sleep — they just have the very, very basics.” In these kinds of conditions, especially for people who arrive without connections in the US, “you’re presenting them with an option to go somewhere.”
Fenske also did not answer emailed questions about whether DeSantis’ office coordinated with anyone in Massachusetts or Martha’s Vineyard in particular to send the migrants there. However, as attorney Rachel Self told Vox in an emailed statement Friday, “Volunteers reported to the church at 7 o’clock in the morning with coffee and breakfast to resume doing whatever they could to help,” and authorities coordinated transportation from the island to Joint Base Cape Cod. Self told Vox that attorneys from Lawyers for Civil Rights Boston, South Coast Legal Services, and Massachusetts Law Reform Institute are providing legal services for the recent arrivals, and “All the migrants were provided phones loaded with Whatsapp so they could communicate effectively and stay in touch with their lawyers.”
What will happen to the migrants shuttled to Massachusetts?
The migrants, many of whom come from Venezuela and Colombia, according to Mackler, but also Cuba, Haiti, elsewhere in the Caribbean, and to a lesser extent Africa and Afghanistan, make the punishing journey through South and Central America with precious few resources, with many fleeing specific threats to their lives or safety. One man from Colombia, who gave his name as Carlos, told Vox that he and his family came to the US because they were threatened by an armed group in their home country.
“There are far more individuals displaced by force — whether it’s climate, or civil conflict, or corruption, whatever dangers that could happen — those numbers, globally have risen dramatically in the past 30-plus years,” Mackler said. “So you have more people seeking protection through the asylum laws, and that has created these crushing backlogs.”
Migrants who are applying for asylum are here lawfully, and Mackler told Vox that many people arriving now have specific, viable claims that could be upheld by immigration court. But, according to the 1996 immigration statutes signed into law by President Bill Clinton, people making asylum claims can’t get work authorization until they’ve been proven to be eligible for asylum.
With the immigration system as backlogged as it is, there’s simply no way that recent arrivals could be far enough along in the asylum process to receive work authorization. So the jobs that DeSantis and Abbott have promised to entice migrants to go away from border areas, if they exist at all, would be unofficial — under the table.
In an email to Vox, Self explained that many of the migrants have connections elsewhere in the US, where they would have preferred to travel “before being lured onto planes under false pretenses.” However, Mackler said there were some reports among people working with recently-arrived immigrants that there has been an uptick in people arriving with no connection to the US.
That’s a situation that Self alleged DHS and the politicians sending migrants away from their states are exploiting. In a press conference the Miami Herald captured on video, Self said that the agents who processed the migrants listed on their paperwork the addresses of “random homeless shelters all across the country” as their mailing address — even though the migrants told agents they didn’t have US addresses.
Stop and watch this video.
— John Scott-Railton (@jsrailton) September 16, 2022
Whatever you thought about the governors’ stunt… it turns out it was worse.pic.twitter.com/GASpsChOzl