Category Archives: Immigration

Five thousand Syrians

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Full marks to Governor Shumlin for refusing to succumb to the hysteria gripping so many of his fellows, and keeping the light on for Syrian refugees in Vermont.

“The refugees from Syria are no different than the refugees from anywhere else in the world,” Shumlin told reporters. “I would encourage us to do what Vermont has always done … It’s the spirit of all Vermonters to ensure that when you have folks who are drowning, who are dying in pursuit of freedom, that Vermont does its part.”

At last count, 16 governors had said they would refuse to accept refugees from Syria. Including, shamefully, New Hampshire Democrat Maggie Hassan.

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The Kingdom EB-5: Spiders in the attic. Lots of ’em.

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About 15 years ago, a retired military man appeared in Dover, New Hampshire with an audacious plan: he had a revolutionary design for midsized passenger aircraft, and he was going to start a company — Alliance Aircraft — to build them. He claimed to have solid interest from some of the world’s major air carriers, and he planned to build a factory in some underutilized mill buildings in the middle of town. Good jobs, economic activity, what could be better?

At the time, I was a reporter/anchor for New Hampshire Public Radio, and I did a story about the project. At first everything seemed ideal, but the more I looked into it, the shakier it became. When I talked to experts in aviation and finance, I learned that this guy wasn’t especially well known and that it’s harder than Hell to launch a successful startup in a capital-intensive field like that.

My report raised questions about the project’s viability and public officials’ enthusiastic embrace of same. In the end, Alliance Aircraft fizzled out. No plant, no planes. Mind you, it wasn’t a scam; the head guy was a true believer. There was little or no public investment involved; the project didn’t even get that far.

Which brings us to today in the Northeast Kingdom. If you haven’t read VTDigger’s latest story about Bill Stenger’s EB-5 project, go and do so. It is a must-read.

The story by Anne Galloway focuses on AnC Bio, the biotech facility planned for Newport and funded by EB-5 investment — the federal program that gives green cards to foreign investors who put money into job-creating projects that would otherwise go unfunded. And the story is so full of authentic jaw-dropping “Holy Shit” moments that my mind was drawn back to the halcyon days of Alliance Aircraft.

I’ll recount some of the lowlights here, but please do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. It’s lengthy, but worth your time.

— AnC Bio Vermont is partnered with AnC Bio Korea, which has developed some promising products but has also been in severe financial straits for several years. How severe? Try “its headquarters was auctioned off in 2012” severe.

The Vermont firm is a separate corporation, but it’s entirely dependent on the Korean company for the intellectual property that would be the lifeblood of a Newport plant.

— Stenger’s group said nothing about AnC Bio Korea’s difficulties in its filings with investors or its communications with the state. Galloway: “State officials… weren’t aware of AnC Bio Korea’s problems until in the course of their own research in May 2014, they learned that the Korean headquarters had been sold at auction to satisfy banks and other creditors.”

— After learning of the Korea mess, the state ordered the Stenger group to cease any communication with investors about the Newport plan. This order was ignored. Thanks, Bill.

— Here’s a biggie buried deep in the story. The proposed site of the factory (plus 18 nearby acres) was purchased in 2011 for $3.1 million by a corporation owned by Stenger’s partner Ariel Quiros. Part of the land was sold to the EB-5 consortium, little more than a year later, for $6 million. That’s a tidy profit for Mr. Q. He’d profit even more if the plant is built and his 18 acres are adjacent to a booming factory.

— AnC Bio has yet to seek or receive FDA approval for any of its products, usually a lengthy process. Stenger: “…the FDA approval of products and services will in part be facilitated by the completion of the building.”

Cart before the horse, Bill?

I could go on, but you can read it all at VTDigger. Suffice it to say that this reeks eight ways from Sunday. And beyond the potential implications for the company, its investors, and the city of Newport, this could blow up big-time in Governor Shumlin’s face. He’s been Head Cheerleader for the Stenger projects, frequently traveling overseas to help Stenger and Quiros court investors. His administration set up a conveniently Stenger-friendly regulatory mechanism.

Not to mention that Shumlin’s former right hand, Alex MacLean, was working with the Stenger group through much of this troubled time. If she wasn’t pipelining information back to the administration about all this, she certainly wasn’t doing her political mentor any favors.

If the Newport project implodes or suffers any of several extremely realistic setbacks, it will be another black eye for Peter Shumlin’s tattered reputation for good management. A largely self-inflicted black eye, at that; he didn’t have to identify himself so closely with this project. But he got stars in his eyes, and he may well pay a heavy price.

Art Woolf’s arguments of convenience

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Welp, Vermont’s Loudest Economist is at it again. Art Woolf’s latest dispensation of wisdom in the Thursday Burlington Free Press is chock full of half-baked research, lazy reasoning, and politically convenient conclusions.

The main conclusion, as is often the case: Vermont sucks.

The topic of Art’s latest “How We’re Doing” effort was outmigration – the fact that Vermont’s population is roughly stable (or stagnant if you prefer, as Art does) and a lot of people are leaving.

This week’s entry in the digital Freeploid is entitled “Ex-Vermonters Vote With Their Feet.” (The print edition had a different title.)

As if every decision to move is a “vote” against Vermont. Every birth, a “yes” vote; every death, a “no” vote. (The Medical Examiner ruling: Death By Taxes.)

popchgsept25The accompanying chart shows three factors in population change: births/deaths ratio, immigration (from outside the US), and Net Domestic Migration. It shows immigration as a constant: we have a relatively small trickle of foreigners setting here. The births/deaths ratio was healthy until 2008, when the birthrate began to drop. But the biggie is Net Domestic Migration, which has been negative since about 2004.

(The chart is, of course, scaled to dramatize the net-migration plunge.)

Woolf chalks up the declining birthrate to our aging population, which is reasonable (although I wonder how much the Great Recession played into it): we do have more people beyond the usual child-rearing age. Woolf speculates that our birthrate will continue to fall as our population ages.

But later, when he’s expounding on the causes of our negative Net Migration, he completely ignores the aging population. Did it occur to him that a lot of our outmigrants are senior Vermonters heading for the Sun Belt? Not to judge by his column:

When people vote with their feet, they are saying something about the desirability of a state.

Those people are saying that despite its many attractions, Vermont is not a popular place for people to live and work.

For some that’s true, but not for an 80-year old who’s tired of hauling firewood and shoveling snow.

Woolf uses our aging population as a cudgel when it’s convenient; he ignores it when it’s not.

Also, as usual, Woolf doesn’t bother to compare Vermont to similar states. The outmigration of young people is a common problem for small, rural states; is Vermont’s better or worse than, say, Maine’s or Wyoming’s? Or northern New Hampshire’s?

Finally, let’s bring up a sacred cow that Woolf would never touch: the role our employers play in making Vermont undesirable. Generally speaking, Vermont’s pay rates are on the low side. Even if you’re talking about comparable jobs, the pay is often lower in Vermont than elsewhere.

Two examples I have some familiarity with: medicine and academics. Pay scales at UVM (and Dartmouth) are lower than at similar institutions elsewhere — sometimes substantially lower. Like, 50% or more. Our institutions get away with that because (a) Vermont offers such a high quality of life that many professionals will settle for a lower salary, and (b) our cost of living is relatively low compared to, say, Boston or New York or even Albany.

Many Vermont employers, especially in technology fields, complain that they can’t find enough qualified workers. Well, maybe they aren’t paying enough. Maybe they’re not recruiting hard enough.

No, that’s not it. Must be the taxes.

To be fair, Woolf doesn’t come out and blame taxes and regulation for Vermont’s outmigration. But he omits a lot of factors that lead to other conclusions: that we have built-in disadvantages, that our employers skimp on pay and aren’t aggressive enough in attracting new residents. And that our aging population is likely a major factor in growing outmigration.

This week’s entry, like many of his columns, is meant to undergird the business point of view — that we need to fling open the door to growth by cutting taxes, regulations, and those pesky environmental laws. As a thorough, honest look at How We’re Doing, the best grade you can give is Incomplete.

Art Woolf spews numbers, provides zero insight

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In the past, I’ve given UVM economist Art Woolf two nicknames: Vermont’s Loudest Economist, for his inescapable media presence; and Vermont’s Laziest Economist, for his thoroughly conventional views. Well, now I’ve got a new one: The Human Almanac.

In addition to (Lord help us) educating the next generation of UVM students, Woolf also does a lot of corporate consulting, publishes a costly newsletter, and writes a weekly column in the Burlington Free Press. The latter is where I see his work, and it’s consistently unimpressive. The typical Woolf column includes an oversized chart or graph (to fill space), a shallow review of statistics, and/or a bit of thoroughly conventional wisdom, all served up in a few hundred words.

In his last two columns, he didn’t even bother injecting a bit o’ the old C.W. They were just bland overviews, free of any context or insight.

This week’s entry is “Vermont Fertility Rate 15% Lower Than U.S.” And, well, that title just about covers it. The column is full of shameless padding, like this:

The average Vermont woman will have 1.6 babies over her lifetime. …Of course, no one has six-tenths of a baby, but when we’re dealing with large numbers of women, and large numbers of babies, fractions and decimals do play a role.

Do tell, Art. I was picturing a landscape littered with partial baby corpses. Glad you set me straight.

He also stretches the content with a parade of irrelevant, or marginally relevant, statistics:

The fertility rate for the U.S. as a whole is 1.9 babies per woman over her lifetime, so Vermont’s fertility rate is about 15 percent below the U.S. average. By contrast, Utah, the state with the highest fertility rate, is 25 percent above the national average.

It’s like a high school student writing a five-page paper.

The “bulk” of the column is given over to a recitation of current and past numbers from the US and the world, followed by one paragraph listing possible reasons why Vermont might have a low fertility rate. That paragraph ends with:

We really don’t know the full reasons.

For this, we need an expert?

Woolf wraps things up with this thrilling conclusion: low fertility has consequences for the economy.

Last week’s entry in the Woolf oeuvre was even less meaty “Vermont Immigration patterns Differ From U.S.”

Stop the presses!!!!!

Do you mean to tell me that Vermont has fewer immigrants from Latin America than, say, Florida or Texas? I am shocked, shocked.

But yes, that’s the knowledge bombshell Woolf drops on our heads: Vermont gets relatively few immigrants, and most of ’em are from Canada or Europe. No shit, Sherlock.

Woolf doesn’t even try to contextualize this nothingburger of a column. The big conclusion reads like this:

Sometimes it’s hard for Vermonters to understand why the concerns and passions about immigration run so deep. One reason is that our immigrant population, and our experience with immigrants, is very different than it is in the rest of the United States.

I really, really hope that Woolf’s own ($150 per year plus tax) newsletter has more to offer than his Freeploid blurts. For that matter, I hope he’s doing some more substantive academic work to justify his UVM sinecure. Because judging by his newspaper columns, Art Woolf is a man without substance.

The Milne Transcripts, part 5: I’m not telling you

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The latest in my series of posts about Scott Milne’s epically bad July 25 appearance on WDEV’s Mark Johnson Show. Not only is he not ready for prime time, he’s not ready for 9 a.m. on a weekday. 

If the late Fred Tuttle was the Man With A Plan, then Scott Milne, Republican candidate for Governor, seems to be the Man Without A Plan. Time after time during the interview, he refused to take positions on important issues. He deferred until September or even until after the election; he said issues were too complicated for him to immediately answer.

His usual excuse was that he’s only been running for a short time. “I’m new to this game,” he told Johnson at one point, “I should get 30 days.” This is a reference to his campaign strategy: August is for attacking the Shumlin Administration, and September is for unveiling his own policies.

Well, I can sympathize with a candidate who’s just getting started — but whose fault is that? Which inexperienced candidate waited until the last possible moment to launch his campaign?

Er, that would be Scott Milne.

It’s like an actor who agrees on short notice to step into the lead role in a play, but when the curtain rises on Opening Night, he tells the audience he needs more time to learn the part because “I’m new to this game.” You think the audience would walk out?

Sorry, Mr. Milne. You signed up for this. You knew the calendar. The lights are up, the curtain is drawn, and you’re on.

Let’s look at his platform of procrastination, shall we?

— On health care reform, he refused to take a stand on the concept of single-payer (although he also called single-payer “reckless” more than once, so take your pick):

The single-payer is clearly something that we’ll be continuing to look at, and talk to the folks that I’m talking closely with now, and we’ll have some more specific ideas on that before the election.

— He calls Vermont’s economy his top priority. What will he do? “We’ll have a plan for fixing the economy” before Election Day. But he did offer a hint about his plan — albeit a useless one:

Our primary, um, fix that we’re going to offer to Vermont is, uh, a much better tone and friendly tone towards business, and then some specific plans about how to attract business and keep business in Vermont.

Aha. His “primary fix” is a better “tone.” Which makes sense; his primary criticism of Shumlin is the “unfriendly tone” toward business. If we just adopted a better “tone,” our economy would shoot through the roof.

— At one point, a caller asked about the then-extant possibility that Vermont would temporarily house some of the immigrant chlldren who have crossed into the US. He began with some good hemming and hawing:

The, um, situation of, ah, folks coming into, ah, Vermont from Central America is, is a really tough one.

After that inarticulate start, detoured into a standard Republican attack on President Obama, filled with ums, ahs, awkward pauses, and even a “Holy Shamoley,” before Johnson prompted him to answer the actual question.

Uh, I don’t know yet. I mean, I’m not going to jump up and down and say no. … I think it’s a complicated decision that deserves a lot of thought.

And then he patted himself on the back for having no opinion on the issue — because taking a stand would be the easy thing to do. Uh-huh. Also the leaderly thing to do.

— On the vexing subject of reforming public-school funding and organization, Milne plans an even bigger dose of delay:

I don’t think we’re going to have a specific plan before the election. What I’ve promised is, there’ll be a plan from the Milne Administration in the House and Senate in the first half of the biennium.

I can understand why he doesn’t want to stake a position during the campaign; the issue’s a toughie, and he’d be alienating some voters no matter what he said. But again, not exactly Leadership in Action.

All this deferral makes Scott Milne look weak. It’s even worse when he sounds weak as well: his voice hesitant, his sentences often incomplete and littered with “ums” and “ahs.”

Scott Milne posits his procrastination as The Big Plan: the “August Strategy” of attacking, the “September Strategy” of revealing his own ideas. I would argue that this is completely ass-backward: Now is the time when Scott Milne has the stage to himself, because Governor Shumlin won’t formally start the campaign until after Labor Day. Milne should be rolling out his proposals this month, and engage the Governor in September and October, when the two men will be sharing the stage.

Of course, the September Strategy is a convenient rationale for a candidate who’s just getting his feet wet and hasn’t worked his way through the issues. He said so himself, frequently referring to “the people I’m talking to” as he formulates his own views.

Not a good look for a man claiming to offer “leadership.”

Best get crackin’, Mr. Milne. You’re on stage, you’re fumbling it, and you’re losing the audience.

Aki Soga takes a stand

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In this day and age, it takes some courage for a newspaperman to criticize his readers. But that’s just what Aki Soga did on the Sunday Freeploid’s editorial page.

The Burlington Free Press’ website has been something of a toxic waste dump this week — in particular, the comments below its stories about Vermont possibly playing host to some of the thousands of children who have crossed our southern border and overwhelmed the Border Patrol’s ability to house them and process their cases.

The comments have been full of ignorance, rage, and hysteria. They accused “our crazy politicians” of “flooding the country” with illegal immigrants. They rant about the cost to taxpayers of housing them “forever,” which is a lie. They say the children aren’t children at all, but are drug mules and gang bangers. There were calls for “taking care of our own” first, which is rich considering what these geniuses probably think of social service programs in general.

There was enough bile and hatred that Aki Soga felt compelled to write an editorial entitled “Rise Above the Ugly Immigration Rhetoric,” upbraiding those commenters and making the case for humane treatment. For which I say, good on ya’, Mr. Soga.

At issue is the federal government’s request that Vermont consider housing up to a thousand immigrant children on a temporary basis. And, as Soga states in the third paragraph of his editorial:

The immediate reaction, coming mainly online in response to a Free Press story published Wednesday, dredges up the worst stereotypes while exposing a stark lack of understanding of the situation.

There is nothing to support claims by some opponents that the unaccompanied minors are gang members or have ties to terrorists. There are no reports of the children posing a serious public health threat.

To the commenters’ call for turning the kids back at the border or immediately deporting them without a hearing, Soga points out that the problem is “largely due to a 2008 law targeting human trafficking — passed with bi-partisan support and signed by President George W. Bush. The law requires children from Central America be given an immigration hearing before they can be returned to their home countries.”

He closes by calling for “level heads” and rejects “fears driven by ignorance of xenophobia,”  and asserts that “Vermonters are better than that.”

And how did the Freeploid commentariat react to Soga’s appeal to reason? Let’s check the comments.

“Joey Miller,” citing a post on the far-right-wing Judicial Watch, invokes the spectre of gangs and drugs:

Bringing a thousand “children” — many if not most of whom will be teenagers — from the most gang-infested murderous communities in the Americas into a small rural state with a serious heroin problem developing WILL result in a significant influx of gang violence here.

“Rich Celia” opts for the simple and straightforward:

Send them back.

“Bill Sprano” cites his standard of justice — which conveniently ignores the 2008 law — that’s LAW — requiring a hearing before deportation. And also ignores the fact that these children aren’t in the country illegally; they presented themselves at the border and were taken into custody according to, ahem, the law. But don’t let that stop Mr. Bill.

…these people are entering the country Against Our Laws! and they are aware it is against the law. This makes them Criminals by definition.

… Crime is Crime and we need to stop pussyfooting around the immigration issues and close the border with whatever force required, and send back as quickly as possible every illegal immigrant we can.

“Tim Vincent” seconds Mr. Sprano’s screed, and adds,

But you know…..It’s not about the law, it’s about creating more Democrat voters.

Yeah, because Obama’s big plot here is to assimilate all these children and turn them into freeloading, welfare-loving Democrats.

And Mr. Smook Banng (which is not at all a pseudonym) makes the rhetorical leap from temporary housing to permanent residency:

what… if hundreds of children came to Burlington, they end up staying for years (or longer), have to be enrolled in the public schools, and the school system needs to hire hundreds more employees to handle all the non-English learners? At what point do you become sympathetic to the plight of the taxpayers[?]

“Hundreds more employees”? At the very most, Vermont would provide temporary housing for no more than 1,000. Even if every one of those chlidren stayed, would the district really need “hundreds more employees”? Only in the fever dreams of Smook Banng.

And in fact, these children are all in custody. There’s a backlog in the system, mandated by LAW, to process their cases. Many will be sent home after due process. Some will be reunited with families already in the U.S. Few if any will remain in Vermont.

To be fair, there were a few voices of reason in the cesspit of the Freeploid’s comment section. But they were outnumbered by the angry trolls dwelling under that journalistic bridge.

Again, congratulations to Aki Soga for making a strong case for thoughtful consideration of the issue. And you trolls can get back under your bridge anytime.