Two men were rescued, and two bodies have been recovered. The others are missing and presumed dead, according to officials. They were men who worked hard to provide for their families here in the United States and to send money back home to relatives still in their native lands, according to family members and friends.

One victim was Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, a father of two who immigrated from Honduras 18 years ago. In addition to his work for Brawner, he had started a small package delivery company. Another was Miguel Luna, a father of three who immigrated from El Salvador 19 years ago.

They were not plundering and pillaging, murdering or creating mayhem, despite the image of such immigrants that has been made popular on the right. Not only were they supporting their families, but they were also making a vital contribution to our economy. You won’t hear nearly as much about these men as you have heard about Jose Antonio Ibarra, the man charged in the murder of Laken Riley, killed on a jogging trail at the University of Georgia.

Presumably, the bridge crew comprised documented workers since private companies are legally obligated to check immigration status, but it’s not clear how they arrived. Two decades or so ago, it was not uncommon for men such as these to cross without papers and to later be absorbed into the workforce, acquiring documents along the way. They worked hard, revitalizing not only industries but also entire communities.

You won’t hear this from presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump or his acolytes on Fox News, but many economists believe that the U.S. economy has maintained a steady growth rate (unlike Great Britain) partly because of immigration. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the surge in immigration will bolster the U.S. economy by about $7 trillion over the next decade. Immigrants fill jobs left vacant by a surge of retiring baby boomers and help make up for a declining birth rate.

If you are worried about the soaring cost of housing, which is linked to a lack of supply, you ought to be happy to welcome immigrants, many of whom take jobs in the construction industry. According to government statistics, Latinos account for about one-third of construction workers. It is worth noting that construction is among the more hazardous occupations — becoming more so as climate change makes summers hotter.

As my hair grays and my joints creak, I think more about needing assistance as I age. There is a shortage of caregivers because such jobs don’t pay well. Who will assist me to get in and out of the shower or to prepare my meals in later years if I need that? If we cannot allow more immigrants, legal and otherwise, into the country, a lot of the elderly will be out of luck.

Still, the anti-immigration die-hards can’t seem to wrap their heads around that reality. They thrill, instead, to Trump’s racist tropes about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” which echoes Adolf Hitler. They indulge in fabrications about immigrants who plot terrorism or spread disease. They support militias who flock to the Texas border, guns in hand, to “protect” the country from “invaders.”

Since the bridge collapse, some right-wingers have fallen further down their racist rabbit hole. Not only have they been unable to acknowledge the benefits of immigration, but they have also gone after native-born people of color, insisting that the Baltimore accident was somehow the fault of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives. There is one small benefit to this: They can’t plausibly deny that bigotry fuels their beliefs.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

So it has always been. Book-banning is as American as apple pie, despite our founding documents about personal liberties and our mythology about freedom. Still, 21st-century book bans and library attacks have a few modern quirks that reveal the performative nature of the reactionary political enterprise.

There was, for example, the Nebraska state legislator who decided earlier this month to read aloud from Alice Sebold’s memoir, “Lucky,” in which she vividly recounted being raped as a college student. Republican Steve Halloran wasn’t content with just reading the explicit account of the assault to emphasize his complaint that the book was “obscene.” He went on to insert the last name of Democratic legislators, a brother and sister with whom he frequently disagrees, in the graphic passage he read.

As lawmakers on both sides of the aisle castigated him for that gross breach of decency, he apologized for smearing his colleagues, Democrats Machaela and John Cavanaugh. But he was no closer to understanding how ludicrous his complaint about obscenity was. Sebold was raped during her freshman year at Syracuse University. That’s what’s obscene.

In the United States, more than 400,000 women were sexually assaulted in 2022, the last year for which reliable statistics are available. If teens want to read Sebold’s account, they should be allowed to. If anything, reading a graphic account would make adolescents more aware of the danger of sexual assault and might keep them safer.

(If Halloran were a reader, he’d know that there is an altogether different reason for pulling “Lucky” from library shelves. Sebold misidentified her rapist on the stand, and the book recounts that unfortunate man’s arrest and conviction. Anthony Broadwater was exonerated in 2021.)

In Prattville, Alabama, meanwhile, a librarian was fired earlier this month for … well, it’s not clear why he was terminated. In a brilliant bit of reporting, award-winning newspaper columnist Kyle Whitmire recounts the shifting rationales that Ray Boles, chairman of the Autauga-Prattville Library Board, gives for firing library director Andrew Foster.

By the time Boles finishes a series of contradictory statements, it seems clear that Foster was fired because he had the temerity to request “clarification” after Boles ordered him to move more than a hundred books to adults-only shelves, many of them with nonexplicit LGBTQ+ content. Books with sexually explicit passages are among those most frequently targeted by reactionary book-banning mobs. So are books with LGBTQ+-related content, even if they are not graphic, and books related to the nation’s history of racial oppression.

I should also note that two of the most frequently banned books, George Orwell’s “1984” and Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” are novels about dystopian societies in which books are banned. Irony, anyone?

That’s just one bit of irony. In addition, there’s this: Here in the early 21st century, when adolescents and even primary school-age kids are drowning in technology — phones, tablets, laptops — and suffering from shorter and shorter attention spans, are parents really that worried about what books they are reading? Are they reading books much at all?

As the mother of a 15-year-old, I am struggling to picture her wandering into a library and pulling “Lucky” off the shelf. Even with the controversy it presents over unjust incarceration, I’d be thrilled if my daughter wanted to read it. The unfortunate truth is that she never ventures into a library without my prompting. How many teens do?

On the other hand, I can’t keep up with all the sexually explicit lyrics she’s listening to on streaming music services and the youth-centered TV shows based around sex, drugs, suicide, sexual abuse and heaven knows what else. Streaming services are well beyond the reach of old-fashioned broadcast censors, and I can’t find enough parental controls to keep all of that out of reach.

If she were merely reading books with sexually explicit passages, that would be a profound relief. At least she’d be reading.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

For better and for worse, much has changed since then. For worse, the U.S. Supreme Court rode roughshod over precedent and abolished reproductive freedom with its 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson. The consequences have been far-reaching in states such as Texas, Alabama and Mississippi, which immediately outlawed most abortions. As a result, pregnant women whose lives are threatened by fetal anomalies have not been able to receive the health care they need, and women who do not want to carry a child to term have been forced to do so.

For better, a majority of Americans have voiced their opposition to restrictions on reproductive freedom. Even in red states such as Kansas, voters have protected abortion rights. The backlash against the Supreme Court’s decision has been so powerful that it propelled Democrats to surprising wins in the 2022 midterm elections.

It’s no surprise, then, to see Vice President Kamala Harris make a historic visit to a Minnesota Planned Parenthood clinic. It’s a way for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign to highlight its support for reproductive rights. As the first sitting vice president to visit a Planned Parenthood facility, Harris can underscore former President Donald Trump’s role in creating an ultraconservative high court.

But there is more to it than that. This visit will help Planned Parenthood and similar clinics around the nation regain their stature — to recover from smears they never deserved. The accusations against Planned Parenthood clinics that cropped up a decade back were based on secret videos filmed — and doctored — by conservative groups looking to demean the clinics. While such clinics have long legally provided fetal tissue to researchers working on cures for diseases such as Parkinson’s, the videos were edited to make it look as though clinic employees were up to no good.

Among conservatives, the hostility toward Planned Parenthood was such that, in 2021, award-winning historian Jon Meacham was disinvited from giving a speech at Alabama’s Samford University, supposedly one of the state’s academically preeminent institutions of higher learning. Meacham’s crime? He had once spoken at a fundraising luncheon for Planned Parenthood.

Harris’ visit can help remind Americans that Planned Parenthood and similar clinics provide a vast array of reproductive services, usually to women who are uninsured or underinsured. Abortion has always accounted for just a tiny percentage of the work at medical facilities conservatives denounce as “abortion clinics.” For the most part, Planned Parenthood has done just what its name suggests: It helps women (or anyone else) plan their families by handing out contraceptives. So do other similar clinics.

It’s too late to restore those services in red states where clinics have shut down. The Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Jackson, Mississippi — known as the Pink House because of its paint job — closed as soon as the Dobbs ruling, in which it was the defendant, was issued. That leaves women in one of the nation’s poorest states without access to affordable reproductive services — not just abortions, but also contraception.

It’s not too late to keep reminding Americans that reproductive choice is a bedrock principle in this democracy. Even for affluent women, the Dobbs decision has meant uncertainty and inconvenience. For those with life-threatening pregnancies, the limits on abortion care have also meant trauma. For less-affluent women, the decision has been so much worse.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, rates of unintended pregnancy are highest for low-income women. Rates of unintended pregnancy, the institute says, are higher in the United States than in most other developed nations. Those statistics speak to the dire need for reproductive services — routine gynecological check-ups, contraception and abortion, among them — for women who are in lower-income brackets.

Harris should keep reminding Americans of that.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

For virtually my entire life, American citizens shared a bipartisan consensus that Russia was a dangerous rival — even after the Soviet Union collapsed. Republicans were more likely to hold to that view as the 21st century dawned. In a 2012 debate, then-President Barack Obama mocked his rival, Mitt Romney, for casting Russia, rather than al-Qaida, as the biggest threat to the world order. After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, many conservatives insisted Romney was right.

Ah, but it didn’t take a decade for that view to be turned on its head. As commentators have noted, Republicans have fallen in line with their leader, Donald Trump, who has shown a strange admiration for Putin. As New York magazine pundit Jonathan Chait wrote last month, “During his time in office and after, Trump managed to create … a Republican constituency for Russia-friendly policy. … Conservatives vying to be the Trumpiest of them all have realized that supporting Russia translates in the Republican mind as a proxy for supporting Trump.”

That’s bad enough, but, unfortunately, there is more to it. It’s not clear why Trump loves Putin — he might genuinely admire a dictator who can get away with assassinating his rivals — but it is clear why some thinking reactionaries who don’t need the political boost of kowtowing to Trump admire Putin and his allies nevertheless: simple bigotry.

Take Rod Dreher, a theocrat and writer who spent months in Hungary and wrote of his deep admiration for its dictatorial president, Viktor Orban. While human rights activists have noted that democratic freedoms, including an independent judiciary and a free press, have seriously eroded under Orban’s rule, Dreher wrote glowingly about Orban’s Christianity and his keeping Hungary out of the “abyss of postliberal hedonism.” In other words, Orban has persecuted gays and lesbians. He also explicitly criticizes migrants, especially those who are not of Christian ancestry.

Putin wrote that playbook. Now that he has made a marriage of convenience with the Russian Orthodox Church, he has taken to blasting Western political standards such as support for same-sex marriage. That’s music to the ears of the American theocrats who want to ban same-sex marriage in this country.

Racism is also an important aspect of Putin’s appeal to some reactionaries. The Russian Imperial Movement, based in St. Petersburg, is dedicated to fueling white supremacy around the globe, and its leaders have reached out to white supremacists here in the United States. (No such group can remain active in Russia without Putin’s implicit approval.) White supremacist David Duke once called Russia “the key to white survival.”

While some of the Trump toadies giving a pass to Putin may not have associated him with white supremacy, Tucker Carlson certainly is aware. Since he was fired from Fox News, Carlson has been drifting closer to the explicitly racist fringe. In February, he flew to Moscow for an interview with Putin that turned out to be an airing of Putin’s anti-Ukraine and anti-democracy propaganda. Then Carlson visited a Moscow grocery and proceeded to praise its offerings as much better than those in American markets. He didn’t note that the average Russian is much poorer than the average American.

For Trumpists, facts don’t matter. Whiteness does. As the brilliant Princeton historian Eddie Glaude wrote on X (formerly Twitter):

“Russia has tapped into the central contradiction at the heart of the U.S. It isn’t the menace of communism and an assault on liberty. Russia has identified with the serpent wrapped around the legs of the table upon which the Declaration of Independence was signed.”

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

But it is quite likely that you’ve heard about the death of Laken Hope Riley, 22, who was murdered several days ago while jogging on a trail on the University of Georgia’s campus. American culture has never judged every murder victim equally, even if each is an equally wholesome citizen. Black and brown victims are rarely afforded the compassion and communal grief shown to attractive white women.

Riley was a young white nursing student at nearby Augusta University and was apparently killed for no reason — just, police say, a “crime of opportunity.” That’s enough to cause chills on UGA’s campus, especially among other young women who frequent the wooded jogging trails.

But there is an additional reason why Riley’s murder has become a cause celebre in the right-wing mediascape: The man charged with her murder, Jose Ibarra, is an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. It seems some suspects are also more important than others — at least as a cautionary tale. To the viciously xenophobic right, Ibarra demonstrates the foolishness of current border policies. According to authorities, Ibarra was arrested by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in September 2022 but released pending appeal of his immigration case.

Right-wing radio host and blogger Erick Erickson declared, “It cannot be ignored that she died at the hands of an illegal alien who crossed into the country in 2022 as President Biden refused to secure the borders.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, chimed in on Fox News, “It’s just outrageous. People are so frustrated. And this is something that we’ve been talking about for years now, about the porous southern border.”

I am so sorry for Riley’s family, as I’m sorry for the families of Gladney and Malloy. As the mother of a 15-year-old, I spend far too much time obsessing over the dangers she faces — sexual assault, car accidents, gun violence — especially as the time nears when I cannot watch over her nearly as much. But threats specifically from undocumented immigrants never enter my mind. That’s because they commit far fewer crimes than people born in this country.

As The Washington Post points out, “There is strong evidence that all immigrants — in the United States legally or otherwise — are more law-abiding than native-born American citizens.” In their 2023 book, “Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock,” criminologists Graham Ousey and Charis Kubrin found that communities with more immigration tend to have less crime.

Moreover, violent crime is dropping in the United States, happily. After surging during the pandemic, when all sorts of antisocial behaviors increased, violent crime has declined since 2020, which coincides with the presidency of President Joe Biden. The campaign of his rival, Donald Trump, of course claims otherwise. On social media, Trump’s campaign has posted the following tagline on an ad: “You’re not safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

There is a long tradition in American politics of Republicans campaigning on restoring “law and order,” and there is an even longer tradition of conservative politicians pandering to the xenophobic tendencies of a sizable population of American voters. During the 19th century, Irish immigrants were caricatured in political cartoons as lazy, drunken and violent. Similarly, Chinese laborers faced virulent racism, dismissed as dirty, disease-carrying dangers to society. There is in many of us, apparently, a primal need to fear and ostracize the “other.”

When an illegal immigrant from Mexico was charged with the death of 20-year-old University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts in 2018, her father wrote an impassioned plea for politicians and their allies to stop using her death as a political pawn. “Do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist. The act grievously extends the crime that stole Mollie from our family,” Rob Tibbetts wrote in The Des Moines Register.

Unfortunately, that racism lives on.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

But this state’s ruling jurists are not so concerned about children already living among us — the food they eat or the water they drink. They’re not troubled about the medical care many will not receive.

Instead, the Alabama Supreme Court has come to the rescue of so-called unborn children, with a perverse ruling that declares frozen embryos are children with the full rights of any human being. The court uses an 1872 state law to undergird its decision, and its reasoning seems to hail from some centuries before that.

Undeterred by the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom from religion, and unmoored from long-standing legal precepts, Chief Justice Tom Parker quotes liberally from the Bible and other religious texts to support his views. Quoting a 17th-century Christian commentator, Parker writes, “(T)he chief excellence and prerogative of created man is in the image of his Creator. For while God has impressed as it were a vestige of himself upon all the rest of the creatures … .”

This absurd ruling has the value of not pretending to be anything other than what it is: a dictate from reactionary theocrats who care nothing for religious liberty or democratic freedoms — no matter how frequently the word “freedom” is used on the right. These Bible-thumpers want to force every American to live according to their antediluvian standards.

There is certainly no scientific standard at work here. Most scientists — indeed, most people — don’t consider any embryo, which is simply an egg fertilized by sperm, to be a person. It’s not even a fetus. It’s the size of a pinhead. According to researchers, 10%-40% of embryos are lost before they are implanted in the womb in natural conception. That’s how nature works.

When couples (or singles) employ IVF, they usually freeze several embryos because of the rate of failure. But those who enjoy the success of one or two babies often don’t want more. Are they to be forced to pay to keep the embryos frozen?

I have nothing but compassion for those trying desperately to conceive through IVF, spending thousands of dollars, hoping against hope for an actual baby.

As Megan Legerski, a Tuscaloosa, Alabama, woman undergoing IVF, told The New York Times, she has miscarried but has three embryos left and will try again.

“Having three embryos in the freezer is not the same to me as having one that implants and becomes a pregnancy, and it’s not the same as having a child. We have three embryos. We don’t have three children.”

Many Alabama women and their partners are now scrambling to figure out whether to transfer their embryos to a state where the judicial system has not gone mad. Dr. Paula Amato, the president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, predicts that “modern fertility care will be unavailable to the people of Alabama.” Indeed, the University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System, the most prestigious provider in the state, has paused its IVF treatment while it tries to figure a way through the court’s legal mess.

As for Alabama’s already-born poor children, those who have had the temerity to show up outside the womb, they will continue to be treated as an inconvenience by the state’s political apparatus. They will continue to attend dysfunctional schools, live in poor housing and receive substandard medical care. Gov. Kay Ivey is among the nation’s 14 right-wing governors who have refused federal funding for extra grocery money for less affluent families during the summer months. Let them eat … well, whatever.

If you see no hint of Christian compassion here, that’s because there isn’t any, regardless of Justice Parker’s screed. This is about a theocracy demanding control — nothing more, nothing less.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

That’s why I dread February’s designation as Black History Month. Its perfunctory tales of a handful of well-known Black Americans leave students with a wrongheaded idea — that the history of Black folk in this country is slight and unrelated to the main story.
Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no American history without the history of Black people, who first touched these shores in 1619, before the Mayflower landed at Cape Cod. We were crucial to the development of what became the United States. Anyone who willfully deletes us from that story is simply engaging in fraud.

Yet, that is what many conservative activists and their allies are doing. As legitimate revisionist historians, ambitious journalists and progressive activists have started to challenge traditional American myths — from the sainthood of Thomas Jefferson to the so-called honor of the Lost Cause — Donald Trump and his right-wing followers have responded with fury, desperate to hold on to a more white-centered version of the nation’s past.

Trump entered the fray after journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones oversaw the ambitious 1619 Project at The New York Times, a 2019 multipart series that emphasized the importance of chattel slavery, that grotesque institution, in the founding and economic growth of the United States. In response, Trump assembled the 1776 Commission, a group of activists masquerading as historians, to attack the series. He vowed to ban the project from school curricula, claiming it taught students to “hate their country.”

His allies have followed with disruptions to classrooms across the nation. Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governorship of Virginia in 2021 after a campaign focused on banning certain school materials, including “Beloved,” a brilliant novel by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. When he was still running for the GOP nomination for the presidency, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to out-Trump his rival with a sweeping statewide campaign to ban books, silence teachers and even take over a public college deemed too progressive. Several GOP-dominated state legislatures have passed laws aimed at restricting “divisive” (whatever that means) content in the classroom.

Their ire is aimed not only at the real history that involves Black folk but also any teaching of the cruelty of white explorers and settlers toward indigenous people, who were ruthlessly exploited and exterminated. The nation’s founding and its growth as a fledgling democracy were built on violence and plunder as well as extraordinary promises of freedom and self-governance. That’s the reality, and schools should teach all of it.

According to the MAGA-addled crowd, though, any lessons that dare to touch on the truth about U.S. history leave white children cowering in shame. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, one of several Republican governors who have signed legislation outlawing the teaching of “critical race theory,” has claimed that such lessons were “running amok.” (Actual critical race theory is a college-level course not taught in elementary or secondary classes.) He said, “Children are dragged to the front of the classroom and are coerced to declare themselves as oppressors, that they should feel guilty because of the color of their skin, or that they are inherently a victim because of their race.” It should be noted that Reeves could not name a single school where such a thing had really happened — likely because that scenario was simply a figment of his imagination.

As a college lecturer who has also lectured in high schools, I have never seen any white students who seemed ashamed or felt guilty about the history of their ancestors. Rather, they seem to get the point of teaching history, which remains as true as when philosopher George Santayana wrote it: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Students cannot continue the path toward a more perfect union without that full history. They deserve that instead of a whitewashed version that is more fiction than fact.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

The Republican Party and its resentful base are now consumed by rage — furious, combustible, irrational. They have slipped far down the rabbit hole, MAGA-addled and drunk on fury with the modern world.

Events of the last week in the House and Senate are illustrative of the collapse into chaos on the political right. A small group of senators had spent months negotiating a legislative deal that would provide robust protections at the border, as Republicans demanded, as well as military aid for Israel and Ukraine. Since so many right-wingers are cozying up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, giving in to their border demands seemed the only way to ensure continued aid to Ukraine.

The GOP insisted on several tough measures, and the bill included those. According to The New York Times, the bill would have tightened the rules for asylum seekers, expanded detention facilities, hired more border agents, sped up the process to send back migrants who do not qualify for entry and even temporarily shut down the border during peak times. Perhaps most important, Democrats gave up on their decades-long demand that any border security bill include a path to citizenship for undocumented migrants already here.

After Democrats agreed to the GOP wish list, Republicans immediately decided they didn’t like the legislation after all. Perhaps they never expected their colleagues to accede to their harsh provisions. Perhaps it was simply their unflagging allegiance to their Dear Leader, Donald J. Trump, who has been denouncing the legislation since he learned of negotiations. He has dared any Republican to support it, declaring on social media that “only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill.”

Political analysts have pointed out that Trump, who adopted Wallace’s angry, racially aggrieved rhetoric in his first campaign, doesn’t want the migrant surge at the border to ease before November. That way, he can keep blasting his rival, President Joe Biden, for allowing migrants to enter, “poisoning the blood of our country,” as Trump puts it. It’s in Trump’s best interest to keep the issue alive through the election, but it’s also likely true that Trump doesn’t care to solve problems at the border at all, even if he were to return to the White House. There is no easier way for him to keep his xenophobic base enraged than to constantly bash the nonwhite migrants trying to escape violence and dire poverty in their home countries.

After all, Trump had four years to solve the migrant crisis, and he accomplished little other than separating babies and small children from their parents. (Some of those families, by the way, have yet to be reunited.) He is credited with increasing border apprehensions and detentions, but he didn’t deport as many undocumented migrants as President Barack Obama did.

And what of that 2,000-mile border wall that Trump was going to force Mexico to pay for? In fact, the Trump administration built 458 miles of barriers, 406 miles of which merely replaced old ones. The 1,200-mile stretch of the Rio Grande, the least secure part of the southern border, was left to customs officials and vigilantes.

Trump has never been schooled in the processes of governing, so he may have no idea about the bureaucratic hurdles and budget maneuvers that would be required to build a solid wall of more than a thousand miles. Some of the property such a wall would be mounted on is on private land, and the property owners may or may not want a wall. Besides, as critics have noted, even walls are not the ultimate protection. Drug smugglers have been digging tunnels under border walls for decades.

Still, in six of seven swing states, voters say they trust Trump over Biden on immigration by 52% to 30%. Trump doesn’t have to do anything about the problem — he just has to keep voters enraged.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

As a part-time lecturer at a public university, I’ve taught a few of those students myself. Let me join the chorus affirming, “College is not for everyone.”

But who said it was?

In recent years, as more and more young adults struggle with debt acquired paying college costs, critics have insisted that the idea of “college for all” was a huge blunder, a colossal misdirect that set up generations for economic disaster. Many of those critics attribute that blunder to former President Barack Obama.

That is inaccurate, and here’s why: Obama never declared “college for all” a goal. He did say, several times, that the United States should once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. The U.S. did have one of the first systems of universal, compulsory public education in the world, and with generous benefits for veterans after World War II, this nation led in educational attainment for decades before China, India and nations in Western Europe made spectacular advances. Today, a well-designed campaign to increase our percentage of workers with four-year degrees seems like a reasonable goal.

So does Obama’s other proposal. Shortly after his inauguration, in his 2009 address to a joint session of Congress, he urged every American to pursue education beyond a high school diploma.

“Tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training,” he said. “This can be community college or a four-year school, vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma.”

That speech was delivered in the middle of the so-called Great Recession, when the housing market collapsed, the stock market tanked and unemployment lines were long. It was a depressing time, and the newly elected president was presenting a message that pointed to a brighter future.

In the intervening years, the economy has gone through other cycles, ups and downs, with the most disorienting period a COVID pandemic that shuttered businesses and, once again, fueled unemployment. The recovery, happily, has brought a low unemployment rate and, though soaring prices have eaten into savings, higher wages.

Through all the business cycles, one thing has not changed: Americans need more education in order to get the best jobs. With technology taking over many of the simplest tasks, workers will need more training for jobs that robots can’t do. Community colleges and vocational schools offer that training.

With many baby boomers retiring, there is a critical shortage of workers in skilled trades from the construction industry to manufacturing. Ironworkers, welders, plumbers and electricians are in demand. Those jobs require postsecondary training but not a four-year-college degree, and they pay a decent wage.

Medicine is also experiencing a critical staffing shortage, especially of nurses. That’s why so many hospitals now recruit outside the country, from the Philippines to Jamaica, even though a high school graduate in the U.S. can become a licensed practical nurse (LPN) within one to two years and a registered nurse (RN) within three.

Our political leaders could make educational attainment more palatable for families by making community colleges free, as Obama proposed. That would be a significant boost for students whose career aspirations don’t depend on a four-year college degree. It would also be a significant boost for the U.S. economy.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

I remember when affirmative action was the go-to excuse for every white student who failed to gain entry to the college of his or her choice, for every white job applicant who failed to get the position, for every white worker who failed to get a desired promotion.

America is now in the Trump era, a second post-Reconstruction period that has brought explicit racism back into prominence. Among Rufo’s allies, DEI is described as having an overarching power and authority that its predecessor, affirmative action, lacked. Apparently, any problem — trivial or world-shaking — can be blamed on practices designed to promote racial equity in the workplace.

The practice of affirmative action, a phrase coined during the Kennedy administration, was meant to ensure that government contractors made “affirmative” efforts (beyond their usual malign neglect) to ensure that some people of color and women were hired. By the 1970s, many private corporations and nongovernment institutions had adopted some semblance of the practice to help Black, brown and female Americans gain a foothold in the mainstream American economy.

Affirmative action immediately attracted critics on the right, of course. President Ronald Reagan, who had opened his campaign with a Mississippi speech defending “state’s rights,” intended to gut Kennedy’s executive order.

Corporate leaders resisted, as did several members of Reagan’s cabinet, according to the Washington Post. John Huck, then chairman of pharmaceutical giant Merck, said his company would continue using “goals and timetables” to increase diversity. “They are a part of our culture and corporate procedures,” he said. Reagan backed down.

There remain corporate and institutional leaders working to instill the value of diversity in their workplaces and trying to protect the modest gains they have made toward hiring and promoting people of color, but they are overmatched by vicious campaigns of dishonesty designed to banish DEI by associating it with any failure in any sector.

Billionaire Elon Musk, for example, used his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to insist that diversity efforts are to blame for the dangerous mishaps afflicting Boeing airplanes: “Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety? That is actually happening.” Musk cited a corporate filing from Boeing that added DEI and climate to its long-range business plan, which already included “product safety, employee safety and quality.”

Notably, Musk did not blame “climate” for Boeing’s failures. Nor has he discussed the spectacular shortcomings of his Teslas, which are the subject of investigations and lawsuits because of deaths and injuries. In December, Tesla recalled two million vehicles. I don’t suppose DEI caused Teslas to crash.

Nor is DEI responsible for Boeing’s problems, though Musk’s lies have been repeated throughout the right-wing mediascape. Donald Trump Jr. chimed in with a post on X: “I’m sure this has nothing to do with mandated Diversity Equity and Inclusion practices in the airline industry!!!”

Trump meant that remark sarcastically, but it was literally true. Aviation experts always study airline accidents, including those in Boeing aircraft, and they have never cited DEI practices. Boeing’s troubles stem from its decision to cut costs, a corporate practice that often leads to problems with safety.

Furthermore, no matter what Boeing says in its corporate filings, the aviation industry has always been dominated by white men, and it continues to be. According to Vox, racial and ethnic minorities make up 35% of engineers for commercial airlines, up from 32% in 2020.

Back when affirmative action was the bogeyman, a few Black intellectuals made the argument that the practice hurt them because any advances they notched in overwhelmingly white institutions — whether corporations or government offices or universities — would be credited to affirmative action. I always believed that was a naive argument. The truth is that their racist critics would always find a way to use their Blackness against them, with or without affirmative action.

And that remains true. Affirmative action wasn’t to blame for this lack of respect, and neither is DEI. The real problem is racism.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.