Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Associated Press has learned that Homeland Security Secretary Jeh (Jay) Johnson is considering limiting deportations of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally but without serious criminal records. On President Barack Obama's orders, Johnson is conducting a politically charged review of U.S. deportation policy. The potential change could shield tens of thousands of immigrants now removed each year solely because of repeated immigration violations, such as re-entering the country after being deported. The change would fall short of deportation curbs demanded by activists frustrated by congressional inaction on immigration legislation. The possible move was confirmed by two...

The Office of BGLTQ Student Life, in partnership with other campus organizations, has expanded Harvard’s Pride Week into Pride Month in order to increase its thematic scope and impact on students. Throughout the month of April, the Office of BGLTQ Student Life has facilitated an event series, entitled Harvard Pride ’14, centered on queer issues and student life. Campus organizations—including Queer Students and Allies, the queer Jewish student group BAGELS, and the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality—organized and sponsored individual events. “We found that only providing programming in a week limited the opportunities for students...

There is a growing trend on American college campuses, a trend that augurs badly for free speech and robust debate. I refer to the way various groups of people use expressions of hurt feelings to trump speakers they disagree with. The most recent manifestation of this was at Brandeis University. Brandeis had invited the Somalia-born Ayann Hirsi Ali to receive an honorary doctorate and speak at the university’s commencement exercises. Her remarkable story is certainly worth honoring. She fled her native Africa to avoid one of those “arranged marriages,” finding asylum in The Netherlands. While living there, she was elected...

The College Board on Wednesday will release many details of its revised SAT, including sample questions and explanations of the research, goals and specifications behind them. “We are committed to a clear and open SAT, and today is the first step in that commitment,” said Cyndie Schmeiser, the College Board’s chief of assessment, in a conference call on Monday, previewing the changes to be introduced in the spring of 2016. She said the 211-page test specifications and supporting materials being shared publicly include “everything a student needs to know to walk into that test and not be surprised.” The overall...

Lately, labor law issues have been much in the news, including the vote against the UAW at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, and the ruling that college football players are free to unionize. And on March 31, another federal labor statute was the focal point of a court decision, namely the Davis-Bacon Act. Here is the background on the law. In 1931, Republican Congressman Robert Bacon (NY) teamed up with Republican Senator James Davis (PA) to push through a bill to rectify an egregious wrong (at least as they and some of their constituents saw things) – that construction contractors were choosing...

MEXICO CITY—Latin America is the world's most violent region, accounting for nearly one in three global homicides, according to data from a new study by the United Nations. Latin America racked up some 134,519 homicides in 2012, about 31% of the total for that year, according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime's Global Study on Homicide, its first since 2011. Yet the region's 574 million people comprise just 8% of the global population, according to U.N. figures. As a whole, Latin America's per capita homicide rate is 23.4 per 100,000...

AUSTIN, Tex. — Former President George W. Bush called the achievement gap between white and black children “a national scandal” on Thursday and urged both parties to come together to address it as the central civil rights issue of the modern era. Paying tribute to President Lyndon B. Johnson at a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, Mr. Bush said the real test of the nation’s commitment to equality would be to fix an educational system that has tolerated low standards for too long. “There’s a growing temptation among public officials in both political parties at...

More than a million children attend public schools in New York City. About 780,000 of them are poor enough to qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch. Getting into the program requires some paperwork, which is a burden but not a terrible one; the application is just one page. So why do so many eligible children — about 250,000 — not participate? The problem, advocates for schoolchildren say, isn’t so much aversion to the menu — today across the city, it’s roast turkey, stewed beans, sweet plantains and an oatmeal raisin cookie (plus chickpea salad, for high schoolers) — as...

With the recent confirmation that immigration enforcement in the country’s interior is all but eviscerated, it is an opportune moment to assess America’s future if its immigration policies--de facto and de jure--remain unchanged. California provides a window into that future, since the transformation unleashed by the last three decades of mass immigration is further advanced there than anywhere else. Nearly 50 percent of all California births are now Hispanic, with the state’s Hispanic population almost equal to the white population. The consequences of this demographic shift have been profound. In the 1950s and 1960s, the state led the nation in...

Purpose A large body of empirical research finds a significant racial gap in the use of exclusionary school discipline with black students punished at rates disproportionate to whites. Furthermore, no variable or set of variables have yet to account for this discrepancy, inviting speculation that this association is caused by racial bias or racial antipathy. We investigate this link and the possibility that differential behavior may play a role. Methods Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class (ECLS-K), the largest sample of school-aged children in the United States, we first replicate the results of prior studies. We...

Last week, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that because members of Northwestern University’s football team seem close enough to “employees” of the university to satisfy the statutory definition, they can proceed in their stated desire for union representation. The United Steelworkers union, hoping for a transfusion of dues money, helped the activist players, led by quarterback Kain Colter, push their petition for a union certification election. Conceivably, the union could wind up negotiating on behalf of the Northwestern players with the university over all matters that are subjects of collective bargaining under the law...

No Bloomberg excerpts allowed, story here.

COLUMBUS, Ga. — Republicans, poised for strong gains in the midterm elections, are offering starkly conflicting messages about President Obama to rally their voters. In one moment, they say the president is feckless and weak. But in the next, they say Mr. Obama is presiding over an “imperial presidency” that is exercising power that verges on dictatorial. So far, they are succeeding in having it both ways. Representative Paul Broun, Republican of Georgia, who has criticized Mr. Obama for “leading from behind” on foreign policy, stood before a gathering of Republican women here recently, his voice loud and deliberate, as...

Sometimes it makes sense to borrow to finance an investment; sometimes equity is a better choice. When it comes to college education, however, borrowing (especially through the government) is usually a mistake. If we could catalyze a system of equity financing for higher education, that would be a great improvement over the status quo. In his 1955 paper “The Role of Government in Education,” Milton Friedman suggested the idea of equity contracts to finance college education. Friedman thought that loans were not the appropriate means of financing education and argued that the better way was to advance the needed funds...

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has quietly revived an investigation of Florida’s Bright Futures scholarships, a move that could reignite long-simmering complaints about the fairness of the popular program. Since the program’s inception, an outsized share of more than $4 billion in scholarships has gone to white or affluent families, at least some of whom were wealthy enough to afford college without any help. In recent years, state lawmakers — concerned about rising costs of the program — changed the standards to make the scholarships even harder to get, raising the minimum SAT and ACT test...

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To most ears, it probably sounds inoffensive. A little outdated and clinical, perhaps, but innocuous enough: homosexual. But that five-syllable word has never been more loaded, more deliberately used and, to the ears of many gays and lesbians, more pejorative. “ ‘Homosexual’ has the ring of ‘colored’ now, in the way your grandmother might have used that term, except that it hasn’t been recuperated in the same way,” said George Chauncey, a Yale professor of history and an author who studies gay and lesbian culture. Consider the following phrases: homosexual community, homosexual activist, homosexual marriage. Substitute the word “gay” in...

SPRINGFIELD — Illinois Democrats went all-in Thursday with their election-year class warfare theme as Speaker Michael Madigan pitched the idea of asking voters to raise taxes on millionaires, Senate President John Cullerton advanced a minimum-wage increase and Gov. Pat Quinn compared wealthy opponent Bruce Rauner to TV villain Mr. Burns. The moves continued a Democratic push to highlight income inequity that started Tuesday night before Rauner had even claimed his narrow victory in the Republican primary for governor. Rauner and Republican legislative leaders have countered by accusing Democrats of being tax happy and trying to drive a wedge between the...

Racial minorities are more likely than white students to be suspended from school, to have less access to rigorous math and science classes, and to be taught by lower-paid teachers with less experience, according to comprehensive data released Friday by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. In the first analysis in nearly 15 years of information from all of the country’s 97,000 public schools, the Education Department found a pattern of inequality on a number of fronts, with race as the dividing factor. Black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students. A...

Nearly a quarter of the U.S. workforce will soon have to answer a personal question from the boss: Are you disabled? U.S. regulations going into effect next week require for the first time that federal contractors—a group that includes Boeing Co., Dell Inc. and AT&T Inc., T among some 40,000 others—ask their employees if they have a disability. Those that don't employ a minimum of 7% disabled workers, or can't prove they are taking steps to achieve that goal, could face penalties and, in the most extreme cases, the loss of their contracts, according to a government official. The target...