Polinotes - Analysis & Research
Analysis and Research on Border Issues by Martin Paredes
When Renard Johnson announced his candidacy to be El Paso’s next mayor on January 30, 2024, few knew Johnson, his business or his history. Hence the reason of Johnson’s early mayoral announcement to introduce himself to El Paso’s voters. However, as this paper shows, Johnson’s public persona is a carefully crafted identity designed to keep the voters from looking too deeply in who Renard Johnson is.
In 2020, political underdog and activist, Verónica Carbajal came close to showing that a grassroots-driven political campaign can overcome long odds to win a marquee election. Carbajal almost unseated a former mayor coming in a close third in a tight race for El Paso’s next mayor. Carbajal went on to endorse the eventual winner, Oscar Leeser. Carbajal, it seemed, could compete in El Paso’s politics. However, two missteps in 2022 and 2023 made her an unviable for future elections. In this paper we examine Carbajal’s controversial vote for $400 million in non-voter approved certificates of obligations and her support for a controversial climate charter hurt her political future.
Each political season there are three major topics of discussion about El Paso. The first is that property taxes are one of the highest in the country. The second is that government entities tack on fees as hidden taxes, like the storm water fees. The last topic is that El Paso is a low wage town. This paper compares El Paso to eight other similar cities, taking into account the population, the geographic location of the city, the political party in charge and what it costs for a family to live in that city. The cities are ranked against El Paso in terms of housing costs – including the tax burden – and the cost to own a vehicle as well as the costs to shop at the local Walmart.
A former Border Patrol chief turned congressman is the architect of today’s failed immigration policies. Silvestre Reyes’s Operation Hold the Line operation led to today’s official immigration strategy of “prevention through deterrence”. It is a strategy that failed then and continues to fail to address the problem of irregular migration. Not only did it fail to deter undocumented migration from entering the United States, but Reyes’ operation was “successful” in one thing only – keeping El Paso’s gardeners, maids and nannies from going to work while doing nothing for keeping undocumented migrants from crossing the border.
In 2001 “water planners widely assumed that El Paso ‐ ‘that parched desert city’ ‐ would run out of water by 2030…Juárez, they said, might deplete its water in a matter of several years…into this ‘crisis’ scenario stepped would‐be water marketers like El Paso businessman and University of Texas regent Woody Hunt and Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz.” Reports described “the two men gallivanting around West Texas in search of underwater sources and concocting high‐flying plans to sell water to El Paso.”
As El Pasoans recover from the most recent flooding, the obvious question has been why? Why hasn’t the local government fixed the flooding problems? Although an important question to have because of the recent flooding, there is an even more important question the community needs to ask ‐ who controls the water policies for El Paso?
The politics of immigration often devolves into extremist arguments over “open borders” and the dangers of the border. The language used is designed to control the narrative for the agenda driving it. Such is the case around the recent debates over whether there is an ongoing border crisis today. Images of children in cages, pods and stories of children separated from their parents is used by both sides to frame the immigration debate. Lost in the narratives is the truth.
How did a person who had little ambition to run for office, suddenly win a municipal election and before anyone looked was running to be president? It starts with a quick handshake in an office filled with furniture from the 50’s, a meeting with his father that led to a discussion about the future of politics through the internet and a small online newspaper. This is the story of how Beto O’Rourke became political.
The United States is the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, in terms of population. America is constantly told that the Latino vote is rising and yet it bubbles up but never asserts itself. Latinos are present in America, but Latino voices are muted on the national dialog. The reason for this is that Latinos are not one, but several cultural and political identities each pulling in different directions.
Many conservatives in the United States like to channel Ronald Reagan as the image of the America First doctrine and true U.S.-centric conservatism. This narrative is part of the fiction that is driving today’s far right-wing conservatism that put Donald Trump into office. The problem, though, is that it is all based on a lie. Ronald Reagan dreamt of a future where Canada, México and the United States not only shared a common market to challenge the rest of the world, but also open borders between all three countries. In short, Ronald Reagan wanted open borders between México and the United States.
One consistent argument about immigration is that immigrants should assimilate. Unfortunately, like everything else having to do with immigration, the assimilation of immigrants is a complex problem because it involves many dynamics. Cultural assimilation is the fusion, or the integration of an ethnic minority into the dominant culture. The argument normally offered is that immigrants are expected to resemble the majority in behavior, values and social mores. Not normally included in the classical definition of sociology is language. However, it is a significant part of the debate about the assimilation of immigrants into America. Ignoring the language factor is, perhaps, because the assimilation of social mores assumes that a common language is part of that requirement. Whether language is part of the sociological definition of assimilation language is central to understanding immigrants in America.