Mexico Is Pushing Migrants Back South | The United States Has a Keen Demographic Edge | The Real ID Deadline Will Never Arrive, and more

On Tuesday, Mr. Biden will announce that he is increasing some of those tariffs. That includes quadrupling electric vehicle tariffs to 100 percent, tripling certain levies on steel and aluminum products to 25 percent, and doubling the rate on semiconductors to 50 percent.
But Mr. Biden’s trade war differs from Mr. Trump’s in important ways. Mr. Trump was trying to bring back a broad swath of factory jobs outsourced to China. Mr. Biden is seeking to increase production and jobs in a select group of emerging high-tech industries — including clean energy sectors, like electric vehicles, that Mr. Trump shows little interest in cultivating.
Mr. Biden has pulled more policy levers, some of them created by Mr. Trump. He has imposed more restrictions on trade with China, including limiting sales of American technology to Beijing, while funneling federal subsidies to American manufacturers trying to compete with Chinese production.
And in a sharp break from Mr. Trump’s go-it-alone posture, Mr. Biden’s strategy relies on bringing international allies together to counter China through a mix of domestic incentives and, potentially, coordinated tariffs on Chinese goods.
As they compete for the White House again, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are both promising to further increase trade pressure on China, which both men accuse of unfair trade practices that disadvantage American workers. Here is how their plans overlap, and where they diverge sharply.

The Other Busing Program: Mexico Is Pushing Migrants Back South  (Simon Romero and Paulina Villegas, New York Times)
The buses rumble into town day and night, dumping migrants in a city many didn’t even know existed.
But instead of landing closer to the U.S. border, they are being hauled roughly 1,000 miles in the opposite direction — deep into southern Mexico in a shadowy program meant to appease the Biden administration and ship migrants far from the United States.
Mexican authorities rarely publicly acknowledge the busing program, making it much less contentious than the efforts by Republican governors to transport migrants to blue states that have become political theater in the United States.
Yet the busing program is exposing the chasm between the Mexican government’s rhetoric promoting a humanitarian approach to migration, and the country’s role as a heavy-handed enforcer of U.S. border objectives, leaving many migrant families stranded to fend for themselves.
Mexico’s National Migration Institute declined to comment. Officials there sometimes frame the detention and transfers of migrants in humanitarian jargon as “rescues” or “dissuasion” aimed at easing conditions in dangerous, overcrowded areas, or they use the technical term “decompression.”

Americans Must Prepare for Another Round of Election Denial  (Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post)
We know it is coming. The array of contestants in four-times indicted former president Donald Trump’s vice-presidential beauty pageant have repeatedly refused to say they unequivocally will accept the election results. Trump has already begun to lie about Democrats enlisting illegal immigrants to vote. If the MAGA forces do not win, Americans can expect an enhanced replay of 2020 election denial — amplified by Truth Social, Elon Musk’s X and China’s TikTok. Americans must collectively prepare for it — and for any violence MAGA forces (from the gang who argued Jan. 6, 2021, was “legitimate political discourse”) might incite.
Democrats can certainly sound the alarm. For starters, they can underscore that only one side is planting the seeds of election denial. President Biden and other top Democrats can talk about it at the convention this summer when they will have the largest national audience of the campaign. But Democrats cannot do it alone. It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment both to ensure all legal votes get counted and to counter expected election denial.
The news media must go “beyond pointing out that claims of widespread voter fraud are false and not substantiated (if, indeed, there is no evidence that irregularities occurred),” journalism scholars Heesoo Jang and Daniel Kreiss argue. Coverage, they say, should frame election denial “as a violation of democratic norms with deleterious implications for democracy.” That means treating election denial “or ex ante assertions that a candidate will not accept the result of an upcoming election — as fundamentally different from other campaign issues.” (They found news coverage fell short in 2020 and did not adequately “condemn, correct, or call out election deniers.”) A starting point would be for news organizations to intensely educate voters and set standards for how they will cover false claims of election denial.
In addition, local election officials will need support. “More than half of local election officials reported being concerned about the safety of their colleagues or staff — a significantly higher number than in 2023, but about equal to 2022,” the Brennan Center reported this month. “Similarly, more than one in four worries about being assaulted at home or work. And concern about harassment of family or loved ones reached levels seen in 2022, the last federal election year.”

The Real ID Deadline Will Never Arrive  (Jim Harper, The Atlantic)
If you fly regularly, you’ve probably seen signs saying that the Real ID Act will soon go into full effect. When that happens, all domestic travelers using a driver’s license at TSA checkpoints will have to show a federally compliant one—or be turned away. On May 7, exactly a year ahead of the latest purported enforcement date, a USA Today story bore the headline “The 2025 Real ID Deadline for New Licenses Is Really Real This Time, DHS Says.” Maybe the Department of Homeland Security needs to pinkie-swear to make the 2025 date really, really real, because those airport signs and travel stories have been telling us about a final deadline for more than 15 years. And yet, that deadline has never arrived. If past extensions are any indication, it probably never will.
The 2005 Real ID law created a national system for sharing driver information, set more onerous documentation standards for driver’s licenses than states had previously used, and added security rules that pushed states to mail licenses to applicants rather than issuing them on the spot. During the years of collective panic that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, lawmakers and executive-branch agencies pushed through a raft of measures—common-sense ones, such as fortified cockpit doors, but also more controversial ones, such as expanded data surveillance and airport body-scanning machines. To this day, recorded airport announcements still warn passengers about “heightened security measures” that have been in place for more than a decade and might well remain heightened in perpetuity.
Originally meant to take full effect in 2008, Real ID now looks like a particularly misguided bit of post-9/11 security theater. The measure survives in public policy despite, or perhaps precisely because of, its lack of urgency.
The deadline has been delayed again and again. The initial holdup was that many states bristled at federal encroachment on their turf and at the cost of revamping their license systems to meet the new standards. More recently, Homeland Security has cited the slow uptake of Real ID cards—the department estimated last year that 44 percent of the population did not have a compliant license—and administrative backlogs related to the coronavirus pandemic.
If requiring a Real ID license for every airline passenger were essential to preventing another 9/11-style attack, this would have become clear years ago. As my 2006 book, Identity Crisis, pointed out, supporters of Real ID could not plausibly claim that the policy would thwart foreign terrorists, who can travel within the United States using passports.

The United States Has a Keen Demographic Edge  (Brent Peabody, Foreign Policy)
U.S. politicians have begun to lament the country’s falling birthrate. Their concern is legitimate; The United States’ total fertility rate has fallen from a robust average of 2.12 births per woman in 2007 to less than 1.7 births per woman today. (Demographic experts generally identify 2.1 as the rate needed to keep the population stable absent immigration.) From a smaller tax base and a shrinking labor pool to higher pension burdens that could crowd out spending on things such as education and infrastructure, falling birthrates represent a looming social and economic drag on U.S. prosperity.
This discourse, however, misses key context—namely, that the demographic situations in China, Russia, and the European Union are an order of magnitude worse. Far from being a drag, the United States’ relatively strong demographic hand endows it with a key advantage in an age of great-power competition with China and Russia.
While the United States may be in demographic transition, its competitors are increasingly in demographic turmoil. Nowhere is this more apparent than China. In the span of less than a decade, its birthrate has plunged from 1.81 births per woman to 1.08, according to the official figures, placing it among the lowest anywhere. Chinese authorities anticipate a modest rebound, speculating that fertility rates will rise above 1.3 by 2035, a figure that would still spell demographic doom for the world’s second-most populous country.
But far from recovering, a confluence of demographic and social trends suggests that the Chinese birthrate still has further to fall.

Internal Emails Reveal How a Controversial Gun-Detection AI System Found Its Way to NYC  (Georgia Gee, Wired)
In February 2022, a meeting was set up between New York City mayor Eric Adams’ team and an artificial intelligence gun-detection company called Evolv. An email thread from Evolv representatives included an accompanying brochure, which listed opportunities to partner together: in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, NYC schools, hospitals, and gathering places such as Times Square. One area conspicuously missing from the list, though, was the subway.
After an in-person meeting a few days later, Evolv cofounder Anil Chitkara made another attempt to sell the company’s technology—through name-dropping.
“As I mentioned, Linda Reid, VP Security for Walt Disney World (Florida) has known us since 2014 and deployed many of our systems at the Parks and Disney Springs,” Chitkara wrote in a February 7 email to the Mayor’s Office, obtained by WIRED. “They’ve had success screening for weapons with Evolv Express … There may be some interesting parallels to how you are thinking about everyone’s role in security.”