Author: News Polite

LOS ANGELES — After Iryna Merezhko persuaded her sister in Ukraine that her young nephew should join her in Los Angeles to wait out the war, she traveled halfway around the globe to pick him up. “I told him it would be a California vacation,” she recalled. “We would go to Disneyland, Universal Studios, the beach.”

The boy, Ivan Yereshov, 14, made it with her to Tijuana, Mexico, early this month, joining thousands of Ukrainians waiting at the border for permission to enter the United States.

To be on the safe side, Ms. Merezhko carried a notarized power of attorney attesting that Ivan had been handed over into his aunt’s care. But an officer informed them that Ivan could not enter with his aunt — because she was not his parent. “They told us we would be separated for one or two days,” recalled Ms. Merezhko, who said that she embraced Ivan as his initial enthusiasm dissolved into dismay.

Ten days went by before she would learn his whereabouts.

Dozens of Ukrainian children have been separated from relatives, friends or older siblings with whom they have traveled to the southern border under a law designed to prevent migrant children from being trafficked. In effect since 2008, the law requires U.S. border authorities to place “unaccompanied minors” in government shelters, where they must remain until their guardians have been screened and approved.

The brunt of the law has been felt by Central American children, the largest group of minors to reach the border in recent years, and who are often fleeing gang violence. But those children typically are aware of the policy and know that they will be taken into temporary custody. For Ukrainian children, the separation from their caretakers has been an unexpected, shocking twist in their escape from a war zone.

Similarly tense scenes unfolded at the border under the Trump administration, which used family separations, often much longer ones, as punitive measures to discourage families from attempting to cross into the United States. Under that policy, even children accompanied by their parents were removed to government shelters.

“Imagine — some of these children’s parents died or are fighting; they’re traumatized from the war and the journey,” said Erika Pinheiro, a lawyer with Al Otro Lado, a migrant support group that works with asylum seekers in Tijuana, a border city that is opposite San Diego. “Then they get separated from family, without understanding why, and sent to a shelter where staff don’t speak their language.”

Ms. Pinheiro acknowledged that it was vital to protect children from potential traffickers, but she said that more careful screenings at the border could alleviate the need for traumatic separations. “There are people out there who don’t have the children’s best interest at heart,” she said. “There are also lots of extended family who should be legitimately processed.”

U.S. authorities have not released figures on how many Ukrainian children have been separated from caregivers, but volunteers working with the refugees said they have counted at least 50, a number that is increasing. Up to 20 children have lately been arriving daily in Tijuana with someone other than a parent, they said. Often these children have a father who could not leave the country because men must support the war effort and a mother who could not travel. Their parents entrusted someone else to ferry them to the United States.

Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that it was required by law to transfer minors who are not accompanied by a parent or legal guardian to government shelters.

“Caring for our most vulnerable populations, including children, is of utmost importance,” the agency said.

Migrant advocates concede there is a risk of children becoming vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation amid the chaos of war, but said U.S. authorities were enforcing their country’s policy inconsistently, sowing confusion and heartache. Sometimes a child traveling with an adult sibling has been removed to a shelter, but not always. Many children have been separated from aunts, grandparents or friends; others have been released to continue on with them.

Last month, Molly Surazhsky of Brooklyn, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, escorted Liza Krasulia, 17, whose mother is a close family friend, from where she had escaped the war in Poland to the southern border.

Ms. Surazhsky said she had consulted an immigration lawyer in New York who said that she did not foresee any problems. They carried a notarized letter from the parent giving Ms. Surazhsky authority to care for Liza.

But on March 30 at the border, officials told them that they would have to hold the girl for up to two days. “They said, ‘She will be treated better than we are,’” recalled Ms. Surazhksy.

Liza was shocked and began to sob.

“I told her, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere without you.’”

After checking into a hotel in San Diego, Ms. Surazhsky got a call from Liza, who by then was even more distraught. Officers had confiscated her phone, baggage, book — and her shoelaces. She was sharing a cell at the border with 25 women and children from Ukraine, Russia and other countries, all trying to sleep on the floor with only flimsy foil blankets to cover them.

A few days passed before Ms. Surazhsky learned that Liza had been transferred to a migrant children’s shelter in the Bronx.

She submitted 40 pages of paperwork and fingerprints, and waited for approval to officially sponsor her.

On Monday, she was informed that Liza would be released from the shelter the following day, three weeks after they had crossed the border.

“While I understand the necessity of vetting caretakers, there has to be a better way for the government to do this without inflicting more trauma on the children,” said Ms. Surazhsky, a textile artist. “They are making kids feel like prisoners.”

Casey Revkin, a co-founder of the nonprofit Each Step Home, which helps migrant families navigate the reunification process, said that for years Central American children have been unnecessarily removed at the border from grandparents, adopted parents and siblings.

“The government could send social workers to the border to verify the familial relationship and avoid the trauma of separating these children, who have gone through so much, from their caregivers,” Ms. Revkin said.

Ms. Pinheiro pointed out that during the Afghan evacuation, the U.S. government issued a directive that instructed authorities to allow children to remain with “nonparental caregivers” with whom they had entered the country, rather than be transferred to shelters.

Government shelters where the children are being taken are operated by a separate government agency, the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency said in a statement that its role was not to make “immigration determinations.”

“Our job is to provide them with care and protection while they’re in our temporary custody,” the statement said.

In the case of Ms. Merezhko, who has lived in the United States since 2014, the family had made a decision to try to get Ivan to safety in Los Angeles as quickly as possible, without waiting for the United States to begin issuing permission for refugees to fly directly. Entering through Mexico, which does not require visas for Ukrainians, has been a stopgap measure for an estimated 5,000 Ukrainians since the war began in February.

Ms. Merezhko spent about $7,000 to purchase airline tickets, took leave from her job as a pharmacy technician and set out to retrieve the boy. They rendezvoused in western Ukraine, after he had managed to board an evacuation train out of the besieged city of Kharkiv, where the family lived.

“I thought I was doing the right thing because it was the only way to save the child, to bring him to a safe place,” she said.

From Madrid, they boarded a flight to Monterrey, Mexico, and connected on April 6 to Tijuana. They slept in a tent erected outside a gym that was already overflowing with Ukrainians waiting to report to the border checkpoint for processing.

When it was their turn two days later, Ms. Merezhko said, Customs and Border Protection officers carefully studied the documents and notarized letter from Ivan’s mother stating that her sister had been granted full responsibility for him.

An officer told them that they would have to be separated — for just one or two days.

“Everything will be OK,” Ms. Merezhko assured Ivan.

The following day, when her phone rang, an officer passed the phone to Ivan. “Mama, Mama, is that you?” he asked, thinking it would be his mother in Ukraine.

His aunt’s heart sank. In the 60-second exchange, all that he was allotted, the boy said that he was still at the border. The officer told Ms. Merezhko to expect another call soon.

Days went by, no call came and her anxiety mounted.

Ms. Merezhko learned that Ivan was now probably at a government shelter, and she found the number of a hotline for families trying to locate children.

An attendant confirmed that Ivan was in the system, and told his aunt that she would be contacted by a case manager in a few days.

“I got no information about how he is, where he is,” recalled Ms. Merezhkho.

Days passed.

She called the hotline again, and an operator urged her to be patient: It could take 20 to 30 days before Ivan was released, she said, and that process had not even started.

During an anguished call, Ms. Merezhko’s sister, Kateryna, told her that she now regretted sending away her only child. “At least we would know where he was if he had stayed with us,” she told her.

Over the weekend, with the help of Ms. Revkin, from the nonprofit, Ms. Merezhko filled out 25 pages of forms to which she attached green cards, marriage certificates, birth certificates and pay stubs for her and husband. Yet she had nowhere to send the file.

Finally, on Monday, Ms. Merezhko’s husband, Vadym, got a call from Ivan, who said he was at a shelter in California. A case worker said they could send the documents. But there still was no word on when Ivan would be released.

“Good news today,” said Ms. Merezhko. “But I am a little bit worried about how long it will be.”

One of the occupational hazards of my profession is having people ask me what’s going to happen to the market. I’m never sure whether to give the answer attributed to various famous financial titans — it will fluctuate — or to reply, more accurately, “God knows.” But some predictions seem safe. Clearly, the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates repeatedly over the months ahead, continuing that process until there are clear signs that inflation is coming down to tolerable levels.

But isn’t the Fed far behind the curve? Inflation is at a 40-year high, yet the Fed has only begun to hike. Shouldn’t it greatly raise rates now now now?

Well, no. We need to talk about how monetary policy actually works. And when we do, we’ll see that there’s a troubling paradox about current policy. The Fed must hike: Inflation must be curbed, and as a practical matter, interest rates are the only game in town. Yet higher rates will operate largely by hitting the housing market — and over the longer term, one big problem with America is that we aren’t building enough housing.

One reason discussions of monetary policy can be confusing is that the interest rates the Fed controls don’t really matter in any direct sense to the average consumer. The Fed can effectively determine very short-term interest rates — in fact, its normal target is the interest rate at which banks lend to one another overnight. But no important, real-world decisions depend on that interest rate.

What matters, instead, are longer-term rates, because monetary policy mainly affects the demand for long-lived assets. A business considering whether to invest in software that will be superseded in two years, or even a machine that will wear out or become obsolete in three or four years, doesn’t care much about what interest rate it has to pay. But interest costs are crucial when you’re deciding whether to buy something that will last for decades, like a house. In fact, the most important interest rates for the economy are, you guessed it, home mortgage rates.

And here’s the thing: Although the Fed doesn’t directly determine mortgage rates, banks deciding how much to charge for loans pay a lot of attention to what they think the Fed will do in the future. If they expect short-term rates to go up, they’ll start charging more for home loans right away, because they don’t want to tie up their money since they’ll be able to get more later.

Sure enough, with everyone expecting the Fed to keep raising short-term interest rates several times over the next year, mortgage rates — and long-term rates for business borrowers — have already shot up more or less to prepandemic levels, even though the Fed has just begun to hike:

So tight money is already here. This will almost surely cool off the economy; whether it will cool things enough to control inflation — or cool them off too much, leading to recession — is something we’ll have to see.

In any case, I don’t see any alternatives for the Fed. I don’t think inflation has gotten entrenched in the economy; markets and consumers both expect it to come down a lot in a year or so. But we don’t want to take the chance that it might get entrenched. So hike the Fed must.

There is, however, a problem. The Fed’s efforts to control inflation will work mainly through the housing market, driving down sales and construction. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that America hasn’t been building enough houses over the long term.

Since about 2014, the cost of shelter, as estimated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has been rising considerably faster than the overall cost of living. I’m not talking about house prices; I’m talking about rental rates for apartments and “owner’s equivalent rent,” the bureau’s estimate of what houses would rent for. Here’s the picture:

What’s going on here? The answer is that after the housing bubble and bust of the 2000s, construction of new housing plunged and never fully recovered:

Some of this can be attributed to Nimbyism in places like California and New York, but housing construction has lagged and shelter costs soared even in places like Texas, where zoning is very, um, liberal. So we really need to build more housing in this country.

You see the problem. We need higher interest rates, at least for a while, to bring inflation down. But higher rates will “work” largely by depressing housing construction, which was already too low.

For now, I don’t see an alternative. We could, in principle, try to cool off the economy by, say, raising taxes (good luck with that). Maybe more to the point, a gradual pullback by consumers, as the effects of pandemic aid recede, plus falling inflation may eventually let us get interest rates back down.

For now, however, the Fed looks set to solve one pressing problem in part by making another, less pressing but still real, problem worse.

U.S. and European officials talk incessantly about making more of the world’s advanced computer chips anywhere other than Taiwan, which they consider vulnerable to Chinese invasion or influence. They’re on a mission to make more chips in the U.S. and Europe and want to spend taxpayer dollars to do so.

Apple doesn’t seem so worried. For years to come, Apple has planned for devices rolling off assembly lines to continue relying on chips made largely in Taiwan.

Apple has a track record of bending global technology manufacturing to its will, and the company has lobbied for more computer chips to be made in America. But Apple and other big buyers of chips do not seem to have made it a priority and are not seriously using their influence over suppliers to speed up the building of chip factories in the U.S., Japan or Europe.

“The industry is not raising this as something that they need to see some action on immediately,” said Brett Simpson, a computer chip specialist and partner at the investment firm Arete Research.

The apparent disconnect between Western governments and the biggest buyers of chips, like Apple, raises a question for both companies and policymakers: Who is right about the urgency of the economic and geopolitical risks of concentrating chip-making in Taiwan — the people who need votes or the companies that vote with their wallets?

Government officials might be overstating the risks of concentrating chip-making in Taiwan, or chip buyers like Apple might be underestimating them. Or maybe these companies find it too daunting to shift more quickly away from the expertise of Taiwan’s chip factories. Whatever the reason, it’s as if elected leaders and the companies that need chips the most are working from a different sense of what is possible and necessary for the future of this essential industry.

Let me recap why big businesses and big governments want to keep computer chips flowing but aren’t moving in lock step on how and how quickly to achieve that.

Many important products — including smartphones, medical devices and fighter jets — need computer chips to function as their brains or memory. Some of us have become keenly aware of these teeny components because the manufacturing of computer chips hasn’t kept up with the demand of people who have wanted to buy cars, computers and other goods during the pandemic.

The shortages of some products, and the increasing tensions between the U.S. and China, have turned the spotlight onto the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC. It makes most of the world’s cutting-edge computer chips, including for Apple’s products, almost entirely in factories in Taiwan.

TSMC is expanding into other places, including Arizona, but it takes years to get new factories up and running. It’s in everyone’s interest to keep factories churning out computer chips without interruption, because the global economy sputters otherwise. The Biden administration and many tech experts also say that it’s strategically important to preserve America’s know-how in chip-making and counter China’s ambitions in chip-making and other essential tech areas.

Changing the world’s reliance on chips made in Taiwan won’t be easy, and industry officials told me that Apple has been working behind the scenes to support legislation to manufacture more chips in America.

Some big chip buyers also have said that they’re helping TSMC pay for its chip factories outside Taiwan and will buy chips manufactured there. The question is whether all this could move faster if influential customers put more of their muscle into it.

Simpson told me that if Apple and other big customers such as Qualcomm and Nvidia wanted to more quickly spread manufacturing away from Taiwan, they could press TSMC to get new factories ready to go all at once rather than in phases, as TSMC has been doing. They could also commit to buying more chips from other manufacturers such as Samsung and Intel with factories outside Taiwan. Instead, Apple and others have mostly been doubling down on contracts with TSMC.

When Washington and Silicon Valley don’t seem to share the same sense of urgency, it’s tough for all of us to know if it’s worth the collective effort to create a new world order in computer chips.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration announced Tuesday that it is restoring parts of a bedrock environmental law, once again requiring that climate impacts be considered and local communities have input before federal agencies approve highways, pipelines and other major projects.

The administration has resurrected requirements of the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act that had been removed by President Donald J. Trump, who complained that they slowed down the development of mines, road expansions and similar projects.

The final rule announced Tuesday would require federal agencies to conduct an analysis of the greenhouse gases that could be emitted over the lifetime of a proposed project, as well as how climate change might affect new highways, bridges and other infrastructure, according to the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The rule, which takes effect in 30 days, would also ensure agencies give communities directly affected by projects a greater role in the approval process.

Brenda Mallory, chairwoman of the council, described the regulation as restoring “basic community safeguards” that the Trump administration had eliminated.

“Patching these holes in the environmental review process will help projects get built faster, be more resilient, and provide greater benefits to people who live nearby,” she said in a statement.

The move comes as President Biden’s climate agenda faces headwinds from Congress and the courts. The president also is under pressure to boost oil production as a way to temper high gas prices across the United States. Last week the Interior Department said it would begin offering oil and gas drilling leases on public lands and waters, despite Mr. Biden’s campaign promise that he would end new leases. Senior administration officials this week maintained the leasing decision was necessary because of a court ruling, and said that it had also raised federal royalties that companies must pay to drill.

On Friday, which is Earth Day, Mr. Biden will be in Seattle, where aides said he is expected to give a speech highlighting efforts to expand solar energy and offshore wind farms as well as clean energy initiatives that Congress authorized last year as part of a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package.

Administration officials said the new rule would not have major immediate impacts since the Biden administration had already been weighing the climate change impacts of proposed projects. But it would force future administrations to abide by the process or undertake a lengthy regulatory process and possibly legal challenges to again undo it.

The National Environmental Policy Act, or N.E.P.A., was signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970, after several environmental disasters including a crude oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., and a series of fires on the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio that shocked the nation.

It mandates federal agencies to assess the potential environmental impacts of proposed major federal actions before allowing them to proceed. Agencies are not required to reject projects that might worsen climate change — only to examine and report the impacts.

The Trump administration had freed the government from considering the ways in which proposed new dams or pipelines, for example, might increase emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that are warming the planet to dangerous levels. It required agencies to analyze only “reasonably foreseeable” impacts. Mr. Trump said the change would eliminate “mountains and mountains of red tape” that he said had delayed projects across the country.

Under the changes announced Tuesday, agencies would have to consider the direct, indirect and cumulative impacts of a decision — including the effect a new project would have on neighborhoods already burdened by pollution.

The administration’s changes also encourage agencies to study alternatives to projects that are opposed by local communities, and it says the law’s requirements are “a floor, rather than a ceiling” when it comes to environmental reviews.

Republicans and some business groups are hostile to the changes, arguing that additional reviews would delay the development of badly needed infrastructure.

The American Road and Transportation Builders Association, a trade organization, wrote in comments to the Council on Environmental Quality that federal reviews for many transportation projects take five to seven years, with some lasting as long as 14 years. The new rule, it argued, would make matters even worse.

“Project delays resulting from the current N.E.P.A. process will often lead to demonstrable and significant costs to the taxpayers,” the group wrote in a letter to the agency. “This is simple logic, based on continuing increases in labor and materials costs, among other factors.”

Democrats and environmental groups embraced the move.

Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona and chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, said the Trump administration had “stripped and gutted” environmental protections.

“I’m glad this administration recognizes how egregiously wrong those actions were and is moving forward to restore the protections that have helped protect our environment while promoting sustainable development for decades,” he said in a statement.

The new rule also proposes giving federal agencies the authority to work closely with communities to develop alternative approaches to projects. Historically, the N.E.P.A. process has been one of the most important tools available to local communities to try to amend or stop projects that could cause significant harm.

The final rule represents the first phase of a two-step regulatory process. Administration officials said that, in the coming months, it would propose another set of broader changes to the law.