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Immigration has become one of the central issues of the 2024 race, with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump vowing to expand the draconian policies of his first term and deport 10 million immigrants from the country amid what he calls an "invasion." Democrats, meanwhile, are touting their own border crackdown at the Democratic National Convention this week in Chicago. President Joe Biden celebrated his executive action to block many asylum seekers at the southern U.S. border, and Vice President Kamala Harris promises to hire thousands more border agents if she is elected. We host a roundtable discussion in Chicago with Oscar Chacón, executive director of Alianza Americas, an immigrant rights group; Maria Hinojosa, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, founder of Futuro Media and host of the Latino USA podcast; and Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of Mijente, a national digital organizing hub for Latinx and Chicanx communities.
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 Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/ReutersIf you created a word cloud from all Tim Walz's interviews over the last few weeks, the word ‘weird' would be featured prominently, as would ‘football,' ‘Minnesota,' and maybe ‘white guy tacos.' But one word above all would stand out among the vice presidential candidate's vernacular: ‘folksy.'
Walz's supporters use that term: A tweet from screenwriter Adam Best praising the native-Nebraskan's "organic, folksy, straightforward vibe" got 25,000 likes. His detractors use it, too. Glenn Beck railed against the idea that he was the "most folksy dad ever."
The use of folksy may seem spontaneous. But like ‘aw-shucks' with Reagan and ‘malarkey' with Biden, such phrases—and their intention—are not entirely off-the-cuff. They are part of a concentrated effort, going back to Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, to create an American brand of English.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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Arab American voters could significantly impact the 2024 presidential election, particularly in Michigan, home to the largest Arab community in the United States. Many of these voters, incensed at U.S. support for the Israeli war on Gaza, have mobilized over the past year to pressure the Biden administration to change policy, including by casting hundreds of thousands of ballots for "uncommitted" in Democratic primary elections to signal their demand for policy changes. We speak with Osama Siblani, founder and publisher of The Arab American News, who has had several meetings with senior figures from the White House and the Democratic presidential campaign. Despite all those meetings, "nothing has happened" except "more killing," Siblani says. "Something has to be done to stop Benjamin Netanyahu's appetite for killing."
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