From the Summer Olympics in Paris/ to SCOTUS/ to Title IX on Campus
Every four years, the Olympic Games are always inspiring and usually leave a few lasting legacies and influences (although it doesn’t appear that this year’s host-introductory-sport break dancing will make it further). But one issue that came up dramatically in these past Olympic games in Paris had just been addressed in the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) and will undoubtedly be reopened on college and high-school sports venues throughout the country. The issue is gender identity or biological sex as a moniker for participation in women’s sports competitions.
It started last April when the U.S. Department of Education announced that it would redefine “sex” in Title IX rules to include “gender identity,” requiring schools to ignore the biological differences between male and female in favor of “an individual’s sense of their gender.” Two U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 5th and 6th Circuits granted preliminary injunctions, blocking the new rules from going into effect on behalf of lawsuits by the states of Tennessee and Louisiana. In July, the Supreme Court upheld the injunctions and denied an emergency appeal by Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.
But the issue was reflected in an incident during the first days of the Olympic Games when an Italian female boxer quit the Olympic ring in tears, just minutes after her match had begun when she was punched very hard by an athlete who had been barred from other international competitions because of tests showing an unacceptable level of male hormones. For a few days, it was a nasty issue in the international press. Clearly, the gender/sex issue has now hit the most elite of international sports competitions, but it starts in school and college competitions. This Fall, it will be an issue on school campuses with the potential of becoming a partisan election issue.
The Latino Vote and the DNC Presidential Convention
The descriptor “joy” seems to have become the accepted press narrative word for the Democratic National Committee presidential nomination convention (at least by the end of the third day when this piece was written). The heady prognosis that Democrats will win it all – the presidency, as well as Congressional and Senate majorities - on election day, November 5, made the Democratic delegates giddy with happiness. It was the same reaction that Republican convention delegates felt in July when they embraced the same prognosis of winning it all after their presidential nominee, Donald Trump, survived an assassination attempt and the GOP convention turned out to be one of their most united and happy ones since 1980. Therein lies the caveat for political joy. It can be short-lived.
President designate (at least as of August 21) Kamala Harris, for all her youth and vigor, in contrast to President Biden, the once expected nominee, has many challenges ahead. Two of the most important ones are the diminishing Democratic Latino vote, and the volatile immigration issue -- especially the surge of hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossers since 2022 from all around the world, and the failure of Vice President Harris to fix it - charged (perhaps unfairly) by President Biden to do so. In the Gallup election poll just before the convention, Harris was still behind Biden with regard to support by Latino voters. “The way Latinos vote isn’t that they’re trending to the Republicans, it is that they’re not enthusiastic necessarily, so they stay home,” noted Maria Teresa Kumar, CEO of Voto Latino. “The more the Harris campaign talks about small business and the economy, that will attract many young Latinos in general that are entrepreneurs.”
“As for the immigration issue, there is now a narrative that, ‘we have to fix the border, we have to be tough on it’,” Kumar said at a pre-convention press panel. “But we also must have pathways to safeguard the folks already here. When the vice president went down to Central America and convinced businesses to go to the root of the problem and start creating investments, she couched what was happening at the border as a Western Hemispheric issue that needs not just government but our Canadian, Mexican and Colombian friends to be involved. With good businesses, we can address undocumented people staying.”
According to delegates at the DNC convention, the top issues being discussed as Latino voter talking points include: Pathway for permanent residency for TPS and DACA recipients; labor; immigration reform; and access to affordable medical care for essential workers/farmers.
A Book Announcement
Speaking of election day, here’s another national event that I am very excited to announce. On November 5, 2024, my book The Law That Changed the Face of America: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 will be re-issued in paperback by my publisher and available for sale on Amazon.
I wrote it in 2015 for the 50th anniversary of the law, which is actually the most liberal immigration law in the world and has become the gold standard for immigration legislation. It was our nation’s second comprehensive immigration law -- following the first, the Immigration Nationality Quota Act of 1924 -- the most restrictive in our history. Because of the largest and most uncontrolled entry of millions of immigrants between 1880 and 1920 from countries torn by war and revolutions in Europe, and due to the fear of growing Soviet Communism’s influence in the US that could lead to World War II, Congress in 1923 passed the Quota Act. It set heavy restrictions on immigrant entries from almost every nationality and ethnic group except northern Christian Europeans, border Mexicans, and Canadians. It lasted until 1964 when the Civil Rights Act made the quotas illegal. The new 1965 INA opened up immigration to every nationality equally and ushered in what became millions of permits for workers, refugees, and asylees to come to the United States. The book tells the story of this evolution up to the demands for immigration reform today.
While I had written this story in 2015 for the retail market, Rowman and Littlefield, the academic publisher, marketed the book as an academic history for $56 on Amazon. This November 5th, the paperback will be accessible to everyone for around $23 – just in time for the law’s 60th anniversary and the likely offering of courses and lectures about this epic legislation during 2025. Buy the book on pre-order or on election day as a transition from election season to governing concerns, especially the job of Congress.
