Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Michael Galant about sanctions and immigration for the June 20, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CBS (6/7/25)

Janine Jackson: Federal agents are abducting people off the streets, rolling up on workplaces and playgrounds to tear men, women and children away from their families. Driving off in vans, telling no one where they’re going. They’re interrupting scheduled immigration status appointments to say, We’ve changed the rules, and now you’re out of status and a criminal. Into the van. Raising a question, observing—well, that counts as interference, also now a crime. Sometimes they’re saying that the abduction was an administrative error, after someone has been left in a basement without food or water for a while.

There is much to acknowledge and understand in the current nightmare, but if one question is, “Given it all, why would anyone think it makes sense to try to come to the US to live?” then you’ll need to expand your vision to the global stage, and see the role that US actions have in determining conditions in the countries immigrants are coming from. And why “If you don’t like it here, go back where you came from,” lands different when circumstances in the place they come from will still be determined by US policy.

Michael Galant is senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Michael Galant.

Michael Galant: Thanks so much for having me.

JJ: I will say the issue isn’t only with MAGA replacement theory zealots who think that the immigrants are dragging us into criminal chaos. I suspect a lot of “liberals” think that while it’s mean to call immigrants “invaders”—because, after all, “they” do a lot for “us”—still, they’re coming here to take advantage of our superior quality of life, and maybe we just can’t afford that anymore. The “us and them” line is still operative in many people’s understanding of immigration, and that confuses and obscures something, doesn’t it?

MG: Yeah, and I think you’re absolutely right that there is this sort of bipartisan consensus that, whatever we might disagree on what the appropriate level of migration is, or with what humanity we should be treating migrants, but they’re still operating on the same terrain, right, the same sort of frame of understanding, of the question of migration. And I think that question itself really needs to be addressed, as you mentioned in the intro, it is often US policies that are themselves determining the conditions that caused migrants to leave in the first place. And it’s oddly rarely questioned in Congress. It’s rarely discussed, why are people leaving in the first place, and, perhaps, why is the US enacting policies that are contributing to those conditions?

CEPR (3/3/25)

JJ: The US interferes in other countries in multiple ways, but you wrote recently about one that goes under the radar—under under the radar, in this context. So talk to us about this piece that you wrote with Alex Main about economic sanctions. And I want to say, you make clear it’s not about a feeling, it’s not about an anecdotal sense about the reasons people have for moving. It’s research, it’s data.

MG: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I want to make clear from the start: Migrants should be welcomed into our communities. They should not be scapegoated, they should not be repressed. And, at the same time, we should not be creating the conditions that force them to leave their homes.

I mean, most migrants are not choosing to leave their community, to leave the only place they’ve ever known, often leave their families, to come to a new country where they risk discrimination, on a whim, right? They’re coming for good reason, and that is typically they’ve seen either violence and insecurity in their homes, or they are facing poverty and lack of economic opportunity.

That should not be a shocking thing. I think if you talk to anybody on the street, they will tell you that migrants are more likely to be coming from poorer countries to wealthier countries. And there’s US involvement in that, and the whole range of potential issues, of which economic sanctions is only one. But I can go into that, as that was the subject of our piece and of our research.

JJ: Please.

CEPR (9/25/23)

MG: So, effectively, the argument here is pretty simple. There are mounds of evidence that economic sanctions harm people. Sanctions come in many forms, but in their broadest forms, broad economic sanctions, which is those imposed on Cuba and Venezuela, the goal, the intent, is to harm the macroeconomy of these countries, which in turn, of course, affects civilians. It affects their lives, it affects whether they can feed their children. So because there are mountains of evidence that sanctions are harming individuals, there are also mountains of evidence that people migrate due to economic need. One plus one equals two. It is clear that when we impose sanctions on countries and hurt their people, the effect of that is going to be that people migrate to the United States.

But there is also recent research to that effect. So in October of last year, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization published what I think is the first and only systematic cross-national analysis of how sanctions impact international migration. And using data flows from 157 countries, I believe, the authors find that Western multilateral sanctions have increased, on average, immigration from targeted countries by 22 to 24%. So that’s a massive increase as a result of sanctions. And the authors also find that when sanctions are lifted, migration decreases again. So there’s a clear empirical analysis there that one plus one equals two, sanctions harm people, harmed people migrate, sanctions cause migration.

JJ: I think that there is such a miscommunication about economic sanctions in the news media that obscures that very kind of information. They’re often presented as “making Castro squirm,” they’re presented as targeted, and they’re really only going to target leadership in countries. Now there’s a problem with that already, but what you’re saying is, no, there’s no way to simply surgically target an economic sector of a country without having that impact folks, and usually the most vulnerable first.

Michael Galant: “Sanctions are presented as this peaceful alternative to warfare, but often for civilians on the ground, the effects are very similar to war.”

MG: That’s exactly right. Sanctions are presented as this peaceful alternative to warfare, but often for civilians on the ground, the effects are very similar to war.

And “sanction” is a broad term. This does include imposing visa restrictions on individual foreign leaders. Of course, that’s not going to have the same effect as, say, the entire embargo of Cuba. But many of our sanctions regimes are broad, and intentionally so. The implicit logic of them is we hurt this country’s economy, that causes distress among the civilian population, and eventually the civilian population will rise up and overthrow their government.

And so in Cuba, when the embargo was imposed, there was a State Department memo from the time that has since been declassified, where it makes those intentions very plain. It says the goal is to cause hunger in order to overthrow the regime.

These days, government officials, advocates of sanctions, are often much more careful in their word choices. But the implicit logic of sanctions involves the intentional targeting of civilians.

JJ: I think it’s important to interrogate that logic. Some would say it’s hypocritical or cross-purposed to say, “Well, we’re going to sanction their country into hardship…but they can’t come here!” It’s complicated, and yet it makes sense if you’re of a certain frame of mind, I guess.

MG: That’s exactly right. To take one example, and I can also talk through Venezuela, but to take Cuba as an example, because it is one of our oldest, most comprehensive sanctions regimes, sanctions have been in place over six decades now, with the embargo. And there has been some tightening and loosening of sanctions over the years, particularly under the Obama administration. There was a light thawing of relations and the easing of sanctions, and we saw their economy really improved during that time, as hopes improved and the like.

New York Times (6/16/17)

But then when Trump came in the first time, he reversed all the Obama measures, and then tightened sanctions even further. Biden, unfortunately, basically maintained the Trump measures. He made only very small tweaks at the margin. And as a result of that, we’ve seen, from 2020 to 2024, 13% of Cuba’s population emigrated in those four years, 13%. It’s really shocking to imagine, if any of your listeners—many are probably based in the US, some are probably based abroad—imagine 13% of your country’s population immigrating over four years, and a good deal of that immigration is a result of the US sanction that has ended in an economic crisis, and made it much harder for ordinary people to live their lives.

JJ: Media tend to personalize, just to pull us back to media. Here’s a woman who crossed the border, holding her son close, or whatever, and it can be moving and poignant, but I feel that one effect of that is to kind of get people thinking on an individual level: “Well, I would never do that. I wouldn’t make that choice in those circumstances.” In terms of media, the story of migration is of course about people, but if we don’t integrate an understanding of policy and practices, we’re not going to get that story right.

MG: Absolutely. I think we need both. I understand that my organization has a lot of economists, and we’ll talk in terms of numbers, and sometimes that won’t really pull at people’s heartstrings in the way that they need to. And at the same time, on the other hand, you have the case where you talk only in terms of individuals, and don’t understand the broader structural causes, and how US policy contributes to these conditions. So we need both of them. Absolutely. But, yeah, we should not ignore, we should not remove ourselves from the structural causes, because, ultimately, when you look at the world—no one would disagree with you that migration tends to flow from poorer countries to wealthier countries.

And so the “solution” to migration—not that migration is itself a problem—but the “solution” is very clear. It is development of the Global South, allowing the Global South to develop, addressing the many ways in which US and other policies of wealthy countries inhibit the stability, economic and otherwise, of the Global South, and to allow greater shared global peace and stability and prosperity.

JJ: Well, and finally and briefly, that vision is shared. You note in the piece that, while the Biden administration claimed to address root causes, they had an inadequate understanding or representation of those causes, if you will. But there are, finally, other visions out there that acknowledge this.

MG: That’s right. And we’re seeing, of course, there have always been more grassroots people’s movements that have mobilized in solidarity with the Global South in pursuit of a more equitable world order. But now we’re also seeing in Congress, there was a group of progressives led by Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, and also representatives Ramirez and Kamlager-Dove, who created a new caucus, but it’s specifically about reframing how we understand migration.

And Representative Casar introduced a migration stability resolution, which is all about the actions that would be needed to address how the US contributes to migration. And it includes, just to name a few, how US weapons trafficking feeds cartel violence in Mexico; fixing trade agreements that are designed to work for multinational corporations based in the US, instead of working-class people here and abroad; fixing the inequities in the global financial architecture that result in debt crises in developing countries; addressing the climate crisis; stopping destabilizing US interventions, from coups to military interventions.

This whole gamut of actions is to truly address migration at its root, if we’re not just listening to those who are trying to scapegoat migrants. To truly address migration at its core requires an entire reorientation of how the US relates to the Global South, and Latin America in particular.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Michael Galant, from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. His piece, with Alex Main, “Economic Sanctions: A Root Cause of Migration,” can be found on their website at CEPR.net. Thank you so much, Michael Galant, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MG: Thank you.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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CEPR (3/3/25)

This week on CounterSpin: We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities—brown immigrant communities—around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also. But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question—“Why is anyone trying to come to the US anyway?”—by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from. We’ll talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Inequality.org (5/29/25)

Also on the show: Anyone who pays attention and cares can see that the Trump budget bill is a brazen transfer of resources from those that are trying to meet basic needs to those that can’t remember how many houses they own. But corporate reporting rarely breaks out economic policy in terms of how it affects different people—especially how it affects communities for whom they show no consistent concern. Economic policy is itself racialized, gendered, regionalized, targeted. Humanistic journalism would help us see that.

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.”

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Earlier this week, at a House of Representatives’ hearing, Trump toady Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) repeatedly assailed three University presidents with the question of would they discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews, without any evidence that this hateful speech is prevalent on campus.

Pursuing her fulminations, Stefanik was cruelly oblivious to the real ongoing genocide in Gaza with her support of unconditional shipment of American F-16s, 155mm. missiles and other weapons of mass destruction used to kill children, women and the elderly who had nothing to do with the preventable October 7th Hamas violence.

Meanwhile, a State Department spokesman continues to say that the Israeli government does not intentionally target civilians. With U.S. drones over Gaza daily, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has visual proof that the overwhelming bombing on civilian structures is killing innocent civilians.

The evidence is in the rubble of hospitals, health clinics, ambulances, schools, libraries, places of worship, marketplaces, water mains, homes, apartment buildings, and piles of unburied corpses being eaten by stray dogs.  All this information is in the possession of bomber Biden’s regime.

The Bidenites and their bloodthirsty cohorts in Congress were forewarned when the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant and other Israeli officials on October 8th shouted these chilling genocidal orders to their army: “No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water.… We are fighting human animals and will act accordingly.” (See, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide). Add an already illegal 16-year Israeli blockade of 2.3 Palestinians suffering from dire poverty, with 40% of their children down with anemia.

Now, about half of Gaza’s population are children, 85% of the entire population is homeless, wandering helplessly into nowhere, afflicted with pending starvation, sickened by spreading infectious diseases and dirty drinking water.  There is little or no medicines for diabetics and cancer patients. No surgery, no anesthesia, no emergency transport, no shelter from cold weather, only American-made bombs and missiles blowing up Palestinians into bits with Israeli snipers everywhere.

The Palestinians cannot flee from their open-air prison.  They cannot surrender – the Israeli government wants them gone. Bear in mind, the population that is not yet blown up is sick and dying, denied needed outside humanitarian aid. Defying feeble Biden’s wishes, Netanyahu only allows a trickle of aid trucks to enter Gaza, and those that do enter can scarcely reach their destinations.

All this raises the issue of the gross undercount of casualties. The Hamas Health Authority has restricted its count to the names of the deceased and injured supplied by hospitals and morgues. These locations are now largely rubble or inoperative. Bodies under the rubble, many of them children, can’t be counted. Thousands of missing people cannot be counted. The Ministry’s suspended count is over 17,000 fatalities, plus 45,000 injuries. With the far larger carnage unable to be tabulated, the actual fatality toll may reach 100,000 soon.

Nonetheless, about two weeks ago, the New York Times reported the death undercount of children in Gaza in two months was ten times greater than the deaths of Ukrainian children in nearly two years of Russian bombings. One of its headlines – “Smoldering Gaza Becomes a Graveyard for Children.”

There are about 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza and about 5,500 of them are due to give birth. Where are they going to do that? How can they be cared for and be nurtured? These mothers are sick and starving. Add the babies to the terrorists toll.

Gaza’s area is about the size of Philadelphia. How many dead, injured, and dying people would there be if 20,000 bombs were dropped on civilians and civilian structures in Philadelphia? Philadelphians trapped without food, water, medicine or any escape route. Imagine 85% of 1.5 million residents homeless, wandering in the streets and alleys. And with virtually no humanitarian aid coming from outside the city. There wouldn’t be any fire trucks or water to extinguish spreading fires.

Over a nine-week period there would have to be over 200,000 deaths and many more permanently disabled for life.

There are courageous Jewish groups (e.g., Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now) and rabbis calling for an end to the slaughter, demanding a ceasefire. There are protestors at all of Biden’s public events/trips reminding him of next November.

Veterans for Peace and other veteran groups are engaged in non-violent civil disobedience in front of the Scranton, Pennsylvania factory producing 155mm missiles for Israel. (Scranton is Biden’s hometown.) Public opinion is turning against the Biden/Israel war without limits on the Palestinians.

Biden wouldn’t want to poll the American people about his $14.3 billion genocide tax, charging American taxpayers to further prosperous Israel’s war of extermination in Gaza. They’ll likely tell Biden that poor children, unaffordable health facilities and other necessities in America need that money first.

There are some 30 Democratic Senators demanding that this Biden bill contain conditions and safeguards so that the money is not used to blow up more Palestinian children and women. But what else are these funds for other than to expand Israel’s military budget? The Israeli extremist ruling coalition under Netanyahu has made no secret of wanting to take over all of remaining Palestine as part of their “Greater Israel” mission to include what they call Judea and Samaria. As Israel’s Founder, David Ben-Gurion, frankly declared referring to the Palestinians, “We have taken their country.” (As quoted in The Jewish Paradox (1978) by Nahum Goldmann.)

It is a cruel irony of history that Israeli state terrorism is producing a Palestinian Holocaust. Netanyahu’s regime has killed over 60 journalists—three of them Israelis—120 United Nations relief workers and instituted total blackouts to keep the grisly events in Gaza out of the news in real time. Netanyahu, to shield his colossal failure to defend Israel on October 7thand to keep his job, is making sure that his country joins the world community of savage, slaughtering regimes, exemplified by the Bush/Cheney unlawful criminal destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by Hillary Clinton toppling Libya into permanent violence and chaos since 2011. (Obama later called his conceding to Hillary’s demands as his worst foreign policy decision).

Capitol Hill and the White House don’t wait for any blood-guilt to be recognized. That will surely come later with the judgment of history and the nightmarish visions of innocents being vaporized because of Washington’s unconditional backing of the Israeli blitzkrieg against what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has repeatedly called the “totally defenseless people” of Gaza.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

A historic United Nations vote on December 31 called on the ICJ to look at the Israeli Occupation in terms of legal consequences, the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and the responsibility of all UN Member States in bringing the protracted Israeli Occupation to an end. A special emphasis will be placed on the “demographic composition, character and status” of Occupied Jerusalem.

The last time the ICJ was asked to offer a legal opinion on the matter was in 2004. However, back then, the opinion was largely centered around the “legal consequences arising from the construction of the (Israeli Apartheid) wall.”

While it is true that the ICJ concluded that the totality of the Israeli actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are unlawful under international law — the Fourth Geneva Convention, the relevant provision of the earlier Hague Regulations and, of course, the numerous UN General Assembly and Security Council Resolutions  — this time around the ICJ is offering its view on Israel’s attempt at making what is meant to be a temporary military Occupation, a permanent one.

In other words, the ICJ could — and most likely will — delegitimize every single Israeli action taken in Occupied Palestine since 1967. This time around, the consequences will not be symbolic, as is often the case in UN-related decisions on Palestine.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has done more than any other Israeli leader to ‘normalize’ the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, was understandably angry following the UN vote, describing it as ‘despicable’.

His other coalition partners were equally intransigent.

The Israeli “Occupation of (the) West Bank is permanent and Israel has the right to annex it,” said Knesset Member Zvika Fogel, during an interview on January 1 with Israeli Radio 103FM.

More than anything else, Fogel’s words encapsulate the new reality in Israel and Palestine. Gone are the days of political ambiguity regarding Israel’s ultimate motives in the Occupied Territories.

Indeed, Israel is now trying to manage a whole new phase of its colonial project in Palestine, an endeavor that began in earnest in 1947-48 and, in Israel’s own calculation, is about to end with the total colonization of Palestine — Israel’s version of a ‘one-state solution’ that is predicated on apartheid and racial discrimination.

Fogel, whose party, Otzma Yehudit, is an important member of Netanyahu’s new rightwing coalition, does not reflect his personal views or those of his ideological camp alone.

The new government, packed with extremists, the likes of Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Yoav Galant, among others, is now committed to an anti-peace agenda as a matter of policy. As soon as the new government was sworn in on December 28, it announced that “the government will advance and develop settlements in all parts of Israel.”

Ben-Gvir, whose raid of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Occupied East Jerusalem raised much criticism worldwide, is sending clear messages to Palestinians and the international community at large: as far as Israel is concerned, no international law is relevant, nothing is sacred and no inch of Palestine is off limits.

This time, however, it is not business as usual.

Yes, Israel’s territorial expansion at the expense of Occupied Palestine has been the common denominator among all Israeli governments in the last 75 years; but various Israeli governments, including that of Netanyahu’s early cabinets, found indirect ways to justify illegal settlement constructions. So-called ‘natural expansion’ and ‘security’ needs were some of the many pretexts furnished by Israel to justify its constant push for land acquisition by force.

Practically, none of this would have been possible if it were not for the inexhaustible United States support of Israel – financially, militarily and politically. Moreover, US vetoes at the UNSC and the relentless pressure on UNGA members allowed Israel to circumvent international law unscathed. The outcome is today’s tragic reality.

According to the official UN news website, there are currently nearly 700,000 illegal Jewish settlers. The Israeli NGO ‘Peace Now’ says that these Jewish settlers live in 145 illegal colonies in the Occupied West Bank, in addition to 140 settlement outposts, many of which are likely to be made official by the new government.

In fact, the Netanyahu-led alliance has been formulated with the understanding that the outposts would be legalized in the future, thus receiving official government funding. This should not pose a major political problem for Netanyahu, who, in 2020, had succeeded in selling the idea to the Israeli Knesset of annexing much of the West Bank and is now determined to carry out a process of ‘soft annexation’ — a de-facto annexation that is likely to become legalized as a de jure annexation later on.

Nor would the full colonization of Palestine prove to be a legal problem. Israel’s Nation-State Law of 2018 has already provided the legal cover for Tel Aviv to flaunt international law and to do as it pleases in terms of colonizing all of Palestine and marginalizing all of the Palestinian rights. According to Israel’s new Basic Law, “the State of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination”. It was this particular reference that was cited in the new government’s statement on December 29.

And there are not many in Israel who are protesting this. In a recent article in the Palestine Chronicle, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explains how the current socio-political formations of Israeli society make it nearly impossible for alternative mainstream politics to emerge, aside from the three dominant rightwing and extremist currents at work in the Netanyahu coalition: Ultra-Orthodox Jews, National Religious Jews and Likud’s secular Jews.

This means that change in Israel could never come from Israel itself. While Palestinians continue to resist, Arab and Muslim governments, and the international community at large must confront Israel, using all means available to end this travesty.

The ICJ’s opinion is very important, but without meaningful action, a legal opinion alone will not reverse the sinister reality on the ground in Palestine, especially when this reality is bankrolled, supported and sustained by Washington and Israel’s other western allies.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.