Leaving it all behind. Every day now, immigration seems to be in the news across Europe and the U.S. It’s understandable; the numbers of migrants and asylum seekers have continued to break records each year since the pandemic let up. But what’s happening with the migrants themselves? Why are so many people around the world uprooting their lives? Today, Rebecca Hamlin looks at the causes driving the huge waves of migration globally, how these causes can interact and complicate one another, and the effects of government policies designed to stem it.

—Michael Bluhm

111MHz: ‘Seven Steps to Heaven.’ As long as it’s so hot, how about some sizzling Miles Davis—from a 1966 track collected in The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Miles Davis at Newport 1955-1975. Later in his career, Davis slowed this number down, but here—just a few years before he went electric—this hard-bop number keeps the energy and showiness of the 1963 album track. But here it’s in full force, live at the Newport Jazz Festival—with Wayne Shorter on tenor, Herbie Hancock on keys, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Downfall in Dhaka. On August 5, the prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled to India after weeks of public protests against her increasingly autocratic rule. Students had been demonstrating since June against a quota system restricting eligibility for government jobs, which people in the country widely see as secure and lucrative.

Bangladesh’s supreme court overturned the law behind the quota system, but the protests grew into a broader movement calling for Hasina’s removal. She’d ruled Bangladesh since 2009, regularly quashing dissent, including by killing opposition activists.

Amid the recent protests, government security forces and vigilantes from Hasina’s party—among them, a paramilitary unit whose past leaders have faced international sanctions over accusations of torture, kidnapping, and murder—cracked down on demonstrators, arresting more than 10,000 of them.

Why did the crackdown fail—and the rebellion work?

The most violent day of protests was August 4, as almost 100 demonstrators died in clashes across Bangladesh. But that evening, protest leaders decided to move up by one day a planned mass march to Hasina’s residence, originally scheduled for August 6. Instead of backing down when faced with a new curfew and rising violence, the protesters realized that the public’s fear of the regime had largely faded, allowing the movement to continue growing. Dozens of former senior military officers also called on its current leadership not to rescue “those who have created the current situation.” On August 5, the army chief announced Hasina’s resignation, saying he’d begin the formation of an interim government.

Hasina, one of the world’s longest-serving female leaders, was the daughter of Mujibur Rahman, who led Bangladesh to independence and served as its first president. He and most of his family were assassinated in an army coup in 1975, survived only by Hasina and her sister.

—Michael Bluhm

People’s Republic behaving badly. On June 17, Chinese coast guard ships rammed and boarded Philippine navy vessels, confiscating and damaging equipment. One Philippine sailor lost a finger when a Chinese boat collided with his dinghy at high speed.

The Filipinos were on their way to resupply a WWII-era warship, the Sierra Madre, beached on a partially submerged reef—the Second Thomas Shoal—which has become a critical flash point between the countries. The Philippine armed forces’ chief of staff called the Chinese attack “piracy.” 

The incident is the most serious clash yet between Beijing and Manila in the South China Sea, but for years the People’s Republic has been escalating its “gray zone” tactics in the Philippines’ maritime Exclusive Economic Zone—aggressive actions intended to change the status quo there without resorting to lethal force. Chinese ships have rammed, blocked, surrounded, fired water cannons, and used military-grade lasers against civilian and military vessels. China also uses its coast guard and a “fishing militia”—flotillas of fishermen trained and equipped by the military—to patrol and occupy disputed areas.

Over the past decade, Beijing has become increasingly aggressive in waters far from its coast, claiming ownership of most of the South China Sea against longstanding, internationally recognized treaties. China has seized disputed islands and turned them into military installations, driving tensions with countries throughout the Indo-Pacific. Vietnam and Malaysia say Beijing’s ships intrude in their waters, while Japan and China struggle over control of islands in the East China Sea.

So how are China’s neighbors responding?

Over the past week, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines have all agreed to new security deals with the United States. On July 28, Tokyo and Washington announced the creation of a joint-force headquarters in Japan, along with a deal to increase their co-production of air-to-air and air-defense missiles. This follows the increased military cooperation agreed during the April state visit by the Japanese prime minister to the U.S. capital, where the two sides agreed to integrate Japan into military exercises and defense architecture with Australia and the U.K.

While U.S. officials were in Tokyo, they attended a trilateral meeting of the defense ministers of Japan, South Korea, and the U.S.—the first visit to Japan by a South Korean defense minister in 15 years. Now, Tokyo and Seoul are overcoming decades of enmity to work together in confronting China, and the three ministers signed a new cooperation memo on July 28, establishing annual, joint military exercises.

Meanwhile, the Philippines and the U.S. agreed on July 30 that Washington would provide US$500 million to modernize the Philippine armed forces, while the U.S. also agreed to boost its investment in Philippine cybersecurity. Manila has become closer and closer to Washington since the election of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in 2022—after his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, repeatedly made overtures to Beijing and berated the U.S.: In 2023, Manila gave the U.S. military access to four new bases across its islands; and in May, the two countries carried out their biggest joint military drills ever.

—Michael Bluhm

Weather report: Brooklyn, U.S.A. It’s high-summer New York City, regularly in the mid-30s C (mid-90s F)—and swampy. On July 31, there were clouds over Brooklyn. They belonged to an approaching cold front that led to an all-too-brief shower, temporarily cooling the city before making it only more humid.

Follow the bitcoin. Of everything Donald Trump could have been doing this past weekend, the former U.S. president and current Republican Party nominee traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, to speak at the Bitcoin 2024 conference. Having once called Bitcoin “a scam,” Trump is now promising that, if reelected in November, he’ll make America the “crypto capital of the planet—and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.”

While Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s now-presumptive nominee, was not there, her campaign has reached out to top crypto executives to “reset” her party’s relations with them. This followed 14 Democratic members of Congress signing a letter urging their party’s leadership to be more open toward cryptocurrency, to combat what they called “a public perception” that their party “holds a negative viewpoint on digital assets.”

It’s all in stark contrast with the U.S. administration of President Joe Biden—whose chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, has called the crypto industry “rife with fraud, scams, bankruptcies, and money laundering.” Under Gensler, the SEC has won a string of lawsuits against crypto companies.

Why, seemingly all of a sudden, has crypto become so politically salient in the U.S.?

It’s true, there’s money in it, at a moment when money really matters. Citing OpenSecrets, The Washington Post estimates that crypto companies and investors have already donated some $121 million this election.

But there are voters in it, too—a lot of them. Upward of 52 million Americans own digital assets—Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, or other kinds of digital property altogether, like music or art. Overwhelmingly, these voters are young; they’re politically motivated; and about half of them say they’d be less likely to vote for a candidate who has negative views on crypto. These voters evidently believe in cryptocurrency as an asset category to help stake their futures on. But from across the speeches at Bitcoin 2024 alone, they also evidently believe in it as a crucial element of humanity’s future as a whole.

—Gustav Jönsson

How can you keep on moving. It’s hard to read the news without reading something about a crisis; it can feel a bit like hearing wolf. But the United States is in the grip of a homelessness crisis. Last year, there were some 70,000 more homeless people in America than there were in 2022—more than 650,000 in total. Today, Dennis Culhane explains why U.S. homelessness fell in the years after 2008’s Great Recession—and then why it started trending up again. The recent spike, Culhane says, has been largely on account of immigration. “… 75% of last year’s increase was in just four jurisdictions: New York, Massachusetts, Chicago, and Denver”—where Texas’ Governor Greg Abbott bussed tens of thousands of migrants who’d come into the country over its southern border—overwhelming existing shelters. But there’s more to it than that—a slate of reasons why U.S. homelessness programs could fare much better than they do against homelessness itself.

—Gustav Jönsson

Two concepts of populism. With U.S. President Joe Biden announcing he won’t seek reelection in November, the American news media has—unsurprisingly, if not naturally—kicked off intensive coverage of his presumptive successor as the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, and her chances of winning in his place. How much money is she raising? What are her poll numbers like? Who will she pick as her running mate? Fair enough.

But the question for American voters, who’ll determine the outcome of the election, isn’t whether Harris will win but how the Democrats would govern under her leadership if she does. For many, that question has already been answered by partisan messaging or media narratives. But for the rest, it’ll be answered by the substance of the policy agenda she advances—and, not least, the style of the political rhetoric she advances it in.

Her opponent, Donald Trump, has his own policy priorities—from ending illegal immigration to dismantling the existing federal bureaucracy—but they all belong to a signature style, a form of populism that pits his supporters against his opponents, often foreigners, and sometimes the U.S. government itself. The style is central to what makes Trump feel as clear and compelling to his supporters as he does.

As David Kusnet, President Bill Clinton’s former chief speechwriter, noted during the first year of the current presidency, Trump won in 2016 because he spoke to “Americans who might have voted for Clinton and Obama but felt let down by the political and economic system.” Vastly outspent by Hillary Clinton, Trump did what she couldn’t—capitalize on broad and deep feelings of disaffection and dislocation in America. It was apparent to Kusnet then that this style wouldn’t be Trump’s alone but ascendant in the Republican Party as a whole. Several Republican lawmakers, including one J.D. Vance, were already experimenting with variations on the theme.

But as Kusnet also pointed out, Biden adopted a populist style of his own, throughout his 2020 campaign and from the outset of his presidency—a “progressive populism” that emphasizes the economy and its bearing on everyday people. The two styles represent two traditions in American politics. To Kusnet, the underlying idea of the cultural tradition Trump represents is, “They think they’re better than you are,” whereas the underlying idea of the economic tradition Biden has represented is, “They’re robbing you blind.”

Biden may not have condemned “millionaires and billionaires” with the same frequency or force as the Democratic senator and self-identifying socialist Bernie Sanders has. Still, Biden has repeatedly framed aspects of his policy agenda as responses to “corporate greed” on behalf of the American working and middle classes. It’s been a relatively forbearing mode of economic populism, Kusnet says, “because it doesn’t attack the wealthy, as such; it just attacks policies that favor the wealthy.” But it’s an idiom that can speak powerfully to millions of undecided voters.

—Gustav Jönsson

Histories of violence. The assassination attempt on Donald Trump over the weekend, injuring the former U.S. president—and killing Corey Comperatore, a firefighter from Sarver, Pennsylvania—has triggered a lot of understandable anxiety, not least throughout the media. In the U.K., the BBC declared that “the illusion of security and safety in American politics—built over decades—has been dramatically shattered.” In the U.S., The Atlantic, a publication founded in 1857, led its coverage of the crime by announcing in a banner at the top of its homepage that the incident was “part of a terrible new era of political violence.”

Is this true?

America has a long record of political violence, at times deadly, going back to the country’s founding. In 1804, Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. secretary of the treasury, was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, then Thomas Jefferson’s vice president. Between 1830 and 1860, historians have documented some 70 physical fights—including a caning—among members of Congress.

Four U.S. presidents have since been assassinated, and 13 others survived attempts—including Ronald Reagan in 1981. More recently, Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise—a Democrat and a Republican, respectively—were shot while serving in Congress; and in 2022, Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, was badly wounded in their home by an attacker wielding a hammer. In 2020, Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer was the target of a kidnapping plot, ultimately foiled by law enforcement.

From the 1960s through the ‘90s, much of the developed world went through an era of regular political violence. Between 1970 and 1998, the Red Army Faction—also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang—carried out a series of bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings in West Germany. In 1978, the Red Brigades killed Italy’s former prime minister Aldo Moro. And beginning in the late 1960s, groups like the Weather Underground undertook a program of political violence in the United States. Even in Canada, globally renowned as easygoing, the Front de Libération du Québec—a militant Québécois separatist group—kidnapped and killed a government minister in 1970. Over these same decades, thousands of British and Irish died in the conflict over the political status of Northern Ireland.

As recently as 2022, the former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot and killed, while Pakistan’s PM survived a shooting the same year—as Slovakia’s did this May. Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, was stabbed while campaigning for office in 2018.

So no, there’s no reason at the moment to think a terrible new era of political violence is upon America or the democratic world. We’ve been living through one for a generation.

What may be changing, however, isn’t the quantity of political violence but its quality. The leftist bombings of the 1960s and ‘70s, along with the jihadi operations of more recent decades, have receded. But it appears they’re being replaced by attacks rooted in domestic political polarization and ethnic identity. During the recent election campaign for the European Parliament, German police recorded at least half a dozen assaults, almost all involving supporters of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. Across Europe, meanwhile, recent years have seen more and more Jews and immigrants—mostly Muslims—subject to brutality, neofascist and otherwise.

—Michael Bluhm