America’s largest gun lobby opened its annual convention Friday in Texas, less than 500 kilometers from an elementary school where 19 children and two adults were killed by a teenage gunman with an automatic weapon just days earlier. VOA correspondent Scott Stearns has our story from Houston.
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Two fires that merged to create the largest wildfire in New Mexico history have both been traced to prescribed burns set by U.S. forest managers as preventive measures, federal investigators announced Friday.

The findings could have implications for the future use of prescribed fire to limit the buildup of dry vegetation amid a U.S. Forest Service moratorium on the practice. They also could affect complex deliberations concerning emergency aid and liability for a fire that has spread across 1,260 square kilometers (486 square miles) and destroyed hundreds of structures.

The two fires joined in April to form the massive blaze at the southern tip of the Rocky Mountains, in the Sangre de Cristo range.

One of the fires was previously traced to April 6, when a prescribed burn, set by firefighters to clear out small trees and brush that can fuel wildfires, was declared out of control.

On Friday, investigators said they had tracked the source of the second fire to the remnants of a prescribed winter fire that lay dormant through several snowstorms only to flare up again last month.

Investigators said the prescribed “pile burn” was initiated in January at Gallinas Canyon in the Santa Fe National Forest outside Las Vegas, New Mexico, and concluded in the final days of that month. Fire was reported again in the same vicinity on April 9 and escaped control 10 days later amid dry, hot and windy conditions, Forest Service investigators found.

Scientists and forest managers are racing to develop new tools to forecast the behavior of prescribed burns amid climate change and an enduring drought in the American West. Prescribed fires are aimed at limiting the accumulation of timber and underbrush that, if left unattended, can fuel extremely hot and destructive wildfires.

Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham in a statement called the investigation results a “first step toward the federal government taking full responsibility” for the New Mexico wildfire. She highlighted her pending request to President Joe Biden to direct the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay 100% of costs related to a broad range of recovery efforts.

Forest Service Chief Randy Moore last week announced a 90-day pause and review of protocols for prescribed fires that limit the buildup of flammable vegetation that can lead to extremely hot and uncontrollable wildfires. He did not specifically link the review to the fires in New Mexico.

“It will also ensure the prescribed burn program nationwide is anchored in the most contemporary science, policies, practices and decision-making processes, and that employees, partners and communities have the support they need to continue using this critical tool to confront the wildfire crisis,” the agency said in a statement Friday.

So-called pile burns can often include wildland debris collected over months or even years. Forest managers cut back trees and gather debris into mounds, preferring to burn forest fuels in the winter when prescribed burns are easier to control.

In January, Santa Fe National Forest workers started burning through a series of piles across an area of 1.5 square kilometers (0.6 square miles), after advising the public of possible smoke hazards.
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The head of the Texas Department of Public Safety said Friday that police responding to the shooting at an elementary school made the decision not to enter a classroom where the shooter was because they believed students were no longer at risk.

At a news conference outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said the incident commander at the scene of Tuesday’s school shooting judged there was no longer an active shooter or threat to children and thought it had transitioned to a hostage situation with time to wait for a tactical team to arrive.

McGraw identified the incident commander as Pete Arredondo, chief of police of the Uvalde Consolidated School District.

McGraw told reporters, with the benefit of hindsight, “it was the wrong decision” to wait to confront the shooter.

Uvalde police have come under sharp criticism from parents and bystanders at the scene Tuesday for their delay in confronting the shooter, Salvador Ramos, 18, who had entered the school through an unlocked door and killed 19 children and two teachers.

Officials said Ramos, a high school dropout, was in the school for 40 minutes to an hour before police stormed the fourth-grade classroom where the killings occurred.

McGraw said as many as 19 police officers arrived at the scene and were in a hallway of the school, but the incident commander felt a tactical team was needed to perform the required police operation.

U.S. Border Patrol tactical officers eventually arrived, along with other officers and equipment, including a ballistics shield. They entered the classroom where Ramos was situated and where he was shot and killed.

McGraw said based on sounds recorded on security cameras and shell casings found at the scene, Ramos fired more than 100 rounds during the incident.

The National Rifle Association went ahead with the opening of its annual convention Friday in the city of Houston, just days after the shooting.  Texas Governor Gregg Abbott, who was scheduled to speak at the convention Friday, pulled out of his appearance and will instead travel to Uvalde. The governor will, however, deliver a prerecorded video message at the convention.

Former President Donald Trump is still scheduled to speak at the gun rights lobbying group’s three-day event.  

President Joe Biden is scheduled to visit Uvalde on Sunday.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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More than 12 million immigrants moved through Ellis Island, a primary U.S. federal immigration station in New York, between 1892 and 1954. The assimilation of these newcomers into the great U.S. “melting pot” in their pursuit of the American dream is a key part of the nation’s story.

Many Americans have come to idealize those early immigrants, mostly Europeans, as somehow more desirable than today’s immigrants, who primarily hail from Latin America and Asia and are more likely to be viewed by some as slow to assimilate, potential criminals, a financial drain on the system, and as stealing jobs from the American-born.

Economic historians Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky are using cutting-edge data collection and analytics to separate immigrant fact from fiction while comparing modern-day migrants to those who came to America a century ago.

Successful children

“One big surprise was how well the children of immigrants are doing, and how (children of) immigrants from nearly every sending country are more upwardly mobile than the children of the U.S.-born. And how that stays constant over 100 years, regardless of the sending country,” says Abramitzky, a professor of economics at Stanford University.

The reason many children of immigrants do better than their American-born counterparts can come down to location, said Boustan, a professor of economics at Princeton University.

“They’re locating in very dynamic cities with a lot of good job opportunities, and that’s helping set up their kids for success,” Boustan says. “We find that the children of the internal migrants — the U.S.-born families that move somewhere else — actually look a lot like the children of immigrants. And so, what’s really happening is that immigrants are willing to move to good places, and a lot of U.S.-born families stay in the location where they were born.

Another less-apparent advantage for children of immigrants in low-paying jobs, is that their parents might have college degrees and professional skills honed in their home countries that they cannot apply in the U.S., but they instill a drive for education and professional success in their children.

The data suggests that the children of today’s immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Mexico or Guatemala who grew up in relatively poor families are doing just as well as the children of Norwegian, German and Italian immigrants of the past. Like them, they are more likely than the children of equally poor U.S.-born parents to make it into the middle class or beyond.

The duo’s findings are laid out in their book, “Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success.”

Disputing existing narratives

The data also dispels the notion that today’s immigrants are a financial burden, Boustan said.

“Even if immigrant parents are low paid, their children are able to move up very quickly into higher paid, more productive jobs,” she says. “So, at this timescale of a generation, we see that immigrants are able to pay more into the system than they take out.”

Abramitzky and Boustan extrapolated that today’s immigrants assimilate as quickly as immigrants did a century ago. They used markers like learning English, living outside an ethnic neighborhood, intermarriage and giving children American-sounding names to conclude that today’s immigrants are no more likely than past immigrants to retain their native culture.

Anti-immigrant forces often point to crime as a reason to limit immigration or build a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. However, the data shows immigrants today are less likely to be arrested and imprisoned for a crime than people born in the United States.

Job thieves?

Do immigrants steal jobs and reduce the wages of U.S.-born workers? The data suggests immigrants fill gaps at the opposite ends of the labor market, where there is a lot of demand but not enough workers to fill those roles, according to Boustan.

“These days, immigrants bring a set of skills that are not very widespread in the U.S. today,” Boustan says. “Many immigrants are very highly skilled Ph.D. scientists, tech workers, and those skills often create more jobs than take away jobs.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum, uneducated, poorer immigrants tend to work in manual positions like construction, agriculture and landscaping or in service professions such as helping the elderly or providing child care.

“People who are at the lower tail of the income distribution are doing the kinds of jobs that are hard to find U.S.-born workers to do,” Abramitzky says. “Immigrants and the U.S.-born workers are not perfect substitutes to one another.”

A 2020 Pew Research poll suggests that Americans on both ends of the political spectrum generally agree that immigrants — both the undocumented and those in the U.S. legally — mostly work in jobs that U.S. citizens don’t want.

But Harvard professor George Borjas, a labor economist specializing in immigration issues, says the influx of immigrants can hurt the prospects of the working poor.

People in low-wage jobs that require limited education face significant competition from immigrants, according to Borjas, who writes that an increase in the pool of low-skilled workers drives a drop in overall earnings.

The immigrants themselves, and business owners who use immigrant labor, are the biggest winners from an influx of immigration, he says.

In their book, Abramitzky and Boustan point out that strict immigrant quotas in the 1920s did not result in higher wages for U.S. manufacturing workers, even though immigration had dropped by “hundreds of thousands.”

The co-authors hope lawmakers will examine the data before crafting future immigration laws and policies.

“That immigrants are upwardly mobile from nearly every sending country, regardless of where they come from, suggests that there are more similarities than differences in the immigrant experiences, despite the huge change in sending countries,” Abramitzky says.

“We see that immigrants are doing just as well as immigrants in the past. …Designing the policy (while) having in mind that immigrants aren’t able to assimilate and integrate, is misinformed.”
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The National Rifle Association is going ahead with the opening of its annual convention Friday in Houston, just days after a lone teenage gunman entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, also in Texas, and killed 19 children and two teachers. 

Texas Governor Gregg Abbott, who was scheduled to deliver an in-person address at the convention Friday, has pulled out of his appearance and will instead travel to Uvalde. The governor will, however, will be a presence at the convention with a pre-recorded video message, according to The Dallas Morning News. 

Former U.S. President Donald Trump, however, is still scheduled to speak at the three-day event of the gun rights lobbying group. 

Meanwhile, Texas law enforcement authorities are facing tough questions about their response and the length of time it took them Tuesday to storm the school to confront 18-year-old gunman Salvador Ramos.   Officials say Ramos, a high school dropout, was in Robb Elementary for 40 minutes to an hour before police barged into the fourth-grade classroom where he had killed 21 people. 

Witnesses say parents of the children trapped in the school, located in a residential neighborhood, and onlookers who gathered at midday on Tuesday had shouted at police to enter the school and put an end to the carnage. 

One witness outside the school, Juan Caranza, 24, who watched the scene from outside his house across the street, said women shouted at police, “Go in there! Go in there!”

Police further filled in the timeline of the shooting Thursday. Victor Escalon, a regional director at the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Ramos walked into the building through an unlocked door and without encountering a school safety officer, contradicting earlier reports. 

The school normally has an armed officer on duty, but when the gunman arrived Tuesday, “there was not an officer, readily available, armed,” and the gunman entered the building “unobstructed,” Escalon said.

The gunman was killed when a U.S. Border Patrol tactical team arrived, broke into the classroom and killed the gunman, Escalon said.

Javier Cazares, whose fourth-grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raised the idea with other bystanders of storming the building themselves because he did not think police were moving fast enough.

“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said. “More could have been done. They were unprepared.”

One bystander recorded a video posted to his Facebook account that gave his running account of parents trying desperately to get police to move more quickly to rescue their children.

“These cops are right here. Bro, there’s a (expletive) shooting at the school, and these (expletive) cops are telling everybody to leave, dude, while everybody’s here trying to pick up their (expletive) kids,” the man said in an account published by The Washington Post.

Later, the man says the children “are all in there, and the cops ain’t doing (expletive) but standing outside.” 

One woman, who said her son was in the school, urged police to take a shot at the gunman if they could.

“They’re kids,” she shouted. “I’m going to go, I’m going to (expletive) go.”

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw on Wednesday defended the police response, saying, “The bottom line is law enforcement was there. They did engage immediately. They did contain (Ramos) in the classroom” before killing him.

Escalon, of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said that two Uvalde police officers arrived four minutes later and ran into the school but were quickly pinned down when Ramos fired at them.

Authorities continued to search for a motive behind the horrific rampage, the deadliest U.S. school shooting spree in nearly a decade. They said Ramos had no known criminal or mental health history, although some acquaintances recounted his troubling anti-social behavior, such as firing a BB gun at random people walking in Uvalde.

A 15-year-old German girl who Ramos chatted with online said he told her he “threw dead cats at people’s houses.”  

Just as Ramos unleashed his attack, he texted the girl, warning her in a private message that he was about to shoot up an elementary school.

Abbott said Wednesday that 17 others were wounded or injured in the attack, but none had life-threatening injuries. A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety said the injured include “multiple children” who survived gunfire in their classroom. 

The husband of one of the teachers killed in the mass shooting died Thursday.  Joe Garcia was married to Irma Garcia, his high school sweetheart, for 24 years and they had four children.  Garcia had a heart attack as he was making arrangements for his wife’s funeral. 

Students at schools and colleges across the U.S. staged walkouts on their campuses Thursday to demand tougher gun control measures. 

The White House said President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Texas Sunday to grieve with the community.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters
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