Opinion
4A
Thursday, March 18, 2021
Our View
Solutions for
child care
recovery
ural Oregon is facing a diffi cult post-
COVID economic recovery. The $1.9 tril-
lion federal coronavirus relief package
will undoubtedly help, but without addressing some
long-standing barriers to economic development, we
will not grow and thrive.
The lack of child care is one of those barriers.
We live in a child care desert, where the number of
available slots is a fraction of the need.
Without adequate and aff ordable child care
options for children younger than age 5, a laundry
list of problems arises:
• Parents (women, mostly) who want to work or
attend school may need to drop out of the workforce
or college, harming their family’s long-term eco-
nomic future.
• Employers trying to recruit and retain
employees have limited options, as potential
workers are not available.
• A “brain drain” ensues, as professionals leave
rural Oregon to pursue their careers in areas with
more child care options.
• Rural school districts suff er from diminishing
student enrollment year after year, as young families
move away.
• When there are few preschool options, many 5
year olds are not ready to learn when they start kin-
dergarten, which undermines their chances of future
academic success.
A strong child care system is needed to solve
these problems.
The Ford Family Foundation’s recent report,
“Child Care in Rural Oregon,” charts a path to
improve the quantity and quality of child care. Their
fi ve recommendations should be quickly enacted.
Their fi rst recommendation is for the Oregon
Department of Human Services to use data from
surveys of child care providers across the state
to accurately model the actual costs of providing
child care, to calculate reimbursement rates that are
fair across the state and don’t put rural areas at a
disadvantage.
Second, do away with the state’s current system
of paying more for child care in urban areas than is
paid in rural areas, and permanently waive or sig-
nifi cantly lower the co-payments for low-income
families who receive child care assistance.
Third, recognize that both home-based child care
providers and child care centers need consistent and
reliable funding. They need to receive payments
based on a child’s enrollment rather than their daily
attendance.
Fourth, launch a statewide system to link child
care provider networks so that administrative ser-
vices, such as bookkeeping and payroll, can be
shared by home-based child care and child care cen-
ters across the state, lowering costs for all.
Fifth, make changes in Oregon’s child care reg-
ulations to allow small child care centers to be
located in nonresidential settings, so they can be
licensed as “Certifi ed Family Child Care.” This
would allow for mixed-age groups of up to 16 chil-
dren in “micro-centers” in schools and other existing
buildings.
These steps don’t solve the underlying problem
causing the shortage of child care: This care is
expensive to provide because of the high caregiv-
er-to-child ratios needed for the safety of very young
children, and is not subsidized by the government
except for very low-income families. The brunt of
the cost of child care is primarily borne by families.
For many families, child care costs more than their
mortgage, and can be as high as college tuition.
Ultimately, we as a nation need to face the fact
that a child’s education does not start in kinder-
garten. It starts at birth, so the more tax dollars
we spend on high-quality child care and educa-
tion, the less we will spend on remedial services
and social welfare systems, and the better off we
will be in the long run.
R
Other Views
White House ignores border chaos
JOE
GUZZARDI
IMMIGRATION ANALYST
he daily Southwest border
updates are generating nation-
wide concern, except in Wash-
ington, D.C., where indiff erence
reigns.
The latest Department of Home-
land Security report showed that in
February, more than 100,000 people
were either apprehended by or sur-
rendered to federal immigration offi -
cials on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Those totals, a 14-year high, include
about 9,460 unaccompanied minors
and more than 19,240 family units,
which refl ect 62% and 38% increases,
respectively, when compared to Janu-
ary’s statistics.
Nonetheless, President Joe Biden,
Homeland Security Secretary Ale-
jandro Majorkas and Press Secretary
Jen Psaki refuse to even hint that the
administration’s lax border policies
need immediate reining in. For his
part, Biden has not spoken offi cially
about what his administration calls a
border challenge. But Psaki refused to
call the border rush a crisis, instead
labeling it “an enormous challenge.”
Mayorkas, when asked a similar ques-
tion about whether the border events
represented a crisis, answered with a
fl at out “no.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott didn’t
hesitate to call the growing border
chaos a crisis. Abbott has a better
perspective on the border infl ux than
White House operatives, and the gov-
ernor formed Operation Lone Star
to deploy personnel from the Texas
Department of Public Safety and the
T
Texas National Guard to the border to
secure the area. Abbott said Opera-
tion Lone Star’s goal is to “deny Mex-
ican cartels and other smugglers the
ability to move drugs and people into
Texas.”
While the White House border
rhetoric has focused almost exclu-
sively on what it describes as the need
for a humanitarian response to migra-
tion, it’s ignored the undeniable con-
nection between open borders and
human smuggling. Ohio Sen. Rob
Portman is the Senate Homeland
Security and Governmental Aff airs
top Republican who has overseen
three separate committee investi-
gations that date back over several
administrations.
Portman’s 2016 investigation,
“Protecting Unaccompanied Alien
Children from Traffi cking and Other
Abuses,” uncovered that the Depart-
ment of Health and Human Services
failed to adequately vet or to con-
duct in-depth background checks on
the Ohio adults to whom it released
minor children. The adults turned
out to be human smugglers. The
2018 report, “Oversight of the Care
of Unaccompanied Minor Children,”
came to similarly shocking and dan-
gerous conclusions. HHS and DHS
didn’t make the recommended post-
2016 changes to traffi cking crimes
and to tracking whether released
aliens report for their designated
immigration court dates.
Biden appears either under-in-
formed or indiff erent to the growing
human traffi cking trade that his
administration encourages. After
ending the Remain in Mexico policy,
the latest federal government’s
inducement for more unaccompanied
children to rush the border is that
HHS will pay for minors in its cus-
tody to be fl own to their sponsor or
family member’s home, often illegal
immigrants, when, as is invariably
the case, the receiving adult cannot
pay. Furthermore, Biden’s DHS sub-
mitted a notice to the Federal Register
to withdraw an existing proposed
rule that would require the receiving
immigrant to sponsor and care for an
arriving migrant once s/he becomes a
lawful permanent resident.
While Biden and those close to
him debate semantics, last week
DHS reached its breaking point, and
begged ICE deportation offi cers to
travel to the border ASAP to help
with what the agency called “security
operations” for the illegal immigrant
children and families that have over-
whelmed a swamped Border Patrol.
Michael Meade, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement acting director,
pleaded for “immediate action.” Vol-
unteers would include civilians with
medical or legal experience as well as
drivers and food servers.
Offi cials on the scene won’t spec-
ulate on when the emergency request
for increased border assistance might
be called off . The Biden administra-
tion is in full denial, and the president
refuses to travel to the border to eval-
uate conditions.
As the surge with its associated
criminal and COVID-19 risks inten-
sifi es daily, an educated guess is that
the existing calamitous circumstances
will remain unchanged well into the
peak summer months.
———
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for
Immigration Reform analyst who has
written about immigration for more
than 30 years. Contact him at
jguzzardi@pfi rdc.org.
Letters
Man can’t live without
nature, but nature can do
without man
I agree with George Wuerthner
in his comment (National forests,
BLM lands should be off -limits to
logging, Feb. 16) that forests are
restored by natural processes. That’s
about all, though.
The forest ecosystems started
changing dramatically when white
man hit the East Coast and hav-
en’t stopped changing ever since.
He points out a lot of problems that
contribute to where we are today,
but I don’t hear any answers to
them.
Sounds as if he is against the
Malheur collaborative because log-
ging is part of the possible prob-
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lem-solving ideas. Remember, for
the past 30 to 40 years, the environ-
mentalists have guided and directed
the U.S. Forest Service in doing its
work.
Now we can’t see the forest for
the trees.
I’m glad to see that there are
some folks trying to work together
to fi nd answers for our man-made
problems.
We should remember, man can’t
live without nature, but nature can
do without man.
Ken Koser
Prairie City