Category: State news

More than 13,000 Afghan refugees landed in Wisconsin at Fort McCoy near Tomah in August 2021 and are now being resettled across the state and nation. Not only did they face trauma in being airlifted suddenly from Kabul, but continue to face uncertainty about their futures, including the legal process for obtaining legal immigration status in the U.S. that’s described as complex.

“A lot of people specifically with this situation were hoping there would be something called an Afghan Adjustment Act,” says Erin Barbato, director of the University of Wisconsin Law School Immigrant Justice Clinic. “We’ve had before it with the Cuban Adjustment Act, which would allow everybody who came in this emergent situation to have an expedited manner to obtain their lawful permanent resident status and then have a pathway to citizenship. But so far, it doesn’t seem like there has been much movement in our Congress to make this happen.”

Quoted: UW politics professor Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center, says, “Really in modern times, we’ve seen nothing like what has happened in Wisconsin, and nationally, since the 2020 election.”

He continues, “The unwillingness of most of one party to accept the results and to continue pushing with audits and investigations and questions and subpoenas and other efforts to try to keep their concerns alive, is really new and doesn’t have any precedent. And I think it is not well supported by the facts of the election.”

Quoted: “He’s been I would say argumentative and somewhat belligerent,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“It’s a little bit of a sort of bull in the china shop analogy, that he’s just throwing elbows and feels, it seems, quite confident about what he’s doing. … I can’t diagnose him psychologically from a distance. I wouldn’t want to do that. But there is a pattern of him being brazen I would say and aggressive in his actions without maybe thinking about all the consequences of what he’s doing.”

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomy professor James Lattis said the southwest direction of the object means it was likely a meteoroid and not a piece of space junk, which generally travels east.

He said it’s common to see meteors in the early morning hours in the Midwest because the region is facing forward in the earth’s obit around the sun.

“It’s like looking out the windshield of your car,” he said. “You get more bugs on your windshield because that’s the direction you’re moving.”

A new poll of Wisconsin residents shows that climate change, the federal budget deficit, income distribution and race relations are among the top concerns heading into the 2022 midterms, although many of the same respondents felt issues were a larger problem at the national level.

University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs sent an eight-page survey to 5,000 residents between July and September 2020. Nearly 1,600 individuals from all over the state except Menomonee County responded, with a response rate of 33 percent.

Quoted: “Correlation does not mean causation,” said Timothy Smeeding, professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In other words, if two variables run parallel historically, it doesn’t mean the one is causing the other.

A number of factors have contributed to the rise in out-of-wedlock births, he said.

There has been a rise in cohabitation, more permissive sexual mores, a decline in shotgun weddings, easier divorce laws, a drop in manufacturing jobs for males without college degrees and greater financial independence for women.

Quoted: “If the GOP primary becomes a three-way race, it will likely quickly become one of the most costly in the country,” said Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center.

“The funding will need to emerge quickly because the primary is only seven months away and two of the prime candidates have not even officially entered the race.”

Quoted: “This has gotten worse, not better,” said Michael Wagner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication whose research focuses on the functioning of American democracy. “I think we had a moment a year ago to try to push the reset button on how we think about democratic elections, and instead, we kept playing.”

“It’s made it convenient for people who want to doubt the election to cling to that — and that was part of what motivated the insurrectionists,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at UW-Madison.

Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that running for office is a remedy “as long as it is done in the spirit of genuine public service and not merely to implement a dogmatic agenda.”

He notes: Volunteering on local boards and commissions is “an underappreciated way to contribute and see what good is happening in the public sphere.”

Quoted: Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said stormy days aren’t that rare of an occurrence at this time of the year for the state.

“Even in a normal year, under perfectly normal circumstances, we’d have a nice progression of pretty stormy days, followed by a couple of clear days, followed by stormy,” he said. “But there are a couple of things that might be fueling a little bit of an extra punch for these things.”

Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute for Climatic Research at UW-Madison, said the amount of time where tornadoes are a risk for the state is only going to grow.

“On the whole, we’re not sure how (tornadoes) are going to change in the future, whether they’re going to become more intense, less intense, more common, less common,” he said. “But in a warmer climate, we’ll start to see conditions more favorable for tornadoes earlier in the year, in April or May, and then becoming more common in the fall through November.”