Editorial Roundup: United States
Oct 26, 2026, 5:58 PM
Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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Oct. 22
The Washington Post says surging oil costs are spurring investments in renewables
Despite continuing Iranian attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, oil shipments from the Middle East have now surpassed prewar levels. The might of the U.S. military is to thank for the recovery of oil flows through the strait itself. But the proliferation of alternative routes around the region, new production outside the Middle East and declining fuel consumption are thanks to the might of the free market.
Oil flows throughout the Middle East averaged more than 24 million barrels a day last week, up from 23.3 million before the war, according to the ship tracker Kpler. Heavier reliance on Saudi and Emirati pipelines has allowed more crude to bypass the strait: 40 percent of non-Iranian Gulf crude is going through pipelines, up from 17 percent before the war.
At the same time, the U.S. military has helped restore flows through the strait even as an American embargo has mostly choked off Iranian crude. Oil flows through the strait have rebounded to 82 percent of prewar levels, facilitated by a clever ship-to-ship transfer system in which the military escorts shuttle tankers through Hormuz to cargo ships in the Gulf of Oman.
While the work-around has proved effective, oil flows cannot rely on costly military escorts in perpetuity. Attacks by Iranians and their proxies, combined with an expectation that hostilities will escalate following the midterm elections, keep prices elevated. These were foreseeable consequences of President Donald Trump’s war of choice. Picking this fight in February all but guaranteed trouble in the strait.
While the military can protect freedom of navigation, no central planner could replicate the decentralized adjustments being made because of higher prices. Producers outside the Middle East added 2.3 million barrels a day between February and August, led by the United States, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Venezuela and Nigeria, according to the International Energy Agency.
Oil production across the Western Hemisphere is projected to surge in the next decade, as high prices justify investments in marginal projects. Chevron, for example, plans to put nearly $14 billion into Argentina over the next decade, tripling production there. Four out of five institutional investors say that disruptions in Middle Eastern markets make them more likely to invest in Canada, according to a recent survey by ATB Cormark Capital Markets.
On Wednesday, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham authorized a long-stalled offshore natural gas project in the North Sea while announcing major investments in renewable energy elsewhere. North Sea drilling has long been opposed by progressives in the Labour Party, but high prices and the worst inflation in a year created cover for Burnham to give the green light.
Thanks to a freer, more diversified energy market, the Iran war has not re-created the crippling shortages Americans endured in the 1970s. While high gas prices are certainly a major political headache for the party in power, the U.S. has been relatively insulated.
Over the past decade, the U.S. has expanded energy production through fracking and horizontal drilling, leading to record-high domestic crude output and growing exports. Before the war, Americans were already importing far more petroleum from Canada than the Middle East. Last year, only 8 percent of U.S. crude imports came from Gulf countries.
President Richard M. Nixon instituted disastrous price controls on oil after a 1973 OPEC embargo. Whenever prices are artificially capped below the market equilibrium, demand outstrips supply, leading to the shortages and gas lines that endured through the decade. Trump floated a ban on diesel exports last month, but advisers convinced him that the idea would backfire by causing supply disruptions.
Finally, high prices cause people to use less oil. Electric vehicles become more attractive. So does public transit. The IEA forecast in August that global oil demand would decline 1.6 million barrels per day this year.
The lesson for long-term energy security is that government should welcome abundance, competition and trade. Let prices rise when oil gets scarce. Let producers profit by finding more of it. Let consumers decide when substitutes make sense. Free markets cannot prevent wars, but they can make their fallout much harder for adversaries to dictate.
ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/10/22/free-market-is-defeating-irans-oil-shock/
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Oct. 23
The New York Times says Trump Administration’s raid of Ilhan Omar’s home is a tool of authoritarianism
The revocation of a political opponent’s citizenship has long been a tool of authoritarian repression.
The Soviet Union stripped Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the dissident author, of his citizenship in 1974 and deported him to West Germany. Czechoslovakia revoked the citizenship of Milan Kundera, another celebrated author, in 1979. East Germany and Romania, under Communist rule, took similar steps against critics, as did Chile under Augusto Pinochet, Greece under its military dictatorship, Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini. More recently, Nicaragua stripped more than 300 government critics of their citizenship.
Now comes a new effort to do so from President Trump’s administration. Last week, federal agents searched the Washington home of Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and a Somali immigrant, apparently as part of a federal investigation of her citizenship. The search should disturb all Americans, regardless of whether they agree with Ms. Omar’s political views.
The investigation of her is a chilling example of the federal government using its immense power to silence a critic. It is an affront to free speech, the rule of law and American ideals. It continues the Trump administration’s use of denaturalization as a weapon. In May and early June alone, the government began proceedings to take citizenship from 33 people, more than in any other entire year since at least 2008.
Ms. Omar is by any definition a political opponent of Mr. Trump’s. She is among the most progressive representatives in Congress, an original member of the so-called Squad, along with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a frequent critic of the president. Mr. Trump, for his part, has repeatedly vilified her in public over the past seven years, often in ugly, racist ways that play into his broader fearmongering and lies about immigrants and Muslims. He has called her “garbage,” “scum,” “a disaster,” “a troublemaker” and “a terrible person.” He has mocked the head scarf she wears. He has said she should return to Somalia, which he has derided as having “nothing but crime, bedlam, filth.”
In an interview with The New York Times in January, he called for her deportation. “Ilhan Omar is a woman that should be immediately thrown out of Congress and sent back to her, her country, from where she’s always complaining about,” he said. When Tyler Pager, a Times reporter, followed up to ask if she should lose her citizenship, Mr. Trump replied, “Oh, absolutely.” Nine months later, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security entered her home and seized her phone, computers, notebooks and passport. They did so in the final weeks of Ms. Omar’s re-election campaign, violating a Justice Department standard against taking public action in an investigation of a candidate within 60 days of an election.
Mr. Trump’s allies have claimed, among other things, that Ms. Omar’s father misrepresented her age during her naturalization process 26 years ago by saying that she was 17 — and thus still a child — rather than 18. We do not pretend to know whether the allegations have merit. Yet as tempting as it may be to focus on them, they are not the main issue.
Sometimes, Mr. Trump makes claims about his perceived enemies that are simply false. Other times, his claims have some connection to reality. Repeatedly, though, he and his appointees use their law enforcement powers selectively and thus unjustly.
The list of critics whom they have targeted for investigation and prosecution includes John Bolton, E. Jean Carroll, James Comey, Lisa Cook, Cassidy Hutchinson, Gen. Mark Milley and Miles Taylor. At the same time, the Trump administration has failed to enforce the law against or has pardoned flagrant and violent criminals, so long as they are friendly to the president.
In the case of Ms. Omar, the administration has gone back more than a quarter-century to investigate a prominent critic. If her naturalization can be revisited, it suggests that no naturalized citizen is safe. It also indicates that the federal government can go searching for any decades-old problem to hound somebody who has criticized the White House. Those are the tactics of authoritarian societies.
They also evoke dark periods in American history. During the Red Scares of the early and mid-20th century, the federal government attempted to strip citizenship from labor leaders and others it accused of being radicals, often focusing on immigrants. At the time, officials like A. Mitchell Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy used the cases to whip up anti-Communist fervor and justify their efforts to undermine American democracy.
Mr. Trump is following a similar playbook with Ms. Omar. The investigation of her should end immediately.
ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/opinion/ilhan-omar-trump-citizenship.html
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Oct. 26
The Wall Street Journal on Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Starlink and Ukraine
Ukraine says its satellite access is finally back to full speed, but the throttling episode of recent weeks has mushroomed into a larger story about the Trump Administration and an indispensable battlefield technology. Elon Musk did himself no favors over the weekend with a credulous social-media outburst about the Russia-Ukraine war.
Nobody is stepping up to take credit for slowing down Ukraine’s eyes and ears in the sky. Mr. Musk’s odd explanation is that Ukraine violated the “terms of service” of Starlink, a commercial product, by using it for offensive military purposes. But that sounds like a dodge. Ukraine said the slowdown also hit Starshield, the military equivalent that helps Kyiv push the Russians out of its territory.
Mr. Musk has insisted that Starshield is under U.S. political control, as it should be. The Trump Administration has denied it is reducing such help to Ukraine. “I’ve heard it was fixed,” President Trump said late last week. “But if it’s not, I’ll speak to him,” meaning Mr. Musk. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the slowdown was a project between someone in the Administration and Mr. Musk.
Meanwhile, someone on the SpaceX board should be assigned to keep Mr. Musk away from his keyboard. “The endless slaughter of Ukrainian and Russians must stop,” Mr. Musk posted, adding the public should have “some sympathy for the poor Russian conscripts too. Those kids have no choice but to fight and die in drone strikes.” Another installment: “May the bloodthirsty warmongers, who push for a war that never ends, burn in hell!”
But who is responsible for the endless slaughter? That would be Vladimir Putin, who elected to roll tanks over the Ukrainian border in 2022 and continues to throw tens of thousands of men into the fight even as he gains almost no territory.
The practical effect of the SpaceX slowdown was to help Mr. Putin do more killing, and the Russian dictator is terrorizing Ukrainian schools, parks and grocery stores with missiles to force Ukraine’s surrender. Mr. Musk can spare us his moral indignation, since throttling Ukraine is abetting the bloodletting.
The episode has managed to unite lawmakers in Congress who are otherwise tearing each other apart over the midterm election. Democrats are vowing investigations, and they’re exploiting the affair to make the public more cynical about tech “oligarchs.” Progressives are now talking about nationalizing Mr. Musk’s technology, which would be a disaster on many levels but which Mr. Musk’s Putin aid is inviting.
The irony is that the fastest route to ending the killing is extending Starshield’s reach several hundred kilometers into Russia, to put pressure on Mr. Putin and eliminate more of his capacity to launch strikes on Ukraine. This is what Republican lawmakers visiting Ukraine recently proposed, in exchange for a Ukrainian pause on striking Russian energy assets.
Let’s hope Mr. Trump has at least noticed the blowback he can expect if he ever shuts off U.S. intelligence support for Ukraine. What was supposed to be unsubtle coercion of Ukraine boomeranged into a strategic and political own goal for the U.S.
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Oct. 21
The Guardian says Americans, at the midterms, are wondering where economy is that Donald Trump promised
It is no great revelation that Donald Trump is enriching himself as president. He raked in $2.2bn in 2025, with his position and his personal interests frequently overlapping. Yet this week’s poll finding that 34% of Republicans (and 66% of all American voters) think that he is using his position to make himself rich merits attention. Separately, voters in a Fox News poll last week put government corruption at the top of their list of concerns – just ahead of inflation and high prices.
Mr Trump pledged that people would be better off if they voted for him. Billionaires are; not the rest. He promised to lower grocery costs (they have risen) and to cut the price of gasoline to below $2 a gallon. It’s more than double that, thanks to his illegal war on Iran. Tariffs haven’t helped. Incumbents struggle when life feels unaffordable, and polling for the Guardian has shown the disenchantment of key voting groups. The gulf between his own prosperity and the lives of his base now looks less like an inspiration and more like an insult. Cash offers seem unlikely to help much.
The president’s popularity rating sank to a record low of 36% in a poll on Wednesday. Mr Trump, of course, is not on the ballot. But he is touring red states as he seeks to shore up the vote in places where the idea of a Democratic victory looked laughable two years ago. Democrats are rightly cautious about their midterms prospects, having been burned too many times. But less than a fortnight from 3 November, with many votes already cast, polls suggest that they will take the House and could well claim the Senate too.
The party is still unpopular, though impressive candidates are performing far better than anyone expected in surprising places – notably Texas and Kansas. But they are now more trusted on economic issues. Independents are turning away from Mr Trump and his party, and many Republicans seem unenthused, for multiple reasons. The “Maga-sympathetic” pollster Rich Baris argues that “Donald Trump did this to himself”. His base believed Mr Trump was their champion. Now they suspect that he is “just another politician”.
There is merited concern about how the president has already used his power to tilt the midterms, and more about what he may do if his party fares as badly as forecast. Republicans still hope to reclaim ground through traditional if unsavoury means, massively outspending Democrats.
Yet while some polls are tightening, culture war attacks and salacious lies about opponents such as James Talarico in Texas do not seem, at least so far, to be as powerful as Republicans hoped. That’s not just because Democratic candidates are repositioning themselves. The toxic messaging of the presidential race – that Kamala Harris “is for they/them, President Trump is for you” – doesn’t land if voters believe that he’s actually for himself and his friends.
Republicans now point to France’s unrest and claim that a Democrat-dominated Congress would bring chaos and destruction to America. Their fearmongering has often motivated core voters. But while Democrats stick to the economic attack, Republicans are trying to change the subject instead of offering answers. Mr Trump’s bread-and-circuses politics is floundering, cage fights on the South Lawn of the White House notwithstanding, as voters ask what happened to the bread.
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Oct. 26
The Boston Globe on what cities and towns can do to protect their communities from ICE
Mariola is a Lynn Public Schools paraprofessional, Salem State University student, and single mother raising a 15-year-old son.
Mariola, who asked that her last name be withheld, came to the United States in 2010 illegally as a 20-year-old Mayan woman fleeing persecution and violence due to her Indigenous heritage in Guatemala. In 2013, she was pulled over for a traffic violation while driving without a license. She was granted a stay of removal, which lasted until President Trump’s immigration crackdown, when federal authorities told her to prepare for detention May 11.
After an advocacy campaign by the Lynn Teachers Union and immigrant groups, with support from Lynn Mayor Jared Nicholson, the Lynn City Council, and Representative Seth Moulton, Mariola was allowed to remain free with a “reasonable fear” hearing scheduled, a step toward obtaining asylum.
Mariola is like so many who have come to Lynn before her seeking a better life in the United States. As in many Gateway Cities, immigrants helped make Lynn the city it is today, working in its storied shoe companies and starting small businesses. Approximately 43 percent of Lynn’s population is foreign-born, according to 2024 US Census data.
As a result, Gateway Cities like Lynn are being hardest hit by Trump’s aggressive enforcement of immigration laws.
The Commonwealth’s attractiveness to immigrants, both white collar and blue collar, is one of its key competitive advantages. They start companies that employ thousands. They generate tax revenue. They rejuvenate downtowns. Critics of immigration note that the heavy flow of migrants during the Biden administration overburdened the state’s shelter system. But on balance, immigrants have been a boon to the region.
If that pipeline dries up, the Commonwealth’s economic future will be imperiled.
Trump’s policies — his ramp-up of detentions and deportations, his visible surges of immigration enforcement agents in US cities, and his attempts to limit paths to legal residency — are not making American cities like Lynn stronger but are visibly weakening them.
There is not much that individual cities can do about federal immigration enforcement. The long-term solution is immigration reform at the federal level that provides border security, expands legal immigration pathways, and directs Immigration and Customs Enforcement to focus on public safety threats. In the meantime, Lynn is showing how city officials can limit the damage — and why they have to.
As in many Gateway Cities, school enrollment in Lynn is dropping and businesses that are run by, cater to, or employ immigrants are struggling or even closing. City leaders must spend their time and money trying to protect residents, whether providing aid to struggling families, trying to control where federal agents can operate, making public statements, or writing to federal officials seeking to help individual immigrants.
“It’s a troubling moment for our community,” Nicholson told the editorial board. “We’ve tried to stand with our immigrant neighbors and stand for our values.”
The working-class city of Lynn, formerly known as “Shoe City” because it housed America’s largest shoemaking industry, has long welcomed immigrants. In the late 1800s, native-born workers dominated Lynn’s shoe companies, according to historian John Cumbler’s 1979 history of Lynn, “Working-Class Community in Industrial America.” But as demand for labor increased, there was an influx of foreign workers. By 1920, Cumbler wrote, 62 percent of Lynn’s shoemakers were foreign-born or had a foreign-born parent.
Irish immigrants were the first to come, followed by English and French Canadians, then German and Scandinavian immigrants, all in the mid- to late 1800s. In the early 1900s, these immigrants were followed by Polish, Russian, Italian, and Austrian arrivals, Cumbler wrote.
By the 1930s, the shoe factories closed and General Electric became the biggest employer. After World War II, those who were well-off migrated to the suburbs surrounding Lynn. Lynn’s population dropped from 102,300 in 1930 to 78,500 in 1980.
Yet in recent years, Lynn’s population has started rebounding and immigrants are again driving the revival. Today, Lynn is home to large populations from the Dominican Republic and Guatemala, alongside immigrants from Spain, Brazil, Cambodia, and Haiti. “The most recent waves of immigration helped the city recover from deindustrialization,” Nicholson said. This wave of immigrants tends to work in service industries, not factories.
But Lynn’s large Latino immigrant population has also made it a target of Trump’s immigration crackdown. In 2025, there were several months of enforcement surges. In one high-profile case, a man was arrested outside an elementary school for being a passenger in a car registered to an immigrant who entered the United States illegally. A Lynn teenager was detained after shoving her brother. More recently, immigration advocates say most arrests have occurred at Lynn District Court.
Lynn’s immigrant families are struggling. Silvia Hernandez, speaking Spanish through an interpreter from LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts, said her husband, who worked in landscaping, was detained by ICE officers in July and deported to Guatemala. Hernandez was pregnant at the time with the couple’s fifth child. All of their children were born in the United States. Her husband was the breadwinner, and she doesn’t have money to pay for child care so she can work. “It’s been very difficult for me to pay my rent and my bills,” Hernandez said.
School enrollment in immigrant-heavy cities has declined. A recent report by the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center found that 10 Gateway City school districts experienced enrollment drops of at least 5 percent of their English learners in October 2025, compared to October 2024.
In Lynn, according to Superintendent Molly Cohen, enrollment of English learners dropped by 6.4 percent between January 2025 and January 2026, from 7,704 students to 7,212 students. Enrollment overall dropped by 3.7 percent during that time.
There’s no way to know if students are returning to their home country, moving between districts, or staying home. But Lynn Teachers Union president Phil O’Connor said educators “constantly are hearing from students talking about their fellow classmates, worried about whether they’re going to come back to school or not.”
Cohen said the school has added new staff focused on communicating with absent students and families and trying to ensure students feel safe coming to school. The school has held “know your rights” training for staff and partnered with outside organizations to offer resources to families.
There’s also an economic impact. When people fear leaving their houses, they’re not eating at restaurants or shopping at bodegas. Immigrants without legal status can obtain taxpayer identification numbers and pay taxes, but some worry that if they report income, they will be targeted. Frances Martinez, president and CEO of the North Shore Latino Business Association, said among members, since November 2024, the organization has seen at least 36 small- and home-based businesses, mostly retail, shut down in Lynn, and another 14 closed elsewhere on the North Shore.
City officials have tried to support residents. The city distributed “know your rights” cards. In February, Nicholson joined leaders of Boston, Chelsea, and other cities in signing an executive order barring civil immigration enforcement on city property. The city later erected signs outside public buildings saying they “may not be used for civil immigration enforcement activities.” (Asked whether the city has that authority, Nicholson said the federal government hasn’t tried to use city property since he signed the order, so it hasn’t been tested.)
Since then, in August, Governor Maura Healey signed a law that will prohibit civil immigration arrests from occurring in courthouses without a judicial warrant as of Nov. 3 and that restricts immigration arrests in nonpublic areas of state buildings and in other sensitive locations, like schools.
In May, Lynn launched a Lynn Relief Fund, with $50,000 in city money and $20,000 from the United Way, to help families facing emergencies, which can include immigration-related income loss. The city gave money to its local legal aid agency to increase legal representation for immigrants in Lynn.
Kelly McGuire, organizer of the Lynn hub of LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts, said the organization works with over 80 Lynn families where a member was detained or deported, offering financial help and referrals to social services. LUCE volunteers take shifts in the Lynn courthouse, connecting detainees to legal counsel and informing families about detentions.
Lynn’s experience is emblematic of other Gateway Cities with immigrant residents. A report by MassINC found that Gateway Cities are home to a quarter of the state’s population but 40 percent of its foreign-born residents and over half of new arrivals. Chelsea and Revere each lost between 200 and 300 English learners in their schools between the 2024-2025 school year and 2025-2026. Storefronts and bodegas are struggling in those cities because people fear going out, said Gladys Vega, president and CEO of La Colaborativa. Claudia Quintero, director of Central West Justice Center in Springfield, said she sees immigrants without legal or permanent status continuing to work but avoiding “extras” like doctors’ visits or school extracurriculars.
Andrew Melendez, founder and director of the Legacy Economic Development Corporation in Springfield, said Springfield has a number of Dominican immigrants with legal residency who opened storefront businesses. But since the US Small Business Administration barred non-US citizens from receiving small-business loans, businesspeople can’t get startup capital. Melendez spoke to a Haitian man with Temporary Protected Status whose company makes marketing videos, who worried he would have to close his business once Trump ended TPS for Haitians — which Trump did in July. “The immigrant population took a risk coming here. They’re willing to take a risk starting a business because they came here for the American dream,” Melendez said. “The worst thing we want is for people to say let’s close shop.”
The solution to Lynn’s predicament will have to come from Washington in the form of immigration reform, or at least more rational and humane enforcement of existing laws.
In the meantime, cities in Lynn’s position need to do what they can to help families caught in the enforcement dragnet. This can mean, as the city is doing, providing emergency assistance so families left behind can pay the rent. It could also mean, as LUCE is advocating, finding public or private money for legal aid to help immigrants obtain legal status and navigate the immigration court process.
Helping immigrants stay in the city isn’t about offering handouts but is instead about stabilizing communities by keeping families intact while protecting business owners and workers who are contributing to the local economy.
At the Lynn Museum and Arts Center, operations manager Elena Hirshman-Seidel tells visiting students about Jan Ernst Matzeliger, a Black immigrant from Dutch Guiana who came to Lynn in 1877, worked at a shoe factory, and invented the lasting machine, which transformed shoe manufacturing. The message, Hirshman-Seidel said, is immigrants make important contributions.
Immigrants have long flocked to Massachusetts’ Gateway Cities seeking a first step toward a better life, and they have improved those cities. Gateway Cities can still be where these immigrants settle and thrive, if only they’re allowed to remain.
ONLINE: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/10/26/opinion/immigration-lynn-gateway-cities/
