Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 50. Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 4:24 PM for 9h 24m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 3.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1783, the last British troops leave New York City three months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris.
John Davis reports Grassroots sponsorships bringing Ukrainian war refugees to Wisconsin (‘Refugees are making their way to the state though private sponsorships and small organizations’):
Tatyana Lukash said her life was turned upside down in February when Russia invaded Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine and home to Lukash, her husband and teenage son.
“We had a decent life. We had everything we needed. We are alive and God brings us here (to Wisconsin). We will try,” she said.
Lukash and her 15-year-old son went to Poland in March, and she spent months looking for a more stable living situation.
Her 45-year-old husband, a now unemployed welder, had to stay behind in Ukraine because he’s still eligible to be drafted into the Ukrainian military.
Lukash connected on Facebook with Gary Coryell and his wife, who live on a hobby farm in northern La Crosse County.
The Lukashes are the second Ukrainian family Coryell has sponsored. A mother and daughter lived with them for about six weeks this summer before moving to Texas for work before Lukash and her son moved in with them in mid-October.
“Bringing these people into our home has given me a passion and a purpose that I haven’t felt in many years,” Coryell said. “These people are in harms way, especially the mothers and the children. Open your homes and your hearts, and you won’t regret it.”
Coryell has been using the federal government’s United for Ukraine program that was established in late April as a way for Ukrainian refugees to live in the United States under a sponsor.
Sponsors help refugees fill out paperwork proving they have some form of financial support. The federal government then does a background check on the refugees.
An eternal reminder: productive free markets involve private voluntary transactions of capital, labor, and goods. Restrictions on the free movement of workers are presumptively wrong, economically and morally. (Indeed, the economic benefit of greater prosperity through the free movement of labor is itself a moral argument.)
Wisconsinites’ humanity ameliorates Russian depravity. These displaced Ukrainians are productive people, who are likely to be soon on their feet; Wisconsin is a state with chronic labor shortages.
They’ve come our way after unlawful violence against their entire nation. We cannot give them what they once had. We’ve no such power of restoration. Wisconsinites can, however, through collective efforts offer them a place among us, for so long as they should like.
They, and we, will be better for it.
‘The result is tragic’: Russian missiles hit civilian infrastructure, killing at least six: