As House Republicans begin their formal impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden on Thursday, Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer says they already have “overwhelming” proof that he abused his office for his family’s financial gain.

The White House vehemently disagrees. The Biden impeachment is “based on lies,” many of which have been “actively disproven,” according to a memo emailed to news organizations earlier this month.

What two years of GOP investigations have indeed produced is clear documentation that Hunter Biden, the president’s son, used his famous last name as leverage in trying to land foreign business deals, according to publicly released House committee interview transcripts and documents.

What the probes have not yet turned up is any solid proof that President Biden personally profited from those deals, or that he used his powers as an elected official to bend policy to the benefit of his son’s employers, despite some circumstantial hints to the contrary.

That sets the GOP inquiry apart from previous presidential impeachments, which began with more credible evidence of wrongdoing, say some experts. This process may look less like the Nixon, Clinton, or Trump impeachments and more like the Republican House investigations into the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, says Frank O. Bowman, an emeritus professor of law at the University of Missouri.

The Benghazi probes spiraled in a different direction after investigators discovered that Secretary Clinton had been using an unsecured home server to handle government emails, some containing classified information. FBI investigations of Mrs. Clinton’s emails likely damaged her 2016 presidential campaign.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP/File

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testifies on Capitol Hill before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, Jan. 23, 2013.

Republican leaders may be hoping that with the Biden impeachment inquiry, like Benghazi, “somewhere along the way something will pop up,” says Professor Bowman, author of  “High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump.”

The Biden brand

The central focus of the House impeachment inquiry is Hunter Biden and his lucrative foreign business connections, and how – or whether – his father was connected to them.

“Bank records show that nearly $20 million in payments were directed to ... Biden family members and associates through various shell companies,” Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy said earlier this month.

But so far, “Biden family” in this context remains a stretch. Records produced by House committees prior to the opening of the impeachment inquiry show that the vast majority of that money went to Hunter Biden and his business associates.

None yet shows that any went to Joe Biden himself.

What House Republicans do have is testimony that the son used his father’s name and the implication of access to the highest levels of the U.S. government to attract clients and foreign deals. Devon Archer, a Hunter Biden associate interviewed by House investigators, said that Hunter marketed the Biden “brand” to prospective partners.

The younger Biden talked to his father on the phone every day, said Mr. Archer, especially after his older brother, Beau Biden, died in 2015. Mr. Archer testified that he saw Hunter put his father on speakerphone, or reference his father being on the line, some 20 times during business meetings.

The elder Mr. Biden, who was vice president at the time, also appeared at two dinners hosted by his son, said Mr. Archer. He went around the table and shook hands with people, most of whom he seemed to be meeting for the first time. At no time did he talk in anything other than generalities, according to Mr. Archer’s testimony. 

Vice President Biden appeared to be glad-handing like a normal politician, said Hunter’s business partner. Asked if the son was selling the “illusion” of access to the father, Mr. Archer responded, “Yes.”

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Devon Archer, Hunter Biden's former business partner, arrives on Capitol Hill to give closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee in Republican-led investigations into President Joe Biden's son, July 31, 2023.

The Burisma allegation

In 2014, Hunter Biden was named a board director of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, owned at the time by a man the U.S. government considered to be corrupt. Then-Vice President Biden was the point person for the Obama administration on Ukraine policy.

The younger Mr. Biden’s appointment made some U.S. officials uncomfortable, reportedly including Vice President Biden himself. “I hope you know what you are doing,” Hunter recalled being told by his father, in a 2019 story in The New Yorker.

Republicans have long alleged that Vice President Biden helped Burisma at his son’s urging. In particular, former President Donald Trump and others insist that the United States pushed out Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, by threatening to withhold loan guarantees in 2016 in order to stop Mr. Shokin’s investigations into Burisma. 

Critics say this charge has long been debunked. The U.S., its allies in the region, and the International Monetary Fund all wanted Mr. Shokin fired and coordinated their efforts to accomplish the task. They believed he slowed corruption investigations of Ukrainian elites and even interfered with prosecutions. A State Department memo prepared for a 2015 Biden trip to Ukraine wrote that getting rid of Mr. Shokin was key to anti-corruption efforts, as he is “widely regarded as an obstacle to fighting corruption, if not a source of the problem.”

House Republicans have also pointed to an FBI document as evidence Vice President Biden may have received a $5 million bribe from Burisma.

The 1023 Form, used to record interviews with informants, cites an FBI source as saying he had heard Burisma’s CEO say he had made two $5 million payments to “the Bidens.”

The Burisma official did not give any further information or full names, according to the informant – who also said that he had no idea whether the boast was true, according to the FBI document.

China shakedown?

Other items House investigators point to as possible evidence of President Biden’s involvement in his son’s deals include WhatsApp texts from 2017 in which Hunter Biden threatened a Chinese businessperson over payment holdups.

In one of the messages, which were provided to the GOP by an IRS whistleblower who had been investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes, Hunter told his Chinese contact, “I am sitting here with my father we would like to understand why the commitment has not been filled.” 

If the answer was not forthcoming, “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction,” Hunter Biden wrote.

Hunter has denied that his father was actually in the room during that conversation, and said that it was a period of his life when he was in the grip of addiction. At the time, Joe Biden was a private citizen. He angrily said “no” when asked by a reporter whether he was in the room.

The elder Mr. Biden has, however, made some misleading public statements about his son’s foreign connections.

Responding to a question at the second presidential debate on Oct. 22, 2020, Mr. Biden claimed his son had made no money in China. But in court testimony this summer, Hunter Biden said he had indeed made substantial sums from Chinese deals – his first public confirmation of that fact.

On Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee released two bank wires obtained by subpoena that allegedly reveal Hunter Biden received payments originating in China that list President Joe Biden’s Delaware home as the beneficiary address.

Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, told CBS News that the bank transfers were the result of a loan from a private individual – and they referenced his father’s address because that was the one listed on Hunter’s driver license.

Impeachment becoming more common

To House Republicans, all this created the need for an impeachment inquiry, even if it has not yet directly implicated the president.

House investigations to this point “paint a culture of corruption” around the Biden family, said Speaker McCarthy when he directed the House to open impeachment proceedings on Sept. 12 without ordering a full chamber vote.

Yet this impeachment effort opens under different circumstances from previous ones, say some experts. President Richard Nixon had faced years of Watergate investigations and the public release of the White House tapes before resigning under an impeachment threat. President Bill Clinton had been investigated for years by independent counsel Ken Starr. President Trump was on-transcript asking the president of Ukraine to open an investigation into Hunter Biden as a favor to him, and was impeached a second time after congressional investigation of his actions in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The Biden impeachment inquiry, meanwhile, opens with far less factual foundation, says Professor Bowman. Whatever Hunter Biden did, he is not the president.

“It really does devalue the institution,” Professor Bowman says.

The scope of the inquiry is also different, in that it focuses on events that occurred years before Mr. Biden became president.

When the Constitutional Convention created an impeachment process, members thought it would primarily be applied to acts that were happening at the time, and that were so egregious judgment could not wait until the next election, says Keith Whittington, a political science professor at Princeton University who has written widely on impeachment powers. 

The Founding Fathers knew impeachment might arouse political passions, but they did not foresee how partisan the process might become. Due to party polarization, voters are dug into their positions. Many members of Congress have safe seats and worry more about their next primary than about general elections.

Under those conditions, impeachment may become a more usual, if still pointed, political tool.

“We are probably in a political dynamic right now where incentives are fairly strong to impeach presidents,” says Professor Whittington.

When Maldivians head to the polls this weekend, they’ll vote for either incumbent President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih or Mohamed Muizzu, mayor of the capital, Malé. But the contest might as well be between India and China. 

With hundreds of islands famous for white-sand beaches and luxury resorts, the Maldives sits along critical shipping corridors in the heart of the Indian Ocean. The archipelago’s strategic location makes it “an integral part of a free and open Indo-Pacific region,” according to the U.S. State Department, as well as a battleground for the heated rivalry between Asia’s rising superpowers. 

For years, Delhi and Beijing have been vying for influence in the Maldives’ atolls. The current administration has strongly favored India, but many Maldivians worry about Indian military presence on their shores, as well as mounting foreign debt. Opposition leader Dr. Muizzu, whose conservative coalition opposes the growing security relationship with India, took a surprise lead over Mr. Solih in the first round of elections earlier this month, though neither candidate secured enough votes to win outright.

As voters return for the Sept. 30 runoff, it’s clear that anti-India sentiment has bolstered the challenger, and with him, the prospects for Maldives-China relations. Beijing and Delhi are watching the election closely, viewing it as a referendum on the archipelago’s foreign policy goals. For Maldivians, it represents a delicate balancing act with the country’s sovereignty on the line.

“Maldivians take a lot of pride in their sovereignty, even if it is a small country,” says Azim Zahir, an international relations lecturer at the University of Western Australia. An opposition victory would have “serious foreign relations implications,” including a “likely row between Malé and New Delhi,” though he notes that no government would attempt to completely sever India ties. 

Dhahau Naseem/Reuters

Mohamed Muizzu, a pro-China presidential candidate from the opposition party People's National Congress, gestures after casting his ballot in Malé, Maldives, during the first round of voting, Sept. 9, 2023. Growing anti-India sentiment has bolstered the challenger, as well as prospects for Maldives-China relations.

Ally shuffle

India is a “traditional friend of the Maldives,” says Amit Ranjan, an expert in South Asian politics and research fellow at the National University of Singapore. As neighbors, they share deep ethnic and linguistic links, and India was among the first to establish diplomatic relations with the Maldives when the island nation gained independence more than 50 years ago.

Ties flourished under Mohamed Nasheed, the country’s first democratically elected president, until opponents accused him of being beholden to Delhi. When Abdulla Yameen came to power in 2013, he reined in Indian influence and encouraged Chinese investment. Amid a flurry of infrastructure projects – including the country’s first inter-island bridge, the $200 million China-Maldives Friendship Bridge – the Maldives racked up a $1.4 billion debt to Beijing, even by conservative estimates. That’s about a fourth of the country’s gross domestic product. 

Mr. Solih’s victory in 2018 saw the Maldives scale back Chinese contracts and embrace an “India First” policy, vowing to prioritize relations with its immediate neighbor. But now, as India positions itself as China’s geopolitical competitor, the pendulum of public sentiment appears to be swinging again. 

“India First” or “India Out”?

There are about 75 Indian defense personnel stationed in the Maldives – a small figure, even for a nation of 520,000. Yet their presence – and the lack of transparency surrounding their deployment – makes locals like Aishath Liusha uncomfortable. 

“Maldivians are always very close to India,” says the law student, who fondly remembers growing up in Malé with Indian teachers and nurses. But lately, she adds, “we are looking at Indians as a threat.” 

Ms. Liusha is also worried about the Maldives’ growing debt to India, which after several housing and infrastructure projects and an influx of pandemic aid, now equals the money it owes China. 

Proponents of the opposition’s “India Out” campaign accuse the current government of “selling off” the Maldives to India. Critics say such claims are exaggerated, and argue that the opposition has encouraged a paranoid, xenophobic view of India.

Hamdhan Shakeel, a senator with the Progressive Party of Maldives, says that’s not the goal. To him, it’s an issue of balance.

“India will always remain as the closest partner to the Maldives. However, at the same time we must also acknowledge China as a close partner,” he says via WhatsApp. “To say that one is more important than the other is to disservice their contributions to the development of Maldives.” 

He says the opposition coalition “will maintain an ‘India first’ policy in terms of regional affairs, but not ‘India only’ policy as currently practiced.”

Alasdair Pal/Reuters/File

A worker for the Progressive Party of Maldives poses with an "India Out" flag in Malé, Maldives, March 21, 2022. Opposition parties have accused the current government of “selling off” the Maldives to India.

Exacerbating this debate over foreign influence, according to Dr. Ranjan, is the escalating power struggle between India and China, which are currently locked in a tense border standoff. While resource-rich nations like Saudi Arabia can navigate tensions and safeguard their sovereignty more easily, he says countries like the Maldives and Nepal are feeling the pressure to pick a side.

“When you are a small country, it is very difficult for you to manage this balancing thing for a long time,” says Dr. Ranjan.

Election prospects

Since the Sept. 9 vote, the Maldives has seen a surge in voter re-registration, which some interpret as a favorable sign for the ruling party. The opposition has urged election watchers to investigate.

As both candidates attempt to muster late-game support, former President Nasheed has emerged as a possible kingmaker. Mr. Nasheed, who was seen as being too close to Delhi during his tenure, has been critical of Mr. Solih and even hinted at endorsing the pro-China Dr. Muizzu. If that happens, Dr. Ranjan says Mr. Nasheed “may become a bridge” between India and the new government formed by the opposition.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Former President Yameen, who jailed political rivals and curtailed freedom of speech, has already thrown his weight behind Dr. Muizzu, giving some undecided voters pause. Ms. Liusha worries about the return of authoritarian practices, but Mr. Solih has also failed to deliver on his campaign promise of weeding out corruption.

When it comes to presidential candidates, “we are in a situation where we have to go for a lesser evil,” says Ms. Liusha.

From the back of a pickup truck, Javier Milei grips a red chain saw and shakes it in the air.

Its motor blares and spews smoke as the libertarian economist defining Argentine politics in the run-up to the Oct. 22 presidential election leads a caravan through the streets in the province of Buenos Aires. 

As Mr. Milei swings the chain saw – a nod to his plan to slash public spending and his desire to get rid of politics as usual – he screams, “The caste is trembling. The caste is trembling!” His fans go wild, shouting with approval.

Mr. Milei surprised many when his party won nearly 30% support in presidential primaries, catapulting the once-fringe economic pundit into the global spotlight. But observers say he’s tapped into widespread discontent among Argentines.

This scene of fervent Milei supporters is a snapshot of what’s being called a “new collective” of left- and right-wing voters united in their disgust for the status quo and for the dominant coalitions that for decades have failed to steer Argentina to prosperity.

And his base is primed to grow. Experts say Mr. Milei has figured out exactly what people want to hear, leaning into tried – and in some cases failed – economic policies of the past, while challenging social mores in a country that has been a trailblazer for human rights in Latin America.

He’s appealed to a “cross section of age, social classes, and socioeconomic origin, which is very different from the votes we have seen before,” says Pablo Touzón, an Argentine political scientist. 

Argentina today is “a different society with different needs and demands that traditional political parties have not known how to respond to,” says Paola Zuban, a pollster with Zuban Córdoba, which came closest to predicting the popularity of Mr. Milei’s party leading up to the primaries. 

“What is at risk is a rupture” in how Argentines have come to see themselves as a society over the past 40 years of democracy, she says. 

A “pivotal” moment

For most of the past four decades, Argentina has been governed by the Peronist movement, which has traditionally represented the working class. Sixteen of those years were dominated by a left-wing brand of politics fostered by former Presidents Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The center-right Juntos por el Cambio coalition, which is considered the main opposition party, had a four-year stint under former President Mauricio Macri, which closed out with a spike in inflation and more debt in 2019.

Mr. Milei’s rise is borne out of the “decomposition” of these two main political forces, Mr. Touzón says. His ardent supporters are “born from the crises of both coalitions.”

The heft of this voting bloc became clear on Aug. 13, when presidential primary elections – open to all voters, making them essentially a dry run for the general election – resulted in Mr. Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party clinching nearly one-third of the vote. The sudden emergence of a strong third-party force shook up the political chessboard. 

“It is a pivotal political moment,” says Ms. Zuban, the pollster. What voters are looking for has completely changed, she says.

Cristina Sille/Reuters

Supporters of Argentine presidential candidate Javier Milei hold dollar bills with his face on them during a campaign rally in Buenos Aires, Sept. 25, 2023. One of the libertarian's proposals is to peg the Argentine peso to the U.S. dollar.

Mr. Milei rose to fame with incendiary critiques of government policy on prime-time talk shows. He’s been repeating the same, increasingly vitriolic attacks on members of the “political caste” for years, calling them “parasites,” “useless,” and “crooks” who are entirely to blame for Argentina’s woes. 

He founded La Libertad Avanza in 2021 and snagged 17% of the votes in midterm elections that same year, taking political office for the first time as a national legislator.

His platform is focused mostly on economic overhaul, promising to ditch the flagging Argentine peso for the U.S. dollar and to eliminate the Central Bank. He’s crafted a message that taps into the exhaustion felt by a society pummeled by skyrocketing inflation (124% over the past year) and a disintegrating local currency.

It resonates with young people in particular, especially young men, many of whom say they see no path to building a future here.

For Nestor Martínez, a pizza-maker in his early 40s, it’s the fact that finally there’s a candidate “proposing different ideas” that’s drawn him to Mr. Milei. Mr. Martínez still identifies as a Peronist, but he says the political coalition moved too far to the left under Ms. Fernández de Kirchner, who ended her presidency in 2015 and currently serves as vice president.

“Work is the only thing that is going to take this country forward. We went too far to the other side,” he says, referring to what he views as the proliferation of welfare policies here. A study by the Catholic University of Argentina found that at the end of 2022, more than half of all Argentines received some form of social assistance.

If he becomes president, Mr. Milei says he will dramatically cut social spending, slash taxes (which just last week he told Congress were a form of “theft” by the government), and abolish several government ministries, including the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity. His far-right policies also cut at the heart of some key pillars of Argentine society, including turning the once-prized public education system into one that uses vouchers and privatizing parts of the public health system.

He says he’s committed to rooting out “social justice” and socialism, which he says have “infected” society. He has expressed support for the softening of gun laws and denies that climate change is real. On reproductive rights, he has pledged to hold a referendum to see if the country should reverse the legalization of abortion, which was a hard-fought victory by the Argentine feminist movement in 2020. 

He’s an eccentric personality, with five cloned English mastiff dogs and a new relationship with an actress known for her impersonations of Ms. Fernández de Kirchner. Add on his hallmark incendiary comments attacking everyone from Pope Francis to government officials, and Mr. Milei fuels wall-to-wall media coverage. 

Giving “change a chance”?

Argentina’s views on progress have swung to different extremes repeatedly in the nation’s tumultuous history.

Following its last military dictatorship, which murdered thousands of political dissidents, public consensus grew around prioritizing human rights, civil liberties, and constitutional protections.

A decade later, Argentina lived through a neoliberal period of dramatic deregulation, including a policy that pegged the peso to the U.S. dollar and ended in economic and political disarray. The government defaulted on its international debt, ordinary Argentines lost their life savings, and social unrest gripped the country.

In the 2000s under the Kirchners, the country recovered with the help of a commodities boom, and it became more populist, expanded public spending, and implemented protectionist policies.

But Mr. Milei’s supporters aren’t looking for political common ground, says Ms. Zuban; they want a clean slate. 

That sentiment reverberated outside the Central Bank last week, as people lined up for the launch of a book written by Ramiro Marra, La Libertad Avanza’s candidate running for mayor of the city of Buenos Aires.

“I think we need to give change a chance,” says Sofia Tisera, a young medical student who now identifies as a libertarian thanks to Mr. Milei. “I’m really attracted to the dollarization plan. ... I think it will be very beneficial to Argentina.” 

She supports virtually all of Mr. Milei’s proposals, except his opposition to legal abortion. But, she says his approach of holding a referendum is the right one. “It’s a very interesting space because nobody is judged; everyone is able to think freely,” she says.

Others in line bemoan a state that has turned “too socialist,” a society that has abandoned the idea of meritocracy, and a public education system many believe is falling apart.

Francisco Herrera, a Venezuelan immigrant whose been in Argentina for six years, says that as far as he is concerned, Mr. Milei “represents a radical change” desperately needed here.

Argentina has a long history of swinging from one set of extreme policies to the next, so why not try something new, he asks?

“Nothing ventured,” Mr. Herrera says, “nothing gained.”

Ira Porter/The Christian Science Monitor

Le’Ana Jackson, a senior at the University of California, Riverside, has had to be proactive about housing during her time on campus. She says the school’s communication and offerings have been inconsistent.

Le’Ana Jackson doesn’t hide her ambivalence toward the University of California, Riverside, office of campus housing. Questionable experiences during her sophomore and junior years forced her to be more proactive as a senior.

She applied for campus housing this past March – and never heard back from the school. So she and two friends have joined with three other female students that they don’t know to split a six-bedroom house near campus.

“UCR has a record for awarding more housing to students than they can house,” says Ms. Jackson, a political science major.

Although that school is the focal point of Ms. Jackson’s woes, a report found there were as many as 417,000 California college students who didn’t have stable housing in the state’s three higher education systems: the University of California, California State University, and California Community Colleges. Some students have lived in vehicles or commuted long distances from home – a few via plane. Schools have pushed dorm capacities to limits, where units that used to house two students now house three. The problem is two-sided, involving a lack of inventory for students to rent and affordability. Housing costs and rents here have skyrocketed post-pandemic, as they have elsewhere in the United States.

California is a snapshot of how this problem has played out for students across the country. According to a report released in 2021 by The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, 43% of university students and 52% of community college students indicated in fall 2020 that they were experiencing housing insecurity. Students also reported having higher rates of anxiety and depression, lower GPAs, and worse health.

In California, the reality of near-homelessness is sometimes bleak, and frustration with campuses up and down the state is common going into another school year.

“We need to continue to be able to expand our housing, but at the same time, be conscious of and provide [a wide variety of] cost options for people ... so that they can afford to come here and get their education,” says Gerry Bomotti, vice chancellor of planning, budget, and administration at the University of California, Riverside.

Mr. Bomotti says that unlike coastal California schools, UC Riverside had many private housing units available to students at a reasonable price pre-COVID. Post-pandemic, 32,000 units were filled by people leaving more expensive coastal areas for what is known as the Inland Empire, exacerbating the housing problem where UC Riverside is located. Additionally, the UC system let students in campus housing out of leases during spring 2020 when the pandemic hit and didn’t require them to pay penalties or remaining balances, says Mr. Bomotti.

“The housing in general in the private housing market did not offer that option, and in general they held students to their leases. So I think a lot of students – not all, but many of them – learned from that and were like, ‘Hey, I’m better off if I get housing at the university,’” Mr. Bomotti speculates.

Ira Porter/The Christian Science Monitor

Ph.D. student Issac Lin walks across campus at the University of California, Riverside to catch a bus home. Mr. Lin found an apartment in a neighboring town after being wait-listed for housing by the school.

Many California schools across the three systems serve first-generation and low-income students. First-year students are given priority to stay on campus, which officials say helps retention and graduation rates by fostering a stronger connection to the school. Graduate students, many of whom already have their own families, need housing, too, as do community college students.

The state steps in

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and other state leaders pledged more than $2 billion to build housing on 35 campuses over two years starting in 2022. In 2022, $1.4 billion was given to start construction on more than a dozen of those campuses, followed by $750 million for 2023. More than $1 billion was initially pledged for community colleges to build dorms, but that money was yanked from the budget due to California’s deficit.

State lawmakers also pledged $1.8 billion in interest-free loans for schools to build. More than 20,000 new low-cost housing units for students are planned, with some already starting construction. California has also provided tens of millions of dollars for initiatives such as free public transportation for students, depending on the geographic locations of their campuses.

At UC Riverside, where the school has added 2,326 beds since 2019 and plans to add 1,568 more on its north campus, the state just awarded $126 million for a project. The school will designate 652 of those beds for Riverside Community College District students. The hope is that the new building will open in fall 2025, Mr. Bomotti says. It is the second of a four- or five-phase housing build for their north district, which will add thousands more beds to the 8,700 the school currently has.

That will go a long way toward addressing the more than 3,300 students on the campus waiting list, Mr. Bomotti says.  

“We do have the capacity to increase our enrollment, and we want to in order to serve California students,” he says. “So housing, and availability and affordability, is very key and critical for us.”

Delayed leases, flying to campus

Ms. Jackson, at UC Riverside, started college during the pandemic, which meant she stayed home in Sacramento her freshman year. Sophomore year, she was placed in an off-campus studio apartment through the university for a little under $700 a month. Junior year, UC Riverside didn’t tell her and her roommate until a month before classes started that they could share a $1,750-a-month, one-bedroom apartment a long walk from campus. School started at the end of September, but they couldn’t sign their lease until the second week in October. She had to pay for a hotel in the meantime.

“My parents were mad. They were like, ‘Just switch schools. Come home to Sacramento State.’ But I waited out the two weeks,” says Ms. Jackson, who described the process as long and dreary.

One of the more arresting news stories to surface about the housing shortage was a graduate student from UC Berkeley who flew from Los Angeles, where he lived, to Berkeley, where he took classes three days a week. Cost was the reason he cited.

Graduate students, who already have fewer beds available, also have felt the effects of the crunch. Rafael Jaime is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles and president of UAW 2865, a union representing more than 36,000 graduate student instructors, researchers, and teaching assistants. He led the largest strike in U.S. higher education in 2022 that resulted in significant raises for teaching assistants, about a 50% increase in base pay by the end of 2024. That helps to pay for exorbitant rent, which had been taking up to a whopping 55% of their pay. Housing wasn’t specifically addressed in the contract, but in the next one it should be, he says.

“This makes it really difficult for the University of California to attract the best talent, but it also makes it really difficult for those who are here to actually be able to do the kind of research and teaching that we’re here to do. And a lot of us, there are many who have been forced out because of the cost of living crisis,” Mr. Jaime says.

He thinks government intervention is needed. A combination of not just students, but workers for schools and residents unaffiliated with universities are driving prices up, he says.

Mr. Jaime travels at least 45 minutes by subway from his downtown LA studio apartment, to the Westwood area where UCLA is, several times a week. 

At UC Riverside, Issac Lin is getting a Ph.D. in physics. He is in the second year of his program and had to find housing while still in China, his country of origin. He found a roommate through his Ph.D. program. They each pay a little less than $1,100 per month for a two-bedroom apartment in Moreno Valley, a neighboring town to Riverside, which he commutes to by bus.

Rent ate through a lot of his teaching assistant salary that first year, he says. The raise he got after the strike has helped with housing costs.

“I tried to get campus housing, but I quickly realized that that wasn’t going to happen,” Mr. Lin says while walking across the sleepy campus recently. “They said something about a waiting list, but it was too long,” he says, shaking his head.

REUTERS

A Sikh volunteer stands guard inside the holy Sikh shrine of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, in the northern state of Punjab, India, Sept. 20, 2023.

A bit of shocking news last week forced much of the world to study up on a long-simmering rift in India. Canada accused the Indian government of killing a Canadian citizen near Vancouver who was a prominent activist for an independent Sikh state in his native homeland. While much of the focus has been on Sikh separatists and the diplomatic fallout for India, another spotlight turned on Punjab, the Indian state where Sikhs are in the majority.

There the separatist sentiments that fueled a decade of violence between Sikhs and the state half a century ago have significantly diminished. Instead, many of today’s Sikhs are bridging divides, joining hands with Hindus to restore historic Muslim mosques in Punjabi villages. Some of the funding comes from Sikhs living abroad. Sikh and Hindu families have donated land where new mosques now stand.

These projects – more than 165 so far, according to one Islamic association’s count – demonstrate that religions can lay a foundation for unity by practicing their shared tenets, such as meekness and sincerity. “This kind of brotherhood should prevail across India,” Mohammad Mursalin, a resident of the Punjabi village of Kutba Bamaniya, told Religion Unplugged. “Love must be nurtured, and animosity must dissolve. ... All religions emphasize love; none advocate hate.”

The mosque-building marks a healing counterpoint to the lingering tense relations between Sikhs and India’s nationalist Hindu government. Many Sikhs living abroad still worry they are being surveilled by Indian intelligence services, yet even “hard-core faith groups” in the Sikh diaspora have become apolitical, says Gurharpal Singh, an emeritus professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. The reason for that shift is significant. “They’ve become much more spiritually oriented,” he told The New Yorker last week.

That coincides with a prevailing sense of spiritual accommodation at home. A comprehensive Pew Research poll on religious tolerance in India in 2021 found that 95% of Sikhs feel very proud to be Indian. Some 70% of Sikhs said a person who disrespects India cannot be a Sikh, while 82% of Sikhs said they feel very free to practice their religion.

As new mosques rise, the community affections they represent may be aiding calls for a formal process of reconciliation to address the violence against Sikhs during the 1980s, especially now amid rising Hindu nationalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Erasing communal divisions, wrote Dharamvira Gandhi, a Hindu former member of Parliament from Punjab, in a newspaper opinion piece, requires repentance, forgiveness, “large-heartedness and broad-mindedness.” Those qualities are consistent with Sikhism’s core tenets of equality, humility, and love-inspired service to others.

It isn’t just mosques. The unity felt in many Punjabi communities has led to shared religious festivals and joint restoration projects of historically significant Hindu and Sikh temples. Such actions are solvents for the fears and suspicions that now have set two democracies at odds with each other.