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Thursday, December 09, 2004I think this Instapundit post on immigration is about right.A few years back, a friend who was teaching here got shipped back to France: Her crime? She was teaching at a university, but registered as a teacher, not a professor. For those who have wandered through ivy-covered halls, a professor is someone with a PhD and tenure. For the INS, though, it was a different story. The language confusion - and not French/English, but immigrationese/academese - got her shipped out when she applied with the right designation and was asked what had changed. Idiotic. But, who's at fault? Was the official who judged her case an officious bureaucrat? Or an overworked functionary who really wasn't ready to challenge his boss, his boss and the next boss up the line, much less the idiotic system of rules that created the situation? Particularly given that Congress loves nothing more than to hear about the number of illegals and frauds that were dealt with, this being the INS' best proof that it is doing something with taxpayer money. The INS (or whatever this week's acronym is) official is dead on in noting that the biggest fault is with Congress and the taxpayers. We, the taxpayers, love cheaply picked fruit. We don't want to pay, either in fruit costs or in taxpayer dollars, for cherrypickers that break an arm falling out of a tree. We love clean public toilets and neatly manicured lawns, but react in high dudgeon if a Mexican willing to be available any day, any time, beats out our teen for a job in which said teen wants his schedule adjusted for football practice, class trips and visits to the really good orthodontist an hour away from town. And we adore the au pairs, refugees and others who make our own communities more interesting while wondering why those who are going to have the hardest time assimilating can't just get a job and shut up about it. In short, we the people like immigrants just as long as they're doing things we don't want to and not getting things we want. Finding the balance where we can screw them enough to feel like we got our money's worth without feeling guilty about it is tough business, which is why American's simultaneously bitch about illegals and keep quiet about their gay friend who only married the Russian woman so she could stay in the country, worry about Mexicans taking our jobs but hire them to put up the back shed (for which we also didn't get building permits) and so on. The biggest complication of 9/11 for immigration was this: up to that point, the problem with illegals is they did jobs we might want more cheaply than we would; their selling point was that they did jobs we wanted done more cheaply than other people would. When some of them suddenly wanted to kill us too, that was a bit upsetting. Worse than cutting into your Uncle Fred's lawn manicuring business, ya know? But I'll betcha Angelenos haven't started cutting their own lawns in greatly increased numbers to take away the incentive of illegal migration. I haven't yet heard anyone in the supermarket complain that if their lettuce was really California-grown, American-picked, they should be paying an extra 80 cents a head. Meanwhile, in my neck of the woods, Asians put up with crappy conditions in native cuisine restaurant jobs so they can learn English and earn a living and Mexicans congregate at every Home Depot and Builder's Square to help you move your heavy purchases, low cost for you and no taxes paid by them. Which brings me to a little bit of bad news: The immigration voucher plan is nice... but... if it's going to work, we need to get back to the issue I raised earlier: Americans don't necessarily want justice for immigrants, and the businesses that use them certainly don't. What's sought is the balance where they're underpaid enough that it's worth the hassle of using them but not so terrible that Amnesty might declare your state the new Guatemala. Any voucher system will have to assume, among other things, that while guest workers have basic human rights, their minimum wage is lower and employer obligations are less. Otherwise, guess what? The lowest of the low will still use illegals, and probably of a worse variety since sincere strivers will go into the guest worker program, and then the strivers, the ones we want, will be shut out - at least of the better jobs - because the costs are the same to hire them as natives and the paperwork is worse. The solution to the whole mess? Here's one piece of the puzzle, offered before: Designate a number, say 123-456-7890, as the guest worker number. If someone shows up for a job, you put that on the W4 while they apply for a tax number. If they're still actually there when the tax number comes through, they get guest worker status at whatever wage they negotiate and if they file income taxes two years in a row, welcome them onto the citizenship track. Such a plan has massive imperfections and details to sort out, but the crucial element is there: Those who find a way to function within our society are welcomed with a minimum of bureaucratic fuss so that the bureaucratic apparatus can focus on those who want to be here but whose place in our society is more difficult to figure out. Would it have stopped 9/11? Hard to say. Would it cut down on a lot of other problems and maybe, just maybe, allow the INS or whatever they're calling it, to do a better job of determining who they didn't need to spend so many resources on - and thus who they did? Quite possibly. 
posted by gbarto at 11:15 PM Bush Keeps Four Secretaries, Taps Nicholson By JENNIFER LOVEN, AP (pulled off AOL, no link) So, we're keeping Norton at Interior - good, Chao at Labor - fine. And then we're keeping Mineta at Transportation and Jackson at HUD. Jackson seems to me the finest HUD secretary we could ask for in a Republican administration: His name doesn't even ring a bell with me. Don't ever recall seeing him in the news and thinking, there's a story I've got to find out about. Like I say, a perfect HUD secretary in a Republican administration. Mineta, on the other hand... 4 airliners were hijacked and turned into weapons on his watch and the result is hundreds of thousands of cross-continent travelers with unkempt fingernails. True, no more attacks have happened. But, well, this isn't necessarily a guy I would have kept. They're also bringing on Jim Nicholson for Veterans' Affairs. This is a good pick. As RNC Chair, Nicholson was sort of a pain in the you-know-what, too sensitive to media critiques to hold the line on controversial (read conservative) positions, but too much a believer in said positions to keep his mouth shut before he got burned. In short, Republicans were forced to take moderate positions while getting blamed for conservative ones that were deemed unworkable but never tried. However, Nicholson is a good guy who seems sincerely to want to do well by those he works with. The VA position, while it has its challenges, seems to fit in with his background (Nicholson is a dedicated Vietnam vet and a credible spokesman for soldiers) much better than the RNC position. We hope things turn out well - i.e. that in four years he'll have done as well as Secretary Jackson at HUD.
posted by gbarto at 7:49 AM Tuesday, December 07, 2004Annan: I'm Not GoingToo bad. We're getting to the point where even an organization as corrupt as the U.N. might actually drive him out. Not for his activities, of course, but for allowing every tyrant's favorite figleaf of legitimacy to come under such scrutiny.
posted by gbarto at 11:12 PM Monday, December 06, 2004Instapundit says Charles Pasqua, one of the conservatives' henchmen in France, may be implicated in the oil for food scandal. The number of people who should be surprised can be counted on the fingers of Captain Hook's right arm. The only question with a scandal like this is whether Chirac made money, and if so, how much and who will take the fall?
posted by gbarto at 9:19 PM Philippine mudslides and illegal logging... The Belmont Club has an excellent piece on illegal logging in the Philippines and its role in some pretty devastating mudslides. The most important point boils down to this: in the real world, even communists are capitalists. Everyone needs money. Everyone needs income sources. And in corrupted societies like the Philippines, one of the many things for sale is waivers from the laws. One thing not for sale, unfortunately, is legal timber - at least not enough of it. Seems the greens got most logging outlawed as well as killing off the idea of tree plantations. The result? No incentive to protect trees from illegal logging because a) no one owned them and b) with most logging being illegal, lumber prices went up enough to make it worth the risk of getting caught. Wretchard suggests some good capitalist solutions for making more lumber and fewer mudslides, but these will not, of course, come to pass because international environmental activists are usually anti-capitalists looking for a friendlier looking disguise, not people who actually care about the planet or its inhabitants and Philippine politicians are usually not advocates of the people but fraudsters who found a better gravy train than used cars. Or at least it looks that way.
posted by gbarto at 1:59 AM Hmmm... Cicero says: I am not certain, but this looks like a rejection not only of the specific rules under consideration in the Groenigen protocol, but of the idea of non-voluntary euthanasia altogether.The Turkster, being open-minded, will concede the possibility that a non-voluntary euthanasia is somewhere out there waiting to be performed for righteous reasons. But he's mystified as to what they might be. In any case, any rules governing euthanasia must begin with an overwhelming bias toward life, and with the questions being asked geared toward reasons not to act. "Can we get this done, already?" is not an appropriate question to be asked before ending a human life. --- That said, a few side notes: While the Turkster is pretty leery of euthanasia, he is also leery of forcing people to live, against their will, in unbearable pain. Patients who feel they need more morphine ought be allowed, even if there's a risk of lethality - if the patient is made aware and says it's worth the risk. In the case of minors, who can't speak for themselves, there's a place for parents making such a call provided it's congruent with feedback from the actual patient. But outside parties in bureaucracies should not be making such calls, ever. Though if Cicero wishes to let his H.M.O. decide if a lethal injection or expensive surgery with potential complications is the best bet, as a good libertarian I'll let him make that decision.
posted by gbarto at 1:51 AM Sunday, December 05, 2004from AOL Headlines:Insurgents Try To Derail Ballot Weekend attacks kill dozens Can Iraq hold January election? The answer, of course, is that it must. That way lies victory. Backing down or postponing elections, insures that the violence will continue and the elections will be continually postponed. Contrary to the newspaper headlines, the insurgents are in a world of hurt. Not for the rate at which they're taking casualties. Not because the U.S. led coalition is militarily superior. But because there is nowhere for them to go and nothing for them to do. Not proactively. Right now, the U.S. has a plan. It may not be the best plan. But it goes like this: The quasi-representative governing council will be replaced, at the end of January, with a democratically elected government selected by those people who can and will vote. At this point, Iraqi sovereignty will rest in the hands of the Iraqi people. Those whose candidates didn't win may feel robbed. Some may declare the whole thing fraudulent and first refuse to vote and then deny that the government represents them. Big deal. We have that here, though on a much more controllable scale. The thing about the U.S. plan is this. Each time we make a major move, we have a little less power and the Iraqi people have a little bit more. In time, the insurgency will be facing Iraqi police more often than American, British and other foreign soldiers. And in time, as Baathists get discouraged, the Al-Qaeda led insurgency will contain more foreigners in percentage terms than the defenders of the Iraqi people. That is, they'll be the Red Guard, or Action Directe or - in their fondest hopes - the IRA. They'll be a threat. They'll be a problem. But they won't be fighting for the people or for Iraq except in their own minds. Those who aren't cynically just in the game as spoilers to begin with, that is. The thing about the insurgents' plan is... it doesn't exist. It's very sweet to dream of rebuilding the caliphate starting with Iraq, but Saddam Hussein couldn't do that in 25 years with the Iraqi establishment working for him. The people are not taking to the streets to tell America to go home. More importantly, they aren't taking to the streets to demand the rule of Allah. Once upon a time, dreams of a Caliphate, starting with Afghanistan, may have seemed remotely plausible. The fatal mistake was attacking the U.S. before having de facto control in more than one country. Had they gradually radicalized Pakistan, then Kashmir, then built a real alliance with Iran, we might have woken up on some September 11, say 9/11/12 with a hell of a mess on our hands. We might have been attacked by a "country" or coalition that comprised half of Central Asia and had good prospects, after the attack, for wooing the Central Asian republics - Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - to join the fun for a real epic struggle. But, Osama bin Laden is not immortal. Is he now dead or alive? At the moment, we think he's alive. But does/did he have enough time on his hands to wait another decade to set the game in motion? And had he thought this game out beyond his own lifespan? The Taliban, let us stipulate, were headcases. They believed in magical thinking, specifically that if they made Allah happy, Allah would render null and void the laws of politics, governance, sociology and history and make them kings among men. 9/11 makes perfect sense if you think God will be so moved by your gesture that he'll smite the Americans. Apparently, though, Allah's decided to watch and see how this one plays out. Maybe he saw how the Christian deity came out in Europe after playing favorites with the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs all those years and decided it was a bad gamble. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have realists in them, people who know that wars are won by building upon strategic victories until things turn to your advantage. It's not clear that Osama is among these. Were it not for the problem of getting pummeled on the battlefield, though, the insurgency would still face a big problem. Like the dog who catches the car, they would be faced with the question, what now? The Taliban are the only parties to this latest brouhaha who have experience dealing with this question. They did almost as well as Yassir Arafat at constructing a civil society based on protracted struggle for Allah's triumph. (Arafat did somewhat better since he was really constructing an uncivil society based on protracted struggle for his own enrichment and continuing power - it helps to understand your real aims in a venture like this.) If the insurgency postpones the elections - thanks to violence plus certain Sunnis and others threatening to take their marbles and go home if the vote is held - the question on January 30 will be, for them, what now? They can drink all the non-alcoholic beer they want and drive through the streets honking their horns, but it won't change the fact that tomorrow is not only another day, but another day just like January 29. That is, a day when the insurgency has no means of winning over the Iraqi people, no means of governing them and no control or understanding of civil institutions of the sort that turn insurgencies into governments. It is important to note that the U.S. was very lucky in its little revolution. We did not start with people accustomed to living in fear and intimidation. We started with people who were relatively hardy, relatively self-sufficient and used to doing their own thing until they had tamed America enough for the Brits to conceive of actually having a society to rule over here. We fought not for Allah, nor God nor even free potato chips, but for the rights of Englishmen. We have the upper hand in Iraq in that we are again pushing for, after a fashion, the rights of Englishmen, which have in expanded form come to be the rights of Americans. Getting to a free and civil society will be hard. Getting the Iraqis to worry more about their model of toaster than what their leaders - not rulers - are blabbing about today will take time. But it's been done. In the U.S., in the U.K., in Australia, even in France, Germany and Italy. Bit by bit, as freedom and self-rule come, the people get to a blissful place. A place where by means of an electoral upset every ten or twenty years, they can get the people who get their kicks organizing tax policy, police patrols, sewage disposal and freeway building to tred carefully and stay out of their hair. Sure, we complain. You have to, or the wonks will get uppity. But nobody in the U.S., U.K., Australia, France, Germany or Italy lies awake nights wondering if an untimely comment at the pub will land them in a body bag tomorrow. Even in Iraq, actually, people don't worry much about that anymore. They're more worried about the sort of people the Iraqi government can't seem to get fitted for body bags. You know, the folks who want to shoot at people, which totally kills business at your kiosk. The people who gun down would-be policeman, which makes it even harder to file a police report for your stolen t.v. in Baghdad than in New York. The people who want to kill you for Allah when you're trying to get to the office. Tacky people. Make a mess of everything for a God who loves them so much that he's letting them get slaughtered at better than ten to one ratios by the godless pagans. Embarrassing. So, what of January 30? If the people vote, it's another defeat. This election matters. But who wins is already less important than it might have been. If there really were a chance of the insurgents' putting together a popular mandate, they'd be encouraging the people to get out to vote and show the Americans. In a few years time, their hands on the levers of government, they'd find a reason to cancel elections they controlled if things looked bad, and Jimmy Carter would write an op-ed about how those pushing for the elections were the same sort of people who harrassed Arafat when that good man was working so hard for peace. So, if the Iraqi people elect leaders on January 30, those leaders will get a basketcase of a country where those idiots who still didn't know the game was lost continued to shoot people. Every bag of garbage successfully hauled away would mark a small victory and every shoplifter who got a day in court would mark a major victory. But it would be a step in the right direction: struggling, largely ineffectual leaders fighting to preserve... the government the people had elected. And hoping to serve those people well enough to get reelected. Brahimi will still blather, the U.S. will still fight, the insurgents will continue to agitate. But it will be a new game: defending the government of the Iraqi people. Or trying to overthrow it. A whole new ball of wax where, because it's no longer, Brahimi, America, etc, but the will of the Iraqi people, that is being challenged, the rhetoric will have to shift. Best case scenario: An anti-American pol who has promised to boot us will win. And we'll start to withdraw. At that point, one of two things happens: The insurgents will recognize that all their attacks counted for less than two words - go home - from somebody with democratic legitimacy and, discouraged, they'll go home too. Or the insurgents will fight to overthrow the democratically elected government that claimed Iraq for Iraq, at which point that government can do anything it wants - including inviting us back for one more round if we're willing - to go after an insurgency plainly exposed as indifferent not just to what Iraqis want but to the idea of Iraqis being enough their own people to tell even the mighty U.S. thanks alot but you've done enough now. By the way, would Iraq asking us to go home be a defeat? It would be played that way. But who cares? George W., I think, is man enough to smile about the country he liberated growing up enough to do without him. We would be wise to do so, too, forgoing complaints of ingratitude and giving thanks that our troops can come home and that we can act elsewhere without new burdens. Only one problem: I suspect a pro-American leader will win, and not an anti-American one of the sort to get pissed when we, but not the insurgency, respect his authority. Oh well. Nice thought, though.
posted by gbarto at 2:10 PM |
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