May 11, 2008
The death penalty for drug possession?
It's not called that, but if locking up a legal permanent resident of the U.S. for years and denying her a biopsy for a probable cancer comes to the same thing.
March 24, 2008
A fine balance
Since the ancient Greeks, and even earlier, balance and proportion have been recognized to be at the heart of merit, in art, in policy, and in praxis. Let us now pause to admire the fine equality between the heartless and bottomless greed of the current fatcat administration and its eye-popping and pervasive incompetence. If you wanted to cripple a twenty-first...
January 31, 2008
Driver's licenses for illegals
It's pretty much a straight-up choice between right and wrong. "No licenses" is bad on humanitarian grounds and bad on public-safety grounds, and has no plausible advantage. But it sounds good to most voters. Guess which Democratic candidate was willing to do the right thing?
November 08, 2007
Telecom immunity: just asking
Just a question for all those conservative Republicans who are attempting to give retroactive immunity for FISA violations by telecoms: Why was it that amnesty would mean the end of the Republic when it was impoverished immigrant laborers but it is now perfectly acceptable when it is large telecom corporations? And no: the shoe isn't on the other foot. There...
September 18, 2007
The music connection
Thanks to Jonathan adding the missing piece, I now see the big picture into which the Ghuman case is a window: it's all about music! Musicians of all sorts are nothing but a rogues' gallery of subversion and disrespect for traditional values: Rouget de Lisle, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Gilberto Gil, Richard Wagner, the Dixie Chicks...it goes on and on....
September 17, 2007
Dumb as a post, also as stupid
When I taught at the Kennedy School, we used to have a Foreign Service Officer in the one-year mid-career program about every year. We also had two or three New York cops. The cops were, with about one exception every couple of years, street-smart, plain smart, and funny, but in a dozen different personal styles. They were also outside-the-box, frequently...
August 11, 2007
Immigration crackdown: a political squeeze play?
Is Bush using Chertoff to squeeze employers to squeeze Republican Senators?
Immigration again
Life imitating art: employers of immigrants look at the new enforcement plan and don't like it. I called this on Thursday, hee hee. Chertoff, in effect, points to the (non-silly) principle that one way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it, and says it's all Congress' fault. It will be interesting to see if it can...
August 09, 2007
Immigration lunacy
One indicator of panic in crowds and individuals is an inability to seek or understand what's in one's own interest. The amazing plan from DHS on immigration is one such indicator. The Times editorial gets half the story right, but misses the other half. Recall that our current tested and practiced immigration policy has the following three pieces, a sort...
June 26, 2007
Cloture passes, 64-35
Eighteen new Republica "Yea" votes, compared to last time; only three new Democratic votes, with two Democrats switching the other way.
June 14, 2007
June 13, 2007
June 02, 2007
Immigration and the fear-and-greed coalition
It's coming apart. Bush's crack about people who "don't want to do what's right for America" was a bad, bad mistake.
May 21, 2007
McCain on Romney on the immigration bill
"In the case of Governor Romney, you know, maybe I should wait a couple of weeks and see if it changes, because it's changed in less than a year from his position before. And maybe his solution will be to get out his small-varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his lawn."
May 20, 2007
Business flaking on immigration?
The high-tech guys want their indentured H1-Bs instead of green-card holders who can walk if they get better offers. The restaurants don't want real employee verification. This deal could come unstuck
May 10, 2007
For it before they were against it
The Republican co-sponsors of last year's Senate immigration bill are threatening to vote against the very same bill if Harry Reid brings it to the floor now. Go ahead. Make my day.
May 05, 2007
Moving an immigration bill
How to do employer sanctions the right way. Why the bill that comes out of Congress, if a bill does come out of Congress, is likely to be worse than no bill at all.
April 15, 2007
Good news for atheists and Democrats.
Bad news for nativists.
Latinos are leaving the Catholic Church as they assimilate.
October 03, 2006
Caught in a sticky bit of applied racism
Now this is interesting, and greatly comforting to reality fans: if you put your bloody shirt rhetoric into practice, you can find yourself without apples and other food. Among the Niagara of terrorist unAmerican culturally unassimilable foreigners that have poor Pat Buchanan and so many others in a swit were a few harmless ones who did some really useful work,...
May 18, 2006
Immigration Crisis Solved!
It's pretty simple, actually: those opposed to making citizens out of illegal immigrants say that it is wrong to be rewarded for violating the law. That's true, as a general matter. (In my view, it is vastly overstated: we don't take away someone's license for a parking ticket.) But in any event, why not say that those illegal immigrants who...
May 17, 2006
We are soooooo busted!
Bill O'Reilly has discovered the secret lefty plot to displace the white Christian power structure and replace it with a rainbow coalition. Damn! I mean, we were that close to success!
May 16, 2006
Another Mission Accomplished?
What will the National Guard do at the border? Jonathan asks below. Bush was quite clear about that: The Guard will assist the Border Patrol by operating surveillance systems, … analyzing intelligence, … installing fences and vehicle barriers, … building patrol roads … and providing training. Guard units will not be involved in direct law enforcement activities. I have no...
Why guestworkers?
It's rare to find a policy proposal with no actual benefits. But a guestworker program comes close.
May 15, 2006
Two quick questions on immigration
1) What precisely is it that the military can do that the Border Patrol cannot do to protect the border? 2) It has been five years since 9/11--why doesn't the Border Patrol have the capability to do it? Actually, the President's speech demonstrates the perfection of Sir Humphrey Appleby's syllgism on political crisis decision-making: 1) We must do something. 2)...
May 13, 2006
"The invasion and annexation of Mexico"??
Glenn Reynolds should make sure his brain is engaged before putting his keyboard in gear.
April 16, 2006
Ohne Gastarbeiter, bitte.
Is there any actual advantage of a guest-worker program, other than to employers who get cheap, docile labor?
April 13, 2006
Passover footnote
No matter what anybody tries to tell you, there is absolutely no basis, either textual or traditional, for translating "Avodim hayyinu l'pharoh b'mitzyrayim" as "We were guest-workers for Pharaoh in Egypt."
April 09, 2006
Why the immigration bill failed
Illegal immigration is better for employers than legal immigration, and the Republicans aren't going to take it away from them.
April 07, 2006
Why guest workers? Because they wouldn't have to be Mexican.
Why guest workers? One possible reason in business' eyes: they'd be cheap because they wouldn't be Mexican.
Simple question, simple answer
Real immigration control via employer sanctions would work, but the business lobby won't have it.
Why guest workers?
No immigration bill at all, which seems to be the likely result this year, is probably better than an immigration bill with a "guest-worker" provision. So why do news stories routinely describe the possibility of no bill passing as a "threat"?
April 05, 2006
April 03, 2006
April 02, 2006
Employer sanctions: enforcement is everything
Employer sanctions matter only if they're enforced. Enforcing employer sanctions requires having illegal workers themselves complain about, and testify against, their employers. The greater the legal penalties for coming here or being here illegally, the less willing they will be to complain and testify. So felonizing illegal entry is worse than pointless; it will actually tend to increase the influx of illegal migrants.
March 29, 2006
Six theses on immigration policy
Some random thoughts as the nativist campaign builds up a head of steam.
February 25, 2006
Controlling terrorist mobility
Keeping terrorists out of the country isn't the same thing as controlling immigration generally. Susan Ginsburg argues that confusing the smaller problem with the bigger one leaves us unnecessarily vulnerable.
December 14, 2005
Dog whistle politics on immigration
Why exactly would any undocumented immigrant worker come out of the woodwork for George Bush's promise to give them a three-year temporary work permit? Well, none, really. So why in the world would he propose it? Answering that is a little more complicated, but it speaks volumes about the administration's difficulty in keeping its coalition together. If you are an...
January 07, 2004
The Bush immigration proposal
Josh Marshall has the complete transcript of the background briefing on the new White House immigration proposal. I'm for anything that regularizes the status of the 8 million, or however many it is, illegal aliens now in the country. We clearly aren't going to do the enforcement that would be required either to deport them and keep them (or replacements...
December 17, 2003
Progress on immigration?
It looks as if a deal is in the works to grant legal status to at least some illegal immigrants: those working in agriculture. The President is prepared to go much further, at least rhetorically, talking of the need for "an immigration policy that helps match any willing employer with any willing employee." I'm not actually sure I'd want to...
