Yale law professor Amy Chua, author of World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, argues that democracy is unleashing inter-ethnic conflicts around the world, including in Iraq.
When sudden democratisation gives voice to this previously silenced majority, opportunistic demagogues can swiftly marshal animosity into powerful ethno-nationalist movements that can subvert both markets and democracy. That is what happened in Indonesia, Zimbabwe, and most recently Bolivia, where weeks of majority-supported, Amerindian-led protests resulted in the resignation of the pro-US, pro-free-market "gringo" President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. In another variation, recent confiscations by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, of the assets of the "oligarchs" Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky - all well-known in Russia to be Jewish - were facilitated by pervasive anti-semitic resentment among the Russian majority.
Iraq is the next tinderbox. The Sunni minority, particularly the Ba'aths, have a large head start in education, capital and economic expertise. The Shiites, although far from homogeneous, represent a long-oppressed majority of 60-70%, with every reason to exploit their numerical power. Liberation has already unleashed powerful fundamentalist movements which, needless to say, are intensely anti-secular and anti-western. Iraq's 20% Kurdish minority in the north, mistrustful of Arab rule, creates another source of profound instability. Finally, Iraq's oil could prove a curse, leading to massive corruption and a destructive battle between groups to capture the nation's oil wealth.
Chua points out that the government of Indonesia, once it became democratic, nationalized $58 billion dollars worth of assets formerly owned by Indonesian Chinese. The result is stagnation of Indonesia's economy with high unemployment, poverty, and the rise of extremist movements. Will similar calamities befall Iraq? Since I favor placing empirical evidence ahead of ideological beliefs when setting policy I think the rational response to the situation in Iraq is to split the country up into 3 countries where there is a single dominant overwhelming majority in each country with more trust of its own members. More arguments for that approach here.
Chua is unwilling to build on her observations to either explain why there are market dominant minorities or to explain what ought to be done about preventing the development of the conflicts that inevitably come from having market dominant minorities. Paul Craig Roberts argues that Chua misses obvious conclusions about US immigration polices and about US foreign policy that can be drawn from her observations.
Certainly the U.S. government and the IMF should take care not to export policies that worsen ethnic conflicts, but the more powerful conclusion to be drawn from Chua’s material—a conclusion that Chua studiously avoids—is that the U.S., Europe, the U.K., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand should immediately cease and desist from reconstructing themselves as multi-ethnic societies. Accentuating ethnic conflict abroad is stupid, even criminal, but it is insane to import unassimiliable ethnic groups into Western countries, thus replicating in the West the Third World conflicts that Chua so terrifyingly describes.
In his analysis of Chua's work Steve Sailer points out that property rights and one man-one vote do not always mix and that this is bad news for the future of the United States.
That property rights and one man-one vote democracy don't always mix well would not have surprised Aristotle, Edmund Burke, or Alexander Hamilton. Yet many Americans who call themselves conservatives have forgotten this.
One reason: we are one of the fairly small number of lucky countries with "market dominant majorities." We can have our cake (capitalism) and eat it too (democracy) because our majority group is economically quite competent.
America's perpetual trouble has been a less-productive black minority. Black-white economic inequality is not a problem that America is going to be able to solve any time soon. But, due to our market-dominant majority, our country is rich enough to live with it.
In contrast, if our current mass immigration system is allowed to continue, America will become just another country with a market dominant minority. Through government policy, we will have inflicted upon ourselves the kind of ugly society seen in most of the rest of the world.
Also see Vinod on Amy Chua's work.
Proclaiming that all ethnic and racial groups should all be equally economically successful will not make it happen. Less successful groups will inevitably resent more successful groups and will therefore act politically, whether at the ballot box or by other means, to express their resentments. Any society whose most successful groups become a smaller fraction of the population is one that is going to have more strife, more crime, more use of government to seize assets from the most successful groups, less civility, and less trust. The debate over this problem and its implications for and foreign policy - especially for immigration policy - has now reached the leftish mainstream in the UK with David Goodhart's Prospect article about Great Britain becoming too diverse being republished in the Guardian. Anthony Browne, Environment Editor of the London Times, has also played a role in bringing a skeptical look at immigration into the mainstream of British political debate. But that debate is still taboo in The New York Times and other legitimizers of elite liberal-left discourse in America. This taboo also has the effect of making US foreign policy in places like Iraq dangerously naive as the assertion of unversalist beliefs about how we can all just get along in democratic capitalistic utopians obscures the much uglier truths about why the world's problems are so much less tractable.
The Mexican government continues to busily lobby American local, state and federal government officials for acceptance of the matricula consular ID card granted by Mexican consulates to Mexican illegal aliens (and even to some Guatemalan illegals) in the US. At the very same time that the Mexican government wants US government agencies to treat illegal aliens more like legal aliens in Mexico 5 million people are ineligble to vote, get a bank account, or go to school because they have no birth certificate.
Isabel Lopez Torres, a shy-eyed 11-year-old, can't write her own name because she's never been to school. Like thousands of other children in Mexico, she's been barred from public schools because of a bureaucratic barrier: She has no birth certificate.
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The government estimates that more than 5 million Mexicans lack birth certificates. For poor people in rural areas, getting a birth certificate can mean walking hours or even days to the nearest municipal office. For many, especially in the poorest indigenous communities, the $5 or $10 processing fee represents the family's food budget for a week.
Effectively these Mexicans who do not have birth certificates are not even being treated as full citizens in their own country. This is happening even while the hypocritical Mexican government is pushing to have US government agencies to treat Mexican illegal immigrants as de facto US citizens.
Mexico is broken and needs to be fixed. But the ease with which Mexicans can cross over the border into the United States reduces the internal pressure in Mexico to make substantial reforms. In fact, as Allan Wall reports from Mexico, many illegal alien men who travel from Mexico to live and work in the United States abandon their families in the process of doing so.
Sara and her five children were abandoned by her husband in 1985.
This deadbeat dad is believed to live in Texas. Since his emigration, he has not sent one cent to his family!
Señora Garcia related to the reporter, Angel Amador Sanchez, that many other women were in her situation. In a town like Jerez, where emigration is a part of the culture, that’s not surprising, and as Sara puts it, “...these men abandon their wives and children as if it were nothing.”
The United States can not fix Mexico by letting tens of millions of Mexicans come to the United States.
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and the Urban Institute have released a report entitled Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth Are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis.
Washington, DC--February 25, 2004-- Half or more of Black, Hispanic and Native American youth in the United States are getting left behind before high school graduation in a “hidden crisis” that is obscured by U.S. Department of Education regulations issued under the “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) Act that “allow schools, districts, and states to all but eliminate graduation rate accountability for minority subgroups,” according to a new report from two nonpartisan groups, The Civil Rights Project at Harvard and The Urban Institute.
The new report, also issued by the Civil Society Institute’s Results for America (RFA) project and Advocates for Children of New York, notes that the minority high school graduation rate crisis is masked by the widespread circulation of “misleading and inaccurate reporting of dropout and graduation rates.” According to the report, while 75 percent of white students graduated from high school in 2001, only 50 percent of all Black students, 51 percent of Native American students, and 53 percent of all Hispanic students got a high school diploma in the same year. The study found that the problem was even worse for Black, Native American, and Hispanic young men at 43 percent, 47 percent, and 48 percent, respectively.
The graduation rates tell only half of this story. The other half is just how much did the students learn? When comparing only high school graduates those black and Hispanic students that do graduate score far lower on standardized tests of knowledge on average than white students that also graduate. So the picture is even grimmer than it first appears.
Asian ethnics do slightly better than whites.
By comparison, graduation rates for Whites and Asians are 75 and 77 percent nationally.
The use of the category "Asians" is unfortunate as it is a huge continent populated by a diverse assortment of peoples. Surely there are differences in graduation rates between, say, East Asians, Southeast Asians, and South Asians. But rarely is any effort made to compare them.
The success of Asians as a whole is still a very important point which is entirely ignored by the bulk of the press reports on this story. Why are they more successful? Given that Asians are more successful in school doesn't it make sense to adjust immigration policy to reduce Hispanic immigration in favor of Asian and white immigration?
Christopher Edley of Harvard blames Jim Crow for this problem.
"We will never dissolve the hegemony of Jim Crow segregation . . . unless we get serious about this problem," said Christopher Edley, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, which joined the Urban Institute to write "Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth Are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis."
How can that be the explanation? The vast bulk of Hispanics came to this country after Jim Crow laws were repealed and settled in parts of the country that had no Jim Crow laws. Plus, the vast bulk of Hispanics are not even black. The "legacy of racism" explanation for why some ethnic groups do poorly in school is getting very old and tired.
In fact, liberal New York has the worst statewide black and Hispanic high school graduation rates.
ALBANY, N.Y. -- New York has the worst statewide graduation rates for black and Hispanic high school students in the nation, according to a report released Wednesday.
Edley does get one thing right: these results are frightening.
"It's frightening," said Christopher Edley, the co-director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, who will become dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, in July. "With graduation rates this low, one has to worry about the long-term growth and wealth of the nation."
By the year 2030, the U.S. Bureau of the Census projections suggest that Latino students age 5 to 18 will number almost 16 million — 25 percent of the total school population.
That percentage will rise even higher in later decades.
Asians, although a small percentage of the population, are not considered underrepresented in science and engineering. Asians were 4 percent of the U.S. population in 1999 and 11 percent of the people employed in S&E occupations in that same year.
Asians are going to be too small a percentage of the total population for their higher performance in science and engineering to compensate for the lower academic achievement of Hispanics and blacks. The rate at which the size of this problem grows could be slowed if immigration policy was changed to only allow highly skilled immigrants to settle in the United States.
The Treasurer of the federal government of Australia, Peter Costello, is proposing to encourage Australians to work more years in order to avoid large tax increases to pay for a larger elderly population.
The Australian Treasurer, Peter Costello, will warn today that Australia faces higher taxes, deep Government spending cuts or massive budget deficits unless more mothers and older people stay in the workforce.
Mr Costello will use a speech in Sydney to unveil far-reaching measures to tackle the challenges of Australia's ageing population.
The reforms include changes to make the superannuation system more flexible and encouraging older workers to extend their working lives.
Among Costello's proposals is one to to allow more flexible access to the Australian tax-free savings accounts in order to discourage complete retirement in order to get access to it.
Federal Treasurer Peter Costello today unveiled plans to keep older people in the workforce longer and encourage retirees to take their superannuation savings as a pension rather than as a lump sum.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard agrees.
The Government wanted to cut the eligibility test back so anyone who could work at least 15 hours a week would no longer qualify but the Senate blocked the move.
Yesterday, Mr Howard described the discussion paper's subject as among the most critical facing Australia.
He said Australians should be encouraged to stay in the workforce instead of assuming they had to retire at a certain time of life.
Costello wants a finer granularity test of when retired people are retired or working.
Additional work rules apply to people aged 65 and over. The work test is consistent with superannuation’s intended role as a retirement income vehicle. The rules apply to when a person can make superannuation contributions and when a superannuation fund must pay out benefits. People aged 65 to 74 must work at least 10 hours in each week to be eligible to make contributions; a superannuation fund must also pay out a member’s benefits if they fail this test.
Work opportunities for people over 65 are likely to increase as the population ages. However, the current weekly work test is too stringent and does not accommodate more flexible working arrangements, such as seasonal and irregular part-time work. It also imposes an administrative burden on individuals and superannuation funds.
From 1 July 2004 the Government will change the contribution and cashing rules for people aged 65 to 74 to an annual work test so these rules are consistent with current and future work trends. The Government will consult with the industry and community on an appropriate work test.
One doesn't have to understand the details of Australian retirement tax laws to see the thrust of what Costello is trying to do. He wants people to have more incentives to keep working and paying taxes in order to delay the date when retirees become net burdens to the government. He also wants to reduce the size of the burden by allowing retirees to more advantageously to work in a partially retired status and to switch back and forth between being completely retired and working.
Costello is also proposing changes in the rules for eligibility for complete disability so that some who are currently categorized as totally disabled will instead for part time and provide for some of their support.
Costello says longer work lives are necessary in order to avoid higher taxes.
Keeping taxes at low levels is not only a personal imperative but a national economic imperative as well. Citizens rightly demand that taxes be restrained so that their own financial freedom and prosperity can be improved.
But it is also vital for the economy that taxes are kept as low as possible. High personal taxes stifle incentive and enterprise and high corporate taxes will drive businesses offshore.
We need a tax system that will raise the required revenue to pay for our national defence, our health, our education, our aged.
The United States faces the same problem. The United States also needs to change tax laws, labor laws, and the rules of eligibility for entitlements programs to encourage people to spend more time in the workforce. Currently American politicians are ignoring the problem. By contrast, Australia's top leaders are discussing the problem publically and making substantial proposals to address it.
Update: US Federal Reserve Chairman Allan Greenspan says the retirement age must be raised.
"It's a problem for the U.S. budget," said John Shoven, director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. "Economists of all political stripes are worried about this." To Greenspan, the response is inescapable. "We will eventually have no choice but to make significant structural adjustments in the major retirement programs," he said in a statement delivered before the House Budget Committee. He urged several actions to reduce payouts, including raising the age of eligibility for full benefits, now scheduled to rise to 67.
Greenspan says we can not afford to pay for all the commitments we have to retirees.
"We have been making commitments without focusing on our capability of meeting them," Greenspan said. "And I think it is terribly important to make certain that we communicate to the people who are about to retire what it is they are going to have to live with. And if we promise more than we can actually physically deliver, I think it will be a major blot on our whole fiscal process." Greenspan did not buy into Democratic plans to repeal some of Bush's tax cuts. Instead, he urged reducing the deficit mainly through spending cuts.
Read the links and you will see that John Kerry, John Edwards, and other Democrats reacted far more harshly to the proposal than the Republicans did.
While it is widely believed (except on the political Left of course) that getting welfare benefits tends to corrupt spirits and cause people to become lazy and decadent Mark Steyn points out that one group in the West has turned the welfare state into a source of enormous opportunity.
As an idea, the multicultural welfare state is too weak to have any purchase on us: that, indeed, is its principal virtue in the eyes of its few fanatical zealots - Polly Toynbee, Baroness Kennedy, etc; politically speaking, it's an allegiance for those who disdain allegiance. Most of us give a shrug of indifference and go back to watching the telly, like Susan Moore. A few look elsewhere, like those Tipton Talibannies. On the Continent, they're just beginning to wake up to the looming iceberg of unsustainable welfare systems. But, like the Sun's Shop-A-Sponger Hotline, they're missing the point. It's not the cost, it's the system itself. The cradle-to-grave welfare society enfeebles the citizenry to such a degree you can never generate enough money.
Happily, not all recipients waste their time on the dole: Muhammed Metin Kaplan set up his Islamist group, Caliphate State, while on welfare in Cologne; Ahmed Ressam, arrested in Washington State en route to blow up Los Angeles International Airport, hatched his plot while on welfare in Montreal; Zacarias Moussaoui, the "20th hijacker" currently on trial in America, became an Islamist radical while on welfare in London; Abu Hamza became Britain's most famous fire-breathing imam while on welfare in London; Abu Qatada, a leading al-Qaeda recruiter, became an Islamist bigshot while British taxpayers were giving him 10 times as much per week as Susan Moore. It was only when he was discovered to have £150,000 in his bank account that the Department for Work and Pensions turned off the spigot. If only the Susan Moore-ish super-spongers were as purposeful as the neo-Moorish super-spongers.
Perhaps the Europeans are on to something with their continued toleration of illegal Muslim immigrants, Muslim asylum seekers, and continued legal Muslim immigration. The Euros have to know that their welfare states are robbing their nations of vitality. So what did the clever, urbane, and sophisticated European elites do in response? They looked around and found an immigrant group that would not be corrupted by the modern social welfare state. That is certainly a stroke of genius. It is obvious that the American Right has been far too harsh about the deficiencies of Europe. We have no bold stroke of genius to compare to that.
The venture capitalists and self-made entrepreneurs should admire this curious strain of immigrant entrepreneurial initiative in pursuit of the jihadist market. It takes a lot of personal drive and a definite willingness to take risks to be able to develop and execute terrorist plots while living in a Western welfare state. It would be only too easy for Muslims in Europe to just sit around watching the telly or getting involved in illicit drug use. But these jihadists turn their backs on the temptations of the idle and decadent life. Imagine what they could do if they turned their attention to proselytizing amongst Europe's tens of milions who are living off the dole. Islam could give these lay-abouts and bums a new sense of purpose and direction. Rather than sleeping in late every day and hanging out listlessly while having illegitimate neglected babies the bums-turned-converts, fired up by a clear message of the hate of infidels provided by the unambiguous words of the Prophet, could fill their days with prayers and weapons training and their nights with plotting and building bombs.
I am surprised that mass immigration advocates in the United States are not pointing to the entrepreneurial spirit of immigrant jihadists to promote the virtues of immigration. The willingness to work against tough odds in the face of considerable resistance should appeal to Panglossians of the utopian capitalistic variety. At the very same time, the jihadists on welfare should get more support from good Leftists because, again, the Jihadists on the dole show that welfare does not have to result in laziness and decadence. If the non-Muslim poor could only be stirred to some great purpose they would demonstrate to all welfare skeptics that the nanny state does not have to rob its charges of drive and ambition.
Kurds displaced from their homes and lands by Saddam's regime are returning home and displacing Arabs in the process of doing so. (same article here and here)
In a quiet mass migration, Arabs are fleeing their villages in northern Iraq and Kurds are moving back in, reversing Saddam Hussein's campaigns of ethnic cleansing and effectively redrawing the demographic map.
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Kurds are insisting on retaining -- or expanding -- the system of self-rule they enjoyed under U.S. protection after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War. Kurdish militiamen, known as peshmerga, fought alongside U.S. soldiers last year and now expect a political payoff for that support.
Who can blame them for wanting autonomy?
The Global IDP Project of the Norwegian Refugee Council tracks internal displacement of populations due to wars and other causes and has published a report claiming that
The collapse of the regime of Saddam Hussein following the US-led war in Iraq in March 2003 created the political conditions for the 800,000 Kurds who had been forcibly displaced under a brutal policy of "Arabisation" to return to their homes. But the beginning of these return movements has also caused a new wave of displacement. As several thousand Kurds began to reclaim their homes in the north of Iraq, about 100,000 Arabs who had been installed there by the previous regime fled in the months following the war.
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From the mid-1970s, much of this resulted from the Iraqi authorities' campaigns in the north of the country to neutralise Kurdish aspirations for independence and to strengthen control over some of the world's largest oil-reserves. These campaigns involved the violent, large-scale and systematic alteration of the ethnic composition of the northern region where forced displacements of one group went hand in hand with the settlement of another. The Iraqi authorities destroyed up to 4,000 Kurdish villages and caused the displacements of around 800,000 Kurds. Arabs, mainly Shi'a families from central and southern Iraq, were brought in to replace the Kurds, as part of a wider "Arabisation" of the region. Non-ethnic Arab Iraqis, mostly Kurds, but also Turkmen and Assyrians were forced to either leave the oil-rich areas or to sign a form "correcting their nationality" so as to be considered as ethnic Arabs. To increase the number of Arabs in the region, incentives, such as free land and free houses which had mostly belonged to the evicted Kurds, were offered by the Baghdad regime (RI, 21 November 2003; CHR, 26 February 1999).
The end of the Iraq-Iran war in 1988 saw the intensification of the atrocities committed against the Kurds. In the course of a campaign code-named Al-Anfal, the authorities committed mass executions, poisoned entire villages with noxious gas and imposed economic blockades on others. The Al-Anfal campaign left more than 180,000 people missing, who are now presumed dead (Alliance International pour la Justice, December 2002). Most survivors were relocated into settlements or "collective towns" controlled by the army where they became dependent on the Iraqi authorities for food, water and other basic services (Fawcett and Tanner, October 2002, pp. 8-10).
With 180,000 killed and 800,000 displaced they have strong reasons to want their houses, apartments, and farm lands back.
Global IDP's Iraq country page has more reports on internal displacements in Iraq.
Arild Birkenes, the project's analyst for Iraq, tells RFE/RL that the displacements in the north of that country are reversing what once were deliberate programs during the Hussein era and earlier to give the oil-rich areas an Arab majority: "The current displacements are a direct effect of previous displacements and evictions. What is happening now is exactly what Saddam Hussein's regime was trying to do but the other way around."
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Many of the Kurdish refugees fled to Kurdish-administered parts of northern Iraq that fell out of Baghdad's control after the 1991 Gulf War. Some 30,000 of those Kurds are reported to have returned home again since Hussein's regime was toppled in April.
If a mere 30,000 Kurds out of the 800,000 original displaced Kurds can return and cause the displacement of 100,000 Arabs then as more of those 800,000 Kurds try to return home there will be a great deal more displacement of Arabs by Kurds which will happen in the future.
Birkenes says Arabs and members of Iraq's Turkoman minority accuse the Kurdish administration of encouraging refugees to return in a deliberate effort to ensure non-Kurdish groups will be outnumbered in the event of a referendum on the future status of the city and the Kurdish region: "The Turkomans and the Arabs in Kirkuk, especially, and also in some of the other governates controlled by the [U.S.-led] coalition and the Governing Council in Baghdad, [say] that the Kurdish regional government is trying to increase its influence in the same way as Saddam Hussein's regime tried during the 1970s, 80s and 90s."
The two main Kurdish factions, whose forces entered Kirkuk as Hussein's forces retreated early last year, now say they control security in the city. Their united Kurdish administration has denied any charges of forcing out Arabs or other groups.
The Kurdish administration says it provides only humanitarian aid to returning Kurdish refugees -- many of whose homes are now occupied by Arab settlers.
But Kurdish leaders also maintain that Kirkuk is a Kurdish city and should be part of a Kurdish region in a new federal Iraq. Some 2,000 Turkomans and Arabs demonstrated in Kirkuk in late December against any effort to incorporate the city into an autonomous Kurdish province. Five people were reported killed in the unrest.
Note the nature of the fight. The Kurds want a Kurdish majority to democratically vote for a Kurdish administration. The non-Kurds want a non-Kurdish majority to vote for a non-Kurdish administration. Democracy can not work under such conditions. There is not enough of a shared common interest.
Birkenes says the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is now trying to stem the return of Kurds to Kirkuk in order to lower the tensions: "It seems that the CPA has a kind of two-pronged approach, meaning that they are trying to physically prevent Kurds from entering into Kirkuk and, at the same time, are working politically with the Kurdish regional government and encouraging them not to encourage Kurdish return movements."
He says that the CPA has also requested the Kurdish regional government to stop providing humanitarian assistance until a commission can be formed to mediate property disputes between returning refugees and settlers.
The new report, which was issued yesterday, says that many of the displaced Arabs are now living north of Baghdad in "abandoned army camps and public buildings, most without access to health services, electricity or running water."
The CPA ought instead to focus on creating housing for the displaced Arabs. For the displaced Arabs that are Shias then the housing should be created south of Baghdad. For the Arabs are that Sunnis the housing should be created north of Baghdad. Keep the incompatible groups away from each other.
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The bloody suicide attacks against the major U.S.-backed Kurdish parties are likely to suppress Kurdish factionalism - at least in the short term - and stiffen the Kurds' resolve for a strong degree of self-rule within a federal Iraq.
That is unlikely to go down well among the country's majority Arab community or among the Turkomen, an ethnic group related to the Turks who like the Arabs fear Kurdish domination.
The Kurds have no reason to trust the Arabs. Why should different ethnic groups which speak different languages and who view each other which such warranted distrust and animosity be put together in the same country? See my pevious argument for the partition of Iraq and the arguments of others in favor of partition of Iraq.
Yet another serious thinker and accomplished scholar has come out for a radical change in current US immigration policy. Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, has come warning of the dangers of the current trend in US immigration in the March/April 2004 issue of Foreign Policy in an important article entitled The Hispanic Challenge.
The impact of Mexican immigration on the United States becomes evident when one imagines what would happen if Mexican immigration abruptly stopped. The annual flow of legal immigrants would drop by about 175,000, closer to the level recommended by the 1990s Commission on Immigration Reform chaired by former U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. Illegal entries would diminish dramatically. The wages of low-income U.S. citizens would improve. Debates over the use of Spanish and whether English should be made the official language of state and national governments would subside. Bilingual education and the controversies it spawns would virtually disappear, as would controversies over welfare and other benefits for immigrants. The debate over whether immigrants pose an economic burden on state and federal governments would be decisively resolved in the negative. The average education and skills of the immigrants continuing to arrive would reach their highest levels in U.S. history. The inflow of immigrants would again become highly diverse, creating increased incentives for all immigrants to learn English and absorb U.S. culture. And most important of all, the possibility of a de facto split between a predominantly Spanish-speaking United States and an English-speaking United States would disappear, and with it, a major potential threat to the country's cultural and political integrity.
Contemporary Mexican and, more broadly, Latin American immigration is without precedent in U.S. history. The experience and lessons of past immigration have little relevance to understanding its dynamics and consequences. Mexican immigration differs from past immigration and most other contemporary immigration due to a combination of six factors: contiguity, scale, illegality, regional concentration, persistence, and historical presence.
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In the past, immigrants originated overseas and often overcame severe obstacles and hardships to reach the United States. They came from many different countries, spoke different languages, and came legally. Their flow fluctuated over time, with significant reductions occurring as a result of the Civil War, World War I, and the restrictive legislation of 1924. They dispersed into many enclaves in rural areas and major cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest. They had no historical claim to any U.S. territory.
On all these dimensions, Mexican immigration is fundamentally different. These differences combine to make the assimilation of Mexicans into U.S. culture and society much more difficult than it was for previous immigrants. Particularly striking in contrast to previous immigrants is the failure of third- and fourth-generation people of Mexican origin to approximate U.S. norms in education, economic status, and intermarriage rates.
If you are not yet convinced that current immigration trends are deeply harmful for the United States then I encourage you to read the article in full. Huntington focuses on the cultural reasons why current immigration policy is harmful in contrast to many commentators who focus on the economic costs. His cultural arguments are important and deserve more attention than they receive.
However, the economic arguments also bear repeating here because, yes, they matter too. For instance, 100 years ago for someone to come to the United States without a high school level of education - let alone a college degree - was not much of a problem because most jobs didn't require advanced training or a great deal of cognitive ability. Industrialization was producing factory jobs that required the ability to do incredibly monotonous and simple tasks over and over again. A much larger portion of the labor force were manual laborers and many worked outside doing things that required considerable physical brawn. Well, automation has advanced to the point that a continually dwindling portion of the workforce does factory jobs or outside hard manual labor jobs.
The upshot of the continuing changes in the economy is that the relative value of less skilled workers has declined and looks set to continue to do so. At the same time the Western democracies have all built up welfare states that seek to maintain a minimum level of education, medical and other services and goods available to all. A substantial and growing portion of the population gets more in goods and services from the government than it pays in taxes. When considered on top of the economic problem the cultural and political problems outlined by Huntington become even more serious. We can not afford - either economically or culturally - to continue on the current path on immigration policy. We need to deport the illegals, stop Hispanic immigration, and put both the need to maintain the existing culture and the advantage of much higher skilled and talented immigrants as key factors in determining who is eligible to immigrate to the United States.
For more on Huntington on other subjects see my previous posts William H. McNeill On Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Kurtz on Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington.
Update: One argument made by defenders of massive immigration from Mexico is that the initial immigrants may not be well educated but the successive generations of their children and grandchildren will eventually approach US norms. Well, no. The most stunning table in Huntington's article shows little improvement in education attainment across generations of Mexican immigrants.
Education of Mexican Americans by Generation (1989-90)
* Except Mexican Americans, 1990
First Second Third Fourth All Americans * No high school degree (%) 69.9 51.5 33.0 41.0 23.5 High school degree (%) 24.7 39.2 58.5 49.4 30.4 Post high school degree (%) 5.4 9.3 8.5 9.6 45.1
Look at the bottom row showing post-high school achievement even into the fourth generation. This is happening in spite of the fact that racial quotas for college admissions used by so many colleges and universities have long applied not just to blacks but to Hispanics as well. This is a stunning result. I honestly expected a higher figure just because enough universities have enough dubious departments with low standards that it is possible to get a bachelor's degree without studying much difficult material.
Update II: Huntington is also the author of a new book on immigration entitled Who Are We : The Challenges to America's National Identity.
Update III: A later issue of Foreign Policy features a large number of mostly vitriolic responses to Huntington's article. Here's part of Huntington's reply to his critics. (free registration required)
Yzaguirre and Roger Daniels allude to Benjamin Franklin’s concerns about German immigrants in Pennsylvania maintaining their language and culture. They do not go on to quote Franklin’s argument that to correct the situation, the government should “distribute them more equally, mix them with the English, establish English schools where they are now too thick settled.” George Washington and Thomas Jefferson endorsed similar policies. One can only hope that Yzaguirre and Daniels now support measures like these which our nation’s founders thought essential to maintain the United States’ identity.
Bruce Wright accuses me of promoting the “lazy Mexican stereotype.” Yet the only sources I quote on Mexican culture are Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Along with Yzaguirre and Jacoby, Wright also attacks me for saying that America’s core culture is “Anglo Protestant.” Historians have, however, repeatedly shown that to be the case, and I document this point at length in my forthcoming book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. As I point out in the article, if America had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics, it would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil. The differences between the cultures of the United States and Mexico have also been highlighted by the Mexican philosopher Armando Cíntora, Mexican Foreign Ministry official Andrés Rozental, and Mexico’s premier novelist, Carlos Fuentes, who has commented with Tocquevillian eloquence on the gap between Mexico’s Spanish-Indian heritage, with its “culture of Catholicism,” and America’s Protestant culture descended “from Martin Luther.”
The last refuge of those unable to make reasoned arguments based on facts and logic is to resort to slander and name-calling, as do Daniels, Wright, Jon Lindsay, and Edward Lopez Jr., who variously refer to me—or my argument—as “unsavory nativis[m],” “chauvinism,” “European nativism,” “unabashed racism,” or “xenophobic.” Such charges should have no place in FOREIGN POLICY.
In general, the critical responses demonstrate how difficult it is to have a serious, informed, and reasoned exchange on what is, as Pei accurately writes, “the most fundamental question about the United States’ future as a nation and a culture.”
Also see my later posts Samuel P. Huntington On Cosmopolitans, Imperialists, And Nationalists and Samuel P. Huntington On Nationalism Versus Cosmopolitanism.
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post examines why the Bush Admnistration has repeatedly overestimated both jobs growth and government tax collection revenue.
Figures released by the White House show that its overestimate of job creation in 2003 was the largest forecast error made in at least 15 years, and its 2002 underestimate of the deficit was the largest in at least 21 years. But the statistics show that forecast errors began to increase considerably around 1997, under the Clinton administration. By contrast, the Bush administration's GDP forecasts have been relatively accurate, indicating job growth and tax receipts have shed their historical correlation to GDP growth.
If the economists she is quoting are correct then many people and/or companies are finding new ways to shelter their income from the tax man. I haven't seen this written about anywhere. Does anyone have any idea how and why this is happening? Are more people self-employed and hence in a position to write off more expenses against taxes? Or is a larger fraction of all stock and other assets being held in tax free retirement accounts and hence out of the reach of the tax man?
If anyone can find some relevant links please post them in the comments.
Food scarcity is not yet as bad as it was in the early 1990s. But the amount of food available per person in Cuba is declining.
It is nevertheless clear that monthly subsidized ration allowances have grown slimmer over the years, providing Cubans with what most experts agree is less than two weeks worth of food for every month. Eggs, for example, are restricted to 6 to 8 per person per month.
To supplement their subsidized rations, many Cubans must shop at up to nine different types of state-run and independent markets that charge higher dollar prices - in a country where the average monthly salary is about $10 - although many Cubans receive dollars from relatives abroad.
The article notes that an increasing portion of Cuban food imports come from the United States as the US has loosened agricultural trade restrictions with Cuba. But Cuba doesn't have enough to sell to the rest of the world (the vast bulk of which does not maintain US-style sanctions on Cuba) to provide the revenue to buy enough food for its populace. Somehow Castro missed out on learning about the great historical discovery that socialism doesn't work. Why haven't some visiting Canadian or European Union leaders let him in on the secret?
What is happening in Cuba is still only bush league hunger. To get up into the really big hunger leagues Cuba is going to have to compete with North Korea. Hunger in North Korea is so bad and so sustained that North Koreans are, on average, 8 inches shorter than South Koreans.
Update: The current level of crop sales to Cuba are a fairly recent turn of events.
The heightened tensions come amid a surge in American food sales to Cuba, which totaled $256.9 million in 2003, an 80 percent increase over the previous year, according to the New York-based U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council.
The rise in sales has been quite dramatic in just 3 years.
Cuba in three years climbed from last to No. 35 on the United States' list of food export markets despite continued tightening of American sanctions against the island, according to a leading Cuba-U.S. business group.
The legal change that made crop exports to Cuba possible happened in 2000.
Under the Trade Sanction Reform and Export Enhancement Act, which was established in 2000, the United States can send some food and medical supplies to Cuba.
Part of the cash that Cuba uses to buy US food is coming from Cuban-Americans who take money to family members in Cuba.
On a recent visit to Miami, Treasury Secretary John Snow suggested that the administration might toughen current rules that allow Americans to send up to $300 per quarter to relatives in Cuba. These rules also allow Cuban-American travelers to take up to $3,000 to Cuba each quarter to be divided among 10 households.
Past US interventions in Cuba bear some resemblance to what the US is trying to do now in Iraq.
General Leonard Wood and the Rough Riders commanded by Theodore Roosevelt, liberated Cuba from Spain. Wood, as governor of Cuba, accomplished something similar to what President Bush is trying to do in Iraq. Wood did many good things for Cuba: He built roads, bridges and schools, established the Correctional Courts and improved sanitation. He also created the Rural Guards Corps to police the countryside.
Of course Cuba ended up going communist. The US did not ultimately succeed in transforming Cuba permanently for the better. Now it faces hunger and continues under communist rule.
US rulers of Cuba from 1899 thru 1903 made many good reforms and improvements.
Brook's administration restored some services while controlling customs, postal services, sanitation; and health agencies. In December 1899 General Leonard Wood initiated the second period of United states administration in Cuba. Wood was a very energetic man who led the most impressive United states-administered reconstruction programs in Cuba. As a former United States surgeon general, Wood undertook a campaign for the eradication of malaria and yellow fever in Cuba. Dr. Walter Reed, an army surgeon, worked on epidemiology and tropical parasitical diseases projects using research results obtained previously by Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay of Cuba. A census taken in 1900 gave a bleak picture of the island's population of 1.5 million (200,000 less than in 1895), in both economic and educational terms. Schools were built, students were enrolled, special training was provided for teachers, and the University of Havana was restructured. Several public works programs were also established for the improvement of railroads, roads, and bridges.
Cuba's past history has a number similarities with Haiti's past and present. Just as the US occupied Haiti for a number of years so it did with Cuba as well. Plus, just as with Haiti the US left and the government called for the US to return when rebellions sprung up.
1906
In the "August Revolution" disgruntled Liberals rebel against Estrada Palma. The Cuban government is unable to defeat the insurgents and requests U.S. military intervention.1906-9
The United States military occupies Cuba and governs the island through a provisional government.
There are places in the world that can get better under US rule but which will deterioriate once the US military and US administrators pack it up and leave.
You might expect that a highly doctrinaire communist hellish dictatorship would not call a potential future leader by the title "King". But if so then you do not reckon with one Koh Young-hee (also spelled Ko Yong-Hi and Ko Yong-hui), Japanese born Korean lover and likely past and perhaps current wife of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Koh is referred to in the North Korean media as the "beloved mother" and also has been calling herself "Mother of Pyongyang". Well, Koh had two sons by Dear Leader Kim and she is promoting the title "Morning Star King" for her the younger son Kim Jong Woon (also spelled Kim Jong-un) who may now be the favorite to eventually succeed Kim Jong-il as leader of North Korea.
The scepter in the Hermit Kingdom passed from the Great Leader to the Dear Leader - and will he in turn pass it on to his youngest son, already extolled by some as the Morning Star King?
The previous Asia Times article by Yoel Sano is an excellent tour thru the innards of the North Korean ruling elite and explains the extent to which inter-family ties within the elite and intergenerational loyalty within ruling families ensures stability for the regime. North Korea's regime looks remarkably stable at this point and unless the United States can cut off more external sources of aid and trade the regime looks likely to remain in power and continue its nuclear weapons development program for years to come.
Kim Jong Chol
Possibly the favourite to succeed Kim Jong Il, this 22-year-old is Kim's son with the former dancing girl Ko Yong-Hi. He was educated in Geneva. His younger brother Kim Jong Woon was recently renamed "Morning Star King" by his mother, according to some defectors' reports, suggesting he may be her choice.
Back on September 13, 2003 the South Korean newspaper The Chosun Ilbo was predicting that "Morning Star King" Kim Jeong-woon (Kim Jong Woon or Kim Jong-un) would be annointed Kim Jong Il's successor.
Pyongyang is undergoing preparations to designate the third son of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as Kim's eventual successor. The announcement would be made next Feb. 16, the leader’s 62nd birthday.
That birthday has now come and gone. The precedent of Kim Jong-il's ascension suggests that the annointing of the next ruler of North Korea will not happen suddenly with a single big announcement but instead will unroll gradually as a favored son is appointed to more higher positions that indicate he is the chosen one.
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has a post about what university presidents think undergraduates ought to read.
Here is what university presidents think:
1. The Bible
2. The Odyssey
3. The Republic
4. Democracy in America
5. The Iliad
6. Hamlet
7. (tie) Wealth of Nations, The Koran, The Prince
10. (tie) Federalist Papers, Don Quixote, On Liberty, Invisible Man, King Lear, War and Peace, Moby Dick, The Lexus and the Olive Tree
What an incredibly deficient list. The longer list is not much better and completely misses the bulk of what science is telling us about human nature, life forms in general, and the physical laws of the universe. A person can not be truly educated if that person does not understand:
Evolution of species by natural selection is obviously the most important idea to come along in the last couple hundred years. Yet most people (and I suspect, most university presidents) still model the world using a pre-Darwinian set of concepts. Plus, even a lot of people who accept natural selection created us still shrink from embracing many of its ramifications (including the fact that natural selection is still happening).
What does it tell us about university presidents that many of them cited Karl Marx and not a single one cited Charles Darwin? Marxism is not a useful set of ideas for thinking about the world. Yet natural selection obviously is. At least the university presidents didn't mention some other discredited modern era frauds such as Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead.
The inclusion of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History Of Time for a science book is a poor choice since it is not going to teach the reader how to think scientifically or to be able to better understand science. Two mentioned Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel which strikes me as a poor choice. William H. McNeill's review and follow-up outline some of the problems with the book as has Steve Sailer. So the university presidents have no useful advice to offer students to learn about biological science and human nature. They could have pointed to a number of other books such as Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. or perhaps Edward O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.
Colleges and universities do a poor job of training young minds. They are very costly, inefficient, and do not require their students to learn basic topics which are essential for making sense of the world. My own biggest educational deficiency is that I had only a single class in statistics and that was not mandated. As a result, I know enough math to detect all sorts of fallacies coming from second rate social scientists (i.e. most social science academics), commentators, politicians, and others. But I'm painfully aware that there are types of analyses I just can't do or even follow that the statistically more adept can perform. You can't understand reality without understanding statistics. Does that mean I'm not truly educated? Afraid so.
Religious conservative candidates are winning most of the seats in the Iranian parliament.
Interior Ministry figures on Saturday showed conservatives had won at least 55 of the first 106 seats declared, out of 289 contested on Friday, an analyst at the Parliamentary Research Centre said.
The parliament is not powerful at all. The Guardian Council of mullahs routinely rejects legislation passed by the parliament. In spite of the lack of power in the Parliament the mullahs rejected most reformist candiates for the 2004 parliamentary elections in order to ensure a more compliant parliament would be elected.
The Guardian Council, whose 12 members are all appointed directly or indirectly by Khamenei, disqualified more than 2,000 mainly reformist aspirants. A further 1,179 contenders withdrew.
Few of the candidates who were running wanted to challenge the power of the Islamic clerics.
The candidate ban by the Guardian Council left fewer than 250 veteran reformers among nearly 4,500 candidates and provoked one of Iran's most serious political crises in decades.
Voter turn-out is down considerably from the 2000 election.
With the votes tallied from more than half of Iran's 207 districts, the turnout was 43.29 per cent, said Interior Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity. If the trend holds, it would be a noticeable drop from the 67.2 per cent in the last parliament elections in 2000.
Turnout was especially low in Tehran.
However, it has been confirmed that participation in the capital Tehran was just 28 per cent, which could raise questions about the future Parliament's legitimacy.
Nationwide turnout appears to be headed to around the 50 per cent mark.
Thus the Europeans face a stark choice. They can decide to - holding their noses - continue dealing with the Iranian regime because they need its cooperation on a number of issues, notably nuclear non-proliferation, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Or they can orchestrate a set of new diplomatic, economic, and even military pressures on the regime as a means of encouraging the emergence of a genuinely democratic internal opposition.
The Bush administration, for its part, needs to develop a coherent analysis of the Iranian situation. It must decide whether or not Iran is, in the words of the State Department's number-two, Richard Armitage, a "sort of democracy" or a despotic regime using religion and violence to remain in power.
Has Taheri just reached this conclusion? This has been obvious for years. The United States can either overthrow the Iranian government by force or try to organize a bigger sanctions regime against Iran in order to try to get the Mullahs to stop developing nukes and supporting terrorists. So far the Bush Adminisration has not shown that it has the stomach for such an undertaking and the European leaders have clung to the belief that diplomacy alone can bring the Iranian government to acceptable terms.
Writing from Tehran David Hirst describes this election as the final stage of a plan by the ruling mullahs to block democratic reformers. (same article here)
Today’s elections, followed by next year’s presidential contest, are the culmination of the conservatives’ strategy to regain their ascendancy over the “popular” as well as the “sacred” sources of sovereignty in Iran. The reformists call it a “white coup d’etat.” This is hardly an exaggeration for what the turbaned sages of the Council of Guardians did in disqualifying 2,500 reformist candidates, including 80 serving deputies, who were judged insufficiently “Islamic” and told that they would be waging “war on God” if they resisted their fate.
Abdulwahab Badrakhan says the Iranian elections served to strip away illusions about the regime.
Alas, these elections did not raise question marks with respect to their results as much as they raised doubts about previous voting. What did the previous elections mean? What did their slogan, "reform" - should it happen - mean? Was it a lie sold to the Iranians, and marketed to the outside, which desired to believe it as a form of help to Khatami? What does this reform mean if the "pre-reform" practices remain, and even increased their pressures on freedom, silencing the press, suppressing the opponents and the elected people's representatives? One should admit a virtue for these non-elections: they removed the mist, dust, and makeup from the regime's real face. This means that it stayed as it is despite Khatami's charisma, his lenient rhetoric, his adorable smile, honest character and pure intentions. One should also admit that the Guardians Council does not commit mistakes in correcting the situation: the regime in Iran is not democratic, and its elections are nothing more than decorations.
Meanwhile the mullahs keep pursuing the development of nuclear bombs.
According to diplomats familiar with investigations by the International Atomic Energy Agency, inspectors have found designs and parts for a G2 uranium enrichment centrifuge - a more advanced version of the G1 system previously declared by Iran.
...
Some reports said the components were found on an Iranian air force base. If this is confirmed, it would create a possible link between Iran's nuclear programme and the military, despite claims that nuclear facilities are entirely civilian and designed to generate electricity.
Libya's cooperation in revealing what it was able to buy on the nuclear blackmarket has been very valuable for being able to guess what Iran might have. The fear is that Iran may have been able to buy a complete bomb design.
"The inspectors have been matching up everything Libya got with what we know Iran to have," one of the diplomats said. "The concern is, if the Iranians got everything so far, do they have a weapons design? That would be the biggie."
Powell said Iran and other rogue nations should learn from Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi , who realized after years of trying to pursue weapons of mass destruction that it was not making his people better off nor elevating his country's status internationally.
The European Union is going to keep negotiating with the mullahs.
The EU expressed Friday its concern about the conditions under which parliamentary elections are being held in Iran, but underlined that the European bloc's policy to engage the Islamic Republic in dialogue has not changed, IRNA reported from Brussels.
Spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States is giving Iran until a March 8-10 meeting of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency to comply with promises made late last year. If Iran is found not in compliance, the United States could urge that the IAEA board refer the matter to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions or other options.
Russia's nuclear-energy minister, Alexander Rumyantsev, confirmed yesterday that Moscow will override U.S. objections and ship nuclear fuel to a Russian-built reactor in Iran.
I am still betting on the mullahs turning Iran into the second Islamic nuclear power after Pakistan. The Bush Administration has not yet shown a willingness to either overthrow the Iranian government or do air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Bush Administration may yet try to get the Europeans to take the issue to the UN Security Council to seek sanctions. But it is not clear whether this path will be taken.
The current year allotment of H1-B visas have already been assigned 5 months into the fiscal year.
WASHINGTON - The federal government won't accept any more applications for a popular visa program that provides skilled foreign labor to U.S. companies, the office of Citizenship and Immigration Services said Tuesday.
Less than five months into the fiscal year there already are enough applications to fill all 65,000 slots for H1-B visas, said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for the agency, a division of the Homeland Security Department.
IT managers in search of cheap programming talent are unhappy.
Adrian Williams, an IT manager at a health-care firm, said Wednesday that his company sometimes hires foreign workers because they have more experience and are more affordable than even some recent college grads; these U.S. workers are sometimes willing to take lesser-paying jobs but take much longer to train.
Executives who hire foreign scientists claim this limit puts them at a competitive disadvantage.
Pulling up the welcome mat to foreign talent when corporate America is gearing up for a turnaround poses a threat to America's global competitiveness, Cheung and other executives said recently. They predicted that a shortage of H-1B visas would force them to pass over promising foreign-born scientists, leave crucial jobs unfilled or delay projects that require special talents that can't be found in this country.
Handing out visas in a first-come first-serve fashion starting at the beginning of each fiscal year is an inefficient way to allocate a scarce resource. I have two proposals for better ways to hand out skilled work visas:
Auction off the visas once a month with one twelfth of each year's visas sold every month. This accomplishes two goals at once. First, it causes more of the visas to be allocated to the most valued workers. Secondly, by doing the auctions continuously throughout the year it assures a continous supply of the most skilled workers to fill slots that come available during the year. A finer time granularity on skilled worker availability will increase market efficiencies of labor allocation. Currently the system allocates visas toward companies which just happen to have openings when the new allotment of slots for a year becomes available at the beginning of a fiscal year. But those users are not, on average, going to be the most productive users of the resource. Yearly quotas handed out all at once are inefficient at allocating resources.
Make fewer visas available at lower salary levels. Which workers are more valuable to the economy? Those who make more or those who make less? On average, more value is going to be generated by those who make more. So why hand out visas for programmers who make $35k per year when we could be handing them out to engineers or scientists who make $70k or $120k or more?
People who make more produce more on average. They pay more in taxes. They are more likely to be net benefits to the economy and less likely to generate costs for the rest of us in excess of the taxes and benefits they provide. A visa allocation system should be designed to optimize for allocation of work permits to workers who will generate the most in benefits and least in costs.
It may be possible to improve upon this scheme above in all sorts of ways. How to factor in the lower salary of a young scientist who is as yet unproven? We expect salaries to increase as a person proves himself. So we might conceivably have lower allowed salaries for younger workers. But we don't want companies to use a scheme of constantly bringing in low-paid workers for a few years and then shipping them back to get new low-paid ones. Such workers might be in occupations where the employer does not expect great growth in productivity as a result of experience. So how to protect against that? Make a company pay more for the visa if the salaries of its H1-B workers are never going up? Or make the visa cost more if the total amount of tax paid by the worker over the life of the visa is low?
The US should try to get the most talent possible from the limited number of H1-B visas, permanent residency visas, and citizenships it hands out to foreigners. How best to do that?
Update: One problem with a pure auction scheme is that some employers who simply want cheap labor will use an auction scheme to bring in large numbers of low-paid workers in some occupation where the gap in salaries between the US and other countries is the largest. A prospective employer would be willing to pay an auction price that is smaller than that gap. From the standpoint of the common good of all American citizens this is not the best reason to bring in immigrant labor. We should want laborers who will pay more in taxes, produce more in goods and services, innovate, and be law-abiding. An auction scheme ought to account for both cost and benefit forms of externalities. With that in mind here are some additional ideas:
Update II: Another advantage of a visa auction is it reduces the amount of subjective judgements of value made by government workers. Plus, it reduces uncertainty and opportunity cost caused by application time delays by compressing the amount of time it takes for an employer to get a work permit.
Update III: There is another problem with an auction system: Some potential employees can't be tested for their talent level without being employed for a while. Also, some occupations have a far greater amount of variability in productivity from one worker to the next. There is a narrower variation in productivity among truck drivers for example than among computer programmers or engineers. It is harder to judge in advance the level of productivity of workers in occupations that have larger variations in performance. If all visas are for an equal period of time then the companies bidding on them are going to tend to favor bidding for visas for job positions where productivity is more predictable in advance. A company that might want to try out an engineer for 6 months to find out if that engineer is a star or mediocre is going to tend to not want to pay for a work permit that lasts for, say, 6 years. Therefore there should be a market for permits that are extensible. In fact, an argument could be made for a market for, say, 50,000 6 month or 1 year permits where then a smaller market for, say, 35,000 5 year extension permits would be available at the end of the 6 months.Those companies that were most impressed by their workers would be willing to then bid more for the extensions.
Former Democratic Governor of Colorado Richard Lamm is on a slate of anti-immigration candidates that are running for positions on the board of directors of the Sierra Club. Lamm says the environment can not be protected from massive population growth.
Our natural American birth rate will lead to a stable population around 2050. But with the current level of immigration our population will be approximately 500 million on its way to a billion. I have yet to meet an American who wants one billion neighbors. What possible public policy advantage would there be to an America of 500 million? Do we lack for people? Do we have too much open space, parkland and recreation? What will 500 million Americans mean to our environment?
We have a chance to stabilize America’s population or we can double it and double it again: The key driver is immigration. If we continue with our present policy of mass immigration (America takes twice as many immigrants as the rest of the world combined) we will continue to grow and grow and grow. The geometry is relentless.
Opponents of Lamm's faction claim immigration is not a proper issue for the Sierra Club to take on.
But to Sierra Club members like McGinn, the immigration-reduction stance being advocated by what he calls "outside " candidates is part of a misguided insurgency as insidious as any noxious weed.
"Everything gets related back to the environment in one way or another, but that does not make it an environmental issue," said McGinn, 44, the de facto local spokesman for Groundswell Sierra, which says its mission is to "save" the 112-year-old Sierra Club.
But if something hurts the environment why is it not an environmental issue?
Sierra Club activists in a group called Support US Population Stabilization (SUSPS) support candidates for the Sierra Cluib board who will change Sierra Club policy back toward opposition to immigration and advocacy of population stabilization. SUSPS states its polices on its main web page:
SUSPS® is a network of Sierra Club activists who support a comprehensive approach to environmentalism within the Sierra Club. This approach includes effective action for population stabilization in the United States. Currently Sierra Club policies call for stabilizing U.S. population but do not address the combined impacts of mass migration and birth rates on U.S. population growth.
...
Immigration into the U.S. averaged a near replacement level of 178,000 per year from 1925 through 1965. In 1965 Congress increased legal immigration approximately 6-fold through the Immigration and Nationality Act. After subsequent legislation further increasing yearly legal immigration, the U.S. now takes in a million legal immigrants and an estimated 700,000 illegal immigrants each year. This high level of migration will be responsible for nearly 70% of U.S. population doubling during this century.
Environmentalists need not apologize for acknowledging this demographic reality. To the contrary, environmentalists who refuse to recognize the seismic shift of demographics in the U.S. betray their own cause. Only by confronting birth rates and mass migration as the root causes of U.S. population growth will we be able to ensure sustainability for future generations - of all species.
Another website which advocates for the anti-immgration Sierra Club board candidates is SierraDemocracy.org.
"It's a democratic process. To accuse these candidates of taking over the Sierra Club is like accusing the Democrats of taking over the White House," said board member Paul Watson, who co-founded Greenpeace and now heads the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
As Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee goes thru the math about population growth in California and shows that immigration is the major driver of population growth.
This is what typically happens in California every year:
As 300,000 foreign immigrants - legal and illegal - arrive in California, another 500,000-plus babies are born (60 percent of them to immigrant mothers, incidentally), and 200,000 or so Californians die. The state's net population growth is 600,000.
Adding 600,000 new souls a year translates into 6 million each decade.
Walters discusses the battle for control of the Sierra Club position on immigration and concludes:
It's a microcosm of California's reluctance to seriously debate growth in its most fundamental terms even as we cope with its massive impacts.
I do not want to see the population of California double. That is one of the reasons why I am for the stop of all illegal immigration, deportation of all illegal immigrants, and much greater selectivity for who can come in as legal immigrants. I hope Richard Lamm and his allies win the Sierra Club board election.
Neoconservative hawk Max Boot, after reviewing the history of US military occupation of Haiti, claims that holding elections in Iraq will accomplish little and that nothing short of a sustained occupation of Iraq lasting decades will transform it into a democracy. (LA Times requires free registration)
Applying those lessons to Iraq today, it's obvious that holding an election — whether through direct balloting, as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani insists, or through caucuses, as U.S. proconsul L. Paul Bremer III prefers — has to be a secondary concern. The top priorities must be to create a constitution that upholds basic freedoms and an apolitical security force that upholds the constitution.
And it's vital that the U.S. not rush for the exits. Long-term imperial control, à la Haiti in the 1920s, is no longer acceptable. But American troops have to remain in Iraq for the long haul — probably decades, as in West Germany or in South Korea — to nurture that country's democratic development. If they leave prematurely, Iraq will turn into a Haiti with oil wells.
Would it take decades of occupation to transform Iraq into a semi-liberal democracy? Yes, of course. But here's the twist: A US occupation of Iraq for decades is not by itself enough to transform Iraq into a sustainable democracy. It seems unlikely that the Bush Administration has either the willingness or the understanding needed to start pursuing the kinds of transformations of Iraqi society it would take to make Iraq into a sustainable semi-liberal democracy. One of the practices in Iraqi society that must be changed in order to make Iraq into a nation-state with a limited amount of corruption and some loyalty on the part of the people toward their government is a great decline in the practice of cousin marriage. Don't expect the Bush Administration to tackle that one. Therefore do not expect US occupation of Iraq to cause much in the way of lasting changes.
Given that the US already has enough "nation-building" responsibility on its plate with troops on the ground dying daily there fortunately seems little chance that US troops will go into Haiti to deal with the increasing violence and breakdown of basic law and order there. Writing for the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College Peter Bunce wrote a report in 1995 about the 20 year US occupation of Haiti.
Thesis: The first United States Occupation of Haiti, after a slow start, made a great variety of capital improvements for Haiti, made changes in the Haitian political system, and refinanced the Haitian economy, none of which had much lasting impact on the Haiti people once the occupation was terminated.
Background: The United States occupied Haiti originally to restore public order in 1915. It's self-imposed mandate quickly expanded to reestablishing Haitian credit in the international credit system, establishing good government and public order, and promoting investment in Haitian agriculture and industry. After a slow start, marred by a brutal revolt in 1918-20, the United States Occupation of Haiti was reorganized and began to address many of the perceived shortcomings of Haitian society. Its international and internal debt was refinanced, substantial public works projects completed, a comprehensive hospital system established, a national constabulary (the Gendarmerie [later Garde] d'Haiti) officered and trained by Marines, and several peaceful transitions of national authority were accomplished under American tutelage. After new civil unrest in 1929, the United States came to an agreement to end the Occupation before its Treaty-mandated termination in 1936. Once the Americans departed in 1934, Haiti reverted to its former state of various groups competing for national power to enrich themselves. Almost all changes the American Occupation attempted to accomplish failed in Haiti because they did not take into consideration the Haitian political and social culture. Recommendation: Before the United States intervenes in foreign countries, particularly in those where nation-building improvements are to be attempted, the political and social cultures of those countries must be taken into consideration.
Bill Clinton's later shorter occupation of Haiti was similarly naive and even more destined to fail due to its more limited scope. Now the French are discussing sending troops to Haiti. But unless the French want to stay for decades they will accomplish nothing lasting as well.
Robert Samuelson points out that 70% of the projected fiscal 2004 budget deficit is not due to Bush's tax cut of 2001.
Democrats commit the same sin. They're gleefully denouncing Bush's tax cuts for the super-rich as creating reckless deficits. This is not exactly true. For fiscal 2004, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the causes of the swing from a once-predicted surplus to today's deficit as follows: 40 percent, a weaker economy and "technical re-estimates" of spending and taxes; 30 percent, higher spending (mostly for defense and homeland security); and 30 percent, tax cuts. Even without tax cuts -- which also benefit the middle class -- there'd be big deficits.
Samuelson argues that both parties are failing to deal with the long term financial problem that the US government faces. The biggest cause of the financial problem is the growth of the entitlements programs for old age.
In a Business Week article Christopher Farrell say the long-term gap between obligations and tax revenue is in the tens of trillions of dollars.
Taking into account the funds that need to be spent on this demographic time bomb lifts the long-term fiscal gap to $44 trillion. That's the "optimistic" calculation made by sober economists and green-eyeshade budget experts drawn from the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the Office of Management & Budget, and the Congressional Budget Office during the tenure of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.
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The leaders of the study, Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters, estimate that restoring fiscal sanity requires either hiking federal income tax collections by 69% or raising payroll taxes by 95%. Don't want to raise taxes? Well, Social Security and Medicare benefits could be slashed by 56%. Another alternative is to cut federal discretionary spending by more than 100% (although that's impossible).
I am skeptical of Farrell's claim that the Bush Administration's restrictions on education spending are going to make matters worse. The whole education industry is incredibly inefficient. It cries out for automation and great reforms to accelerate the rate of education. In fact, one of my favorite policy suggestions to help deal with the declining ratio of net taxpaying workers to retirees and other recipients of government benefits is to acclerate education of the young to put them into the labor market at earlier ages. People who go to college and graduate school and do not enter the labor market until their mid to late 20s are a source of costs rather than sources of tax revenue and production. If children went to school all year around and went to college sooner they'd get into the labor market sooner and become net assets to the economy sooner. This would lower the cost of raising children while simultaneously increasing tax revenues and the proportion of the population that is working.
The CBO projected last summer that the growth in the number of Medicare beneficiaries will rise from about 1 1/2 percent a year between 2005 and 2008. Between 2009 and 2013 that growth doubles to 3 percent. In the years thereafter we see the steady retirement of the baby boom generation.
Medicare and Social Security spending will double by the year 2030.
In his written testimony, he noted that increased demand for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will rise significantly a