Non-Mexican illegal immigration from Mexico is surging.
The U.S. Border Patrol has nabbed 15,195 non-Mexican migrants crossing over the Rio Bravo around Eagle Pass in the past eight months, a rise of almost 240 percent on the same period last year, officials said on Monday.
Agents say what they call "OTMs" -- "other than Mexican migrants" -- now account for 90 percent of all migrant detentions in the sweltering trade and ranching hub of 40,000 people. That is up from the 5 percent to 10 percent nationwide normally recorded by the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Mexicans who are caught crossing the border are deported back to Mexico very quickly. But the bulk of Other Than Mexicans (OTMs) are released with orders to appear at a deportation hearing at some future date. Few of those OTMs show up for their hearings. To deport the OTMs the illegal crossers must be held in detention for days or weeks to do legal processing and arrange for transportation (typically flights) back to their countries of origin. But the Border Patrol lack funding to hold all the OTMs for the needed lengths of time. Knowledge of this fact is gradually spreading throughout Latin America and even to more distant places such as the Middle East.
Think about that one year 240% rise of OTMs at Eagle Pass Texas. Effectively the United States now has open borders for non-Mexicans. Unless the Border Patrol's capacity to detain OTMs is greatly increased the flood is going to grow.
Congressman Solomon Ortiz (D-TX), who has served as a sheriff in south Texas, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee - Subcommittee on Immigration on March 3, 2005 says 90% of OTMs never show up for their deportation hearings and organized crime gangs from Central America enter the United States as OTMs.
1. The release of OTMs (other than Mexicans) by the U.S. government. Border law enforcement officers routinely release illegal immigrants into the general population of the U.S. because they do not have sufficient funds and space to detain them at detention facilities. Captured OTMs are released on their own recognizance and are ordered to appear at a deportation hearing weeks after their release. The number of “absconders” – those who never appear for deportation – varies widely, but is said to be 90% of those released, a number now approaching 75,000.
2. The growing number of Mara Salvatrucha (MS 13) gangs, the bloody, violent Central American gangs that are now a serious criminal element in major cities and in states around the country. These gangs are entering the country as OTMs, and gaining easy release.
3. A recent warning to Americans by the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico illustrating the danger of narcotrafficking gangs along the U.S. border directed against Americans in the border area, including kidnapping of American citizens.
Detention facilities and Border Patrol staffing are not keeping pace with the needs.
The Intelligence Reform bill passed by Congress, and signed by the President, mandated 10,000 Border Patrol agents over 10 years, 2,000 annually. The budget received by Congress in early February only funded 210 BP agents. The Border Patrol will lose more than 210 agents to attrition – the strength of the Border Patrol is dwindling. Just this week, 24 more Border Patrol agents were mobilized with the National Guard to the war in Iraq from the McAllen sector alone.
Intelligence Reform mandated an increase of 8,000 beds in detention facilities annually for the next 5 years, still not nearly enough to hold all those coming in to the U.S. Yet, our budget proposal provides for only about 1,900 new detention space beds – over 6,000 beds short of the congressional mandate passed in December 2004.
This is a clear and present danger inside the United States, and the number of released illegal immigrants not returning for deportation grows by the hundreds each week.
Border Patrol agents do not have time to even do background checks on the OTMs to identify and hold the known criminals.
I asked those who stand on our front lines what they would want to say to the U.S. Congress; here’s what they said:
- “Our borders are not secure.”
- “What’s our mission here? We’re spinning our wheels.”
- “The whole system is broken.”
- “We’re releasing OTMs without proper checks due to lack of time and info.”
The Border Patrol caught 39,215 OTMs in 2003 and 65,814 in 2004. The numbers will continue to rise until most OTMs are held for deportation. Terrorists could obviously exploit this route if they got their act together. Middle Easterners enter the US as OTMs from Mexico.
OTM release is just one of the big gaps in immigration law enforcement. Another big gap is the collapse of interior enforcement against employers who hire illegals.
In the Los Angeles area, there are about 400 ICE agents to investigate cases involving narcotics, gangs, port security, criminal immigrants, computer crimes, smuggling and customs violations. They cover seven Southern California counties and part of Nevada.
The last time an employer targeted by the work-site division faced criminal charges here was in 2002, authorities said, when a Pasadena dress shop owner received probation after luring, then imprisoning, an illegal immigrant worker.
"How thin can you stretch roughly 400 employees with all our responsibilities?" Jeffery asked. "Everything is done on a priority basis. That's why the focus may not be the dry cleaners, but rather the power plants."
Any tips that do not involve critical infrastructure, he added, are "put in a file cabinet and filed."
Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies says immigration law enforcement can be improved to deter people from entering the country illegally and to encourage those who are here illegally to leave.
But there is a third way that rejects this false choice, and it is the only approach that can actually work: Shrink the illegal population through consistent, across-the-board enforcement of the immigration law. By deterring the settlement of new illegals, by increasing deportations to the extent possible, and, most importantly, by increasing the number of illegals already here who give up and deport themselves, the United States can bring about an annual decrease in the illegal-alien population, rather than allowing it to continually increase. The point, in other words, is not merely to curtail illegal immigration, but rather to bring about a steady reduction in the total number of illegal immigrants who are living in the United States. The result would be a shrinking of the illegal population to a manageable nuisance, rather than today’s looming crisis.
This is analogous to the approach a corporation might take to downsizing a bloated workforce: a hiring freeze, some layoffs, plus new incentives to encourage excess workers to leave on their own.
It is worth noting that such a strategy of attrition is implicit in many proposals for improved enforcement of the immigration law, such as the recently passed Real ID Act (which, among other things, sought to bars illegals from getting driver’s licenses) and the Clear Act (a bill which, if passed, would systematize the interaction of federal immigration authorities with state and local law enforcement). But however important such specific measures are, they are merely tactics, pieces of a larger puzzle. An overall blueprint for success also needs to be articulated, in order to place such tactics in strategic context for the public, for lawmakers, and for the enforcement personnel assigned to do the job.
Krikorian notes that self-deportation and other means to reducing illegal alien employment have worked in the past. We have precedents for how to make immigration law enforcement work.
During the first several years after the passage of the IRCA, illegal crossings from Mexico fell precipitously, as prospective illegals waited to see if we were serious. Apprehensions of aliens by the Border Patrol – an imperfect measure but the only one available – fell from more than 1.7 million in FY 1986 to under a million in 1989. But then the flow began to increase again as the deterrent effect of the hiring ban dissipated, when word got back that we were not serious about enforcement and that the system could be easily evaded through the use of inexpensive phony documents.
That showed that reducing new illegal immigration is possible; but what about increasing the number of illegals already here who give up and leave? That, too, has already been demonstrated. After the 9/11 attacks, immigration authorities undertook a “Special Registration” program for visitors from Islamic countries. The affected nation with the largest illegal-alien population was Pakistan, with an estimated 26,000 illegals here in 2000. Once it became clear that the government was getting more serious about enforcing the immigration law – at least with regard to Middle Easterners – Pakistani illegals started leaving on their own in large numbers. The Pakistani embassy estimated that more than 15,000 of its illegal aliens left the United States, and the Washington Post reported the “disquieting” fact that in Brooklyn’s Little Pakistan the mosque was one-third empty, business was down, there were fewer want ads in the local Urdu-language paper, and “For Rent” signs sprouted everywhere.6
And in an inadvertent enforcement initiative, the Social Security Administration in 2002 sent out almost a million “no-match” letters to employers who filed W-2s with information that was inconsistent with SSA’s records.7 The intention was to clear up misspellings, name changes, and other mistakes that had caused a large amount of money paid into the system to go uncredited. But, of course, most of the problem was caused by illegal aliens lying to their employers, and thousands of illegals quit or were fired when they were found out. The effort was so successful at denying work to illegals that business and immigrant-rights groups organized to stop it and won a 90 percent reduction in the number of letters to be sent out.8
Americans have to get mad enough about immigration to make politicians enforce immigration laws. Will anger build to a high enough level that elite desires will cease to determine immigration policy?
Two Army analysts whose work has been cited as part of a key intelligence failure on Iraq -- the claim that aluminum tubes sought by the Baghdad government were most likely meant for a nuclear weapons program rather than for rockets -- have received job performance awards in each of the past three years, officials said.
The civilian analysts, former military men considered experts on foreign and U.S. weaponry, work at the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), one of three U.S. agencies singled out for particular criticism by President Bush's commission that investigated U.S. intelligence.
The government has failed to punish anyone who carried out the will of George W. Bush.
Despite sharp critiques from the president's commission and the Senate intelligence committee, no major reprimand or penalty has been announced publicly in connection with the intelligence failures, though investigations are still underway at the CIA. George J. Tenet resigned as CIA director but was later awarded the Medal of Freedom by Bush.
Part of the problem here is the normal propensity of government bureaucracies to resist rewarding and punishing based on the quality of work performed. But the Bush Administration places such a high value on loyalty that punishment is unlikely for those who did work which advanced the President's agenda.
My guess: They will find some internal Bush critics and punish them for supposed errors in their analyses. No one loyally serving the President, no matter how incompetently or dishonestly, will be punished.
As for intelligence agencies: We should not expect great performance from them because few of the best minds want to work for the government in general and for intelligence agencies in particular. Plus, their political masters all too often do not want to know the truth.
Update: Back in August 2003 Paul Sperry of World Net Daily reported that the Energy Department official who was put in a powerful position for deciding on Iraq WMD intelligence had no intelligence experience.
The official who represented the Energy Department at a key prewar intelligence meeting on Iraq's alleged new nuclear-weapons program was a human resources manager with no intelligence experience, and was easily swayed by Bush administration hawks, say department insiders.
Though Energy disputed a critical piece of evidence – that Baghdad sought aluminum tubing to make nuclear materials – it nonetheless agreed with the White House's conclusion that Baghdad was reconstituting a nuclear-weapons program. The State Department, in contrast, dissented on both counts.
The conclusion formed the cornerstone of last fall's 90-page Top Secret intelligence report used to justify preemptive war on Iraq.
A former Energy Department intelligence chief who agreed with the White House claim that Iraq had reconstituted its defunct nuclear-arms program was awarded a total of $20,500 in bonuses during the build-up to the war, WorldNetDaily has learned.
Thomas Ryder, as acting director of Energy's intelligence office, overruled senior intelligence officers on his staff in voting for the position at a National Foreign Intelligence Board meeting at CIA headquarters last September.
His officers argued at a pre-briefing at Energy headquarters that there was no hard evidence to support the alarming Iraq nuclear charge, and asked to join State Department's dissenting opinion, Energy officials say.
Ryder ordered them to "shut up and sit down," according to sources familiar with the meeting.
Was he just an incompetent who was accidentally put in charge of something he wasn't qualified to handle? Or did the Bush Administration, having already decided to invade Iraq, fix it so that the Energy Department would give the answer Dubya wanted to hear?
Update: Here's a link to the full text of the Downing Street Memo which shows the Bush Administration decided to overthrow Saddam and then went looking for justiification for their decision. "C" of course is the head of MI6.
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
The decision on the Iraq invasion was not based on real evidence.
Neil MacFarquhar of the New York Times reports from a visit to Iran that the Iranian nuclear development program is very popular with Iranians.
Ehsan Motaghi, a 26-year-old seminary student in Isfahan, cited a parable from Imam Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law and the inspiration for the Shiite branch of Islam, which most Iranians follow. "They can offer me everything from the earth and heaven, but in exchange if they want me to so much as take the food from an ant's mouth that is his right to eat, I won't do it," he said. "Achieving the peaceful use of technology is really a matter of pride and we will not stop this for anything."
Such passions were echoed in two weeks of conversations with Iranians across all walks of life. Virtually all supported Iran's defying the West and moving ahead with its uranium enrichment program, which carries the threat of further United Nations sanctions.
Note that the Iranians could use nuclear power for electric generators without developing the ability to handle the full nuclear fuel cycle. The development of uranium enrichment technology strikes me as motivated primarily by the desire to build nuclear weapons. Also, for the Iranians natural gas is probably a cheaper source of power for electric generation. Given the development costs the government would be unlikely to pursue nuclear power solely for civilian purposes.
A nuclear power program could be justified as a bargaining chip to use to get international sanctions lifted. But at this point the popularity of the nuclear program would make a complete abandonment of nuclear power difficult to justify to the Iranian people. On one hand part of the public fears the mullahs would use nuclear bombs on missiles to keep themselves in power. On the other hand many of those same Persians feel pride at the notion of the nation possessing nuclear weapons.
Some Iranians want to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes as a matter of national pride. Others want a nuclear deterrent.
But most Iranians, the experts say, fall into two other groups. One believes Iran should use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Another wants Iran to master the nuclear enrichment cycle both to avoid depending on foreign suppliers for nuclear fuel and to be able to move quickly to weapons development if Iran were threatened, either by Israel, the United States or a regional rival. That group sees nuclear power as an insurance policy against a forced change in the government.
The idea that overthrow of the mullahs will stop Iran's nuclear program continues to strike me as naive. Also see my previous posts "Iranian People Not In Pre-Revolutionary Frame Of Mind" and "Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program Seen As Broadly Popular" and Iranians Too Apathetic To Rebel.
Robert Kagan argues against the conventional wisdom that wise policies can "manage" the rise of China to produce a favorable outcome. Attempts to manage China fly in the face of a historical record of failed attempts "manage" the rise of Germany, Japan, and other powers in the past.
The security structures of East Asia, the Western liberal values that so dominate our thinking, the "liberal world order" we favor -- this is the "international system" into which we would "integrate" China. But isn't it possible that China does not want to be integrated into a political and security system that it had no part in shaping and that conforms neither to its ambitions nor to its own autocratic and hierarchical principles of rule? Might not China, like all rising powers of the past, including the United States, want to reshape the international system to suit its own purposes, commensurate with its new power, and to make the world safe for its autocracy? Yes, the Chinese want the prosperity that comes from integration in the global economy, but might they believe, as the Japanese did a century ago, that the purpose of getting rich is not to join the international system but to change it?
Kagan argues that the Chinese really want to see US influence in Asia to decline and that the values and goals of the Chinese are sufficiently different that US and Chinese interests will inevitably clash. He also argues that the US already has a containment policy toward China even as US policymakers attempt to deny this.
Kagan's essay strikes me as pretty reasonable. Go read the whole thing. China already supports elements of an illiberal world order in North Korea, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere. The extent of China's economic rise will determine the extent of the growth of Chinese influence. If, as I expect, China becomes the wealthiest country in the world illiberal autocracy will gain against liberal democracy.
Syed Saleem Shahzad, bureau chief for Asia Times in Pakistan, says the United States will use militias to fight against the insurgent militia groups in Iraq.
According to Asia Times Online contacts, these US-backed militias will comprise three main segments - former Kurdish peshmerga (paramilitaries), former members of the Badr Brigade and those former members of the Ba'ath Party and the Iraqi army who were part of the Saddam regime but who have now thrown in their lot with the new Iraqi government.
All three segments have already been equipped with low- and medium-level weapons purchased from various countries, including Pakistan. Military analysts believe the US military in Iraq will use the Kurd and Shi'ite militias to quell the resistance in central and northern Iraq, while in the south the former Ba'athists and old-guard Iraqi soldiers will be used against anti-US Shi'ite groups.
Note the divide and conquer aspect of this. But Kurd and Shia militias operating in the Sunni Triangle lack the ability to collect effective intelligence. Sunnis view Kurds and Shias as outsiders. Kurds and Shias lack ties in local tribal networks.
Paramilitary militias play by more brutal rules. The United States has trained and funded them in El Salvador and other Latin American countries to fight against communists and drug lords. The US government has usually denied funding groups that carry out assassinations and terrorising of civilian populations. Sometimes the US has provided a government with a lot of money and some of that money and probably leaked through to paramilitaries, providing the US with deniability. For example, in Colombia during the early 1990s a paramilitary group called Los Pepes (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar) conducted assassinations against friends and business associates of Pablo Escobar. Did US special forces and the CIA have direct contact with Los Pepes members? We may never know.
I wonder whether the Asia Times story accurately portrays the division of labor for the paramilitary forces in Iraq. Peter Maass, writing for the New York Times reports that the chief of a 5,000 soldier counter-insurgency force of Special Police Commandos is headed by Adnan Thabit, a Sunni and former Baathist general under Saddam. (same article here)
The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, to which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a rightist government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980.
The cost there was high - more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the rightist death squads affiliated with it.
There are far more Americans in Iraq today - about 140,000 troops in all - than there were in El Salvador, but U.S. soldiers and officers are increasingly moving to a Salvador-style advisory role.
In the process, they are backing up local forces that, like the military in El Salvador, do not shy away from violence. It is no coincidence that this new strategy is most visible in a paramilitary unit that has as its main adviser James Steele, one of the U.S. military's top experts on counterinsurgency. Steele, having been a key participant in the Salvador conflict, knows how to organize a counterinsurgency campaign that is led by local forces.
Maass' article does not provide a religious and ethnic breakdown for the troops under General Adnan's command. Too many Sunnis in such a command and it will be riddled with spies reporting to the opposition. Too few Sunnis and the soldiers will lack the knowledge, contacts, and skills for operating in the Sunni Triangle.
If anyone comes across more detailed information about ethnic and religious identities of the Iraqi paramilitaries supported by the United States please post in the comments or send me an email. If the paramilitaries can not hunt down the bulk of the insurgents then either a partition or a brutal large scale Shia-Sunni civil war or perhaps even reestablishment of a Sunni regime become probable outcomes.
At this point the US military probably has two choices: Try to harness and form Shiite paramilitaries to fight under US supervision or stand by while the Shiites, furious over killings of Shia by Sunnis, exact revenge without US involvement. The Shiites are hitting back against the Sunnis. (same article here)
No one is sure how long Sistani can hold back the Shiite masses from exacting wholesale retribution — in fact many Sunni Arabs fear it has already begun.
Newly emboldened police commando squads have raided Sunni mosques and arrested Sunni religious leaders, who call them Shiite avengers.
A car bomb exploded April 30 outside the Baghdad headquarters of a Sunni political organization, the National Dialogue Council. Members blame the Shiite-dominated security forces or allied paramilitaries, but the bombers may have been Sunni insurgents outraged at the council's perceived collaboration with the new government.
"The definition of civil war is when the Shiites on the ground start to hit back," said Hussein Shahristani, a top Sistani aide and first deputy speaker of the National Assembly.
Whether the Shias, either on their own or under US supervision, can effectively put down the Sunni insurgency remains to be seen. The Shias outnumber the Sunnies over 3 to 1. But the Sunnis could respond to killings of Sunnis by Shias with their own escalating retaliatory killings.
Sunni and Shia organizations are accusing each other of carrying out targetted killings.
In an effort to mitigate escalating sectarian tensions, officials from the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, considered close to some insurgent groups, met with representatives from the Badr Brigades the military wing of Iraq's largest Shiite party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
Organized by the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the gathering aimed to smother accusations that began earlier this month when the association's leader, Harith al-Dhari, accused the Badr Brigades of killing Sunnis and executing their clerics. A number of Shiite clerics were also killed.
The brigades not only denied the charges, they accused the Sunni association of failing to condemn the insurgency and of trying to ''push Iraq into a sectarian conflict.''
Some Iraqis figure the Americans are omnipotent and hence any violence results from American plots.
"I only want to put this question to you," said Sana Abdul-Kareem, a dentist with four children. "Why can't the U.S., with all its might and capabilities, impose security here? How come with all our oil they cannot provide us with electricity? My son was so happy when the American soldiers first came. But after two years of failure to make good on their promises, he abhors them."
Baghdad resident Ali Jalal said: "The Americans are behind these problems. They don't want the country to be stabilized…. The Iraqi government is like a doll in the hands of the Americans."
Maybe larger scale Shiite retaliations will shock the Sunni leaders out of their support for attacks against Shias. Will the Shiites identify the Sunni insurgents fairly accurately? Will most of the Sunnis killed by Shias really be insurgents? Or will the Sunni insurgents so effectively target Shia leaders and police that increasing portions of Iraq will become effectively ungoverned?
Back on April 14, 2005 Razib at the Gene Expresson blog wrote a post arguing that opposition to infanticide couldn't have caused a shift to Roman Catholic Christianity via natural selection because the conversion happened too rapidly for natural selection to play a substantial role.
But there is another layer to this issue, there is often a difference between ideology and practice. Unlike the pagan Gauls the Roman Catholic French of the 18th century opposed infanticide on principle. But in reality the mortality rates were in excess of 90% before the age of five for many of the "foundling" orphanages where parents who could not or would not raise their infants abdicated their responsibility. Though de jure there was no infanticide, the reality is that the morality rate for these foundlings was so high that the reproductive difference attributable solely to the abolishment of infanticide might have been minimal. Additionally, many individuals married extremely late or remained unmarried.
My point is that all the contentions above are "true" to some extent. Fisher's genetical logic is clear. The pro-natalist ideology of early Christianity and Islam in contrast to the more ambivalent attitude of the pagans is also textually attributed. Scholars who study the rates of pre-modern adoption and abandonment also find that the de facto difference between cultures that exist in the same environment3 but espouse different ideologies is far less than one would gather from the official textual sources which address the point specifically.
Think about the last sentence in that excerpt. Here's my approximate guess: Coexisting believers in rival religions will have lives more similar to each other than their religious texts would lead you to expect if they are very poor. But as their living standards rise they will be able to afford to more accurately live according to their doctrinal beliefs and hence forgotten practices for each religion will be dusted off and increasingly obeyed.
For example, Razib's post discusses infanticide. I've read the late John Boswell's The Kindness of Strangers about child abandonment in Europe from the Middle Ages into the 19th century (and I forget the exact time range he covered, but something along that order). The book surprises because he reported child abandonment rates on the order of 20% to 30% in early 19th century France (if memory serves). Well, necessity is a mother. But once living standards rose due to the industrial revolution religious prohibitions against infanticide were translated into law and enforcement of the law. Once necessity ceased to make child abandonment a necessity for most people anyone who still engaged in the practice faced increasingly stiff sanctions.
Similarly, oil rich Saudi Arabia has enough money to afford the construction of facilities that separate men from women. My guess is that the separation of men and women was less thorough back before the modern oil era because people had to work in various capacities just to survive and could not afford to devote as much time and resources to getting work done in ways that separated men and women.
Of course, when industrialization causes a falling away from religious belief then the same rising living standards that make enforcement of more religious rules more affordable also reduce the percentage of the population that believe in the religious rules in the first place. But absent the decline in religious belief I would expect rising living standards to, in effect, fund stricter adherence to religious taboos and customs.
Also, I've also previously argued (not sure where, maybe on GNXP's blog comments) that the influence of religious texts on the nature of how religions are actually practiced has become greater due to falling costs of printing, wider spread literacy, and the rise of electronic means of communication. Therefore differences between written texts and common beliefs about religions found hundreds of years ago do not prove that today any particular religion's practice can diverge as far from the rules in written texts as was possible when reading of those texts was rarer.
To put this in a nutshell: As compared to the distant past people today can more easily afford both to learn and to carry out "correct" religious practices. That does not mean that people will always engage in religious practices that are closer to all the instructions found in original base texts of assorted religions. Some rules may seem a smaller sacrifice to obey and so people will obey them. Other rules which demand sacrifices that cut too heavily against the grain of human desire will have complex rationalizations built up around them explaining why one does not always have to obey them. But many rules will be obeyed when doing so becomes more affordable. The taboo against infanticide provides a good example for this.
Update: On the subject of how much the base texts of a religion determine religious belief also see Razib's post Islam: essential and nominal. On a related note also see his post Ayaan Hirsi Ali interviewed.
Another point of my own: How a religion is interpreted is also a function of the cognitive abilities and the conceptual toolbox of the interpreter. A dummy is going to tend to reach conclusions about the meaning of various passages in a text based on what that dummy can even imagine. If you could poll, say, 1000 IQ 80 adherents to Islam and 1000 IQ 100 adherents and 1000 IQ 120 adherents and ask them all a long list of questions about their religion you'd get substantial differences between the 3 groups. The smarter folks are going to build a more complicated model, consider more factors, notice more patterns and meanings (whether real or imagined) in the texts of the religion. The same would happen if one repeated the same polling with Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians for that matter.
A society with a single unified church will produce a different dominant interpretation than will a society which has a religion split up into a set of sects where people with different levels of status and intellectual ability join different sects.
One final point: In a less developed society back before industrialization where the bulk of the population was illiterate and worked from dawn to dusk those workers literally had no time to study religious matters. Under those circumstances the elites dominated formulation of religious doctrines. If those elites were smarter on average (and they probably were even a thousand years ago) then a religion's character was determined more by smarter elites than by dumber masses. Industrialization, by producing more time for study for the masses effectively shifted the center of religious interpretation toward the masses and away from the elites.
After seizing the land from over 90% of the white farmers in Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe's government wants the white farmers to come back to lease their former lands to farm.
White farmers may be allowed back on their land in Zimbabwe as part of a plan by the government of Robert Mugabe to solve the country's deepening economic crisis.
The president's key finance aide has called for some of the farmers whose properties were confiscated in a land seizure programme to be allowed to resume growing crops to boost the country's flagging agricultural output.
Gideon Gono, governor of the central bank and Mr Mugabe's main policy maker, made the proposal as he announced a 31% devaluation of the Zimbabwe currency.
With over half the farms seized from whites now lying fallow and the economy down 40% in the last 5 years Zimbabwe's government boldly shows the world where South Africa is headed in perhaps 15 or 20 years. Think I'm exaggerating? In January 2003 the South African labour minister found Mugabe's land program much to his liking.
The South Africa labour minister, Membathisi Mdladlana, said in Zimbabwe yesterday that his country had a lot to learn from President Robert Mugabe's programme of land reform.
"You don't need a weather vane to know which way the wind blows".
"The GMB set the buying price of maize but, given rapid inflation, this price was unattractive, so farmers had little incentive to invest in intensified production and generate a surplus of maize," the researchers said.
Angry residents of Zimbabwe's capital clashed with police on Wednesday, damaging property and vehicles in the first major protest against a crackdown on illegal traders and hawkers, police said on Thursday.
The government is waging war against the informal economy.
So police have raided flea markets, demolished temporary buildings housing small convenience stores, and set up roadblocks throughout the city. With the formal economy in a tailspin, many people had taken up street vending - selling cellphone recharge cards or loaves of bread - to subsist. And now they're being targeted, with critics noting that urban residents are also supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
This will drive the economy down even further.
The extent of Zimbabwe's decline is breathtaking.
After seven years of unprecedented economic decline, 80 percent of the work force is unemployed and 4 million of Zimbabwe's 16 million people have emigrated. Agriculture, once the mainstay, has been hard hit by Mugabe's seizure of 5,000 white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks.
Mugabe has made a deal to bring in a new Chinese colonial class.
Since western countries imposed sanctions on the Mugabe regime three years ago for failing to uphold democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, the Zimbabwean leader has responded by looking East. Mugabe himself vigorously courted Chinese businessmen to invest in Zimbabwe, who in the last three years have descended on Harare and the country's other major cities, setting up shop at every street corner to sell cheap clothing and electronic goods.
...
One local academic joked that Mugabe had "yellow fever" since he can only see allies in Asia, which he knows will not criticize his oppressive policies. But the academic also raised a more serious point: Mugabe is throwing his own political cronies off tobacco growing land and oppressing street hawkers in towns to make way for the Chinese; and he is selling out his country to the Chinese in order to cling to power.
What does the rise of China translate into? Support for the worst sorts of governments.
According to Jerry Seper a new report written by investigators for the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus claims that the National Guard in the US southern border states could stop all illegal immigration across the US-Mexico border.
The deployment of 36,000 National Guard troops or state militia on the U.S.-Mexico border would stop the illegal flow of foreigners into America, says a congressional report that credits the Minuteman Project with proving that additional manpower could "dramatically reduce if not virtually eliminate" illegal immigration.
State militias could also be funded to accomplish the task.
As an alternative to using existing powers and forces, the report said, a $2.5 billion annual initiative coordinated through the states for the issuance of Homeland Security grants could authorize and fund state militia, or state defense forces, to assist the Border Patrol. State militia units already exist in 22 states, including Maryland and Virginia. Militia units also are located in the border states of California, New Mexico and Texas.
We have illegal immigration because effective border control policies are blocked by politicians. Some open borders advocates claim that border control is impossible.
If anyone can find a link to this 33 page report please post it in the comments or send it to me by email.
Putting a large number of National Guard or militia members out on the southern border should be seen as a stop-gap measure before a more formidable barrier is built on the entire length of the almost 2000 mile border.
Estimates for the cost of Israel's barrier fence with the West Bank range upward toward $2 billion dollars with per mile costs ranging from $3 million to $3.5 million to $4.15 million.
Now the government is calling for a total of some 500 miles of fencing by the end of 2005, at an estimated cost of $4.15 million a mile.
Even at $4.15 million per mile a barrier on the US border with Mexico would still be under $10 billion and therefore cost less than one year of illegal alien health care.
Smaller sections the Israeli barrier are concrete walls in order to prevent sniping.
Only a tiny fraction of the barrier (less than 3% or about 15 miles) is actually a 30 foot high concrete wall, and that is being built in specific locations where it will prevent Palestinian snipers from shooting at cars as they have done for the last three years along the Trans-Israel Highway, one of the country's main roads. The remainder is a fence similar to that used throughout the United States, but with a network of barriers, underground and long-range sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles, trenches, land mines and guard paths. Passage through the fence will only be permitted through guarded gates.
I'd really like to know what the cost per mile is for their higher security sections. Also, what is the cost per mile of the thicker barrier section of the San Diego border with Mexico? That section has fences and a concrete wall. Those two numbers would set upper bounds for the cost of a deluxe barrier that would reduce on-going labor costs.
We'd probably want to dispense with the landmines.
Most of the barrier will be a chain-link type fence similar to those used all over the United States combined with underground and long-range sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles, trenches, landmines and guard paths. Manned checkpoints will constitute the only way to travel back and forth through the fence. The barrier is altogether about 160 feet wide in most places.
Layers of fences and other obstacles combined with sensors would slow down any attempted border crossers and give border patrol personnel time to reach illegal border crossers before they could travel far inland. An effective barrier would cause many would-be crossers to give up trying entirely. Others would cross at much slower speeds and be detected before making it through the barrier region. This would reduce the number of border patrol personnel needed for effective border control.
The Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test which 12th graders must pass to get a high school diploma is flunking almost 1 in 10 of Texas 12th graders. (requires free registration)
AUSTIN – Nearly one of every 10 high school seniors – more than 21,000 students from the Class of '05 – can't get a diploma this month because they couldn't pass some portion of the state graduation test after multiple tries, the Texas Education Agency reported Friday.
Minority failure rates were particularly alarming. Fifteen percent of black students and 14 percent of Hispanics – about one in seven – flunked one or more subject areas of the test. The failure rate for whites was 5 percent.
This is the very same Texas where George W. Bush wanted us to believe back in 2000 that he put blacks and Hispanics in Texas on an accelerated learning track with his educational policy changes. Any politician who claims he has greatly improved the outcomes in some state's educational system is a liar.
The TAKS test failures do not even begin to measure the racial differences in educational outcomes in Texas. Texas already has the nation's highest high school drop-out rate and that rate is of course much higher for blacks and Hispanics. Therefore about half of Hispanics do not even stay in school long enogh to take TAKS in the 12th grade.
The TAKS results are incredibly unsurprising. Racial differences in academic performance are pretty stable and substantial. Stefan and Abigail Thernstrom, in their book America In Black And White, compared races by showing what white equivalent grade level of knowledge Hispanics and blacks have achieved when they are in 12th grade.
"… Blacks nearing the end of their high school education perform a little worse than white eighth-graders in both reading and U.S. history, and a lot worse in math and geography. In math and geography, indeed, they know no more than whites in the seventh grade. Hispanics do only a little better than African-Americans. In reading and U.S. history, their NAEP scores in their senior year of high school are a few points above those of whites in eighth grade. In math and geography, they are a few points lower."
Students in the 3rd and 5th grades can not advance to the following grade unless they pass the TAKS test for their grade level. Imagine what could result from holding back kids multiple times. Instead of 17 year old Hispanic kids starting 12th grade if they get held back 4 times until they manage to achieve the minimum standard in earlier grades they could end up 17 years old and in 8th grade. Sound unbelievable? But the Thernstroms report that the average Hispanic or black 12th grader is at the same level of knowledge as the average with 8th grader.
Recently, while browsing Tom Wood's new "Right on Race" blog, I had a chance to ask Stefan Thernstrom what the NAEP data actually showed. He graciously provided the following raw data, to which I've added some straightforward calculations. (Number fans click here for table).
Conclusion: overall, the white-immigrant Hispanic achievement gap is actually 14% worse than the notorious white-black disparity.
But for American-born Hispanic children (not just second generation, as many might assume, but the second up through the seventh generation), the gap is 67% as large as the white-black variance.
Exactly as I predicted!
Here is yet more evidence that the Hispanic-white educational achievement gap does not close in later generations.
What will American politicians do as the years go by and the use of standard tests and tough requirements for advancement between grades does not close the performance gap between the races? Tough standards will further reduce the number of blacks and Hispanics who get high school diplomas. Will politicians continue to support tough standards as that happens?
The United States should stop the massive Hispanic immigrant influx and it is time we deported all the illegal aliens. The US also needs to raise standards for legal immigrants to assure they and their descendants will be able to perform well in US schools and in the job market.
Students who can not perform well enough to pass tougher tests for high school diplomas ought to be given the opportunity to learn economically useful skills which require less intellectual ability. Most of those students who are not going to cut it academically will still enter the labor force and we woud all be better off if they entered the job market with some vocational training. But those kinds of training are not going to be offered widely enough as long as politicians and pundits pretend that everyone can and should aspire to attend college.
Recently Muslim in several countries rioted in response to a Newsweek article claimings Korans were kicked around and flushed down a toilet by Guantanamo interrogators in order to break down Muslim interrogation subjects. Robert Spencer argues for seeing the Muslim response to the report as the biggest problem.
When in April EBay offered a consecrated host for sale, imagine if Catholics had rioted and seventeen people were killed.
The media would have been full of stories about the dark side of the “Christian Right.”
Imagine if, when Muslims desecrated the Tomb of Joseph in Nablus in 2000, destroying it with hammers, rampaging Jewish mobs had killed dozens of Palestinians.
The establishment media response would again have inundated us with stories about the heroic Palestinians and their Israeli oppressors.
Neither of those things really happened. But seventeen people have been killed and hundreds wounded in riots by Muslims since Newsweek published its story about an American interrogator flushing a Qur’an down the toilet at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
Spencer says the biggest problem here is that Muslims in many countries would respond to the Newsweek article by rioting and killing in the first place.
Spencer argues there have been wrong two main reactions to the Newsweek story: First, on Right some argue that Newsweek was irresponsible for running the story and should be blamed for the result. Some make that argument based on the point that the story might not be true. Others go further and say regardless of whether the story is true Newsweek shouldn't have run it because basically we know how those Muslims would react. In this line of thinking the media have an obligation in the war against terrorist, radical Islamic, or whatever we are fighting to not provide material suitable for propaganada.
The second reaction, coming mostly from the Left, argues that we shouldn't have done stuff like reports of prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo or the invasion of Iraq or support for Israel or assorted other things that have made Muslims feel aggrieved. This argument assumes moral responsibility rests chiefly on the shoulders of white males or America and that anyone non-European, non-white, or culturally non-Western is either not morally rseponsible for what they do or automatically justified due as a result of victimhood from Western white male oppression.
But both of these reactions are misguided. The Muslim reaction to the Newsweek story - like the Muslim reaction to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses or the Muslims reaction to Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali's movie Submission - is radically different than, say, the reaction to Andres Serrano's Piss Christ. No one killed Serrano. He didn't have to go under 24 hour a day police protection and go into hiding. The Muslim reaction is an assertion of the moral legitimacy of measures to protect their religion from any and all criticism. That assertion is incompatible with classical Western liberalism and that assertion makes Islam incompatible with Western society.
If the critics of the Bush Administration handling of interrogations at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and other sites wanted to state "Well, given that Muslims believe in a religion that asserts its supremancy and demands unversal subservience to Muslim religious claims and given that we need to avoid insulting their illiberal sensitivities in order to fight terrorism we have got to give deference to Islam that it doesn't deserve" then I could see seriously considering their argument. But of course they aren't going to say that.
One Muslim semi-Westernized intellectual claims that mistreatment of the Koran is spiritual torture.
'This is the ultimate spiritual torture,'' said Muqtedar Khan, a non-resident fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution who studies Islam and world politics. ''If this was done, it is the ultimate blow.''
Think about that. Seriously, should all the people in the world be forced to treat some book as sacred just because the adherents of a single religion claim that noone should be able to mistreat it? This sounds like a global equivalent of the push for a constitutional amendment to ban US flag burning.
Often the wiser course may be to avoid insulting a person's or group's beliefs or values. But if we can't insult some group's beliefs without getting marked for death (e.g. Salman Rushdie or Theo van Gogh) then we are less free regardless of whether we insult them or not. I don't want to live in a society like Holland where some elected officials live under police protection due to their criticisms of Islam.
By the end of the week, the rioting had spread from Afghanistan throughout much of the Muslim world, from Gaza to Indonesia. Mobs shouting "Protect our Holy Book!" burned down government buildings and ransacked the offices of relief organizations in several Afghan provinces. The violence cost at least 15 lives, injured scores of people and sent a shudder through Washington, where officials worried about the stability of moderate regimes in the region.
Laura Bush states the obvious.
"In the United States, if there's a terrible report, people don't riot and kill other people," she said. "And you can't excuse what they did because of the mistake - you know, you can't blame it all on Newsweek."
Differences in values between different cultures are large and in many cases incompatible. Will Laura Bush learn any lessons about incompatible cultures from this episode? If she does will she try to teach them to George?
Azza Basarudin, a UCLA graduate student in Middle Eastern Studies, recently complained that when she bought a used Koran on Amazon.com from Bellwether books she discovered that someone had written "Death to all Muslims" on the inside cover. She reacted to this as if she were being persecuted and complained to the Muslim Public Affairs Council which proceeded to lodge a series of complaints and draw press attention to the incident. Daniel Pipes sees this as another example of Muslims demanding special rights for their religion at the expense of the freedom of the American public at large.
(5) The idea that a Muslim has the right, without proof, to accuse a non-Muslim of blasphemy, as Basarudin and MPAC have done, brings to mind the notorious anti-blasphemy laws in force in Pakistan. There, as the World Council of Churches explained in 2000, those laws "have become a major tool in the hands of extremists to settle personal scores against members of the religious minorities particularly Christians." In the United States, the blasphemy accusation serves as the basis for a Jesse Jackson-like corporate shakedown (note MPAC's demand for Amazon to fund its programming).
(6) That Amazon suspended Bellwether from selling Korans via Amazon is a symbolic punishment rather than a substantive one, but it matters nonetheless. Can one imagine any other book's defacement leading to such a penalty?
(7) This episode is yet another instance of Islamist organizations relentlessly seeking special privileges for Islam. At a time when American Catholics must endure "art" that consists of the crucifix in urine and a Virgin Mary made in part of elephant dung, why should American Muslims be indulged in their exquisite sensibilities? As Stephen Schwartz keeps repeating, if Islam is to flourish in America, it must adapt to America.
Used book reseller Bellwether Books should not be held responsible for what is written inside a used book. When you buy a used book over the web you are taking a very obvious gamble on ripped pages, scrawed comments, highlighting markets, and all the rest. No groups which attempts to elevate an insult written in a book should be able to demand any sort of restitution or donation to its cause by book sellers (as MPAC has predictably tried to do with Amazon). My attitude: Grow a thicker skin or emigrate. If you don't like freedom of speech then leave.
View from the Right blogger Lawrence Auster, respondng to the Pipes article, argues for an even more drastic response to illiberal Islam: Deportation.
Stories like this need to be covered, but the problem is, we can keep writing about these things forever and it will make no essential difference. The curse of having these fanatics in our face will continue. If we don’t want ourselves and all the generations that come after us to have to keep dealing with this stuff, there’s only one answer: initiate a net out-migration of Muslims from the U.S and the West, year after year, until the numbers of those that remain are tiny, their Muslim identity weak, and their power non-existent.
You, Mr. Pipes, want to manage the Muslim problem, a job that will never end and that leaves them in our face, forever. I and the people who think like me want to solve the Muslim problem.
Whether Auster's preferred response is reasonable depends in large part on the nature of Islam. Auster's response will seem illiberal by many. But if the more pessimistic Western interpretations of Islam are correct then toleration of Islam amounts of toleration of intolerance. In my view the Dutch ought to deport every single Muslim who says Theo van Gogh or Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Rita Verdonk or Job Cohen or Ahmed Aboutaleb deserve to be killed.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian immigrant to the Netherlands who is an elected member of the Dutch Parliament, has renounced Islam. With the slain Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh she made the film Submission which offers a highly critical view of Islam. Radical Muslims in the Netherlands assassinated van Gogh and Hirsi Ali now lives under constant and mostly secluded guard due to numerous death threats she has received from Muslims in the Netherlands. Hirsi Ali advocates a complete stop of Muslim immigration into Europe and in favor of an intellectual revolution in Islam that is in some respects analogous to the outcome of the Protestant Reformation.
Hirsi Ali argues that there is less a problem with migration in general, than with its Muslim component in particular, and that she should know, because she is herself a Muslim migrant. Hopes for a moderate Islam are only meaningful, she argues, if it is possible to chip away the theological brickwork - constructed, she believes, on a foundation of female oppression - which permeates the structure of the religion. But Islam, she says, is unable to endure criticism or change, and is essentially at odds with European values. With up to 20 million Muslims living in the EU, the journey she has taken in the past 16 years from Africa to Europe, from asylum seeker to politician, and from devotion to apostasy, has come to appear central to the story of the crisis of multiculturalism on the continent. This month, Time magazine selected her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world - an odd but remarkable acknowledgement for a 35-year-old Somali who four years ago was unknown, even in the Netherlands.
Note, however, that the early stages of the Protestant Reformation were highly intolerant of anyone who didn't adhere to the dominant Protestant Chuch in each area of Europe where new non-Catholic Churches developed. The Protestant Reformation took centuries to play out. Changes in beliefs have to take place across generations since many people will not change their beliefs as they get older. Therefore while I wish success to those who are trying to reform Islam as a practical matter we have to accept that as things now stand Islam is not compatible with a free Western liberal society. Also, the basic underlying texts of Islam strike me as more problematic for a reformation than the Bible was for Christianity. Islam's texts just leave less wiggle room for a reinterpretation.
The other problem with the prospects for an Islamic reformation is that the Islamic societies just do not have the general level of intellectual ferment that would support an religious intellectual revolution. While I do not have any statistics handy the figures in the past I've seen appallingly low figures on the rate of new books published in Arabic, for example. The Arab countries are not full of readers and thinkers who are eagerly seeking out new ways to look at life, society, and religion. So I don't see how a serious intellectual revolution in Islam could spread in Muslim countries.
Allowing Muslims to immigrate to the West might be justifiable from the standpoint of grand strategy if those Muslims living in the West would start an intellectual movement that would reform all of Islam along more liberal and tolerant lines. But the number of Muslim living in Western societies is already large enough to allow newer and more liberal intellectual strains of Islam to develop. Further Muslim immigration into the West seems imprudent and may well be folly.
Thanks to Raj for the pointer to the Guardian article on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and thanks to Rochi Ebner for the pointer to the Robert Spencer article.
Update: Writing for the sometimes conservative National Review Online Andrew McCarthy takes on knee jerk right wing partisan attacks on Newsweek as missing the point.
The outpouring of righteous indignation against Newsweek glides past a far more important point. Yes, we're all sick of media bias. But "Newsweek lied and people died" is about as worthy a slogan as the scurrilous "Bush lied and people died" that it parrots. And when we engage in this kind of mindless demagoguery, we become just another opportunistic plaintiff — no better than the people all too ready to blame the CIA because Mohammed Atta steered a hijacked civilian airliner into a big building, and to sue the Port Authority because the building had the audacity to collapse from the blow.
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Sorry, but I couldn't care less about Newsweek. I'm more worried about the response and our willful avoidance of its examination. Afghanistan has been an American reconstruction project for nearly four years. Pakistan has been a close American "war on terror" ally for just as long. This is what we're getting from the billions spent, the lives lost, and the grand project of exporting nonjudgmental, sharia-friendly democracy? A killing spree? Over this?
I'm surprised that NRO would run an article so critical of thoughtless right wing demagoguery. Good for them.
McCarthy complains about the "soft bigotry of low expectations" coming from right-wingers (I hesitate to call them conservatives) who support democracy building in the Muslim countries. Well, low expectations certainly are at least inconsistent with support for democracy promotion as a key strategy in reduce the risk of terrorism. But what is wrong? The low expectations or the support for democracy building? In my view a realistic realistic appraisal of all the available evidence on the Muslim countries leads logically to low expectations. Therefore the neocon Bush Administration project to export "sharia-friendly democracy" is an exercise in folly.
Yes Andrew, we just got a killing spree, over this. Integrate this evidence into your view of the Muslim countries.
If you are not a long time ParaPundit reader and haven't read all my posts on why democracy is not a panacea check out some of my older posts on democracy: "Prospect Of Democracy Breeding Ethnic Hatred In Iraq" and "Robert Conquest On The Limits And Pitfalls Of Democracy" and "History Of American Interventions Bodes Poorly For Democracy" and "Democracy Requires A Supporting Set Of Beliefs" and "Will Democracy Make Middle East Governments More Anti-American?" and "Low Per Capita Income Countries Never Remain Democracies" and "A Critical Look At Natan Sharanky's Democracy Argument".
Eric Schmitt and John Burns of the New York Times say US officers who a few months ago were offering very optimistic assessments of progress in Iraq are now offering much more negative views. (same article here)
In interviews and briefings this week, some of the generals pulled back from recent suggestions, some by the same officers, that positive trends in Iraq could allow a major drawdown in the 138,000 American troops late this year or early in 2006. One officer suggested Wednesday that American military involvement could last "many years."
...
But the officer said that despite Americans' recent successes in disrupting insurgent cells, which have resulted in the arrest of 1,100 suspects in Baghdad alone in the past 80 days, the success of American goals in Iraq was not assured.
"I think that this could still fail," the officer said at the briefing, referring to the American enterprise in Iraq. "It's much more likely to succeed, but it could still fail."
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"I think it's going to succeed in the long run, even if it takes years, many years," he said.
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One of starkest revelations by the commanders involved the surge in car bombings, the principal insurgent weapon in attacks over the past three weeks that have killed nearly 500 people across central and northern Iraq, about half of them Iraqi soldiers, police officers and recruits.
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The senior officer who met with reporters in Baghdad said there had been 21 car bombings in the capital in May, and 126 in the past 80 days. All last year, he said, there were only about 25 car bombings in Baghdad.
The car bombing rate is up by an order of magnitude. Yet, supposedly the US military is making progress against the insurgency. Also, the 500 Iraqi people killed in the last 3 weeks works out to an annual rate of over 8500. Given that half of them are Iraqi security foces the Iraqi security forces are experiencing a death rate of over 4200 per year. But Iraq's population of 26 million is about an eleventh of the US population. So to scale up that death rate to the US population level imagine that we were experiencing about 47,000 military deaths and an equal number of civilian deaths per year from a civil war or rebellion.
Japan looks set to join Honduras, Italy, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Spain, and Poland (and did I miss any country?) in withdrawing their troops from Iraq.
The police are crucial and the police are lagging.
Iraqi army units have slowly become better trained and disciplined. But the police, who make up one-third of Iraq's security forces, have made fewer gains and are more prone to corruption, said Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command.
...
"Ultimately the police become more important in the final stages of the insurgency than the military," Abizaid said.
The Bush administration says the Iraqi police are adequately trained and equipped, a view not shared by U.S. commanders in Iraq.
The statements of the political appointees in the White House and Pentagon can not be trusted. The US officers in Iraq see a very tough situation and believe the war will last for years. These officers obviously do not want to fail. But note that their optimistic assessment is a war that lasts for many years which we eventually win.
Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior advisor to the president of the Rand Corporation, says the pattern in the Middle East is easy conquest followed by much more difficult occupation.
''IT IS EASY to conquer an Arab country," observed the general. But drawing on years of experience in the Middle East, he added that the Arabs' ''natural inclination to rebellion makes it difficult for the invader to maintain his control."
This prescient warning came in 1957 from Sir John Glubb, a British general who fought Iraqi insurgents in the 1920s.
Jenkins says we might make progress and gradually bring the insurgency under control. On the other hand, he also says the whole thing could fall apart.
On the other hand, insurgents could carry out spectacular and costly attacks against US forces, undermining claims of progress and strengthening arguments for prompt withdrawal.
Iraq could collapse into fighting between religious and ethnic groups leading to even more disorder and violence. A tragic error in targeting or new revelations of abuse by coalition forces could intensify hostility in Iraq and cause revulsion in the United States.
The police in Iraq are neutralized by bribes, threats, and killings.
"The US needs to reorganise its intelligence system. Most of the resources - platforms, analysts - are at the national and strategic level. We have to decentralise and get the assets down to the tactical level. We rely on technical means but the insurgency disarms technology. It is mainly a human endeavour."
The US is trying to build Iraq's fledgling security forces and new intelligence bodies but, judging from the insurgents' ability to kill police chiefs and kidnap regional governors, there is evidence that the new Iraqi security apparatus is deeply penetrated by insurgent sympathisers.
There are unconfirmed stories of police chiefs being appointed only to be turned against the coalition within months through bribes and threats.
James Atticus Bowden, a former Army officer who served as a company commander, says Rumsfeld is McNamara.
Additionally, the big shock and awe bombing campaign was a bust. It didn’t collapse the regime. It killed civilians and destroyed records that would be very useful for the nationwide intelligence needed to restore security. Clearly, Rumsfeld thought the war meant defeat Hussein and get out. The plans called for a reduction from about 150,000 U.S. troops rapidly down to 30,000. How could the Sec Def not know there would be an Occupation?
The colonels at the Army War College knew it. The Army Chief of Staff, GEN. Eric Shinseki, who was let go, knew it. Just like they knew, and recommended, to keep the Iraqi Army on the payrolls, intact, and selectively weed out the Baathist bad guys.
Rumsfeld didn’t understand the fundamentals of the war, which war, OIF was. Our forces on the ground did well to overcome the failures of understanding and planning. But, it cost us.
Bowden is quite correct about the occupation. Then Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki did say a few hundred thousand soldiers would be needed for an occupation. The US Army is hard pressed to even maintain current troop levels. Recruitment is declining. Short of instituting a draft can the US military fight in Iraq for years to come? Also, will US public opinion move so far against the war that continuation of the war will become politically impossible? Any predictions?
To those who support continuation of the US fight against the Iraqi insurgents I have a question: How many more years of war do you think it is worth fighting? 2 years? 5 years? 10 years? If you knew it would take 20 years to defeat the insurgency would you still be for keeping over a hundred thousand US soldiers in Iraq for 20 years? Also, what benefits to US national interests do you expect to see from fighting there many years?
Thanks to Greg Cochran for the first link.
Steven A. Camarota, Director of Research, Center for Immigration Studies, testifed on May 4, 2005 before the US Congress House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims. Camarota argued that immigrants are displacing Americans from jobs and driving down wages and benefits.
Prior to the economic slowdown that began in 2000, I had generally assumed that the primary impact of immigration would have been to reduce wages and perhaps benefits for native-born workers but not overall employment. An important study published in 2003 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics showed that immigration reduces wages by 4 percent for all workers and 7 percent for those without a high school education.1 A significant effect to be sure.
However, after a careful examination of recent employment data, I have become increasingly concerned that immigration may also be reducing employment as well as wages for American workers. A study by the Center for immigration Studies published last year shows that between March 2000 and March 2004 the number of unemployed adult natives increased by 2.3 million, but at the same time the number of employed immigrants increased by 2.3 million.2 By adults I mean persons 18 and older. About half the growth in immigrant employment was from illegal immigration. And overall the level of new immigration, legal and illegal, does not seem to have slowed appreciably since 2000. By remaining so high at a time when the economy was not creating as many new jobs, immigration almost certainly has reduced job opportunities for natives and immigrants already here.
Native employment is falling in states with high immigrant influxes.
Not only is native unemployment highest in occupations which saw the largest immigrant influx, the available evidence also shows that the employment picture for natives looks worst in those parts of the country that saw the largest increase in immigrants. For example, in states where immigrants increased their share of workers by 5 percentage points or more, the number of native workers actually fell by about 3 percent on average. But in states where the immigrant share of workers increased by less than one percentage point, the number of natives holding a job actually went up by 1.4 percent. This is exactly the kind of pattern we would expect to see if immigration was adversely impacting native employment.
Of course, businesses will continue to say that, "immigrants only take jobs Americans don’t want." But what they really mean is that given what they would like to pay, and how they would like to treat their workers, they cannot find enough Americans. Therefore, employers want the government to continually increase the supply of labor by non-enforcement of immigration laws.
Employers want low labor prices. But the Americans who are displaced from jobs demand more social services such as health care, unemployment benefits, and welfare from government. Also, the lower wage immigrants, legal and illegal alike, end up using medical care and other services paid for by middle and higher income taxpayers. Plus, the illegals are driving down the benefits packages offered by employers and thereby increasing the number of people who have no medical insurance. This, in turn, increases the number of native people who turn to government to pay for medical care. So low priced immigrant labor is effectively subsidized labor for those employers who use it and the rest of us are paying for it through taxes, higher crime rates, and more pollution and crowding.
Steve Sailer points to an Across Difficult Country post which (and I hope I don't lose you) points to a Professor Bainbridge post which excerpts a Wine Spectator article arguing that cheap Hispanic laborers are needed in the California wine industry.
Hispanics are the backbone of the wine industry, pure and simple, says Pete Seghesio, CEO of Seghesio Family Vineyards in Sonoma County. Year-round, most of the vineyard work is done by Hispanics—everything from pruning vines in the winter months, to thinning grapes and leaves during the growing season, to the actual harvest.
"We can't do what we do without them," Seghesio says. "California cannot make 90-point wines without the hand care of these individuals. We're not Australia, where many of the [farming operations] are done by machines. It's impossible to make the kind of quality wine we're making in California today without this labor force of hands." ... The bottom line, though, is this, says Seghesio: "If people really knew the percentage [of Hispanics working in California] that's driving our economy, there wouldn't be any of this talk from our government."
The UCLA corporate law professor has got the evidence to understand this whining right there in front of him. But he fails to notice it. I bet all my readers already see the problem. But then, unlike Professor Bainbridge (and did I mention he's a corporate law prof at a prestigious university?) they had the advantage of my bolding. Oh, and think about Down Under in the unlikely chance you haven't figured it out yet.
People who do not get paid much are the backbone of California's wine industry because the labor is plentiful. It is plentiful and therefore it is cheap. If it was not plentiful it would cost more. In my youth high priced labor was considered to be a wondrous thing that made America the envy of the world. Some of you may be too young to remember those times. But they did exist and the Democratic Party of those times even thought that high priced labor was a good thing. Really, I'm not making this up.
What is with the California wine industry? Is it impossible for Californa vintners to use machines? Are the wine company owners all just mechanically incompetent and incapable of installing and running and servicing machines? Are there no people in California (maybe in car repair shops?) who could run those Down Under automated gadgets for processing wine? Or are the vineyards too poor to afford machines? No, it can't be that. A lot of those winers are rich people who took up wine making as a hobby. Or are California's capital markets too unsophisticated to be able to provide funds to buy capital equipment? Nope, that's not it. Look at Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the biotech start-ups in San Diego. Funds are very obviously available.
Being the kind of guy who thinks automation is the road to higher living standards I see the trailing technological edge of the California whine (er, wine) industry as a sign that something is amiss. One wants to ask the professor whether cheap low skilled immigrant labor is a disincentive to innovation and capital investment? Is the necessity born from high labor costs the mother of invention?
Professor Bainbridge then whines:
Unfortunately, if my hate mail is any indicator, Seghosio's wrong. People know and an awful lot of them don't seem to care. They don't want the illegals here, no matter how much they contribute to our culture and economy.
Poor baby. Bainbridge wants locally grown fine wines. He feels culturally uplifted from refined local wines grown by lots of very poor low wage workers. He can't imagine it any other way. Never mind what getting that wine does to the local schools, pollution from crowding, crime rates, welfare rolls, tax rates (which, er, are kinda anti-business, no?), and jail crowding. He's getting his culture from a wine bottle apparently.
Across Difficult Country blogger C. Van Carter sees a form of the "Let them eat cake" attitude coming from the professor.
Speaking of professors, UCLA professor of law Steven Bainbridge observes that without illegal alien serfs, wealthy gluttons like himself would have to pay more to get drunk on California wine. Bring this up the next time you encounter some pathetic slob who doesn't know Merlot from Pinot Noir complaining about illegal aliens ruining his children’s schools or driving up his costs of buying a home, it should shut him up.
When I was a kid (yeah, back when high wages were considered a virtuous state of affairs and the Democratic Party was the party of the working class) I used to think that college profs must know everything. Now I know better.
Susan Aud of the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation and Vicki Murray of the Goldwater Institute have found that per pupil spending in Arizona public schools is widely unerreported.
Twenty years ago, TurboTax revolutionized income tax preparation.1 This analysis and accompanying database will bring the same simplicity, transparency, and accuracy to Arizona public school finance that Turbo Tax brought to the United States Internal Revenue Code by presenting complex Department of Education financial data in a clear and understandable way. Currently, the state does not synthesize the department’s multiple accounting systems, making it difficult for the public to know how much is actually being spent on students. This also makes it difficult for policymakers to obtain accurate figures to create informed education policy. For instance, the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, says the state spends $5,009 per student, and Education Week’s annual Quality Counts ranking claims Arizona spends $5,487.2 With so many conflicting figures, how can Arizona policymakers and taxpayers know the cost of educating a student in an Arizona public school?
For the first time, with the database accompanying this study (available on the Goldwater Institute website at www.goldwaterinstitute.org), policymakers and the public can readily access the most accurate per-student expenditures—by both student and district type—for all 218 regular Arizona public school districts. This database will also be updated as new information becomes available. This analysis explains Arizona’s base equalization formula funding and suggests an alternative education finance model. It focuses on the state base equalization funding tied to students to determine the net change in district revenue if a student transfers to a school outside the district.
Total per-student funding consists of two types—those that vary according to the number of students in a district and those that are fixed.3 The first type is referred to in Arizona as equalized base funding. This is the amount the state has determined is tied to students when they enter the public school system, when they leave it, or when they change districts. The second type, omitted from most published reports, includes local, county, non-equalized state, and federal funding. This is the portion of perstudent funding that is fixed, or not based on student counts, and remains with school districts if students leave.
This analysis finds that the average state base equalization funding per student ranges between $4,200 and $4,600, and the average per-student portion of nonequalized district funding is $4,309. Thus, the average total spending for an Arizona public school student is between $8,500 and $9,000. These are minimum averages because they apply to students who do not have special educational needs, such as learning or physical disabilities and English language learner status, and who do not attend schools in districts that are small and/or located in rural areas.
Thus, policymakers and the public can now see how much education funding is directly tied to students and how much stays with school districts. The online database breaks down state equalization base funding for students according to four categories and non-equalized district funding into per-student amounts according to local, county, state, and federal funding categories.5 With that data, policymakers can readily calculate the fiscal impact to school districts and the state if students were given education grants to attend private schools. For instance, if five percent of public school students in Arizona, roughly 40,000, transferred to private schools using elementary education grants worth $3,500 and high school education grants worth $4,500—both less than current state base equalization funding—the net savings to the state and local districts would have amounted to $32 million in fiscal year 2003.6 Total funding in half of the school districts would have remained unchanged, and in the other half it would have decreased by less than one percent.
The incorrect low estimates for per pupil spending have been used by political groups to justify increases in government funding of education.
In fact, citing the 2004 Quality Counts per-student spending figure, Arizonans for Voter Rewards and Education Funding, headed by Mark Osterloh of Tucson, filed an initiative mandating “the Legislature to pour nearly $2 billion more into the public school system to bring per-pupil education spending up to the national average. Arizona ranked 49th in spending in the most recent Education Week Quality Counts ranking at $5,487 per pupil. The initiative does not indicate how lawmakers should pay for a spending increase to the national average of $7,524 per student.” See Robbie Sherwood, “Feeling Lucky? Plan Would Reward Voting,” Arizona Republic, July 31, 2003.
If the numbers being bantered around for Arizona's per pupil public schools spending can't be trusted then what about other states? Are per pupil spending levels underreported in other states? Public schools bureaucrats have two incentives to underreport spending. First off, they can point to low per pupil spending and claim that any failures of their students to learn a lot are due to a lack of money. Second, a widespread public image of cash poor schools eases the task of getting more money appropriated for education.
Just as school systems have an incentive to underreport funding they also have an incentive to overreport performance. For example, a recent Harvard/Urban Institute study found much higher Hispanic and black drop-out rates than the school systems have been reporting. Also, standardized test cheating by teachers has been discovered in many school districts.
Standardized test results can not be trusted unless the tests are administered by proctors who are independent of the school system being tested. School financing needs to be made more transparent as well. We shouldn't have to wait for a free market think tank to pour over the books of a state to figure out how much is really being spent. But a big increase in transparency may not have the effect of improving the average quality of education. My guess is greater transparency will have the unintended consequence of segregating students more by cognitive ability. See my post "Housing Prices Increasingly Driven By SAT Scores".
Privatization probably can't improve school performance much either. However, privatization would be more cost effective.
Froma Harrop of the Providence Journal-Bulletin makes a liberal argument for immigration restriction.
But this issue does not belong to the right. Or it shouldn't. Illegal immigration hurts most liberal causes. It depresses wages, crushes unions and kills all hope for universal health coverage. Progressives have to understand that there can be little social justice in an unregulated labor market.
“Liberals are so confused on this issue,” says Vernon Briggs, a labor economist at Cornell University and self-described liberal. “Immigration policy has got to be held accountable for its economic consequences.”
Many Democrats used to get it. In 1964, President Johnson abolished the Bracero program, which brought in “temporary” farm workers from Mexico. Its demise let Cesar Chavez organize U.S. farm workers. His union won some battles early on, but a new wave of illegal immigrants in the mid-1970s reversed that progress. The union barely exists today.
Harrop argues that if Hillary Clinton would take a consistent immigration restrictionist line that she could win the Presidency in 2008. Harrop sounds like she'd be very happy with that outcome.
Upper class liberals used to identify much more strongly with working class American interests. But a recent Pew poll showed that 58% of liberals favor a temporary worker permit program while only 36% oppose.. Two other major pillars of the Democratic Party's coaltion (at least as Pew categorize the people they polled) are "Disadvantaged Democrats" (in other words: blacks and Hispanics) and "Conservative Democrats" (in other words, the former heart of the party). The "Disadvantaged Democrats" heavily oppose temporary immigrant worker permits with 63% against to 30% in favor. This result makes sense. Poor lower class blacks are having their wages driven down and their jobs taken away by the huge illegal Hispanic influx. Their salaries and labor market participation rates are declining. The "Conservative Democrats" also understand