Morning Coffee Videocast: Immigration Is a Good Thing

In which I drink my morning coffee, use up Google's bandwidth, and muse about immigration:

4 min 43 sec - May 14, 2006. Brad DeLong's Morning Coffee. We should be open to immigration--for lots of reasons.

Immigration Is a Good Thing

Comments

[michael]

what happened to the morning diet pepsi? for second there I thought you had signed a promotional deal with pepsico...

A sidenote on the economic impacts of immigration... one of the major economic complaints I always hear about illegal immigration is that they leach money from the government by not paying for social services them or their children receive like education and health care. But if they were granted legal status then that would not be a problem because they would become taxpayers just like the rest of us. Plus they are already paying payroll taxes for programs like social security. That's money they will never see again... so in a way they are subsidizing social security.

[Macneil]

A VAT would be a good way to raise revenue that would affect both documented and undocumented workers. Already undocumented workers do pay taxes. Except for school, they don't consume many government services. And they pay for schools via rental payments anyway.

[AJ]

does anyone have a link where we can read Paul Krugmans NYT columns for free ? ( I see that NYT has now made it $$)

[Warren]

Immigration is a good thing. ILLEGAL immigration is not a good thing. Either build a wall or let more of them in legally.

Guest workers who send money and themselves back to the old country are NOT IMMIGRANTS. This applies to many Mexicans and to the H-1B workers, who learn skills and take their experience home to India.

Immigration is a good thing. But not that other crap.

[anne]

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/05/amartya_sen_ide.html#comments

May 13, 2006

Amartya Sen: "Identity and Violence"

'Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny,' by Amartya Sen, Review by Kenji Yoshino, NY Times: "My first exposure to murder," the Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen writes in "Identity and Violence," "occurred when I was 11." It was 1944, a few years before the end of the British Raj and a period of widespread Hindu-Muslim riots. The victim was "a profusely bleeding unknown person suddenly stumbling through the gate to our garden, asking for help and a little water." Rushed to the hospital by Sen's father, the man died there of his injuries. He was Kader Mia, a Muslim day laborer knifed by Hindus. He had been asked by his wife not to go into a hostile area of then-undivided Bengal. But he had to feed his starving family, and he paid with his life.

To the young Sen, this event was not just traumatic but mystifying. How was it, Sen asks ..., that "... human beings ... were suddenly transformed into the ruthless Hindus and fierce Muslims..."? And how was it that Kader Mia would be seen as having only one identity — that of being Muslim — by Hindus who were, like him, out in the unprotected open because they too were starving? "For a bewildered child," Sen remembers, "the violence of identity was extraordinarily hard to grasp." And, he confesses, "it is not particularly easy even for a still bewildered elderly adult."

Sen's book argues for the reasonableness of that bewilderment. He takes aim at what he calls the " 'solitarist' approach to human identity, which sees human beings as members of exactly one group." This view, he argues, is not just morally undesirable, but descriptively wrong. While "a Hutu laborer from Kigali may be pressured to see himself only as a Hutu and incited to kill Tutsis . . . he is not only a Hutu, but also a Kigalian, a Rwandan, an African, a laborer and a human being."

The originality of this critique is that it eschews trite appeals to the common humanity of those in savage conflict. Instead, Sen invokes the myriad identities within each individual. Because all of us contain multitudes, we can choose among our identities, emphasizing those we share with others rather than those we do not. ....

In a related vein, Sen criticizes the solitarist approach to civilizations. Influential texts like Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order" take a drubbing for assuming monolithic Western and Eastern civilizations. With charming erudition, Sen demonstrates that things usually ascribed to one culture in fact often arose in another. Vindaloo, now seen as a quintessentially Indian dish, originally derived from chilies brought from Portugal, while the trigonometric sine function, assumed to be a European discovery, came from India. (An unequal exchange if ever there was one.)

For all its urbanity, however, "Identity and Violence" neglects what others will take to be common sense. Hutus and Tutsis will not lay down arms because they are told they are Kigalians, laborers or human beings. ... The strength of Sen's argument lies in its intuitive nature: "In our normal lives we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups." Its weakness lies in its failure to explain why, at critical junctures, we disown that knowledge. Is it because human cognition tends to trade in binaries? Is it because violence creates identity as much as identity creates violence? Is it because human beings fear the choices or solitude a more cosmopolitan outlook would force them to face? ...

This foray into identity and culture will seem a new departure for a scholar best known for his contributions to economics. But in all his work Sen has insisted that human beings are not simple. As early as 1977, he assaulted the concept of homo economicus, the individual who acts only in his narrow self-interest. And the complications he stresses point in a hopeful direction, revealing the extent to which actual people are guided by the claims of others.

In giving human complexity its due, Sen has always been a theorist of identity politics, even before the phrase became fashionable. ... "Identity and Violence" ... [shows] that one can be a Nobel winner, a secular saint and a writer who, for good and ill, retains a child's faith in our human natures.

[Eli Rabett]

I have a small suggestion for economists who want to see the effects of illegal immigration for themselves. Wherever you are find the local shape up, you know, the 7-11 where the landscaping and building contractors show up between 6 and 10 in the morning to pick up casual labor. Go down there and watch what happens. Then you can close your eyes and claim that these folks are not in your community, and yes, Virginia, they are depressing wages in that sector.

If you don't know where these places are in your city, then a) you have not been looking, b) just ask the guys who do your lawn or remodel your kitchen. If you can find a REAL old timer, ask him (and it will be a him in that case) how the ethnic identity of those doing casual labor has changed in the last 40-50 years.

Otherwise, don't bother talking to me about it.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Am I the only one who can't get the podcasts to run? Is Firefox the problem?

"Already undocumented workers do pay taxes."

According to a Knight -Ridder newspaper account froma month or so ago, both the SSA and IRS are overlooking massive tax fraud and misuse of SS numbers. Gee, I wonder who ordered that.

Legitimate employers and taxpayers get bombarded whenever there is even a minor document matching problem. But apparently if an employer has thousands of phony SS# and document match problems the Bush administration overloooks that.

[Ari]

"My daughter was in a car hit by a Mexican looking driver who fled the scene of the accident at high speed."

Huh? That is the point of Anne's post of the terrific review of Amertya Sen's book. What does a Mexican look like? Was the driver wearing a sombrero? What does a Mexican look like? Huh? Like you or me? As far as I can tell Mexicans look like any and all of us.

[Karlsfini]

Brad, I wasn't aware you'd been drinking diet drinks. Stop that immediately.

A lite beer isn't so bad, but its better to make your own by buying regular beer and adding filtered water -- that way you can control the "liteness" and get up to 20% more beer for the money. (With the added social value that you don't have to be seen buying lite beer.)

As for illegals not paying for the schools, they pay property taxes too, indirectly if they rent. Since most illegals are up here without the kids, they actually support the schools without using them.

(Brad probably already mentioned that in the videocast. Being left-handed I always read the comments first. The words "diet pepsi" of course made my blood run cold. I'll look at the videocast now.)

[save_the_rustbelt]

"Immigration is a good thing. ILLEGAL immigration is not a good thing."

Amen.

[anne]

Thank you, Ari :)

The argument is that taking on a confined sense of who we are is both artificial and desensitizing. Artificial, because even in identities such as ethnicity there is no definitive type. How white does one have to be to be white, how black to be black? By biology we are each distinct, and a biological characteristic sets each of us on a gradient with some more typically Asian and some less. But, what is Asian? Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Indonesian.... Ethnicity, race, is an artificial construct if we think we understand precisely what "Othello" the Italian Moor could have been.

[anne]

Now, if ethnicity is only relatively so for each of us, what of singular identity taken on during a time of stress or crisis? There is a fierce danger in identifying so strongly with what we think is Japanese that the Chinese are beyond sympathy or understanding during a time stress no matter how supposedly severe. I listened to an art historian who was part of Pacific military intelligence during the World War, who explained that to sympathize even with the Japanese was essential for his psychological well-being and he would think to Japanese art. I wish we had been less fiercely "American" in just deciding to go to war and stay at war.

[anne]

The mother :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/16/international/africa/16appiah.html?ex=1297746000&en=363d1c2d0df3d2ef&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

February 16, 2006

Peggy Appiah, Author Who Bridged Two Cultures
By NADINE BROZAN

Peggy Appiah, who as a daughter of a British chancellor of the exchequer defied the conventions of her time by marrying an Ashanti political leader and who went on to become an author and a revered figure in her adopted homeland, Ghana, died Saturday in Kumasi, Ghana. She was 84.

The cause was a heart attack at Akomfo Anokye Hospital, according to her son, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Reared in upper-crust Britain, the youngest of four children of Sir Stafford Cripps, a Labor party leader and cabinet officer in the Clement Attlee government (1945-51), Peggy Cripps caused an international sensation when she announced plans to marry in July 1953. Her fiancé was Joseph Emmanuel Appiah, who was in London as a law student and representative of Kwame Nkrumah, prime minister of the Gold Coast, the British colony that became Ghana in 1957.

Nkrumah was Ghana's first president, and Mr. Appiah was a close associate and his choice for vice president, until political differences led Nkrumah to imprison him several times.

The Appiahs are said to have been the inspiration, along with another African-British couple, Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, for the 1967 film "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," which dealt with a California couple's reaction to their daughter's engagement to a black doctor.

That view was lent support by Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the department of African and African-American studies at Harvard, and a friend of Mr. Appiah's since their student days, who noted that it was a marriage of equals at the highest levels of their societies.

"She was to the manner born and he was an aristocrat related to the king of the Ashanti," Mr. Gates said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. "He was the John Adams of his country; its founding father with Kwame Nkrumah."

The couple met at a gathering of the West African Students Union, of which Mr. Appiah was president. From the start, Miss Cripps made it clear that she would not be intimidated by the firestorm of criticism the couple endured.

"If we experience any difficulties in mixing with Europeans, I shall throw in my lot with the colored people," she told The Sunday Express of London.

The marriage came to symbolize far more than the union of two individuals. Richard Weight, a British historian who is making a documentary about interracial marriage, said: "For a lot of people, it drew the line between those who thought Britain had an integrated postcolonial future and those who didn't. And it became an international story with particular resonance because it involved the daughter of a former chancellor." ...

[anne]

The son :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/books/review/12FREEDMA.html?ex=1276315200&en=b3e3c0b7da1d201c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

June 12, 2005

'The Ethics of Identity': A Rooted Cosmopolitan
By JONATHAN FREEDMAN

These may be conservative times, but liberal political theory is poised to make a comeback. And not just the chilly sort that flickers in the hearts of libertarians, but a variety that seeks to revive the traditions of tolerance, pluralism and respect for both individual and group rights that animated liberal thought for the greater part of the last two centuries. Such, at least, is the promise offered by the Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's suave and discerning ''Ethics of Identity.'' Appiah seeks to reorient political philosophy by returning to the example set by John Stuart Mill in ''On Liberty.''

Having in his youth rebelled against his father's dry utilitarian philosophy and solaced himself with Romantic poetry; and having loved, married and lost a brilliant woman, Harriet Taylor, Mill constructed a passionately precise argument for the rights of both individuals and minority groups in the face of ''the tyranny of the majority.'' Appiah wants to graft the branch of Millian individualism back onto the tree of political philosophy at a moment when possibilities of personhood unknown to Mill have entered public discussion -- the openly gay man or lesbian and the postcolonial subject, to name a few. Affirmative action, gay marriage, the human rights movement, even the teaching of evolution in the public schools: just about all the hot-button controversies of our moment turn on the scope and limits of individual and group rights Mill attempted to sort out more than a century ago.

No wonder, then, that Mill has been claimed by both the left and the right: the N.A.A.C.P. and the Young Americans for Freedom can each trace their lineage back to ''On Liberty.'' But Mill remains a shrewd choice: pursuing his example enables Appiah to jettison a good deal of the baggage that has been piled onto the liberal project in the last hundred years, to return to first principles. Appiah uses Mill -- who, over the course of the book, becomes more its touchstone, less its subject -- to focus ethical attention on the notion of identity.

This notion, he suggests, posits both a self with the freedom to create itself and a self shaped in relation to collective identities. Indeed, for Appiah these two ways of viewing the self are inseparable. I am who I am not only because I am engaged in the lifelong task of becoming the person I want to be but also because I can identify myself with groups of people engaged in similar ''life-projects'': secular Jews, people with kids, people raised in Iowa City, to mention three personal instances. Appiah stresses that the life-project I am carrying out, the story of my self that I'm struggling to tell, can't be separated from the affiliations in which that project was formed and to which it refers. The very pursuit of individualism demands the cultivation of collective identities, and the often conflicting ethical demands of each represent the poles between which Appiah's arguments swing....

[anne]

We contain multitudes, as Kenji Yoshino writes, and I too am liberally demented enough not to know what a Mexican looking driver would look like though I might imagine any manner of foolish stereotype.

[anne]

Then we are continually becoming many things, many beings, while often dramatically resisting being many or cosmopolitan. But, in accepting the multiple identities which are necessarily ours comes more proper understanding of what we might hold other and even threatening. We contain multitudes :)

[Karlsfini]

Okay, now I've watched the videocast...

If I understand it, Brad's not supporting illegal immigration, but calling for a fair system.

The true evil of illegal immigration is not it lowers wages, but that it is exploitative.

The illegals picked up at Seven-Eleven aren't going to ask for dust masks, or hearing protection or goggles or gloves. If they fall off the roof they're not going to sue. An illegal can be a child, but child-labor laws aren't going to be enforced.

(A large part of the illegals who are still children seem to be out of sight, cleaning up office buildings after midnight.)

The exploitation is building up a tremendous reservoir of hatred in Latin America with the predictable blowback -- which like debt and the hatred in the Middle East, our kids will someday have to deal with. (Another reminder to read Chalmers Johnson.)

Seldom mentioned, but while the illegals send $$$ south to the poor, Mexico itself sends $$$ north to the rich: to the stockholders and executives of HomeDepot, Walmart, McDonald, BurgerKing, etc. The president of Mexico comes from Coca-Cola.

If you haven't been to Mexico in the last five or ten years, you're in for a shock. Strip development and malls. Everything you could have stayed home for.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=6467&u=99|4|...

Red-breasted Nuthatch Taking a Bath
New York City--Central Park, Tanner's Spring.

Here is a red-breasted nuthatch, that differs from other nuthatches as well as all other red-breasted nuthatches even brothers and sisters. Imagine then a singular nuthatch, while Samuel Huntington would argue that we must look at an entire "civilization" as though all who might be inclused were "one." How could it be so? There is both an inability to know inevitable human difference in such steretyping and a culturally isolating danger :)

[dryfly]

Sure let's supersize the US population. You enjoy traffic, noise and a degrading enviornment with 300,000,000 US inhabitants. The Academikistas were hysterical to slow the natural population growth to a sustainable level and now we should go to where, a billion?

I second this theme.

Is Brad suggesting EVERYONE & ANYONE who wants to come here can and do it at the time of their choosing? Or do we as citizens here through our elected officials have the right to set limits & conditions?

I have yet to hear from anyone who believes either extreme (no immigration under any circumstance or completely open door, no restrictions).

So we are all in the same boat - we all want some limited legal immigration. Maybe we are at different ends of that same boat though - some want more immigrants than others, some want more stringent criteria then others. Whatever.

Reminds me of the joke where a man asks a women if she'd sleep with him for a million dollars. Woman agrees. Man then asks if she'd sleep with him for a hundred dollars. She angrily responds... "What do you think I am, a WHORE?!" Man replies "Why yes, we established that with the first question... now we are negotiating the price."

We are all whores when it comes to immigration in particular & globalization in general. It is time to put away the 'high rhetoric' of each sides extreme position and get down to negotiating specific numbers & criteria.

So how many and under what criteria should immigrants be allowed in? I'd love to hear from Brad on this one...

[anne]

Notice the attempt to move social studies beyond a utilitarian base or philosophy to a recognition of a biological or social truth that we are distinct individuals even when we may wish least to be as when we identify ourselves with a social stereotype. Utilitarian thought would have us be changeable one for another, while Stuart Mill or Kant or Rawls would recognize singularity. Where utilitarian thought in economics readily allows for the value of market solutions provided a grossly measurable product is increased, thought in terms of a combination of singular and shared identities looks to how specific individuals fare in solutions.

[ilsm]

2164th;

One of the meaner stages of fascism is to have the to fear, hate and yield your rights for security against them.

[Ari]

Anne has raised an issue of central importance:

We often think we can stereotype others and this is a cause of all sorts of trouble. There are Mexicans who are black haired and brown and blond and red and grey, just as there are Americans. The cantor of our temple and his wife are black haired but the children are red haired. Recently I met a Ugandan student who happens to be Jewish, and decends from generations of Ugandan Jews that I knew nothing about. There are Mexicans of a range of skin shades as there are Americans, so how am I to know the difference?

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/opinion/31mon4.html?ex=1288414800&en=d17f0afc17386acd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

October 31, 2005

Why Race Isn't as 'Black' and 'White' as We Think
By BRENT STAPLES

People have occasionally asked me how a black person came by a "white" name like Brent Staples. One letter writer ridiculed it as "an anchorman's name" and accused me of making it up. For the record, it's a British name - and the one my parents gave me. "Staples" probably arrived in my family's ancestral home in Virginia four centuries ago with the British settlers.

The earliest person with that name we've found - Richard Staples - was hacked to death by Powhatan Indians not far from Jamestown in 1622. The name moved into the 18th century with Virginians like John Staples, a white surveyor who worked in Thomas Jefferson's home county, Albemarle, not far from the area where my family was enslaved.

The black John Staples who married my paternal great-great-grandmother just after Emancipation - and became the stepfather of her children - could easily have been a Staples family slave. The transplanted Britons who had owned both sides of my family had given us more than a preference for British names. They had also given us their DNA. In what was an almost everyday occurrence at the time, my great-great-grandmothers on both sides gave birth to children fathered by white slave masters.

I've known all this for a long time, and was not surprised by the results of a genetic screening performed by DNAPrint Genomics, a company that traces ancestral origins to far-flung parts of the globe. A little more than half of my genetic material came from sub-Saharan Africa - common for people who regard themselves as black - with slightly more than a quarter from Europe.

The result that knocked me off my chair showed that one-fifth of my ancestry is Asian. Poring over the charts and statistics, I said out loud, "This has got to be a mistake."

That's a common response among people who are tested. Ostensibly white people who always thought of themselves as 100 percent European find they have substantial African ancestry. People who regard themselves as black sometimes discover that the African ancestry is a minority portion of their DNA.

These results are forcing people to re-examine the arbitrary calculations our culture uses to decide who is "white" and who is "black."

As with many things racial, this story begins in the slave-era South, where sex among slaves, masters and mistresses got started as soon as the first slave ship sailed into Jamestown Harbor in 1619....

[Ari]

Please do not worry about the troll's antagonistic comments. Troll's can only antagonize.

[michael]

OK whoever is posting those long articles it's getting kind of annoying...

As for the overpopulation doomsayer... last I checked the U.S. population growth rate was very miniscule and a far cry from places like China and India. And we have plenty we have plenty of open space... it's just a matter of properly using it. Massive tract housing and suburban sprawl are a the problem, not population growth. If cities did a better job with development planning and providing adequate transit infrastructure, population growth wouldn't be such a problem. Take California for example... the population has grown like 50% over the last few decades but our freeway mileage has only grown by like 6%... no wonder why LA, OC, San Diego, and certain parts of the Bay Area have such bad traffic problems.

[Ari]

Brad DeLong did not divide immigration between legal and illegal, but just advocated for a general acceptance of immigration. I agree, for I would not be here were immigrants from eastern Europe to have been restricted years ago. What the posts and several important comments have shown is how broadening and strengthening immigration has been for Americans. Arguing for looking to people for individual worth and not fooling ourselves into thinking we can stereotype with no loss in understanding is the purpose of many of the terrific additions to this thread.

Terrific discussion and I mean no disrespect, Zarkov, though I am arguing that what we think we know of someone superficially we often do not.

[Ari]

Anne -

“The argument is that taking on a confined sense of who we are is both artificial and desensitizing. Artificial, because even in identities such as ethnicity there is no definitive type.”

If I understand correctly this is Anne's report on what Amartya Sen is arguing, and this makes perfect sense to me. Amartya Sen is giving us a superb sense of democracy. I think the ideas of Sen and Appiah are brilliant and should change how we think of identity forever.

[Doctor Jay]

It is my contention that nobody can reliably (100% accurate) identify someone as being a citizen of Mexico only by looking at them.

Not to mention only getting a look at someone driving a car away from the scene of an accident. Presumably they were in a hurry.

Are you sure he was Mexican and not Guatamalan or Nicaraguan or Costa Rican? Gosh, might he have been from Venezuela?

Of course, there's a whole category of Mexican citizens that you wouldn't identify as Mexican because they are light skinned, tall and thin.

The point is that such identifications are reliable just often enough to make the people who make them more confident in them than they should be.

There is a set of genetic features that many would associate with Japanese, Mexican, even Irish. But these categories have no clear boundaries, and diffuse rapidly through the population of the world.

[wml]

"Where utilitarian thought in economics readily allows for the value of market solutions provided a grossly measurable product is increased" For better or for worse this is probally false, depending on exactly what you mean by it. If x_i is dollars possessed by individual i and u(x_i) = sqrt(x_i) utils, and x = sum(x_i) is the only measurable product available. Then the distrubtions x_1 = 0, x_2 =0, x_3 = 36; x_1=12, x_2=12, x_3=12 are indistinguisable according to the aggregate sum, but the second distribution grants higher utility. You need to know the whole mapping between resource and individuals; aggregate figures won't work.

Perhaps you mean you just need to know the utility sum, and that the utility sum is the aggregate figure you are refering to. But then consider the maxmin egalitarian rule, which many have described as consisent with Kantian approach - maximize the welfare of the worst off person. The aggregate measure you need to know is (tautologically) the welfare of the worst off person. So the Rawlsian difference principle itself requires reference to "a grossly measurable product" to determine the first best outcome.

At most the Kantian approach also requires consideration of process - for example Rawls would require the process to respect individual civil liberties. So the grossly measurable product isn't sufficient to pick out the best society. But it will in general a) still be neccessary and b)both utilitarian and Rawlsian theories of justice need to know distribution of resources to be evaluated.

[wml]

"Utilitarian thought would have us be changeable one for another, while Stuart Mill or Kant or Rawls would recognize singularity."

Also, Mill explicitly rejected the singuality idea. First he changed the definition of happiness from Bentham pleasure minus pain notion to give extra weight to "higher pleasures." He then claimed that respecting indidiual autonomy except when choices harm others, as a matter of fact, would lead to more aggregate happiness. He then goes on for hundreds of pages trying to make a case for this empirical claim. But he doesn't make an a priori assertion that individuals should be respected as indivduals just because.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=6474&u=99|6|...

Black-throated Blue Warbler Contemplating a Tulip Tree Flower
Central Park--New York City.

Interesting comments. WML, I will think carefully about your clever argument though I am inclined to argue in turn :)

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/books/chapters/0612-1st-appiah.html?ex=1141966800&en=4bac214e1b341711&ei=5070

June 12, 2005

'The Ethics of Identity'
By KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

"If it were felt that the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being; that it is not only a coordinate element with all that is designated by the terms civilization, instruction, education, culture, but is itself a necessary part and condition of all those things; there would be no danger that liberty should be undervalued, and the adjustment of the boundaries between it and social control would present no extraordinary difficulty." So Mill wrote in the book's celebrated third chapter, "On Individuality, as One of the Elements of Wellbeing," and it is a powerful proposal. For it seems to suggest that individuality could be taken as prior even to the book's titular subject, liberty itself. Our capacity to use all our faculties in our individual ways was, at least in part, what made liberty valuable to us. In Mill's accounting, individuality doesn't merely conduce to, it is constitutive of, the social good. And he returns to the point, lest anyone miss it: "Having said that Individuality is the same thing with development, and that it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well-developed human beings, I might here close the argument: for what more or better can be said of any condition of human affairs, than that it brings human beings themselves nearer to the best thing they can be? or what worse can be said of any obstruction to good, than that it prevents this?"

To be sure, Mill does offer conventionally consequentialist arguments for liberty-arguments that liberty is likely to have good effects. His most famous arguments for freedom of expression assume that we will find the truth more often and more easily if we allow our opinions to be tested in public debate, in what we all now call the marketplace of ideas. But he argued with especial fervor that the cultivation of one's individuality is itself a part of well-being, something good in se, and here liberty is not a means to an end but part of the end. For individuality means, among other things, choosing for myself instead of merely being shaped by the constraint of political or social sanction. It was part of Mill's view, in other words, that freedom mattered not just because it enabled other things-such as the discovery of truth-but also because without it people could not develop the individuality that is an essential element of human good. As he writes,

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need for any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm's way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it.

Individuality is not so much a state to be achieved as a mode of life to be pursued....

[Karlsfini]

Anne,

Thanks for all the the stuff on the birds and bees, and also the comments.

It's sometimes easy to forget the responsibilities that come with being human.

I don't know that I'm exactly happy after I read your comments, but at least I'm not so depressed.

[erg]

From his appearance and context the driver likely was an illegal migrant from Mexico driving with no insurance, possibly no drivers license or a counterfeit license.

And you (or your daughter) was able to deduce all that from a probably brief glimpse of a guy in a few seconds. You could not only tell whether he was legal or illegal (which in itself is a pretty amazing feat), but a whole host of other attributes. You're wasting your time here Zarkov. Open a detective agency. Sherlock Holmes has nothing on you !!!

For what its worth, when I was in college in LA, my ancient car was actually hit by an even more ancient car. The guy driving it was an illegal, no license, no insurance, didn;t even understand English [ One of his friends had to translate]. After I threatened to report him and file a claim, he agreed to pay $200 or maybe it was $300, all he said he could afford.

[jacob]

1. Diverse controllable immigration is a Very Good Thing.
2. Immigration of only or mostly uneducated workers is a Not such a Good Thing.
3. Illegal uncontrollable Immigration of uneducated workers is a Very Bad Thing
4. Illegal uncontrollable Immigration of uneducated workers from a single country is a Disaster in a Making.

It’s a country where a middle class is shrinking, where the gap between rich and poor grow bigger and faster and where poor are mostly Mexican while rich are Indians, Chinese and some Whites.
If you need any prove, just stop blogging and check out student body of Economics department at Berkeley. Don’t even go to EE department at Berkeley. You can also check out who is working in Bay Area high tech companies and who is cleaning toilets.
Moreover, if you want to know the trend, please read:

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/living/education/14535127.htm

Sanchez has failed the math portion of the exam twice and was scheduled to take it again Wednesday. He said the exit exam isn't fair.
``We try to get good grades and we work really hard. And then they come up with another exam to pass.''

and
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/opinion/14kristof.html?hp

Why are As an-Americans so good at school? Or, to put it another way, why is Xuan-Trang Ho so perfect?

[Darren]

To Werner Patell (first comment). I live in the area of Toronto with the highest concentration of immigrants (my building is full of them) and I can assure Brad's other readers that you don't know what you're talking about. Everyone speaks English (although when talking amongst themselves they often choose not to), their kids are very cute, and as for crime, any large American city would love to have our murder rate. Immigrants contribute far more than they cost.

[andres]

Oooh boy. I like anne's approach of irritating this crowd both by indifference and by her long articles and bird pictures. But I like to take a more direct baiting approach.

Here's a simple proposal: everyone can agree that Mexican immigrants have a depressing effect on low-skill wages, and exert unnecessary upward pressure on the population. So in order to compensate for these problems I have a different suggestion in mind:

Deport the trolls. The illegal Mexicans, after all, tell better jokes, listen to better music, drink better beers, and best of all they don't have a fetish for automatic weaponry.

A simple rule: if you start complaining about all these brown-skinned illegals who are driving up the crime rate and living it up with welfare payments, then the US government arrests you, seizes your passport and gives you a one-way ticket to Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, or other picturesque locations. Not only will this offset the downward wage pressure and the upward population pressure, it will also generate positive external economies of vibes, as I like to call them, and make this country a much more peaceful place to live in. Too bad there's no chance of it happening.

On a more serious note, why don't we try to take a wee bit more subtle approach and try to reduce Mexican immigration, legal and illegal, by helping to make Mexico a place that poor Mexicans would want to live in. Today, most poor Mexicans are treated like illegal immigrants in their own country, even when they do have jobs.

And its' not as if we don't have control of what goes on in Mexico. After all, a huge number of Mexicans are employed directly or indirectly by US corporations. If both the US and Mexican governments got together and told both the manufacturers and agribusinesses that they either have to start paying _much_ higher real wages in Mexico or transfer their corporate charters to China, I think we could end the huge unskilled immigrant labor problem in one step.

Yeah, sure you say. But think about it. The Mexican government, all the while with the blessing of their supporters in the US government and Wall street, has an illustrious career of massacring students, disappearing left-wing dissidents, threatening and harassing union organizers, and generally kissing the asses of US companies who want to employ poor Mexicans for approximately diddly squat in comparison to the US minimum wage. We here in the US elect governments which are buddy-buddy with the Mexican government and Mexican business elites, and then we get all huffy when the social policies of Mexico result in a huge tide of poor Mexicans who are willing to get treated like dirt by our nativist trolls because their own government and businessmen don't treat them any better. I hate to sound like a hopeless Pavlovian, but isn't it time we started to think about changing the _antecedents_ that cause illegal migration, or does the rest of the gallery here think that that's hopelessly simple minded?

[A. Zarkov]

Darren:

Canada doesn’t border Mexico. Canada does not have waves of illegal migrants poring across its borders. Canada is very selective about who it lets immigrate.

If you want to immigrate to Canada as a skilled worker you must you must have at least one year of paid work experience within the last ten years, and you must have the funds to support yourself and your family for six months. Not only must you have work experience it must be at “skill type 0” or “skill level A or B.” Go to the Canadian NOC web site to find out what this means. Not just any Joe qualifies. Oh and BTW you had better speak one of Canada’s two “official languages” English and French. You had better be proficient to get enough points to qualify which means speaking, listening, reading and writing ability. You had better be able to provide “conclusive proof” of your proficiency. And language ability is only one of six factors needed to qualify as a “skilled worker.” No wonder all the immigrants in your office speak English—they have to. Duh!

Another thing, don’t be too old if you want to come to Canada. You get 10 points for the age factor if you are between 21 and 49. If you are over 53 you get 0 points. In the US we call this age discrimination. You also better have a confirmed job offer. Your spouse counts too in your score. Finally if you want to rack up enough points to qualify as a skilled immigrant have a Master’s of PhD degree with 17 years of full time educational study.

If you can’t make it as a skilled worker come to Canada as a “Business Immigrant” meaning fork over a $400,000 investment to own or manage a business in Canada. And have a net worth of at least $800,000.

If you are lucky enough to have a family member in Canada you could try sponsorship. But sponsors must agree to support the immigrant for at least 10 years. Or as a last resort you could try playing the “I oppressed card.” But I don’t think that would work too well for Mexicans.

[A. Zarkov]

erg:

Your own experience proves my point. It’s a common experience in LA to encounter an illegal migrant driving without insurance and even without a license. Even Doctor Watson would have no trouble with this one. If you had been seriously injured requiring expensive medical you might have been out of luck. At that time it was common for auto insurance companies to put a low cap on uninsured motorist coverage. Even now some companies don’t offer it at all, like GEICO.

[wkwillis]

Darren
You have good experience with the consequenced of immigration because you live in Canada and Canada has a reasonable immigration policy. If America had Canadian immigration policies, America would also have good experience with immigration and be in favor of more (Canadian type) immigration.
Ari
I got my van because it was totalled by two Hispanic (Spanish speaking) individuals who ran off after colliding with my father's girlfriend's daughter's car and abandoning their friend's/relative's car. He claimed that it had been stolen. Hey, maybe it was and they were Hispanic (Spanish speaking) crminals. Could be.
So I got it for $750 and fixed it up for another twenty five hundred. This is an ancecdote, something that happened to me, a datum. As to whether illegal immigrants tend to drive without insurance, I will leave that to those who are in touch with reality to answer.
As for me, I want to immigrate to Australia precisely because it has tough immigration policies. Very high rate of nonwhite immigration, very low rate of unskilled immigration.
If I wanted to live in a country with prolowskilled immigration policies, I could stay here in America.
Long term I prefer to live in a country that doesn't screw over it's lower class. It's likely to be less exciting in a social sense.

[Darren]

Zarkov, Willis: thanks for your responses. FYI, I was responding to the first post in this thread (now deleted I see) which was along the lines of "immigrants are bad. Look at Toronto, full of dark-skinned people who can't speak English. And now there's lots of crime here... etc etc etc" As I live in the very epicenter of this dread wave of immigration to Toronto I thought I'd respond. If there were several hundred thousand unauthorized immigrants in Toronto, not speaking English, not assimilating, pushing down wages and driving uninsured cars (I've never even *heard* of anyone doing that here), I might feel differently.

[A. Zarkov]

Darren:

Ok fair enough. I didn’t see the original post either. Delong has a habit of doing that. He will sometimes delete a post that is on-topic (or at least not too far off topic), not abusive or too long. Canada has sensible and really strict immigration policies. Perhaps too strict. I ran a calculation on a hypothetical PhD with 30 years technical job experience, English speaking etc and over 53. He didn’t qualify be he lost too many points on age. Obviously Canada wants immigrants to pay into the public retirement and benefit system for a good long time before drawing benefits. If the US had Canada’s immigration policies, we would have very few Latino immigrants. Then of course some (but not all) liberals would yell “racist.” The US government also requires sponsors to be financially responsible for the relatives that they sponsor, but then doesn’t enforce the rules. Since you can’t enforce the rules against people with few assets, the sponsors would have to be vetted. American liberals love social democratic countries like Canada and France, but then ignore the things they do that they would bitterly condemn if the US did the same thing. This Canadian immigration policy matter is a perfect example of that.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=6487

Magnolia Warbler
New York City--Central Park, The Ravine.

Andres is always clever :) Watch for warblers, for they are even now immigrating and who can tell to what purpose but they sing so anyhow.

[Auros]

Wouldn't it be more to the advantage of Mexicans to have a competent, non-corrupt government, than to send all of their best workers to our country?

Wouldn't it be more to our advantage if our immigrants were legal, and on a path to citizenship, than to have a growing non-voting underclass?

[andres]

Hmm. One can't provoke trolls anymore with an honest hour's writing. Let's take some of wjd123's points step by step.

"Talking about the benefits of immigration a day before the debate in the Senate over illegal immigrants is a good way of conflating illegals with legals."

Who says they're illegal? WE do of course. We actually pass laws telling them they can't come here and put these laws into written documents with nice fonts and quality paper. Ignorant American Indians, on the other hand, did not bother putting their anti-immigrant laws in writing and for this reason they were justifiably screwed over.

The whole legal/illegal thing is just a backhanded way of labeling and discriminating against otherwise identical people. If you're a legal immigrant, then you're a fine potential citizen who can make a contribution to this country. But if we declare you illegal and you ignore our declaration, then you're degenerate scum and should consider yourself lucky to be kicked back south of the border in one intact piece. So who's conflating what here?

"Economist are the last people who should have a say on illegal immigration. When it comes to how many immigrants we should let into the country economist have something to say. When it comes to illegals its those who make and enforce our laws who should be addressed."

Yeah sure. Economists also have nothing really to say about our country's drug policies and about the most efficient way to deter or otherwise reduce crime. What a useless profession.

"The government's failure to secure our borders opens the United States to diseases of mass destruction. Our health agencies are reporting outbreaks of third world diseases that were thought eradicated here a half century ago."

"We don't need terrorists sneaking into our country illegally to cause wide spread destruction. Those coming here with less rare diseases such as hepatitis and tuberculosis can kill hundred's of thousands of our citizens."

Sorry willie, but if exposure to icky diseases is your main concern, then we should hardly stop with illegal immigrants: anyone who has had contact or exposure to illegal immigrants is a threat and should be treated as such. If you come within breathing distance of Jose your gardener or Maria your local Burger King clerk, then it's the leper colony for you, citizenship notwithstanding. For that matter, travelling abroad without getting the proper pre- and post- travel medical treatment should also get you in the slammer, citizenship notwithstanding.

"Illegals end up working in our restaurants, or factories, our homes. It doubtful that most have been screened for contagious diseases. People in our cities are crowded into buses and subways next to illegal aliens."

If you're still worried about diseases, then there's one perfectly good way to prevent this problem, according to your logic: let's make all immigration legal, and now because all these immigrants are legal, they won't be carrying all these awful diseases, according to your definition. After all, legality makes for good, non-infectious immigrants, doesn't it?

Or more seriously, immigrants to this country might be more likely to check in for medical treatment if they don't have to be afraid that they'll be reported to the INS and get deported (and in the process get roughed up by uniformed officers who think you carry icky diseases). If you're concerned about disease, why make immigrants go into hiding? Or do you actually think you can build a wall that's tall enough and thick enough to keep everyone out? Al Qaeda's killers, mind you, got through with perfectly legal-looking documents.

"Members of Congress and our President aren't going to resign for their dereliction of duty. The only way we are going to get these incumbents out of office before they cause us any more harm is to vote them out."

Now there's something I can agree with, though not for the reasons you're hoping. It's just a pity that so many politicians hope to get votes by pandering to your way of thinking.

Of course, nothing that I've said above will probably change your mind, so I sometimes wonder why I bother. Perhaps because you might admit to yourself that wages, population, government spending and even disease aren't really what worries you--you just need someone out there to fear and loathe so that you will feel better, though what makes you feel worse in the first place is something I'm unaware of.

[baileyman]

Brad's argument begs the question, why have a nationstate with borders, then? Clearly, if we are not worse off, and others become better off, and if that is reciprocal for those of us goind to Mexico and elsewhere, let's have anarchy.

[andres]

"Brad's argument begs the question, why have a nationstate with borders, then? Clearly, if we are not worse off, and others become better off, and if that is reciprocal for those of us goind to Mexico and elsewhere, let's have anarchy."

A good question. If you talk to most economists, for better or worse they'll tell you (if they're honest) that nation-states with borders serve only as a means of preserving a linguistic, cultural, and possibly a religious identity. But when they act to restrict trade in goods, services, or factors of production (read immigrants in this case), nation-states are a decidedly sub-optimal institutional arrangement.

I don't agree with such a viewpoint all or even most of the time, but this is one time in which I do.

[erg]

Your own experience proves my point. It’s a common experience in LA to encounter an illegal migrant driving without insurance and even without a license. Even Doctor Watson would have no trouble with this one.

In my case, Inspector Clouseau could have found it out, because I actually met the guy and talked to him indirectly. However, I would not claim to have the brilliant ability to be able to surmise as much information from him as you were able to do only because your daughter caught a fleeting glance of him.

2 years after the incident I spoke of, my car was sideswiped in a parking lot, leaving an even larger dent. This was student only parking, so its a little unlikely that it was done by someone who was "Mexican" looking. Still I suppose if I were as prescient as you are, I could have tracked it down to illegal immigration in some way.

[A. Zarkov]

andres:

How many countries in the world have unrestricted immigration policies? Certainly not Mexico. Certainly not Canada. If Mexico, the US and Canada want to form an EU-like confederation where goods and people and capital can move freely throughout the North American Continent with a single currency then that’s a policy decision to be determined by popular will. We can debate the pros and cons. In the meantime we don’t have that, so we need to regulate immigration across our northern and southern borders. Canada and Mexico do exactly that, and so should we. Let’s not pretend there is zero cost to illegal migration. Let’s not pretend that a “path to citizenship” doesn’t mean amnesty. We tried amnesty before and it didn’t work. If anything it seems to have let to even more illegal border crossings.

When you say: “Who says they're illegal? WE do of course.” You seem to think the US has no right to control its borders. Of course it’s we do determine our immigration policy. Every country determines its own immigration policy. Do you think there is something special about the US that means it has no right to control its own borders? Something special that doesn’t apply to other countries? I don’t follow your reasoning. I see nothing special about Mexicans that should give them an access not available to other countries.

[A. Zarkov]

erg:

Who said it was only a fleeting glance? Did the driver in your second accident flee the scene at high speed? It’s this behavior that suggests the driver is uninsured, a criminal on the lamb, or an illegal migrant. In LA the latter is the most probable choice. The illegal migrant choice is not a certainty, but it’s a good bet. Which would you bet on?

[erg]

"Who said it was only a fleeting glance? \"

Zarkov -- you said your Mexican looking driver fled the scene. Assuming the normal dictionary definition of fled, I assume that means he left rather abruptly. My apologies if you or your daughter, in addition to possessing the skills of Sherlock Holmes, also possess the telescopic vision of Superman and were able to determine from a distance how "Mexican looking" he was.

"Did the driver in your second accident flee the scene at high speed? It’s this behavior that suggests the driver is uninsured, a criminal on the lamb, or an illegal migrant. In LA the latter is the most probable choice. The illegal migrant choice is not a certainty, but it’s a good bet. Which would you bet on?"

It happened to a parked car, but it was in a student only lot that required a card to enter. I presume the student could have been one of those illegal immigrants who get into college, while getting in-state tutions, but I tend to doubt it.

Anyway in the other accident I mentioned, the illegal driver in question did not flee the scene. So I have an anecdote to partly contradict yours, and furthermore, I do not have to rely on whether the guy was "Mexican" looking.

[wjd123]

andres,

If the Indians knew about smallpox they would have kept all the European out. If they would have had the means of testing or vaccinating they would have tested and vaccinated before the European entered the country.

Your argument that if we just had open borders everyone would be more likely to guard against infectious diseases is ludicrous. The law is to help insure that people who would act irresponsible act responsible. And those who can't afford a physical can't afford a physical. Those that come here legally have to have a physical. We simply don't know what diseases those who entered our country illegally carry.

I have many objections against illegal immigration but I thought the infectious diseases one was the easiest way of showing how our government has failed in its duty. That was what everything that came before the last paragraph which you agree with was aiming at.

Your right, laws are just pieces of paper if we aren't going to have the means to enforce them. Employers can hire illegals with impunity. Once illegals get across our borders they have little to worry about because the federal government won't do it's job or allow anyone else to do it for them. See, there is another objection. The general disrespect for the law that our federal government fosters.

BTW, my way of thinking is to have a national identity card that everyone needs to have in order work here and that can be cleared by the federal government much like a credit card. I also want strict sanctions on employers who hire people without an identity card or who don't verify its authenticity with the federal government. And most importantly I want a way to enforce the law.

Those here working illegally will no longer be able to work. Those coming here illegally for jobs will no longer be able to find them. My hope is that those here illegally will go home without us rounding them up because they won't be able to make a living, and those who would come here illegally won't because they can't get jobs.

So what politicians are pandering to my why of thinking. Not the open border type, not the amnesty type, and not the cheap labor type. Maybe the law and order type but I want to vote them out of office along with the rest of incumbants for not performing their duty--trying to close the barn door after the horse has gotten out.

I want a system that works already in place before I'm willing to even consider allowing some illegals to stay. We are not going to get it from Bush or those in Congress today. Besides I don't trust any of them.

[TommyG]

I am still frustrated that the costs of immigration (both legal and especially illegal), as well as overpopulation in general are not being counted.

From the North [San Diego] County Times
"State pushes cities harder on housing"
Monday, December 19, 2005

By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer

Come next year, it will be harder for California communities to skip out on doing their part to house the state's swelling population. On Jan. 1, a bill authored by Assemblyman Dave Jones, D-Sacramento, will become law and apply more pressure to cities that thumb their noses at state mandates to set aside land for housing to accommodate projected growth.

...

The new production targets specify that cities set aside enough land to allow for a specific number of homes to be built, within a wide variety of price ranges. For instance, Encinitas was told it must zone property for 1,712 housing units overall, including 392 homes for very-low-income families, 299 for low-income families, 324 for moderate-income families and 697 that sell at market rates, [David] Harris [Housing coordinator for the coastal San Diego County city of Encinitas] said.

...

While experts say the historically low interest rates helped drive prices skyward, a big factor is California's population growth, which has reliably added 600,000 residents a year.

...

In the case of Encinitas, which has little open land left to build on, rezoning is the only option. Harris said Encinitas is boxed in the politically unpopular corner of having to rezone single-family-home land for townhomes and apartments.

I live in what is, for Encinitas, considered the low income part of town. Do you think the wealthy neighborhoods will get rezoned? Hardly; my neighborhood will be sacrificed on the altar of expediency first, you can guarantee that. So now I am expected to put up with population densities to rival those of Singapore and just keep quiet about it. I sacrificed to buy a home in Encinitas 18 years ago and now the life that I and my wife want will be taken away by those who value only population growth. Why is their desire for ever more babies of greater weight than my desires for peace and quiet? Population and unlimited growth are complicated subjects, and of course now I will be accused by those who know nothing of my, and my family's, past, of being racist or bigoted because of skin color. B***s***! I don't care about the color of your skin or eyes, I only care about how we can come to a just balance of desires. I just want an honest admission by the economic community that, well, we don't know how to put a dollar value on open space and clean air and clean water and peace and quiet so it must have a value of precisely $0.

Other columns on this blog have spoken of the difficulties in planning when taxes, even a few years into the future, are uncertain. Imagine trying to create a future when the only reliable assumption you can make is that you will be overrun by people who cannot and will not value any of the things that you yourself do. I don't know the answers to the questions I have posed, but I suspect that the unlimited growth of population will only make things worse.

Ok, liberal, you can start ranting about land rents now :)

[wjd123]

As soon as it comes to that point in the illegal immigration debate about employers who hire them we get some gobbleygook that sounds tough but is basically a form of voluntarism on the employers part.

Bush wants a tamper proof card for immigrants which is in reality useless unless everybody carries one. Otherwise illegals can simply show some other form of identification and claim they are citizens.

Haven't we learned by now that if Bush's lips are moving he is lying. I'm tired of his deceptions and rosy assumptions.

[andres]

"When you say: “Who says they're illegal? WE do of course.” You seem to think the US has no right to control its borders. Of course it’s we do determine our immigration policy. Every country determines its own immigration policy. Do you think there is something special about the US that means it has no right to control its own borders? Something special that doesn’t apply to other countries? I don’t follow your reasoning. I see nothing special about Mexicans that should give them an access not available to other countries."

Zark, it's right in front of your nose, but you refuse to see it. This is, as far as I know, the only viewpoint which I have in common with fanatic libertarians. So you read correctly, even if you refuse to gauge the implication: I believe that no nation on earth has the moral right to tell foreigners "no, you cannot live here and we forbid you to do so". Impractical? Who's to say. The one virtue that it has is that in effect, this viewpoint does away with racism or xenophobia.

And the the supposed lack of practicality is really an excuse for countries to avoid looking in common at the social problems that create illegal migration and which are generated on both sides of each border. Take a look at any problem created by illegal immigration, and I fully believe that it cannot be made worse and is usually made better by making such immigration legal. To take the case of wages, most US companies who pay their Mexican maquila workers a flimsy tissue that they call a salary would suddenly find very few workers available if all Mexicans were free to look for work north of the border at the US minimum wage. And when a mass inflow of Mexican immigrants started making jobs very scarce here in this country, maybe that's when the US public would wake up and for the first time ever threaten to hang both Mexican and US politicians from the nearest lamppost unless they take steps to provide Mexican workers with a decent living _in their own country_.

This is a problem that applies not just to the US but to all major cases of south-north migration. Migration from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco is starting to make anti-Muslim xenophobes out of a substantial part of Europe's native population. If all such immigration was absolutely and legally guaranteed, then Europeans would have no recourse but to rub both their own corporations' and the North African governments' noses in the excrement of the horrible living conditions south of the Mediterranean. No more excuses.

Getting back to the case of Mexico, legal migration would finally confront the US public with the travesty that economic and social policy south of the border has been for the past four or five decades. This policy includes dry, neglected ejido farms cut off from any source of credit or capital development, established unions whose leaders are corrupt and do anything the government and its business allies tell them to do, maquiladora industries where independent unions are ruthlessly quashed in order to keep wages at rock bottom, and yes, totally inadequate levels of financing for schools, sanitation, and environmental cleanup in poorer areas, thanks in part to corruption and thanks in part to Mexico's continuing foreign debt burden.

Don't you think it's time that _these_ problems should be addressed, rather than trying to scapegoat the brown-skinned families who have to suffer the consequences? Think about it.

[andres]

"I have many objections against illegal immigration but I thought the infectious diseases one was the easiest way of showing how our government has failed in its duty. That was what everything that came before the last paragraph which you agree with was aiming at."

You're right that the government has failed in its duty, but you totally mistake the reasons how and why. You want to protect the US public against smallpox, flu, and other nasties and yet you want to do so by almost literally forcing underground the very people most likely to be carrying such pathogens. And that is precisely what the US government has done for the last few decades.

Keep in mind that I'm in favor of free immigration, not _unmonitored_ immigration. Is it so difficult to say to immigrants, "you are free to come in, but you must submit to a full physical examination when you do so"?

Is it so difficult to say to immigrants who have infectious diseases (most of which are easily treatable), "you must go through treatment before you come into our country, and no, you do not have to pay immediately but we will make provision for you to pay out of your future earnings"? To make it easier, we can even force the Mexican government to bear a substantial cost of the treatment.

I don't think it's that difficult, but we don't give them a chance by making it clear that we'll boot them right back south of the border if we catch them, and now not before declaring them felons and possibly making them spend time in prison where they will get their asses kicked and also infect the prison population.

So again, please explain to me how the government can make us safer from disease by maintaining a policy of illegality. In spite of my vehement tone so far, I'm willing to listen if I hear any halfway conving arguments, which I haven's so far.

PS. There's a very good film from the early 1980's called El Norte (english subtitles) which gives an example of exactly the concerns you have in mind and why illegality just makes the whole situation worse. A Guatemalan brother and sister cross the border by going through an unguarded sewage tunnel, where they are attacked by rats. The sister gets bitten and doesn't find out that she has plague until it's too late to save her life. If immigration had been legal, not only would they have had access to preventive treatment (ie, full physicals), but they would never have needed to cross the border under such hazardous physical conditions in the first place.

PS2. btw, the thoroughness with which our border guards monitor the most likely crossings has led to an increasin number of immigrants crossing over at the most desolate points of the southwestern desert, with predictable results. The number of illegal immigrants who have died from dehydration and heat-related trauma can only be estimated. To save lives, we can either build another Great Wall across the southern border or we can come up with a saner immigration policy. Your pick.

[A. Zarkov]

andres:

You don’t think nation states should have borders, but most of the rest of the world disagrees with you. Humans seem to want to form clusters and draw borders around these clusters. Countries even go to war over border disputes. The book “Why Geography Matters” has extensive discussion about borders, and how much countries fuss over maps that depict borders correctly. Nevertheless I’m glad to see you don’t single out the US, which has one of the most liberal immigration policies of any country in the world. A country without borders ceases to be a sovereign entity. So what you really want is a one-world government. But I think you make a mistake when you regard border problem as one of economics. It’s also one of language and culture. The French want to keep their language and culture, but they need immigrants to do the dirty work. On the other hand, the North African immigrants to France don’t want to assimilate into French society either. They also want to keep their own language and culture, which includes their religion. The problem is their religion won’t tolerate other religions so Europe is on a collision course. I think it will end badly with mass transfer of Muslim Arabs. I hope I’m wrong, but they’ve done it before. The Allies forced the expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans from European countries. The policy is right there in the Potsdam Agreement:

"The Three Governments, having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner. "

The transfer was anything but orderly and humane.

You are of course entitled to your utopian desires, but I’m afraid you are likely to be disappointed.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/opinion/16tue1.html?ex=1305432000&en=b0d4f041c3997cc7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

May 16, 2006

Border Illusions

President Bush's speech from the Oval Office last night was not a blueprint for comprehensive immigration reform. It was a victory for the fear-stricken fringe of the debate.

These are the people who say illegal border crossings must be stopped immediately, with military boots in the desert sand. Never mind the overwhelming burdens of Iraq and Afghanistan, the absence of a coherent and balanced immigration policy, and the broad public support for a comprehensive solution. America must send its overtaxed troops to the border right now, they say, so a swarm of ruthless, visa-less workers cannot bury our way of life under a relentless onslaught of hard work.

Rather than standing up for truth, Mr. Bush swiveled last night in the direction of those who see immigration, with delusional clarity, as entirely a problem of barricades and bad guys. His plan to deploy "up to 6,000" National Guard troops to free the Border Patrol to hunt illegal immigrants is a model of stark simplicity, one sure to hearten the Minuteman vigilantes, frightened conspiracy theorists, English-only Latinophobes, right-wing radio and TV personalities, and members of Congress who have no patience for sorting out the various and mixed blessings that surging immigration has given this country.

Those on the other side of the argument have spent frustrating months making a quieter, more complicated case. Supporters of a compromise immigration bill in the Senate want a balanced approach that is both tough and smart. They, too, would add people and technology to enhance security on the Mexican border, which is now about as solid as a screen door. But unlike the House bill, which is fixated on enforcement, the Senate bill seeks to restore law and order in a variety of ways. It would, for example, shorten an immigration backlog by adjusting work and family visa quotas, tighten the enforcement of immigration laws in the workplace and put illegal workers on a path to assimilation and citizenship.

Mr. Bush gave lip service to aspects of comprehensive reform, but that part of his message was, as usual, delivered with a mumbling lack of conviction. He denounced "amnesty" again, but did not speak up forcefully enough for a citizenship path for the 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants who, in huge national marches in recent weeks, have made their hunger to assimilate powerfully clear....

[anne]

Well, I am thoroughly pleased for in preparing to go to war with Mexico we will need all the intelligence we can get. Imagine all those Spanish calls flying about who knows where and why. I always thought it would come to this, however. Shock and awe to the south, appropriately enough. Mexico, we are coming! Canada, be very afraid. Fear is what we are about.

[anne]

Fear is what we are about, fear is what we wish, fear, fear, fear. We went to war in Iraq because fear was cultivated, and we stay in Iraq because we are told to be afraid. We fear China and India and Russia and Venezuela and Bolivia and above all else for the present we fear Mexico. Mexico, we are afraid but the troops are coming!

[anne]

Ah, the weapons we were looking for all this time we really in Mexico. I understand. Mexico, we are coming!

[anne]

"Fox Tries to Defuse Mexicans' Concerns Over Moving Troops to Border"

Another classic headline :) Mexico, we are coming!

[anne]

"Bush's Plan to Seal Border Worries Mexico"

For those wishing a complete set of classic headlines :) Be worried Canada, be very worried.

[Ari]

Anne, we are living in strange and dangerous times. The question is, who is the danger us or them?

[wjd123]

andres,

I'm going to try to explain where I stand and where I believe we differ. In order to do so I'm going to have to bring in free trade and some philosophical beliefs. It's a bumby ride. Some things don't need to be there, but I'm venting so I what them to be there.

I'm neither for open borders nor our present system of free trade. Both tear down economic morality, laws and regulations, we have built up in our country.

Unlike the EU we are destroying our economic morality and not enhancing it. Countries can join the EU but they have to meet standards: be a democracy, allow for the free association of labor, and be able to obey EU laws. Once a country becomes a member of the EU their citizens can travel and work anywhere they want within the union. Also a Spaniard living in England can vote in local elections. The EU also enhances civil liberties, EU laws protecting woman in the work force are stronger than any of their member countries.

On the other hand free trade with Mexico destroys our economic morality as companies leave the U.S. for a countries with less restrictive laws and regulations.

Why are we giving countries access to our markets without extracting guarantees of economic morality and civil liberties from them. We should only trade with Mexico under normal trade relations. We should withdraw from NAFTA, CAFTA and all the other fast tract free trade agreements we have entered into. We are getting nothing for our troubles and hurting the poor. We should also abandon the WTO which also destroys economic morality.

I also don't want China owning our national debt and controlling our grand children's economic destiny. I would suggest a balanced trade with China.

Facts: after NAFTA, Mexicans make less than they did before NAFTA, illegal immigration has increased, the flow of narcotics has increased, companies that moved to Mexico for cheap labor and to avoid our labor and environmental laws are now moving from Mexico to China for even cheaper labor and Chinese government subsidies.

You agree that the situation we face today with illegal immigration is a result of Congress not doing its duty. Then you go on to say if Congress would go on to abandon its duty all together and allow open borders the problem of illegal immigration would be solved. That's too cute by half.

You don't open your borders to third world countries unless you're planning on having a third world labor force and wrecked social services. Our social services are already being strained by illegals. Also economist, just like they have a theory of comparative advantage, have a theory of factor price equalization. Open our borders and keep trading with countries that have no economic morality and most of us will end up as one harmonious heap of naked labor doing the bidding of our corporate keepers as they fowl the air and land in the name of competition.

I'm an internationalist who believes in international organizations that enhance civil liberties. I believe that the ultimate purpose of corporations is to serve the needs of society. Just as I believe that individual and social needs can conflict, I believe that corporate and social needs can conflict. When they do it's the governments job to see that society isn't injured. When it comes to international trade we need standards to protect economic morality. International governments with sanctions and the means to enforce them can protect economic morality and widen it. We have an example of this in the EU.

You seem to be a libertarian who believe the solution to problems is to do away with the laws that make something illegal. At times that's true. Such as doing away with the Jim Crow laws. Now you want to do away with laws that say who and how many can immigrate here as long as they have a card that says they got their shots and are clear of infectious deseases.

I believe that your solution, which amounts to open borders, would be a social disaster, destroying our social services and our economic morality. I also believe that for the most part the law protects our civil liberties and it is the law that can enhance them.

[andres]

Hee. I don't know what's funnier, Zarkov saying that I regard border problems as only problems of economics or wjd123 insulting me by calling me a libertarian. Just for the record, I believe that libertarianism is an extreme form of dogma, inverted communism if you will, whose logical end product is corporate totalitarianism. Ayn Rand and her kind simply want to create a different kind of Soviet dictatorship.

However, even the stopped libertarian clock is right twice a day, to dig into my bag of cliches.

Zarkov, your conception of the state is a little too encompassing for my tastes. I fully agree that the state has a duty to preserve linguistic, cultural, and religious autonomy, and in many cases it also has a duty to preserve autonomous economic policy.

I do not believe that expanding the role of the state by further restricting immigration helps any of those goals--there are more productive and efficient ways for the US government to reduce immigration which I've already mentioned. For one thing, immigration restriction encourages xenophobia, possibly racism as well, and that tends to undermine international relations and long-term international political stability.

Secondly, denial of entry to a large portion of the world's population only serves to drive most of that portion underground when it does seek to immigrate, and also increases the likelihood of injury or fatality during border crossings. And the existence of an underground population only worsens those problems--disease, drug use, crime, terrorism--that immigration prohibition was supposed to prevent.

Does totally free immigration create serious problems? Of course it does. And not just economic problems; no one wants to see French culture drown in a wave of Berber-speaking Muslim migration, or American culture vanish under a tide of Mexican food and mariachi music (gack).

However, perfectly free immigration will force us, the American people, to come to terms with some very bitter facts about the international economy, and our role in that system. Namely that, with a few bright exceptions, the developing world is a socioeconomic catastrophe in the making. Developing countries are plagued by corrupt governments, massive inequality of wealth (especially land), labor exploitation that is aided and abetted by multinational corporations, environmental degradation, and pandemics such as AIDS which go mostly untreated because it isn't profitable to do so. For too long we, the American people, have done little more than apply bandaids to these problems and have ignored the complicit role that our government and corporations play in that disaster.

Erecting a Great Wall with barbed wire and machine guns across the Mexican border is not even a bandaid to any of those problems, and it's a pretty expensive non-solution at that. More national guardsmen on the border? Guess what guys--pretty soon things are going to escalate because you've raised the stakes. Mexican immigrants, if they want a better life badly enough, will not be deterred and will react accordingly. In addition to water bags, they and their coyotes will probably start packing hardware and will try to blow away anyone wearing a uniform who tries to get near them. Militarizing the Mexican border is the first step in a long road that will turn the Mexican border into another Iraq. Just ask the Israelis.

Anyway, I'm done. The rest of you can go on explaining why it's a good thing to turn the USA into a paranoid, xenophobic fortress akin to the Roman Empire. But I've laid out my case as best as I can, and will hereby shut up and no longer post to this topic.

[anne]

I like you, Andres, however confused you may be as to who you really are :)

[andres]

Anne, when I figure that out, I'll let you know...

[Corvid]

I'd suggest everyone here, including Brad, take a look at what has happened in the American meatpacking industry over the past 30 years, where wages have gone down from $20 an hour (probably equivalent to more than $30 an hour now) to $9 an hour and jobs that provided a decent living and a safe, clean work environment now are poverty jobs with dangerous, degrading work conditions. Same has happened in much of the construction industry.
This isn't due to outsourcing, offshoring or technological development. It's strictly due to the fact that for 20 years the U.S. has been very selective in enforcing its laws and giving employers of illegals a free pass DIRECTLY AT THE EXPENSE OF WORKING AMERICANS. It's a deliberate taking, like eminent domain but without the compensation. The overall benefit or cost to American society is beside the point. Some Americans are hurt in an unjust way by willful refusal to enforce the law. THAT's the issue. Are economists the only people who can't see this?
Also, I don't think it's a case of "Ive got mine, Jack, to hell with you." Mexico is a resource-rich country with 13 billionaires at last count. They've got theirs too. They just refuse to use it.

[anne]

Corvid

"I'd suggest everyone here, including Brad, take a look at what has happened in the American meatpacking industry over the past 30 years, where wages have gone down from $20 an hour (probably equivalent to more than $30 an hour now) to $9 an hour and jobs that provided a decent living and a safe, clean work environment now are poverty jobs with dangerous, degrading work conditions."

Agreed, and an important comment, but the problem is looking to strengthen safeguards of workers and balances against employers. And, at the least, to enforce laws protecting against unfair worker practices.