Im-Politic: For Biden, It’s Americans Last on Migrants and the Virus

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asylum seekers, Biden, CBP, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, detention, Donald Trump, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, ICE, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Journal of the American Medical Association, lockdowns, Mexico, migrants, Remain in Mexico, stay-at-home, testing, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, Worldometers.info, Wuhan virus

Some of you might have heard and been concerned about reports that President Biden’s new policies will result in migrants caught by U.S. border authorities being released into the United States without being tested for the CCP Virus. If you knew how much potential for superspread these policies hold, you’d be even more concerned.

Under President Trump, the problem appeared under control because Washington ended the policy of processing migrants who crossed the southern border illegally and then releasing them into the United States to await future hearings on their requests for permanent residency. Instead, apprehended migrants claiming to be asylum seekers, were returned to Mexico (whatever their nationality) until their cases could be brought up. And last March, these policies were extended to all would-be border crossers due to pandemic concerns.

Yet due at least partly to the Biden administration’s immigration-welcoming statements and actions (including during the campaign), migrant flows northward have surged, and current U.S. detention centers have been filling to overflowing despite American court orders preventing them from holding detainees for more than 72 hours in certain facilities in Texas. Worsening the situation has been Mexico’s new refusal in some instances to accept migrants expelled from U.S. territory. (See here for details.) And the new U.S. President seems determined to facilitate immigration inflows generally.

Therefore, the U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement (CBP) agency publicly acknowledged last week that “some migrants will be processed for removal, provided a Notice to Appear, and released into the U.S. to await a future immigration hearing.” Crucially, this practice is proceeding even though CBP doesn’t test arrivals for the CCP Virus unless symptoms are visible. (See the previously linked article for the statement.) 

Which is where the public health threat comes in. Because data from the virus has seemed to be unusually prevalent among these migrants. To begin with, although figures only go through August, a paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that the monthly rate of cases in detention centers was more than 13 times that for the U.S. population as a whole.

Although the JAMA authors wrote that increased testing at the centers only partly explains these high numbers, it also points out that they may also stem from “challenges faced implementing the Pandemic Response Requirements” – like overcrowding. At the same time, they confirm that because asymptomatic detainee testing has been “limited,” even these case numbers could be underestimates. And since migrants tend to be relatively young, asymptomatic cases are surely more common than among legal U.S. residents generally.

The total number of virus cases found among migrants in the detention centers since February has been small – just over 9,300. But the real measure of the danger comes from the incidence of the CCP Virus in the migrants’ main native countries – which look to be sources of large and ever greater greater supply going forward.

Yes, their overall case rates are much lower than their U.S. counterparts, as these data from the Worldometers.info website show:

cases per million

U.S.:                  83,687

Mexico:            14,920

Guatemala:         9,052

Honduras:         15,573

El Salvador:        8,708

One big reason, however, is that they’ve done so little testing, as these numbers from the same source make clear:

tests per million

U.S.:               984,900

Mexico:            37,781

Guatemala:      45,624

Honduras:        39,569

El Salvador:   110,338

Given the immense virus-related uncertainties revealed by these statistics, any measures that increase the numbers of untested migrants in the United States are simply incomprehensible for any government taking seriously the obligation to protect its own population. And given the tight controls already restricting individual, group, and business activities in the United States, these Biden decisions seem even less defensible.

It’s one thing for the new President to reject an America First framework for public policy. It’s quite another to adopt positions that merit the bizarre and perverse label “Americans Last.”

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(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Biden’s Immigration-Enabling Goals Couldn’t be Worse Timed

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asylum seekers, California, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Department of Labor, Eduardo Porter, illegal aliens, illegal immigration, Immigration, Jobs, Joe Biden, NAFTA, North American Free Frade Agreement, Open Borders, path to citizenship, Pew Research Center, recession, refugees, services, The New York Times, The Race to the Bottom, wages, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Apparent President-elect Joe Biden emphatically and repeatedly told the nation that he’s determined to increase the flow of immigrants to America – whether we’re talking about his promises that will greatly strengthen the immigration magnet (like creating a “roadmap to citizenship” for America’s illegal alien population, tightly curbing immigation law enforcement activities, and offering free government-funded healthcare to anyone who can manage to cross the border lawfully or not), or his promises to boost admissions of refugees, speed systems for processing applications for asylum and (legal) green card applications, and generally “to ensure that the U.S. remains open and welcoming to people from every part of the world….”

During normal recent times such pledges – and the fallout of pre-Trump efforts to keep them – had proven troublesome enough for the U.S. economy and for working class Americans in particular. Inevitably, they pumped up the supply of labor available to U.S.-based businesses, and created surpluses that enabled companies to cut wages with the greatest of ease – exactly as the laws of supply and demand predict.

During the CCP Virus pandemic and its likely economic aftermath, however, this quasi-Open Borders strategy looks positively demented, as emerging trends most recently described by New York Times economics writer Eduardo Porter should make painfully obvious.

According to Porter in a December 1 piece, “The [U.S.] labor market has recovered 12 million of the 22 million jobs lost from February to April. But many positions may not return any time soon, even when a vaccine is deployed.

“This is likely to prove especially problematic for millions of low-paid workers in service industries like retailing, hospitality, building maintenance and transportation, which may be permanently impaired or fundamentally transformed. What will janitors do if fewer people work in offices? What will waiters do if the urban restaurant ecosystem never recovers its density?”

What’s the connection with immigration policy? As it happens, the service industries the author rightly identifies as sectors apparently vulnerable to major employment downsizing are industries that historically have employed outsized shares of immigrant workers (including illegals). And along with other personal service industries, they’re kinds of sectors whose modest skill requirements would continue to offer newcomers overall their best bets for employment.

The charts below, from the Pew Research Center, show just how thoroughly dominated by both kinds of immigrants these sectors, and present similar data broken down by occupation. (The U.S. Department of Labor tracks employment according to both kinds of categories.)

Twenty years ago, in my book The Race to the Bottom, I wrote about news reports making clear that

“immigrants were flooding into California in hopes of landing jobs in labor-intensive industries such a apparel and electronics assembly that NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] had steadily been sending to Mexico — where most of the immigrants come from! In other words, the state was importing people while exporting their likeliest jobs.” 

And not surprisingly, wages throughout the southern California in particular stagnated.  

If a Biden administration proceeds with its stated immigration plans as quickly as it’s promised (with many actions scheduled for the former Vice President’s first hundred days in office), this epic blunder will wind up being repeated — but this time on a national scale.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Im-Politic: Time for an America-First Asylum Policy?

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asylum seekers, Central America, cities, crime, El Salvador, election 2020, FBI, Golden Triangle, Guatemala, homicide, Im-Politic, Immigration, Joe Biden, migrants, murder, New Nationalism.com, Robert Claude, Trump, WorldPopulationReview.com

One of Joe Biden’s central campaign promises has been to reverse Trump administration moves to curb most forms of legal and illegal entry into the United States by migrants from abroad, and one of the biggest complaints he and other supporters of loosening all forms of immigration restrictions has concerned the Trump policies toward those seeking asylum.

In particular, these critics of the President’s charge that the administration has unjustifiably, and even cruelly, restricted the grounds for a valid asylum claim to the longstanding criteria of persecution or fear of suffering persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, “membership in a particular social group,” or “political opinions.” Among the circumstances the administration was overlooking, as the former Vice President’s website explains, has been was the recent outbreak of gang violence in Central American countries that has supposedly forced numerous residents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in particular to flee northward for their lives.

As a result,, Biden has pledged to “restore our asylum laws so that they do what they should be designed to do–protect people fleeing persecution and who cannot return home safely” – including expanding the definition of persecution to include (among other threats) victimization or fear thereof of gang and other major criminal violence.

I’ve backed the Trump stance out of concern that such changes would trigger a completely unabsorbable flood of asylum-seekers and recipients who would be granted entry for reasons having little or nothing to do with longstanding U.S. definition of asylum grounds, and prevalent in every country on earth — and everything to do with an understandable but much less dramatic quest for higher living standards.

So I was grateful to Robert Claude, who puts out the very fine New Nationalism blog, for pointing out to me this past weekend an item he posted over the summer pointing out that several American cities recently have suffered from murder rates that actually are as high or even higher than those of major cities in those three Central American countries (which collectively are called “The Golden Triangle).

Because Robert’s figures only went up to 2017, I decided to investigate a little further. And lo and behold – as of full-year 2019, the story remains the same.

It’s important to note that not all major American cities are Central America-like homicide hotbeds. But significantly, four are. Here are the numbers for murders (and other “non-negligent homicides” for the United States) – drawn from the latest of the FBI’s annual U.S. crime reports, from local news organization accounts for cities not included in the FBI surveys, and from the worldpopulationreview.com website. The figures represent murders etc per 100,000 inhabitants:

San Salvador, El Salvador: 59.1

Guatemala City, Guatemala: 53.5

Tegucigalpa, Honduras: 48.0

St. Louis, Missouri: 64.54

Baltimore, Maryland: 58.27

Birmingham, Alabama: 50.51

Detroit. Michigan: 41.45

Moreover, some U.S. cities are uncomfortably close to Central American murder levels. They include Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana (31.72 and 30.67, respectively), and Kansas City Missouri (30.49).

Some caveats are important. Each of the Central American cities is considerably larger than the American murder capitals – and scale may affect murder and other crime rates. Moreover, the three Central American cities cited are all national capitals. There’s evidence that in smaller cities in the region, the murder rates are somewhat higher. And it bears observing that the U.S. figures are all for the relevant cities proper. For Tegucigalpa, the numbers may include suburbs. The coverage for the other two Central American cities wasn’t specified.

At the same time, even though most U.S. cities are still much safer than most of their Central American counterparts, keep in mind the trends. For many of these U.S. metropolises, the murder rates have gone up so far this year. According to the U.S. State Department agency that monitors crime and safety conditions generally for U.S. travelers, the murder rates for each of the three Golden Triangle countries (data by city isn’t reported) have fallen substantially in recent years. (See here, here, and here.)

The murder rates in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are still horrific. But so are those for the four U.S. cities with comparable problems — and for those urban centers which aren’t much safer. Which at least logically raises a big question for the Biden-ites if they win the White House: If they’re determined to permit foreigners to come to the United States for fear of getting murdered, would they give Americans facing the same problems the same right, including the same forms of resettlement assistance?

Im-Politic: How Mexico’s Paying for the Border Wall After All

Tags

AMLO, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, asylum seekers, border security, border wall, caravans, Central America, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, international law, Jorge Ramos, Mexico, Migrant Protection Protocols, migrants, The New York Times, Trump

Here’s quite the spectacular new entry in the “Life is Strange” category: President Trump has turned out to be right in predicting that Mexico would pay for a border wall to curb illegal immigration. Only this victory has taken a form that neither Mr. Trump nor anyone else could have possibly expected. It didn’t even totally entail developments at the border envisioned!

It’s a major win nonetheless, and if you doubt me, then take the word of Jorge Ramos, the well known anchor for Spanish language TV network Univision, a major champion of de facto Open Borders policies, and of course no fan of the President’s. 

For as Ramos has pointed out in a New York Times op-ed piece yesterday, Mexico has created at least the functional equivalent of a wall. He’s referring to the decision (forced by a very effective – though of course widely condemned – tariffs and border-closing threat by Mr. Trump, as Ramos ruefully observed) of Mexico’s new President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (nicknamed “AMLO”) to use Mexican forces to prevent Central American migrants and various other supposed asylum seekers from entering the United States en masse. Nor has Ramos been the only mass immigration advocate to point out this specific Trump success.

Some of these Mexican National Guards personnel are helping the United States enforce its new policy that permits requiring many asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their cases are judged. This Migrant Protection Protocols program replaces the obligation created by international law that until now has been interpreted to rquire Washington to admit  U.S.-bound asylum seekers’ entry even before evaluation. Although motivated by entirely understandable humanitarian concerns, this measure never anticipated the type of mass migration and related asylum fraud situation faced by the United States nowadays.

Other Mexican National Guards have been deployed to the country’s southern border with Guatemala, where they’ve been unmistakably effective in preventing huge caravans of Central American migrants from traveling through Mexico to reach the U.S.-Mexico border.

The United States has been indirectly financing a small portion of these efforts (through training programs to help for Central American officials better control their own borders). But the vast majority of spending on these efforts is coming from Mexico.

The President is entirely correct in continuing to emphasize the need for more effective physical barriers at the U.S.-Mexico border. But the essence of his famous campaign wall-building promise was to improve America’s own border security greatly, and to make Mexico pay the costs. And that’s exactly what’s now happening to a major extent. Even better – this approach is working. Illegal crossings at the U.S. border are down, and Mexico’s Lopez Obrador says that the migrants groups seeking to enter his country are shrinking.

President Trump has been supplied with abundant material for reelection campaign ads this week (notably, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ripping up of her ceremonial State of the Union transcript). Jorge Ramos’ op-ed has just given him some more.

Im-Politic: Trump Should Go All-in on Sanctuary Jurisdiction Shaming

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asylum seekers, border security, election 2020, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, migrants, Open Borders, Sanctuary Cities, Trump

Anyone doubting the political and moral genius of President Trump’s so-called threat to transport the migrants flooding the U.S. border to sanctuary jurisdictions throughout the country simply lacks a grip on politics and crucial aspects of morals. At the same time, the President has been missing a potentially crucial opportunity to gain the upper hand (both politically and morally) for good on intertwined immigration and border security issues via the sanctuary jurisdiction angle.

The expressed outrage of many sanctuary jurisdiction leaders at Mr. Trump’s proposal to drop the migrants off within their bounds could not be a more classic case of failing to put one’s money where one’s mouth is. Suddenly, cities and counties and states that have been harping for years at how welcoming the United States historically has been and should be, and advertising how welcoming and therefore signaling how virtuous their welcoming policies have been, seem to have decided that their hospitality and generosity are limited after all.

Further, as numerous immigration-realist commentators have noted, after just as many years of portraying sanctuary policies as not only the height of morality but the height of self-interest – because of all the contributions illegal aliens make to their economies and their cultures – the sanctuary leaders and their fellow Open Borders backers in Congress and the Mainstream Media are now singing a different tune. They’re condemning as especially shameful partisanship measures that could greatly increase these populations.

In fact, the Open Borders types’ reactions to this latest Trump position are simply the latest example of one of their defining characteristics. As I’ve been writing, they’ve long been pushing immigration policies that shower them with outsized benefits and display no interest whatever in paying a proportionate share of the costs.

And this observation brings us to where the President needs to administer a genuine coup de grace. Predictably, some of the debate over his statements to date have revolved around supposed legal and policy issues. According to the above-linked Washington Post article, even Mr. Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security argued that his sanctuary jurisdictions plan would violate the law. But in both political and moral terms, such considerations should be completely beside the point – and deserve to be pilloried as either clueless or cynical distractions.

For if the sanctuary and Open Borders enthusiasts are so convinced of the righteousness of their cause, they not only shouldn’t allow such considerations to keep the President from putting this policy into effect – much less retreat behind them. They should be volunteering to get the ball rolling, offering all the resources at their command – and should have been out in front since the unprecedented scale and makeup of recent migrant flows first become clear.  President Trump, for his part, should have been shaming them into action all the while – and shouldn’t wait a minute longer to start turning these tables on them. 

Moreover, even in sanctuary jurisdictions whose leaders are – verbally, anyway – putting their (taxpayers’) money where their mouths are, an intensified Trump strategy will speak volumes about the loonie-ness of indiscriminately indulgent immigration policies.  Efforts to cope with constant streams of low-skilled, poorly educated newcomers should make for an equally constant stream of head-shaking media reports.  Jurisdictions with large numbers of homeless Americans (like those all along the West Coast) would be in for especially, but justifiably, humiliating coverage.

From time to time, the President has depicted Open Borders and sanctuary positions as boons for the nation’s elites at the expense of middle- and lower-income Americans. The uproar over his new sanctuary proposal is a golden opportunity to turn this insight into one of mos consistent themes – and into a thumpingly winning campaign issue in 2020.

Im-Politic: The Washington Post’s Nazi-Baiting on Trump & Immigration

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Adolf Hitler, asylum seekers, border security, Central America, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Im-Politic, Immigration, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Mainstream Media, migrants, Nazism, Open Borders, refugees, Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Washington Post

Just when I think that I couldn’t become angrier at the bile spewed by some of President Trump’s critics and too often reported as fact or respectable, newsworthy opinion by the Mainstream Media, Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers keep topping themselves. And this morning I saw a series of such statements so inexcusable that I’ve decided to post about them even though I’ve already expressed my views in a tweet.

The accusations came in a Washington Post article today titled “’Our country is FULL!’: Trump’s declaration carries far-right echoes that go back to the Nazi era.”

Reporter Isaac Stanley-Becker was referring to the remarks made by Mr. Trump last Friday during his visit to the U.S.-Mexico border, where even champions of what I’ve come to call the Functional Equivalent of Open Borders are now finally admitting that flows of migrants mainly from Central America are overwhelming federal government facilities set up to deal with foreigners seeking to cross into the United States.

Stanley-Becker, who is based in London, wasn’t simply content to observe that the President’s language “fits a pattern of far-right rhetoric reemerging globally. Fear of an immigrant takeover motivates fascist activity in Europe, where, historically, the specter of overcrowding has been used to justify ethnic cleansing.”

With the evident endorsement of his editors, he went on to write that “Adolf Hitler promised ‘living space’ for Germans as the basis of an expansionist project….”

In this vein, he sought to legitimize this analysis by quoting an historian (from the University of California at Berkeley) who contended “The echoes do indeed remind one of the Nazi period, unfortunately. The exact phrasing may be different, but the spirit is very similar. The concern about an ethnic, national people not having proper space — this is something you could definitely describe as parallel to the 1930s.”

In addition, Stanley-Becker reported that “The president’s words became even more freighted when he repeated them on Saturday before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, saying, ‘Our country is full, can’t come. I’m sorry.’” (Which sounds like an opinion, not the kind of fact that news reporters are supposed to present in their own voice.) And he supposedly documented the follow-on statement that Mr. Trump’s remarks “drew outrage” by citing precisely one tweeter and Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke.

The author was clever enough to slip into his story the kind of qualifier meant to convey objectivity but skated over far too quickly to alert most readers to their potential to invalidate the entire exercise. For example, Stanley-Becker briefly noted that “Hitler promised ‘living space’ for Germans as the basis of an expansionist project, which historians said distinguishes the Third Reich from today’s xenophobic governments.”

But in case you’re tempted to conclude “That distinction seems pretty darned important,” the author hastily added, in a classic example of insinuation, “Still, experts found parallels” (by which he meant the aforementioned Berkeley professor).

Moreover, let’s not forget the towering double standard Stanley-Becker and similar Trump haters have created. For if the President’s words and (prospective) actions “echo” and “remind” of Nazism, what should be made of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt – under whose administration refugees from the Third Reich itself were turned away from American shores? Does this record reveal racist, anti-semitic, xenophobic Nazi sympathies? Or “echo” them etc.? In fact, Roosevelt’s name isn’t even mentioned in the article, even though he received cables from the ship on which they traveled begging for admission.

Does Roosevelt deserve such descriptions – and condemnation?  If not, why not?And to return to current circumstances, President Trump has clearly been reacting against the large numbers of U.S.-bound migrants falsely seeking asylum (which is awarded to those fleeing persecution) who are seeking better material lives. Roosevelt was denying entry to individuals and families clearly seeking to escape a regime that was obviously targeting them because of their identity.

Because this is a free country, Stanley-Becker, his editors, and his publisher have every right to accuse President Trump of using coded, pro-Nazi or Nazi-sympathizing dog-whistle attacks to advance his immigration policies. But their profession’s ethics prohibit them from portraying these views as unvarnished facts in news columns. And common decency demands they have the courage to make these charges openly, rather than using the weasel words and phrases and similar ploys so typical of character assassination.

Im-Politic: Trump Immigration Policy Caught Red-Handed – Working

Tags

asylum seekers, border security, border wall, ICE, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Mainstream Media, Michael Miller, MS-13, refugees, Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Washington Post

Mirroring the broader, hysterical Never Trump-ism that’s overcome so much of America’s bipartisan political establishment and its grassroots supporters (along with their foreign counterparts), the Mainstream Media just keeps killing it in the Trump Derangement Syndrome Department. And hot on the heels of that Financial Times editorial I posted on yesterday that faulting a Trump nominee for lacking the leadership and intellectual “heft” of someone who should have been tried as a Vietnam War-related criminal comes a Washington Post article handling the President’s immigration policy record with equally clueless – and equally jaw-dropping – incompetence.

According to Post reporter Michael Miller (and his editors), Mr. Trump is way off-base targeting the murderous Hispanic criminal gang MS-13, and similar networks of thugs, to muster support for his restrictionist immigration policies. The reason? “[E]ven as [the President] warned again and again about the dangers posed by MS-13 members and the need for a wall to keep them out, killings connected to the gang were plummeting in many of the areas where MS-13 has been most active.”

In other words, what could be dumber? And/or more cynical?

But in the very same article, Miller told readers that “federal law enforcement officials say MS-13 violence fell last year as a result of intensified nationwide investigations.”

More specifically, the author writes, “While Trump’s attacks on the gang have been relentless, current and former immigration officials, law enforcement agencies and gang experts attributed the decline in MS-13 murders to an aggressive response by local and federal authorities.”

For good measure, accompanying the article is a photo with this caption: “Northern Virginia Gang Task Force officers partner with ICE [the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency] officers to arrest an alleged MS-13 gang member in Manassas in 2017.”

Maybe Miller thinks the President has nothing to do with ICE and other federal authorities?

The author did present convincing evidence that President Trump has hardly been the first chief executive to crack down on MS-13. But he also presented evidence just as convincing that none of the success achieved by these campaigns has lasted. And if you think that the President’s insistence on more physical border barriers has been irrelevant to this crisis, consider this point made by the author: Following evidence of a reduction in gang activity, after 2014, “a surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America helped revitalize MS-13.”

And as made clear by a 2017 Post article linked in Miller’s piece, many of them made their way into the United States because inadequate border security enabled them to sneak in, or because, thanks to permissive federal policies for dealing with arrivals as a whole, “more than 150,000 such teens and children [to that point, two years ago] have been detained at the border, screened and placed in communities through the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).”

And “Follow-up [for these resettlement efforts] is limited, and many youths fail to show up for immigration proceedings, a recent congressional investigation showed. At the same time, there are gaps in local efforts to reach vulnerable children and teens before the gang does.”

These problems could be greatly reduced by (1) better physical barriers that prevent would-be border crossers from setting foot in U.S. territory in the first place, and thereby automatically becoming eligible for the entire range of due-process protections to which citizens and other residents – legal and illegal – are entitled; and (2) related Trump administration proposals that would require refugee applicants and asylum-seekers to stay outside U.S. territory while their claims are examined.

In other words, Miller and his editors clearly thought they were serving up a classic Trump “gotcha” story. But even a minimally careful reading of the piece catches them red-handed in a disgraceful – as well as inept – example of media bias.

Im-Politic: Elites’ Learning Curve on Populism is Still Largely MIA

Tags

American Enterprise Institute, asylum seekers, Brookings Institution, chattering classes, David Brooks, establishment, Europe, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jobs, migrants, migration, Open Borders, Populism, refugees, The Guardian, The New York Times, Trade, Trump, working class

While we’re still (I hope!) in a Thanksgiving frame of mind, let’s not forget to give thanks to America’s ever clueless bipartisan political establishment and chattering classes. As just made glaringly obvious by a Hillary Clinton interview and a New York Times pundit, these utterly intertwined – and indeed incestuous – elites not only mostly remain just as dumbfounded about the developments that have triggered the rise of populism in the Western world as they were the day after Donald Trump became president. They helpfully keep reminding us of how little they’ve learned – and therefore how completely undeserving they are of returning to power.

Clinton’s obliviousness (again) came through loud and clear in a lengthy sit-down earlier this week with the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper. According to the Democratic presidential nominee, whose inept campaign strategy and transparently canned messaging helped key Mr. Trump’s victory, Europe “needs to get a handle on migration.”

That contention’s hard to argue with. But Clinton’s main reason was anything but. According to the former Secretary of State, European leaders’ overly “generous and compassionate approaches” to migration “lit the flame” that have “roiled the body politic” and strengthened the positions of Trump-like populists who have used “immigrants as a political device and as a symbol of government gone wrong, of attacks on one’s heritage, one’s identity, one’s national unity….”

In other words, Clinton apparently has no concerns that a massive influx of migrants – or refugees, or so-called asylum-seekers, or even economically motivated immigrants – could drive down wages for the working class or lower income cohorts of a country’s native-born population, or wind up admitting criminals and terrorists from violence-ridden regions, or swamp a country with newcomers either ignorant or actively contemptuous of its cultural values (e.g., its treatment of women).

She’s simply advocating that establishment politicians do the proverbial – but never well defined “something” – to keep on the fringes counterparts who are mindful of the above, and completely legitimate, concerns. In fact, Clinton’s continuing contempt for such leaders, and their followings, is made clear by her contention that populist voters are defined by

“a psychological as much as political yearning to be told what to do, and where to go, and how to live and have their press basically stifled and so be given one version of reality.

“The whole American system was designed so that you would eliminate the threat from a strong, authoritarian king or other leader and maybe people are just tired of it. They don’t want that much responsibility and freedom. They want to be told what to do and where to go and how to live … and only given one version of reality.”

In other words, “deplorables,” anyone?

If anything, New York Times columnist David Brooks is even brain dead-er on the lessons of 2016. On Thanksgiving day, the paper posted a column of his contending that at least some of America’s establishment has been “chastened” by populism’s successes, and recently has been “working together across ideological lines” to “build the bipartisan governing coalitions” that “pay attention to actual Americans and actual solutions” to the problems that have so divided the nation.

One of his prime examples? A joint effort by the establishment liberal Brookings Institution and the establishment conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to develop policies aimed at “Restoring Opportunity for the Working Class.”

On the one hand, it’s good to see that Brookings and AEI aren’t simply dismissing American populism’s main political base as racists and xenophobes. Even better: The report they’ve just issued recognizes job and income loss resulting from offshoring-friendly trade deals and other wrongheaded globalization-related policies as major sources of working Americans’ economic decline and political anger. And the recommendations for trade policy fixes are pretty good – even including an endorsement of unilateral U.S. tariffs in certain situations. In fact, combining these ideas with many of the more purely domestic policy proposals in the study could make a real difference.

On the other hand, the study’s authors decided to ignore the impacts of Open Borders-friendly immigration policies, because they regard “the perception that immigration is responsible for what ails the working class” as “mistaken.”

And some skepticism is warranted on the trade front as well. After all, experts from both think tanks have been among the strongest critics of Trump administration trade policies – no doubt because so many of their donors are businesses that profit from the trade status status quo, and (in Brookings’ case), many of the very foreign governments in the same category.

But what I found especially revealing was Brooks’ description of the report. It ignored the trade recommendations completely and zeroed in on the measures that, unless accompanied by trade and/or immigration policy overhauls (at least), would wind up as an approach that essentially substitutes various forms of welfare for work: “wage subsidies, improved parental leave, work requirements for some federal benefits, child care tax credits.”

And by the way, of course Brooks endorses the study’s calls for more government aid for education that reduces the current emphasis on sending all young Americans to four-year colleges and increases the emphasis on “career education and training.” That’s fine except that there’s little point to vocational type training if family wage jobs keep fleeing overseas or becoming ever lower-wage jobs because immigrants keep supercharging the labor supply.

Nor have any of the education boosters ever responded to two related points I made in my globalization book, The Race to the Bottom: First, people all over the world as just as capable of being retrained and reeducated as Americans; and second, governments all around the world know this, especially in countries with such immense labor surpluses that they’ll long be able to under-sell American workers.

Brooks closes his article by wondering whether the United States contains “enough chastened members of establishments, who have governing experience, who acknowledge past mistakes, who take the time to reconnect with the country and apply their expertise in new ways” to lead the nation successfully. The Brookings-AEI report provides some grounds for optimism. Unlike Hillary Clinton and Brooks himself.

Im-Politic: Caravans and Open Borders Grandstanding

Tags

asylum seekers, caravans, Central America, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, migrants, refugees, Trump

By now it’s become an article of faith among President Trump’s critics that his stated determination to prevent the caravans of Central American migrants from entering the United States represents a shameful, and possibly racist, break with America’s longstanding tradition of providing haven for victims of poverty, persecution, and numerous other hardships and outrages that remain all too common abroad.

In other words, in striking contrast to the Statue of Liberty’s message of welcome for the world’s “tired…poor…[and] huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Mr. Trump and his supporters are cruelly telling the Central Americans to return to their destitute and violence-wracked countries.

So what do the critics believe should be done instead? Specifics are often lacking, but let’s do a thought experiment and try to figure out how a policy that literally doesn’t “turn its back” on downtrodden foreign populations would like. That is, let’s try to imagine the gist of what a President Hillary Clinton would say about the caravans if she took seriously claims that the Trump approach to the problem is unforgivably callous and wrongheaded – claims that she’s made clear she agrees with via her strong condemnation of Trump administration policies that have resulted in frequent separation of migrant children from their parents:

“My fellow Americans:

“As you have seen in many news reports, several so-called caravans of Central Americans are heading north, through Mexico, filled with men, women, and children hoping to make new lives in the United States.

“Many politicians and news organizations in conservative and Republican ranks, along with out-and-out right-wing extremists, have portrayed this caravans as an impending ‘invasion’ of our country. They’ve urged my administration to deal with this ‘national security emergency’ by taking all necessary steps to turn the migrants back – including stationing the American military at the border.

“I come before you tonight to make clear that I will strongly reject such measures. They would represent a violation of our solemn international treaty obligations. They would amount to a betrayal of America’s long, proud history of welcoming immiserated populations from all corners of the world. And they would ignore simple human decency. In fact, some who urge a hard line toward the migrants are clearly playing on longstanding dark, but completely unjustifiable, fears about foreigners and even about racial and ethnic minorities.

“So I will not send regular military or even national guards units to the border. I will not beef up Border Patrol deployments. And I certainly will not begin building a Wall – as my chief opponent in the last election so foolishly and crudely recommended.

“Nor will I outsource my migrants policy to Mexico, or to the migrants’ home country governments. For none of these countries can guarantee the migrants the safety from crime and violence and the escape from poverty that they, like all members of the human family, deserve.

“In fact, I’m issuing an Executive Order that explicitly establishes gang and domestic violence as valid reasons for granting asylum. For aren’t these dangers just as appalling and inexcusable as the religious, political, and other forms of persecution to which grants of asylum have historically been restricted? Further, this new directive will abolish the artificial distinction between refugees from these horrors and refugees from joblessness, threadbare wages, hunger, homelessness, and other forms of economic privation. For if you’re being victimized for your political leanings or religion or nationality, you’re almost surely trapped in grinding, dehumanizing poverty as well.

“Of course, I’ll be directing that much more of the Justice Department’s budget be allotted to end the shortage of immigration judges that has produced immense backlogs in our immigration courts. Yet until the shortage ends, I will also mandate the construction of high quality accommodations for asylum applicants awaiting a hearing, including first-rate schooling for their children. And needless to say, applicants will enjoy the full come-and-go freedom to and from these facilities. Otherwise, we’d be putting them in cages, however gilded.

“Moreover, I will immediately put into effect my campaign promise to increase five-fold America’s admissions of refugees from Syria’s horrendous civil war. In fact, I apologize to these refugees for waiting so long to address their plight.

“And finally, because too many recent arrivals – from Central America and elsewhere – continue living precariously in the shadows, I will restrict the enforcement of domestic immigration law to finding and deporting dangerous criminals. For far too long taxpayers – including these many of these Aspiring Americans – have paid far too much money for the hounding of individuals and families whose only illegal behavior has been seeking better lives.

“We Americans need to remember: Except for our native American and native-born African-American populations, practically all of our ancestors came to this country for the exact same reasons motivating the Central Americans and so many others today. The Pilgrims were seeking freedom of religion. The Jamestown settlers were economic migrants. How can we deny caravan members and others like them the same opportunities that our nation has extended to our own forebears?

“The answer, it must be clear, is that we mustn’t and we can’t – if we want to be law-abiding global citizens, if we want to be true to our country’s best traditions, and if we want to be able to look ourselves squarely in the mirror.”

Pretty inspiring, isn’t it? But before you pick up the phone to call your Member of Congress (or the White House) to demand implementation of this agenda right now, ask yourself about the impact of an announcement like this. According to Gallup, as of last year, nearly 150 million people around the world would like to move to the United States. That includes 37 million Latin Americans.

Yet since the situation in Central American has clearly worsened over the last year, along with the crisis in Venezuela, that figure now is surely conservative. Additionally, the Trump administration’s current attitude towards migrants could well be depressing the number who consider migrating to the United States an option worth thinking about even idly. The kind of welcoming position Trump critics seem to want – i.e., one that further and greatly strengthens already powerful magnets that have attracting enormous foreign populations to this country – could well supercharge their ranks.

The lessons of this exercise couldn’t be clearer. If you believe that the United States could easily absorb anything close to this inflow in the near future, go right on lambasting the Trump administration and supporters of its immigration policies as modern day [INSERT YOUR FAVORITE ARCH-VILLAIN FROM HISTORY OR LITERATURE HERE]’s. But if you’re genuinely interested in devising an immigration and migrants and refugee policy that acceptably reflects your version of America’s values but recognizes the inevitable limits on such good intentions, you’ll start grandstanding less and thinking about the who, what, how, why, when, and where more.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: U.S. Trade Policy Deserves Blame for the Caravans

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apparel, asylum seekers, Bangladesh, CAFTA, caravan, Caribbean Basin Initiative, Central America, Central America Free Trade Agreement, China, economic development, El Salvador, globalization, Guatemala, Honduras, immigrants, Immigration, manufacturing, migrants, Multi-Fibre Arrangement, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, Northern Triangle, Trade, Uruguay Round, Vietnam, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Hot on the heels of the current caravan of Central Americans heading through Mexico to the U.S. border, another such procession is gathering in Guatemala. And these two have followed the flood of unaccompanied migrant children from the area that reached the United States in 2014.

I wish I could tell you that there’s a silver bullet for solving the problem – though nothing could be clearer than that these human tides will keep organizing in even greater numbers if Washington follows the general advice of the Open Borders lobby to view all of the caravan-ers as legitimate asylum-seekers entitled to full due process once they reach the border and request this status. Upon which time current procedures call for recording their claims and then releasing them based on the ludicrous assumption that they’ll report back to immigration court on the appointed date and risk being rejected and thus deported.

What I can tell you is that this crisis has been greatly aggravated by an unforgivably short-sighted U.S. trade policy strategy that emerged in the 1990s. It consisted of indiscriminately liberalizing trade with developing countries, and thereby ignoring the case for targeting trade diplomacy to ensure that countries and regions of greatest importance to the United States receive the lion’s share of the benefits. And the prime victims of this strategic failure – which mainly reflected the determination of offshoring multinational manufacturers and Big Box retailers to gain maximum flexibility to source imported inputs and final products – were the poorer countries of the Western Hemisphere. That group of course includes Mexico and the Central American countries that have sent so many migrants northward.

Interestingly, Central America and the Caribbean countries were placed prominently in line to receive significant shares of the vast U.S. market by a Reagan-era initiative aimed mainly at stemming the spread of left-wing revolutionary forces in the region. But scant years later, any hopes generated by this strategy for fostering more prosperity in these impoverished regions and strengthening the appeal of pro-Western leaders were kneecapped by two big decisions.

The first was the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993. The second was the phase out of U.S. and other developed countries’ quotas on apparel imports that was approved the following year as part of the Uruguay Round global agreement that reduced various trade barriers worldwide and created the World Trade Organization (WTO). And the third was the Clinton administration’s subsequent rush to liberalize trade with a host of low-income countries outside the Western Hemisphere.

In principle NAFTA’s tight focus on Mexico was justifiable given Mexico’s size, position as a U.S. neighbor, and history of political, economic, and social policy failure that seemed to be reaching a crisis point. But economic growth and employment could still have been greatly lifted in Mexico and Central American (along with the Caribbean countries) had American trade liberalization stopped or at least paused there.

Yet the quota phaseout forbade Washington from incorporating any strategic or non-economic considerations into apparel trade policy, whether conditions urgently required them or not.  As a result, it ensured that the benefits of freer trade would be greatly watered down (and many garnered by China and the rest of developing Asia in particular), and insult was added to injury by new liberalization deals reached or renewed, or decisions made, regarding Vietnam, sub-Saharan Africa, Jordan, most of developing Asia (in the form of a deal on information technology products, including labor-intensive consumer electronics), and China. Largely as a result, the poorer countries of the Western Hemisphere were left in the dust in the business models of the multinationals and the big retailers.

Nowhere does the opportunity lost by Mexico and Central America come through more clearly than in the apparel trade figures. This sector is almost always the first utilized by developing countries to begin their industrialization and modernization drives mainly because its own labor intensivity means that capital and technology requirements are pretty modest, the relevant skills can be taught fairly easily, and its job-creation promise is substantial.

Here are the figures for apparel imports from Mexico, the three “Northern Triangle” Central American countries, China, and two other current Asian textile giants (Bangladesh and Vietnam) for four key years. Next to them will be the figure for the share of American apparel consumption (market share) won at that point by each. We start with 1997 because that’s the year when the U.S. government began adopting its current dominant system for slicing and dicing trade and manufacturing data – which enables us to see statistics that are apples-to-apples. The second year is 2001 – the year China’s was admitted into the WTO – and thus gained substantial immunity from American laws aimed at curbing predatory trade practices. The third year is 2006 – when Congress approved a Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) negotiate by George W. Bush’s administration. And the fourth year is last year – the latest for which we have full-year numbers.

1997

Mexico:                       $5.317b                    11.29 percent 

El Salvador:                 $1.052b                     2.18 percent

Guatemala:                  $0.973b                     2.07 percent

Honduras:                    $1.689b                     3.59 percent

China:                          $7.279b                   15.46 percent

Bangladesh:                 $1.442b                      3.06 percent

Vietnam:                      $0.026b                      0.06 percent

2001:

Mexico:                       $8.112b                     12.99 percent 

El Salvador:                 $1.634b                      2.62 percent

Guatemala:                  $1.630b                       2.61 percent

Honduras:                    $2.438b                       3.91 percent

China:                          $8.597b                     13.47 percent

Bangladesh:                 $2.101b                      3.37 percent

Vietnam:                      $0.048b                       0.08 percent

2006:

Mexico:                       $5.514b                       7.16 percent 

El Salvador:                 $1.408b                      1.83 percent

Guatemala:                  $1.685b                      2.19 percent

Honduras:                    $2.519b                      3.27 percent

China:                        $22.405b                    22.09 percent

Bangladesh:                 $2.915b                       3.79 percent

Vietnam:                      $3.226b                       4.19 percent

2017:

Mexico:                       $3.806b                       4.52 percent 

El Salvador:                 $1.920b                       2.28 percent

Guatemala:                  $1.371b                       1.63 percent

Honduras:                    $2.522b                       3.00 percent

China:                        $29.322b                     34.85 percent

Bangladesh:                $5.046b                       6.00 percent

Vietnam:                    $11.613b                     13.80 percent

The big takeaway? Even during the decade after the Central America free trade deal was signed, the three Northern Triangle countries actually saw their share of the U.S. apparel market stagnate or actually shrink. Mexico’s share has been cut by about almost 60 percent. And the business won by China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam has exploded – since 2001 for China, and since 2006 for the two other Asians. Again, the year that the free trade deal that was supposed to benefit El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras was inked.

With Mexico, there are of course mitigating factors. Chiefly, although its apparel competitiveness in the U.S. market is way down, its competitiveness in higher value automotive manufacturing in particular is way up. But millions of poor Mexicans still could have benefited from apparel employment, and no such progress has been made in Central America – which is partly understandable since incomes are even lower, and governments and other institutions needed for economic development are so much weaker.

Apparel should have been the great hope for these populations, but that sector’s potential for expanding production (which of course needs to be export-oriented since these countries’ domestic markets are tiny) and employment has been virtually choked off. Just as important, the prospect that apparel wages in the Northern Triangle might rise adequately has been limited, too – since pay throughout developing East and South Asia (even in China, according to the chart below) remains so much lower.

American trade policy could have lent a big helping hand to Central America had it adopted a strategically sensible set of priorities. But it failed to learn a fundamental lesson of strategy: When everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. You can see the victims of this failure in the flow of human misery heading up from the Northern Triangle.