Im-Politic: More Mainstream Media MS-13 – and Illegal Alien Crime – Double Standards

Tags

Hannah Dreier, illegal alien crime, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Long Island, Mainstream Media, MS-13, ProPublica, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Trump

Anyone still doubting that the Mainstream Media has turned into a brazen propaganda machine for Open Borders-friendly immigration policies, should ask themselves this: Why did The New York Times recently devoted a humongous article in its Sunday magazine to mistakes made by law enforcement on Long Island and elsewhere in the fight against Hispanic gangs like MS-13 – whose ranks are filled with illegal aliens – yet completely ignore stabbings by such gang members in the same Long Island community shortly after the magazine investigation appeared?`

The magazine article, by Hannah Dreier of “the independent nonprofit investigative-journalism organization” ProPublica was clearly viewed as more than just another freelance piece by the publication’s editors. As they state, it was “a collaboration” between the two organizations. Along with its length, this relationship makes clear that The Times viewed the subject as an unusually high priority.

In the December 27 article, Dreier does a good job – along with whatever assistance the newspaper provided her – of making a case that the intensified anti-MS-13 drive on Long Island and elsewhere in the country has caught up innocents. She also makes a reasonable case that the problem is rooted in the Trump administration’s dissatisfaction with its predecessors’ approach to the problem which, in her words, takes “time and on-the-ground work. Immigration agents spend months mapping out networks and gathering evidence using informants and wiretaps.”

Less convincing is her clear implication that this approach was remotely satisfactory, especially in light of her implicit acknowledgment that, while this more patient, more careful strategy was being pursued, MS-13 thugs on Long Island had

“periodically taken part in brutal killings. In 2003, in Central Islip, members beat and stabbed to death a young man who they thought was a rival and stuffed his body in a drain pipe. Also in Central Islip, the gang shot a toddler and his mother in 2010 and left their bodies in a patch of woods.

“In the last few years, Long Island’s MS-13 members and victims have gotten younger. In 2016, MS-13 gang members murdered five Latino Brentwood High students with bats and machetes. In 2017, the gang killed three more local Latino students and left their macheted bodies in a park in Central Islip. Some two dozen young men from Brentwood and Central Islip were eventually charged with the murders. A few were as young as 16.”

Also interesting: The author writes that “Many [Immigration and Customs Enforcement – ICE] agents wanted to arrest and deport suspected MS-13 members under President Obama. But they were constrained by an Obama-administration policy that required ICE agents to focus on undocumented immigrants who had committed serious crimes.” Meaning that Mr. Obama didn’t consider the above killings “serious crimes”? Just wow.

Indeed, writes Dreier, “President Trump took office at the peak of this local wave of violence” – hence his decision “that he was making the gang a federal law-enforcement priority.” The dragnet created by the Trump Justice Department and local law enforcement on Long Island (and in other communities that participated in such programs) has no doubt erred in instances. But there’s also no doubt that the old methods were failing.

In other words, I wish that Dreier (and her Times collaborators) had presented a much more balanced view of the situation and the results of the two strategies, but let’s grant that in a single article – even one as long as this one – has every right to maintain an overall emphasis.

It’s the follow-up – or, more accurately, its complete absence – that puts The Times in such a bad light. Specifically, on January 9 – only some two weeks after this magazine article’s appearance – two teenagers from one of the Long Island high schools on which Dreier focused were stabbed near a local fast food restaurant. The following day, the Suffolk County (Long Island) District Attorney charged that the three suspects arrested were MS-13 members, and all were illegal aliens. They all attended that same high school. For good measure, two of the accused assailants had been detained by ICE, which hoped to deport them, but were ordered released by federal judges.

Given the lengthy coverage The Times had just devoted to law enforcement mistakes, and given that Long Island is part of the paper’s home base, you’d think that a write-up of this incident would have been judged reasonably big news. Or any kind of news. But as of this morning – a week after the stabbings – not a single word about them had appeared in The Times.

Even stranger: In the weeks before Dreier’s lengthy article was published, the paper’s local coverage had run several articles on local MS-13 crimes. Its national staff has looked into the gang and its atrocities, too, but nothing as detailed as the Dreier “mistakes” piece has appeared. It’s in these national pieces, of course, that policy and policy debates are likeliest to be mentioned, and most such coverage stressed either that MS-13 isn’t such a big deal (e.g., here) or that its presence has little to do with illegal immigration and is being used by the President as a political prop (e.g., here), or that his descriptions of the Democrats’ views of the gang are misleading (e.g., here), that the president’s claims of progress versus its predation are exaggerated (e.g., here). And by now, it should come as no surprise that The Times has never published any item about victims of crime by illegal aliens, or about the failure of the pre-Trump programs in preventing such offenses, that’s been nearly as long as Dreier’s opus.  (Here‘s the only recent example of reporting on the subject.) 

Former Times news chief Jill Abramson is coming out with a book claiming, among other things, that the paper’s news pages have become “unmistakably anti-Trump.” The magazine’s Dreier article, and its other MS-13 coverage – and non-coverage – sure looks like a leading example.

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Im-Politic: September 11 Forgotten at Ground Zero

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Chanel Foundation, Coca Cola, G20, Ground Zero, Group of 20, Im-Politic, International Olympic Committee, Jamal Khashoggi, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Saudi Arabia, September 11, terrorism, World Trade Center

On the back of the older of our two family cars is a faded bumper sticker declaring “9-11. We Will Never Forget.” I wish I had a spare that I could send to the folks running the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, along with the Chanel Foundation, the International Olympic Committee, the Coca Cola Co., and other businesses and organizations like them. Because the Port Authority – a partnership involving the two states mentioned plus the federal government that operates major transportation assets in the New York metropolitan area – and the others just mentioned clearly have forgotten.

My evidence for this charge? Not two decades after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Port Authority, which developed the World Trade Center (WTC) site that stands in the shadow of the September 11 memorial, installed an exhibit at the Center an art exhibit that showcases the flag of Saudi Arabia – the home country of 15 of the 19 September 11 aircraft hijackers, which is ruled by a monarchy widely accused of (and in fact sued by the families of many September 11 victims for) harboring the terrorist forces responsible for the attacks. In other words, the a Saudi flag image is all but flying above Ground Zero. 

The exhibit, which opened last month, was funded by the Chanel Foundation, the Olympic Committee, and Coke. Although there’s no evidence that these sponsors had any role in the decision to locate the art at the WTC, since money talks, surely they could have prevented this outrage.

To be sure, Saudi Arabia’s is not the only flag displayed. The work consists of candy-shaped sculptures of the flags of all the countries comprising the Group of 20 (G20) – a loose network of the world’s twenty largest economies, which meets periodically to discuss various global issues. The French artist who created the sculptures didn’t mean to single out the Saudis as paragons of virtue, either. And that certainly wasn’t the (stated, at least) intent of the Port Authority, which called installing the work a part of its “continuing efforts to transform the World Trade Center site into a dynamic space in Lower Manhattan….”

Yet even leaving aside the appropriateness of prominently displaying a portrayal of the Saudi flag virtually on the very spot where the Twin Towers stood, the sculptures’ ostensibly intended message is pretty ditzy, or pretty cynical, depending on your standpoint. The flags come in the shape of wrappers around pieces of candy. The sculptor’s objective for this format (though not for placing it at the WTC site, which wasn’t his decision) was “to celebrate mankind on an international level and pay tribute to People of the entire world.” That’s pretty kumbaya-y, especially considering that G20 meetings are combinations of cold-blooded exercises in advancing national interests and multinational business interests (mainly in the case of the pre-Trump United States), with periodic rhetorical lip service to and occasional instances of international cooperation.

But hey, he’s an artist. Coca Cola and the like surely understand the self-interested aims that are served by portraying such arrangements and their workings as high minded (indeed sugar-sweet) efforts to promote international friendship and harmony.

Even so, this kind of globalist propaganda is still much less offensive per se than planting a facsimile of the Saudi flag so close to the scene of an atrocity committed by adherents of the kinds of jihadist movements strongly supported by Saudi leaders. Moreover, it’s especially troubling given the evidence that this same regime killed dissident Saudi journalist (and legal U.S. resident) Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey – an action that ignited much higher profile and sustained domestic and worldwide condemnation. So it’s not as if a lot of post-September 11 reform has taken place.

Like I said, the “Never Forget” bumper sticker on my car is pretty faded by now – and the Port Authority’s decision has prompted me to get a replacement. In fact, I think I’ll make it three (to go onto our second car). Moreover, I am going to send the other to the Port Authority. I hope all RealityChek readers will consider doing the same.

Im-Politic: So Trump Voters are Xenophobes and Racists on Immigration?

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assimilation, Clinton, English, Grinnell College, identity politics, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, nativism, racism, Trump, xenophobia

Charges that supporters of more restrictive immigration policies are racists and xenophobes and all- around bigots are so widespread that I don’t even see the need to document this claim with links. That’s why a recent poll from Grinnell (Iowa) College is so fascinating and important. It’s full of evidence showing how overwhelming false these allegations are.

Just as important: The survey reveals strong and bipartisan support for the kinds of assimilationist approaches to newcomers that are emphatically rejected by diversity- and identity politics-obsessed leaders of the Democratic party and especially its progressive wing – although it also finds that Left-of-center backing for these views lags the national totals.

Much of this evidence comes from respondents’ views on “what it mean to be a ‘real American’.” The survey, which was taken last November (after the midterm elections) presented 12 possible answers (which were not mutually exclusive). According to Grinnell faculty who analyzed the results, agreeing with the following propositions revealed “narrow” and “restrictive” beliefs about national identity:

”To have been born in America”

“To have lived in America most of one’s life”

“To be able to speak English”

“To be a Christian”

I wouldn’t quarrel with this characterization, with the exception of English ability. How, after all, can anyone meaningfully participate in American life in any dimension without speaking the country’s dominant language?

The rest of the propositions were described by the pollsters as more values-based – and more praiseworthy.

“To respect America’s political institutions and laws”

“To accept people of different racial backgrounds”

“To accept people of different religious backgrounds”

“To believe in getting ahead by one’s own hard work”

“To believe in treating people equally”

“To support the U.S. Constitution”

“To take personal responsibility for one’s actions”

“To believe that democracy is the best form of government”

No quarrel here, either – with one major exception I’ll get to below.

According to the prevailing narrative, Trump voters should strongly support the restrictive views of American identity (i.e., those most closely associated with prejudice), and supporters of his 2016 presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, should emphatically reject them. Only that’s not what the Grinnell survey shows at all. Let’s zero in on the most clearly nativist and bigoted possible responses.

It turns out that only 33 percent of Trump 2016 voters agreed that being native-born is “very important to being a real American,” five percent view it as “fairly important” and 20 percent as “just somewhat important.” Those are higher percentages than for the Clinton voters. But 39 percent of this group regarded this criterion as being at least “just somewhat important” to “real American-ness” – including 20 percent who saw it as “very important.”

These results don’t easily jibe with the mainstream picture of most Trump voters chomping on the bit to keep out all foreigners, and the gap separating them from Clinton voters is anything but yawning. Indeed, 41 percent of Trump voters considered native-born status as “not important” (versus 61 percent of Clinton voters).

The Christian criterion generated answers more consistent with the depiction of Trump voters as prejudiced – 51 percent believed it had any importance. But only 32 percent considered it “very important,” while 43 percent called it “not important.” A quarter of Clinton voters ascribed at least some importance to a Christian identity, including 16 percent of responses in the “very important” category. Sixty nine percent dismissed it as having no importance. And the results for having lived “in America most of one’s life” generated similar numbers among both groups.

But there’s another category that can be carved out of the list of Grinnell criteria – standards supportive of the idea that newcomers need to be adequately assimilated into the nation’s culture before they can be considered “real Americans” – and in particular, need to buy into the country’s distinctive founding ideals.

It’s not an idea that dovetails terribly well with either the kind of nativism that the Grinnell researchers deplore, or with the diversity worship of the contemporary Left. But it’s hard to understand how any country can succeed without the kind of ideological and related values consensus sought by assimilation. P.S.: The imperative of this goal has been recognized and touted not only by many of the Founding Fathers, but by the early 20^th century titans of the original progressive movement.

In that vein, it’s encouraging that overwhelming majorities (more than three-quarters in all instances) of both Trump and Clinton voters agree that accepting people of different racial and religious backgrounds is “very important” to being a real American. (And yes, it’s curious that Trump voters’ score on the latter doesn’t jibe well with their responses on the Christian criterion.) Even stronger, across-the-board support was generated by the notion that “treating people equally” is crucial to real American identity.

It’s more encouraging still, if you believe in assimilation, that healthy majorities of all the Grinnell respondents concurred on the importance, for real Americans, of respecting America’s political institutions and laws, supporting the Constitution, and believing in the importance of hard work and taking responsibility for one’s actions.

But the partisan split characterizing these responses showed that Clinton voters’ support for these assimilationist values – except regarding the importance of personal responsibility – was notably weaker than the national results.

Specifically, only 68 percent of Clinton voters answered that it’s “very important” to American identity to respect those American political institutions and laws; only 55 percent put similar stock in hard work; and only 73 percent valued supporting the Constitution this highly.

Much lower still were those shares of Clinton voters who awarded “very important” status to the assimilationist values of English-speaking ability and believing that “democracy is the best form of govenrment” – at 26 percent and 52 percent. But I’ve placed these answers in a category of their own because, although the Trump voters’ levels of agreement were much higher (68 and 69 percent, respectively), they fell somewhat short of their endorsement levels of the other assimilationist positions.

President Trump often says (along with many others), “If you don’t have borders, then you don’t have a country.” I’d make the same claim for assimilation and the common ideological values it requires (again, including a working knowledge of English). According to this survey, although Ms. Clinton’s voters don’t seem nearly so sure, Mr. Trump’s voters strongly agree. And thumping majorities of the latter aren’t racists or xenophobes. That’s why their views on immigration strike me as by far the best guides to national immigration policy – and why I don’t see how any thinking adults could disagree.

Im-Politic: Another Take on the Shutdown/Border Wall Dispute

Tags

2018 elections, 2020 elections, border security, border wall, Democrats, government shutdown, Im-Politic, Immigration, Trump

It’s obviously not such a Happy New Year for many federal government employees, with the current partial shutdown continuing and no end immediately in sight. What continues to puzzle me is why the Democrats have taken such a hard line – that is, if their substantive and political beliefs about the Border Wall whose funding is at the heart of the dispute are to be taken seriously.

On substance, the Democrats insist on portraying the Wall as at best a grossly inefficient way to improve border security – and certainly much less effective than the “enhanced fencing, technology, drones, satellites, lighting, sensors, cell phone towers” they insist are “the things the experts have clearly indicated would improve our border security.”

Politically, the Democrats say they’re confident that the Wall is unpopular – as made clear by their new proposal to end the impasse. The plan would fully fund most federal agencies through the upcoming September end of the current fiscal year. But it would only the extend through the middle of next month the current appropriation for the Department of Homeland Security (the lead agency on border security) minus any Wall funding.

Although the Democrats’ plan would include money for “fencing,” their strategy clearly assumes that the public values ending at least this episode of Washington dysfunction much more highly than building President Trump’s Wall. Moreover, most polls seem to bear out this analysis. (See in particular here.)  

But it’s at least arguable that if the Democrats do indeed view the Wall as “a 5th century solution to a 21st century problem”, and a political loser to boot, they should approve Mr. Trump’s full $5 billion request. After all, a Wall that won’t work by definition won’t present significant obstacles to greater flows of migrants with whose plight the Democrats ardently sympathize. They could depict themselves as the champions of compromise and reason who were willing to go the extra mile to work with an extremist president in the interests of restoring at least minimal normality to American public life. And the cost to taxpayers would be meager (in federal budget terms).

The Democrats’ acceptance of the President’s proposal would indeed give Mr. Trump a political victory of sorts by enabling him to proclaim that he’s kept a campaign promise. But this victory would only resonate with his base – which by itself isn’t nearly big enough to reelect him.

In this vein, even better for the Democrats: They’re surely confident that time is on their side. First, even if Wall installation began tomorrow, it couldn’t possibly deliver on its restrictionist promise for many months – or, crucially, by the time presidential campaign 2020 is in full swing. So the Democrats’ would have many months’ worth of opportunities to claim somewhat credibly that the Wall is indeed a failure.

Second, they show every sign of believing that in the 2020 elections they’ll regain the political power they’ll need to scrap this project. That’s undoubtedly why so many in the party have expressed an interest in running for president. And the Democrats’ chances of taking control of the Senate, and thus of the entire Congress, look promising, as well – as they’re defending many fewer seats than the Republicans.

All of which brings up some alternative explanations for the Democrats’ shutdown strategy. For example, maybe they’re (and in particular, their genuinely Open Borders-infatuated leaders) are actually afraid that a Wall (in tandem of course with other security measures) will work, at least once it’s finally in place. Maybe they’re so strongly opposed to more physical barriers because these structures will reduce the numbers of migrants who manage to set foot on American soil, and thereby become eligible to be handled by a loophole-filled immigration law and policy framework that ensures many of them will be released into American society – and ultimately freed to add to pressure in key (Democratic) states for ever wider voting rights.

And maybe they’re not so confident about their 2020 chances either for the White House and in the Senate. Maybe they’re consequently counting on showdowns like that over the Wall to bait the President into still more of the kind of harsh-sounding tweets, and especially threats, that unmistakably turn off many 2016 Trump supporters outside his hard core – and who exhibited buyers’ remorse in last year’s midterms. Ditto for supporters of many of their own midterms victors – centrist politicians who didn’t promise to shut down ICE (the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency), and who appear truly concerned with border security.

Maybe the Democrats are simply playing for time and hoping that a prolonged shutdown and./or devastating findings from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation will combine to destroy Mr. Trump’s reelection chances whatever chaos emerges at the Border from a continuing failure to enhance security – and even after the government is reopened. And maybe it’s some combination of the above (since a single cause rarely explains major political, social, cultural, or historical developments).

None of these possibilities mean that the Democrats’ shutdown strategy per se will fail. Indeed, the President has already cut his funding request significantly, and shown flexibility on the ludicrously crucial phrasing (“wall,” “fence,” “barrier”) aspects of the issue. But I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if, because of the above analysis, and particularly of an even greater migrant flood it might bring, a resulting Democratic victory turned out to be Pyrrhic.

Im-Politic: ‘Tis the Season – for Immigration Double Standards

Tags

Associated Press, Chuck Schumer, CNN, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mainstream Media. Nancy Pelosi, migrants, Open Borders, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Trump

All reasonable participants in the often angry national debate about American immigration policy surely agree that the deaths of migrant children in U.S. custody and the killing of a police officer at the hands of an illegal alien are comparably tragic. Why, then, have the Open Borders supporters treated them like night and day, focusing intently on the former and literally ignoring the latter? And why has President Trump so needlessly fed his own critics’ charges of cruelty, racism, and xenophobia on immigration policy with some double standards-setting of his own on these matters?

The discrepancy on the part of Open Borders advocates has been especially dramatic when it comes to Congress’ leading Democrats – who will assume control of the House of Representatives in January. House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, and other major figures in the party (including its likely presidential candidates) have uniformly expressed outrage at the deaths this month of two Guatemalan children held by the U.S. immigration authorities after being brought to the border by parents on long, arduous trips from their home country.  (See, e.g., here and here.)

But the early morning December 26 killing of a Newman, California police officer (and an immigrant himself) by a suspect identified as an illegal alien by local law enforcement officials has elicited no response at all – even from Pelosi, who represents a California district.

The same pattern marks the coverage of these incidents by the Mainstream Media, which has made its Open Borders sympathies abundantly clear in recent years. For example, the Washington Post this morning was still highlighting on its front page the controversy over the children’s deaths. But the police officer’s death didn’t even make the print edition. The killing was mentioned on the paper’s website three times yesterday and today. But all three items were taken from the wire services, meaning that the Post hasn’t as of now assigned one of its own reporters to investigate.  (See, e.g., here.)

The New York Times did cover the policeman’s killing with one of its own correspondents – and ran the story on page 15 of the news section today. But an article on the children’s deaths, which are no longer breaking news, received front page coverage.

Visit the website of the Associated Press, the world’s largest bona fide news agency, and you’ll see an article on the most recent Guatemalan child’s death right near the top of the home page. But you need to scroll way down to find a piece on the police officer’s killing.

CNN also featured a follow up on the most recent child death prominently on its home page. But its coverage of the police killing doesn’t appear anywhere. You need to look for it with the search engine.

In my view, President Trump has dropped the ball here as well. It’s true that his administration has expressed regret over both migrant children’s deaths, is investigating these events, and seeking ways to handle the new flood of migrants more effectively. It’s also true that the administration has blamed the children’s parents in part for putting them in dangerous situations to begin with – and I agree. I also fully support the administration’s insistence that the U.S. government’s responsibilities to its own citizens are qualititatively different – meaning greater – than to citizens of other countries.

But although Mr. Trump has tweeted about the shooting (without condolences for his family or his colleagues) he’s made no comment at all about the children’s deaths. And just as the Open Borders folks exhibited a major blind spot in failing to acknowledge the special shame surrounding the death of a public official who risked his life every day on behalf of others by an individual who commonsense immigration policies likely would have kept out of this country, the President has exhibited a blind spot in failing to acknowledge the special sorrow surrounding the death of a minor who bore no responsibility for his circumstances. And he could so easily have done expressed such sentiments without conceding a single inch of ground in his campaign for the most stringent border security regime.

Im-Politic: Has a Major U.S. Economist Secretly Been in China’s Pocket?

Tags

China, donors, economists, globalization, Huawei, Im-Politic, Isaac Stone Fish, Jeffrey D. Sachs, national security, Project Syndicate, technology, telecommunications, think tanks, trade war, Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Washington Post

I’ve always been skeptical of claims that money explains everything about where prominent folks stand on policy debates. Sure, money talks loudly, and that’s why, for example, I’ve so consistently reported on how leading U.S. think tanks are lavishly funded by corporate interests (e.g., here) and even by foreign governments (e,g, here) with huge stakes in matters on which they regularly comment, such as trade and globalization issues.

But I’ve believed that for the most part, their positions are also at least partly sincerely held – reflecting either an inability even to question what they’ve learned in school, or the power of group-think in their professional and social circles (inside the Washington, D.C. Beltway in particular these realms tend to overlap substantially), their honest convictions, and typically some combination of the above.

I still refuse automatically to write off analysts who disagree with me as simple donors’ mouthpieces, but a recent incident has reminded me that – in the words of a close long-time friend – when seeking to understand political behavior, the most cynical explanation is rarely wrong.

The story begins with an article on the Project Syndicate website – a sort of digital global op-ed page (which, to be sure, overwhelmingly publishes writers with globalist/establishment viewpoints) – by economist Jeffrey D. Sachs.

Sachs is a world-renowned figure in his field, but as with many of his colleagues, seems to assume that mastery of conventional economic concepts translates into expertise on all other subjects. (Google “Krugman, Paul” for perhaps the leading example of this phenomenon.) So I wasn’t entirely surprised to see him writing on the recent American arrest, on sanctions-busting charges, of a senior executive from the Chinese telecommunications entity Huawei – even though he has no special credentials on China, or technology, or national security.

I was very surprised by the nature of Sachs’ attack on the U.S. action, which ran on December 11. Most criticisms of the arrest focused on whether it would escalate the U.S.-China trade war – whether because it signaled a more aggressive turn in Washington’s approach, or because it would trigger Chinese retaliation – or whether the United States ultimately could curb China’s technological development, or whether the American tech industry could continue excelling after a cutoff of its access to Chinese markets or parts and components.

But according to Sachs, the Huawei arrest mattered most because it showed that “The Trump administration, not Huawei or China, is today’s greatest threat to the international rule of law, and therefore to global peace.” That’s pretty out there given that Huawei’s largest shareholder is a Chinese telecommunications company owned outright by the Chinese state, that its close relationship with Beijing has caused governments the world over to limit its presence in their markets for national security reasons, and that the Chinese regime itself has been challenging international law, and in turn peace and security, in the South China Sea region.

Still, I was inclined to write off Sachs’ diatribe as yet another example of Trump Derangement Syndrome, or the outgrowth of idolatry of the globalization status quo fanatical enough to fuel (sincere) outrage at any development threatening to change it – e.g., President Trump’s decision to confront China’s trade predation.

As a result, I was inclined to dismiss as off-base the reaction of one of my Twitter followers to Sachs’ article: “I guess we know who is signing Jeffrey Sachs’ paycheck these days.”

So imagine my surprise when, on December 12, Washington Post columnist Isaac Stone Fish reported that Sachs had written the forward to a big report put out by Huawei in November.

Nothing necessarily improper there. Academics engage in such activities all the time. And if Sachs genuinely believes that an entity that clearly is an arm of the repressive Chinese government deserved “kudos” for “producing… a timely and clear roadmap to help governments, businesses and civil society [emphasis added] to create digital nations on the path to sustainable development,” well that’s his business.

What is massively improper has been Sachs’ reactions to Fish’s questions about Sachs’ relationship with Huawei in light of his glowing praise of the entity both in the report and in his Project Syndicate piece: “Did Huawei pay you for that [the forward]? If so, don’t you think you should disclose that?”

Rather than respond to Fish, Sachs stonewalled – in fact, going so far as to delete his Twitter account.

In the process, he not only made it difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has something to hide when it comes to Huawei. He’s also unavoidably created shadows over two respected organizations with which he’s been closely affiliated: Columbia University’s Earth Institute (which he headed between 2002 and 2016), and that Institute’s Center for Sustainable Development (which he heads now).

I’ve been looking for evidence of Huawei or other Chinese funding for these organizations, and haven’t found any yet. But that doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been any (perhaps funneled through third parties?), and that it hasn’t colored their work. Because like I said, when seeking to understand political behavior, the most cynical explanation is rarely wrong.

Im-Politic: Immigration Realists Should Love this Corporate Cheap Labor Lobby Immigration Study

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Business Roundtable, Cheap Labor Lobby, China, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jobs, national security, Open Borders, OPT, Optical Practical Training program, student visa, tech jobs

You have to hand it to the Business Roundtable (BRT) – an organization comprised of the CEOs of America’s largest companies. It’s not often that a lobby group puts out a study that undercuts its own message in no less than three ways. But that’s exactly what the Roundtable has accomplished with its new report warning about the consequences of Trump administration actions deemed likely to reduce the numbers of foreign students that come to study in the United States.

The focus of the BRT’s concern is the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which allows foreign students to work temporarily for employers for years after their graduation. The Roundtable and other supporters of issuing lots of these visas portray them as a valuable way for domestic U.S. businesses to improve their (and the nation’s) competitiveness by increasing their access to the best talent on the planet. As a result, they argue, programs like OPT boost these students’ incentives to study in the United States and thereby become eligible to enhance its well-being to begin with.

Opponents charge that OPT hands employers yet another means of hiring less expensive foreigners over equally capable but more expensive native-born workers, and thus suppressing wages for all workers in the technology-heavy industries in which these visa holders are highly concentrated. OPT and programs like it have also been criticized (including by the Trump administration) for enabling large numbers of students from China gain cutting-edge tech skills that Beijing can ultimately used to undermine American economic and national security interests, and for providing these students and the Chinese government with golden opportunities to spy on American industry.  

The BRT’s case for the biggest possible OPT program rests entirely on its supposed economic benefits. But these exclusively economic arguments are their own Achilles Heel.

First, the damage the BRT claims the U.S. economy will suffer from a hypothetical (but in my view, reasonably assumed) 35 percent reduction in OPT visas by 2020 and a consequent 60 percent decline in participation in OPT by 2020 is laughably small. Chiefly, by 2028, according to the BRT, the economy will be a cumulative $52 billion smaller in inflation-adjusted terms than otherwise, and the cumulative number of jobs lost by native-born Americans will hit 255,000.

These numbers may sound big, but keep in mind: They represent not annual losses but the estimated total damage over ten years from OPT cutbacks. And they’re laughably miniscule given that the United States currently produces goods and services (the activity that generates the “size of the economy,” or gross domestic product, figure) at an annual, rate of nearly $18.7 trillion in real terms, and that this economy is currently supporting nearly 150 million jobs.

Second, logically speaking, the reverse proposition is also true: If the economic losses resulting from cutting back on the OPT program are so infinitesimal, then so is the economic contribution made by the program at its current size. In fact, it’s reasonable to conclude from the BRT report that if OPT was eliminated completely, the U.S. economy (rightly) wouldn’t even notice.

Third, the BRT’s complete neglect of the national security dangers posed by the OPT program looks like an implicit confession that they’re considerable. Are the BRT’s CEOs telling us that they shouldn’t be considered at all? That reducing them is worth no cost at all? That enhancing national security isn’t even worth the itsy-bitsy price that the BRT itself reveals OPT curbs would entail? 

Of course, none of these conclusions reflects well on the Roundtable, or on the corporate Cheap Labor Lobby of which it’s a card-carrying member. That’s why I’m hoping that immigration and national security realists share it with as many recipients – including government decision-makers – as possible. If this is the best that the Open Borders movement’s Big Business branch can do to tout the OPT program, it’s fate will quickly be sealed.

Im-Politic: The Mainstream Media’s Latest Immigration Fakery

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criminal aliens, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, Mainstream Media, The Atlantic, Trump, Vietnam, Vietnam War

Just when I thought that it had become impossible for the Mainstream Media’s pro-Open Borders bias and Trump Derangement Syndrome to make me genuinely angry, along came The Atlantic‘s article yesterday on Trump administration policy toward refugees from Vietnam – including those who arrived in the Vietnam War’s tragic aftermath.

The piece – loudly advertised as an “exclusive” – clearly sought to convey the impression that the Trump administration has decided to start deporting certain groups within this population simply because it’s determined to rid America of as many foreign-born residents as possible, along with preventing the entry of as many newcomers as possible. In the case of the Vietnamese, of course, this policy would be morally outrageous both because so many refugees aided the U.S. military effort and (along with their descendants) face grim fates if they return; and because the United States inflicted so much damage on the country during its decade-plus of massive armed involvement. (I’m not trumpeting a position on the war – which I opposed – here. Just stating a fact.) When I saw the headline, I was up in arms myself.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover (in the fourth paragraph) what’s really changing:

“The administration last year began pursuing the deportation of many long-term immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries who the administration alleges are ‘violent criminal aliens.’”

Why is that a change? Because, in the authors’ view, this decision violates

“a unique 2008 agreement  [between Washington and Hanoi] that specifically bars the deportation of Vietnamese people who arrived in the United States before July 12, 1995—the date the two former foes reestablished diplomatic relations following the Vietnam War.”

But Trump administration officials have concluded, and told The Atlantic on the record, that the agreement “does not explicitly preclude the removal of pre-1995 cases.”

Which seems eminently reasonable when the article finally makes clear that the U.S. intent now is not indiscriminately to round up Vietnamese-Americans and kick them out of the country in order to advance (circle one or both) nativist or racist goals. Instead, the intent was to treat as exempt from the 2008 deal “people convicted of crimes.”

Indeed, these folks were not only convicted of crimes. According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Katie Waldman, “these are non-citizens who during previous administrations were arrested, convicted, and ultimately ordered removed by a federal immigration judge.”

But how did the Atlantic authors describe a U.S. government effort finally to get rid of convicted criminals who clearly have been using delaying tactics to put off removal orders by the American judicial system? As

>”the latest move in the president’s long record of prioritizing harsh immigration and asylum restrictions….”

>a ”new stance [that] mirrors White House efforts to clamp down on immigration writ large, a frequent complaint of the president’s on the campaign trail and one he links to a litany of ills in the United States.”

>a “shift” that “leaves the fate of a larger number of Vietnamese immigrants in doubt.”

>a betrayal of many “refugees from the Vietnam War. Some are the children of those who once allied with American and South Vietnamese forces, an attribute that renders them undesirable to the current regime in Hanoi, which imputes anti-regime beliefs to the children of those who opposed North Vietnam.”

In fact, if anything, the new Trump policy changes a 2017 administration decision that makes no sense at all for anyone who believes that criminal aliens have no business remaining in the United States one minute longer than necessary: exempting these criminals from deportation if they arrived in the country before 1995. What on earth was that about? And why does The Atlantic, by posting this “scoop” seem to object so strongly – especially since nowhere does this piece challenge the convictions?

Im-Politic: Elizabeth Warren, Nationalist?

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Elizabeth Warren, Emmanuel Macron, global poverty, globalization, Im-Politic, nationalism, progressives, Seattle WTO protests, third world, Trade, World Trade Organization, WTO

Whatever its historical roots, “nationalism” has recently become a dirty word. Among the dangers embodied by this concept, as determined by political correctness authorities such as France’s (politically besieged) President Emmanuel Macron, it’s “a betrayal of patriotism. By saying ‘Our interests first, who cares about the others,’ we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what gives it grace, and what is essential: its moral values.”

How stunning, therefore, to read Elizabeth Warren’s recent speech on U.S. foreign policy. According to this definition, the Massachusetts Democratic Senator, progressive heroine, and likely 2020 presidential hopeful, is a card-carrying, selfish, immoral (amoral?) America First-style nationalist – at least when it comes to international trade and related globalization issues.

Skeptical? Just read the Warren transcript. On the one hand, she admitted that “The globalization of trade has opened up opportunity and lifted billions out of poverty around the world” – which by any standard is a pretty remarkable achievement. Yet on the other hand, Warren condemned the “trade and economic policies” behind this epic success for failing to deliver “the same kind of benefits for America’s middle class.”

In fact, she emphasized, “U.S. trade policy has delivered one punch in the gut after another to [U.S.] workers and to the unions that fight for them.”

It’s true that, elsewhere in her speech, Warren briefly referred to revamping American trade policy to ensure “that workers are meaningfully represented at the negotiating table and build trade agreements that strengthen labor standards worldwide.” But much more often, she lambasted agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its successor, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) for encouraging “outsourcing jobs to Mexico.”

In other words, either such outsourcing somehow failed to ameliorate poverty in Mexico (even though Warren credits it with uplifting the poor elsewhere), or she assigns little importance to achieving that goal. In either case, Warren has some major explaining to do.

Also fascinating about Warren’s speech: If it’s to be taken seriously (never a sure thing when it comes to politicians’ rhetoric), it would represent a significant, and in my view, welcome change in progressives’ take on trade, globalization, and what’s fundamentally wrong with them.

For since these issues became front-page news during the debate over NAFTA, at the start of the 1990s, critics to the left-of-center have proclaimed that U.S. trade and related policies would remain unacceptable unless they boosted living standards everywhere, not just in America – and that they had betrayed workers in developing countries as completely as their counterparts in the United States.

American progressives’ emphasis on the devastation created in the third world by U.S.-spearheaded trade arrangements came to a head during the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in 1999 – as did the companion belief that win-win solutions for workers and consumers everywhere should be and could be the very raison d’etre of the global economy. And as indicated by this 2015 statement from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, it remains their party line today.

The point here is not that no conceivable form of globalization can ever produce globe-wide benefits. Instead, it’s that the road to mutual gain is unlikely to proceed in a straight, smooth, uninterrupted line, and that without recognizing that hard choices are likely for the foreseeable future, and that those global benefits may not be distributed evenly, the worst of all worlds is all too likely.

So here’s hoping that her speech is evidence that Warren is becoming aware of these at-least-likely complications, that she’ll start prompting such globalization realism on the American Left – and that she won’t be deterred by apologists for a failed status quo who, along with most of her fellow progressives, have been reduced to portraying nationalism as part of the problem, rather than potentially part of the solution.

Im-Politic: What Trump Can Learn from the Weekly Standard’s Woes

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Daniel McCarthy, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, neoconservatives, The American Conservative, Trump, Weekly Standard

To many readers, Daniel McCarthy’s excellent new article in the Spectator USA about the likely demise of the Weekly Standard magazine will be most interesting for his thoughts on what this apparently impending event says about how best to keep alive non-mass market political publications. After all, McCarthy edits another such publication: The American Conservative.

To me, his piece is most interesting for another reason: It briefly points to how President Trump can marginalize a Mainstream Media that has worrisomely transformed itself from an essential watchdog for democracy into an unapologetic defender of a failed bipartisan political establishment – and in a much more effective way than by hurling insults on Twitter or at political rallies. And it’s no coincidence that the relevant McCarthy observation supports some suggestions I’ve made along these lines. (See, e.g., here.) 

McCarthy is surely on target when he contends that the Weekly Standard chose the wrong business model – and especially the wrong business model for losing money (which he rightly notes is a feature of virtually all political magazines). And since a healthy democracy depends on the survival of a critical mass of such publications, his advice – stemming from years of experience in the field – seems well worth heeding.

But the following McCarthy passage matters much more now when it comes to Mr. Trump’s conflict with the Mainstream Media – which of course is largely self-serving, but which nonetheless has the potential, if conducted wisely and shrewdly, to push these news organizations into behaving more constructively:

“The Weekly Standard provided prestige and access to political leaders, especially Republicans.

“The Weekly Standard’s value lay in the fact that it was an insider magazine. It was a top-down product — there was never an independent mass audience clamoring for a second National Review or for a specifically neoconservative publication. (Commentary, as a monthly, already served that market as far as demand could justify.) What was important was that the magazine be read not by a mass market but by Republican officials and their staff and various other influential persons, primarily in Washington, D.C. If officialdom read the Weekly Standard, then it was worth continuing to spend millions on it. In business terms as well as ideologically and literarily, the Weekly Standard had a lot in common with the New Republic, which for decades was dependent upon Marty Peretz’s singular financial support as owner of a magazine that touted itself during the Clinton years as the ‘inflight magazine of Air Force One.’”

Although McCarthy doesn’t make this point explicitly, it captures what’s truly essential about the above analysis: The power and influence of the Standard and the rest of the Mainstream Media – and in the case of smallish political magazines, their ability to attract angel funders – depends on their access to leading political figures, and in particular, on enjoying such close access that their audiences can depend on them to reveal the so-called real inside story of big political and policy decisions.

To accomplish this goal, writers and editors from these organizations need (credibly) to make clear that they’re regularly welcomed into the confidences of bigwigs right on up to the presidency, specifically at chummy off-the-record or on-background lunches and dinners and other such get-togethers that advance the interests of each kind of participant. In addition to turning the favored journalists into must-follows for the political- and policy-minded (and into power-brokers of sorts themselves), these gatherings enable the hosts to make key points or send key messages (often about potentially controversial plans or proposals) to the public at large through sympathetic conduits. In the process, politicians can avoid being held accountable for the content of these messages if they backfire or fall flat.

It’s clear that Mr. Trump hasn’t treated Weekly Standard, or many other – if any – Mainstream Media figures like political intimates. And since it represents a neoconservative school of thought that has never enjoyed any notable popular following, the magazine’s obvious loss of insider status has undoubtedly contributed to its weakening viability under the current administration.

But as I’ve written (see, e.g., the post linked above), the President keeps giving exclusive interviews to other major news organizations – including to the most hostile – which inevitably enhances or sustains their prestige. On the one hand, it’s clear that, as widely observed, Mr. Trump is engaging with the Mainstream Media in the belief that any publicity is good publicity – and likely due to his own (arguably well founded) confidence that he always prevails politically whenever these encounters turn testy. (Think “Jim Acosta“.) On the other, this approach certainly hasn’t made the Mainstream Media pay any significant, much less prohibitive, price for propagating Fake News and too often flagrantly exhibiting bias.

As a result, the establishment press has little incentive to report more responsibly. And ultimately, by continuing to act as if there’s no adequate alternative to the increasingly fallen Washington- and New York-based press corps for his own communications purposes, and for serving larger national purposes, Mr. Trump is squandering a major opportunity for all Americans – even Never Trump-ers – along with a chance to undermine influential enemies and expand his base.