Im-Politic: Why China’s U.S. Election Interference is a Very Big Deal

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battleground states, Center for Strategic and International Studies, China, Chinese Americans, collusion, Democrats, election 2020, elections, entertainment, Freedom House, Hollywood, Hoover Institution, Im-Politic, Mike Pence, multinational companies, Nancy Pelosi, National Basketball Association, NBA, Robert Draper, Robert O'Brien, social media, The New York Times Magazine, think tanks, Trump, Trump-Russia, Wall Street

It’s baaaaaaack! The Russia collusion thing, I mean. Only this time, with an important difference.

On top of charges that Moscow is monkeying around with November’s U.S. elections to ensure a Trump victory, and that the President and his aides are doing nothing to fend of this threat to the integrity of the nation’s politics, Democrats and their supporters are now dismissing claims administration about Chinese meddling as alarmism at best and diversionary at worst.

In the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, commenting on recent testimony from U.S. intelligence officials spotlighting both countries’ efforts, to “give some equivalence” of China and Russia on interference efforts “doesn’t really tell the story. 

She continued, “The Chinese, they said, prefer [presumptive Democratic nominee Joe] Biden — we don’t know that, but that’s what they’re saying, but they’re not really getting involved in the presidential election.” ,

The Mainstream Media, as is so often the case, echoed this Democratic talking point. According to The New York Times‘ Robert Draper (author most recently of a long piece in the paper’s magazine section on Mr. Trump’s supposed refusal to approve anti-Russia interference measures or take seriously such findings by the intelligence community ), China “is really not able to affect the integrity of our electoral system the way Russia can….”

And I use the term “Democratic talking point” for two main reasons. First, the Chinese unquestionably have recently gotten into the explicit election meddling game – though with some distinctive Chinese characteristics. Second, and much more important, China for decades has been massively influencing American politics more broadly in ways Russia can’t even dream about – mainly because so many major national American institutions have become so beholden to the Chinese government for so long thanks to the decades-long pre-Trump policy of promoting closer bilateral ties.

As for the narrower, more direct kind of election corrupting, you don’t need to take the word of President Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien that “China, like Russia and Iran, have engaged in cyberattacks and fishing and that sort of thing with respect to our election infrastructure and with respect to websites.”

Nor do you have to take the word of Vice President Mike Pence, who in 2018 cited a national intelligence assessment that found that China “ is targeting U.S. state and local governments and officials to exploit any divisions between federal and local levels on policy. It’s using wedge issues, like trade tariffs, to advance Beijing’s political influence.”

You can ignore Pence’s contention that that same year, a document circulated by Beijing stated that China must [quoting directly] “strike accurately and carefully, splitting apart different domestic groups” in the United States.

You can even write off China’s decision at the height of that fall’s Congressional election campaigns to take out a “four-page supplement in the Sunday Des Moines [Iowa] Register” that clearly was “intended to undermine farm-country support for President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war….”

Much harder to ignore, though: the claim made last year by a major Hoover Institution study that

“In American federal and state politics, China seeks to identify and cultivate rising politicians. Like many other countries, Chinese entities employ prominent lobbying and public relations firms and cooperate with influential civil society groups. These activities complement China’s long-standing support of visits to China by members of Congress and their staffs. In some rare instances Beijing has used private citizens and companies to exploit loopholes in US regulations that prohibit direct foreign contributions to elections.”

Don’t forget, moreover, findings that Chinese trolls are increasingly active on major social media platforms. According to a report from the research institute Freedom House:

“[C]hinese state-affiliated trolls are…apparently operating on [Twitter] in large numbers. In the hours and days after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of Hong Kong protesters in October 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported, nearly 170,000 tweets were directed at Morey by users who seemed to be based in China as part of a coordinated intimidation campaign. Meanwhile, there have been multiple suspected efforts by pro-Beijing trolls to manipulate the ranking of content on popular sources of information outside China, including Google’s search engine Reddit,and YouTube.”

The Hoover report also came up with especially disturbing findings about Beijing’s efforts to influence the views (and therefore the votes) of Chinese Americans, including exploiting the potential hostage status of their relatives in China. According to the Hoover researchers:

“Among the Chinese American community, China has long sought to influence—even silence—voices critical of the PRC or supportive of Taiwan by dispatching personnel to the United States to pressure these individuals and while also pressuring their relatives in China. Beijing also views Chinese Americans as members of a worldwide Chinese diaspora that presumes them to retain not only an interest in the welfare of China but also a loosely defined cultural, and even political, allegiance to the so-called Motherland.

In addition:

“In the American media, China has all but eliminated the plethora of independent Chinese-language media outlets that once served Chinese American communities. It has co-opted existing Chineselanguage outlets and established its own new outlets.”

Operations aimed at Chinese Americans are anything but trivial politically. As of 2018, they represented nearly 2.6 million eligible U.S. voters, and they belonged to an Asian-American super-category thats been the fastest growing racial and ethnic population of eligible voters in the country.

Most live in heavily Democratic states, like California, New York, and Massachusetts, but significant concentrations are also found in the battleground states where the many of the 2016 presidential election margins were razor thin, of which look up for grabs this year, like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

As for the second, broader and indirect, Chinese meddling in American politics, recall these developments, many of which have been documented on RealityChek:

>U.S.-owned multinational companies, which have long profited at the expense of the domestic economy by offshoring production and jobs to China, have just as long carried Beijing’s water in American politics through their massive contributions to U.S. political campaigns. The same goes for Wall Street, which hasn’t sent many U.S. operations overseas, but which has long hungered for permission to do more business in the Chinese market.

>These same big businesses continually and surreptitiously inject their views into American political debates by heavily financing leading think tanks – which garb their special interest agendas in the raiment of objective scholarship. By the way, at least one of these think tanks, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has taken Chinese government money, too.

>Hollywood and the rest of the U.S. entertainment industry has become so determined to brown nose China in search of profits that it’s made nearly routine rewriting and censoring material deemed offensive to China. And in case you haven’t noticed, show biz figures haven’t exactly been reluctant to weigh in on U.S. political issues lately. And yes, that includes the stars of the National Basketball Association, who have taken a leading role in what’s become known as the Black Lives Matter movement, but who have remained conspicuously silent about the lives of inhabitants of the vast China market that’s one of their biggest and most promising cash cows.

However indirect this Chinese involvement in American politics is, its effects clearly dwarf total Russian efforts – and by orders of magnitude. Nor is there any reason to believe that Moscow is closing the gap. In fact, China’s advantage here is so great that it makes a case for a useful rule-of-thumb:  Whenever you find out about someone complaining about Russia’s election interference but brushing off China’s, you can be sure that they’re not really angry about interference as such. They’re just angry about interference they don’t like.`      

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Im-Politic: Shameful Holocaust-Related Revisionism from The Times

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1619 Project, anti-semitism, concentration camps, Holocaust, Holocaust Survivor Syndrome, Holocaust survivors, Im-Politic, Jennifer Orth-Veillon, revisionism, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, U.S. military, World War II

If you’ve been reading RealityChek for any meaningful length of time, you know that I’m not big on using terms like “disgusting,” and “vile.” But those were the first words that came to mind last night after finishing an April 28 New York Times Magazine article titled “For Some Holocaust Survivors, Even Liberation Was Dehumanizing.” And they were still my reaction after having slept on it.

If you’re not experiencing the same repugnance upon seeing this headline or reading the entire piece, just ask yourself what its point could possibly be? It can’t be to tar every member of the U.S. and Russian forces who first entered Nazi concentration camps in late 1944 through the official end of World War II in Europe (whose 75^th anniversary came yesterday). The author, France-based “freelance writer and university lecturer” Jennifer Orth-Veillon, explicitly describes acts of (what she, at least, sees as) exceptional compassion and what may be called “re-humanization” of the prisoners by the liberators (who, just to be as accurate as possible, didn’t shoot their way into the camps but found facilities from which most of the Nazis and their non-German underlings had fled).

But readers are also told that:

>”According to accounts, not all soldiers acted equally when confronted with that responsibility [of helping the prisoners regain “their lost humanity”] and some further mistreated them, extending the trauma they had endured while imprisoned. It’s hard to imagine that survivors could have suffered further….”

>”[T]he portrayal of liberation in some of their memoirs reveals that the end of the Holocaust opened new wounds.”

>One survivor wrote in his memoirs that (in Orth-Veillon’s words), “At the beginning of their internment, prisoners who weren’t selected for the gas chamber learned quickly from Nazi guards that they weren’t viewed as humans but as animals. Orders were barked, compassion was nonexistent. Semprún [the memoirist] hadn’t expected that his liberators would view him in the same way.”

>”Semprún’s brush with his liberators echoed Primo Levi’s description of his interactions with the Soviets at Auschwitz in January 1945.”

>”Some of these [liberators’] reactions suggest soldiers were experiencing a kind of shock, while others point to anti-Semitism, even within the most senior echelons of the military. After inspecting displaced persons camps in Germany in summer of 1945, Earl G. Harrison, a lawyer and American representative to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, expressed harsh criticism of the ways Jews were treated by the Americans, claiming evidence of conditions similar to the Nazi-run concentration camps from which they had been freed. He summarized his observations by stating, ‘We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.’ When President Harry Truman read the report, he ordered Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to inspect displaced persons camps. During a visit to a camp in Bavaria, Gen. George S. Patton told Eisenhower that he blamed the refugees for the squalor. He complained they were ‘pissing and crapping all over the place,’ and wanted to open his own concentration camp ‘for some of these goddamn Jews.’ Maj. Irving Heymont, who was stationed at the Landsberg displacement camp, said in his letters that some Americans proclaimed that they preferred German civilians, who seemed normal, to the Jewish survivors, whom they characterized as animals undeserving of special treatment.”

Again, Orth-Veillon described much nobler liberator reactions, too. But there’s no need to engage in an exercise comparing article space devoted to one set of reactions versus the others to wonder about the value of presenting instances ranging from insensitivity to outright anti-Semitism at all. The author not only doesn’t go so far as to allege that these contemptible liberator words and deeds typified their reactions. Her piece contains no data or other material indicating that such responses represented the majority of liberator reactions. Nor do readers see anything indicating that these reactions even remotely approached levels that could legitimately described as significant – by any standard.

Instead, while writing of the record of what Orth-Veillon describes as the activity of “more than 30 American military units,” including entire divisions (which during World War II generally contained 15,000 troops), she repeatedly uses the describer “some.”

To which it needs to be asked, in the snidest and most indignant way, “So what?” As the author makes clear, most of troops were either in their late teens or barely out of them. They were confronted with sights and sounds and smells that the literature’s greatest authors had never even imagined outside renditions of the underworld. They had spent varying amounts of time during the preceding months experiencing their own horrors fighting their way across western Europe.

And “some” were bigots to begin with? And “some” looked away in shame or embarrassment or simple bewilderment (or covered their ears after hearing the latest of many survivor tales, as Orth-Veillon quotes another memoirist as contending)? And “some” in general didn’t act with all the skills of psychologists or other career care-givers? What is to the slightest extent even notable about these episodes, either individually or collectively?

Don’t expect any useful guidance here from the author. The “end of the Holocaust opened new wounds”? Could anything else be expected by anyone who’s thinking is minimally adult? Ditto for the passage reporting that once the prisoners “attained long-awaited freedom…the way some [that word again!] liberators treated them reinforced the idea that they had become less than human.” Because no one before her had ever recognized that the end of months and even years of the most bestial treatment, however ardently desired, wasn’t going to be a day at the beach even in the most ideal circumstances?

News flash: These difficulties are so widely known that the mental health profession has not only long identified a group of issues known as “Holocaust Survivor Syndrome,” they’ve discovered that it can be passed on in even physiological form to survivors’ children. And don’t think that the liberators themselves have been immune to struggle (to a much less extent of course). My own late father, who worked for a time in the camps as a Yiddish language translator, stopped believing in God as a result. I hate using anecdotes to make points, but is it imaginable that his experience was unique? Or so decidedly exceptional?

Don’t expect any useful guidance on supposed lessons learned from The New York Times itself, either. The article is introduced with the observation that it’s part of “a series…that documents lesser-known stories from the war….” And the editors valued this offering because it “explores the complex and sometimes dehumanizing interactions between the concentration camp prisoners and the Allied soldiers who liberated them.” In other words, they considered illuminating enough to justify literally thousands of words the insight that human behavior among participants of various kinds in the immediate aftermath of arguably the most monstrous atrocity in human history can be “complex.” P.S. – note another use of a conveniently cover-your-butt modifier – “sometimes.”

So should the episodes described in this article be swept under the rug by scholars like Orth-Veillon, and by news organizations like The Times? Actually, the operative verb is “ignore.” Because on top of being so morally obtuse as to qualify as repugnant (unless the author, and her editors, are incapable of distinguishing right from wrong?), this article is much more troubling than the kind of shamefully slanted and thoroughly inaccurate historical revisionism represented by another New York Times endeavor – the 1619 Project. After all, for all its fatal factual and interpretive flaws, this (completely inappropriate) Times venture into scholarship – which seeks to reduce the entirety of American history to a tale of slavery and racism – at least has the intellectual honesty to claim that its findings justify major rethinking of long-held ideas.

Orth-Veillon (and her editors) display none of that forthrightness. Instead, they’ve served up a product that’s difficult to explain other than as a gratuitous, sensationalistic (“clickbait-y,” in more contemporary terms) effort to pollute the reputation of servicemen and women who accomplished nothing less than ridding the world of an historic and dangerous evil. So yes – completely ignore these findings, at least until some evidence emerges of noteworthy scale. Recognize that they’re as deserving of attention as a typographical error. And if you don’t agree, send a letter to The Times asking for an article relating how some of the concentration camp guards really weren’t so bad. After all, no doubt there were “some.”

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

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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.

Im-Politic: And Now, Immigration Derangement Syndrome

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Dan Amira, Fox Business News, Fox News, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jose Antonio Vargas, Mainstream Media, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Trade Derangement Syndromeu, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Twitter

My main Twitter hashtag of choice to express disdain used to be #TooFunny” but lately I’ve largely switched over to #SMH (Shaking My Head) because it added the idea of incredulity. And items like The New York Times Magazine‘s interview last week with illegal alien author Jose Antonio Vargas nicely illustrates why the change is needed.

Vargas, in case you don’t know, is an illegal alien with a difference – other than being a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He’s made his status public, in the apparent confidence that he’s created too high a profile to run any serious deportation risk. And so far, he’s been right.

The Times Magazine interviewed Vargas because he’s just published a memoir, and of course that’s fine on both counts. What’s not fine is how interviewer Dan Amira, and all his editors, gave Vargas a total pass for the following jaw-dropping statement:

“There’s an entire anti-immigrant machine, and it’s very savvy at how it uses media.”

That’s when Amira should have shouted, “Whoa!” Not that the school of thought that favors sensible restrictions on immigration (that “anti-immigrant machine”) isn’t full of highly intelligent and capable people. Of course it is. But Amira should have aggressively followed up on the idea that the individuals and organizations that comprise the restrictionist movement have been highly, and even a little sneakily, effective at manipulating news organizations and their employees into unknowingly peddling “anti-immigration” propaganda.

In the process, ignore Vargas’ fatuous definition of savvy media work: “cementing” in Americans’ minds the notion that the immigration policy debate “is about borders or walls.” If it’s not supposed to be largely about borders, what should be the focus? Melania Trump’s wardrobe?

Just consider the apparent belief that any major media organizations (outside of a few anchors and panelists on Fox News and Fox Business News) are chock full of reporters and editors and pundits harboring any significant skepticism about the most indulgent possible immigration policies, including maximally open borders and maximal leniency toward the current illegals population. Who does Vargas think these journalists are? Can Amira identify any at his own New York Times? And if so, where have they all been hiding since the current phase of the immigration policy debate began in 2006, when illegals and their supporters started staging large-scale pro-amnesty protests complete with cheeky signs contending “We Built America” and the flags of their countries of origin flying proudly.

It’s tempting to ascribe these utterly ditzy performances by Vargas and Amira to the simple cluelessness so often shown by journalists and policy activists, who rarely need to step outside their tightly circumscribed socio-professional bubbles. But my hunch is that there’s something else going on. I suspect that Vargas believes the media is gullibly parroting a restrictionist line, and that Amira let his observation pass, because both find it a convenient explanation for why the kinds of loosey-goosey immigration policies they and everyone else they know (along with all people of good will) supports aren’t yet the law of the land. After all, in their eyes, its virtues are so obvious and so widely appreciated that nothing but a devilishly clever conspiracy could be responsible for frustrating their objectives.

In other words, it may not be enough that American politics and policy are being saturated with Trump Derangement Syndrome and Trade Derangement Syndrome. Large shares of the establishment may now be suffering Immigration Derangement Syndrome as well.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Some Rare Big Media Realism on Globalization

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globalization, Immigration, Jobs, Labor Department, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring, Pankaj Mishra, Sarah Chaney, strikes, The New York Times Magazine, The Race to the Bottom, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, unions, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Every now and then, the Mainstream Media and the establishment conventional wisdom it parrots show some signs of approaching an understanding of how trade liberalization and globalization really work. Happily, this past week was one of those weeks.

The first of these two signs came in The New York Times Magazine, in the form of an article by Pankaj Mishra, who weirdly isn’t identified in the on-line version of the piece, but who appears to be a prominent Indian writer. Its theme: The world’s leading economies – including the United States in the first two-thirds of its history and now China – have nearly all experienced their greatest rises to prosperity and power based on policies that rejected orthodox free trade principles.

To anyone who has seriously followed the trade and globalization debate over the last quarter century, the case for this claim is anything but new. It’s been made by numerous leading scholars and other analysts. What is new is for this argument to be showcased in such a high profile media outlet. On the one hand, if this kind of information was presented to readers remotely as often as the trade and globalization conventional wisdom, American policies today might be vastly different – and the economy much sounder.

On the other, because of Donald Trump’s political success, the chances of moving U.S. trade policy onto a more realistic foundation seem higher than at any time since the 1930s. So if Mishra and The Times Magazine wind up speeding up that process to any extent, and aiding the adoption by Washington, D.C. of policies that factor in this reality, more power to them.

The second sign came in a Wall Street Journal story on findings I’d spotlighted on Friday – a Labor Department study on the virtual disappearance of major labor actions like strikes from the national economic scene. In her own report on the Labor study, Journal correspondent Sarah Chaney quoted a scholar of labor relations as noting that (in her words) “one major impediment to work stoppages…is globalization.”

To which my immediate reaction was “bingo!” – along with a sense of vindication. Way back in the late-1990s, when I was researching my book The Race to the Bottom, it became clear as can be to me that most efforts to measure globalization’s impact on the U.S. economy were missing a key point: A job doesn’t have to be either eliminated by foreign competition (whether predatory or not) or offshored for American trade policies to have affected employment or wage levels. The mere prospect of offshoring in particular, and its increased likelihood as a result of trade agreements aimed at encouraging it, would also matter, and often decisively.

Wages would be the principal victim, since workers aware that their jobs could easily be sent overseas, to lower cost locations like Mexico (via NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement) or China (through numerous trade liberalization decisions taken since the early 1990s) would hardly be aggressive in pressing for better pay either by striking or taking any similar actions.

And in the book, I cited some evidence for this proposition: A 1992 survey by The Wall Street Journal finding that “one-fourth of almost 500 American corporate executives polled admitted they were ‘very likely’ or ‘somewhat likely’ to use NAFTA as a bargaining chip to hold down wages”; and a 1996 report commissioned by NAFTA’s own Labor Secretariat finding that “more than half the firms…surveyed used threats to shut down U.S. operations as weapons to fight union-organizing drives.”

Moreover, it should be just as obvious that mass immigration creates the same kind of wage-depressing force.

The next step for the establishment and its media messengers to take is to recognize that the very national economic openness for which they have pushed means that terms like “the American labor market,” at least used conventionally, have become largely meaningless. In addition, supposed mysteries like continued wage stagnation during a long economic recovery featuring near-historic lows in the headline jobless rate aren’t so mysterious at all.

In fact, that supposed national labor market has for decades consisted both of American workers inside the country’s borders and all the other workers around the world that have been made available to employers by trade and immigration policies. So if you want a labor market truly capable to pushing wage growth back up to historical norms, no measures are more important than turning that labor market more genuinely national once again.

Im-Politic: Challenges for Everyone Debating America’s Muslims Policy

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Arabs, Im-Politic, Immigration, Islam, Middle East, migrants, Muslim Americans, Muslims, radical Islam, Scott Anderson, terrorism, The New York Times Magazine

Scott Anderson, an historian of the Middle East, has performed an invaluable public service with his piece in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. His article “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart,” is both a great primer on the deep, complex roots of a regional crisis that keeps jolting the rest of the world, too, and a powerful challenge to most of the voices – including mine – who have been speaking out on American policy toward admitting Middle East refugees and toward its own existing Muslim community.

As RealityChek regulars know, I’ve been much less clear on defining a U.S. approach going forward than in criticizing those who, within the Obama administration and without, have demonized as bigots and xenophobes anyone insisting that tighter restrictions and more monitoring are essential. That’s because, despite my adamance that the nation faces a Muslim problem at home as well as abroad, and that debunking what I’ve called “denialism” is a vital first step toward urgently needed reform, I haven’t been able to formulate feasible, specific ways of preventing Americans resident in the country from turning into home-grown terrorists.  I do favor immigration bans or at least freezes on war-torn Middle East countries where reliable vetting is absolutely impossible, but no one should imagine such measures alone will keep the nation safe.   

Anderson’s portrait of the Middle East should prompt rethinking by everyone. Supporters of basing new measures largely or solely on religion – and specifically, on what they see as the dangerously reactionary, intolerant, anti-Western nature of Islam – will be struck by the relatively small role played by religion in the author’s analysis. But if you think about it seriously, you don’t have to view Islam as a model of peace and progressivism, or ignore evidence of grossly outsized American Muslim participation in terrorist activity, to recognize that the religion is widespread in a huge, populous part of the world – Southeast Asia – where it hasn’t been a major security threat. Moreover, the large Muslim populations of India and Bangladesh don’t qualify, either. (At the same time, due largely to the – often Saudi Arabian-funded – propagation of fundamentalism, an extremist threat has certainly been growing in these areas.)

At the same time, “Fractured Lands” strengthens the case for thoroughgoing immigration and refugee policy changes by presenting abundant evidence that the nation (and world) do face a special problem from the Arab Muslim world. Anderson rightly describes both the domestic and foreign influences that led him to observe that “In my professional travels over the decades, I had found no other region to rival the Arab world in its utter stagnation.”

Those who have finished the compelling picture Anderson has drawn of disastrous foreign meddling and imperialism in the Middle East could reasonably be tempted to claim that outsiders have actually been the main problem. After all, as the author reminds, the early 20^th century Europeans practically ensured eventual chaos by creating states with no regard for “national coherence, and even less to tribal or sectarian divisions.” The logical follow-on point: Immigration curbs would amount to the contemptible version of “blaming the victim.”

But again, the experiences of other parts of the world push back strongly against this position. Much of East Asia, for example, was controlled by Europe for long stretches of modern history. (And the United States ruled the Philippines for decades.) True, Japan remained independent, and China was at least nominally so. Foreign imperial ventures in the region, moreover, don’t seem to have resulted in borders that so flagrantly ignored ethnic realities.

But both Japan and China suffered horrific destruction during World War II, Korea was all but flattened in the 1950s, and Indochina experienced a similar nightmare in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, several Asian countries that emerged from the imperial era were religious and ethnic polyglots to some extent – like Malaysia, Singapore, and especially Indonesia. And don’t forget the subcontinent! Yet even counting the latter’s brutally violent post-independence breakup into Hindu-dominated India and overwhelmingly Muslim (East and West) Pakistan, they’ve cohered much better than the Arab Muslim countries, not to mention leaving them in the dust economically.

So it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that East and South Asia have, despite towering obstacles, somehow created the ingredients for longer-term success that have totally eluded the Arab Muslim world. As a result, it’s just as hard to avoid asking why anyone would expect even the beginnings of Middle Eastern progress along these lines in the foreseeable future – and why, without immigration policy overhaul, the region won’t continue to send violent extremists abroad, including to the United States.

The challenge, then, to everyone involved in the Middle East immigration debate is clear. Status quo fans will have to reject their denialism. And restrictionists will need to come up with properly focused, workable curbs. Of course, election years aren’t the most promising times for such consensus building. But don’t expect much sympathy on that score from the terrorists.