Remains of the Berlin Wall (my photo, available under cc license)

The wall was built to bottle up an incipient revolt—a mass emigration that threatened to expose the Soviet system as inferior to the West, as an oppressive dungeon that its most educated young people yearned to escape. The wall not only blocked those yearnings; it also made clear to the brighter young Soviet and Eastern European leaders that the system itself—the ideological basis of their rule—was suspect, that it could not be sustained, much less compete with the West, without the internal imposition of force.

It’s interesting to reflect that it’s very much still the case that millions of people living in Ukraine and Russia and for that matter Mexico and Mozambique would love to engage in mass emigration to the West and expose the systems under which they live as corrupt and uncompetitive. Indeed, according to Gallup 700 million people would like to migrate permanently to a new country:

But of course the voters of the United States and Canada have no intention of letting as many people show up as might like to come, and the voters of Western Europe have even less desire for this, and those of Japan even less.

Lou Dobbs loves it

The New York Times manages to produce an article about the controversy over Lou Dobbs that doesn’t really offer any specific examples of what Dobbs’ critics are talking about. But to get a flavor, the man’s strain of nativism runs so deep that he’s denounced St Patrick’s Day. His show is so unhinged that he promotes “birther” conspiracy theories. From time to time CNN has to scrub official transcripts of his show to eliminate casual racism. Dobbs thought the racist “Obama waffles” box was hilarious.

That just sets the backdrop for the kind of racial stereotyping, cavalier attitude toward the truth, and downright weirdness that characterizes his obsessive coverage of Hispanic immigration into the United States:

Dobbs has a long history of spreading hate and paranoia. He has routinely discussed the North American Union conspiracy theory, incorrectly claimed that undocumented immigrants drain social services and don’t pay taxes, and repeatedly amplified the falsehood that undocumented immigrants are disproportionately violent. He has been an unrepentant purveyor of hateful attacks, fraudulently claiming, for example, that immigrants are spreading leprosy and seek to reconquer the southwestern United States.

For all that, if CNN wants to stand by Dobbs then, fine, they should stand by Dobbs. But if they want to stand by Dobbs then they should stand by Dobbs and feature him prominently in their four-hour “Latino in America” documentary. After all, from what you can see watching the network day-to-day the executives at CNN think Dobbs has a credible and important perspective on this issue. Instead, they just kind of want to sweep the crazy uncle under the rug for the purposes of a big special, and then trot him back out again when everything’s back to normal.

You hear more and more stories like this in recent years and it’s just very hard for me to see the percentage in adopting visa policies that deter young, educated Asians from coming to the United States. From the very beginning our country has always derived powerful benefits from “brain drain” effects in which a healthy proportion of smart people from all around the world want to come here. There’s no good reason to throw that away.

Schaerbeek Town Hall

Fascinating find from The Economist:

There can never be full integration of the migrants “swarming” into Brussels, according to a report by the Royal Belgian Geographical Society—at least among the current generation of adults. The immigrants are too different in their religious beliefs and customs, and their impact is too overwhelming. “When they are sufficiently numerous in a neighbourhood” they open their own hairdressing salons, grocery shops and bakeries, the report notes, not to mention “butcher’s shops where they sell meat from ritually slaughtered animals”. They have large families and cram twice the agreed number of tenants into flats, creating “deplorable” living conditions, annoying landlords and disturbing their neighbours. Perhaps “partial assimilation” may one day be achieved, it concludes, but it will be hard: the newcomers’ religion and language “do not ease any attempts at contact.”

The report in question? It dates from 1933 and describes the panic caused by Jewish immigrants from Poland, when they moved into Brussels neighbourhoods like Schaerbeek. It was recently unearthed by Anne Morelli, a professor of history of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Prof Morelli reproduces a long extract from the report in this thoughtful essay for KVS Express, an excellent trilingual journal published by the Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels. The report is in English on page 18 of this pdf file.

And of course you see this in the United States, too, as anti-immigration rhetoric tends to very precisely parallel what was said about the un-assimilability of Jews and Catholics before the first world war. There’s even a parallel between the very real problems associated with violent strains of Islamist ideology among European Muslim Communities and the only quite real problem of anarchist violence that was associated with U.S. immigrant communities. I assume that if Nicholas Sarkozy were to be shot and killed by a French Muslim tomorrow, we’d never here the end of talk about “Eurabia” and so forth yet Leon Czolgosz didn’t prefigure the destruction of the United States at the hands of mass wave of Polish political violence.

As I’ve said before, the argument that there should be a test of immigration status before someone becomes eligible for subsidies to buy health insurance is reasonable clear even if it’s not a sentiment I find particularly compelling. But the idea of adding an immigration status check to letting people buy insurance on a regulated exchange with their own money is genuinely nuts. Andrew Romano points out that this will make health insurance more expensive, not cheaper:

Consider a few statistics. According to a July article in the American Journal of Public Health, immigrants typically arrive in America during their prime working years and tend to be younger and healthier than the rest of the U.S. population. As a result, health-care expenditures for the average immigrant are 55 percent lower than for a native-born American citizen with similar characteristics. With the ratio of seniors to workers projected to increase by 67 percent between 2010 and 2030, it stands to reason that including the relatively healthy, relatively employable and largely uninsured illegal population in some sort of universal health-care system would be a boon rather than a burden. “Insurance in principle has to cover the average medical cost of all the people it’s serving,” explains Leighton Ku, a professor of health policy at George Washington University. “So if you add cheaper people to the pool, like immigrants, you reduce the average cost.” More undocumented workers, in other words, means lower premiums for everyone.

We’re talking about implementing, in essence, a policy based on pure spite that’s not going to accomplish anything to improve citizens’ lives. Meanwhile, folks should attend to Andrea Nill’s point that stringent verification mechanisms tend to mostly wind up excluding legal residents who just have problems with their paperwork. Members of congress ought to consider the reality that voting mostly happens retrospectively. If you’re going to vote yes on a controversial health care package, your best defense is going to be making sure the package works well when implemented. These efforts to deflect immigration-related criticism are undermining the more important need to make the bill work as well as possible for most people.

Everyone’s had a good time making fun of Joe Wilson, but it’s worth observing that Senators Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Max Baucus (D-MT) are going to make sure that Wilson’s outburst lets him win the substantive policy fight:

The controversy over Republican Rep. Joe Wilson’s shouting out “You Lie!” at the President over his claim that illegal immigrants wouldn’t benefit from health-care reform apparently sparked some reconsideration of the relevant language. “We really thought we’d resolved this question of people who are here illegally, but as we reflected on the President’s speech last night we wanted to go back and drill down again,” said Senator Kent Conrad, one of the Democrats in the talks after a meeting Thursday morning. Baucus later that afternoon said the group would put in a proof of citizenship requirement to participate in the new health exchange — a move likely to inflame the left.

The policy rationale for declining to provide subsidies to people who are in the country illegally is fairly clear. But the new Wilson-Baucus line is really nuts. They’re saying that people should be required to provide proof of citizenship before they buy health insurance on the individual market with their own money. This will have a direct cost to taxpayers since some verification mechanism will need to be put into place. It will also have an indirect cost to you and me and everyone we know—the vast majority of people, after all, aren’t undocumented immigrants but we’re all going to need to go through a citizenship check hassle before we buy health insurance. It will probably also make average premiums higher, since the exchanges will be left with a smaller risk pool and there’s no real reason to believe that the subset of undocumented immigrants who are capable of affording an unsubsidized insurance policy are below-average health risks. Last, of course, this will make the undocumented immigrant population sicker with negative public health consequences for their coworkers, friends, family, and the customers of the businesses they walk at.

That’s a mighty high price to ask U.S. citizens and legal residents to pay all for what amounts to spite. As I said yesterday, we could implement citizenship checks before you buy ibuprofen at CVS or before you get on the highway, but we don’t—it would be cruel and pointless, an inconvenience to everyone that accomplishes nothing. A person who wants to be deliberately tendentious could characterize SAFETEA-LU as a plan to “give highways and mass transit to illegal immigrants” but that would be an extremely strange way to look at it.

To revisit last night’s action, the President said this:

THE PRESIDENT: There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms — the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.

REP JOE WILSON: You lie! (Boos.)

THE PRESIDENT: It’s not true. And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up — under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place. (Applause.)

Brendan Nyhan bends over backwards to construct an interpretation of the situation such that Rep Wilson is merely being highly misleading rather than telling an outright falsehood:

Obama is clearly referring to the false claim that health care reform would provide free health insurance to illegal immigrants. Many people may interpret Wilson’s outburst as a defense of this claim (it’s impossible to know what he was thinking). However, as Rob correctly points out, Obama’s reforms would apply to everyone — including illegal immigrants — who purchases coverage through health insurance exchanges, including from a proposed government insurance program known as the public option. If you define the public option as insuring someone and describe it as a reform, then Obama’s statement could be seen as misleading and Wilson’s point could be seen as more supportable.

(wikimedia)

In other words, though the bills would prevent undocumented immigrants from receiving any taxpayer assistance in purchasing health insurance, the proposals on the table don’t do anything special to prevent an undocumented immigrant from buying health insurance with his own money. To characterize this as “insur[ing] illegal immigrants” strikes me as about on a par with claiming that Obama’s health care plans give ibuprofen to illegal immigrants. After all, nothing in the bill stops illegal immigrants from buying ibuprofen in a store! And the very same FDA regulations that assure citizens and legal residents and tourists of the safety of ibuprofen will also benefit illegal immigrants.

Is your bus full of immigrants? (cc photo by Charlie Brewer)

One frustrating aspect of the health care debate is that the President keeps getting accused of wanting to do things that he’s not actually doing but that would actually be good ideas. For example, as he explained last night the public option he’s designed stands no chance whatsoever of driving private insurance companies all out of business. But driving private health insurance companies out of business with public-private competition would be a good idea! Similarly, contrary to Rep Wilson, the bills under consideration really won’t give health insurance to undocumented immigrants. But like Alexandra Gutierrez this seems regrettable to me—undocumented immigrants are people, too!

Obviously, it’s politically impossible for elected officials to take any other stand on this immigrant issue, but it’s a really unfortunate and inhumane posture they’re adopted. Hopefully someday soon we’ll get an immigration reform measure that directly deals with the multi-faceted problem of the presence of a mass community of undocumented people in the United States. Until then, I’m still waiting for the moment when conservatives realize that “illegal immigrants might use it!” actually works as an argument against basically all public sector endeavors. Illegal immigrants benefit from the cops catching murderers! They ride the bus! They drive on highways! Better just eliminate all services to make sure no one from Mexico takes advantages of any of them.

Chateau Frontenac, Québec City (cc photo by Joe Shlabotnik)

Mark Krikorian visits Québec City (lovely, as I recall) and comes back with some typically bizarre thoughts:

Quebecois are a distinct people, a nation, who should have an independent state (though, I hasten to add, it’s none of our government’s business one way or the other). But what they have now seems better than that — all the advantages of independence without any of the responsibility, kind of like Puerto Rico. And the destructive effects of efforts to keep Quebec in the Canadian confederation (official national bilingualism and the attendant rise of bilingual, deracinated elites) should be a warning of the disaster that would result were Puerto Rico to become a state. Vive le Quebec libre! Viva Puerto Rico libre!

So . . . bilingualism clearly creates a lot of practical problems and Canada’s had various headaches around it. But the fact that many elite Canadians speak two languages hardly strikes me as a social and cultural crisis. The United States is a very big country and English is the world’s dominant language, so it’s totally viable for American elites to be monolingual. And good for us. But it’s actually quite typical for people to have multiple language competencies without becoming “deracinated” in any troubling way.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that it’s hard to solve these issues through secession. Canada has a large Francophone minority. But if Québec were an independent country, it would be a country with a large Anglophone minority. Either way, human rights and a decent respect for the legitimate claims of minority groups winds up being indispensable. Krikorian’s dream of slicing the world into neat, tidy, perfectly homogeneous political units just bears very little resemblance to reality.

Harry Reid (D-NV)

An item in yesterday’s Congress Daily said that Nancy Pelosi “told the Asian American and Pacific Islander Summit this morning that Congress would tackle immigration reform after finishing with health care and energy.” CD opined that “it seems unlikely that Congress could work through all three mega-issues this year” but Pelosi didn’t say that. Harry Reid, meanwhile, explicitly said he thought immigration could be done this year:

“As far as I’m concerned, we have three major issues we have to do this year, if at all possible: No. 1 is healthcare; No 2 is energy, global warming; No. 3 is immigration reform,” Reid said. “It’s going to happen this session, but I want it this year, if at all possible.”

Obviously, this still may not happen. But it’s good to hear. In the immediate wake of the Sonia Sotomayor announcement, you sometimes heard that now that we’re getting a Latina justice, there’s no need to do immigration reform. The reality, however, is that the presence of huge numbers of undocumented immigrants in the United States is a very real problem that needs to be confronted. Efforts to make any other kind of social policy—be it health care, higher education, labor law reform, whatever—wind up being complicated by the problem. You could try to solve the problem in an impractical and inhumane manner by deporting everyone, or you can try to find a practical way of getting law-abiding people paying taxes on put on a path to citizenship. Just trying to ignore the issue isn’t going to viable.

Unless, that is, you’re Pat Buchanan in which case you take a cute story about Sotomayor spending her summers re-reading classic children’s books she hadn’t had a chance to read as a kid and turn it into a pretext to mock her:

Amanda Terkel reminds us that normally Buchanan claims that Hispanics need to work harder to learn English. But faced with an actual example of someone working to learn English, he has nothing but scorn and spite.

Meanwhile, Buchanan also thinks a vote against Sotomayor would be a vote for the white working class. In the real world, of course, despite the attention on “hot button” social issues, the bulk of federal litigation has to do with economic matters. As Jeffrey Toobin wrote of John Roberts:

After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.

It’s not clear to me why consistently siding with corporate defendants would count as a blow for the interests of the white working class.

I’m not really sure how this came up, but it seems that earlier today Max Baucus (D-MT) said that undocumented immigrants are out of luck in terms of health care:

Baucus told the group that his plan would not cover illegal immigrants who are working in the U.S., which means hospitals would probably bear the cost of treating those in the country illegally.

“We’re not going to cover undocumented workers because that’s too politically explosive,” he said.

It’s a bit hard to disagree with Baucus on the “too politically explosive” front, but I think it’s worth dwelling for a moment on the fact that this is really too bad. I mean, human beings deserve health care when they’re sick. And like all uninsured Americans, undocumented immigrants who show up at emergency rooms with severe problems do, in fact, get treated. So insofar as congress has a good health care bill that can get people out of the emergency rooms and into preventive care, timely treatment for their problems, etc., there’s no really persuasive reason other than crass politics for keeping them out of the system. Conversely, adding a “citizenship monitoring” function to the health care system will pull funds and attention away from improving people’s health.

But all this is really mostly one more reason why we could use comprehensive immigration reform in this country. It’s unfortunate that every substantial social policy argument we undertake now needs to have a “how are you going to exclude undocumented immigrants?” component. And not just unfortunate, to some extent it’s paralyzing. Suppose some zealot proposals a bill to revoke the federal transportation funding from any state that allows undocumented immigrants to ride on its mass transit systems? Next thing you know, bus drivers are checking people’s green cards and nothing works.

That’s interesting. Conventional wisdom has had it that the recession should make public opinion more hostile to immigrants, but things seem to have moved in the opposite direction. And indeed things should move in a more pro-immigrant, pro-immigration direction since the evidence is pretty overwhelming that openness to immigration boosts economic growth. Then when you think about the use of your marginal federal dollar, consider the possible long-term benefits of investing in better infrastructure or better schools or treating a sick person versus using it on harassing a bunch of people in hopes of inspiring some of them to move back to Mexico.

At any rate, there’s a pretty obvious political upside to providing a path to citizenship for folks living here illegally, so this is something progressive politicians would do well to run some political risks for even if other polling comes in more mixed.

I don’t think this idea is nearly the panacea that Gary Shilling and Richard LeFrak seem to think it is, but nevertheless a program to offer permanent resident status to foreigners who buy American houses does seem to me like a good idea. It should, at a minimum, help decrease the amount of time it takes for the capacity overhang in U.S. housing to get soaked up. Meanwhile, there would be some stimulative effect to getting more people to move here. They’d presumably buy furniture, etc. I’m just a bit skeptical that there’s be all that many people taking advantage of such an offer—traditionally people immigrate to the United States to find work, but this is not a good time to be job hunting.

Barry Ritholtz also likes the other.

Part of the nature of privilege is that huge problems in other people’s lives can remain invisible to even a good liberal. So it wasn’t until November 2007 when I for the first time met several couples afflicted by the problem that the issue of U.S. immigration law’s unfair treatment of gay and lesbian couples came to my attention. The essence of the matter is that the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act allows U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents to sponsor their spouses for immigration purposes. So if you’re stationed in Belgium for a couple of years for work, marry a Belgian, and then want to move back to the United States you can take your husband or wife. But if you’re a man who falls in love with a Belgian man, or a woman who falls in love with a Belgian woman, you’re out of luck. If your company wants to transfer you back to the states, you’ve got a big problem.

At any rate, Jerry Nadler and Pat Leahy have a bill called the Uniting American Families Act that would address this situation. The best solution, of course, would be to let gay and lesbian couples just get married on an equal basis with other couples, thus eliminating the need for special legal workarounds for the secondary discriminatory results of discriminatory marriage rights. But that doesn’t seem to be politically realistic, and this is a small, decent step that could be taken to help relieve a severe source of pain to a lot of people who are needlessly suffering right now.

And don’t let yourself become complacent with the thought that these are “good” robots either. As Chris Fabri observed yesterday:

Don’t you people read Asimov? Robots are bad for humanity, even when they are an apparent positive, and not bent on our destruction. I’m going to call it “Fabri’s Wager:” Either you 1.invent robots and they turn on you, destroying civilization, or you 2. invent robots and they eliminate the need for humans to do anything, thus effectively destroying civilization. So clearly, we should not create robots.

Exactly. Beware robots. Of course Steve Sailer thinks it’s great that Japan’s full of robots — it’s an alternative to immigration.

This won’t be the first time a culture war has come to a close. In the 1920s, battles over evolution, immigration, prohibition and the resurgent Ku Klux Klan dominated election after election. And those issues played into that era’s version of the red-blue divide, pitting newly arrived, saloon-frequenting, big-city Catholics against old-stock, teetotaling, small-town Protestants. In 1924, the Democratic convention split so bitterly over prohibition and the Klan that it took more than 100 ballots to nominate a candidate for president.

Then, says Beinart, that era came to a close in the 1930s driven to an end by a combination of economic problems and generational turnover. Beinart says something similar is happening today:

Today, according to a recent Newsweek poll, the economy is up to 44 percent and “issues like abortion, guns and same-sex marriage” down to only 6 percent. It’s no coincidence that Palin’s popularity has plummeted as the financial crisis has taken center stage. From her championing of small-town America to her efforts to link Barack Obama to former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, Palin is treading a path well-worn by Republicans in recent decades. She’s depicting the campaign as a struggle between the culturally familiar and the culturally threatening, the culturally traditional and the culturally exotic. But Obama has dismissed those attacks as irrelevant, and the public, focused nervously on the economic collapse, has largely tuned them out.

Palin’s attacks are also failing because of generational change. The long-running, internecine baby boomer cultural feud just isn’t that relevant to Americans who came of age after the civil rights, gay rights and feminist revolutions. Even many younger evangelicals are broadening their agendas beyond abortion, stem cells, school prayer and gay marriage. And just as younger Protestants found JFK less threatening than their parents had found Al Smith, younger whites — even in bright-red states — don’t view the prospect of a black president with great alarm.

I think we should be suspicious of arguments that seem to assume that US political history operates as a series of repeating long cycles. Realistically, the number of cases Beinart is working with here are somewhere between one and two, not nearly enough to use as the basis for meaningful predictions. It’s definitely true that the economic downturn is making GOP culture war attacks relatively ineffective. But something similar was true in 1992. Elections that take place during recessions are dominated by a desire to punish the incumbent party. But that doesn’t mean people don’t care about these issues anymore. What’s more, I would say that part of the reason the McCain-Palin camp’s culture war politics seems so lame is that McCain’s record has left him unable to campaign on Federal Marriage Amendment or the need to rounp-up immigrants and deport them. Unlike praise of small towns and vague condemnations of “fake” Virginia, those are real issues — genuine subjects of legislative activity that I can imagine people running and winning on. Not, to be sure, amidst a recession and with a hugely unpopular conservative incumbent. But I have a feeling both of those issues will be back soon enough.

In skirmishes around the country in recent months, evangelicals and others who believe Republicans have been too timid in fighting abortion, gay marriage and illegal immigration have won election to the party’s national committee, in preparation for a fight over the direction and leadership of the party.

On immigration, I think this is wrong but it’s not totally absurd. Given John McCain’s record, it’s really possible that he left some votes on the table that adding some anti-Hispanic demagoguery to the mix of the anti-black and anti-cosmopolitan demagoguery could, in principle, have helped him grab. On gay marriage, though? No way. The right has been pushing this issue about as hard as it can be pushed for the past five years. It’s done them some good, but also wrecked their brand with younger and more tolerant voters, and it’s clearly a topic that’s going to be less and less useful over time.