Outis

Thoughts on the plight and problem of unauthorized immigrants.

I was hoping to write about the power and importance of myth and, in particular, the myth of an intellectual elite separate and distinct from the financial elite.

Unfortunately, as often happens, my employment has thrust me back into a conversation I would just as soon leave for a few weeks: immigration and, in particular, illegal immigration.

First things first: no one, not a single living soul, is in favor of illegal immigration.

Illegal immigrants would much rather be legal immigrants. Illegal immigrants would much rather enter the U.S. by bus, train or plane in search of employment. Illegal immigrants would much rather pay a fee to the U.S. government for permission to seek out such work than pay a coyote to smuggle them in.

Instead, half of all illegal immigrants enter the U.S. legally on false pretenses. The other half of this population is forced to enter the U.S. at great peril. They must pay smugglers for the service of being lead through the desert, packed into an unventilated cargo vessel, put into indentured servitude in a U.S. sweatshop.

Illegal immigrants enter the U.S. labor market at a considerable disadvantage to authorized immigrants: unable to demand fair treatment or fair wages. They avoid all manner of essential instutitions — health care, law enforcement — for fear of deportation. They are workers, only, without rights or respect.

So, let’s get that clear, once and for all: no one, least of all migrants, themselves, likes illegal immigration.

Repeat: no one wants illegal immigration.

Everyone involved in this complex social, economic and political debate — except, perhaps, for unscrupulous businesses and professional race-baiters — wants an end to illegal immigration.

How then, should we go about addressing the suffering of illegal immigrants as well as the localized fiscal drain — repeat, local, discrete and specific drain — their unauthorized status places on local and state governments?

The most important step in this direction is to move the discussion out from the fringes, from the domain of the righteous and those possessed by anger, and into the public square, into our churches, universities and government agencies.

Parts of the problem, parts of the solution

For too, too many groups and individuals, this one issue has become a simple answer to a host of complicated questions.

I suspect that the guaranteed silence, the default disadvantage of the immigrants in question, has allowed this issue to metastasize into a matter of religious overtones.

For rather than confronting the U.S. demand for cheap labor, rather than confronting the poverty that defines the vast majority of the world’s nations, those who wish to magically eliminate the presence of illegal immigrants frame the issue as a matter of morality: illegal immigrants are bad people who must be sent away.

Those who insist on placing our focus on the immigrants, themselves, rather than the role they play in our economy, are simply shooting the messenger.

In fact, illegal immigration is the result of several — repeat, several — causes and, accordingly, requires a co-ordinated and comprehensive respons — not a single law, a single wall, a single rule.

This is not, as the demagogues and rabble rousers would maintaing a matter of right and wrong, but of supply and demand. Should America export low-paying jobs or should it import workers to do the same?

Once again, illegal immigration is a matter of economic choice, however abetted by culture and tradition. Immigrants enter the U.S. illegally because they can obtain employment.

If the U.S. government truly believed that immigrants enter the U.S. illegally for benefits, you can bet your last Gramm-Rudman-Hollings dollar that there would be a far more aggressive response to this issue.

Instead, it is met with laissez faire tolerance by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, by the executive branch and legislative branches of the U.S. government because it is a matter of markets and trade, a matter of development and competition.

For if you consider the panoply of trade, security, health and social challenges on our horizon, this issue, however important, is not, as the above cited zealots argue, the fundamental threat against all that is good and just in America.

Compare for instance, the fiscal cost of the (possibly necessary, possibly gratuitous) invasion and reconstruction of Iraq. Compare that cost with the impact of illegal immigrants in the U.S.. Now, repeat this comparison all the way down the line: health care and health insurance, energy, competition with China and India, the global AIDS epidemic, etc.

Yet, sampling the various and sundry web sites devoted to this issue, taking stock of the many political radio programs and several high-profile activists (and, even, elected officials) who find a reason to be in this unresolved problem, one would think that the cure for cancer, itself, lies in an aggressive, punitive response to immigrants.

Rather than tackling the demand for immigrant labor, in all its difficult implications for capitalism and the role of government in the marketplace, they seek only to make the supply — human beings — the hated enemy of all righteous patriots.

Thus, you will rarely find in these strident jeremiads an honest or comprehensive accounting of the trade balance between such states as California and Mexico (the latter being the number one destination of the former’s exports).

Steeped in a river of rage, those who wish for a simple solution deny the complexity of the problem by casting in the shadows for a conspiracy of incompetent governors, legislators, senators, representatives, economists, industrialists, entrepreneurs and, of course, immoral peasants from the Third World. In other words, the problem is not difficult, the problem is “them.”

Hence, illegal immigration becomes a moral rather than an economic concern, allowing true believers to paint the world into a simpler place, organized betewen good and evil, rather than the far more ambiguous reality of good people in bad situations or bad people in good situations.

So it is that rhetoric decries a millenarian crisis, a world turned upside down and resting on this single issue.

The American way

Our nation’s Anglo-Saxon heritage is largely a tribute to the protection of religious minorities like the Puritans. So it is that everyone is entitled to the free exercise of their religious beliefs, even when such beliefs are stated as matters of political and social import — for what all-encompassing system does not also include prescriptions for the proper ordering of man and nature?

Our challenge, as participants in a commonwealth, is to sort out the religious implications and underpinnings of our political claims. If you see illegal immigration as a moral issue, then be prepared to discuss ethics.

Does your proposal reduce suffering or simply brush it under the carpet?

Does your plan ameliorate poverty or does it push it, temporarily, out of sight and out of mind?

Does your committment to fairness and justice entail that we organize our economy around equal opportunity or are you hoping to safeguard the privilege of some at the expense of the majority who are without?

If you feel these questions are irrelevant, then perhaps we should avoid morality altogether in discussing this issue.

Such a change in rhetoric might very well be the first step we take towards progress.

The following originally appeared as a postscript to an entry, poorly articulated and subsequently pulled, that asked the now popular question: If the presidency were a U.S. corporation and the invasion of Iraq one of its products, how would it be judged and how would the occupation have fared under such circumstances?

postscript

With a tinge of shame, I remember the kind of pompous disdain this President Bush expressed for “nation-building,” during the debates against then vice president Gore in the summer of 2000.

The new conservative activists in the U.S. Crongress had gotten a lot of mileage over Kosovo and the like during the Clinton administration. So Bush sneered at the very notion of using the U.S. armed forces as a police force. What bloody arrogance.

And I quote:

The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation-building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders.

– Governor George W. Bush

Very careful, indeed.

Do most Republicans really believe the lie that the choice in 2000 was between Bush and Gore and not between Governor Bush and Senator McCain?

Imagine, for a moment, how “President McCain” would have handled 9/11.

Arrogance incarnate [5/8/2004]

In “The Price of Arrogance,” Fareed Zakaria writes:

Since 9/11, a handful of officials at the top of the Defense Department and the vice president’s office have commandeered American foreign and defense policy. In the name of fighting terror they have systematically weakened the traditional restraints that have made this country respected around the world. Alliances, international institutions, norms and ethical conventions have all been deemed expensive indulgences at a time of crisis.

Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq — troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani — Washington’s assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.

Could FedEx American Express win the war? [8/20/2004]

The August 23, 2004 edition of Newsweek delivers Mr. Zakaria’s own answer:

Perhaps Iraq would have been a disaster no matter what. But there’s a thinly veiled racism behind such views, implying that Iraqis are savages genetically disposed to produce chaos and anarchy. In fact, other nation-building efforts over the past decade have gone reasonably well, when well planned and executed.

“Strategy is execution,” Louis Gerstner, former CEO of IBM, American Express and RJR Nabisco, has often remarked. In fact, it’s widely understood in the business world that having a good objective means nothing if you implement it badly. “Unless you translate big thoughts into concrete steps for action, they’re pointless,” writes Larry Bossidy, former CEO of Honeywell.

Bossidy has written a book titled “Execution,” which is worth reading in this context. Almost every requirement he lays out was ignored by the Bush administration in its occupation of Iraq. One important example: “You cannot have an execution culture without robust dialogue–one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor, and informality,” Bossidy writes. “Robust dialogue starts when people go in with open minds. You cannot set realistic goals until you’ve debated the assumptions behind them.”

Say this in the business world and it is considered wisdom. But say it as a politician and it is derided as “nuance” or “sophistication.” Perhaps that’s why Washington works as poorly as it does.

Before there was something, there was nothing.

And that nothing continues to permeate our world. From the certain death that is the crescendo of life to the night that ushers in the day, nothing is always with us. Even our bodies are made of nothing — for how else could x-rays pass through us?

From the infinitesimal spaces between orbiting electrons to the seemingly infinite space that separates orbiting planets, in every known and still unknown realm, at the heart of every mystery and in the gaps of every lasting myth, there is nothing.

So it is in music, which is meaningful only because of silence: not only in the accoustical spaces between beats, in the fleeting presence of a note or a chord, but also in the logical spaces between melodies — the distance between point and counterpoint or call and response.

For me, writing music is a matter of wrestling with the nothing underneath every song — of articulating the memory that, somehow, precedes the experience.

So it is that the best songs are ones that are like a thing that needs to be, that probably already existed — if elsewhere or otherwise.

Conversely, the worst songs, the ones that refuse and resist their own birthing, the ones forever marred and scarred, are those that lack sure footing on the stilts that lift up what is from the dark, bottomless depths of what is not.

All of this can be put in much simpler terms: get a good groove going and you can go anywhere with a song. But fail to find the right rhythm and nothing will fit — even the smartest, complementary melodies will forever hang slightly askew.

Given all the above, I can’t help but think that songs are prayers; regardless of the rational framework in which and through which they are understood, be it by the song’s author, performer or audience.

For what else but prayer speaks to the unknown, to the forthcoming, to the unfolding? What human prayer does not lament our constitutive “brokenness” while, nonetheless, daring, daring to address God?

For who else is listening when a song is first sung, as the notes are pulled from and echoed into the void.

for example
1981, Kraftwerk, “Computer World”. Daring in its palette of sounds, elegant in its composition, this German electronic disco record is as close as any artist can get to the basis of order, the edge between note and noise, beat and silence, moan and laugh.

1987, Sonic Youth, “Sister”. Far more earnest than the coy evasions of Kraftwerk, this gritty, brightly lit, rumbling rock opera is a prayer in the mystical tradition. Made by New York City avante-gardists, working in the pop form of rock and roll, this short collection of songs is truly greater than the sum of its parts — an accomplishment of faith more than science, of inspiration rather than formal technique.

1994, Tortoise, “Tortoise”. Hiding under lite jazz instrumentation, this modest record is as quiet as a roaring mouse and as genuine as a poor man’s gift. Pegged on electric basslines and swinging if spare drums, it manages to breathe air into the rock sound. An inhalation awaiting an exhale. “Tin Cans & Twine” (audio).

In Iraq or in the U.S., demagogues are bad for democracy.

When the Soviets took power, the communications technology they favored wasn’t telephone networks, but the loudspeaker. — Nicholas Lemann

As it becomes more difficult to reach across the party line, campaigns are devoting more energy to firing up their hard-core supporters. For voters in the middle, this election may aggravate their feeling that politics no longer speaks to them, that it has become a dialogue of the deaf, a rant of uncompromising extremes. — “Political Split Is Pervasive,” The Washington Post

I recently had the opportunity to interview, via email, the astute editor of a magazine devoted to talk radio.

Early on in our email exchange, the interviewee quoted Shakespeare to say “All the world is a stage,” and talk radio, though it claims to offer political advice, is primarily a form of entertainment.

To which I responded: If talk radio is mostly entertainment, then it need not be faithful to the democratic process.

In other words, if talk shows hosts are merely entertainers they have no obligation to defend their statements through a dialogue with expert detractors.

Perhaps, their entertaining but not necessarily truthful depiction of political matters, left unexamined, might negatively affect our society’s ability to engage in democracy. (Mind you, this applies to liberals as much as conservatives.)

My concern, as a Cuban refugee and an American citizen by choice, is the anti-democratic effect of the populist demagogue. As I see it, when monologuists set the tone for public debate, dialogue is often very difficult– and democracy relies on dialogue.

But, the editor of the talk radio industry magazine countered that politics is actually war by peaceful means and no one side need give the other the opportunity to speak.

He went on to say that the occasion for a rebuttal is made possible by the “Freedom of Speech” protections in the U.S. Constitution and it ultimately falls to the marketplace of ideas and enlightened consumers to sort out competing claims.

Respectfully and joyfully, I disagreed, on several points.

First, while the definition of politics as “war by other means” has a long historical tradition, from Machiavelli to Clausewitz to Karl Rove, it is not the only definition of the political process.

From the time of Plato, there has been a countervailing definition which holds that, unlike war, politics is a deliberative process where the preferred outcome is not necessarily known beforehand.

In this tradition, people enter into politics not only to establish a particular order (as they would through war) but, rather, to investigate and determine what the best possible order might be.

Furthermore, the marketplace of ideas (or goods) is not inherently transparent and has, on many occasions, been manipulated at the expense of the consumer; whether purchasing fruit or buying into an idea.

And while the First Amendment protects the right to rebutt claims, it does not provide for the means to do so in a public square ostensibly dominated by private soapboxes.

Finally, “What’s entertainment?” For if talk radio is the domain of monologuists, it is also a deviation from the tradition of Shakespeare, novels, movies and other forms of popular storytelling.

In most of these genres, the best stories include not one but multiple perspectives and voices. Almost always, the better realized the villain, the more compelling the story.

For the record, my nerdy response led to a snippy riposte (his), a puzzled apology (mine) and a conciliatory gesture (his).

We ended our email exchange shortly thereafter, with a perfunctory: “We will agree to disagree.”

Later on that same day, I caught an episode of The Charlie Rose show devoted to the Sadr militia revolt in Iraq. As the guests on this television talk show pointed out, wining the war in Iraq proved very easy — but establishing a democracy will be far more difficult.

One guest on the program drew a parallel to the Western democracies, saying: It took us one thousand years, from the signing of the Magna Carta, to develop our democratic institutions. It took the Japanese five to seven years after World War II to create their democracy. In conclusion, Why would we think we can create a democracy in Iraq in less than 12 months?

And that’s when it hit me.

If, as the shrewd talk tadio expert had said, politics and war are two sides of the same concern, then there should be no problem in Iraq: the winner takes all.

But, in fact, there is a tremendous problem in Iraq. For war and politics — by which I have always assumed one means democracy — are not one and the same.

And so the U.S. must now slowly, painstakingly, use military means to create the conditions for a democracy in what was formerly a dictatorship — to fashion a society where dialogue rather than monologue reigns supreme.

This last week, that march towards democracy was ambushed by a charismatic and, I would imagine, highly entertaining figure: Muqtada al-Sadr. Note that what al-Sadr says is beyond refutation — although he is but a student, he has used his father’s legacy as a member of the clergy to issue proclamations that allow for no rebuttal.

Furthermore, in the chain of events that triggered his power play — his military act — the turning point may have come when the U.S. occupying forces closed down his newspaper, al-Hawzah, last week.

[This was all wrong. Dec. 8, 2005] Why was the al-Hawzah newspaper closed down? Because it was printing stories that often had little to no basis in reality. Instead, like entertaining opinions, they painted sensational pictures of U.S. misdeeds.

One could argue that the U.S. was censoring al-Hawzah, but censorship is only meaningful in the context of a civil society, where institutions — like the legal system — exist to hash out the validity of claims. No such institutions exist at the moment in Iraq.

al-Hawzah and al-Sadr tell stories and offer observations that are ostensibly entertaining, popular and compelling. Yet, the expression of same has been found to be a threat for democracy in Iraq, most likely because al-Sadr has no intentions of sharing the stage or engaging in dialogue with his detractors.

Naturally, I don’t mean to imply the popular talk show hosts are the American equivalent of firebrand clerics like al-Sadr. But, the parallels are intriguing.

In order to dismiss this comparison, one would have to succesfully argue that democracy in the U.S. is nowhere near as fragile as it is in Iraq.

Our legal system and our constitution are, without a doubt, a solid guarantee of democracy. Our schools and media are, similarly, both varied, stable and in many ways independent.

But how healthy is our civil society?

postscript

“‘Il Partito d’Amore’ is perhaps the oddest example of a growing phenomenon–the move to the theatre by political satirists unable to gain access to television in a country where all six main channels are owned by, or answerable to, the prime minister. ‘Since classical times, the theatre has been used as a means of communication, especially at difficult moments, as during dictatorships,’ said Fernando Dalla Chiesa, the centre-left senator who plays the part of Mr Berlusconi. ‘In Italy, we do not have an authoritarian system. But we do have a sick democracy.’” — The Economist

footnote: the problem with politics as war

“There is a truth and we don’t all see it, but we have to argue in light of the evidence we have and respect the truth - not power, but truth. With that idea civilization is possible. That is free men, open men, discursive men argue with one another. Barbarians club one another, because it’s all about power. So it makes civilization possible.” — Michael Novak, American Enterprise Institute

From a pragmatic standpoint, the problem with politics as war can be summed up in two words: Pyrrhic victory.

If politics is waged as a constant campaign for victory, the ultimate outcome may in fact be worse for all involved — when considered beyond the narrow scope of a rifle.

While reason is very much a part of successful military campaigns, it is ultimately subservient to the goal of victory; a goal that is seldom redefined in the midst of battle. (”Stay the course…” into disaster.)

And so we come to the constant campaign that has, by many accounts, defined the Bush presidency; a campaign led by Karl Rove with the assistance of loyal guards like Senator Bill Frist and Condoleeza Rice.

Mind you, it’s not their goals or their values that I find most troubling — but, much more importantly, the way in which they seek to make their will a reality.

And the corruption of the policy process — in which political appointees come in with a predetermined agenda, and technical experts who might present information their superiors don’t want to hear are muzzled — has infected every area I know anything about, from tax cuts to matters of war and peace. — Paul Krugman, “The Mercury Scandal,” The New York Times

Now, let’s say you “hate” Paul Krugman and you think the New York Times is a mouthpiece for some “cabal of liberal elites.” Fair enough.

Let’s also, for argument’s sake, suppose that former White House appointee, U.S. Treasure Secretary Paul O’Neill is lying when he reports that the White House wanted to invade Iraq, despite lacking evidence that it was, in any way, a threat to the U.S..

While we’re at it, let’s also assume that Richard Clarke, another White House appointee, is again lying when he reports, under oath, to a congressional commission the same claim: that the White House did not deliberate over the best response to 9/11, but rather, imposed its will as if it were waging war not only against terrorists but, also, against their detractors in the U.S. government.

Moreover, let’s disregard the statements of Richard S. Foster, the government’s chief analyst of Medicare costs, who claims he was threatened with dismissal if he replied directly to legislative requests for information about prescription drug bills pending in Congress.

Nor should we pay much attention to Christie Whitman’s departure from the Environmental Protection Agency, after clashing with the White House over the latter’s decision to withdraw from the Kyoto global warming treaty based on the conclusion that there is, in fact, no validity to the notion of global warming.

Likewise, we need not heed the warning of 60 leading scientists–including Nobel laureates, leading medical experts, former federal agency directors and university chairs and presidents– who note that the White House suppresses and distorts scientific analysis from federal agencies and undermines the quality of scientific advisory panels when same analyses and panels contradict the predetermined objectives of the President.

Nor should we take into consideration the critique offered by John DiIulio, former head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who described the current administration thusly: “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus…It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

Likewise disreputable is Bob Woodward’s latest book, “Plan of Attack,” which, though endorsed by the White House, corroborates the claims made by O’Neill and Clarke, cited above.

Rather, let’s just focus on one question: does the President of the U.S. put his pants on one leg at a time?

If so, we might correctly presume that as with the rest of us mere mortals, he may not know all there is to know about all that can be known.

Assuming that ours is not an all-knowing president or leadership, why should we believe that their beliefs are always necessarily correct, that their conclusions are beyond reasonable doubt?

For this very reason, we enter into politics not only to impose that which we desire to be true but, more importantly, to determine the truth and act accordingly.