If I haven’t bored you to death with my previous post, take a look at the discussion continuing on Making Light right now, covering many of the same issues. Lots of interesting comments from the readers, including highly entertaining discussions of cross-cultural cuisines. Favorite quote: “You don’t have *real* international eating until the Vietnamese are running the pizzeria and the Latinos are serving sushi.”
Tags: immigration, politics
Right now the media is abuzz with discussions of Bush’s proposed immigration plan: spend $1.9 billion to build a fence along a couple hundred miles of US/Mexico border, beef up security by adding National Guard troops (CNN reports it could be as many as 6000), in the name of modernizing the border region and controlling illegal immigration.
This is a terrible, awful, xenophobic idea. For one thing, this kind of border militarization goes better with blocking invading armies, not keeping out low-wage workers. For another, I am not at all convinced we need to keep more people out. Heavier security on this border hasn’t kept people from trying to get into the US. We just kill more of them in the attempt. We create increased criminal activity as the penalties get higher. I don’t think this is even slightly morally justifiable, given that what we’re talking about is not keeping out drug smugglers or terrorists or criminals, but laborers. [1]
Here’s what I want to see. Give everyone who wants to come up from Mexico and work a temporary visa (do a basic check against the list of people who aren’t allowed into the US, of course). Offer the same to Canada if they make it reciprocal. If they show up with families, by all means enroll the kids in local schools. [2] If people find work, give them an extension on the work permit. Give them access to government services after they’ve paid in to the system via taxes for a certain number of months. Spend all the money that’s going into treating the border like a war zone on labor law enforcement instead.
I can’t really find an economic downside to this. If too many workers show up for the number of jobs available, people will go home. The cost of living is cheaper in Mexico. This isn’t allowing people to “jump the line” and get work in the US easier, because there are few legal options for unskilled laborers wanting to come to the US to work. It should cut down on crime by eliminating the market for criminal organizations that smuggle people over. Immigrants will spend money in the communities where they live, so that ought to make local businesses happy. And if you strictly enforce wage laws and punish any business that underpays or abuses its employees, immigrant labor can’t undercut the value of local labor. Supply and demand says that the cost of unskilled labor could get cheaper, but I think that should be treated as a separate issue, with better minimum wage requirements (it shouldn’t be legal to pay a full-time worker too little to buy food and housing) and educational opportunities so unskilled workers can move on up.
This means the only argument left is the cultural one. Anyone who is still freaked out about Spanish-speaking brown people moving into their town and ruining their way of life needs to take a deep breath and get the hell over it. This is not the end of the world. Where is your family from originally, again? And what kind of reception did they get when they arrived? This is an old, old, old story. Anti-Irish and anti-German news clippings are kind of funny to read now, but it’s all the same thing. Except I’m not sure the Germans or Irish encountered crazy border militias on their way in.
[1] Is this a good time to remind everyone that the 9/11 attackers were in the country legally? Or that the London bombers were homegrown? Our issues with terrorism have little to do with our border security.
[2] Look at Europe right now and you’ll see exactly why this is important. They’re struggling with large immigrant populations that never really assimilated into the local culture. The best way I know of to address this is to get everyone in the same schools. Our educational system doesn’t just teach reading and math, it teaches history, social expectations (admittedly it doesn’t always do a good job of this one), and other things that make people citizens of the same place. If done too aggressively it can alienate kids from their families, but I think a balanced approach is possible. And bilingual kids are often able to help their parents navigate when English is required.
Tags: immigration, politics, mexico, usa
…feel like you’ve stumbled into the middle of some cultural phenomena you don’t really understand? (but maybe it’s funny anyhow?) This is like that.
At least it’s good distraction from the completely disgusting “State of the Union 2006″.
Edit: I found another good Numa video right after I posted. Probably my favorite so far.
On the way home from work, I started thinking about the women’s clothing not coming in real women’s sizes issues, and how it’d be great if there were a way to bridge the gap between “someone ought to fix this problem but it would take more money than I have” to “real functioning company doing that thing I wanted”. Because it’s way easier to convince companies to change what they’re doing or address an ignored market by going out and creating a viable competitor for their business than by lobbying the company to see the errors of their ways. Everyone responds to incentives, and lost business is a huge one, the most direct kind.
I think I came up with a way to do it, at least for things like the clothing issue, where there are plenty of people who have an interest in this, but not the capital to change things. Set up a fund where people can contribute money in exchange for a stake in the eventual company. Keep the donations small enough that even people who aren’t normal investors can participate (ideally, as small as $20–but you could contribute more in exchange for more shares. I’d probably set a maximum so no one could buy out the whole project at the start). Make sure that everyone gets their money back if the project doesn’t hit a pre-determined fundraising goal in a set amount of time. This sort of model is already being used in politics and lobbying (well, aside from the refunds), so why couldn’t it work in a for-profit situation?
Lucas asked whether my bright idea was applicable to strippers (I came home and said I needed to write something down before I forgot it, but didn’t mention what it was). And it is, kind of. Want to open a strip club? I bet lots of people would give you $50 in exchange for a share of something like that.
It’s possible that there’s some law against this, since there are all sorts of complicated regulations surrounding businesses and investment, but I’d be very curious to see someone give this a shot.
Tags: investment, business, alternative economics
Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,–too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.
Emma Goldman
Lucas likes to tease that I’m a commie (or alternately, a freedom-hating terrorist–HI NSA), but this week I’m reading anarchists. Anarchism and Other Essays (available in a convenient iPod format) is pretty interesting so far. I get the feeling this is going to be one of those things where I agree with a lot of the premise but a small part of the conclusion, though.
The idea that the things produced of drudgery, coercion, or slavery should be considered tainted by this use of labor makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t seem to have much real weight in practice. Otherwise there would be no demand for diamonds, or cheap sweatshop clothing, or any number of things whose origins involve exploitation. I think almost everyone is so disconnected from where things come from that it’s hard to see this as sufficiently relevant unless it’s right in front of your face. So in most cases, only the workers and those in direct contact with them protest (and a few commies like me, of course).
The other thing I started thinking about when I read the quote at the top is how remarkable it is that people who endure bad work (on any level, from just jobs they dislike to really abusive situations) resist having the life squashed out of them. People resist drudgery any way they can. It’s how we cope and protest.
Tags: anarchism, labor, Emma Goldman
Protests don’t work anymore. Not rallies, not marches, not shouting and singing and sign waving. Why? It’s too easy to stop listening. We’re immune. It’s too ordinary and expected and commonplace. We can always change the channel.
Protests fail because there’s no dialogue. No conversation. No opening. Even people who were against war avoided the war protests we had in 2002, because it was self-indulgent and irrelevant and a rehash of something that worked in another era. Not now, when we can all move along elsewhere, because we’ve already heard the message and made up our minds.
I think the only thing that can work now is real conversation. About what I want and what you want and why we aren’t getting it. Partisan blathering is poisonous, it closes the ears of anyone who doesn’t already agree with that side. We don’t suffer from a lack of opinions, and I think the problem for anyone who doesn’t like the way things are going is trickier than just learning to yell louder. Personal politics are identities, and thus entrenched against the shouts of outsiders.
The news media fails here, fails to offer another kind of discussion. So much journalism is “Mr. X says this and Mr. Y says he’s wrong”, and it’s often the most critical issues that are handled this way. What we need is not only claim A and claim B, but each side’s rationale, who funds them, and what biases they may have from other personal and financial connections. Any external data is helpful, too, if it can provide context or a larger picture or specific details and outcomes. And we need real, concrete, human stories. Not exaggerated ones, no schmaltz. Writing that represents what’s happening to different people, in our country and around the world, and attempts to understand why. Because I think ultimately what we need to address can be stated as an inversion of the feminist phrase: The political is personal.
Posted in world
Tagged civil society, goverment, journalism, media, politics, protests, war
In paradisum deducant te angeli,
in tuo adventu
suscipiant te martyres,
et perducant te
in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem.
Chorus angelorum te suscipiat,
et cum Lazaro quondam paupere
aeternam habeas requiem.
I’ve been wanting to say something about the president of Harvard’s remarks on women in math and science. I think it was incredibly idiotic of him to think he’d stir up a little discussion by suggesting that there were biological reasons women are less often successful in these fields. This is meant to help? The best way to ensure that a group of people will have a harder time at something is for everyone to assume that aren’t as naturally good at it. It’s self-fulfilling.
In a separate bit of women’s issues nastiness, today the Oregonian reports that a woman in Spokane has been denied a divorce from her physically abusive husband because she’s pregnant. Apparently the judge thinks the child has a right to be born to married parents that outweighs her right to be free of her abuser. Her claim that he isn’t the father only does more to justify this. I can’t even begin to understand.
One last item: if you haven’t seen the discussion of whether Social Security is in crisis that appeared in the NYT Magazine, go and at least skim through it. Then read the article on what’s really going on with tax reform. I’m very disturbed by the government making broad changes to help the rich at the expense of everyone else. Why aren’t people yelling about this? When even some of the policy makers are willing to say that their plan is make your tax burden so obviously bad you don’t want to give another cent to the government, shouldn’t that raise an alarm somewhere?
Lucas asked me to write about this: Search for Illicit Weapons in Iraq Ends”, but I feel like there’s not much left to say.
It’s been clear for a while now that the reasons given for invading Iraq weren’t going to hold up. But even now, the people who cooked those reasons up and sold them to the public aren’t going to admit the whole thing was a sham.
It’s a really lousy thing to involve other people’s lives in your own personal conquest, creating reasons to suit your plans, to talk still more of them into bankrolling it for you, and then not even be able to stand up and apologize when it all falls apart.
Apologies aren’t everything, but that’s where you start.
