Coyote Blog

I have been spammed several times with messages breathlessly telling me I have to watch this video about why the free flow of people from poorer nations into the US looking for opportunity is so disastrous.  I had nothing else to do in my hotel room, so I watched a bit.

The video clearly relies on the fact that American students have had crappy education into US history.  He uses the period of 1925-1965 as his base period, to show how much higher immigration rates are today than in these years.  To try to make current immigration seem out of line, he gives us the first real whopper of the video - he actually calls 1925-1965 the "golden age of American immigration", implying it was an era of free and open immigration and representative of a high rate of immigration.  Anyone with any sort of history education should be able to smell a rat - after all, wasn't the late 19th and early 20th century the real period of immigration into this country? 

In fact, 1925-1965 was, on the metric of immigration as a percentage of US population (the correct way to index the number) the LOWEST and most restrictionist period of immigration in our entire history.  In fact, 1925-1965 was the golden age of xenophobic restriction laws (aimed mainly at that time at southern and eastern Europeans).

So, after the lecturer began his talk by saying that white is black, I was obviously not really interested in the rest  (not to mention the fact that he for some reason reminded me of across between Rutger Hauer and Crispin Glover playing a creepy takeover-the-world villain).  He tries to take an environmental approach, I guess to try to lure the Left into the nativist camp.  I will say his upward sloping population charts are pretty funny, given that they have absolutely no relationship to any credible forecast.  He seems to take the global warming modeler's approach to shifting assumptions to get that big hockey stick.  His argument is ridiculous, though.  If you believe that a unit of population brings with it a measure of environmental harm, then immigration doesn't really change the net harm to the globe, it only moves its effects around.  And I would argue that the US with its wealth and attention to environmental matters is in a far better position to mitigate these effects than say Mexico.  I addressed this conservative retread of Paul Ehrlich population bomb panic here.

I thought the city of Washington DC had declared a "Crime emergency" because there was too much crime.  Apparently not, since they have created a whole new class of criminals:  16-year-olds who are ... shudder ... out and about after 10PM.

D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said yesterday that the city had to
set the new 10 p.m. curfew for youths 16 and younger because of
"irresponsible" parents who don't control their children.

"You shouldn't need a curfew if you've got parents who are
responsible," Ramsey said on Washington Post Radio. "But unfortunately
we've got some parents here that are totally irresponsible. Their idea
of raising a kid is throwing a kid out of the house and letting them
straggle back in at 2 o' clock in the morning."

Hat tip to Reason's Hit and Run, which had this comment:

It's not that city officials want to play parent to every kid in the district. It's just that, gosh, turns out law enforcement professionals are better parents.

I hate to think what ideas this will give our local stormtrooper Joe Arpaio, the Sheriff with the largest PR budget in the nation. 

Props by the way to Phoenix New Times reporter John Dougherty, whose longstanding reporting on Sheriff Joe is reminiscent of the tough, confrontational local reporting of old.  Of course, there's no room for that in the milquetoast pander-to-the-local-pols reality of big-city newspapers today, so Dougherty is relegated to the local alternative paper (which may not be fair -- I don't know Mr. Dougherty -- he may prefer to be where he is).   Sheriff Joe is popular here in Phoenix, so the Arizona Republic (the big paper here) panders to him rather than risk confronting a popular figure.  The fact that one of Sheriff Joe's family helps run the Arizona Republic's editorial page may also have something to do with it.

I have written several times about the phenomena of certain nativist Americans who get absolutely freaked out whenever they even encounter Spanish in the good old USA.  Here is another example of what I have started calling Spanish Derangement Syndrome:

A Spanish-language billboard promoting iced coffee is getting a chilly reception from some Bogota officials.

Mayor Steve Lonegan said the McDonald's billboard on River Road near
Elm Avenue and the railroad overpass is offensive because it sends the
message that Spanish speakers and immigrants do not need to learn how
to speak English.

Boy would this guy ever blow a gasket here in Phoenix!  So I have a counter proposal.  Everywhere that Steve Lonegan travels overseas, I think they should remove their English signs and everyone should refuse to speak English.  No English signs in airports, no English-speaking people at the hotel desk, no International Herald Tribune on the newsstand.   After all, having English signs and English-speaking customer contact people all over, say, Germany, just sends the message that Americans don't have to learn German to travel there.

I am reminded that nearly every country in the world has an "American School" where expats send their kids to learn in English and avoid as much contact and assimilation as possible with the local populous.  For example, I had several business associates in Singapore who all sent their kids to the local American School.  Can you imagine what a hissy-fit nativists in the US would throw if there were similar Mexican schools in the US?

Update:  By the way, I don't have any particular problem with English as a criteria for citizenship, but not for mere presence in the country.  Note that I don't consider citizenship the restrictive license that nativists do, as I explained here, among other places.

Also, one would be hard-pressed to argue that the Constitution somehow restricts first amendment speech protections to speech made in English.

Update #2:  Formatting has wigged out a couple of times with this post, with the word "English" formatted out on separate lines each time it appears.  Weird.  Hacker?

I was happy to see the Wall Street Journal come forward with an editorial favoring open immigration (this one is in their non-subscription area).  I am even happier to see that they lead with the issue of fundamental human rights, not with the weak argument of who is to pick the lettuce.

Our
own view is that a philosophy of "free markets and free people"
includes flexible labor markets. At a fundamental level, this is a
matter of freedom and human dignity. These migrants are freely
contracting for their labor, which is a basic human right. Far from
selling their labor "cheap," they are traveling to the U.S. to sell it
more dearly and improve their lives. Like millions of Americans before
them, they and certainly their children climb the economic ladder as
their skills and education increase.

We
realize that critics are not inventing the manifold problems that can
arise from illegal immigration: Trespassing, violent crime, overcrowded
hospital emergency rooms, document counterfeiting, human smuggling,
corpses in the Arizona desert, and a sense that the government has lost
control of the border. But all of these result, ultimately, from too
many immigrants chasing too few U.S. visas.

Those
migrating here to make a better life for themselves and their families
would much prefer to come legally. Give them more legal ways to enter
the country, and we are likely to reduce illegal immigration far more
effectively than any physical barrier along the Rio Grande ever could.
This is not about rewarding bad behavior. It's about bringing
immigration policy in line with economic and human reality. And the
reality is that the U.S. has a growing demand for workers, while Mexico
has both a large supply of such workers and too few jobs at home.

The WSJ argues that polls show that most conservatives are similar-minded.  I'm am not a conservative and don't speak for them, but from the flavor of my email on my pro-immigration posts and from reading various conservative blogs, I have trouble believing it.

I have a number of posts on immigration, but you should start with this one.

Happy Birthday to the greatestn nation on earth.  I spend a lot of time criticizing our leaders and their policies, but there is no place else I would live.  The US Constitution is still, over two-hundred years after its creation, the greatest single document ever written.  Many other countries since have written constitutions and spilled tons of ink pontificating on theories of government, but none have had similar success in protecting individual rights while creating an environment where every individual can focus their productive energies in whatever direction they choose with generally minimal interference.

A while back I wrote about how wealth was created, and I pointed out that the great leaps we have made in human well-being over the last two hundred or so years stem from two effects:

Sure, our leaders, our military, and sometimes the nation as a whole screws up.  I and others are quick to point these screw-ups out and sometimes we find ourselves wallowing in them.  But at the end of the day, unlike in the majority of countries in the world, these screw-ups are treated as such, talked about and debated, and dealt with rather than treated as the norm. 

Take the US military in an occupying role in Iraq.  Out of 100,000 or so people, you are going to have some criminals who commit criminal acts, even in the military.  The US army, unlike nearly every occupying army in history, generally treats its soldiers' crimes as crimes, and not as the inherent right of victors to rape and pillage.  US soldiers who have committed crimes in Iraq will generally go to jail, while worse malefactors in most armies, even the holier-than-thou UN peacekeepers who seem to be engaging in rape and white slavery around the world, generally go unpunished.  For all the crap the US military takes around the world, I bet you that if you took an honest vote on the question of "Which world army would you choose to occupy your country if you lost a war" most people would answer the US.  If for no other reason because, despite all the charges of imperialism, our armies eventually leave rather than remain on as lingering masters.

So tomorrow, I will start dealing out more crap to our leaders, to the administration, to Congress, to the SCOTUS, and most especially to most every bureaucrat who thinks they can better manage my business or my property.  But today I will step back and see the forest rather than the trees, and observe I am dang lucky to be an American.

For further thoughts, I refer you to .  They tend to celebrate first the "right to vote", when in fact many people get to vote but few enjoy the freedoms we do.  The greatness of our country is in our protection of individual liberties and the rule of law.  And the great insight our country was founded with is that rights flow from the very fact of our humanity -- they are not granted to us by kings or Congress.  This last is perhaps most important, as I wrote:

At the end of the day, our freedoms in this country will only last so
long as we as a nation continue to hold to the principle that our
rights as individuals are our own, and the government's job is to
protect them, not to ration them.  Without this common belief, all the
other institutions we have discussed, from voting to the rule of law to
the Constitution, can be subverted in time

Now I am off to see Buckingham Palace.  If I see the Queen, would it be in bad taste to wish her a happy Fourth of July?

One of the problems I have making common cause with many of the civil rights critics of the Bush administration is that they tend to hurt legitimate civil rights by exaggerating their claims into the ridiculous. 

A good example is detentions at Gitmo.  I believe strongly that the Bush administration's invented concept of unlimited-length detentions without trial or judicial review is obscene and needed to be halted.  But critics of Bush quickly shifted the focus to "torture" at Gitmo, a charge that in light of the facts appears ridiculous to most rational people, including me.  As a result, the administration's desire to hold people indefinitely without due process has been aided by Bush's critics, who have shifted the focus to a subject that is much more easily defended on the facts.

Interestingly, as I watch the Beeb this morning, Britain is having a similar debate.  Its hard to figure the whole thing out from the TV coverage and sound bites, but apparently Britain has the ability to detain suspected terrorists for 90 days, and wants the power to extend this.

Many people have told me that I am an insanely naive Pollyanna for not accepting the need for indefinite detention without trial of suspected terrorists.   I have explained in the past that we don't have the right to do this with our own citizens, but we also don't have the right to do this with any other human being (the short explanation:  The individual rights we hold dear are our rights as human beings, NOT as citizens.  They flow from our very existence, not from our government and not from the fact of our citizenship.   In some ways, the government probably has less right to abuse non-citizens, not more).

Here is a test:  If the government had always had this power, ie to detain indefinitely people it thought somehow "dangerous" to "someone"  (with the government getting to define both these terms), how abused would it have been in the past.  My answer is "very much".  Who would J. Edgar Hoover have detained?  Would Martin Luther King have spent his life in jail, much like Nelson Mandela?

By the way, I have no idea what Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld means for all this, since I haven't read it and pundits seem to disagree on what it means  (unfortunately, this may be something we live with a while, a feature of the new muddled "Justice Kennedy compromise" we seem to have to live with on a number of decisions).  If anyone thinks they have seen a definitive analysis, please link it in the comments.

For a while now I have meant to write a post on immigration and terrorism, specifically to refute the argument made by anti-immigration folks that cracking down on immigration is an important part of the war on terror.  Now, I tend to agree that we are too slow in kicking out visitors who commit crimes.  I've always thought in fact that if Mexico found itself send millions of productive workers to the US only to get back a stream of the small percentage who were thugs and criminals they might finally address the root causes of why their own country can't offer productive people any opportunity.

But the guard-the-border folks go further than this, arguing we must stop all immigration with troops and "minutemen" at the border as part of the effort to defend ourselves from terrorism.  I've always thought that this was a fabricated argument, since its so easy to prove that fear of terrorism is not their real motive for troops at the border (if it were, then why are all the troops going to the Mexican border - shouldn't the long stretches of empty land on the Canadian border be just as vulnerable to terrorists?  In fact, it is Canada and not Mexico where Islamic terrorist cells have been found in the last month).

Open and legal immigration would make finding illegal entry of terrorists much easier.  Right now, by pushing Mexican immigrants out into desert, rather than marked border crossings, one gives terrorists a very large haystack to hide in.  Terrorists with violent intent must somehow be sorted out from millions of perfectly peaceful immigrants looking for work.  Arizona Watch quotes James Valliant:

If every person who wanted into America in order to find work was legally
permitted into America, I'll bet they'd be happy to stop by the front gate, show
some i.d., get checked against a terrorist watch-list, etc. Only those with
criminal records, or reasons to flee justice, those with contagious diseases,
and, well"¦ terrorists would have any reason to "jump the gate" at all.

This would concentrate our resources on those who actually posed a threat to
the country. Thousands of border patrol agents would, then, not be going after
thousands "“ ultimately, accumulated millions "“ of people everyday, but just a
few hundred "“ ultimately, a few thousands. I, personally, prefer those odds when
it comes to catching terrorists and mass-murders.

Julian Sanchez revisits Smith vs. Maryland, the Supreme Court case currently used to justify letting the government take about any data they want on your life without a warrant.  Sanchez questions the logic of the case, particularly in light of sweeping technology changes since the early 70's:

Part of the problem here is that since the late '70s, we've gone a long way
toward a world in which a huge amount of our most private information is held by
third parties. A huge chunk of my e-mails from the last couple years are stored
on some server owned by Google, where ad-generating software sifts through my
private communications looking for keywords that will allow the company to
display personally-tailored advertisements for me. Now, maybe I'm naive to have
any expectation of privacy in the e-mails sitting on that server, but I do
pretty much expect that nobody at Google is actually looking through my
correspondence and passing it around to their friends. And I at least
didn't expect until recently that some government program would be
sifting through those e-mails to see whether I used the word "jihad" some
suspicious number of times in letters to people in Saudi Arabia.

I had similar concerns about Smith v. Marlyand here.  One of my arguments was:

This exact same logic [used in this case] seemingly applies to any piece of data submitted
to any private third party unless the data is specifically protected
(e.g. medical records).  Sorry, but this is wrong.  I should be able to
have commercial transactions with third parties without the expectation
that the government can take the records for its own use without any
kind of a warrant....

The implication is that by giving a company data for use in a
transaction, we are giving them an unwritten license to do whatever
they want with the data.  Do you believe you are granting this?  Is it
true that you "entertain no expectation of privacy" in such
transactions?  If you agree with this ability, then I assume you also
agree that the government should be able to see all your:

• Credit card bills
• Records of who you have emailed
• Records of which Internet sites you have visited
• Records of what searches you made in search engines

I also pointed out that since many people spend a lot of money to keep information private (e.g. anonymous surfing software), the market has demonstrated clearly that people, unlike the SCOTUS asserted,  do have an expectation of privacy with such data.

Reason's Hit and Run points to this article by Chirstopher Hayes that helps connect the dots.  The founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and NumbersUSA, both prominent conservative anti-immigration groups, is John Tanton.  Apparently, Tanton's roots are in Ehrlich style population bomb limits-to-growth zero-sum fearmongering.

In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul Ehrlich made these ideas mainstream
with his book, The Population Bomb. With terrifying certainty, Ehrlich
argued that the exponential growth in population and the incremental growth in
food could only mean one thing: mass famine. "The battle to feed all of humanity
is over," the book begins. "In the 1970s "¦ hundreds of millions of people are
going to starve to death."

It was an instant sensation, turning "overpopulation" into a hot topic and
landing Ehrlich repeatedly on "The Tonight Show." Tanton had been ahead of the
curve. As early as the '50s, he avidly read reports from the Population
Reference Bureau, and by the time Ehrlich's book was published, he and Mary Lou
had already started work on the first Northern Michigan chapter of Planned
Parenthood. "I believed in the multiplication tables," says Tanton. "Since I was
a physician and could do something about birth control, it struck me that this
was where I could make my contribution to the conservation movement."...

Tanton, whose worldview was forged in this intellectual milieu, is haunted by
the spectre of an apocalypse just over the horizon, and the thought that he is
one of a select few who see it coming. Sitting at his desk during one of our
interviews, he reaches into a drawer, withdraws an electric metronome and flicks
it on. As the device pulses at 135 beats per minute, he explains that each beat
is a new birth (at the 1969 rate), and each new birth requires resources: food,
clothing, education. It's a trick he used when he gave talks on population in
the '70s, and it's effective. His voice barely rises over the percussive
onslaught, and after just 30 seconds you want to yell: "Make it stop!"

I never really realized this connection or Tanton's roots (for reasons outlined below, his public message has moved on from environmentalism and overpopulation).  Tanton's real reason for being anti-immigration is this:

He explains that reducing immigration will force countries like Mexico to
confront their own population growth rates. "Each country," he says, "ought to
try to match its population to its resource base."

Whatever the hell that means*, since the amount of population the
world's "resource base" is able to support has grown exponentially over
the last 100 years.  But the really, really nutty part, the part that
separates him from the just-plain-wrong Ehrlich types, is the fact the
he thinks this resource matching has to proceed country by country.  No
global markets for this guy, I guess.  Somehow people crossing an
immaginary line in the Sonoran desert makes the population less
sustainable?  On the south side, things are OK, but move 100 miles
north and suddenly the world is doomed? 

In fact, the reality is just the opposite, for the same reasons that
Ehrlich's population bomb theory went bust -- which is that increasing
wealth and technology always tend to lower birth rates.  So I would
argue that immigration from Mexico to the US, with the wealth creation
potential that provides the immigrants, is  likely to result in a net
reduction of world birth rates.

Of course, Tanton has moved on, because the immigration movement could
not get excited about his environmental message and environmental
groups couldn't make heads or tails of his immigration message.

Crisscrossing the country, Tanton found little interest in his
conservation-based arguments for reduced immigration, but kept hearing the same
complaint. ""ËœI tell you what pisses me off,'" Tanton recalls people saying.
""ËœIt's going into a ballot box and finding a ballot in a language I can't read.'
So it became clear that the language question had a lot more emotional power
than the immigration question."

Tanton tried to persuade FAIR to harness this "emotional power," but the
board declined. So in 1983, Tanton sent out a fundraising letter on behalf of a
new group he created called U.S. English. Typically, Tanton says, direct mail
garners a contribution from around 1 percent of recipients. "The very first
mailing we ever did for U.S. English got almost a 10 percent return," he says.
"That's unheard of." John Tanton had discovered the power of the culture
war.

The success of U.S. English taught Tanton a crucial lesson. If the
immigration restriction movement was to succeed, it would have to be rooted in
an emotional appeal to those who felt that their country, their language, their
very identity was under assault. "Feelings," Tanton says in a tone reminiscent
of Spock sharing some hard-won insight on human behavior, "trump facts."

I have never, ever understood why Americans get so unbelievably bent out of shape when they encounter a language other than English, but unfortunately this bizarre brand of xenophobia is fairly prevalent in this country, and Tanton has taken to tapping into it.  The article continues on to describe how Tanton has been very successful in making common cause with a broad range of people, from liberal activists to outright racists.

I found the article interesting as much for the descriptions of all the tactics and campaigns that failed to motivate the anti-immigration base in the past.  My sense from the article is that Tanton understands full-well that if the illegal immigrants were actually 12 million Canadian English-speaking Anglos, he would not be having near the success in getting people riled up about immigration.

* its amazing how many people talk about the world approaching some resource limit, but in fact no one has ever offered any shred of evidence as to where the world's population is vis-a-vis some mythical "carrying capacity".  Every prediction that we are approaching the limits of growth have been wrong.  Julian Simon pointed out that the only resource that matters is the human mind, and it never runs short.  He used commodities prices to prove his point, and beat Ehrlich in his famous bet. 

I missed it when it first came out, but Jack Benway over at Arizona Watch has a nice post in defense of free immigration.  His point, as was mine here, is that the problem is the welfare state, not immigration. 

A prohibition on immigration from any source country violates the basic
principles upon which the US was founded "“ that life, liberty and property are
the inalienable rights of all people unless they sacrifice them by the forceful
denial of another person's pursuit of these same rights. These rights don't stop
at the US border. This does not mean that immigrants should not be screened and
naturalized and subject to the laws of the US. It does mean that the
artificially low quotas that place the current illegals in the position of
criminals by virtue of their presence here are morally wrong. These laws must be
repealed.

And chaos will ensue. What about all the services these illegals use at the
expense of taxpayers? We can't afford this. That's correct, we can't, so stop
offering these entitlements and services "“ to everyone.

Finding this post helps me roughly double my estimate of open immigration supporters here in Arizona (from 1 to 2).

Update:  This issue is really a heated on in Arizona.  It has even divided the writers at Arizona Watch, with Bridgett disagreeing significantly from Jack.

In the next few weeks, Enron leaders Lay and Skilling will or will not be found guilty of various fraud-related charges (betting is that they will be).  You, in turn, may or may not agree with the verdict. (Disclosure:  I used to work with Skilling at McKinsey.  From my knowledge of his brilliant mind and his attention to detail, I thought that his Congressional testimony that he was unaware of the shenanigans in the SPE's was unconvincing, and so thought at the beginning of the trial he would be found guilty.  However, the prosecution's case has had surprisingly little to do with the SPE's and was weaker than I expected, so I am less sure now).

Wherever you are on guilt or innocence, you should be concerned about the increasingly aggressive tactics that prosecutors are getting away with in this and related cases.  Tom Kirkendall is all over this story, and reports:

the Enron Task Force refused Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling's request to
have the prosecution recommend to U.S. District Judge Sim Lake that
half-a-dozen former high-level Enron executives who have declined to
testify during the trial on Fifth Amendment grounds be granted immunity
from having their testimony used against them in a subsequent
prosecution.

Those witnesses -- several of whom have been mentioned prominently
in testimony during the trial -- would likely provide exculpatory
testimony for Lay and Skilling if they were to testify. The
Lay-Skilling defense team limited their immunity request to those six
witnesses even though the Task Force fingered the unprecedented number
of the Task Force identified over 100 former Enron executives
as unindicted co-conspirators in the case for the transparent purpose
of preventing the jury from hearing the full story of what happened at
Enron.

Another potential outcome may be the weakening of attorney-client privilege.

Most any reader of this site will know that I am a strong supporter of free and open immigration.  However, I am sad to see Cingular pull this particular ringtone off the market.  The ringtone went as follows:

The ringtone started with a siren, followed by a male voice saying in a
Southern drawl, "This is la Migra," a slang term for the Border Patrol.

"Por favor, put the oranges down and step away from the cell phone.
I repeat-o, put the oranges down and step away from the telephone-o.
I'm deporting you back home-o," the voice continued.

For years I have been a strong supporter of the complete freedom to engage in what is often called "hate speech."  Beyond the usual slippery-slope threat-to-free-speech argument, I have always thought it was important to let idiots publicly identify themselves.  I mean, what could be better than a cell phone ringtone that just shouts out "I'm a racist moron" to the world?  This is an even better idea than the comedian Gallagher's (he of the cuisinarted vegetables) idea for shoot-able stupid flags.  It is the same reason I allow free commenting on this site and love to get opposing email.

Does it bother anyone else that the only complaint voiced in this article about government requirements for building in surveillance backdoors into the Internet is about the cost?

Oh, and by the way, note the date on the act in question.  1994 makes it a Clinton-era law crafted after the first attempt to bomb the WTC.  All of you Democrats who feel smugly certain that civil liberties will be safe if only your party was in charge should note how closely the Patriot Act resembles Clinton's proposed anti-terrorism bill.  Just as Republicans have found that politicians shed their small government talk once they are in charge, our country's leadership tends to abandon any past queasiness about trampling on civil liberties once in a position of power, no matter what party they represent.

I really wasn't going to post again on immigration - I've said what I have to say and I want to move on before I get too tedious on the subject.  However, I was reading several conservative blogs over the last several days that had a lot of fun pointing out odd signs and screwball supporters of immigration in the recent immigration marches, as a way to mock the those who support immigration (example here).

I agree that immigration supporters have adopted some fellow travellers that they would do better without, particularly the hard-core Marxist remnants who not accidently chose the traditional Marxist-Soviet May Day holiday for their march.

However, I guess two can play at this game.  I would like to walk through some of the key points from a recent emailer to this site.  Below I will address a few of the best passages, but I have included the email in its entirety in the extended post, per the email's instructions.  Really, I encourage you to read the whole thing.  Every paragraph is priceless.

Being born with our rights is fine, HOWEVER the right to live in a PARTICULAR country within a FORMED AND STRUCTURED society of laws that protects those rights IS STRICTLY for THE "CITIZENS" who built that society TO DECIDE who may join them.!

I will call this the nation-as-country-club theory of government.  Basically he is saying that the US is a big country club where most of us get our memberships by inheritance, and we all get to chose the few new members we take in each year.  Of all the theories of government, this is, um, cetainly one of them.  If anything, it reminds me a little of Heinlin in "Starship Troopers" with a society where only those who completed military service are full citizens. 

This is, however, not the theory of government that our country was built on.  In fact, we didn't have any real immigration restrictions in this country for over 100 years after the Contitution was passed.  This model actually has strongly socialist implications.   I will demonstrate that next...

      Liberal Democrats AND SO CALLED LIBERTARIANS (who are really
displaced commis)  will come to be known as the morons who killed the
goose trying to get the gold faster!!!!

Wow!  All along I thought I was a libertarian anarco-capitalist and come to find out I am a displaced commie!  Who knew? 

Let's take an example.  Lets say a person from Mexico wants to rent my house and then go to work for me in my business here in Phoenix.  I believe that I should be able to rent my house to whomever I want and employ whomever I want without government interferance.  The emailer presumably believes that the government should be able to dictate who I can and can't rent my property to, and whom I can and can't employ in my business.  Who is the real socialist here?  I want to let people go wherever they want, and the emailer presumably wants checkpoints demanding to see your paperwork.  Which model looks more like Soviet Russia?

Recently the Arizona state goverment has discussed making it a crime of trespassing for a foreignor to be found anywhere in Arizona without the proper government paperwork.  This law would dictate that if I have a such a foreignor on my property, he is trespassing.  But he has my permission to be on my property, so how is he trespassing?  The only way he can be trespassing is if one assumes that the government, and not me, ultimately own my property.

Of course, half the emails I get still say "but they are illegal - they don't have rights."  OK, here is my counter-example.  Tomorrow, Congress passes a law that says "No one is allowed to criticize any sitting member of Congress for any reason."  What would you do?  I would run to my blog and immediately start posting "Trent Lott sucks;  John McCain sucks;  Hillary Clinton sucks" etc. etc.  Why -- because I still have the right to free speech, even if Congress makes it technically illegal.  Laws and acts of Congress don't change rights.  And if you believe that your rights do flow from Congress, then, well, we better all hold on because we are screwed.

America and the culture it has developed breeds predominantly decent people, these decent people have died to make America (and the world) a better place to live and little by little the world has learned from us and has begun to change for the better.
   Now very silly people act like all the filth sickeness and desease of the world should be welcomed into america?    No No No!!!!

    American society and its culture of law abiding decency must not be overcome by the selfish unwashed unlawful hordes who would come here and destroy what has taken so long for so many to build!!!

This whole cultural assimilation thing always rings hollow for me.  The very timeframe that folks like this get misty-eyed about when this country was built was a time of massive and nearly unfettered immigration.  If you really are concerned about preserving America's traditions and culture (assuming "culture" isn't being used just as a code word to keep non-WASPs out) then I would think you would be strongly pro-immigration.  Immigration is the norm in this country's history, and the current policies are the aberation.  If you really want to live in a country where the government actively defines its role as maintaining the country's culture intact, then you should go to France.

My family, which came over early in this century, was poor, unskilled, and German.  What could be worse from a "cultural" standpoint?  Surely few could argue that for the period from 1875 to 1945 the Germans had one of the top 3 most destructive cultures in the world.  Why would we ever want poor unskilled workers from a militaristic totalitarian culture?  But my family was accepted none-the-less.

By the way, the corruption of our rights and freedoms and government is not coming from the outside - because we already did it to ourselves.  In our original Constitutional framework, government was extremely limited and there was little it could do to influence lives.  In the last 70 years, we have corrupted this framework, trashing Constitutional protections and limitations on government and replacing them with a tyranny of the majority, where 51% can do unto the other 49% in any way they please.  We shot ourselves in the foot before most any current illegal immigrant was even born.

Latinos must be stupid since they dont even have the sense to adopt america!!  Illegals still want to be known as mexicans!!! You know those silly stupid gutless mexicans who allow corruption and filth to be a way of life in mexico??

We fought and died to eliminate that in America but you want to let it back in here??

Wow, I am getting emails from people who have already died!  Anyway, have you ever been to Boston on St. Patricks Day?  The Irish still show a lot of pride in their mother country but they still also consider themselves Americans.  The Irish are a great example -- Easterners in the 19th century rioted in protest of unskilled Irish immigration, but today they are part of the backbone of that American culture you get so misty-eyed about. 

Mexican culture and traditions are one of the things that make Arizona great.  Cinco de Mayo, for example, is a lot more fun than many of our American holidays and many of us anglos have adopted it in the same way most non-Irish have adopted St. Patricks Day.   I am not particularly religeous, but for you conservatives out there I will offer that Mexicans are far more religious than your average American outside of the South.

Oh, and by the way, aren't these "stupid, gutless" Mexicans you don't like actually risking life and limb and arrest to escape the corruption of their home country?

I hope the first victim of a desease from aN ILLEGAL mexican who was never vaccinated is someone you CARE ABOUT!!! jerk!!!!!   

Whoa, you say.  This guy doesn't represent me!  Well, I'll tell you.  I have watched over the last several weeks as conservative blogs have spent a good amount of time picking out the most extreme and unbalanced immigration supporters and using them to mock the pro-immigration position as a whole.  Turn about is fair play.

Update:  I got a second email substantially similar to this one (but with slight variations) from a different email address today, so this is either copied from another source or part of some campaign.   It could even be a mis-direction campaign by immigration supporters, though I doubt it because it is so dead on the tone and content of many other emails and comments I get.

Continue reading ‘One Last Immigration Post’ »

More than any subject on Coyote Blog, my immigration posts have engendered more disapproving comments than anything else I have written.  I won't repeat my position except to say that I don't care if immigration is currently illegal, because my point is that it should be legal.  In short, my stance has been that our rights do not flow from the government but from our basic humanity, and therefore activities like association, employment decision-making, and property purchase should not be contingent on citizenship.  Its one of those arguments where I wish many on my side of the argument would shut up -- If the best argument you can muster for immigration is 'who will pick the lettuce', you are not helping very much. 

For the first 150 years of this country's history, our country was basically wide-open to immigration.  Sure, there were those opposed (the riots in NYC in the 19th century come to mind) but the opposition was confined mainly to xenophobes and those whose job skills were so minimal that unskilled immigrants who could not speak English were perceived as a threat.   It was only the redistributionist socialism-lite of the New Deal and later the Great Society that began to make unfettered immigration unpopular with a majority of Americans, who rightly did not wish to see the world's poor migrate to the US seeking an indolent life of living off of government handouts.

But, as Congress debates a series of immigration plans that make not sense and don't seem internally consistent, I will propose my own.  I hope that this plan will appeal to those who to date have opposed immigration because of the government handout problem.  I am sure it will continue to be unappealing to those who fear competition in the job market or who don't like to be near people who don't speak English very well.  This is an elaboration of the plan from this post:

1. Anyone may enter or reside in the US. The government may prevent entry of a very short list of terrorists and criminals at the border, but everyone else is welcome to come and stay as long as they want for whatever reason.  Anyone may buy property in the US, regardless or citizenship or residency.  Anyone in the US may trade with anyone in the world on the same terms they trade with their next door neighbor.
2. The US government is obligated to protect the individual rights, particularly those in the Bill of Rights, of all people physically present in our borders, citizen or not.  Anyone, regardless of citizenship status, may buy property, own a business, or seek employment in the United States without any legal distinction vs. US "citizens"
3. Certain government functions, including voting and holding office, may require formal "citizenship".  Citizenship should be easier to achieve, based mainly on some minimum residency period, and can be denied after this residency only for a few limited reasons (e.g. convicted of a felony).  The government may set no quotas or numerical limits on new citizenships.
4. All people present in the US pay the same taxes in the same way.  A non-citizen or even a short term visitor pays sales taxes on purchases and income taxes on income earned while present in the US just like anyone else.  Immigrants will pay property taxes just like long-term residents, either directly or via their rent payments.
5. Pure government handouts, like Welfare, food stamps, the EITC, farm subsidies, and public housing, will only be available to those with full US citizenship.  Vagrancy and squatting on public or private lands without permission will not be tolerated.
6. Most government services and fee-based activities, including emergency services, public education, transportation, access to public recreation, etc. will be open to all people within the US borders, regardless of citizenship status, assuming relevant fees are paid.
7. Social Security is a tough beast to classify - I would put it in the "Citizen" category as currently structured (but would gladly put it in the "available to everyone" category if SS could be restructured to better match contributions with benefits, as in a private account system).  But, as currently configured, I would propose that only citizens can accrue and receive SS benefits.  To equalize the system, the nearly 8% employee and 8% employer social security contributions will still be paid by non-citizens working in the US, but these funds can be distributed differently.  I would suggest the funds be split 50/50 between state and local governments to offset any disproportionate use of services by new immigrants.  The federal portion could go towards social security solvency, while the state and local portion to things like schools and medical programs.

With this plan, we return to the America of our founding fathers, welcoming all immigrants who are willing to take the risk of coming here.  We would end the failed experiment of turning citizenship from a voting right into a comprehensive license that is required to work, own property, or even associate and be present within the US border.  Since immigrants today who are "illegal" pay no income or social security taxes into the system today (they do pay sales and, via rent, property tax), this plan would increase tax revenues while reducing some welfare state burdens.

I think if you asked many prospective immigrants, they would agree to this deal - no handouts, just a fair chance to make a living and a life.  However, immigrant advocacy organizations are hugely unlikely to accept this plan, as most seem today to have been co-opted by various Marxist organizations who are opposed to anyone opting out of the welfare state (it is no coincidence that the recent immigration policy protests all occurred on May Day, the traditional Soviet-Marxist holiday).

Finally, I would like to offer one thought to all those who worry about "absorbing" ten or fifteen million new immigrants.  First, I would argue that we have adopted many more immigrants than this successfully in this country's history, including my grandparents and probably yours.  Second, I would observe that as recently as the last several decades, we managed to absorb 40 million new workers quite successfully, as I wrote here:

Check this data out, from the BLS:

• In 1968, the unemployment rate was 3.8%.  22.9 million women were employed in non-farm jobs, accounting for 34% of the work force.
• In 2000, the unemployment rate was 4.0%.  62.7 million women were employed in the work force, accounting for 48% of the total
• In these years, the number of women employed increased every single year.  Even in the recession years of 1981-1983 when employment of men dropped by 2.5 million, women gained 400,000 jobs

This is phenomenal.  After years of being stay-at-home moms or whatever, women in America decided it was time to go to work.  This was roughly the equivalent of having 40,000,000 immigrants show up on our shores one day looking for work.  And you know what? The American economy found jobs for all of them, despite oil embargos and stagflation and wars and "outsourcing".

I think it was George Carlin (?) who used to ask "Do you know what the worst thing is that can happen when you smoke marijuana?" His answer was "Get sent to prison".  The implication, which I have always agreed with for most drug use, was that it is insane as a society to try to save someone from doing something bad to himself by ... doing something worse to him.

I think of this whenever I get in a discussion about security responses to 9/11.  The worst thing that can happen to this country as a whole  (as differentiated of course from the individual victims of 9/11) is to turn the country into a police state to combat potential future terrorist actions.  I personally would greatly prefer to live with a 1 in 100,000 chance of being the victim of terrorism than find myself living in an America that has abandoned its constitution.  I wrote more on this topic here.

To this end, though I tend to be slow to believe these type of stories, this one (via Reason) about domestic NSA wiretapping is pretty frightening:

AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full
access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers'
internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in
its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T
worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit
against the company....

The source is just one low-level guy, so this story is still pretty soft.  I hope the investigation is allowed to play out.

Anyone who actually believed that McCain-Feingold was about cleaning up politics rather than just protecting incumbent political jobs can now disabuse themselves of that notion.  It has become clear that election finance laws are pure Machiavellian politics, passed by those who think it will work to their benefit (ie help them in the next election) and opposed by those who think they will be hurt by it.  Principle almost never plays a part any more.

On April 5, House Republicans voted to limit the speech of 527 groups, who up until now were exempt from McCain-Feingold speech restrictions.  Republicans generally supported the restrictions, despite years of saying that money does not tarnish politics, because, well because Democrats were better last election than Republicans at raising money via 527's.  Democrats, who historically as a party have supported campaign finance and speech restrictions and eagerly voted for McCain-Feingold, oppose the legislation for no principled reason except that 527's are working for them.  Democrats will therefore likely prevent this bill from passing the Senate.

George Will has a nice column lambasting the Republican Congress:

If in November Republicans lose control of the House of
Representatives, April 5 should be remembered as the day they
demonstrated that they earned defeat. Traducing the Constitution and
disgracing conservatism, they used their power for their only remaining
purpose -- to cling to power. Their vote to restrict freedom of speech
came just as the GOP's conservative base is coming to the conclusion
that House Republicans are not worth working for in October or
venturing out to vote for in November.

The "problem" Republicans
addressed is that in 2004 Democrats were more successful than
Republicans in using so-called 527 organizations -- advocacy groups
named after the tax code provision governing them. In 2002 Congress
passed the McCain-Feingold legislation banning large "soft money"
contributions for parties -- money for issue-advocacy and
organizational activities, not for candidates. In 2004, to the surprise
of no sensible person and most McCain-Feingold supporters, much of the
money -- especially huge contributions from rich liberals -- was
diverted to 527s. So on April 5, House Republicans, easily jettisoning
what little remains of their ballast of belief in freedom and limited
government, voted to severely limit the amounts that can be given to
527s.

He captures a priceless quote that gets at the heart of why Congressional incumbents love these campaign finance laws:

Candice Miller (R-Mich.) said that restricting 527s would combat
"nauseating ugliness, negativity and hyperpartisanship." Oh, so that is
what the First Amendment means: Congress shall make no law abridging
freedom of speech unless speech annoys politicians.

Props, by the way, to my Representative John Shadegg for his no vote, as well as to my favorite Congressman Jeff Flake, who voted no as well.

Brian Doherty of Reason observes:

The solution to the legal crisis immigration represents won't come through
immigration law itself, which again and again has proven itself useless at
fully stemming the irresistible tides of human desire for a better life. No
matter how much money is spent or how the law is jiggered, it is not immigration
policy that has created unnecessary tears and strains in America's social
order. Rather, the welfare state is at the root of any legitimate claim that
immigration (legal or illegal) is an assault on the American nation. (There
are plenty of illegitimate complaints, based merely on distaste for
the often-imaginary hell of running into Spanish-speaking people in
day-to-day life or seeing some flag not of your nation, but such complaints
are not worthy of consideration.)...

The free market, as it usually does, has created a system of mutually
satisfactory interdependence, all of us serving each other and helping each
other get what we want. The welfare state, in all its manifestations from
medical care to schooling to pure giveaways, creates a negative sum game in
which resources are forcibly redistributed making some a problem, or a
perceived potential problem, to others, and allowing demagogues to obsess
over precious "public" resources scarfed up by the invading Other.

As long as that system is around to breed resentment and anger"”as well
as counter-resentment and counter-anger such as that seen in the streets of
L.A. of late"”immigration will continue as a political crisis, no matter
how many repeat cycles of jiggering with immigration law, or protesting it,
we go through.

California's
Proposition 187,
attempting to limit the provision of government services to illegal
immigrants, was indeed, whatever the motives of its supporters, in spirit on
the right track to a world where any immigrant ought to be, and can be,
welcome; one where they are pure contributors at the same time to their own
well-being and to everyone else's as well. It's the only permanent and just
solution to the immigration conundrum. But it involves a significant
reduction in federal power, money, and authority, rather than an expansion
of it. Strangely, it's a no-go in today's Washington.

I wrote a similar essay on how the New Deal changed our views on immigration.

I have written several times on prosecutorial abuse, most recently in this post on the Justice Department's current practice of forcing companies to waive attorney-client privilege and punishing companies that help their employees seek legal council.

The WSJ($) editorializes about a recent division by Judge Lewis Kaplan in the KPMG trial.

Those steps were extraordinary in their attempt to
pressure corporate executives: They include waiving attorney-client
privilege to give investigators access to internal documents and
cutting off accused employees from legal and other forms of support. In
short, the Thompson memo said that companies under investigation are
expected to surrender any right against self-incrimination and cut
their accused employees adrift.

In one sense, the memo's guidelines are just that --
internal guidelines for prosecutors. But as a practical matter, only a
rare CEO will risk the death sentence that a corporate indictment
represents. So "cooperation" as defined by Justice is hardly optional.
It was on this point that Judge Kaplan took Assistant U.S. Attorney
Justin Weddle to task last week. When Judge Kaplan questioned the
fairness of pressuring companies to throw their employees overboard,
Mr. Weddle replied that companies are "free to say, 'We're not going to
cooperate.'"

"That's lame," the judge retorted. He then asked Mr.
Weddle "what legitimate purpose" was served by insisting that companies
cut their former employees off from legal support. Companies under
investigation, Judge Kaplan noted, ought to be free to decide whether
to support their employees or former employees without Justice's "thumb
on the scale."

Mr. Weddle replied that paying the legal fees of
former employees charged with crimes amounted to protecting
"wrongdoers." This prompted the judge to remind the young prosecutor
that the accused are still innocent until proven guilty. He also
reminded Mr. Weddle that the Constitution's Sixth Amendment guarantees
the right to counsel. And for good measure, if the government is
confident in its case, it shouldn't be afraid to allow "wrongdoers"
access to an adequate defense.

Its good to see these practices starting to get some judicial scrutiny.  There is unfortunately no real political constituency in this country to get worked up about this kind of stuff.  Left-leaning groups tend to be the first to challenge police and prosecutorial abuses of power, but have little interest in doing so when the target (ie corporations) is someone they have no ideological sympathy for.  And right-leaning groups tend to be strong law-and-order types that feel the need to go out of their way to be tough on recent corporate transgressors to avoid the accusation that they are in bed politically with white collar criminals.

The Supreme Court refused to review the Padilla case:

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the appeal of Jose
Padilla, a U.S. citizen held in a military jail for more than three
years as an "enemy combatant." The Court, however, declined to dismiss
the case as moot, as the Bush Administration had urged. Only three
Justices voted to hear the case, according to the order and
accompanying opinions. The case was Padilla v. Hanft (05-533).

The decision was a victory for the Bush Administration in one
significant sense: by not finding the case to be moot, the Court leaves
intact a sweeping Fourth Circuit Court decision upholding the
president's wartime power to seize an American inside the U.S. and
detain him or her as a terrorist enemy, without charges and -- for an
extended period -- without a lawyer. The Court, of course, took no
position on whether that was the right result, since it denied review.
The Second Circuit Court, at an earlier stage of Padilla's own case,
had ruled just the opposite of the Fourth Circuit, denying the
president's power to seize him in the U.S. and hold him. That ruling,
though, no longer stands as a precedent, since the Supreme Court
earlier shifted Padilla's case from the Second to the Fourth Circuit.

I don't even pretend to understand all the procedural stuff, but I find it amazing that the effective suspension of habeas corpus, particularly when the "war" and "enemy" that is used as its justification is so amorphous and open-ended, isn't something the Supreme Court would like to sink its teeth into.

Apparently, the Justices were reluctant to address the case since it has now been made "hypothetical" by the transfer of status of Padilla from enemy combatant held incommunicado indefinitely to a more mainstream justice track.  However, this transfer occurred, as the appeals court pointed out angrily, in a transparent effort by the Bush administration to avoid judicial review of indefinite detentions.  Which raises the possibility that the administration could hold hundreds of people in such detention, systematically changing the status of any individual whose case comes for review, thereby avoiding review of the program in total.  As Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, "Nothing prevents the Executive from returning to the road it earlier constructed and defended."

One wonders by this logic if the segregationist south could have indefinitely postponed Supreme Court review via Brown vs. Board of Education just by letting individuals like Linda Brown individually into white schools whenever their cases got to the Supreme Court.

And still I ask, as I did here, where the hell is Congress?  I am sorry the Supreme Court failed to review this but the Constitution created this group called the legislative branch that is supposed to have the power to change the law.  If law is unclear here, they could make it clear.

Progressives often wrap themselves up in a lot of libertarian-sounding jargon.  But when push comes to shove, progressives are more comfortable with coercion than free association.  James Taranto links this piece in his Friday Best of the Web:

A longtime singer and guitarist with the Zucchini Brothers and a substitute teaching assistant for Washington-Saratoga-Warren-Hamilton-Essex BOCES [school board], Powell has lived frugally for years. He works about three days a week as a sub, earning about $70 a day, with no benefits. From March to October, he rides his bike 20 miles to work when work is available....

Part of that survival--or so he thought--included shopping at Wal-Mart to take advantage of cheaper prices for himself, his partner and her two children. Then his discussions about Wal-Mart with Sandra Carner-Shafran, a teaching assistant at BOCES and a member of the Board of Directors of New York State United Teachers, started churning inside him. . . .

"I don't like what Wal-Mart stands for," Powell said, noting the mega-chain's scanty health insurance for staffers. "Because of all those things they can lower the prices."

He and his partner agreed to go on food stamps for their family rather than shop at Wal-Mart any longer.

Please observe the moral choice he made that is being applauded by those on the left:  Rather than get low cost food from Wal-mart, which generally* transacts with its suppliers, employers, and customers through mutual self-interest and the consent of all parties in each transaction, he has decided it is MORE MORAL to get his food expropriated from the American taxpayer without their consent.  Lovely.  By the way, it is ironic that he is mad that Wal-mart employees accepts jobs with no health benefits when he in fact has made the same choice himself.

More on what makes progressives tick here.

*The exception being that Wal-Mart does use the force of government via imminent domain to obtain land where the free will of landowners would not cooperate and to get special tax credits from local governments to get area citizenry to subsidize its business.  If Mr. Powell were to protest these practices, I would be all for it, but my guess is that he is not protesting government handouts to Walmart by signing up for... government handouts for himself.

From the Washington Square News, campus paper of NYU:

American media outlets did not utilize their freedom of speech rights
after they chose not to reprint the George Bush cartoons that negatively
depicted the US President, panelists said last night at a
discussion held at the Kimmel Center.

The event, titled "Free Speech and the Bush Cartoons," displayed
easels with blank panels instead of the cartoons after NYU demanded
that the cartoons be removed from display if the public was admitted....

"Realistically, one can have a discussion on smallpox without actually
handing out the the live virus to the audience," university spokesman
John Beckman said. "Any institution has a responsibility that events on
its grounds go smoothly and without disruption."

The panelists expressed concern that all American publications, with
the exception of three, were unwilling to reprint the Bush cartoons....

Bostom said it is healthy to question a politicians, and Republicans should be
able to handle the publication of cartoons that parody them.

"The cartoons were a healthy dose of direct criticism [toward conservatives]," Bostom said.

Schwartz said fear was behind the media's motivation not to reprint the images.

"The New York Times claims not to run the pictures because of the
matter of taste," Schwartz said. "But, in fact, everyone knows they're
perfectly willing to offend people who they don't fear will have the NSA wiretap them."

NYU's decision to bar the public from seeing the cartoons illustrated
an apprehension towards free speech, and its actions were chilling and
absurd, Lukianoff said.

"If you want to talk about an image, you might want to show them," said
Lukianoff, who later pointed behind him at the blank easels and yelled,
"This is censorship!"

Lukianoff said people easily feel harassed by ideas contrary to their own.

"Nobody has a right not to be offended," Lukianoff said.

Midway through the discussion, Republican students who had gathered outside
to protest, unfurled a white banner with red letters that said,
"Freedom of Speech Does Not Equal Freedom to Hate."

Leaf said it is unhealthy for the academic community to avoid discussing sensitive issues.

"Part of being in a modern world and part of being in a university
means being able to talk about these subjects seriously," Leaf said.

People are afraid to talk and publish the cartoons, and we shouldn't
have to worry about dancing around sensitive issues, Leaf said.

During the discussion, Schwartz criticized conservatism, saying
that it forces its followers to imprison themselves in dogmatic
traditions.

"The philosophy I subscribe to is objectivism, which believes reason is man's only knowledge," he said.

Schwartz said that the violent uprisings were motivated by partisanship and not reason.

"Partisanship is blind obedience in rejection of reason," Schwartz said. "If
you base your arguments on partisanship, then it leaves no room for your
argument. It leaves you with no other option but force."

Schwartz said the attacks were not just in defense of Conservatism. 

"This is an attack on the free, rational mind," he said.

CAS junior James Ferguson said it was unfair that so much time was spent on attacking conservatism.

"To demonize a political party is not going to help anything," Ferguson said.
"When did free speech turn into a hateful generalization of conservatism?"

CAS junior Muniba Hassan said the panel will provoke hatred of conservatives,
which has caused many of her Republican friends to be afraid to walk home
at night.

"They used free speech as a way to hide their partisan agenda," Hassan said.

OK, I may have substituted a few words to make a point about the bankruptcy of NYU's censorship, and the double standards they hold since they clearly would not have made the same decision with the alternate facts I have inserted.  Real article here.  Here is a hint to prospective college students:  Distrust any college whose administrators equate exercising first amendment rights to spreading a deadly virus.  More here at FIRE, which continues to do great work.

PS-  If you have not seen the Danish cartoons, spend 10 seconds clicking here.  You will not believe how bland they are.

Of the more partisan blogs I read, I have always enjoyed Captains Quarters for being thoughtful and well-written.  Ed Morrissy is clearly as skeptical about open immigration as I am supportive of it, which  I am generally willing to put into the "intelligent people will disagree" category, until I found this bit a little frightening (emphasis added):

As I have written repeatedly over the past two years, we simply cannot
throw out 12 million people overnight, so some sort of guest-worker
program is inevitable, if for no other reason than to get an accurate
accounting of the aliens in our nation. Either that, or we will have to
herd people into concentration camps, a solution that will never pass
political muster even if were remotely possible logistically. That
program could form a basis of a comprehensive immigration "reform", if
properly written.

Is the implication that his only real problems with American concentration camps for people born in Mexico are logistical?  When one typically says that an idea can't pass political muster, they generally are referring (with a wistful sigh) to what they consider a good idea that for whatever reason could not survive the legislative process.  Let's be clear: herding people into concentration camps based arbitrarily on their birth location is abhorrent, not logistically difficult. 

I haven't called myself conservative for over 20 years, but I thought that most good conservatives would agree with the following statement:

"Our fundamental rights, from speech to association to property, are not granted to us by any government, but belong to us as a fact of our human existence."

Do conservatives still believe this?  I know liberals gave up on it a while back - that is why I pay a transaction "privilege" tax in Arizona, which presumes that the ability to conduct commerce is a privilege that is granted by the government.  But I thought conservatives stood by this statement.  But if they still do, then on what basis can they argue that people not born within the US border somehow have lesser (or no) right to conduct commerce in this country, to buy and live in a home in this country, to sell their labor in this country, etc.?   The only rights or activities or privileges a country should be able to deny non-citizens are those rights and privileges that flow from the government and not from our basic humanity.  Which are.... none (update: OK, maybe one: Voting, since this is inherently tied up with government.  I have written before about why I think voting is one of our less important rights).

I understand there are good and valid concerns about government handouts and taxpayer-paid services flowing to recent immigrants, but to solve this narrow concern, "reform" discussion should be about setting minimum qualification standards for such services or handouts, and not about putting Mexicans in concentration camps.

Update:  A number of readers have scolded me for overreacting to the Morrissey quote, arguing that the quote is just dry understatement rather than any revelation of sinister plans.  Fine.  I have friends who are both legal and illegal immigrants her in Phoenix, as well as several who are in-between (i.e. are constantly battling to hang on to their visa status by their fingernails) so I have personal emotions in the game here that may make me overly sensitive.

I will admit to a huge blind spot:  I just cannot comprehend why Americans, none of whose families are native to this land, get so upset about high levels of immigration, beyond the public services issue.  And the more I think about this latter, the more I am convinced making everyone legal combined with some eligibility waiting periods (for voting, welfare, etc) would generate more tax revenue than it would consume.  In fact, high levels of immigration may be the only viable solution to the demographic bomb we have with social security and medicare.  (By the way, the public services issue is one reason the Democrats have, if possible, an even less viable position than Republicans.  Our Democratic governor has publicly supported continuing free government services to illegal immigrants but opposed allowing them to work.  This makes sense, how?)

I do understand there is "law and order" argument that goes "well, those folks are breaking the law, and we have got to have respect for the law."  Here's a proposal.  Everyone who has never knowingly violated the speed limit, never done a rolling stop at a stop sign, and never tried illegal narcotics in college are all welcome to make the argument to me about the need to strictly enforce every law on the books.  This same logic is used to send refugees escaping Cuba back to Cuba, and it sucks. 

There have been any number of stories about how provisions of the Patriot Act are used more routinely to proecute drug cases than to pursue, you know, terrorists.  Note, however, this provision in the Patriot Act that has nothing to do with national security (via Overlawyered).

Quietly slipped into the reauthorization of the Patriot Act:
first-time-ever authority for the Justice Department to engage in
wiretapping and bugging of private premises for purposes of going after
antitrust violators.

Given the fact the the feds regularly prosecute companies with large market shares for A) raising prices (i.e. monopoly pricing); for B) lowering prices (i.e. predatory pricing); and for C) keeping prices the same (ie price fixing), this becomes an open mandate to listen into any private conversation at any company with a non-trivial market share.  Have fun at your next staff meeting over there at Microsoft or Exxon. 

From the Incredible Bread Machine by G.W. Grant:

"Now let me state the present rules,"
The lawyer then went on,

"These very simple guidelines,
You can rely upon:
You're gouging on your prices if
You charge more than the rest.
But it's unfair competition if
You think you can charge less!
"A second point that we would make
To help avoid confusion...
Don't try to charge the same amount,
That would be Collusion!
You must compete. But not too much,
For if you do you see,
Then the market would be yours -
And that's Monopoly!

I guess I avoided it when I was growing up in Houston, but there sure seems to be something in the water down there as first our Houston-raised president, and now Houston's police chief, seem awfully fond of surveillance.  From Tom Kirkendall:

Anne Linehan and Charles Kuffner are two of Houston's best bloggers on local political matters, and they have been covering an emerging story that amazingly appears to be flying below the radar screen of most Houstonians -- i.e., Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt's
plan announced last week proposing to place surveillance cameras in
apartment complexes, downtown streets, shopping malls and even private homes to fight crime during a shortage of police officers.

Building permits should require malls and large apartment
complexes to install surveillance cameras, Hurtt said. And if a
homeowner requires repeated police response, it is reasonable to
require camera surveillance of the property, he said.

And the Chief's justification for surveillance cameras in private homes?:

"I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother,
but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why
should you worry about it?"

H'mm. That is not the kind of reasoning that one would find in, say, The Federalist Papers, now is it?