Quote of the day

Drezner:

All of the data suggests that illegal immigration has slowed dramatically, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has declined, more Mexicans are exiting than entering the United States .... “The border is much more secure than in times past,” R. Gil Kerlikowske, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, has said. 

The Pres.'s immigration speech

One of the best addresses he's given in a long time, I thought. Very effective on the level of language, both impassioned and conversational in tone: has a President ever used the phrase "here's the thing" in a prime-time speech before? I am not too impressed with the argument that he's overstepping executive authority, but will let the constitutional lawyers quarrel over that.    

Why are criminal gangs in Mexico killing Central Americans trying to get to the U.S.?

This sad story does not make clear why some migrants are being killed en masse by the Mexican mafias. It's one thing to kidnap would-be migrants and force them to run drugs; the mafias benefit from that. But what possible reason would the mafias have for killing them?

And one more thing...

...before I revert to silence for a while. This post throws light on one of the reasons so many immigrants, particularly from poorer countries south of the border, are in the U.S. illegally -- the reason in question being that the U.S. makes it virtually impossible for unskilled workers to get green cards that would enable them to migrate legally.
H/t: IPE at UNC (link at the sidebar).

Of rule, revenue, and raging violations of the Fourth Amendment

No one much likes to be taxed. Many Americans, however, actively hate to be taxed. The U.S. is, relatively speaking, an undertaxed society, especially since the Reagan years, and local, state, and federal governments must try to find ways to raise money that do not involve taxation. This is a problem even in good economic times, and in bad times an acute one. Here's a small example: Every two years I receive a notice in the mail telling me that I must take my car to a facility to have its emission system checked to make sure that it's not violating Maryland's emissions laws. I duly take my car to the facility, fork over fourteen dollars, watch while the technician does something -- and the 'something', to someone's credit, seems to have gotten quicker and more streamlined over the years -- and am handed a piece of paper saying that my car has passed the test. What does this accomplish? Well, I suppose it gives a number (albeit a relatively small number) of people jobs, and I am, all things weighed, definitely in favor of that. It also may make a very marginal contribution to cleaner air, but this is doubtful it seems to me, since how many owners of polluting vehicles are going to obey the notice? -- more than likely they're just going to rip it up. That leaves the real purpose of the exercise: to raise money for the local and perhaps the state governments, and to raise it in a way that does not involve taxation. (I think I'd rather pay fourteen extra dollars in tax every two years and be spared the time and inconvenience of taking my car in for the emissions check, but my preference is presumably not widely shared.)

This is all by way of preface to expressing some -- well, outrage seems the appropriate word -- at seeing tonight's NewsHour report on so-called DUI checkpoints in California. I say "so-called" because the real purpose of these checkpoints, the report made clear, is to find people driving without licenses, impound their cars for thirty days, and then either collect the fines that people pay to retrieve them or, if no one retrieves the vehicle, auction it off. The result is that millions of dollars flow into local government coffers, specifically the coffers of the local police agencies (with a chunk going to the towing companies). Never mind that the people whose cars are impounded are overwhelmingly undocumented immigrants (who often need their cars in the most imperative sense as their survival may depend on driving to a job); and never mind that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has already ruled that the warrantless impoundment of cars under these circumstances is unconstitutional. (The state's legal powers-that-be claim to be waiting for another ruling from the Ninth Circuit but I couldn't see anything unclear about the first one, judging from this report.) After all, the Ninth Circuit ruling is just a piece of paper to those who want to ignore it, and it would be hard as a practical matter (though not impossible, I think) to hold the entire police force of a city in contempt of court.

Now there are probably good reasons from a safety standpoint to get unlicensed drivers off the road, as a Berkeley professor suggested at the outset of the piece. But it's not clear that the impoundments accomplish this. One person interviewed said that when his car was impounded he just went out and bought another. He knew he was doing something illegal by driving unlicensed but he needed a car to get to his construction job. (Presumably some people in that situation can't afford to buy another car, but there were no statistics presented on that. And if you search hard, you can find some pretty inexpensive cars out there. How about driving unlicensed and in a clunker? What gain for safety then?)

If you want to reduce unlicensed driving, do it openly, not under the cover of a DUI check. If you want to reduce drunk driving, how about raising the age for a driver's license? If you want to raise revenue, do it the old-fashioned way, however unpopular. Don't have local police run ostensible DUI checkpoints whose real aim is to find undocumented immigrants driving without licenses and impound their cars for thirty days before selling them to the highest bidder. These checkpoints are discriminatory. They are unconstitutional. They are one small but not insignificant result of a society too immature, and a political system too dysfunctional, to fund essential public services in a conscionable, sensible way: by paying for them directly. The country of course is in the midst of an economic crisis and a recession, but this story underscores a more permanent problem in the U.S.: the survival of a me-first, devil-take-the-hindmost mentality that may have been in some ways beneficial during the first century or so of the republic's existence but became counterproductive in the twentieth century and is unqualifiedly disastrous in the twenty-first.

France and the veil

Wearing the full veil has become a hot-button issue in France, but the reasons may not be immediately obvious to many of those who don't live there. If countries can be said to have ideas of themselves, then assimilationism, the notion that Frenchness is a matter primarily of culture rather than birth, is an element of France's idea of itself. And "culture" here implies acceptance of certain substantive principles. Note, in the BBC article linked above, the French immigration minister's reference to "the principles of secularism and equality between men and women," acceptance of which is considered, at least in this official view, part of what it means to be French.

I recently had a conversation with the sociologist Rogers Brubaker (ah, the pleasures of name-dropping), and afterward I took a quick re-look at his book Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992), which I had read a long time ago. The book brings out, among other things, what Brubaker calls "the weakness of the ethnic moment and the correlative strength of the assimilationist moment in French self-understanding" and the way in which Frenchness has been defined "in social and political rather than ethnic terms, as a matter of social becoming rather than intrinsic being" (p.112). For his bio and more recent books, click here.

P.s. Two relevant blog posts: here (from last July) and here.

Rusty master-key

Kal at TMND critically examines Ross Douthat's views about Islam, as expressed in Douthat's writing on Muslims in Europe, the Swiss referendum on minarets, and so on. The post calls the clash-of-civilizations thesis, to which Douthat subscribes, "a master-key for the intellectually lazy." Nice phrase.

Are governments losing control over national borders? In a word: No.

According to John Robb, "governments worldwide are losing control over all of the classical forms of national power from borders to finances to communication to media to economic activity to security to trade flows (of all types)."

Focus on the first item in this list: borders. Are governments worldwide losing control of their borders? No.

Next month, a conference on "Fences and Walls in International Relations" will be held at the University of Quebec at Montreal. The conference's call observes that:

"...some 26,000 kilometers of new political borders have been established since 1991 (Foucher 2009), and states have declared their intention to dig in behind fences, barriers and built structures. Moreover, the post-Cold War and post-9/11 periods have seen the rise of border walls, symbols of separation which seemed to be on the way out in the wake of decolonization...and were believed to be entirely finished and done with after the fall of the Berlin Wall."

Border walls are back in a big way, and walls often mean more control of what goes in and out of the national territory. They won't always work -- I am skeptical about the extent to which the mostly-uncompleted wall/fence along the U.S.-Mexican border will reduce undocumented immigration -- but on the whole, the more walls, the more control. The notion that states have lost control of their borders is wrong.

P.s. This is not to say that border fences/walls are necessarily a good idea. See, for example, here.

On Britain, France, and border controls

Ten of the twelve suspected terror plotters arrested in the U.K. in the recent raids were in the country on student visas (and were Pakistani nationals), leading to calls to reform the visa system, among other things. Border and immigration controls continue to be contentious, even when the threat of terrorism is not the main issue. In 2003, Britain and France reached an agreement giving each country's border police some limited jurisdiction in the other country: France in a zone in Dover, Britain in a zone in Calais. Now the two countries are working on a controversial plan to build a new center in Calais with the aim of making it easier to deport undocumented asylum-seekers, particularly Afghanis, Iraqis, and migrants from the horn of Africa, who seek entry into Britain by getting on trucks that will cross the Channel (via the tunnel).