Morning Fog

The Hypocrisy Of Immigrants, The Hypocrisy About Immigrants

I think Federal Judge Bolton ruled correctly in barring the implementation of several elements of the proposed new Arizona state law on immigrants.   It was clear, to anyone with a modicum of background in our U.S. system of legal protections and constitutional guarantees, that a lot of the proposed legislation was just plain overstepping by the government of a state whose voters have established an unenviable reputation for putting extremists in office.  Other elements of the new law, if challenged, may also eventually prove untenable.

I don't condemn Arizona unqualifiedly, however, for its radical proposal to fix our broken immigration system.  Arizona is on the front line in this battle, and copes not just with the influx of illegal aliens moving into and through the state, but also with growing concerns about being contaminated by the drug violence across the border.  If immigration and border control are the province of the federal government (and they are), the exasperation of states at "Washington's" failure to deal with the issues that have gone so long unsolved is understandable.

Our problem with immigration in the U.S. is that there are truths no one wants to tell; we debate the problem superficially but hate to admit the messy actuality at its core, somewhat like talking about an egg by describing its shell and ignoring all that messy, sticky stuff inside. 

If we break the egg, the first thing to ooze out is the hypocrisy all of us share.  An old adage has it that "in the long run, we're all dead."  It might also be said, in the U.S., that in the long run, looking backward rather than forward, we're all immigrants.  Even the people we call Native Americans arrived here a historically scant 50,000 years ago and ever since, those who were here have tried to make life difficult for those who tried to come later.  We may pride ourselves on being a "nation of immigrants," but we haven't always welcomed them with open arms.  

The thing we can all learn from this is that even as we all realize uncontrolled borders could be an economic and security disaster, there's a humanitarian element involved in how we deal with those who do manage to get here.  On this aspect, I recommend the novel The Tortilla Curtain, by T.C. Boyle; it's apparently out of print now though copies can be found online, or at your library.  The Arizona law fails this basic humanitarian test, whatever its legal justifications.

Other hypocrisies relate to the question that our current situation begs: How did it get this way, and why isn't anything ever done fix it?  There are many answers but some of the key ones lie in contradictions between what we say we want, and what we really want:

We should be able to control our borders and prevent people from entering the country illegally.  Yes, of course that's true.  But the unmentioned factor is that we don't really want to pay for it.  When one of our major parties propagates the notion that no tax is a good tax, and no government is the best government, who will vote for the increased cost of more border agents, better technology, and the other measures that might be required?  Then there's the corollary:  The idea that a border as long and in most places remote as the U.S.-Mexico frontier can really be closed off like a bunker door is just plain unrealistic; we can spend billions, but there will still be gaps.

We should be able to find illegal immigrants who do manage to get into the U.S., keep them from working, deport them, prevent their getting benefits.  Maybe, though the humanitarian element arises here.  The hypocrisy, though, is that while we say immigrants ought to be able to produce documentation to show they're here legally, this collides unpleasantly with our concept that those of us who arrived here earlier have an absolute right NOT to have to identify themselves.  The question of a "national identity card" has been frequently raised, and just as quickly batted down by a host of opponents ranging across the political spectrum.  On this question, I like today's post from fellow blogger GabbyGeezer (http://www.gabbygeezer.blogspot.com - see "Profile Please," dated July 29.

Labor unions protest that we don't want immigrants flooding the market taking jobs that Americans could have.  There may be a bit of truth in that in these hard economic times, when people are looking for any work at all.  But the deeper truth is that the immigrants don't really compete for the same jobs.  They're doing work, from cleaning toilets to picking fruit, that earlier-arriving immigrants (U.S. citizens) consider beneath them.   And increasingly, by the way,  a trend I've noticed is that second-generation immigrants, like their predecessors of previous generations, are gradually filling in higher levels on the scale, like many of the technical service jobs -- the furnace repairman, the pest control technician, the dry cleaner, the mason, the electrician, even the retail clerk -- that again, except in the hardest times, well-settled Americans with their often valueless college degrees won't take.  This group takes those jobs, and gradually will own the service businesses that perform them; they're probably mostly legal, but I wouldn't be surprised if many were born to "illegal" parents.  And where would we be without them?

Illegal immigrants shouldn't be able to work.  Hah!  The biggest hypocrisy centers on this question of gainful employment.   If we really cracked down and didn't allow anyone to work without appropriate evidence of legal status, the flow of illegals would stop.  That's what most of them come for.  But we don't, and we probably won't.  As noted above, both politicians and employers (the latter by strongly but often invisibly lobbying the former) have turned a blind eye to law enforcement because they know that we need those people -- need them to steal those jobs from Americans who won't take them (above).  Denying jobs to illegals could work very effectively if there were solid sanctions on employers for hiring them, or strictly enforced regulations requiring hirers to ask for documentation.  But this self-evident fact isn't evident to the employers who dearly love a supply of inexpensive laborers who don't ask too many questions.  Those employers and their organizations have resisted tooth-and-nail the least suggestion that they should have any responsibility for checking the status of those they hire.  Too much trouble! Too much time!  And civil rights activists join them, concerned that an employer trying to carry out his responsibilities under such a law, might accidentally offend an Earlier American.

Finally, there is a citizenship issue.  I don't believe that very many foreigners come to the U.S. just to have a baby who would automatically become an American citizen.  There is evidence that some do this - i.e. a recent revelation about some Chinese groups -- but not by the hundreds of thousands.  If this is seen as a problem, though, we could simply alter our citizenship law -- very few countries use the physical place of birth as a determinant of citizenship.  Again, though, I suspect a move to change this longstanding practice would run into serious resistance.

Ultimately, to solve our immigration problem, some of our ideas about ourselves are going to have to change...or at least, become more honest.

Decentralizing The Federal Government

The summer season is upon us.  It's a time when non-stories beging to predominate over real stories, as Congress goes into recess and Washington DC settles into its steamy summer, this year steamier than usual.  The poster child for this sort of thing is the leaking of purported secret papers about Afghanistan recently - meaningless because the secrets are widely known.

A close second, though, is a story I read in the Sunday opinion section of a "major metropolitan newspaper" by one Alex MacGillis, entitled "The Case for Breaking Up Washington ..."  Mr. MacGillis's argument is that there are many governmental functions that could be done from almost anywhere, and need not be located in Washington; these federal offices, he says, should be moved to areas where jobs are needed, where costs are lower, and the like.  Well, that makes a lot of sense, and in fact, it sounds kind of familiar. 

That's because MacGillis is effectively proposing something that has, by and large, already been accomplished.  That's one way to bolster your credentials as a far-seeing social analyst!

As MacGillis tells us in his own article, an astonishing 83% of all civilian federal employees are already located outside the Washington DC area.  Further, he informs us, if we consider only civilians who are not employed by the military and Dept. of Veterans Affairs (why, pray tell, should we do that?) still, 75% of that group are located outside DC.   In short, the writer proposes an idea that's already been implemented, as most federal agencies long ago figured out either that they need branch offices around the country to perform their missions, or that functions like payroll, data processing, records maintenance, and others could easily be located anywhere in the country with no harm to the parent agency. 

I think this writer may have confused the idea of "Washington" as a symbol for the federal government with Washington, the city.  Just as we associate automobiles with Detroit, aircraft with Wichita, or movies with Hollywood, government pops into our minds when someone says "Washington."  But that doesn't mean, as MacGillis's article itself demonstrates, that government doesn't take place anywhere else, any more than thinking "Detroit=cars" disguises the reality that automobiles are being build in Tennessee, Ohio, Alabama, and many other places. 

For government or for any large organization, there's a line along the continuum of field to field office to central headquarters, at which more farming out adds more to cost than it does efficiency.  Multiple buildings, multiple leases, multiple support structures -- these all add to costs. That's why, for example, big organizations are often working to reduce locations and centralize operations.  I suspect we may already be at the stage where more "breaking up" doesn't make much sense. 

This whole long article didn't deserve to occupy space in the Sunday paper, but I think MacGillis may be primed to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Friedman, who has written several books identifying "new trends" several years after the trend had already left the station.  

More On Museums

Shortly after I regretted the concept of a new Latino-American Museum on the Mall in Washington DC, Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post, who wrote the original piece about where such a museum might best be located, published a more thoughtful followup.

In it, he raised some of the thoughts I had voiced, which is nice, but he added a couple of interesting new points as well:

The National Museum of the American Indian, whose layout I also regretted, has experienced a considerable drop in the number of visitors:  2.2 million in its first year (2005) but only 1.4 million last year.  This is a great statistic.  It illustrates my point that the NMAI is a failure that doesn't work as a museum.  Kennicott notes that the problem is, it was designed with "native American communities as its client," rather than museum visitors.  Amen to that! 

Kennicott also notes that the downturn in attendance at the NMAI may signal that the trend of ethnic museums has already run its course.  He points out that shortly after the new Latino museum opens, if it does, minority groups will be a majority in the U.S.  -- an odd time to be building new monuments to the concept of minorities.  This fits logically, too, with the idea that our history ought to be presented as a cohesive whole or, as Kennicott puts it, that "history won't be well-served by an infinite fracturing into sub-narratives, each controlled by a different cultural group."

Outmoded Infrastructure - Those Overhead Power Lines

Sunday afternoon my little neighborhood experienced a heavy thunderstorm - unusually heavy winds and a violent torrent of rain, but still a thunderstorm - that passed through the area in less than 30 minutes but put out the electrical grid to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses for 10 hours (in my case) or even longer.   This was only the longest of three recent power outages, all of three hours or more, over the past two weeks.  Two were weather-related, the third was somebody driving into a utility pole.  

In addition, we've experienced at least two blips in the same period, of the sort that punch out the power just long enough to shut down computers and cause the waste of 15-20 minutes rebooting, logging in again, and the like.  I wish this performance were rare, but power outages occur where I live on the average of one or two a month.  The electric company's reporting number should be on speed dial, but by now, I have it memorized anyway.

The constant interruption of power supplies, even by fairly normal weather or routine traffic accidents, has several causes, but primary among them is simply our failure as a society to protect power lines by burying them.   Here as in other endeavors, a business's short-term cost considerations are allowed to overrule sensible public policy.  No one has found a way yet to deliver electric power wirelessly; until we do, it only makes sense to update our infrastructure to minimize the potential for disruption.

Wiggy Leaks Of Government "Secrets"

The hot news today was the presentation on wikileaks of a vast quantity of government reports that supposedly reveal the "truth" about the war in Afghanistan, that things are "much worse than thought."

From what I hear about these documents without reading them (and I'm not going to read them, for reasons I'm about to state), the "damage" they could do to the war effort is probably nil.  They're mostly reports by mid-level officers, which may or may not reveal "truth" (or the truth as one person sees it). 

But the bigger problem is what they "reveal" --  The Taliban is strong in the provinces, the Afghan government is corrupt, the Pakistani secret service is working against the U.S. in Pakistan and Afghanistan.... duh.  I have to assume the guys at Wikileaks live somewhere in an isolated hamlet in western Kansas, one that doesn't have internet or newspapers, if they think this stuff is news.  (Actually, Wikileaks central these days appears to be in Iceland.)  Certainly, anybody who gives a fig about the war, or who has read one or two articles about it, already knows all this.  These facts are givens in the strategic planning that led up to the hard decision to add more troops, and no one has made any secret of them.

These wiggy "leaks" have to be seen as either a publicity stunt (shamelessly imitating the Ellsberg papers) for Wikileaks, which is getting increasing attention from media these days, but perhaps running the risk of irrelevance, as a political stunt ginned up by the mysterious private who supposedly submitted them to embarrass the administration, or as a combination of both.  Either way, they're a stunt, and not worth much of anyone's time.

The Sherrod Firing/Rehiring

The whole story of Shirley Sherrod has to be well-known by now to anyone within reach of a smart phone, the web, a newspaper, a radio or a television.

As has been pointed out, there were quite a few quirky actions and responses by any number of people but the lessons I see are:

• That the Obama White House staffers, not just in this case but in a number of instances, have been too quick to react to news events or developments. It's nice, perhaps essential, in this day of instant viral communication, to respond quickly, but from the White House in particular, one expects measured -- and hopefully correct -- response.

• That the gap between "traditional" media like print news and TV, and more instantaneous electronic means is significant, and measurable. But quicker isn't always better, if the game is only to rush to the scoop without checking facts.

• That too many bloggers (those involved in the breathless race to be the first with some tidbit of information or misinformation) are too inclined to accept whatever somebody posts as gospel, without questioning its source. While these same people might say they mistrust the "traditional media," or think they can do better getting the news "direct," this incident points up the folly of relying on the blogosphere for your news.

• That a nonentity named Breitbart has had his moment of fame but it may be -- should be -- over because it's so clearly evident that he chose selectively what he posted on the internet. Will his making up the truth matter to his fans? Maybe not, if they're the kind described in the previous paragraph. Breitbart's complaint that he's the victim here? Well...let's just say...No way!

Judiciary Committee Votes

Too frequently already has Morning Fog pointed out the dysfunctionality of the current Supreme Court nomination and confirmation process.  A President of either party proposes an eminently qualified jurist for the Court, though naturally someone whom he sees as sharing the main tenets of his own legal philosophy; opposing party Senators on the Judiciary Committee try to examine the nominee's politics and to predict how she/he will vote on various politically-charged issues that might come before the court.

Up until a couple of decades ago, though, Senators generally conceded a President's right to get an obviously qualified nominee confirmed and, absent any serious questions about the prospective justice's legal qualifications (seldom if ever have there been any), even most of the opposition would vote for the nominee or possibly abstain.  In recent years, and this week in the case of Elena Kagan, Republicans largely refused to vote in favor.  Some didn't even show up in person to vote. The one exception, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who eloquently took the high road, deserves the praise he is getting (in some quarters at least) for having done so.

The Court's authority and legitimacy rest on its remaining above the fray and on the public perception that it is politically neutral. When the opposition Senators refuse to approve a clearly qualified nominee - indeed to a lesser extent even during hearings when they persist in asking politically charged questions they know won't (can't!) be answered - they undermine public trust in the Supreme Court by making it out to be just another partisan political forum.

Let's hope that the example Graham has set may inspire broader-based willingness by overly partisan politicos to say "aye" when the time comes:  Aye to a nominee, aye to the seriousness of the process, and aye above all to having faith in the Constitution, which if I'm not mistaken, all Senators have sworn to uphold.  

The Intelligence On Intelligence

Well worth reading is the current review of U.S. intelligence and homeland security apparatus being generated by the Washington Post starting Monday, July 19.  All the articles, information, graphs, and such can be located together in one frame at: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america. 

While the information presented provides a good factual update (e.g. number of agencies and/or private contractors involved, amounts being spent, etc.), no one inside the beltway ought to be much surprised at the broad conclusions:  that huge amounts of money are being spent without much accountability or control, and without much in the way of clear improvements.

In fact this has always been the case with our intelligence agencies, particularly the largest of them, the CIA.  Even the agency's Congressional "watchdogs" seldom know the whole story.  It was inevitable that the Bush administration's solution to the terrorist attacks in September 2001 -- which amounted to little more than a mindless, rushed, dumping of money into "security" -- could only exacerbate the kinds of problems that already existed. 

The confirmation process for a new Director of National Intelligence, also proceeding today, is an interesting counterpoint to all of this.  It's little wonder that previous DNIs have been unable to establish control of the hydra-like monster that is our intelligence/security apparatus today.

The Museumall - Stop The Insanity

"The juggernaut of Museum Politics is moving again, straight toward the Mall."

So begins Philip Kennicott's report in the Washington Post. The article notes that there is a move afoot to establish a Museum of the American Latino. 

It's totally predictable that once one museum focused on a single ethnic group was given the green light to build on/near the Mall, others would start lining up.  The National Museum of the American Indian was the first, I guess, and incidentally, it is a colossal failure as a museum); we have the African-American Culture and History Museum coming soon, and now this latest, but I feel certain, not last, entry.

But perhaps I'm wrong about that.  In a way, developments of the past 25 to 40 years on the Mall have been all about assuaging the national conscience for groups that felt "left out" of formal history in some way.  Maybe it all began with the huge Vietnam War memorial (now scheduled to expand even more), which came about largely because of national guilt about the way the people who fought that war were ignored or even actively denigrated.  Yet as a Vietnam veteran myself, sorry, I have to say, I never felt I needed a monument.   

Then came the rush to museums, with much the same justification.  Indians? It's a wonder Native Americans survive at all outside museums but in this age we feel remotely derelict for having sought to eradicate them.  African-Americans? Well, we all know that story, and though things have improved, that group undoubtedly and justifiably still feels it has been omitted from the national story.  Latinos?  Arguably less so, but still, much of today's swelling Latino population in the U.S. feels invisible.  Get a museum, get your legitimacy -- will Latinos be the last group?  Almost certainly not. 

It's not that these groups and cultures aren't an important or interesting part of our country's history, nor that we should ignore that heritage.  But I have several objections to all this museum-building.

First, I realize that Washington is the nation's capital but why can't we seem to build museums elsewhere anymore?  The District of Columbia really doesn't need any more museums.  We have too many!  There's no room for anything else. The city is boring enough to walk through with all those government buildings but filling in the rest of the limited space with wall-to-wall museums (each with its dull cafeteria and multi-acre "gift shop") doesn't improve things a bit.  There is no parking and very little practical public transportation for visitors to these facilities.  Tourism is an important element of the DC economy, but variety might serve tourism development better.  When you've got 50 museums in town, the 51st doesn't add much economic value.  Moreover, if they're on federal land, they won't be taxable so it can be argued that extra museums are a collective economic drag that decreases the tax base. 

Second, the traditional character of the National Mall will be forever altered with each addition.  We need to think about that.  Part of the attraction for museums; I suppose, besides the prestige of a Mall location, is that they all want to be tax-free.  But the available space is extremely limited.  The Mall is far, far from being the jewel of the park-designer's art that Central Park is in New York City.  It looks more like a very large sandlot where neighborhood kids might gather to play ball (as they often do).  Yet most people for generations have found the extended open vista from the Capitol down the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial (since it was built) impressive and inspiring.  The increasing clamor for new museum sites inevitably will obtrude into that space, as the World War II Memorial already has done.  Kennicott's article (above) is mainly focused on the suggestion that there are other, potentially better sites for a Latino museum than directly on the Mall.  But it's clear that suggestion will fall on deaf ears.

Last, and by far most important, is that the proliferation of sectoral museums, particularly here in the nation's capital, skews the real nature of our historical development and makes it more difficult to understand.  As I argued more than a year ago with respect to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, a far more sensible approach would be an integrated single museum or museum complex that presents the many currents of American society in relationship to one another.  If we may agree that the Smithsonian hasn't succeeded in achieving that up to now, we shouldn't think that a clutch of museums focused on single aspects of a complex story is going to fill the gap.  In fact, their presence will delay any impetus to represent African-American, or Latino-American, history as an integral part of the fabric of our nationhood.  

The Newspaper Reader's Role: The Good

I'm always intrigued by the page the Washington Post calls "Free for All," which runs in the paper on Saturdays.  Here's where readers get a chance to react to stories they've seen/read in the paper.  Too often, those who write in use their one crack at fame to wax indignant over some minor offense, but occasionally, someone makes a serious and valid point, such as correcting a factual matter, or pointing out a different angle. 

One example of the "good" that letter-writers can do were two different reactions to a piece the Post published entitled "6 in 10 Americans lack faith in Obama."  That's a rather dramatic statement, and it turns out, one that's simply not borne out by the data the poll produced.  As both letter-writers pointed out, in order to get to the "6 out of 10" result, the pollsters basically had to count people who said they had "some" confidence as if they had "no" confidence. 

This may reflect the way the poll responses have been grouped in the past (this poll is run with the same/similar questions every couple of months) but it still isn't correct to say, as the writers Dan Balz and Jon Cohen did, that sixty percent of those polled "lack faith" - especially not on the front page of the post.  

About the only thing we can give the Post credit for here is providing a link in the article to the actual raw data of the survey.  At least it was possible, for those who bothered, to determine that the story line was a glaring misstatement.