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Another Crack at Illegal Immigration

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Mike Cronin

This is a revision of my post dated November 23, 2014.

President Trump has partially fulfilled one of his most controversial campaign promises.  Earlier this week, he signed an executive order to build a wall along the Mexican border, and his administration floated the idea of a 20% tax on Mexican imports to pay for the construction.  The mainstream media is predictably up in arms.

While I am encouraged by Mr. Trump’s attention to the illegal immigration issue, I find myself in disagreement that a wall is the right solution – but not for the same reasons as the crowds of critics assailing the president.  I’ll explain in a bit, but let’s untangle the knot a little first:

If you are an elected Democrat, the illegal immigration “problem” is: how to make it legal for illegal immigrants to vote? There are millions potential voters out there who cannot legally participate in national elections. How to solve that problem? Adopt narratives that simultaneously paint the illegal immigrants as victims who need rescuing and those who see things differently as racists. Then legalize the immigrants (or some portion of them) somehow, and/or prevent the passing of laws that require voters to produce a photo ID proving their eligibility.

If you are in one camp of elected Republicans, the illegal immigration problem is that there are millions of potential Democratic voters out there who might vote illegally or who might become legal voters at the stroke of a pen. How to solve that problem? Adopt narratives that illegal immigrants are by definition criminals just for being here, and who steal jobs from American citizens, who vote illegally, and who cost us a lot of money in “stolen” benefits and entitlements.

If you are in another camp of Republican lawmakers, the problem of illegal immigration is that you are fearful of alienating constituents of Latino or Hispanic origin, so you go along with Democrats on immigration issues.

If you are in yet a third camp of elected Republicans, the illegal immigration problem is that you receive significant campaign funds from donors who employ illegal immigrants, so you also tend to vote along Democratic lines on immigration.

If you run a manual-labor intensive business that can’t afford to pay the minimum wage, paying an illegal immigrant in cash under the table is an attractive option.

If you are a desperate person from Mexico or an impoverished country to our south, getting to America for the opportunities and freebies is an attractive option.

If you are a cunning and morally flexible person, exploiting the stream of immigrants headed north is an attractive option.

I believe the real problem with illegal immigration is: too much government.  Here’s what I mean:

  1. Our federal and state governments blatantly disregard current immigration law via policies like “Catch and Release,” “sanctuary cities,” and the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” directive (i.e. President Obama’s executive order that established the so-called “Dreamers”). Our federal government maintains at least two federal police agencies (Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol) charged with enforcing those same laws. In so doing, our lawmakers are essentially telling our protectors: “Your written job description says ‘enforce the law,’ but your real job is just to have a job so that I can tell voters I did my job by creating your job.” How dysfunctional is that?
  2. In addition, our current immigration law is too byzantine and restrictive. Currently, it’s fairly easy to visit the US, but unless one can claim to be one of the “Three R’s” (Related to a citizen, Rich, or Remarkable), it is extremely difficult to attain a green card or citizenship.

I think Mr. Trump’s actions show promise for resolving the dysfunctional aspect of immigration enforcement, but a wall is too dystopian, sinister, and unnecessary. Functional enforcement policies and increased presence all along the border will reduce the flood of illegal immigrants to a trickle. On the other hand, the bureaucratic burden to those aspiring to remain here longer than a visa allows still remains to be addressed.

So how do we solve such a multi-faceted problem?  With a multi-pronged strategy that is consistent with limited government:

  1. Enforce existing law
  2. Control the border via increased presence
  3. Update the law to minimize bureaucracy and maximize freedom – by addressing all of the competing interests and reducing or eliminating the motivations that lure our government into violating its own laws:
    • Make it much easier to become a legal “permanent resident” and moderately easier to become a citizen. This benefits immigrants wishing to live and work here permanently, and it would benefit lawmakers in both parties who represent immigrant constituencies.
    • Create a migrant worker visa AND migrant worker wage scale & tax status. This legitimizes hiring migrant workers and paying them less-than-minimum wages. This would benefit migrant workers by making it legal (and safer) to do what they are already doing, and it would benefit industries that can’t be profitable paying the regular minimum wage to unskilled workers. It will be perceived and promoted as a threat to citizen minimum-wage earners…but that is another Gordian knot – which I addressed here.
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The Network Revolution

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By Mike Cronin

Every so often you come across a book that leads you to multiple epiphanies.  “The Seventh Sense” by Joshua Cooper Ramo is turning out to be such a book for me (I haven’t finished it yet). Ramo’s theme:  Networks are the next revolution, are you ready to capitalize on that?  This post is not quite a book review – it’s more a chronicle of some of the thoughts it has prompted so far.

Historians, archaeologists, and geologists like to describe history and pre-history in terms of epochs, periods, and ages, such as the Cretaceous Period, the Jurassic Period,  the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Space Age, etc.  In human history, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment brought Western Civilization out of the Dark Ages and mark the beginning of the increasing pace of change. They signaled the advancement from superstition to science.  Those who best understood the power of reason over tradition were best –positioned to become the elite.  The Industrial Revolution marked a similar point – those who best understood the promise of industrializing were best positioned to become the elite: Getty, Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc.

Since that time we’ve had the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, the Space Age, and the Information Age; and again, those who could best foresee the advantages of the advancements of their time became the elites. Howard Hughes. Bill Gates. Michael Dell.

The next historical paradigm shift may very well be centered on harnessing the power of networks. Human networks started small with clans and tribes, and then grew into cities and nations and empires…which built physical networks of trade routes and roads.  Trans-oceanic shipping started to tie the nations, cities and empires together across and around the globe, but the connection speed was very slow – weeks or months, or even years.

Steam power shrunk that time to days or weeks across the oceans…and continents, on rail networks. The telegraph and radio and television accelerated message transmission to the speed of light, but the bandwidth was still very narrow.

Along came computers and the internet, and advanced us to the current state of affairs: instant, high-bandwidth communication to almost anywhere on the globe.  Here’s where Ramos comes in: We are nodes in networks, be it human, mechanical, or electronic.  The people who best understand networks and how to leverage their advantages are becoming, or are poised to become, the next generation of elites. Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. Sergey Brin.

In my view, such a radical paradigm shift could lead to the replacement of the nation-state (i.e. country) as the model for organizing human geopolitical affairs.  Instead of a world divided into hundreds of countries with hundreds of governments, imagine two global entities: The connected world, and the isolated world. The so-called Globalists may be onto this concept, but they generally have been going about achieving it the wrong way.  Some of them were (or still are) putting the cart before the horse.  They had already attained some measure of “elite-ness” in the existing Space Age and Information Age paradigms, then anointed themselves as our betters and purported to tell us how we were to usher in their vision of things – with themselves on the top, people like George Soros.  Many such globalists miscalculated badly with the US election, while President Trump’s campaign team represents an effective example of the new paradigm.  Trump’s message may smack of nationalism, but his campaign strategists still shrewdly demonstrated a facility with the power of networks that eluded the globalist elites.  The Trump campaign spent half as much money as Hillary Clinton’s, yet it harnessed the power of social media networks to connect “nodes” the Clinton campaign ignored and to bypass the mainstream media.  This strategy was at least partially responsible for Trump’s electoral win.

Time will tell whether his Cabinet and other advisers will show the same prescience as his campaign strategists.  Meanwhile, you and I and our children must learn to harness the power of networks if we are to remain relevant in the coming Network Revolution.

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Social Justice: Still a Weasel Word

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By Mike Cronin

Some time ago, I wrote about the squishy-ness of the term “Social Justice.” It still rankles.

In addition to this blog, I frequently answer questions on a forum called Quora.  Therein, I recently had a debate with a fellow over “social justice” in general, and whether whites should pay reparations to blacks to atone for slavery/Jim Crow/Segregation specifically.

I’ll state right up front: Reparations are a bad idea, and no, I don’t hate blacks.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I believe in individual liberty, limited, rights-protecting government, and Capitalism.  I am also a bit of a skeptic, mildly contrarian, and I tend to prefer rational responses over emotional ones.  I don’t waste energy on hatred, I don’t see any race as superior or inferior to any other race, and I generally deal with people as individuals vice members of some group. It also means I think of justice and injustice in terms of individual action and consequence.

This brings us back to Reparations.  I can’t support the idea because, regardless of how blacks were oppressed or injured by slavery (or later on Jim Crow laws and Segregation), the people who were slaves have been dead for generations – just as the people who held them as slaves have been dead for generations. Treating blacks as a race of sub-humans then was a morally repugnant act committed by more than a few whites, most especially the relatively few whites who actually owned slaves.  But not every white person was an oppressor then, nor were all slave owners white, nor was every black person a slave.

“In my mind, government-sponsored racial discrimination based on benign prejudice is just as noxious as discrimination inspired by malicious prejudice.” – Clarence Thomas

Indeed, social justice warriors seeking to impose reparations on whites always seem to ignore or forget that 360,000 Union soldiers, mostly white by far, died in the service of reuniting the country and limiting the spread of slavery to the west.  The Union Army and Navy killed 260,000 Confederates, again mostly whites, who were trying to keep the South, which was wholly dependent on slavery, independent.  Let’s make that point a little more succinct: Whites trying to reunite the country and limit, if not outright eliminate, slavery fought and killed other whites – by the hundreds of thousands, to do it. Between the end of the butchery of the Civil War and Dr. Martin Luther King’s civil eloquence, most blacks (but not all) were still treated poorly by many whites (but not all). Black incomes and living conditions took an overall upward trend.

Then came the War on Poverty.  Welfare. An insidious form of wealth transfer. Take money from those who earned it, and give it to those who didn’t.  It put many blacks (and others) right back into bondage – into the slavery of perpetual dependence.  Reparations is a smoke screen word to do more of the same.

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During the exchange, I attempted several different ways to make the case that the historical injustice done to the blacks who were slaves and the subsequent victims of post-bellum hatred and discrimination can never be corrected – because the victims and victimizers are long gone.  No one alive today can be responsible for transgressions committed generations in the past – because they weren’t even alive, much less involved, in committing the transgressions.  Thinking that one race is responsible for, and must atone for, the plight of another race is every bit as racist a notion as thinking that one race is superior to another.  It is a large step down the path to perpetual grievance and resentment that plagues much of the rest of the world.

I maintain that “social justice” is a weasel word.  Seeking “social justice” in the form of unjust “wealth transfers” and reparations can never correct the uncorrectable sins of the past.  Real justice can prevail when everyone stops attributing the traits, or actions, or intelligence, or habits, or crimes, etc. of individuals to all the members of a race, or tribe, or nation, or ethnic group, or gender, etc. and starts treating individuals as individuals.

Despite my denunciation of social justice and my espousing of individualism, my interlocutor kept pressing me for details of my plan to bring social justice to blacks today.  We were both using English words, but he was speaking weasel-ese.

 

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Hate Speech and Hate Crime: Weasel Words

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By Mike Cronin

It’s been awhile since we translated any weasel-ese, but two related terms have been prominent recently, so let’s have a go.  This past week, four Chicago young adults, aged 18-24, allegedly kidnapped an 18 year-old special-needs man and tortured him (by beating him and forcing him to drink toilet water, among other things). The suspects “broadcast” at least a portion of their acts “live” on Facebook. The alleged perpetrators are black; the victim is white.  The pundit class is convulsing about whether the incident is a hate crime.

The term “hate crime,” and its close relative, “hate speech,” are weasel words.

Kidnapping is a crime. Torturing someone is a crime.  In the Chicago case, barring a revelation that the entire thing was a hoax or prank, or some other dramatic “plot twist” in the case, it will take some extremely deft legal defense to get the four suspects acquitted of the basic charges of kidnapping, assault, and aggravated assault.

When a prosecutor tries to “prove beyond a reasonable doubt” to a jury that a suspect is guilty of a crime, he or she often must show that the suspect had the opportunity, capability, and intent (or motivation) to commit the crime.  Hate can certainly serve to motivate someone to commit a crime, but hatred is not a crime in itself, since it is simply an emotion.  If one commits a crime driven by hate, the crime is the crime and hate is the motivation.

By creating a special treatment category for offenses motivated by hatred, i.e. “hate crimes,” the weasels are trying to criminalize hatred itself.  (Interestingly, the tables have been turned, in that some of the opinion-aters who are usually the first to allege a hate crime are going through all manner of rhetorical gyrations to prevent that label from sticking to the Chicago case.)

Similarly, by categorizing offensive rhetoric, racial slurs, and other venomous utterances as “hate speech,” the weasels are again trying to criminalize an emotion. The concepts of banning hate speech and prosecuting hate crimes are being promoted by people who themselves hate opposition. They would repeal the First Amendment if they could, then they would make it a crime to dissent.

Think I’m off my rocker?  Observe the rise of the campus speech code and its ever-increasing (and ever-more-ludicrous) list of things one cannot say.  University campuses have become minefields for the unwary orator who opines outside the designated “free speech zone.”

In a rational academic setting, students must be exposed to schools of thought different than their own in order to learn and grow – the whole point of a “higher” education!  Sometimes different ideologies are offensive or difficult to accept…until one hears them presented and discussed in the academic setting and has a change of opinion.  Banning the mere potential giving of offense is banning the opportunity for growth and learning.

Are you a hater?  Probably not, but you have probably experienced the emotion of hatred once or twice in your life.  If the weasels who are currently trying to make hatred a crime have their way; someday in the not-too-distant future, you will be guilty of a crime merely for thinking your own thoughts.