Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Ed Schultz Looks Into the Abyss

In a clip noted by Andrew Johnson, MSNBC's Ed Schultz argues against Obama taking unilateral action to provide work permits to millions of illegal immigrants:
The MSNBC host passionately came to the defense of American workers and urged the White House not to use executive actions to grant legal status and work authorization to millions of immigrants in the country illegally. He warned that it would be an “electoral death nail” for Democrats in the upcoming midterms.
“Hold the phone — this would be a mistake if the president were to do this,” he said on Tuesday. “Politically, there is no way Democrats can go home and campaign on across-the-board amnesty for millions of undocumented workers — I don’t think that’s a political winner for the Democrats.”

A few thoughts in no particular order:

Schultz backing away may be a sign that some on the left realize how politically problematic unilateral action on immigration by President Obama may be.

Some "progressives" may be awakening to the serious Constitutional implications of the president going rogue on immigration law.  As Schultz said, "I don’t think one man should have that much power."

Schultz also suggested that a mass legalization via executive order could undermine the economic position of the American worker (both native-born and legal immigrants).  Perhaps others on the left will also address the economic consequences of bad-faith open borders.

For those who are sympathetic to immigration reform, unilateral actions by the president may make legislative reform much less likely to happen.

Economic Stagnation and Its Consequences

Peter Morici argues that the economy has seen a long-term stagnation in both employment and raw growth:
The economy has created only about 6 million new jobs during the Bush-Obama years, whereas the comparable figure during the Reagan-Clinton period was about 40 million. A recent study by the Center for Immigration Studies indicates that virtually all the new jobs created since 2000 went to immigrants, whereas none were created for native-born Americans.
Adding in discouraged adults who say they would begin looking for work if conditions were better, those working part-time but say they want full time work, and the effects of immigration, the unemployment rate becomes about 15 percent—and that is a lower bound estimate.
Many young people are being duped both by unscrupulous for profit, post-secondary institutions—as well as accredited colleges and universities with low admission standards—to enroll in useless programs. They would likely be in the labor force now but for easy access to federally sponsored loans and will end up heavily in debt.
Adding in these students, the real unemployment rate among U.S. citizens and permanent residents is at least 18 percent.
Since 2000, GDP growth has averaged 1.7 per year, whereas during the Reagan-Clinton years, it was 3.4 percent. The reluctance of both Presidents Bush and Obama to confront Chinese protectionism and currency manipulation and open up offshore oil for development have created a huge trade deficit that sends consumer demand, growth, and jobs abroad.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Warnings on Presidential Edicts

Yuval Levin warns about the Constitutional implications of President Obama's contemplated immigration moves:
Many people in Washington seem to be talking about the prospect of the president unilaterally legalizing the status of several million people who entered the country illegally as though it were just another political question. But if reports about the nature of the executive action he is contemplating are right, it would be by far the most blatant and explosive provocation in the administration’s assault on the separation of powers, and could well be the most extreme act of executive overreach ever attempted by an American president in peacetime....In one sense, the approach the president is said to be contemplating does fit into a pattern of his use of executive power. That pattern involves taking provocative executive actions on sensitive, divisive issues to isolate people he detests, knowing it will invite a sharp response, and then using the response to scare his own base voters into thinking they are under assault when in fact they are on the offensive. That’s how moving to compel nuns to buy contraception and abortive drugs for their employees became “they’re trying to take away your birth control.” This strategy needlessly divides the country and brings out the worst instincts of people on all sides, but it has obvious benefits for the administration and its allies. 

Hot Air has an interesting (and grim) collection of other reflections on the president's possible power grab.

Monday, July 28, 2014

What Could Have Been

A new CNN poll finds that, if a presidential election were held today, Mitt Romney would handily beat Barack Obama 53-44.  According to this poll, Americans are tied 49-49 on whether the president is sincere about what he says; in 2011, 65% of those polled thought that the president was sincere.

Germany and Immigration

The Washington Post reports on Germany's expansion of a skills-based immigration system.  Immigration to Germany has increased in recent years, though the United States still takes in many more immigrants each year.
But the latest upsurge is largely based on Germany’s reemergence in recent years as Europe’s undisputed economic leader, a beacon of light on a continent still suffering from the aftermath of a brutal debt crisis. In the 28-nation European Union, free movement of labor means nationals can easily relocate from one country to the next. And with unemployment at 25.1 percent in Spain, 26.6 percent in Greece, and 12.6 percent in Italy, Germany — with an economy built on industrial giants such as Siemens and an army of innovative small and midsize companies — has never looked so good.
But Germany also is looking beyond Europe for prospective workers, with German factories courting Indian engineers and German universities competing for Chinese students. In 2012, Germany simplified the process for immigrants from outside the E.U. In 2013, Germany introduced a “Blue Card” system, effectively granting entry to anyone with a university degree and a job offer with a minimum salary of $50,000 to $64,000 a year, depending on the field. As a result, the average immigrant moving to Germany is better educated and more skilled than the average German.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Attack, Attack!

Daniel Halper writes in Politico Magazine about some of the opposition he has run into writing and promoting his new book on Clinton World, Clinton, Inc.
[M]any, many people in Washington, on the left and right, popped up to warn me of what to expect from the Clinton PR team. Other authors—legitimate ones with serious pedigrees—who’d written about the Clintons said they were threatened and verbally attacked. Of course, nearly everyone in Washington has seen the much-vaunted Clinton PR machine in action. 

Friday, July 18, 2014

The Humane and the Rule of Law

At NRO, I make the case for the notion that defending the rule of law can be allied to humanitarian principles for immigration policy.  Ignoring the law has helped create the shadows that allow predators to exploit human misery and desperation.

Illegal immigrants enter into this country in a state of abstracted legal, but less immediately actual, peril. The odds that an illegal immigrant will be deported once he or she makes it into the interior of the country are vanishingly small, but there is still a chance – saying “you can (probably) stay” is different from saying “you can certainly stay.” That chance of deportation encourages the illegal immigrant to stay away from the orderly course of the law and thereby strengthens the hands of exploitative law-breaking employers, human traffickers, gangs, and the other predators who prowl the shadows of our immigration system.But what also strengthens the hands of these predators is the legal vacuum created by the current immigration regime. A rigorous enforcement of immigration law would also go after the unscrupulous employers and gang members and traffickers, but the current indifference to law provides these types with shadows within which they can operate. Imagine what child labor would be like in a United States where it was technically illegal but, in practice, it was allowed or even encouraged and subsidized on a massive scale. Child workers would be more likely to be open to abuse and neglect in that situation than in a situation either where child labor was totally allowed or where laws against child labor were rigorously enforced. It is no surprise that, in the contemporary United States, violations of child-labor laws also go hand in hand with illegal immigration: The abuses enabled by indifference to illegal immigration facilitate other abuses and law-breaking.

Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Reflecting on the deeper sources of bad-faith open borders, Mark Krikorian writes:
The core issue is whether there should be any limit placed on immigration. Supporters of immigration limits (high or low is not the issue here) obviously want the de jure prohibition against illegal immigration to be a de facto one too, with the laws consistently enforced. The other side is objectively (if not rhetorically) opposed to any meaningful limits on immigration, and so would prefer the de facto situation to become the de jure one.This situation persists because the pro-limits side knows the de jure limits do at least exercise some control over the number of people moving here from abroad, even if they’re not well enforced. The anti-limits side has as its goal the admission of as many people from abroad as possible, so a limbo status for them is fine so long as they’re able to physically remain in the country. As Lincoln might have put it, both parties deprecate bad-faith open borders, but one of them would promote it rather than accept limits, and the other would accept it rather than let the borders be opened altogether.

Monday, July 14, 2014

More Reformicon Blogging

Ross Douthat explores the role of social issues for the project of conservative reform:
As much as cultural outreach matters, I wouldn’t want the kind of conservative political party that essentially declines to represent populist and social conservatives at all on many issues, enforcing an elite consensus instead of representing its own constituents wherever those constituents seem too disreputable or insufficiently cosmopolitan. This is what you have on the center-right in many European countries, Sullivan’s native isle at times included, and I don’t think it’s worked out particularly well...
Meanwhile, Quin Hillyer argues that reform conservatism has Reaganite roots:
The point is not that today’s reformers are merely copying Reagan’s policies. They aren’t. Much of their thinking, their reimagining of how to apply conservatism in the real world, is fresh and valuable. But it still is a reimagining, not a new imagining.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Defending Reformicons

David Frum defends "reform conservatives" by saying that reform-minded conservatives are trying to respond to present-day problems:
Conservatives dominated American politics in the 1970s and 1980s because they offered workable solutions to broadly experienced problems: crime, inflation, slow growth, the Soviet threat. In recent years, however, conservatives seemed to have less to say to the nation. Stagnant wages, rising personal indebtedness, long commutes, health-care costs, climate change—these new challenges did not elicit new thinking.
The reform conservatives seem more open to the new. This is progress. If the policy agenda that follows remains cautious, remember: These conservative reformers aren’t trying to change the world. They’re trying to change a political party.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

The Specter of Neofeudalism

At NRO, I explore how the concept of "neofeudalism" can provide a device for thinking about some current trends and their risks for American society:
Kotkin’s analysis focuses on the demographic structures of California, but we can explore more broadly some of the underlying tendencies of neofeudalism. It might be helpful to contrast the neofeudal state with the traditional liberal republic. The latter is composed of individuals (and organizations of individuals) coming together to form a nation governed by laws, and it aims to be in accordance with certain foundational rights. The neofeudal state, on the other hand, is anti-national. Rather than the unified body politic of the liberal republic, the neofeudal state slices and dices its residents into discrete subsets, each with its own unique rights and responsibilities. Solid economic and social divisions were a key part of feudal society, and they also play a role in present-day neofeudalism. Moreover, the institutional dysfunction characteristic of neofeudalism undermines the efficient functioning of the republic and makes the nation more vulnerable to the whims of executive diktat.
The hardening of divisions in society is the backbone of neofeudalism. Some of these divisions are economic. The breakdown of opportunity and the weakening of the middle class divide American society while also harming economic growth. But these divisions may also be social and cultural, replacing traditional American narratives of equal access to the public square with a fragmented and fractious society. The existence of divisions does not define a neofeudal society, but neofeudalism hardens differences into caste-creating walls. While a free republic certainly has divisions, those divisions are counterbalanced by an assertion of universal dignity and of rights that transcend the social hierarchy.
Read the rest here.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Looking for a GOP Majority

At The Weekly Standard, I dig into a recent report from the Pew Research Center in order to explore some of the strategies Republicans might use to rebuild their political coalition:
A key part of this enterprise of political persuasion involves taking account of contemporary facts and grounding these facts in a deeper discourse of principles. President Obama's administration has offered a narrative of social and economic uplift through the ministrations of a centralized and technocratic bureaucracy. That was the vision of the (failed) stimulus. That is the vision of Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and much else of the president's policies (including energy, infrastructure, and education). In order to counter this narrative and appeal to Hard-Pressed Skeptics and other uneasy members of the Democratic coalition, Republicans might argue not that a vision of social and economic improvement is flawed but that the current policies of bureaucratic progressivism fail to achieve or even actively undermine that vision.
Republicans could offer an alternative narrative of market-oriented uplift, in which decentralization, economic growth, and a vibrant, multifaceted civic space encourage a broad pursuit of happiness. They might note that massive bureaucracies can often become of a tool of enriching the powerful rather than leveling the playing field (as Too Big to Fail potentially demonstrates, for instance). By warning about the potential for government bureaucracies to facilitate favoritism and corruption, Republicans could appeal to the skepticism of Outsiders, Skeptics, and even some of the Next Generation Left. Furthermore, by attending to the possible injustice of this favoritism and corruption, they can also reach out to the economic and social-justice concerns of the Skeptics and Faith and Family Left. In contrast to present stagnation, Republicans could make a case for a dynamic economy, in which economic gains are not reserved for the few.
In their approach to the role of government, Republicans might put forward the idea that government can be a legitimate actor but that it is also an actor about which we should be skeptical. Rather than denunciations of government as an endless font of evil, conservatives might instead advance the traditional American viewpoint that the government should be rigorously held to account. Many in the center believe that government does have a purpose, but they also worry about government becoming unmoored from its constitutional foundations and becoming a tool for a self-dealing, self-perpetuating elite. A Republican case for limited government can be allied to a case for effective government: Placing limitations upon a government may make it most effective in its role of protecting fundamental rights and advancing the public good. 

Read the rest here.