Anchor Babies, Welfare Queens, and Other Gutless Euphemisms

I don't usually write about immigration because it's not my specialty, but I do know a thing or two about language. Earnest People™ are asking what term they should use instead of "anchor babies" because critics (rightly) believe it is a derogatory term, but right-of-center folks want a term to describe children who are used as excuses to stay in the country. 

Here's my suggestion:

"Greatly exaggerated phenomenon I use to express both my disdain for immigrants and signal my resentment of the continued growth of the welfare state despite the two not being closely related"

Doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it? Okay, maybe this:

"Undesirable brown child."

"Whoa, Jon. That's going too far!" you may be thinking. But it really isn't.

This continued conversation has context and that context is nativism.  Nativism is and always has been closely tied to racism--even leading to hate crimes--and there's just no getting around that. You can have non-racist reasons to oppose immigration, but "anchor babies" is a loaded term and you're kidding yourself if you think otherwise.

There is little evidence that a large number of unauthorized immigrants are coming to America with the intended purpose of having children to stay in the country legally. Yes, people have children while they're here. And sure, people have children for bad reasons all the time so I'm sure that some people do, in fact, come here with that intention. But there's nothing really to support that this is some sort of widespread scheme to do so and therefore that it warrants massive policy change. How do I know this? The law doesn't make it easy to have a kid get parents legal access to the Land of the Free: (Via WaPo)

In order to apply for such an option, the parent of a so-called anchor baby would need to do all of the following.

• Wait for his or her child to reach the age of 21.

• Leave the United States.

• Return to their home country.

• Have their child begin the lengthy process of applying for a family reunification immigration request.

• Clear consular interviews and a U.S. State Department background check. (One or both would very likely provide evidence that said parent, at some point, lived in the United States illegally -- long enough for that "anchor baby" to be conceived or born. And despite widespread belief to the contrary, there is indeed a penalty for that.)

If a person has lived in the United States unlawfully for a period of more than 180 days but less than one year, there is an automatic three-year bar on that person ever reentering the United States -- and that's before any wait time for a visa. So that's a minimum of 21 years for the child to mature, plus the three-year wait. 

And, for the vast majority of these parents, a longer wait also applies. If a person has lived in the United States illegally for a year or more, there is a 10-year ban on that person reentering the United States. So, in that case, there would be the 21-year wait for the child to mature to adulthood, plus the 10-year wait.

Our immigration naturalization system is explicitly set up to not be gamed...by unskilled brown people from Latin America, anyway. And if you think they're banking on American sympathy to let them stay, the tidal wave of deportations during the bulk of the Obama administration and the unabashed nativism from the GOP frontrunners undermines that naive (and likely nonexistent) assumption on their part.

But back to my point--we've seen this before. The "Welfare Queens" of the 1970s and 1980s was a racially tinged, sexist anti-welfare moniker  that was, to put it mildly, wildly overstated. Yes, some people cheat Welfare. People also cheat Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, but you don't see too many politicians demagoguing about those gray haired goodfornothing bandits wreaking havoc on our national debt.

WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT DEADBEAT GRANDMAS

Nah. They were blaming women, particularly black women, as a political foil. "Anchor babies" is of the exact same stripe: women and children of color living off (white) America who earned their wealth the old-fashioned way. (The GI Bill, farm subsidies, and mortgage interest deductions, of course.) But I digress.

If you really want to make "anchor babies" a campaign or policy issue, then do so. But be honest about what you're saying. The problem is a broken system created and driven by the same old nativism responsible for the bulk of our counter-productive immigration laws for over a century. Racial resentment continues to drive politics in this country and the adults in the room should acknowledge that.

Some Thoughts on Procedure

 

Courtesy of Memegenerator.net and JPB.

"Procedure" is a word that evokes banality. It is the stuff of bureaucracy and litigiousness. It's the word we use to describe colonoscopies in polite company. And, if my Twitter feed is any indication, it is the last refuge of political scoundrels trying to make a point.

But procedure is also the bulwark of rights in our judicial system. (ie, Due Process) Those in power must follow procedure to exercise that power in a way consistent with law and custom. Presidents, Congressmen, police officers, prosecutors, and bureaucrats all most follow procedure to maintain their legitimacy.

I happen to agree with many on the Left, and a few on the Right, that Obama's executive orders relating to immigration were within the laws and customs currently on the books. Whether those laws should have exceptions that one libertarian friend said "you could drive a truck through" is another story entirely, but that's the law Congress gave him to work with.

(dis?)Courtesy of the White House

The Right's sky-is-falling narrative is overblown and off-base, at least in this context. Their references to a King or Emperor skirting procedure would be laughable if not so tragic, given what most of them are conveniently ignoring.

Obama has not once, but twice unilaterally sent troops to fight in civil wars that pose no existential threat to the United States nor could be construed (with a straight face) to be in line with the AUMF --lest we understand the text to mean the Authorization to Unilaterally Murder Foreigners. (See also: the Kill List.)

But you see, it's much easier to rile up the Right's base by helping millions of brown people here at home than blowing up different brown people half-way across the globe.

Take a moment to process that.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Alabama Crops Rot: Why?

Via Doug Mataconis:

A sponsor of Alabama’s tough new immigration law told desperate tomato farmers Monday that he won’t change the law, even though they told him that their crops are rotting in the field and they are at risk of losing their farms.

Republican state Sen. Scott Beason of Gardendale met with about 50 growers, workers, brokers and business people Monday at a tomato packing shed on Chandler Mountain in northeast Alabama. They complained that the new law, which went into effect Thursday, scared off many of their migrant workers at harvest time.

“The tomatoes are rotting on the vine, and there is very little we can do,” said Chad Smith, who farms tomatoes with his uncle, father and brother.

“My position is to stay with the law as it is,” Beason told the farmers.

Beason helped write and sponsor a law the Legislature enacted in June to crack down on illegal immigration. It copied portions of laws enacted in Arizona, Georgia and other states, including allowing police to detain people indefinitely if they don’t have legal status. Beason and other proponents said the law would help free up jobs for Alabamians in a state suffering through 9.9 percent unemployment.

The farmers said the some of their workers may have been in the country illegally, but they were the only ones willing to do the work.

“This law will be in effect this entire growing season,” Beason told the farmers. He said he would talk to his congressman about the need for a federal temporary worker program that would help the farmers next season.

“There won’t be no next growing season,” farmer Wayne Smith said.

“Does America know how much this is going to affect them? They’ll find out when they go to the grocery store. Prices on produce will double,” he said.

So, let me get this right: crops rotting. Hard working American farmers at risk of losing everything they own. No one coming to work the fields.

It can't be about jobs, as this is threatening to put more people out of work. But if the anti-immigrant folks are to be believed, it's NOT about racism either.

Kick out all the brown people, make a lot of people lose their farms and homes--in many cases, old farms that have been owned by the same family for generations--make food more expensive for the average citizen who is struggling to get by, and generally inflict more damage on an already depressed economy. Historically speaking, racist otherism is about the only thing that makes Americans dumb enough to continue with such programs in the face of all available evidence.

If you don't want to call it racism, fine: call it criminally ignorant economic insanity. But the Alabama electorate should decide whether it will continue to support the politicians that did this to them, and if they do, I'd like to know why.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

The Unintended Consequences of Immigration Enforcement

One of the recurring tropes I hear from the anti-immigrant folks is that undocumented immigrants get in car accidents and have no insurance, thus costing innocent, responsible drivers money by forcing out-of-pocket payments for damages or consequent higher premiums, due to no fault of their own. While I can certainly empathize with the people who feel 'cheated' by these folks, they should actually be blaming the system.

Why? Because the enforcement mechanisms in place in many states forbid undocumented immigrants to have drivers' licenses, thus rendering them ineligible to purchase auto insurance. Given that 'driving while undocumented' has become a deportable offense, one can assume that many of the hardworking immigrants who risked so much to get here would pay a few bucks a month to drive legally and pay for inadvertent damage their mistake may have caused.

It's good to see this story making headlines, finally. Kudos to WaPo for covering it, albeit too late for the CIR battle.

A Modest Proposal Compromise

There is a growing concern that the benefits of citizenship are too broadly given to undesirables children born in this country of non-citizen parents. Further, there is another concern that those who are accused of taking-up arms against their country, or aiding those who do, should have their citizenship revoked without trial or proof of treasonable acts. To address both of these issues, may I suggest a compromise: combine the two, and make them retroactive to 1860. After all, this is a matter of national security and one cannot be too careful.

As you may recall, beginning in 1860, millions of Americans renounced their citizenship and took up arms against their former country. Their deeds, through direct confrontation or diseases brought on by wartime conditions, ended up in the deaths of over 300,000 loyal Americans--100 times the number killed on September 11, 2001. By the logic outlined above, that treason should be recognized and all the descendants of those who took up arms, aided their traitorous comrades, or participated in the government of the insurrectionists should have their citizenship revoked as they are progeny of traitors. They owe their heretofore recognized citizenship to the birthright. That is, of course, unacceptable.

These descendants often still fly the flag of treason and commemorate their forebears' disloyalty in numerous ways. Thus, the combined legislation should include the confiscation and destruction of all property bearing the treasonous flag, including but not exclusive to real estate, monuments, clothing, transportation, and music--so we can once and for all rid the nation of "Freebird."


This may be problematic for many so-called Americans. As we cannot let the fact that perhaps 12 million workers are here in the United States illegally dissuade us from deportations and other law enforcement efforts, millions of descendants of those who would tear apart our nation should get no different treatment. The American birthright to citizenship has allowed children of murderous traitors to grow up around us. Thus, for those white people individuals under reasonable suspicion of traitorous descent, documentation of legal immigration and/or non-traitorous bloodline shall be required by law enforcement officers. (All current law enforcement and other government employees will have to provide this paperwork to remain gainfully employed by the state.)

We are not savages, so let us make sure that all the illegal traitor descendants may apply for citizenship through the proper legal channels. They may start at the back of the line, just like every other non-citizen who wants to be an American. That they're here illegally and contributing to society is not a valid excuse for skirting the law. The law is the law, and it's not fair to all those who have waited for years to come here legally, that some simply being present is enough to grant immunity. It's not like we told their great-great grandfathers to take up arms against their own country.

Slave descendants whose lineage can be traced to slaveholders predating emancipation, of course, would be exempted. Questionable cases and all other challenges will go through the newly formed Bureau of American Integrity, which will be overseen by a non-partisan board made up of genealogists, Native American chiefs, and angry black studies professors.


Some may complain that these measures are too harsh and unconstitutional. To them, I say, everything changed on April 12, 1861.

Reactionary Imbecility

One of the dangers of working at a place like Cato is living with a constant target on your back. Any time you do something that can possibly be construed the wrong way, chances are it will be -- and often very publicly. This just happened to a colleague last night after he tweeted something with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.

Predictably, Think Progress went ape:

Michael Cannon, a health policy expert for Cato, the libertarian think tank founded by Charles Koch of the oil conglomerate Koch Industries, took to Twitter today to trade jokes about the oil spill. Responding to a tragic story about a New Orleans area sheriff asking federal authorities to investigate reports that undocumented workers are involved in the oil spill clean up, Cannon tweeted that undocumented workers “are very absorbent.”...While Cannon might have gotten a good laugh out of his comment, pervasive anti-immigrant rhetoric leads to dehumanization and sometimes violence.

Never mind that Charles Koch is no longer associated with Cato. Never mind that Cannon has previously tweeted about the unfair and racist anti-immigrant law in Arizona. And never mind that the person he was responding to is herself a child of an immigrant and is a grandchild of Japanese internment camp victims--camps, of course, established by heroic lefty icon Franklin Roosevelt. No, we at Cato are racist shills for big oil because we believe in private property and free markets. We are fully incapable of holding views in line with the Left and joking at the expense of irrational sheriffs who make headlines with their idiocy. We are evil people whom deserve no benefit of the doubt--or even simple fact-checking our policy stances.(PDF)

Kudos to Dave Weigel for debunking this baseless nonsense over at his WaPo blog.

Quote of the Day

I'm concerned about the whole idea of carrying papers and always having to be able to prove your citizenship. That brings up some shades of some other regimes that weren't necessarily helpful to democracy.

- (Well-known pinko liberal) Governor Bob McDonnell (R-VA) on Arizona SB 1070

Via Dave Weigel

By the Time I Get to Arizona

If you haven't heard yet, Arizona's legislature just passed a harass-the-Hispanics bill. I wish I was kidding.

I don't have time to get into the problems with localities enforcing federal law, but this is just so broad that it boggles the mind how rational people can pass such god-awful legislation. Here is a good and pretty short video detailing some of the major problems with the bill. Pay particular attention to the "anti-discrimination" provision.


It seems only appropriate to play this for Mood Music Monday.





You can urge Arizona's governor Jan Brewer to veto this odious legislation here.

Thanks to America's Voice for the Selden link and the petition to the governor.

Update: Governor Brewer signed the bill today (Friday), with accompanying empty rhetoric about how it's not going to encourage racial profiling.

Yglesias to Me: How Stupid Are You?

ATTENTION GOOGLERS:

Oh Hai! 

you're probably looking for Matt's new digs at Slate, which can be found here. I noticed a recent uptick of hits on this post because people are Googling "Yglesias Slate" and come here. You can read on if you like, but to me this is a dead issue and I'd just as soon you read other more recent blog posts of mine as opposed to this one.

That said, I'm writing this addendum before the post to set a few things straight:


Matt and I are cool. We're not going for ice cream together any time in the forseeable future, but this was a spat from nearly two years ago because neither of us was feeling particularly charitable toward the other. I didn't understand where his unspoken shift from businessman meaning 'business owner' to businessman meaning 'rent-seeking Master of the Universe' was and the subsequent placement of nominally anti-immigrant condescension in the MOTU was somewhat unfair, but I overstated it. Likewise, he has a tendency to bite the heads off trolls on Twitter now and again, so it's totally understandable that he reacted the way he did.

Thanks for stopping by. JPB


So, in the mess that was the Health Care vote last night, I was checking Twitter for the various 140 character reax from conservatives, liberals and libertarians whom I follow. I noticed a tweet from Tim Carney referencing a post on rent-seeking earlier in the day from Matt Yglesias, late of the Atlantic and now a blogger at ThinkProgress: (In its original entirety)

As long as we’re talking about intellectual influences, I thought I might talk about an idea that’s important to me that, as best I can tell, I thought up all by myself. I don’t want to claim that it’s actually original—and certainly one way to think about it is that it’s just public choice economics looked at through the other end of the telescope—but I didn’t read it anywhere.


This is an idea about the simple story you’ll find in your intro micro textbook about the behavior of a perfectly competitive market. The normal way people seem to react to this story is that people with right-wing views start talking about how bad government intervention is and people with left-wing views start talking about how unrealistic the assumptions underlying the model are. But another way is to think about it from the point of view of a businessman. This competitive market sure looks like a horrible place! You might make a living there, but you sure as hell aren’t going to get rich. Think of the immigrant family that owns the dry cleaning shop around the corner—long hours, hard work, modest income. That’s your capitalism and it pretty much sucks.


Obviously the whole reason to become a businessman in the first place is to get rich. Operating a business in a competitive marketplace is for suckers, or immigrants with limited English ability. The whole name of the game is to do something else. Get a license for something. Get into a line of work with network effects. Win government contracts. Get your hands on some intellectual property. Become a monopoly. Find some barriers to entry. If you think about Bill Gates, who’s about as successful a businessman as they’ve got, and he’s doing a whole bunch of those things simultaneously. That’s how you get rich.


From a formal point of view, you could consider this a libertarian analysis. But I don’t think the formal aspects of ideology are very important, and it has relatively little to do with any concrete political program I see anyone trying to advance. And to me it suggests that people overrate tax cuts as a means to spur capitalistic growth.

Having read this--and not really knowing what to make of it--I tweeted:

Shorter @mattyglesias: Working immigrants' life "pretty much sucks" http://ow.ly/1pa1I || wonder why they don't all leave then? #opportunity

As befits an Ivy League educated journo/talking head, Yglesias picked up and responded with the title of this post. Stay classy, Matt.

Given that we have a number of mutual friends and that my few brief personal encounters with him have been generally positive, I have developed a certain respect for Yglesias. I don't agree with what he says more often than not, but usually his writing is thoughtful and I have learned from him.

But the post I reprinted above is simply garbage, and well beneath him. Despite my deficiencies, I would like to flesh out my thoughts on the post.

The first paragraph sets no discernible tone for the piece. It's simply superfluous, but I'm as guilty as anyone for writing my train of thought too literally and, additionally, working without strict editing constraints sometimes leads to sub-par posts. c'est la blogging.

In the second graf, Matt moves from banality to straw-man land. He couches his forthcoming argument about rent-seeking in political Left versus Right terms, but then puts the reader in the position of an entrepreneurial businessman and the narrative takes an unsettling turn: (again):

But another way is to think about it from the point of view of a businessman. This competitive market sure looks like a horrible place! You might make a living there, but you sure as hell aren’t going to get rich. Think of the immigrant family that owns the dry cleaning shop around the corner—long hours, hard work, modest income. That’s your capitalism and it pretty much sucks.

Obviously the whole reason to become a businessman in the first place is to get rich. Operating a business in a competitive marketplace is for suckers, or immigrants with limited English ability.

Maybe it's my aforementioned stupidity, but I don't see the argumentative value of the two swipes at immigrants. I have no reason to believe Yglesias is a quasi-nationalist American exceptionalist who views all fer'ners as the "other"--so I can only operate on the assumption that this implicit suckers/immigrants comparison is projected upon the business owner.

As my tweet implied, the immigrants of limited English capacity are probably, in fact, very grateful for the opportunities this country gives them and for the opportunities they could pass on to their children. Yet, I fail to see how their national origin would in any way differentiate their motivations for busting their asses and providing for their families from the businessman in whose mind Yglesias puts his readers. I don't think my father and his now-deceased brothers began a janitorial and security service with the expectations they were going to become the next Brinks or join the ranks of those numerous millionaire janitors that pepper the country. Of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be "rich," but I don't think most entrepreneurs start businesses with greatly exaggerated expectations of wealth. After all, the harsh realities would set in rather quickly and all non-millionaire-making ventures would probably fold in short order once the owner realized that so much time, work, and energy was necessary to simply provide for his family and make the lives of his customers and employees better.

I don't know Matt well enough to understand his intentions for projecting this disdain for the sucker/fer'ner into the mind of your average American businessman. One could read either he actually does think their life sucks or that entrepreneurs look down their noses at them. Either way, I don't see what it has to do with anything, and that he did it twice is just odd. 

I agree that rent-seeking is bad, but your average entrepreneur never gets to the monopolist/professional rent-seeker status he alludes to. Indeed, one has to first attain more than moderate success to influence the government in the ways Matt describes--thus undercutting the crux of whatever argument he was trying to make.

And to that end, the last graf doesn't clarify what exactly that point was. Um, tax cuts? Disparaging the immigrants who work tirelessly to make a demonstrably better life in America than they had in their native country is a novel way of criticizing tax policy, I'll grant you, but hardly illuminating.

The post was crap, and apparently I'm stupid for saying so. Can anyone explain to me what sublime brilliance--or, I'd settle for a cogent point, actually--I missed in his post?

Our Misguided Immigration Policy

You know things are getting bad when an immigrant-friendly mayor is put in the position to lament:

“I’m the hero of every redneck in America.”

This is exactly what happened to Irving, Texas mayor Herbert A. Gears.

Because the federal government has a schizophrenic and ineffective immigration policy that localities are trying to make up for. Upon his election, I think he summed up the problem facing states and cities pretty well, saying:

“We’ve defined what our responsibility is, and that’s only to allow the federal government to do its job. It’s not our responsibility to evaluate it or assess whether it’s good or not.”

Well, enabling bad laws have predictably bad consequences--hurting your own economy, for one:

Just after sunrise one morning last summer, as his two sons hurried out the door to school, Oscar Urbina might have presented a portrait of domestic stability in this Dallas suburb, a 35-year-old man with a nice home, a thriving family and a steady contracting job.

But a few weeks earlier, after buying a Dodge Ram truck at a local dealership, he had been summoned back to deal with some paperwork problems. And shortly after he arrived, so did the police, who arrested him on charges of using a false Social Security number.

Mr. Urbina does not deny it; he has been living illegally in the Dallas area since coming to the country from Mexico in 1993. But the turn of events stunned him in a once-welcoming place where people had never paid much attention to Social Security numbers.

If the arrest had come earlier, it might have had little effect on his life. But two years ago, Irving made a decision, championed by its first-term mayor, Herbert A. Gears, to conduct immigration checks on everyone booked into the local jail. So Mr. Urbina was automatically referred to the federal authorities and now faces possible deportation, becoming one of more than 4,000 illegal immigrants here who have ended up in similar circumstances.

Let's hear it for deporting productive members of society that spend money in our economy!

You can read the rest of this pathetic story here.