So I’ve blogged before about how stupid the “No on is illegal” slogan is. It’s an absurd and wholly unjustified parsing of a common linguistic form. I mean would anyone raise a protest about the use of the term ‘illegal bicyclist’? Obviously not because an ‘illegal bicyclist’ is someone who is bicycling illegal just as an ‘illegal alien’ is someone who is illegally in this country. Neither term suggests that the person’s mere existence is illegal. Not only is this slogan wrong but it makes the whole movement look silly, stupid and irrational.

Terms aside in some sense I very much support the goals of this movement. Quite clearly the number of immigrants the US is taking in is nowhere near an unsustainable amount (consider them as a percent of population to earlier waves of immigration). Also while I used to worry that highly skilled immigration would cause a brain drain I’ve been convinced that in fact it causes the exact opposite. Since highly skilled workers retain many ties to their homelands it actually encourages high tech development in the home country as well as bringing economic benefit to the US.

However, I’m bothered by the fact that most of these protesters seem to support the status quo. The more I learn about illegal immigration from Mexico and further south the more I’m appalled at the horrible price it exacts upon the immigrants themselves. This price is primarily an indirect result of the illegality. Rather than being able to cross openly migrants must put themselves in the hands of coyotes and rather than taking out loans or other financial instruments for legitimate passage to the US they must catch free rides on gang controlled trains or otherwise engage in dangerous types of transit.

Illegal immigration really does need to be stopped in the same sense that illegal drug use needs to be stopped. We need to figure out a way to legitimatize the process to eliminate the harms that illegality brings. A guest worker program combined with amnesty and real employment enforcement is a good start but we need to both give the workers the chance to stay here permanently (even if we deny them social services that we might give citizens) and ensure that we allow in more guest workers than we are now allowing in illegal immigrants. Also we must exempt them from minimum wage laws otherwise their will be too much incentive for companies to hire genuinely illegal migrants. I know many people might not like the idea of exempting them from minimum wage but it’s a choice between legally doing so and the harms of illegal immigrants working for below minimum wage.

My last post touches on an issue that never fails to drive me nuts: the lack of concern American’s show for foreigners. The total US deaths in Iraq are now about 3,000 while many estimates put the total civilian deaths in Iraq up in the hundreds of thousands. Should Iraq degrade into a civil war millions of Iraqis would probably die while even more would suffer gravely yet our responsibility to the Iraqis seems to barely register compared to the worries about our troops or strategic interest.

In particular the reason I don’t find myself convinced by the many policy wonks who recommend troop withdrawals is that I doubt they are properly weighing the harms to the Iraqis. Even if Bush’s troop surge only decreases the chances of an Iraqi civil war by 1% and it will cost an additional 1000 American lives it is surely justified (1% of 1 million is 10,000 so it has a highly positive expectation even ignoring the indirect harms of a civil war). Perhaps I’m just not informed and there is a compelling analysis which suggests a troop withdrawal is actually the best thing for the Iraqis but until I see it I won’t be convinced.

Still, even if it isn’t right it is certainly understandable that we would care far more about American soldiers than faceless Muslim foreigners. However, whenever I debate someone about globalization I’m appalled to see that people actually take up the mantle of moral righteousness while demanding that jobs go to rich Americans rather than poor individuals in the third world.

Now we can argue all day about whether the US government has a responsibility to selfishly benefit Americans even at great cost to foreigners. However, there is no possible justification for the moral outrage we see at companies that move tech jobs overseas to places like India. With tech jobs there is no way to make the (suspisciously self serving) arguments about the harm of working in third world factories and it is blatantly obvious that having a tech job in their country makes far more difference to people in China and India than it makes to us in the US. Even if you think the US government ought to selfishly try to protect US jobs you should at least be able to recognize that the CEO who moves tech jobs to India is doing the morally right thing.

If you want to be selfish, fine. However, I am getting more and more disillusioned with liberals in the US as I constantly see them advocating selfish policies with the rhetoric of fairness and helping the worse off. Now I’m all for taxes and other government programs to cushion those who lose their jobs but listening to ‘liberals’ claim to be championing the poor while trying to give jobs to (relatively) rich Americans at the cost of the world’s poor is just too disgusting to bear.

Yes, I realize this is no different than a hundred other selfish things we all do every day. Sure every time I purchase a candy bar rather than donating my money to third world development I’m being selfish. However, there is something particularly nauseating about defending that selfishness with moral righteousness. Also it’s particularly depressing to realize that people don’t even seem to be able to comprehend the argument that it might not be morally right to stop offshoring.

Surely somewhere there have to be American liberals who don’t put American interests (so far) above those of the third world. Why don’t I ever seem to hear about them?

So I am a strong supporter of radically increased immigration and amnesty for the illegal immigrants currently in the country but the recent pussy footing with the term ‘Illegal Immigrants.’

In the last few days NPR has been giving a great deal of play to this argument that the term ‘Illegal Immigrant’ is inherently biased/anti-immigrant because it deems the immigrants themselves to be illegal while for other crimes we only call the act illegal not the person themselves. Though NPR got some professor of linguistics to back this argument up that doesn’t make it any less absurd. Illegal immigrants are called ‘Illegal immigrants‘ because their immigration is illegal!

There is nothing special or different about this type of terminology. It is the same thing we do when we wish to pick out any group of lawbreakers in virtue of their lawbreaking. Illegal immigrant is no more pejorative in this sense than calling people drug dealers, murderers or shoplifters. Sure as a matter of practice illegal immigrants are going to be identified as illegal immigrants more frequently because their very presence in the country is a continued violation.

Ultimately I am sympathetic with the idea that it is problematic to link illegal immigrants so strongly with lawbreaking as it conveys the sense of moral disapproval we usually reserve for criminals. In other words the problem is talking about illegal immigrants the same way we would any other sort of lawbreaker but if this is your concern stand up and say it. Claiming that we are somehow terminologically treating illegal immigrants worse than shoplifters is just silly.

So the latest big topic is immigration and president Bush’s support for a guest worker program. This is a beautiful strategic move by the president. The way immigration concerns cut across party lines and are so deeply emotional for both sides makes it a perfect change of topic to distract people from his illegal wiretapping and other failures. However, this topic also exposes the hypocrisy of so many republicans and even democrats as well.

Those opposed to amnesty for current illegal residents or demanding tough laws on immigration enforced against employers have a tough time explaining why these illegal residents don’t deserve to be given the same benefits and consideration from the US government as citizens. Since they don’t want to admit they are just selfishly protecting interests of ‘people like them’ they frequently buttress their position with strong rhetoric about the law and being law abiding.

Now it might be beyond the average American to remember the republican’s idealistic talk about the ‘rule of law’ from the Clinton impeachment and contrast it with the current defense of president Bush’s illegal wiretapping or they may simply think Clinton’s impeachment was a bad episode and we learned our lesson but hopefully even they can see the tension when public figures are denouncing censure for the president’s willful and unnecessary violation of the law in one breath and raving about the rule of law and not ‘rewarding’ illegal immigrants in the next. I don’t have much hope but it would be very satisfying in the anti-immigrant republican congressmen got trapped with questions like, “You believe in not tolerating the illegal behavior of poor immigrants does this mean you support impeachment or censure for the president?” After the standard mumble about the president not violating the law it could be followed up with, “If it was shown the president violated the law and went opinion shopping to justify his acts would you support impeachment or censure then?”

Sigh, I know it is too much to hope for but it just drives me mad when I hear all these republicans (and some democrats) ranting about the law when immigrants come up but then when asked about Bush’s wiretapping say they aren’t really concerned about illegal wiretapping if it helps catch terrorists. Is enforcing the constitution and preventing the president from seizing power even when used for ‘good’ that hard a principle to understand? I guess I just I still haven’t really accepted that most people really don’t make any attempt to reason or justify any of their beliefs and don’t feel any obligation to distrust (empirical) beliefs they haven’t justified.

BLOG UPDATE: Category links are fixed (didn’t know they were broken for a couple months now) and the comment system should now be a bit less buggy (it should remember your info now).

So I’m listening to KALW here in Berkeley and I’m appalled by the interview they are doing with John Perkins author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman.  The interviewer is doing the absolute worst kind of interview possible, apparently hard hitting but allowing the interviewee to present his facts without any rebuttal and ultimately ending up sympathetic to the interviewee.  Since what John Perkins was saying sounded a great deal like standard simplistic anti-corporate rhetoric dressed up in scary conspiracy theory rhetoric I figured I would do some background searching on the internet.  Unfortunately a simple google search turned up only a bunch of far left sites (hmm maybe this is just a nutty site) saying “ah ha I knew it all along,” and more uncritical interviews. So when I found some more critical information I thought I would try and give some critical context for this book (wikiepedia has a nice quick summary).

 Though given that KALW just did a little report on the inconsistencies over whether Cheney turned to the right or left before shooting his friend, disagreements between the guests over whether he had a beer at lunch, and rants about his lack of a hunting license maybe I should just stick to the more mainstream KQED (never really thought I would be saying that).  I mean jesus christ the administration is openly breaking the law to wiretap the phones of US persons don’t we have better things to worry about than whether or not Cheney was hunting quail without his $7 license.

Rather than clutter up the main page with detailed points about why what this guy says is silly I will give the one paragraph summary here and let you read the rest below. Basically this guy repeats the standard liberal rant against globalization with the extra bonus of an implausible conspiracy story that while the cheif economist at a major corporation (and in the peace corp) he was secretly working with at the behest of the NSA.  In other words it’s an attempt to whip people up into a furor to demand we not support corporations who pay low wages in foreign countries and avoid giving loans to poor countries to improve their infrastructure (though we should avoid burdening them with debt).  While things like fair trade coffee may be usefull as a way to generate additional aid critisizing call centers in India (as he does) just makes sure companies are less likely to provide jobs in these countries (and does little to prevent companies with less concern about public opinion or located in other places from exploiting weak enviornmental laws in the third world).  As someone who is deeply concerned about the welfare of the developing world and would be happy to double our tax rate and use all that money to aid the third world I find this sort of argument deeply pernicious.  It plays directly into the hands of protectionist US unions who want to (selfishly) keep jobs in the US at the expense of people in the third world.  If we believe that all people are made equal taking deliberate actions to give benefit to US citizens at great cost to people in the developing world are simply indefensible.  It is even worse when we are willing to screw over people in the third world to avoid offending our delicate liberal sensibilities (corporations/genetic engineering is bad).  Of course there are more reasonable criticisms of locating factories in the third world (though I disagree with most of them) and I will consider these elsewhere but the sort of eggregiously inflamatory rhetoric and conspiratorial gloss provided by people like this guy inflames people and falsely suggests we ought to treat the third world as some sort of cultural museum of spiritually superior indigenous ways while distracting people from looking to experts for guidance on the complex economic questions which determine how we can best help the people in the third world.

A couple days ago I heard the most egregious example of this sort of horrific willingness to let the third world suffer so people can feel smug about being liberal.  A panel of experts was talking about the problems of hunger in the third world and seemed to unanimously agree that animosity for GM food in the first world was causing people to starve in the third world.  This wasn’t a panel that was uncritically positive of GM, they agreed that giving GM food to third world persons was effectively using them as test subjects (I kinda disagree) but reasonably thought that most people would prefer to take the risk of eating GM food than starve or suffer malnutrition.  After they say this some liberal fuck-up gets up and says something like, he is worried about giving GM food to the third world because it might do violence to their traditional way of life.  I mean jesus fucking christ people are dying out there it is time to put away that hippie commune with nature/traditional cultures are filled with wisdom attitude that made you popular in college or in yoga class and help (or at least not interfere) people implement real world solutions to save them.

Whether or not you agree with me that outsourcing of jobs is in the long run beneficial to the third world at the very least you must admit that these are tough questions with people genuinely having beliefs on both sides of the issue.  The thing we most need is expert and scientific investigation of what best helps these people and the last thing we need is people clouding the issue with conspiracy theories, and inflammatory rhetoric.  One doesn’t solve the tought problems of coruption and poverty with indignation or moral outrage but with systematic research and planning and this sort of uninformed demonization of western influence and capatilism doesn’t help.

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So in a previous post I argued that all the criticism of google for  establishing a censored version of its search engine in China is unjustified.  Now some lawmakers want to make it illegal for US search engines to locate in China and probably prevent servers for blog content and other applications that might give the Chinese government leverage over free speech.  I believe that the bill would also attempt to prevent Google and Yahoo from offering censored search results for the Chinese (even on a server in the US) and prohibit the export of technology to let others do the same (no shipping China a box of servers and selling google.cn to some local company).  Ironically such a bill might have first amendments problems of its own.  Free speech rights have been understood not only to protect your right to say something but also not to say something, e.g., the government can’t force newspapers to parenthetically say “which some people believe is murder” whenever they mention the word abortion, and arguably telling a search engine that they can’t return some subset of their results when someone goes to google.cn would raise such an issue (though since the audience is not inside the US their is probably wiggle room).  Putting aside the interesting legal questions I want to discuss the wisdom of such a bill as well as the irony of passing such a bill in the current political environment.

Since I’ve already talked about the whole google China thing here recently I’ll put the rest of the post in the extended entry and give my front page a break.

ASIDE:  I just heard someone on the radio ask something like, “Does free speech mean we must endure insults to The Prophet.”  Of course it does.  Everyone is in favor of free speech except for…  the Chinese government included.  The central principle of freedom of speech is that being offensive is never grounds for banning speech.  Free speech except for religious, ethnic or whatever sort of speech just isn’t free speech (banning speech that is directly harmful, e.g., the fire example, ordering a hit etc.., is not about offensiveness and hence a truly different matter).

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