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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

 So Perkin’s claim is basically that through his whole career he has been a secret agent of the NSA which was working through private companies to destroy the economies of developing nations for our benefit.  The supposed mechanism by which this would happen is getting them to take out loans from the world bank, diverting this money to western run construction projects that don’t help the poor and then using the countries failure to repay the loans as leverage to get them to do what we want.  This is a fairly standard criticism of world bank policy in the past several decades and contains an element of truth.  The west did often use debt as a lever to make the third world make pre-market reform sometimes (often?) with unfortunate results and it wouldn’t surprise me if we had occasionally used this to make them support our foreign policy objectives.  However, there is every reason to believe that most (all?) of this pressure was done with the genuine intent of aiding that country.  I know some extreme liberals may find this hard to believe but there are plenty of people who really think entirely free markets are to the benefit of the third world.

Of course what makes Perkin’s account inflammatory and interesting is not this grain of truth but his terminology of “economic hitman” (implying a particular intent) and his claims of covert government action.  However, the “economic hitman” terminology seems to be nothing but a snappy line to garner attentions (perhaps having origins as a black in-joke) and his claims about being a government agent seem to be pretty absurd.  As the government points out his characterization of the NSA is more appropriate for a TV thriller than fact (one would expect this to be a CIA operation if anything) and seem to be an almost paranoid reinterpretation of pretty much nothing.  Given that he has implied that 9/11 might be a US conspiracy (above link) and his other books suggest a over credulity (he seems to believe tribal shamans travel beyond time and space) he isn’t exactly a reliable source.

Ultimately his ‘argument’ seems to rest on a misinterpretation of things other people would regard as just a few greedy companies, or even helpful economic activity as some kind of economic warfare.  Just from a half hour on the air he had some pretty dizzying quotes which I will repeat here (not verbatim, memory and all).  Most amazingly he said, “At least slaves were given food, housing and free medical care people who work in sweatshops are not.”  This hardly needs any rebuttal at all.  Surely a company who locates in a foreign country and gives indigenous people the option of working in a factory in addition to their normal option of substance farming (no matter how low the wages) is not engaging in the moral equivalent of slavery.  Furthermore, though he argues that these companies are doing harm he dismisses as irrelevant the question of whether things would be worse if companies had not located in that country.  Yet this is the very heart of the dilemma.  People in the industrialized world are unfortunately only willing to give so much money in charity and corporations are not the channels through which this money is distributed.  If the countries are doing better because the companies are present on net the indigenous people are being aided not exploited.  To subject companies to criticism because they only helped indigenous people X amount instead of Y will only encourage these companies to locate in first world nations and not even help X amount.  Of course this isn’t to say their aren’t some practices companies validly deserve criticism for and there have been situations with companies truly taking advantage of the ignorance of the third world to apparently offer benefit but really cause more harm than good by destroying environmental resources but this is a standard concern and it is well known we need to keep a close eye on companies to prevent this sort of behavior (though improvement is always possible).

In fact the arguments offered by this guy display such a ridiculous misunderstanding of economics that I am inclined to think the best thing we could have done for poor countries is to tell him to wreck their economies.  Most ridiculously he criticized the location of US call centers in India on the grounds that now too many Indians are going to technical school depressing the wages of these jobs.  I don’t know about you but more Indians getting educated and a larger number of them getting employed doesn’t sound like a horrible thing, the call center jobs still pay (as I understand) significantly more than the average wage in the country.  At best this is like calling the United Way evil because it didn’t give as much money in charity this year as it did last year.  More absurd he criticized the companies who set up these call centers on the grounds that if the wages get too high in India the call centers will relocate to Indonesia.  In other words he is upset because the probabilistic system is inclined to give jobs to the worst off and when India’s wages rise someone else will be worse off.  This sounds like an optimal system not something to be ashamed of.  It certainly seems intuitive to me that once a country has a higher wage it is in less desperate need than one which has a lower wage.

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).

Ultimately I don’t think I favor the bill in its full form but I want to make it clear that supporting this law is a reasonable position unlike the ridiculous criticism heaped upon google (though finally the media is doing better). If refusing to bow to Chinese demands for censorship is to the benefit of the Chinese people then we need to stop all search companies from giving in.  Asking one company to stand on principle while its competitors buckle to the Chinese demands just makes sure that virtue is punished and the Chinese people use the other search engines.  It is one of the principle benefits of the free market that it tends to overcome personal conviction and social norms.  This is the reason we don’t live in a boringly puritanical society where no porn is sold, TV is only educational programming and those ‘brain rotting’ don’t exist.  The free market behaves as the Internet is supposed to behave (but doesn’t) and routes around attempts to deny desired products.  Unfortunately in this case the desired product is a search engine that works fast and reliably in China and given the Chinese governments censorship policy this means censored search results.  If we don’t want US search companies to offer censored services for the Chinese a law is the only way to do it.  Even if public pressure convinced MS, Yahoo and Google to all withdraw their censored Chinese services some other company would show up on the scene to cash in on the huge Chinese market.

The important question though is whether we do want to stop US search companies from offering censored search.  Certainly it would be best if the Chinese citizen could access content freely but it would be hopelessly naive to believe that China would just give up on its campaign of censorship because it doesn’t.  Also by the same argument I gave above we should expect non-US companies to crop up offering search.  The bet we would be making by banning US companies from censoring results for China is that our technology and know-how in search technology will be able to out pace the technology and know-how that an Indian, Chinese or other non-US country will generate when fueled by the potential revenue of a billion Chinese citizens.  Personally I don’t think this is a good bet to make.  The number of companies that provide search results is a testament to how easy it is to do adequately and the risk if we bet wrong seems too great.  I suspect that any non-US company that rises to prominence because of a willingness to censor results for China is going to be much more inclined to censor in general.  There are plenty of other repressive regimes out there in the world but most of them simply don’t have the size and economic potential of China and hence can’t expect new search companies will spring into existence just to censor their results but if this new Chinese search company was willing to do so I expect they wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of it.  In other words I don’t think (and really would protest if so) that google, Yahoo or MS is going to offer Iran a search that blocks out pro-Israel propaganda or information contradicting the governments nuclear propaganda but the new companies we would create by denying these companies access to the Chinese market very well might.  Even worse if these search companies were created by people without a commitment to western style free speech they might voluntarily choose not to return results offensive to Islam or they feel are pornographic.

I also find the argument that closer ties and trade with China will improve the lot of the Chinese people in the long run.  I have to give the Representative (Chris Smith) introducing this bill credit for being consistent as unlike a lot of congress he doesn’t seem to think human rights will benefit by embracing China (but I may be mistaken).  I agree that China still has many human rights issues but I disagree that there hasn’t been significant progress.  A middle class is forming in China, trade and business deals are allowed, press freedom seems to be increasing (even if the penalties for going to far are still severe), and most importantly the opinion of locals seems to carry increasing weight.  The idea is that this helps in the long term and I think there are signs that this is the case.  The idea that China should just wake up tomorrow and decide they are a western democracy with all the associated rights is as ignorantly idealistic as was Bush’s belief that the Iraqi people would greet us with open arms for bringing democracy.  Remember people’s rights can be violated by plenty of people besides the government and the current state of Russia provides some lessons about what can go wrong in a sudden switch to democracy. 

I think the better approach is not to demand China change overnight but to bargain with them to minimize the human rights violations.  In this case I think that means we should engage in diplomatic negotiation with China to work out a compromise on internet censorship, i.e., we agree to let US companies censor certain sorts of results and China agrees to weaken its censorship of the internet in return.  Perhaps this is what is going on and congress’s legal threats are really just posturing to convince China we are serious and if so I applaud them.  Hopefully what can come out of all this is a bill which allows our internet companies to compete in the essential Chinese market but establishes regulations on the type of censorship that can be done and the type of data that can be turned over.  Such a law might allow US companies to do what the need to do to make sure China doesn’t spawn a new flock of censor friendly search companies but make sure they didn’t cave to places like Iran that don’t pose the same risk.  The part of the proposed law I like is the bit about servers not being located in repressive regimes.  I don’t think it should apply to all servers, rather, I like the idea that US companies wouldn’t be allowed to save any information on servers in China that might help the government identify dissidents, i.e., they could run search engines in china but if they want to save info about who is searching or to whom some blog belongs to that information would need to be kept inside the US and US laws would prohibit them from turning it over.  I don’t know enough about international law to know if this is plausible but the idea sounds appealing.

I have to remark that I find it pretty ironic that people are worried about google censoring their Chinese results at the same time as they are criticizing Jyllands-Posten for publishing these islamic cartoons and many people are suggesting that it should be illegal hate speech.  I realize that these two groups may not overlap too much but the people criticizing google haven’t seemed to be anywhere near as worked up about the calls for censorship in the cartoon fight.  In fact Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons to point out that media companies were acting just the way people are criticizing google for acting, i.e., refusing to display otherwise appropriate material because some group told them they didn’t like it.