Scolding President Calderón

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the Arizona immigration law.  On the one hand, I see no intrinsic policy problem with a state police officer referring someone reasonably suspected of being in the country without legal documentation to Federal law enforcement authorities.  And I can entirely understand Arizonans' frustrations with people in the country illegally.  On the other hand, enforcement of immigration laws is, for better or for worse, given exclusively to the Federal government, and Arizona is effectively usurping that function from the Feds.  And I really have no idea what a "reasonable suspicion" of undocumented status might really be.

With that said, what this proponent of liberalizing immigration policy knows is that he don't like the President of Mexico coming to speak before the U.S. Congress and scolding Arizona for its new and controversial law:

Calderon also won sustained applause when he said, "I strongly disagree with the recently adopted law in Arizona. It is a law that not only ignores a reality that cannot be erased by decree, but also introduced a terrible idea using racial profiling for law enforcement."

To be sure, immigration will not go away by decree.  But this is a matter for us norteños to figure out, Señor Presidente, and we will do it on our own.  We don't tell you how to write your immigration laws, which are among the most restrictive and punitive of any on the planet -- allow me to quote from of the Constitution of Mexico:

Article 27, Paragraph 1: "Only those persons recognized as Mexicans by birth or by naturalization as well as Mexican corporations shall have a right to acquire legal domain over lands, waters and their accessories.* ... The State can grant the same right to foreigners as long as they agree with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be considered as Mexican nationals with respect to such resources and to decline, therefore, any right to be legally protected by their national governments in case of being involved in a controversy about the resources; such an agreement's breach shall be penalize[d] by transferring the contested resources back to the Nation. Within an extension of one hundred kilometres from the national borders inland and of fifty kilometres from the seashore inland, foreigners shall never be allowed to acquire direct domain over lands and waters."

Article 32: "During peacetime foreigners shall neither serve in the Army nor in a law enforcement corporation. During peacetime only Mexicans by birth shall serve in the Army, int he Navy or in the Air force as well shall perform any employment or commission within such corporations. The same quality shall be fulfilled by captains, pilots, skippers, machine operators, mechanists and, in general, every crew member in a ship or an airplane carrying the Mexican flag. It shall also be fulfilled by port captains, steersman and airport commanders. In the face of similar circumstances Mexicans shall be preferred to foreigners by granting to them all available privileges and providing them with every governmental employment, job or commission which does not require a citizen legal status.."

Article 33: "The Executive Branch of Federal Government shall have power to expel from national territory, without a trial and in an immediate way any foreigner whose presence is considered to be inconvenient. ... [F]oreigners shall not participate in the country's political affairs."

I'd also point out that in order to be President of Mexico, not only must one be a natural-born citizen of Mexico, but both of one's parents must also be natural-born citizens of Mexico. (See Article 59.) By contrast, we're talking in this country about eliminating the requirement that the President be personally a natural-born citizen.

I submit that as between Mexico and the United States, the U.S.A. has the substantially more liberal immigration law so it's quite odd to see a Mexican governmental official criticizing a portion of the U.S. for moving closer but not nearly adjacent to the existing foundational law of Mexico. To be sure, Mexico and the United States are situated differently, and have different kinds of problems to solve with their laws.

But the point is, no one from outside their country is telling Mexicans to liberalize their immigration laws, laws which they have written into their Constitution. That's partially because for someone who is not a Mexican citizen to make such an appeal would violate Mexican law.  Were I to go to Mexico and criticize the laws of a state of Mexico, I would be liable to immediate deportation back home to the United States without due process of law.  I presume that visiting heads of state on diplomatic missions are not likely to be treated in such a fashion.

What is more annoying, however, was the fact that those members of Congress who oppose the Arizona immigration law chose to applaud President Calderón's criticism of it.  Given that President Calderón chose to (tactlessly, in my opinion) weigh in on the issue, the right response of a member of Congress would have been to sit on her hands -- regardless of her opinion on what he said.  President Calderón was invited to speak to Congress for the purpose of making a political appeal for help in fighting drug lords and controlling narco-terrorism which is eroding the sovereignty of his nation -- a matter which concerns us as much as it concerns Mexico.  His remarks about immigration were beyond the scope of that invitation.

Nor would I even particularly gripe about Calderón expressing distaste for Arizona's law in some other forum.  At least while in our nation, he enjoys freedom of speech like anyone else.  But a speech from a foreign head of state to the U.S. Congress is kind of a particular and rarefied forum for diplomacy, and I think one ought to be, well, diplomatic when engaging in diplomacy.  Calderón's remarks cross that line. No citizen of this country voted in your election, Señor Presidente, -- an election which you barely won and which raised substantial questions about whether you hold office almost exclusively by virtue of the strength of political corruption, which I notice that every one in Congress was polite enough to not mention during your visit.  You should have returned that favor.

If you truly want to reduce the amount of migration for labor going from your country to ours, Señor Presidente, then you should enact policies encouraging economic development in Mexico, control crime, put a lid on political and law enforcement corruption.  If you can do those things, your own people will have reasonable economic opportunities at home, and won't feel the incentive to come here in the first place.  Your nation has made progress on these fronts and we are willing to help you do those things because we want to be good neighbors and we see advantage to ourselves in Mexico becoming more prosperous and therefore a better trading partner.  But your display of hypocrisy before our Congress makes me a little bit less willing to help out in this regard. 

And once again, shame on those members of Congress who cheered this -- breach of decorum, at minimum.  Even if you are convinced Arizona's law is an unambiguously bad thing, it is still our law and we are more than capable of using our own political and legal institutions to determine whether it should remain in place.  Your reliance on a foreign head of state's meddling in our internal politics to muster political support for your point of view is unseemly at best.  Kudos, further, to Congressman Tom McClintock who rightly called the whole charade for the hypocritical and disgraceful farce that it was. 

I say all this without altering my advocacy of further liberalizing our immigration laws in any way.  We should liberalize our laws, because it would be to our long-term advantage to do so.  But that's an argument to offer  another day and in another post.  This post is not about immigration policy, it's about international diplomacy.


* I notice that the Mexican Constitution embodies a very different vision of property and natural rights than the U.S. Constitution does. This post is not the place to compare those very different political philosophies.

National Self-Interest

Proposed: "If India and Mexico complete their semi-governmental, semi-private industrialization and modernization programs currently underway, this will be a long-term net benefit to the United States of America."

Swine Flu: You May Already Be (Partially) Immune

Panic over the swine flu is starting to be tedious. I heard yesterday that a client who is a school bus driver saw about half the number of kids as normal going to school this week. Half? There's that much panic out there over this?

Has no one noticed that despite the fact that there is considerable human traffic between Mexico and the United States, we've had one and only one death from this flu so far? In Mexico, there have been twelve deaths. Proportionally, that's a much larger ratio. Still, it's thirteen people dead in about a two-week period. Compare that to the biweekly mortality rate of, say, driving automobiles. Or owning swimming pools. Or smoking.

So here's the thing. Do you get flu shots? Have you had a touch of the regular flu in the past couple of years? If so, there is a reasonable possibility you have already been vaccinated against swine flu. Not 100%, but an appreciable possibility and even if you're not already immunized, chances are you'll just suffer regular cold and flu symptoms and not, you know, die. Money quote:

In the flu vaccine — for more than the past 30 years — we’ve had an H1N1 strain in the standard flu vaccine that everyone gets… at least since 1976 when we had the last swine flu scare. So the theory goes that if you’ve had a vaccine that has a N1 in it... when you encounter a slightly different H1 (which is what the swine flu is) that you will be protected from severe illness and death, but not from getting a cold or a bad cold from that flu strain.

So calm down out there, people. Look, there's certainly a potential for something serious here. That's what all the warnings are about, so medical professionals can get ready, coordinate their resources, and prevent the bad stuff from happening. Certainly I agree that should be taken seriously.

But come on. This isn't 1918, it's 2009. We have the benefit of ninety years of science. We have the benefit of worldwide public health organizations. Vaccinations. Antibiotics and immune system boosters. Sanitation. And did I mention vaccinations?

Lots of Twelve people have died in Mexico. That's because Mexico has only recently emerged as a middle-income, industrialized nation. It's not yet free of its legacy as a third-world country. There is still a substantial underclass there who live in grinding poverty and it's quite likely that those people have no access to any kind of medical care and live in very unsanitary conditions. I'm not saying that all of Mexico is like that and I'm very happy for the Mexicans (and for ourselves, because we benefit from it too) that those conditions are not the norm for most people there. Nor am I saying that we don't have problems like that here in the States, either. These are the kinds of challenges that all nations face to varying degrees.

What I'm saying is that I strongly suspect that when the chips are down, we'll find out that the people who have died from swine flu are overwhemingly from one of two categories of people: 1) those who have to live in unsanitary conditions without access to basic medical care, and 2) those who have eschewed vaccinations as a component of the health care they do receive.

What's stunning to me is that despite the high degree of affluence and access to the benefits of science that we enjoy here in the States, there are people who voluntarily put themselves in class 2 and who so love their self-induced panic that they will spend the next several weeks putting themselves through mental gynmastics to rationalize away the quite obvious facts that this is an ordinary disease that can be prevented and controlled through simple, painless, and affordable vaccinations.

Simple lessons here. Don't panic. Vaccinate. Send your kids to school.

I Think My Idea Is Better

Apparently, there are plans in the works to send U.S. military troops into northern Mexico to help fight the ascendant narcotics organizations there. It seems to be the case that these large criminal enterprises are, in some regions of northern Mexican states, more powerful than the legitimate government. And they are at war with one another (and against the legitimate government), creating a very violent, dangerous, and unstable state of affairs.

I have a suggestion that would not require putting our troops in harm's way to solve what is really a problem for the Mexican government to solve, and which would not involve opening up a third front of significant activity for our military. Here it is: decriminalize drugs. I'm sure you've heard the arguments in favor of this before.

• People are going to do the drugs no matter what; criminalizing the possession, sale, or use of them does nothing to deter the prohibited acts.
• If drugs are really dangerous, then what addicts need is medical help, not a visit to the prisons, and what non-addicts need is education about why the drugs are dangerous, not an ineffective threat of prosecution. If drugs are not really dangerous, then there is no reason to criminalize them.
• Criminalizing drugs adds to the romance and fun of taking them, which encourages people to use them. No subculture exists concerning people who drink a lot of NyQuil.
• Importing decriminalized drugs into the United States is a good deal cheaper and easier that smuggling contraband, which will substantially lower the value of the stuff. The criminals and terrorists who profit from feeding our addictions will have to find a new source of funding for their other activities.
• The harm resulting to people from consuming illegal drugs is really no different than the harm they suffer from consuming legal drugs, like alcohol or prescription medications.
  
• Decriminalizing drugs will substantially reduce the demand for law enforcement and incarceration facilities, freeing up those resources to combat violent crimes. Further, dissociating the drug trade from criminal activity will render the drug trade itself substantially less violent.
• It's the right thing to do in a free society to let adults decide for themselves what substances to put in their bodies.
• We can tax the sale of legalized drugs. Granted, I'm only proposing decriminalization here, which is different than legalization, but if we do take it to the next step, drugs can serve as a source of revenue, rather than something that creates a drain on government revenues. Money in is better than money out. It seems to work out acceptably well in the Netherlands and Switzerland.
  

But of course we won't do that because that would be seen as encouraging drug use. Instead, American soldiers will wind up fighting drug lords in the deserts of Sinaloa and Sonora, some of them will die, and nothing will have been accomplished as a result. If we cut off these drugs lords' funding at their source by devaluing their product, they will starve to death (or, more likely, seek other avenues of economic opportunity).

And this is one decriminalization advocate who does not use the stuff. I tried pot once, a long time ago, and didn't like it. It gave me a blistering headache and the munchies, and no high at all. Maybe I got stinkweed instead of good stuff, but it was enough to convince me that smoking weed wasn't for me. Consequently, I fail to understand what all the fuss is about -- but given that people do want to smoke the stuff, it makes more sense to me for the government to take a hands-off approach than what we're doing now.

If we did that, then maybe our young men and women wouldn' t have to die at the hands of a drug lord in some Mexican wasteland.

Sixth Year Blues

I'll say this for Congressman Jose Serrano (D-NY) -- he introduced a bill to repeal the Twenty-Second Amendment in 2005, just after George W. Bush was re-elected. So he is being evenhanded to introduce it again now that a member of his party is about to take the White House. He seems to genuinely think that the limitation of Presidents to two terms is a bad idea and that the people should be able to pick the President they want.

But it seems to me that right about year six is when most two-term Presidents start to run in to trouble. Recall:

• George W. Bush was elected in 2000; his sixth year was 2006. In 2006, Bush's Republicans lost control of Congress because of poor progress in the Iraq war, oil prices began to spike, and the beginnings of the economic decline we are currently experiencing got started.
• Bill Clinton was elected in 1992; his sixth year was 1998. In 1998, Clinton got impeached. The formerly booming dot-com economy busted.
• Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980; his sixth year was 1986. In 1986, Reagan got mired in the Iran-Contra scandal and the economy turned sour on him. In the November elections, his party lost control of the Senate.
  
• Richard Nixon was elected in 1968; his sixth year was 1974. In 1974, Nixon got into the worst Presidential scandal in American history and had to resign under threat of impeachment and subsequent indictment.
• Lyndon Johnson took office in 1963, so his sixth year would have been 1969. But 1966 would have been Kennedy's sixth year, and that's when Vietnam started to get really ugly, both in the theater and at home with Soviet backing of the VC starting in earnest; France threatened to withdraw from NATO; civil rights struggles got nasty when James Meredith was shot and Martin Luther King spoke out against Vietnam and got pelted with rocks.
• Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952; his sixth year was 1958. In 1958, the economy slipped into recession and the Mideast melted down as Egypt and Syria united to form a single country, and there was a revolution in Iraq which overthrew.
• Harry S. Truman took office in 1945, when FDR died; his sixth year in office was 1951. In 1951, Truman nearly got himself impeached by a red-baiting Congress when Truman had to fire Douglas MacArthur or practically risk a coup held by the guy. That was also the year the Twenty-Second Amendment was enacted and Truman found himself not grandfathered out of its application and therefore unable to run for re-election in 1952. Democrats lost control of Congress in the 1952 elections.
  

Historically, things have gone poorly for Presidents in their sixth years. And they never seem to quite get their mojo back after these things, which often coincide with significant gains for the opposition party in Congress.

So while a President might retain a fair amount of charisma (Reagan, Clinton) or at least a strong appeal to a core constituency (Truman, Bush) the fact of the matter is, we get about six good years out of a President and then the last two are just kind of sputtering along to finish out the term.

Mexico may have it right. Mexico's constitution provides that the President is popularly elected for a single six year term. No candidate for President in Mexico has to run against an incumbent -- and on the other hand, no incumbent has ever had to run to defend his record. In the past, the President has also effectively hand-picked his successor, but that's changed in the last couple of election cycles there. But the big deal there is, the President gets one six year term and it seems that pretty much empties any head of state's reserve of political capital and goodwill.

Just something to think about. I credit Congressman Serrano for consistency in his convictions but maybe eight years is already too long.

A World Without Borders (But Lots of Gradients)

In a move that earned him a standing ovation from his own countrymen and which seems cynically calculated to polarize opinion in the United States, Mexican President Felipe Calderón proclaimed in his state of the nation address:

Mexico does not end at its borders.... We strongly protest the unilateral measures taken by the U.S. Congress and government that have only persecuted and exacerbated the mistreatment of Mexican undocumented workers. The insensitivity toward those who support the U.S. economy and society has only served as an impetus to reinforce the battle ... for their rights. ... Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico.

Recall for a moment that el Presidente Calderón is on some pretty shaky political ground in his own nation. He won a squeaker of an election against the leftist candidate López Obrador, whose supporters jammed the plazas of Mexico City for weeks after the election and who have continued to refuse to accept the results, proclaiming that Calderón is a usurper and that their man should have won. Obrador has created and has been maintaining a shadow government ever since. And, truth be told, I for one have difficulty accepting the concept that there was not a wee little bit of corruption in the election, probably on both sides, which would mean simply that Calderón's machinery was more effective than Obrador's.

Beyond that, Mexico's government is still pretty weak, despite six years of generally good stewardship under Calderon's predecessor. Crime and corruption are down but still significant problems. Drug gangs hold more power than the police and the army in many northern parts of the country. There are still few economic opportunities within Mexico for its underclasses, whose members continue to try to enter el Norte (that means the USA, you ignorant gringo) to find work that they consider lucrative in numbers that a lot of los Norteños find alarming.

One reaction to a perceived lack of political power is shrill rhetoric, and Calderón certainly has given his countrymen (and us) that. And I agree with those who have suggested that the reason this speech was given this way in the first place is to rally domestic political support around el Presidente and away from the shadow government, by making el Norte the big scary Other against whom Mexico requires leadership. Best if we don't react too strongly to this, although there are sure to be those who will lack the will to restrain themselves.

But if you step back for a moment, there is some real wisdom in something Calderón said -- in the first and last sentences of the excerpt above: "Mexico does not end at its borders.... Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico." Although Calderón was being nationalistic, the fact of the matter is that this phenomenon is a two-way street. America* does not end at its borders, either. Wherever Americans travel, they take some of America with them.

We have military bases all over the world and we can project our military power anywhere we please. We can enforce our will, crudely, nearly anywhere. To say that we have failed to do so effectively in Iraq is not correct -- it was our will that Saddam Hussein be deposed and killed, and lo! it is done. It was our will that a democratic government be put in his place, and that too is done. The criticism of what we have done in Iraq is not the result of a lack of power, but rather a lack of wisdom.

Where we choose to do send many of our people, or where they go on their own, little Americas sprout up organically -- places where American culture thrives and spreads, places where English is spoken, hip-hop and country are the music of choice, blue jeans are worn, people read glossy magazines, most people worship Jesus (or at least claim to), and NFL football is a choice topic of conversation. In fact, a lot of those kinds of cultural phenomena happen even where U.S. military power has not been projected. Go to most anywhere in an urbanized area of Europe and Asia. You'll be able to buy Coca-Cola with your Mastercard and it won't take too long to find an English-language newspaper or a McDonald's restaurant. U.S. dollars are preferred to domestic currency almost anywhere in the world that isn't a Westernized urban area.

Certainly there are geographic borders and demarcations of places where military and police power can be legitimately used. A Mexican policeman in the United States needs the cooperation of local law enforcement to do anything -- for instance, if he's following up on a lead about coyotes or drug runners. So too with the DEA or the INS operating in Mexico. But these kinds of cross-border law enforcement activities do happen, every day. If an U.S. DEA agent makes an arrest in Ciudad Juraez, can we really say that the U.S. does not exist south of the Rio Grande? And if wages are paid to a Mexican worker and sent back to Veracruz, can we really say that the employment relationship is purely within the United States?

So just an idea -- although we can draw clear lines on maps and build fences and border checkpoints all we like, might not a vision of the world in which there are really spheres of influence? Like like ink on wet paper, these spheres of influence are strongest at the center and gradually dilute and faded as the capillary action takes the color away from its source. A nation's military power, its economic strength, its cultural reach, even its vices and its crimes -- these things do not know where borders are any more than do wild animals. Especially for those of us who live in proximity to a political border, the influences of neighboring countries are obvious to see. Maybe el Presidente Calderón is on to something.

But that doesn't mean we don't have the right to set our immigration and labor policies in a way that is to our own advantage. We are under no obligation to help Mexico or Mexicans other than to the extent that doing so is to our benefit as well. One might suggest that an enlightened and permissive approach to the subject, as opposed to digging a moat and reveling in crypto-racism, would work out to be in our best interests. But that's a different sort of idea than the one I set out to write about this morning.


* Here, I use the phrase "America" to mean the United States of America, rather than a descriptive term for approximately one-quarter of the land area of the world located on or near the continents of North and South America; I am well aware that Brazilians, for instance, consider themselves "Americans" the same way that Greeks consider themselves "Europeans."