The Free Thinker

First Time Tragedy, Second Time Farce

The elections yesterday show that Americans are waking up after the crisis-numbed sleepwalking into the polls in November 2008. Christie's and McDonnell's victories are a tangible sign of what the polls have been showing for months: the ideological dominance of conservatism (whatever that means), the shifting of independents from the Democrats towards the GOP, the unpopularity of Obama's policies and of the Democratic Congress (and a rapid fall in Obama's own approval rating, which I expect will be lower than Bush's at every corresponding stage of his presidency). The American people are probably not such idiots as to fail to return fewer Dems and more GOPs in 2010, and a GOP takeover of Congress, as in 1994, seems likely. This should really be a no-brainer. It was the formula of the famous 1990s: as Brothers Judd slyly put it, the ideal might be a Democratic resident and a GOP Congress. Of course this is one of the thousand reasons why Americans were such idiots to vote for Obama in 2008: there was obviously going to be a Democratic Congress, and a President McCain was needed to check it, even aside from his superior judgment, experience, integrity, and intelligence. But the sheeple were in shock from the crisis, and did what CNN told them. Now they are beginning to get their wits back.

Maybe we'll be spared the tax-spend-and-regulate health care bill. Harry Reid hinted that it might not pass this year, and it's hard to imagine it will be easier to do so in 2010, an election year. On the other hand, the defeats in Virginia and New Jersey might convince some Dems that their careers are ending anyway, so why not make history while they have the chance. Of course, this was always the reason the Democratic leadership was focusing on health care this year in particular. It's obvious that, while it's tenable that our health care system is sub-optimal, this has little or nothing to do with the 2008 crisis or the high unemployment that is our main problem right now. A leadership confident it enjoyed real majority support would have focused on fighting the crisis now, and saved big structural changes until the economy was recovering, to avoid dumping a huge, gratuitous burden of political risk on entrepreneurs and investors at just the time they were least able to bear it. But the Democrats knew that their getting majorities this big was a sort of mistake, afforded them by the crisis, by the national BDS pandemic, and by the donation of most of the MSM's dwindling reputational capital to the cause. President McCain and a Democratic Congress would have had to focus on bipartisan issues. We might even have got the one thing that would stimulate the economy more than any other policy: immigration reform. But the Democrats had to use the one-party-rule moment to plow through the paleoliberal dream.

I think Marx said that "history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce." The dictum expresses the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama. Hoover-Roosevelt interventionism deepened and prolonged the Great Depression at home and worldwide, permanently altered America's economic constitution, largely discredited democratic capitalism in the eyes of the world, and opened a path for the rise of Hitler and the totalitarian Axis, culminating in World War II. Socialism, poverty, appeasement, retreat, war. Likewise, the comeback of Big Government under Obama has burdened business confidence, impeded recovery, and is altering the US economic constitution, while his weak, vacillating and cynical foreign policy has caused unease in allies from Poland to Israel to India to Japan to France while emboldening Putin-Medvedev and Ahmadinejad and the Taliban, and abetted the lethal blow to international law by letting Russia's thugocracy get away with the dismemberment of Georgia. But the difference of degree is so great as to be a difference of kind. America will not repeat the 1930s as France, to Marx's dismay, would not repeat the Revolution (the 1848 revolution, which led to a reaction and the rise of President-for-Life Napoleon III, was the "farce" to the "tragedy" of the 1789 revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte's world-historic career). Many of FDR's New Deal policies-- a top tax rate of 90%, show trials of leading industrialists and political opponents, an attempt to impose full-fledged planning on the economy-- amounted to very nearly an overthrow of the capitalist order. And it enjoyed strong public support as such. FDR was a formidable leader. By contrast, it is the essence of Obama to be the apotheosis of insubstantiality. "Hope and change" and "yes we can" succeeded not despite but because of their meaninglessness. How can meaninglessness be a virtue? To understand that, an interpretative glance at the past few years is needed.

George W. Bush ran on ideas in 2000, and many of them-- tax cuts, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the No Child Left Behind Act-- became law (Social Security reform didn't but Bush tried), while his foreign policy ideology, especially its liberationist side, seems to have been conceived in the wake of 9/11. Most importantly, Bush found a way to turn the illiberal imperatives of the War on Terror inside out. On domestic and foreign policy alike, Bush represented what might be called the radical center, and as such alienated the left especially, but also many on the right. He twisted America's ideological kaleidoscope. He ended up being unpopular, which is a rather less meaningful fact than might be thought. Suppose there are five issues, and person A is for B, for C, against D, against E, and for F, while person G expresses no views on B and C and leans in favor of D and E but is not sure and seems at various times to be both for and against F. A might be unpopular, if disagreement on one issue is reason enough to dislike him, for the set of people who agree on any position on all five issues is likely to be small, while G might be popular, managing by his vagueness and vacillation to leave a majority not antagonized, particularly if he has a pleasant face or manner. Of course, if G has to make decisions he must take stands and lose "popularity" or non-objectionableness. But the point is that A's unpopularity does not mean that a coherent coalition against him is possible. The Iraq War is a case in point. You can oppose the Iraq War because you are (a) totally pacifist, (b) a defend-the-borders-only type opposed to foreign entanglements, (c) a liberal internationalist of the kind that strongly believes in the "sovereignty" of other countries regardless of regime type, (d) a UN legitimist, (e) not opposed to overthrowing dictators in principle but unpersuaded that it's worth it in this case, (f) in favor of Saddam and other dictatorships for "primitive" non-Western peoples, (g) against all US intervention because you think the US is an incorrigible greedy capitalist imperialist hegemon. These seven groups (and others) might agree on opposing the Iraq War, but they wouldn't agree on any arguments against the Iraq War. So if they want to form a coalition, they'll need to be silent about their reasons for opposing Bush, since any discussion of reasons would shatter the coalition. How can they talk to each other then? By resorting to forms of communication that don't rise to the level of reason, i.e., sneering. If we want to claim we're the enlightened majority against the misguided Bush administration, we can't explain why Bush is wrong, lest we expose our own differences, but we can agree to call him dumb, over and over again. It takes a while to run out of epithets. And if we get tired of negativity, we can get some motivational-speakerish type to dress it up in language about "hope" and "change," by which we all know, however, that "not Bush," is meant. Thus Bush Derangement Syndrome metamorphosed into the Obama administration, and the intellectual poverty of the Obama administration is the intellectual poverty of the opposition to Bush. The word "disillusioned" seems too generous to apply to former Obama supporters; the promise of Obamism was so insubstantial as barely to qualify even as an illusion.

November 3, 2009 may mark the beginning of a return to commonsense, and the GOP takes Congress in 2010 and starts to clean up the mess (first order of business: the deficit), Great Depression II will be far shorter and less painful than Great Depression I. Nonetheless I think there is something irrevocable about America's lapse of judgment in 2008. At the end of the day, a nation capable of electing a man and a party so unfit to lead as Obama and the 2008 Democrats is unfit to lead the Free World.

Relative decline for America was always nearly inevitable and mostly desirable. The 5% of the world's population that are American citizens hold far more than their share of the wealth and power of mankind. This is not to say that Americans must become poorer: on the contrary, we can and may hope that the rest of the world will come closer to America's living standards, and this is not only feasible but will benefit America. A lot of people used to fulminated that the Bush administration was squandering America's moral standing in the world. I am not quite saying the opposite, namely that Obama is squandering the moral authority that the Bush administration won. Rather, as democracy spread, as foreign economies grew and developing countries grew more literate etc., America could no longer enjoy hegemony by virtue of its mere military and economic weight. If it were to lead at all-- and a group of people or nations can usually benefit from good leadership-- it had to articulate and champion an ideology with universal appeal that other nations could believe in and support. Democracy has, for the moment, just such a universal appeal. Under the Clinton administration the US was scandalously unwilling to risk the lives of US soldiers for the benefit of others: thus we pulled out of Somalia and relied wholly on air war in Kosovo and Iraq. The Bush administration broke this taboo, and showed how democracy could be spread not only passively and defensively, waiting for dictatorships to fall, but actively, and how dictators could be held accountable. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, though undertaken in support of UN resolutions and arguably essential to restore the UN's credibility in the face of Saddam's continued defiance and impunity, was at the same time a revolutionary strike against a notion of sovereignty that legitimized every thug who killed his way to the top. It was a risky yet potentially valuable precedent. Polls that showed a decline in favorable attitudes to the US and to Bush in the aftermath of the 2003 war belie the complexity of the world's attitude. Nowhere did a democratic electorate reject a government for supporting the Bush administration. On the contrary, Howard was re-elected, Blair was re-elected, Aznar's political heir Rajoy in Spain was on course for re-election until the Madrid bombings, while Bush adversaries Chirac of France, Schroeder of Germany, and Chretien of Canada lost elections in favor of leaders much more favorable to Bush and America. America's relations with Japan, India, and eastern Europe prospered; relations with western Europe recovered without any particular concessions on America's side. The war was a dangerous expedient; the world knew that and didn't particularly like it; but they didn't have a better alternative; and the fundamental presumption that America is uniquely trustworthy and beneficent which has defined the strategies of free nations since WWII was re-examined but was still, indeed was perhaps all the more, valid. The unholy alliance of Putin, Chirac and Schroeder that had tried to stop the war fell apart, with Chirac and Schroeder losing power and disgraced, while Putin withdrew his country into morbid paranoia. Diplomatically, the gambit succeeded. It seems to be succeeding on the ground in Iraq, too: elections were held, a constitution passed, Al Qaeda nearly sparked a civil war but was beaten back, and a new Iraqi democracy took shape, a development scarcely conceivable six years ago.

An America which exercised its power for the general good, to spread freedom and uphold international security, might be able to hold continued sway over the free world through moral suasion, initiative, and good example. Near the end of the Bush years this seemed to be taking place: al-Qaeda had been drawn into the trap of Iraq and self-defeated; no one questioned the legitimacy of the new Iraqi democracy; the bonds between the Western allies were being reforged with the Iraqi precedent unrepudiated; and the Free World alliance of the Cold War years had now been definitely expanded to eastern Europe and India, and was strengthened in Japan. A McCain administration might have made a cause celebre of Georgia as the Bush administration had done with Iraq, thus reaffirming the commitment to international law which the Iraq war had seemed to undermine-- but international law, please note, in the sense that democracies' borders are inviolable, not in the sense that tyrants are sacrosanct-- and immigration reform at home would have strengthened the foundations of American democracy from below, reaffirming America's egalitarian ideals and signalling its openness to the world. The scenario seems to have the force of destiny, but one can flunk one's destiny, one can miss one's moment.

I'm not sure that the moment can be recovered. Why should allies trust us again if we treat them as shabbily as the Obama administration has done to Poland and Georgia? Indeed, the Obama administration's manner of dismissing the war-- "a dumb war, a rash war"-- is an insulted to Tony Blair and all of America's most faithful allies. It would be an entirely different matter if he had limited himself to respectful disagreement. Obama's ignorant remarks about the impossibility of one nation imposing democracy on another have just enough of the flavor of a new false orthodoxy to make strategic thinking difficult going forward. The situation in Afghanistan is especially sad. The Democrats embraced Afghanistan as "the good war" opportunistically, as a means to outflank Bush's "war president" credentials, but Afghanistan never offered hopes of a conclusion as satisfactory as was possible in Iraq. Iraq is urban and literate and middle-class and densely populated and civilized modern enough to have a decent chance of making democracy work; moreover, Americans were in a position really to run the country for a while, and lay the foundations of a new politico-institutional matrix. In Afghanistan a democratic outcome always stretched the bounds of plausibility, which made objectives harder to define, since our ideology makes democracy obligatory. At this point, we should probably abandon objectives other than to avoid the disgrace of having the Afghans who allied with us be left at the mercy of the Taliban. Maybe we defend the cities; maybe we accept some Afghans as refugees in the US, as we did after Vietnam; maybe we try to negotiate some power-sharing federalist deal. But the Obama administration is far from having made it clear that they have a strategy and are determined to pursue it through to success. The contrast with the Bush administration in 2007 is striking. It seems likely to end in quagmire, attrition, retreat, compromises, a blot on our record.

We have ceased to be the comparative free-market paragon we were in the 1990s. It is not just that we've gotten worse; other countries have gotten better. Western European countries have been comparatively reformist; and now they almost all have right-leaning governments with an interest in fiscal discipline and/or market reform. Now our unemployment rates are above Europe's and may stay there for a while. Asia, not surprisingly, is showing a much more robust recovery from the 2008 recession. America is ceasing to be the cutting edge of prosperity. I think we'll recover, more quickly than in the 1930s, both economically and ideologically. There will be a shift back in the direction of supporting freedom abroad and limited government at home. But by that time the world will have begun to move on, to find ways to rely less on American leadership and example. We probably have decades of prosperity before us, and American ideas, not least the liberationist credo of the Bush administration which is now incarnate in Iraq, will continue to be influential, but the American people, the escapist rubes who voted for "hope" and "change," will cease to be the most important carriers of those ideas.

From the tail-end of the recent discussion:

The person whose dearest wish in life is to come to the US will... find a way to do it.

This is certainly false today-- our immigration restrictions make it impossible for most people to get in-- but I agree with it as an aspiration.  To put the same thing in other words, I support the right to migrate.

Stylized Effects of Immigration

I put the chart below on the final exam for my Econ 309 class:

It represents international migration.  The vertical axis represents the wage of labor, the horizontal axis, the quantity of labor.  There are six curves in wage-quantity space.  Three are labor demand curves, D-North, D-South, and D-World, which is the sum of D-North and D-South.  Three are labor supply curves, S-North, S-South, and S-World, the sum of S-North and S-South.  Three wages are shown.  P-North is the wage that will prevail in the North (a rich country) under closed borders.  P-South is the wage that will prevail in the South (a poor country) if North closes its borders.  P-World is the wage that will prevail in both countries if North opens its borders.

The chart is a bit misleading.  It assumes a sort of "law of one wage," but in reality there are huge differences in wages in the economy, from retail workers at minimum wage to CEOs earning millions.  Still, even if the labor market is segmented, you might get a similar effect within each sector, in varying degrees.  Also note that the chart does not say simply "Southerners win, Northerners lose" from open borders.  Northerners lose out as workers, but they will benefit as capitalists, landowners, and consumers.  It depends on what factors of production comprise most of your lifetime wealth.  It used to be the case that most people's main asset was their labor, but that's less true than it was.  A lot of people have a lot of equity in houses and a lot of money in 401(k)s.  

Is this a pro-immigration or an anti-immigration chart?  My immediate reaction is: Great, you can equalize wages, and increase the total surplus.  Some students reacted with horror at the drop in North's wages.

Is this really what's at stake in the immigration debate?  Mostly yes, I think.  People talk about "culture" and "community"-- especially debate-savvy people who have a PR instinct-- but we don't ordinarily regard cultural engineering as a legitimate government function, and would reject arguments of this kind outside the immigration debate.  But of course, you can't be sure what's really motivating them.

History of Passports

From Wikipedia:

One of the earliest known reference to what served the major role of a passport is found in the Hebrew Bible. In Nehemiah 2:7-9, attributed to the time of the Persian Empire in about 450 BC, it is said that Nehemiah, an official serving King Artaxerxes I of Persia, asked leave to travel to Judea, and the king granted leave and gave him a letter "to the governors beyond the river" requesting safe passage for him as he traveled through their lands.

In the medieval Islamic Caliphate, a form of passport was used in the form of a bara'a, a receipt for taxes paid. Only citizens who paid their zakah (for Muslims) or jizya (for Dhimmis) taxes were permitted to travel to different regions of the Caliphate, thus the bara'a receipt was a "traveller's basic passport."^[1]

It is considered unlikely that the term "passport" is derived from sea ports, but rather from a medieval document required to pass through the gate ("porte") of a city wall.^{[citation needed]} In medieval Europe, such documents were issued to travelers by local authorities, and generally contained a list of towns and cities into which a document holder was permitted to pass. On the whole, documents were not required for travel to sea ports, which were considered open trading points, but documents were required to travel inland from sea ports.

King Henry V of England is credited with having invented what some consider the first true passport, notwithstanding the earlier examples cited, as a means of helping his subjects prove who they were in foreign lands.^[2]

Early passports included a description of the passport holder. Attachment of photographs to passports began in the early decades of the twentieth century, when photography became widespread.

In the later part of the nineteenth century and up to World War I, passports were not required, on the whole, for international travel in Europe, and crossing a border was easy. Consequently, comparatively few people had passports. The breakdown of the European passport system of the early part of the nineteenth century was a result of rail travel. Trains, used extensively from the mid-nineteenth century onward, traveled rapidly, carried numerous passengers, and crossed many borders. Those factors made enforcement of passport laws difficult. The general reaction was abolition of passport requirements.^[3] The Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire maintained passport requirements for international travel, in addition to an internal-passport system to control travel within their borders.

During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons (to keep out spies) and to control emigration of citizens with useful skills, retaining potential manpower. These controls remained in place after the war, and became standard procedure, though not without controversy. British tourists of the 1920s complained, especially about attached photographs and physical descriptions, which they considered led to a "nasty dehumanisation".^[4]

In 1920, the League of Nations held a conference on passports and through tickets. Passport guidelines resulted from the conference,^[5] which was followed up by conferences in 1926^[6] and 1927.^{[citation needed]}

The United Nations held a travel conference in 1963, but passport guidelines did not result from it. Passport standardisation came about in 1980, under the auspices of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

This history doesn't give all the details one might wish, but I noted two things.  1) The word passport comes from the "porte" or gate of a city.  So the authorities at the time tried to control access to cities, where both security and disease were major issues, and where a sort of collective property claim could be based on actually working and developing the land and not having mere military control of pristine wildernesses or of agricultural lands the development of which was largely the work of individual farmers.  Also note that cities constituted a negligible proportion of the total amount of land.  2) In the late 19th century, the response to the rise of rail travel was to abolish passport requirements.  This suggests that the motive for these requirements was not to avoid incurring moral obligations to travellers and migrants by permitting them to inhabit the territory of one's country, since in that case rail transport would make passports even more essential, by allowing more people to come.  It is notable, too, that the late 19th century was a time of relative international peace, though less so than our own times.  Why is the contemporary attitude towards immigration so different from that in the late 19th century?  The reason, of course, is a 20th-century innovation, the welfare state, with its utopian aspirations, a phenomenon for which the term national socialism is so apt that we can't let ourselves be deterred from using it by unpleasant WWII associations, particularly since it continues to justify systems of mass social engineering and world apartheid.

By preventing people from coming to America we make ourselves complicit in every totalitarian regime in the world.  To maintain control, they need to keep their people in, and we-- the United States, and the sovereigntist international order generally-- help them do that by blocking them from going wherever they might want to go.  The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1924, which prevented the entry of German Jews into the US in the 1920s and 1930s, makes us guilty in the Holocaust.  Tsar Peter the Great did not have this going for him.  If he oppressed the Russian serfs too hard, they could flee to the Siberian wilderness or become Cossacks in the steppes, and many did.  Or they could go to America.  Maybe we think complicity with the world's dictators and totalitarians is a price worth paying for whatever it is we think we get from our immigration apartheid regime, but we must at least acknowledge it.

Nativism and the Crisis

"America's Abandoned Cities" (Yahoo! Real Estate):

Indeed, the Kansas City metro area tops our list of America's Abandoned Cities. In Kansas City, rental vacancy rates rose from 11.9% to 15% over the past year; homeowner vacancy rates nearly doubled, up from 2.1% to 3.8%. Comparatively, the average homeowner vacancy rate in the country's 75 largest metro areas improved slightly from 3% to 2.7%, while the rental vacancy rate edged up to 10.2% from 10% a year ago.

Kansas City isn't the only metro where rental and homeowner vacancy rates are rising in tandem. Second on our list is the San Francisco-Oakland metro, where high prices are pushing Bay Area residents out of the region. Third is Tucson, Ariz., where the aftermath of the housing boom has left a glut of inventory. The pair's predicament illustrates both sides of the vacancy coin.

"There really are two reasons why you'd have vacancies: supply-related and demand-related," says Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. "A number of these places have experienced substantial overbuilding, which would lead you to have supply issues. Others, with troubled local economies, are more demand-related."

Many of the cities on the list are still digging themselves out of the wreckage of the real estate bubble. Miami, which ranks No. 8, owns a whopping 12.7% rental vacancy rate, up from 11.4% a year ago; residential towers built in the final stages of the boom now stand as empty monuments to an over-hyped market downtown. Homeowner vacancy stands at 5.6%, up from 3.8% last year, thanks mostly to a spate of foreclosures. According to Trulia.com, 40% of the homes available in Miami's city limits are foreclosures.

"Diversity Immigrant Visa: Recent News" (Wikipedia):

Over 13.6 million applications for the 2008 Diversity Visa Lottery (DV-2010) were submitted — an increase of 4.5 million from the 9.1 million applications submitted in the 2007 Diversity Visa Lottery (DV-2009). The number of applicants for the calendar year 2008 lottery was 33% higher than for calendar year 2007.^[11]

This is the great, wicked absurdity of our times. More homes than ever are vacant in the United States. More foreigners than ever want to come and live in those homes. If we adpoted a "don't restrict immigration, tax it" policy, the financial crisis would vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Everyone who own real estate would enjoy big windfall gains, the mortgage-backed securities that have been sinking the banks would turn to gold, consumer spending would surge, job creation would gallop ahead.

Health Care as a Merit Good

By the way, it might be worth commenting on the idea that health care is a merit good.  As with any positive right, if we concede that a person has a right to health care, i.e., that they just ought to get the treatment they need to stay alive whether they can afford it or not, a corollary of that probably must be a right to coerce others to give up their property for ends which to which they would not rationally consent.  This is ethically problematic.  Still, the idea that it's just wrong for "society" (whatever that means) just to let a person whom medicine could save die because the person can't pay for the life-saving treatment does seem to have a certain force.  If that were the question we're faced with, I would be ambivalent.  I would have at least some qualms about rejecting the idea.

But that's not the question we're faced with.  For if health care is a merit good, i.e., if people just should get it, that moral imperative presumably applies to all mankind.  Not only Americans and West Europeans but Indians and Chinese and sub-Saharan Africans just should get the treatment they need.  But it's clearly infeasible for us to guarantee a level of health care to all of humanity that is even close to that enjoyed by middle-class Americans.  So treating health care as a merit good is not an option (unless we subscribe de facto to a wicked belief that Americans are some kind of superior race).  The real conclusion of this argument is that there is a moral imperative to shrink government and open up trade and do everything we possibly can to achieve maximum growth in the world economy, so that in some not-too-distant future there will be enough resources that everyone's basic needs can be satisfied.  Above all, we must open the borders, by far the most beneficent economic policy within the realm of possibility, compared to which the moral importance of all other economic policies put together is negligible.  In the meantime, the more ruthlessly utilitarian we are in health care policy, the better.  A person's life should be saved by medical processes if and only if the present value of the person's labor services over their remaining lifetime, net of the present value of their consumption needs, as attainable by medical procedures is greater than the present value of the costs of treatment.  This should be the goal of policy as well as personal ethics (that is, if one can only be saved at exorbitant cost, one should go quietly and save African orphans with the money you save).

Washington Post poll:

Another issue that has served as a Republican rallying cry, immigration reform, may become more difficult terrain for them. While 74 percent said that the government is not doing enough to keep illegal immigrants from entering the country, including majorities across party and demographic lines, public sentiment has shifted away from that view since its peak in 2007 among most groups outside the Republican core. At the same time, a growing slice of the population -- including Republicans -- support the broad outlines of a plan giving illegal immigrants "the right to live here legally if they pay a fine and meet other requirements." Six in 10 overall (61 percent) would support such a plan, up from 52 percent in June 2007. Support is highest among younger voters, and independents have gone from being roughly split on the plan to being mostly in favor of it, 59 percent now support it.

Too bad we have a resume-padding slacker in the White House or maybe we'd see some movement on this.  McCain would've gotten amnesty passed by the end of 2009.  Ah, if only we had BUSH back in there...

The poll also shows rising support for gay marriage.  I wonder if Obama will switch sides and support this if it seems politically opportune.  Probably not... but he might if he's afraid people might stop thinking he's cool.

UPDATE: Even Romney might get it done:

Romney believes that one way to attract more minorities to the GOP is to pass immigration reform before the next election, saying the issue becomes demagogued by both parties on the campaign trail. 

“We have a natural affinity with Hispanic-American voters, Asian-American voters,” he said.

"Open House, Anyone? One in nine houses empty" (USA Today):

The white notice taped to the front window of a luxury home in the Vasaro subdivision is a telltale sign.

"Bank-owned," says real estate agent John Groves, without skipping a beat.

There are other clues. Dirt where a lush lawn should be. Vacant lots on either side. And the sale price: $729,900 for a never-lived-in, 5,500-square-foot, five-bedroom, 3.5-bath custom home that about a year ago was listed for more than $1.2 million.

Let in ten new immigrant families and they can share it.

Game Changer

"Obama to Push Immigration Bill as One Priority" (NY Times):

While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday...

Some White House officials said that immigration would not take precedence over the health care and energy proposals that Mr. Obama has identified as priorities. But the timetable is consistent with pledges Mr. Obama made to Hispanic groups in last year’s campaign.

He said then that comprehensive immigration legislation, including a plan to make legal status possible for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, would be a priority in his first year in office. Latino voters turned out strongly for Mr. Obama in the election.

“He intends to start the debate this year,” Ms. Muñoz said.

But with the economy seriously ailing, advocates on different sides of the debate said that immigration could become a polarizing issue for Mr. Obama in a year when he has many other major battles to fight.

Opponents, mainly Republicans, say they will seek to mobilize popular outrage against any effort to legalize unauthorized immigrant workers while so many Americans are out of jobs.

This could be Obama's Iraq: the big, unpopular thing he does that makes him a great president.  Millions of grateful new citizens would ensure his reputation in the history books.  And it would either shift the political spectrum in the Democrats' favor, or else force the Republicans to change their tune to have a chance with the new voters.  I think it would be good news for the free market not only in itself, but because people who work with their hands are less vulnerable to BDS and other sophisticated paranoias, and because immigrants tend to have larger families and so will care about the future and be less inclined to bankrupt the country.

Several times before the country has been in profound crisis and immigration has saved us.  After the Civil War, when the memories of slavery and war were dissolved in an immigration-fueled industrial boom.  After the 1960s, when Asian and Hispanic dissolved the old racial dualism and showed that America was still a land of opportunity.  New people come with a new vision of the country, unburdened by the baggage of old, hard-fought struggles and stalemates, appreciating what is great and unique about this country as natives who take it for granted never can.  It's certainly the best hope for us today.

Man versus God

A sad story-- one of many, I'm afraid-- about how our evil immigration enforcement efforts are gratuitously wrecking hundreds of lives.

During a bitter cold January week, penniless women and children stream into a Catholic church in the northeast Iowa town of Postville that has served as their refuge since May 12, when 389 workers were arrested during an immigration raid at the Agriprocessors Inc. meatpacking plant. The women are among 26 former Agriprocessors workers, most from Guatemala and Mexico, charged with immigration violations and fighting deportation. Released on humanitarian grounds but required to wear electronic ankle bracelets, the women, as well as about 59 children, now depend on the community, especially St. Bridget's church, which operates a Hispanic ministry from a worn brick house.

One woman needs medical care for her anxious 12-year-old son, who has started wetting his bed. Another needs legal help for her husband, arrested during a return visit to Agriprocessors by immigration agents last fall. "I am very sad and worried," says Irma Lopez, 28, a former Agriprocessors worker who remains in limbo with her young daughter while her husband is back in Guatemala, one of many arrested workers deported in October after serving five months in prison. "I worked since I was eight years old and now I feel worthless. I can work but I'm not allowed to."

Eight months after the Agriprocessors raid, Postville is still grappling with what its leaders call "a humanitarian and economic disaster," compounded by the recession and a harsh winter. Life isn't much easier for "legal" workers. [...]

Help has come primarily from community groups and churches, with donations from near and far. The local food pantry is now open Sundays, as well as Wednesdays, serving about 150 people. But some leaders say the help is not enough and worry about shortages and increasing hardships, especially evictions...

If Obama can put an end to this national disgrace, he'll be a great leader.  If not, not.  If the GOP can purge itself of the poison of nativism, it deserves to be a majority party again.  If not, not.  

Praise God for the Church, serving now, as so often in history, as a light of mercy and righteousness amidst the depredations of tyrants...  Suggestion for political theater: those who have been forced to wear electronic ankle bracelets should wear Stars of David, too.

UPDATE: Also, note that forbidding people to work lowers GDP.  That's not the biggest way our enforcement efforts have damaged our economy, though; housing prices are.  As we stepped up enforcement, although the reduction in the illegal immigrant population has been pretty small, it reduced the number of homebuyers.  How large a role immigration enforcement played in sinking housing prices will never be known, but that it played a role can hardly be doubted.  And sinking housing prices, in turn, are at the root of the financial crisis.

It's worth noting that the Great Depression of the 1930s was preceded by the nativism of the 1920s.