Immigration and the Logic of Globalization

In September 2001, Mexican President Vicente Fox visited Washington to discuss with George Bush the status of million Mexicans living and working illegally in the US.

Each president sought what he thought would be the keystone of his presidential legacy—a border open to people as well as goods with a guest worker program to allow Mexicans temporary legal employment in the US. Additionally Fox wanted amnesty for illegals, while Bush wanted to see more effective enforcement measures using "smart border" technology to expedite shipping, frequent travelers and prevent illegal crossings.

Days later the 9/11 attacks swept immigration from the national consciousness. But now it’s back on the national radar screen and dividing Americans across party lines.

In 2006 there are some 11 million Mexican immigrants in the US, most here illegally. In 1970, there were less than 800,000. This increase is not just due to the push factor of a Mexican economy still weak after years of NAFTA but to the pull factors emanating from US businesses that, balancing the potential risks (low) against the obvious benefits of low wages, a docile work force, and weak labor unions weak, actually prefer to hire illegals.

Big business joined moderates of both parties to support what should be properly called the Bush-Fox plan, described by the President in his Oval Office immigration address
There is a rational middle ground between granting an automatic path to citizenship for every illegal immigrant and a program of mass deportation. That middle ground recognizes there are differences between an illegal immigrant who crossed the border recently and someone who has worked here for many years and has a home, a family and an otherwise clean record.

Social conservatives and right-wing populists, nominally Bush’s base who believe with Samuel “Clash of Civilizations” Huntington that Mexican immigration presents “a looming challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity, and potentially to our future as a country,” are not buying it. They want to build walls, make it a felony to be here illegally, and round up and return all undocumented residents.

Thus politics has forced Bush to temporarily replace smart border strategy with dumb border strategy by deploying National Guardsmen to “beef up” the Boarder Patrol. But the truth is neither Minuteman wackos nor National Guardsmen on the border, nor a 3,000 mile wall, nor a guest worker program, nor amnesty will solve the problem of economic migration from Mexico and elsewhere.

Bush uncharacteristically spoke of finding a “rational middle” but, his good intentions notwithstanding, he and all of the participants in this debate have ignored the operative rationality—that of globalization. For untold centuries people have voted with their feet, leaving oppressive regimes and broken economies in search of a better life. Only from the mid-19th, century, that period of imperialism, national economies, protective tariffs, and isolationism, were countries able to regulate who came and went.

The logic of globalization, which promotes the free movement of goods, capital, services, and ideas, and allows American businessmen to locate service centers and factories where ever costs are lowest, must also allow the free movement of labor—that is people. Globalization, followed to its logical conclusion, then also requires that barriers to immigration and emigration fall.

The logic of globalization is that America return to its greatest tradition as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free (subject to criminal background checks). If America opens its borders to all, oppressive regimes everywhere will tremble and throw up barriers to prevent the Exodus of their people. Immigrants who risk their lives to come here are voting for America with their feet. And the last time I checked America needs all the friends it can get.

Stuart Carlson--on top of the Operation Persian Freedom Story

Preemption Redux

As the pressure of world opinion increases on Iran, the Bush administration has chosen to restate its doctrine of preemption—a strategy most of pundits and talking heads thought buried by the ongoing US experience in Iraq. In (“Bush to restate terror strategy—2002 doctrine of preemptive war to be reaffirmed” the Washington Post quotes a part of the report:

“If necessary, however, under long-standing principles of self defense, we do not rule out use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack," the document continues. "When the consequences of an attack with WMD are potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave dangers materialize."

“Such language,” the Post notes, “could be seen as provocative [no shit? Really?] at a time when the United States and its European allies have brought Iran before the U.N. Security Council to answer allegations that it is secretly developing nuclear weapons. At a news conference in January, Bush described an Iran with nuclear arms as a "grave threat to the security of the world." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/15/AR2006031502297.html).

There is little reason to think the restatement a coincidence. Bush is laying the groundwork for Operation Persian Freedom and public being prepared for the necessity of the action. War will come should Iran not submit to US-Western-IEAC supervision of every aspect of its nuclear programs.

In truth even that may not suffice because Bush’s real object is regime change. In Bush’s hands America’s commitment to global democracy is taking on a Rousseau-like quality whereby men and women are forced to be free.
In any case—the MAGIC EIGHTBALL says war comes in the last year of the Bush presidency

Coming Soon: Operation Persian Freedom

"Bush is denying reports today that he plans to invade Iran. Oh, we're still going to invade, we just don't have any plans." Jay Leno.

Preparation for America’s next preemptive war, Operation Persian Freedom © is underway. A year ago Seymore Hersh’s The New Yorker report, “The Coming Wars,” produced quite a bit of chatter about an invasion of Iran in Bush’s second term. But it soon died away. American mainstream media, which persists in attempting to understand Bush Administration policy in rational terms, thought war with Iran unlikely because, well, it would be insane. Sanity and good judgment, however, are not hallmarks of this administration and there is little reason to think these will now be factors in formulating policy.

The Iraq invasion story was also buried by the as yet by the Bush Administration's endless stream of iniquities and incompetence. In effect, its fucks-ups distracted the public from its continuing preparations for Preemption II: Iranian Whupass (the miniseries). How many of the anti-regime websites reporting and analyzing factional strife upon the ruling Iranian clerics are tied to, sponsored and/or controlled by US intelligence agencies? Damn if I know. But in truth it doesn’t matter.
Regime Change in Iran
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1381075/posts
http://www.iran-press-service.com/ips/articles-2005/november-2005/ahmadi_41105.shtml

As the Zen master Yogi Berra said: “You can observe a lot just by lookin’. The Bush administration has announced troop draw-downs in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the winding down of reconstruction efforts. Time to declare (if not victory) that we have stayed the course and accomplished the mission however that may be defined this week.
http://www.slate.com/id/2133639/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/02/AR2006010200370.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/03/AR2006010300303.html
http://www.worldpress.org/Mideast/2185.cfm.html
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,392783,00.html http://www.slate.com/id/2099408

And while the Americans breathe a collective sigh of relief as sons and daughters come home, the military will refit and reconfigure for redeployment as the Right Wing media (FOX, Washington Times, Wall Street Journal, El Rushbo and the other talk radio WingNuts) hammer away at two talking points—President Mahmoud Ahmadi Nezhad is Hitler and Iran is but months (if not hours!!!) away from having nuclear weapons.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11439.htm
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10441.htm

It's likely Bush will launch Operation Persian Freedom in the last 20 months of his term, with or without the UN or EU partners, with Congressional Approval or without it. He will either invoke the War Powers Act or manufacture a crisis that allows him to conduct the war under the current congressional resolution, which currently justifies whatever he deems necessary to protect America from the Evil Doers.

But noooooo! Why marr so bold an act with any shred of legality? Merely assert the inherent powers of the president. Perfect.

Tactical Imprecision

On long car trips I catch up on my Right Wing talk radio listening. Wednesday beginning an11-hour drive from West Kentucky to Northern Virginia I caught Mark Belling (billed as Milwaukee's best known radio personality) sitting in at EIB mike spewing the sort of bilious invective one expects from El Rushbo’s associates.

In the course of his performance of the Neocon Rant 12a (crediting Reagan’s policies for the current strength of the US economy), Belling referred to the Carter era economy suffering “triple digit unemployment, triple digit inflation, triple digit interest rate, triple digit everything.”

Really? Was I asleep when the country had a100% unemployment? 100% inflation? 100% being the lowest possible triple digit option.

It is possible to attribute bullshit like this to the cavalier disregard for fact and common sense that is the stock-and-trade of Right Wing talk show hosts. But two days on NPR’s Diane Rehm show I heard Mark Twain biographer Ron Powers refer to Twain as an “opponent of anti-imperialism.” What he meant to say, of course, was that Twain, a fervent opponent of imperialism, was a founder of the Anti-imperialist League.

While Powers’s case is one of misspeaking unlike Belling’s utter disregard for the truth, both illustrate the increasing inability of American public figures to speak the English language. Our president is the poster child for this affliction, but it’s not exclusive to the Right.

The Right, however, has pioneered the use of imprecise speech as a political tool realizing its tactical benefit, the obscuring of the lie. As Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston informed his student, the last Chinese emperor PuYi: “Your Majesty—if you can not say what you mean, you will never mean what you say.”

Humane Effective American Hegemony

I have chosen to open Poliblog with a piece I did for WKMS Public Radio days after Bush launched his invasion of Iraq.

More of my commentaries for WKMS Public Radio are available at
http://campus.murraystate.edu/academic/faculty/bill.schell/mypage/wkms.html.

In March of 2003, as we moved toward inevitable war with Iraq, I took part in the small candlelight peace vigil at the Lincoln Memorial. Peter, Paul, and Mary took the stage took the stage and we sang the old anti-war songs. There were earnest prayers for peace. Speakers called on President Bush to allow the UN inspectors to do their job and decried a war that would trade blood for oil. Not in our name.

As hot wax dripped onto my hand from my candle, one of thousands burning that night, I listened for the speech I hoped to hear. But I didn’t hear it. Instead I heard calls for America to reject power and global responsibility.Why did no one call for America to accept its global responsibility and to make the transition from Superpower to hegemon exercising leadership by example, persuasion, and consensus building?

I even have a bumper sticker version of my vision: humane, effective American hegemony.

My embrace of the idea of hegemony may seem strange, especially given the criticism of American hegemony by the anti-war movement and the foreign press. The concept is not well understood by Americans, but there’s a sense that it’s not a compliment, particularly when it’s linked to another loaded word that we Americans understand all too well—imperialism.

President Bush has chosen to assert America's preeminence through coercive Hard Power— the least effective tool of hegemony, sustainable only in the short term. Soft Power, winning the consent of other powers by persuasion and consultation, is the usually the best option because it is self-renewing while Hard Power may only be expended.

After 9/11 the Bush administration pissed away world sympathy for the United State bought at the cost of thousands of lives. Rather than use the opportunity to assume for America the role of wise and beneficent hegemon, the President gave his infamous Axis of Evil speech, promulgated his pernicious doctrine of preemption, ran roughshod over friend and foe alike, destroyed the unity of NATO, America’s most important alliance system and cast America as an arrogant imperial power.

Historian Paul Schroeder makes this distinction between an imperial power and a hegemonic power: A hegemon is first among equals; an imperial power rules over subordinates. A hegemonic power is the one without whom no final decision can be reached within a given system; its responsibility is essentially managerial, to see that a decision is reached. An imperial power rules the system, imposing its decision when it wishes.

Hegemony is not stable but a "moving equilibrium" that must be ceaselessly negotiated, revised, and reconfigured. To be an effective, humane hegemon, to achieve a global order based on the ideals of the Four Freedoms [freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear], America must persuade and cooperate with other nations, something Bush, a unilateralist by nature, is not inclined to do.History will judge Bush's rejection of responsible hegemony and his embrace of ineffective, inhumane imperialism as a tragic failure, not only for America but the world entire.

Whoever follows, not matter what their position on the use of force prior to the war, must clean up the wreckage left by Bush's irresponsibile policies. That is the real meaning of the phrase we will soon grow sick of hearing: Stay The Course.

And Jesus wept.