Archive for the 'Politics' Category

Alberto Gonzales: Oblivious with Good Reason

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 30, 2008
in Immigration and Politics
. 0 Comments

Josh Patashnik at The Plank:

…immigration judges aren’t minor backroom bean counters; they’re responsible for conducting formal court proceedings to determine what should be done with aliens who have been apprehended by federal authorities. Yet the former attorney general of the United States admits that he literally didn’t know how they were being screened and selected by people under his direct supervision… It’s particularly disappointing that someone with extensive experience practicing law in a border state would have so little regard for selecting qualified immigration judges.

It is indeed pretty horrifying that an Attorney General was (or pretended to be) ignorant about the hiring portfolio of one of his employees, regardless of what that hiring portfolio included. But the situation is a little more complicated than Patashnik admits.

In fairness, I don’t blame people who haven’t been spending their days at immigration court for the last few weeks like I have (it’s so I can write one of these, though I doubt it’ll attract the attention of future generations of oppo researchers) for not understanding the bizarrely nebulous relationship immigration court has with the DoJ (through the Executive Office of Immigration Reform, which employs judges) and the Department of Homeland Security (Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection and ICE all have some role in referring cases; prosecutors are employed through ICE as well).

Suffice to say that it’s undeniably true that the DoJ hires immigration judges, but immigration court itself is a weird melange of departmental responsibilities. It’s not that the division of labor is unclear, at least in terms of the system: one of my sources explained to me that a 2003 law provided summary clarification by listing all the cases in which the phrase “at the discretion of the Attorney General” should be replaced by “at the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security.”

At the level of individual cases, there’s often some wiggle room regarding whether a case should be handled judicially through EOIR or administratively through CIS. That’s to be expected, but the push-and-pull doesn’t stop there. To cite just one example, hearings for detained individuals are held in a courtroom in ICE offices; cases for non-detained individuals are heard across the street, in a courtroom at EOIR offices. The same ICE attorneys and EOIR judge preside at both.

At the federal level, of course, it’s clear that more emphasis and resources are being placed on immigration court on the ICE end than the EOIR end: think how many people might have been involved in planning the Postville raid, and then think of the understaffing of immigration judges. Furthermore, ICE initiatives like Operation Streamline, which are currently overwhelming federal (criminal) judges in border states, were designed to decrease the caseload on immigration judges — making EOIR even more secondary to immigration proceedings. (This is also why, contra Patashnik, Gonzales’ legal experience in a border state didn’t make him automatically more likely to pay attention to immigration judges as Attorney General.)

Clearly, there were broader failures in corporate culture at the Department of Justice under Gonzales. But the obliviousness regarding immigration judges speaks just as much to another paradigmatic failure: the tendency of the federal government to treat immigration exclusively as an issue of Homeland Security despite its roots in Justice, to the extent that the latter is forgotten entirely.

I’m well aware that in some anthropological circles it may be considered compromising my fieldwork to blog about it during the period I’m in the field, even though most of this information is publicly available through other means and none of it is confidential. I’m also well aware that in some anthropological circles the question of “relevance” is paramount, and relevance doesn’t wait for formal peer review. Besides, I’m an undergraduate. Cut me some slack.

Does this federal subsidy make me look fat?

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 25, 2008
in Food and Politics
. 1 Comment

Via Adam, a story about government intervention that doesn’t get me up in arms:

Better labels are all well and good, but “we don’t want to exhort people to look at labels for trans fat,” he said. “We want people to walk into a restaurant and not worry there’s an artificial chemical in their food” that is killing them. A city trans-fat ban, he says, could prevent 500 premature deaths a year from heart disease.

The first time I ever heard of trans fats was in high school, when I was working in a bakery. A customer asked if our products had any trans fats; I’d never heard of them, so I asked the owner, who had never heard of them either. “What are trans fats?” she asked. The customer allowed as she didn’t know, but that they were bad for you.

“Well, we use the same ingredients you’d use in your kitchen,” my boss said, “just in larger quantities.” (If you’ve never seen a five-pound stick of butter, you haven’t lived.) And that’s the crux of this.

Saturated fats, like butter or lard, really aren’t that bad for you. The problem is when you take unsaturated fats and artificially saturate them. Liquid oil becomes a solid, which is much easier to transport and store. That’s great for bakeries that use large quantities of shortening. (If you’ve never had to clean up the five pounds of butter that have melted into a greasy mess because someone forgot to put it back in the fridge, I envy you.)

Still, if you’ve used oil while baking, you know it doesn’t taste as good. No one would choose partially hydrogenated soybean oil over butter — except that it’s much, much cheaper. The price has been artificially lowered by corn and soybean subsidies (though vegetable oils would probably be slightly cheaper than animal fats anyway, because plants are more efficient converters of energy).

And, like most cheap, convenient food-like products, it’s also much worse for you.

The trans fat crisis is just another symptom of industrial agriculture. It galls me to see programs like this — we incentivize Very Bad Things, then ban them — but it’s a short-term fix for one of the worst consequences of a disastrous federal program. The best option, of course, would be to end farm subsidies and make sustainable farming and eating a viable option for Americans. If people could bake with butter for a reasonable price, they would.

In the short run, though, this is better than nothing.

Sticking to one’s principles

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on July 23, 2008
in Across The Pond and Politics
. 0 Comments

This is a particularly ridiculous newsflash from Number 10 Downing Street, that I just had to share:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7520401.stm

70% Torture. Wash with Like Colors, Cold Water Only.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 12, 2008
in Politics
. 3 Comments

Like Yglesias and Schwenkler, I find the fact that a supporter of torture would make a shirt joking about waterboarding to be viscerally horrifying. But I really don’t see the sale of a T-shirt on one of dozens of sites selling conservative memorabilia as tantamount to identifying support for torture with conservatism. Furthermore, I think that divorced from that context — as it would be when worn — the product itself is a perfect vehicle for the “coming to grips with the horror” that Yglesias discusses.

First of all, remember that almost 70% of Americans believe waterboarding is torture. The reason that this sentiment doesn’t metastasize into an opposition to American operatives using the technique is twofold: some of those who believe it to be torture also believe its use is justified on suspected terrorists; and public discourse centers on the concept and related legislation rather than the actual, current practice (which is deliberately quiet and remote, especially for Americans who don’t consume media compulsively enough to be intimately familiar of what happens in Guantanamo or secret prisons). I suspect that the latter is the more pervasive force: it’s easy to forget going about daily life that torture is something my government does. Being confronted with that fact unexpectedly is like taking a punch to the stomach.

And that’s what I suspect this T-shirt would actually end up doing. It addresses waterboarding directly, as a practice, not introducing the mitigating factors of terrorism or national security. A “You can’t understand a terrorist until you’ve taken him waterboarding” shirt would be a different thing entirely; that would in fact aid in the othering of “enemy combatants” and inculcate an embattled-but-triumphant mindset (two preconditions, in my opinion, for taking pride in the desecration of the human body to begin with). But a shirt that merely declares “I’d Rather Be Waterboarding” is likely to meet with vague curiosity as passersby try to figure out where they’ve heard that term before, followed swiftly by recognition and attendant revulsion. It turns the flippant euphemism of the word back on itself.

Maybe the shirt is, in fact, an illustration that you can no longer call yourself a true conservative without supporting torture — though, again, I don’t necessarily see why that would be true. I’ll take derision of those who find torture unpalatable over an attempt to make torture palatable any day. And if those who see someone walking down the street wearing this shirt are reminded of the fact that their government does things of which they don’t approve as a result, I can’t see how that’s a bad thing.

Admittedly, this is coming from someone who talked for a while about putting up recruiting posters for Club Waterboarding and seeing if anyone got the joke.

In which the U.S. Conference of Mayors agrees with me.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 7, 2008
in Immigration, Media and Politics
. 0 Comments

Insofar as Noah’s response to my post of yesterday can be summarized as “The most pragmatically viable response is to blame employers because it’s better than blaming immigrants,” I agree completely. Insofar as it can be summarized as “We shouldn’t be talking about changing our own perception in ways that can’t make for more viable public narratives” I disagree vehemently.

The initial reason that I wrote the post was actually that I’m frustrated generally with a refusal to expect business owners to see their workers as human beings rather than warm bodies and this is a very good example of that. But Noah’s attribution of it to my radical localism on immigration is also valid. I suspect that a paradigm shift will be a more durable solution to the issue than even the most liberal legislation will, and the xenophobes are more likely to change their minds when they get to know actual immigrants — or at least have to confront them at marches and town-hall meetings — than through narratives delivered on the national stage.

The short-term effects will be pretty bad in places like Hazleton or Prince George’s County, but the short-term effects will be pretty bad there anyway, and what ICE is doing — in those cities as well as more immigrant-friendly places like New Haven and LA — is worse by orders of magnitude. And if the news out of the Conference of Mayors is any indication, local governments are largely at least somewhat pro-immigrant in their outlook. So pragmatically we’re in decent shape.

I get the importance of narratives. But I suspect it’s the smaller, private changes in attitude that will end up driving immigration reform on a human scale.

A clinic for the cure of bleeding hearts.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 7, 2008
in Immigration and Politics
. 2 Comments

Another day, another story about immigration-law processes in the MSM. This one is the Washington Post with an article about the increasing popularity of immigration clinics at law schools, which ought to be reassuring but instead is just hugely depressing.

Apparently, despite sources at a number of schools, the Post couldn’t find anyone who had actually gone into practice advocating for immigrants after participating in one of these clinics as a law student. The best they could do was a current student who “definitely plans to” do so, and an alumna who’s now a lawyer for the government because she wants to “push for the middle.” (Because if we’ve learned anything from Guantanamo, it’s that moderate-minded lawyers have high efficacy and job satisfaction.)

Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate that the clinic system allows immigrants — not to mention disadvantaged clients of other clinics — access to talented legal minds. But it seems to me that rather than giving students a taste of a field that leads them to develop a career interest, clinics actually have the effect of allowing students to quiet their consciences when they take the (lucrative) beaten path after graduation: “Hey, I did the do-gooder thing back in law school, I’ve done my part.” Part of this might be that the culture of law schools does a lot to encourage defeatist attitudes toward social-justice-y but unglamorous areas of legal practice.

The perspective this enables is one I’ve run into most frequently in high-school theatre. Sure, students appreciate the opportunity to get out and do what they love, not to mention the recognition: from what I know of pre-law undergrads, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the prestige of “hot” immigration clinics drew ambitious students who didn’t much care about immigration. But regardless of how fulfilling they find it now, they shrug it off with “but of course I’m not crazy enough to do it for a living.”

What we seem to be left with is a system where the ranks of immigration lawyers are populated by clinic students on one side, and clinic alumni on the other. That bodes poorly for the students — not to mention those they represent.

The table next to me at the Cosi where I’m blogging is occupied by two young lawyers, one of whom just said to the other: “But I’m just out of law school, I couldn’t just go work for the Obama campaign.” Case in point?

Layover NYT blogging

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 6, 2008
in Immigration, Media and Politics
. 0 Comments

The more I learn about immigration policy, the more frustrated I get with the (mostly) uncritical consensus that employers who hire undocumented immigrants deserve to be prosecuted. Today’s NYT lead story reads to me like a step and a half in the right direction.

First of all, since employers are lobbying for more liberal immigration policy at the grassroots and state as well as federal levels, they’re more likely to have an impact where the legislative action is as well as changing citizens’ opinions. (Public opinion, incidentally, is offered by Secretary Chertoff at the end of the article as the reason immigration policy can’t be liberalized — which would be a satisfactory explanation if his department’s own ICE, wholly unaccountable to public opinion, weren’t pursuing more aggressive anti-undocumented-immigrant practices in the absence of any change in law.)

Second of all, this is being covered without recourse to the phantom the pro-immigrant Left usually raises over this issue: “employers who hire undocumented immigrants engage in abusive and inhumane practices!” It’s true that noncitizens don’t have the leverage to protect their rights that would make abuse impossible, but from what I’ve heard in the field the phenomenon is greatly exaggerated.

In fact, the relationship between employer and employee is often more humane than it’s usually given credit for being, and I’m disappointed that the Times didn’t touch on this as well (hence the half-step). Most employers the NYT quotes are driven by their need to “fill” positions, i.e. with warm bodies — providing at least some credibility to the claim of inhumane treatment. One employer goes further in recognizing her employees as human beings, arguing that their skill and knowledge make them “irreplaceable.”

But no one the Times quotes finds himself (or is willing to admit he finds himself) in the position that I hear is most common: having been presented with documentation that appeared to be legitimate at the time of hiring, employers don’t want to confront their workers about it now because they feel a personal connection to them and don’t want to leave them out in the cold. Perhaps this is mostly true of small business owners, who are less likely to be on the radar of a Times reporter; but it seems to me that much of the reason no one says these things in the press is that no one expects them to do so.

Both Left and Right expect employers to treat their employees according to a purely transactional logic rather than a corporate one — some call it exploitation, some entrepreneurialism. And they’re expected to lobby as business owners protecting their interests, not people engaged in relationships with others. But the ability of various dynamics to play into a single relationship — economic and personal, for example — is one of the strongest arguments for integrating immigrants into their communities completely rather than allowing them to remain in the shadows. Failing to recognize the humanity of business relationships makes it impossible to talk about this, and impugns the transactional logic by which we’re expected to talk about business in general.

Classics geekery pays off. Sort of.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 5, 2008
in Media, Politics and Yale
. 2 Comments

Will pointed me towards this ridiculous article in the Washington Post. It starts out well: mocking Maha is always appropriate.

She’s the pouty protagonist in the melodrama that runs throughout “Al-Kitaab,” the standard beginning text in Arabic classes at Harvard and other American universities.

We are taught to speak our first Arabic sentences by expressing Maha’s incurable angst. We learn in Chapter 1 that Maha is desperately lonely. In later chapters, we are told that she hates New York, has no boyfriend and resents her mother.

I tried to find a clip from the Al-Kitaab DVDs, but for some unknown reason no one thought they were interesting enough to put on YouTube. Instead, I present you with a claymation re-enactment of her cousin Khalid’s greatest hits.

Pollak concludes that “[l]earning Arabic should not include lessons in political propaganda.” (Propaganda, apparently, being teenage ennui and sad Palestinians.) All I can say is that if Pollak thinks this is propaganda, he’s clearly never encountered Thrasymachus.

Published in 1965 for boys at English public schools, Thrasymachus combines the best of Greek grammar with the remnants of British imperialism. The story itself deals with a painfully stupid child who descends to the underworld, where he encounters — and offends — various heroes of Greek myth. (The episode where he hits on Briseis in front of Achilles is particularly choice.)

It’s in the prose composition exercises that the ideology really comes out. (Prose comp, for those fortunate enough to escape its horrors, involves translating English passages into Latin or Greek. Theoretically this is to practice tenses and particles, but really it is a particularly fiendish bit of torture invented by Classics teachers who think there should be more pain, and that irregular verbs are insufficient for that purpose.)

The prose composition passage for Chapter 29, for instance, reads:

“If I give you this sword, my son, will you promise to fight bravely when you become a man?” “Yes, father. If the enemy attack the city, I shall never betray you but I will fight until they are all driven out.” “If our king leads us against the enemy’s city, you must follow him and never run away.” “But, father, mother has told me never to leave home. If I leave her, she will grieve.” “If she said that, she was foolish. You must always obey the king if ever he orders you to fight for your native land.”

It strikes me that if you get to college, decide to study Arabic, and don’t already know mainstream Arab opinion on Israel, or who Nasser was, your textbook is as good a place as any to learn it. Al-Kitaab has plenty of problems pedagogically, but by presenting famous Arabs from Nasser to Ibn Batutta, it never claims to be making an ideological statement.

Pollak’s objection isn’t really that the book is political — he wants it to be political, in the direction of his own beliefs. He’s welcome to write his own book. If it has better DVDs, I’ll buy it.

Parenthetically, I present my favorite prose comp passage:

In a certain house, which has only one bath, live two young men, Xanthias and Orestes by name. Xanthias likes the bath, but Orestes is already washing in it. Xanthias says savagely to Orestes, “Get out of that bath, young man.” Orestes, however, who is an insolent fellow and does not like Xanthias, does nothing but wash himself. Xanthias therefore seizes an axe with which he cuts off Orestes’ head. Thus Orestes dies and Xanthias washes himself in the bath. Phew! What young men!

He Forgot It in People

Published
by
Dara Lind
on June 27, 2008
in Media and Politics
. 2 Comments

I haven’t even ordered a copy of Grand New Party to read yet. (I know, I know, shame on me. It’s fourth in my mental queue of books to read on Minneapolis buses. The Bible is third, though, and if I bump it back any further it’ll break the hearts of those nice ladies who proselytized me in Brooklyn Center the other day.) So I’m assuming that the reason the second half of today’s David Brooks column hasn’t received the attention the first half has is that Brooks is just recapping Ross and Reihan’s points.

But Brooks can still turn a phrase inimitably, so I’d be surprised if this line weren’t entirely his own invention:

Self-conscious maternalists like Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins ensured that New Deal programs were biased in favor of traditional two-parent families.

I’m tickled pink by “self-conscious maternalists,” and not just because it’s an adorable phrase (which may or may not have been appropriated for the “Political Views” box in my Facebook profile). The point about being a “self-conscious” maternalist, rather than a “deliberate” maternalist, is that it distinguishes between advocating for the maintenance of convention and being conventional oneself. Eleanor Roosevelt herself was hardly a role model for the sort of “traditional” family she espoused — “well-behaved women rarely make history,” and all that. But she understood that she didn’t need to become what she sought to protect: tradition for her was policy, not performance. Certainly Eleanor wouldn’t have been able to make any respected claim to caring about families today, when the accumulation of “everyday person” (read: good old boy) cred is tracked as scrupulously as that of donor dollars, when candidates establish traditionalism by becoming avatars of it rather than imagining policies to protect it.

It’s not just the ideas of the young conservatives that are heterodox, but their personalities. The blogger vanguard isn’t afraid to be, well, vanguardy. (Caveat: my perception of Brooks’ Crew of Babycon Worthies may well be skewed by the charismatic pull of Reihan’s music videos and James’ sideburns.) If much of what the conservative movement inculcated in its acolytes was the ambivalence surrounding a “Beltway conservatism” that valorized local wisdoms, one of the best side effects of the new breed’s heterodox trajectories is that it’s allowed them to realize that the idea-pushers don’t have to be everything they propose. (If I weren’t a postmodernist, I’d be using the phrase “be themselves” right about now, but from where I stand it’s much more a question of which self they’re being: not a solely public one.)

This isn’t to say that I hope Grand New Party drums the performativity out of politics: that’s technocratic, heartless and insane. But the wonderful thing about performative politics is that it enables the politician to adopt different roles depending on the situation, while the obsession with performing traditional values led to immobility and finally caricature. A man who performs his own platform isn’t necessarily authentic or consistent so much as he is a slave to identity politics.

Demographics David Brooks Didn’t Make Up

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on June 27, 2008
in Media, Politics and Yale
. 1 Comment

I got a phone call this morning: “Did you see the Times? Read the David Brooks column — Will’s in it!”

On further inspection, this turned out to be Will Wilkinson, not Will Wilson (more famous, less my boyfriend), but the point of the column remains: the unconventional young writers are the future of intellect in American conservatism.[1]

…most of these writers did not rise through the official channels of the conservative or libertarian establishments. By and large, they didn’t do the internships or take part in the young leader programs that were designed to replenish “the movement.” Instead, they found their voices while blogging. The new technology allowed them to create a new sort of career path and test out opinions without much adult supervision.

As a consequence, they are heterodox and hard to label. These writers grew up reading conservative classics — Burke, Hayek, Smith, C.S. Lewis — but have now splayed off in all sorts of quirky ideological directions.

There are dozens of writers I could put in this group, but I’d certainly mention Yuval Levin, Daniel Larison, Will Wilkinson, Julian Sanchez, James Poulos, Megan McArdle, Matt Continetti and, though he’s a tad older, Ramesh Ponnuru.

…now excuse me while I add some blogs to Google Reader.

[1] It would be egotistical for me to suggest that, were he sixty years younger, William F. Buckley would probably have been part of the Yale Mafia. In other news, I love paralipsis.