Good Idea/Bad Idea, Wildfire Edition

Good idea: Having a special separate fund to cover catastrophic firefighting costs. This would reduce cannibalization of other Forest Service programs and the need to go begging to Congress after bad fire seasons. Having a reliable pool of money would also encourage and enable the Forest Service to approach firefighting with a longer view, rather than "OMG there's a fire burning right now!"

Bad idea: Enforcing immigration laws and cultural assimilation during a wildfire crisis response. You would think that in San-freaking-Diego they would be able to get all warnings and emergency communications at least in Spanish as well as English*, even if other languages are tougher to get together. And the last thing you want to do when there's a natural disaster on is have people afraid to seek aid because they fear they might be hassled about their immigration status.

Here's the most ridiculous moment in the article:

San Diego police do not typically ask individuals for their immigration status, but when someone is suspected of a crime, "if they are asked for identification and they can't provide what would prove them to be in this country legally, the existing policy allows us to go ahead and call" U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Sainz said.

Let's think of some other reasons that someone might not have their papers on them -- perhaps because they're fleeing for their lives from a wildfire?

*Given some of the troglodytes in the comment section on the original article, my cranky side is tempted to recommend a policy of issuing the warnings only in Spanish.

Henry Waxman's Little Brother Must Work For The Arizona Republic

Proportion of the Phoenix area's population that is undocumented: about 10%.
Proportion of the Phoenix area's criminal charges that are made against undocumented people: about 10%.

This is according to the Maricopa County sheriff's department's own records, and in the face of a huge effort by Maricopa law enforcement to target criminal immigrants. Sheriff Joe naturally had no comment.

It also turns out that undocumented immigration doesn't drive down wages or the economy (with the possible exception of a small downward pressure on the very poorest citizens, which could be easily offset by taking advantage of the net economic growth associated with immigration).

So I guess we're down to "they make us have to press 1 for English" in terms of empirical claims about negative effects of immigration on non-immigrants (although I'd wager even here that there are enough citizens who prefer to do business in Spanish that your 1-pressing finger would still get a workout).

Less Litter, More Deaths

This is pretty ridiculous:

An immigrant-aid volunteer is facing a $175 fine for leaving water jugs in the desert for illegal entrants. ... Millis and three other volunteers with the Tucson-based No More Deaths organization had been placing 1-gallon plastic water jugs on a trail in the refuge, which is known to be heavily traveled by migrants who are illegally crossing into the U.S. from Mexico on foot. Ironically, Millis said, he was also picking up trash while he worked.

So No Más Muertes is creating a net decrease in the amount of litter in the refuge. In particular, they're helping make sure the refuge isn't littered with human bodies -- which can't be good for the ecology, even if you're morally bankrupt enough not to care about the humanitarian aspect of it. The refuge management should be bankrolling NMM's activities, not fining them for it. By working with NMM, they could get volunteers to help address a significant problem that the rangers doubtless don't have a lot of time to deal with, and could even work out a way to minimize the ecological impact of the water stations. Instead, they conflate the NMM volunteers with the effects of the very broken immigration system that NMM is opposing.

Tom Tancredo II

Just when we thought the U.S. House of Representatives had lost its craziest immigrant-hater with the impending retirement of Tom Tancredo, it seems someone else wants to step up to fill the position. Lou Barletta, the mayor of Hazleton, Pa. who was one of the first and most extreme to try to crack down on immigrants* at the local level, is planning a run for Congress. I feel personally insulted by this because he's running in Pennsylvania's 11th District, where I lived from age 9 to 18 (and where my parents still live). So while the incumbent is a pretty center-of-the-party Democrat (and therefore unimpressive by my progressive sensibilities) who has held the seat as long as I've been alive, given his opposition I'm prepared to go out on a limb and endorse Paul Kanjorski in the race for PA-11.

*Yes, immigrants-period, not just "illegal immigrants."

There's a term for what the government is doing ...

... it's "aiding and abetting." Specifcally, DHS is (in a moral, if not legal, sense) aiding and abetting domestic violence by abusers who use their victims' lack of immigration status as a way to control them, by restricting the access of those victims to status that's not dependent on the abuser. It's a sadly common pattern in law enforcement (in immigration and elsewhere) -- crack down in whatever ways comes easiest, on whichever people you can get your hands on, without thinking about how that crackdown can generate unintended consequences elsewhere and inhibit your ability to deal with the people doing the really bad stuff.

In very tangentially related news, on NPR this morning they had a report about mercury contamination in fish. The health experts they talked to said (paraphrased) "the general public should go ahead and eat lots of fish, but children and women of childbearing age should be careful." So women and children are apparently not part of the "general public." It's a nice illustration of how environmental health science still treats the middle-class adult white male as the generic person, with everyone else handled as an exception to the rule. I also like the way they slip from the risks specifically related to pregnant and nursing mothers into warning all "women of childbearing age" -- I guess the public outcry got them to back off explicitly labeling all women as "pre-pregnant," but the mentality behind it stuck. (This is not to say that the mercury contamination versus health benefits of fish tradeoff is being significantly overblown in one direction or the other. Obviously, as a vegetarian I'd prefer that anyone who can afford to do so avoid fish for reasons unrelated to mercury, as well as preferring that everyone could afford to do so, and that fish not be contaminated both for their own sake and for the sake of whatever people or other animals eat them.)

Hillary Goes Nativist

(I know I promised I'd go back to writing about the environment, but this was too good to pass up.)

Contrary to the popular desire to blame Bush and post-9/11 hysteria for the worst aspects of the US immigration system, most of the really bad law -- including the divide-and-conquer between "good immigrants" and "criminal aliens" -- was signed back in 1996 by one Bill Clinton. Now it seems his wife wants a second round of cracking down:

"Anybody who committed a crime in this country or in the country they came from has to be deported immediately, with no legal process. They are immediately gone," Mrs. Clinton told a town hall meeting in Anderson, S.C., Thursday. On Wednesday, she told a crowd in North Bergen, N.J., that such criminals "absolutely" need to be deported. A day earlier, she told a rally in Salinas, Calif., that aliens with criminal records "should be deported, no questions asked." ..."No legal process," the New York senator said at a forum in Tipton, Iowa, according to a political news outlet, the Politico. "You put them on a plane to wherever they came from."

I do, however, have to agree with one person in the comment section here. In what they believed was support for Senator Clinton's proposal, "bah" said:

the immigration laws as set forth in the constitution should be followed to the letter and any amendments or changes/modifications to those laws should be approached with extreme caution . just because the founding fathers could not anticipate many of the current problems today, we as a nation should not quickly and mindlessly trash heart and soul american constitutional principles just to suit some real or perceived narrow social or economic interest(s).

I agree. Here, in its entirety, is what the Constitution says about immigration law:

The Congress shall have power ... To establish a uniform rule of naturalization.

Sounds good to me. I think "open borders for everybody but anti-US terrorists" fulfils the definition of a "uniform rule of naturalization," and sticks pretty close to what the founders intended.

As for Clinton ... who's the Green Party nominating this year?

Huckabee Learns A Fact

I miss the old Mike Huckabee. Back when he was hopelessly languishing at 2% of the polls, he had the freedom to occasionally say something sensible -- like that immigrants are not, in fact, the devil incarnate. But now that it looks like he has a realistic shot at the nomination, he feels like he has to pander to the nativists. His latest salvo is a plan to completely cut off all immigration from countries that harbor terrorists. Perhaps Huckabee would like to go personally tell the Christian refugees from the Middle East that they have to go home, because the same Islamist policies that lead to oppressing the Christian minority also lead to getting in bed with terrorist groups.

I do, however, have to give him a bit of credit. In his first flailing attempt at establishing his nativist cred, Huckabee tried to justify his position with a delusion about a wave of fictional Pakistani undocumented immigrants. But this time around, he's pointing out that all of the 9/11 hijackers entered the country legally (hence, by his logic, the need to cut off all immigration from certain countries). This is not just an actual fact, but a fact that many Americans are either unaware of or ignore. (Perhaps he's raised enough money now that he can afford to hire people to brief him on issues.)

Immigration: A Triangular Affair

(With apologies to J. Baird Callicott*.)

It's easy to slip into thinking of the U.S. immigration debate as a two-sided one, with anti-migrant forces lined up against pro-migrant ones. But I think there are really three positions: nativism, business pro-migration, and progressive pro-migrant. The latter two groups, are both "pro-immigrant" in the limited sense that they want the U.S. to let in lots of immigrants and dislike punitive measures toward those who are here without status under the current regime. But once you get beyond the front lines of the battle with the nativists, the coalition between the business and progressive positions unravels quickly.

To understand the difference between the two views too often lumped together as pro-immigrant, take the following two quotes. The first is a comment left on an editorial in The Oklahoman, and quoted (with tacit approval) by Marisa Treviño:

I live here in Arizona where the infamous sheriff of Maricopa county has the" Immigration Fever" and his politics is beginning to hurt in the county pocketbook. The illegals that were trying to get a work release and come here to work in the low paying sector has been run away. Now the Unions are sending people in to get these jobs, but they want two thirds of a higher salary. Maricopa county is now in financial trouble.

This is a common argument in favor of immigration. But it's a business-type argument that should be anathema to progressives. It boils down to "immigration is good, because immigrants work for cheap and we can exploit them." This kind of argument may make short-term gains in staving off "deport them all and build a wall" policies. But it perpetuates the destructive dynamic of pitting native and immigrant workers against each other.

Now consider this encouraging story, linked by brownfemipower, about efforts by New York carpentry unions to organize immigrant workers:

While the Carpenters union has struggled to organize immigrant workers, union members supported the walk out. "Part of what you need to do to organize non-union workers is to organize your own workers to support the campaign," said Andres Puerta, who's been organizing immigrant workers for the UBC. "Carpenters in New York are aggressive, proud union members and part of that identity is that they support these campaigns."

This approach is not going to help Maricopa County fix its immediate fiscal crisis, since it would lead to immigrants working for the same union wages as citizens (though the roots of the budget woes in Maricopa -- and other Arizona counties, and the state -- go far deeper than Sheriff Joe running immigrants out of town). But it's an approach that integrates support for migrants as people (as opposed to immigration as a phenomenon) with the rest of the progressive agenda.

*Callicott is an environmental philosopher who wrote a famous article "Animal liberation: a triangular affair," which argued that, contrary to the conventional wisdom that the environmental debate is a matter of anthropocentrists versus non-anthropocentrists, there are actually three positions -- anthropocentrism, animal liberation, and ecocentrism. Ecocentrists like Callicott have nearly as much to complain about against the animal liberation view as they do against anthropocentrism.