Obama immigration plan is too tough and too lenient

This has a climate hook, by the way.

Obama's plan, summarized here, takes 13 years to give citizenship to people who have been here just short of forever.  It also legalizes and puts on the same track the people who arrive the day before the proposal would be introduced as legislation.  These are two different sets of people both as far as our ethical obligations and our self-interest are concerned.

The starting point should recognize three categories, and then argue who fits in those categories:

1. Immigrants who have been here a very long time - these people are Americans, basically, and have about as much right and reason to be citizens as the rest of us.  Once we've figured out that they qualify in this category, the wait time should be short to make them citizens.

What constitutes a "very long time" is a devilish detail that could get much debate, but that debate doesn't remove the fact that the category is legitimate.  The law by necessity draws a bright line somewhere in a gray area.  That's just life.

2. People who arrived recently - these are different people.  They aren't Americans, they are prospective immigrants who happen to be here already.  They aren't integrated into society and they haven't given significant investments of their lives into building the country.  The key here is that we owe them no more than we owe other prospective immigrants, so it's up to us to decide whether it's in our interest to give them a different status than other prospective immigrants who haven't come here illegally.

3. People in transition to becoming immigrants - just because you have to establish bright lines in gray zones doesn't mean you have to deny the existence of a gray zone.  So here they are, people who haven't just arrived but also haven't been here for so long that the only ethical and reasonable thing to do is to fast-track them to citizenship.  Some immediate legalization plus lengthy path to citizenship seems appropriate.  Obama's one-size-fits all approach is probably best just for this group.

The climate angle is this aspect (from the link above):  "The White House draft wouldn’t just affect undocumented immigrants currently in America. Spouses and children of newly legalized prospective immigrants could also apply for an LPI visa themselves from overseas if they pass a background check and pay the proper fees."

If you add triple the number of immigrants from the current 11 million, that extra 33 million people will mean a 5 to 7 percent increase our national greenhouse gas emissions.  Global GHG emissions aren't affected in exactly the same way, but it will increase as these people move from lower-carbon footprints to our own.  Even if the effect is reduced by having a total cap on emissions, the cap itself will be determined in part by how easy it is to live within the cap, and increasing the population by 5 percent will make it that much harder.  I don't think LPI visa holders or green card holders should have the right to bring in new immigrants - they should complete the citizenship process first.

Two other points - first, Obama's 13 year proposal is a classic worse-than-unethical-because-it's-a-blunder.  The significant majority of these people are going to be Democratic voters.  You don't make them wait forever to vote, and you don't start off with 13 years as your opening bid and then negotiate something worse than that with the Republicans.

Second, I think the issue underscores the need for future international greenhouse gas regulation to recognize and reward countries for accepting immigrants.  While Europe and Japan have admittedly done a far better job than the US on climate over the last 25 years, it would be an interesting exercise to estimate what their emissions would have been if they had accepted the same level of immigration.  Still far less than the US per person, but maybe not quite as stellar.

The real process problem that Republican leaders have with Obama's immigration order

UPDATE:  per the comments, the change was a policy change and not a new Executive Order as it was originally reported.  Not sure that changes the analysis.)


Republican leaders have complained at great length about the alleged process problem with Obama's DREAM executive order, deferring for two years any action to remove illegal immigrants who were brought here as children.  They say it's not up to Obama to choose which laws to enforce, and the correct process is to change the law via Congress.

So this is silly- prosecutorial discretion is a standard executive function.  The Rs do have a process concern, just not the one they mentioned.  See the recently-passed transportation bill instead:

Thanks to the stubbornness of the Senate’s political odd couple — the liberal Barbara Boxer of California and the conservative James Inhofe of Oklahoma — Congress approved on Friday afternoon a serviceable transportation bill.... it does not include two anti-environmental riders pressed by the House — one approving the risky Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada, the other preventing regulation of toxic coal ash waste from power plants....There are flaws, some serious. Financing for “transportation alternatives” — bike paths, pedestrian walkways and the like — suffered modest cuts. The bill also directs the transportation secretary to suspend environmental reviews of highway and transit projects costing less than $5 million, in violation of environmental law.

What's the relation?  Must-pass, popular legislation is a great place to push one's priorities onto one's opposition, especially unpopular things like stopping regulation of toxic coal ash.  The Rs didn't get all they wanted, but they did get some of it.

They wanted the same process for popular, must-pass legislation barely tolerating illegal immigrants brought here as children - they wanted to see what other, unrelated and toxic provisions they could get passed at the same time within Democratic legislation.  Now, it's no longer must-pass - the Ds can help their constituencies via Executive Order, so Rs have to actually offer something better than the EO to get them on board.

Expect the same thing, by the way, for whatever your favorite flavor of climate legislation.  It won't stay pure.  Sorry about that.  To whatever (limited) extent we can get similar climate results via EPA regulation under the Clean Air Act, that reduces Republican leverage, just as Obama did on the immigration issue.

And Matt Yglesias followed it with a post on economic bubbles

I have trouble understanding how a smart guy like Yglesias manages to keep going further down this path, but when I've said that he prefers society to always have more younger people than older people, I meant it as a somewhat joking criticism.

The joke's on me, because he's pretty literal about it now as a path for growth:

 [If immigration and lax land use regulation prime a state for population growth] then you don't need any particularly optimistic beliefs to see that the state is primed for certain kinds of investment. We're going to need new houses for these new people in the short-run, and we'll need new schools & hospitals, new car dealerships, and new highways for them in the medium run. So we're investing. And with that investment happening we need new Whataburger franchises and new H-E-Bs and probably new power plants as well. And now suddenly we're on the high equilibrium. We need more accountants and more wedding planners, we're going to need some fancy restaurants, we'll need hotels, we'll need more of everything. And since we'll need more of everything and the price of new homes will remain moderate, we'll expect the population to keep growing as people from around the country tend to move here in search of work.

As for how long that all is supposed to last, he's silent.  Ironic that the very next (not so good) post was about economic bubbles, so he acknowledges issues of unsustainability, while missing his own huge blind spot.

And yes, population growth can help economic growth, but it's unsustainable in any number of senses of the word.

Does racial familiarity breed contempt or understanding?

Matt Yglesias points to a somewhat optimistic result from an unintentional experiment in India that brought Hindus and Muslims in close contact in a public housing complex: majority Hindus improved their opinion of Muslims, while minority Muslims had no change of opinion for better or worse of Hindus. One and a half cheers for incremental progress! Hip hip, hooray! Hip hip

Less cheeringly, a knowledgeable commenter sez casual contact usually reinforces prejudice, and only intense contact such as military desegregation really breaks it down. This fits my anecdotal understanding of why New Orleans was so racist when I lived there for several weeks in the early 1990s - working class/unemployed whites had casual contact with black population living in the hellhole public housing complexes scattered everywhere. They couldn't easily avoid each other, unlike Washington DC for the same period.

Still, there seems to be a positive long term trend that casual contact studies might be missing. I left this comment:

I also think the theory, that casual contact increases prejudice, conflicts with the tendency of racial conflicts to eventually resolve over long periods of time of several generations or more. Sometimes they’re resolved through genocide or racial expulsion, but in the modern period it seems like relaxation and eventual merger of the two particular races/ethnicities is more likely.

Maybe the way to make sense of this is that casual contact creates occasional “pockets” of intense interaction, where (for example) intermarriages and business relationships have effects similar to the military effects you describe – maybe not so much on the married couple/business partners who likely are less prejudiced, but in their immediate social circle.

And maybe short-term studies of casual contact miss some of these effects that happen rarely but lead to decreased prejudice.

Just guessing here….

Bonus Yglesias blogging wherein I quote myself: Matt thinks it's no big deal that potential Al Qaeda affiliates tried to contact Latin American drug dealers, because they failed. I think this is wrong, and part of the broader framework of the left wrongly thinking our porous borders are no big deal for national security. I babbled:

I’m going to somewhat disagree with Matt on this. If the African guys truly were Al Qaeda, then the incident shows an attempt, an attempt, by Al Qaeda to link to drug trafficking networks. That’s worrying because drug traffickers and immigrant smugglers have fairly effective systems of getting through US borders. It isn’t something to dismiss as unimportant.

Unfortunately, wingnuts on the right have grossly distorted and exaggerated it to serve their own loony interests on Cuba and Venezuela. It’s really a problem that one of our two political parties has no interest in actual, effective policy.

The worst argument used by the left against tightening border security

I've heard both Arianna Huffington and Bob Scheer make this argument at Left Right and Center: there's no reason to worry about terrorists slipping over the US border with illegal immigrants some time in the near future, because there's no record that they've ever done it before.

I don't understand why they're so strongly defending the Bush Administration's inaction during the nine months prior to 9-11. Sure, Condi Rice can say that no terrorists had smashed buildings with planes before, but it's not a hard threat to anticipate, people did in fact anticipate it, and the Bushies still did nothing. That's inexcusable, and I don't see why the left is defending his performance.

With immigration-control friends like these....

...on this NPR program, people like me who favor a balance between immigration and emigration don't have a chance of finding a good outcome. Racists on the right, ideologically-blinded people on the left, and centrists enjoying the ride of cheap labor, combine for a bad policy mix.

I had thought FAIR was in the realm of reasonable politics, but if they're associating with racists then they're worse than useless.