NYCweboy

A World of Disaster

And I'm not just talking about for Sen. Obama in W.VA last night.

For those who didn't read my old blog, I study urban inequality and have worked with non-profit responders to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and with survivors of September 11 in Lower Manhattan.  I don't consider myself a disaster specialist, but I've certainly seen my own small devastating share in this century.  I'm floored by the tragedies that befell our country on 9/11/01 (almost 3,000 killed and hundreds of thousands personally impacted as survivors/witnesses of the attack, or as relatives of the lost) and beginning on August 29, 2005 (when Katrina made landfall and worked its way across the region, followed by almost a week of flooding in the city of New Orleans and months of water removal.  Almost 2,000 dead, half a million temporarily or permanently displaced, and 300,000 homes damaged or destroyed).  But they PALE in comparison to what we're witnessing in China and Burma right now (and these are only 2 natural disasters of countless across the globe this century).

At least 12,000 dead in China, and rescue efforts compromised and delayed because the damage is so unstable.  I think that's roughly the student body here at MIT.  Over 30,000 dead and almost as many missing after a cyclone in Burma, with a government that won't let in international aid.  The town I grew up in had about 35,000 people in it.  Effectively, my hometown and current school have just been destroyed.

Morning Lady Morsels... For Those Of Us Watching More Than Our Figure

An all female survey of the web today:

• Angry Black Bitch writes one of the best things I've seen on the practical realities of being a community organizer and activist. Admirable as all hell.
• Since I no longer have RedStar (*sob*), let's go to Pam Spaulding for the resignation of Alphonso Jackson
• Among many great things to think about today at Feministing, check out this post for the complexities of abstinence programs and double standards.
• Speaking of standards, Amanda Marcotte offers the question of what makes the deal breaker.
• And Michelle Malkin looks at love and politics... from the conservative side.
• One of the reasons I admire LaShawn Barber - much deeper knowledge of the recording industry than I have.
• I'm Maureen Dowd, and I'm a Sarcastic Bitch. It's just that simple.
• In the Hollywood minute, let's give credit to Melissa over at Shakes for driving Jay Leno to an apology for "your gayest look"
• Also, in the Hollywood minute, let's appreciate some women's humor:
• Okay, one more Feministing thing, because I, too am the face of feminism:

That's Mitt In The Corner... That's Huck In The Spotlight...

And that's me, losing my religion.

In my initial attempts to sort out the GOP field, I pretty much ignored Mike Huckabee; the place he now occupies, as likely go-to guy for the religious right, I had pegged initially to Sam Brownback.  But Brownback fizzled as Giulani, Romney and McCain burned... and as everyone flirted with the idea that Fred Thompson could unite the party.  Now Thompson's in, the party's more fractured than before, and so it falls to the affable seeming Governor of Arkansas (and my, we've been down that road already haven't we - and I mean literally: Huckabee is also from a place called Hope) to take his place as the anointed one.

Read that as you will; one of Huckabee's best assets and worst tendencies is to overstate his religious cred the way Giuliani uses a noun, a verb, and 9/11 in almost every sentence.  Huckabee has claimed to be the Christian leader this nation needs, and suggested at one forum that his success of late is proof of the power of prayer. As The Prospect says, God isn't just his co-pilot, He's also Huck's Iowa Field Director.

Before we get to Huckabee's recent rapid rise, though, we should talk about the guy who seems most rattled by it - Mitt Romney, who after watching his numbers hurt severely by Huckabee's success, caved in and gave "the speech" which was meant to be a discussion of his Mormon faith.  That speech, much hyped, happened this afternnon in Texas, and it was, as things are with Romney, both more and less than anyone expected.

Are You Sure Love Is The Name Of This Game?

Well, as we reach the end of the week, a couple of stories that caught my attention continued to unwind, so it's worth a follow up.

The first one is the continuing reverberations of the credit crunch... which I'm thinking now I'll cover separately; and the other was the unwinding of the week's opening news about Karl Rove.

Much as I suspected, the overall coverage and reaction has been surprisingly unanimous: admire his tactics, or hate his results, few people seemed sorry or surprised to see Rove go.  That included a remarkably wide swath of conservative commentators, who offered considerable insight into party politics and the general sense of malaise that's fallen on the right since last November (or earlier, as they're beginning to realize).

What conservatives still can't seem to face, though, is making the link between Rove's failures and the larger context he's created which will guide the 2008 election - that by making winning the only priority, he's a key reason that what the GOP stands for has become totally muddied.

Burn, Baby, Burn

So the Immigration Bill finally goes down in flames.  I didn't cover the absurd events of the past few days - though I vastly enjoyed Malkin's minute-by-minute accounting and speed typing skills (say what you will, the woman has a career as a transcriber should this whole writing a blog thing fail her).  But in terms of adding to what was being said, I didn't have much - I thought bringing it back up would fail, and it did.

That's due, at least in part to the fact that the underlying impressions of the bill had not changed - conservatives, already angry, became... well, angrier at the prospect that Bush would continue to pursue a policy they clearly disliked.  That's what you get for pandering to your base.  Bush and his people seem the least savvy of politicians in missing the notion that the base has always been dictating terms, not the Bushies. Add to the conservative anger the lukewarm support of even the most ardent pro-Mexican immigrationists, and you have the recipe you had before: a strong core group of Republicans enhanced by a swing-y group of Democrats whose constituencies look a lot like the Republicans as well.

Again, I think Reid termed the bill's failure a win, and it certainly looks that way now - the base is now furious with the Republican Party's apparatus, exacting painful monetary revenge in refusing to donate and paralyzing a number of Presidential campaigns (notably Sam Brownback's, who folded like a card table in today's vote; as well as John McCain, who has essentially torched any hope of seriously contending for the nomination). While others - notably Mitt Romney - are now free to run against the current administration, in many ways they can't: not while they feel obligated to defend our continued involvement in Iraq.

Meanwhile, liberal blogs have done what they've done all along - virtually ignoring a failure on Reid's part as spectacular as the Iraq funding vote (apparently, not mustering a majority of the Senate, never mind your own party, never mind the 60 votes needed for cloture, is only a problem when talking about Iraq). Edward Kennedy can fume about close minded Republicans, but he apparently has nothing to say about Jon Tester, Claire McCaskill or Debbie Stabenow, all of whom voted against cloture as well.  If you can't strongarm the novice junior Senators in your own party when the chips are supposedly down, what leverage do you have, really?

In truth, this bill remained, to the end, a disastrous hodgepodge; shoehorned into a vote without following the normal process of hearings, discussions, and amendments that would, most likely, have indicated that the whole approach here was all wrong. The best its most ardent (read: mildly less lukewarm than the other) supporters could muster that they expected a completely different bill, with less onerous provisions for undocumented aliens to go through, to pass the House and dominate what would ultimately land on the President's desk.  Of all the fictions around this bill, this one may be the most dangerous, if only for being untested; the reality there is that the precarious coalition of Senators required to pass the Senate bill would have completely fallen apart over relaxing the punitive aspects of documenting the undocumented: punishment and suffering is a key element of what's animating the conservative side of this debate.

I reiterate, nothing is going to change on immigration if we maintain a misplaced focus solely on Southern border and mainly undocumented Latin Americans.  The breakdown of our immigration process is bigger than that, and the wage and labor issues tied up in the Mexican workforce are issues - again - that immigration changes alone can't really solve.  Moreover, conservatives have something right in this whole thing that Democrats ignore at their peril: the failure of the Bush Administration to effectively deport violent criminals, known terrorists and others is a scandal.  As much as we don't want immigration officials swooping down on law abiding, if "shadowy" communities around the country, there are thousands of clear-cut, enforceable cases that could be addressed and dealt with that even liberals can acknowledge as requiring deportation. 

Still, I suspect the healthy aspects of this failure are he big news here: the fact that large numbers of Americans made it clear that something, just not this something needs to be done about immigration is a message that I think got through. And it's clear that traditional liberal pleas for sympathy for the undocumented "in the shadows" will only go so far; this story needs a fresh take, and less blanket assertions that every illegal border crossing is a wild, romantic quest for freedom and the American way. Even clearer though - and it will be, next year, when Republicans likely face electoral disasters in almost any urban area - is that an active conservative effort to simply demonize "brown people" is a recipe for disaster.  The next time we contemplate immigration reform - and despite the doomsayers, we will - everyone will need to come up with better arguments, face up to certain realities and try something different. Or we can do this dance again in 2009.  The choice is ours.

Taking The Red Heat

And just as we were getting back to the love, Red offers up a new thought that I have to take issue with:

At one point you said my concern re: 2-tier labor markets is a "labor issue." I don't think we can separate the two, and this point was reinforced for me tonight listening to NPR's Marketplace and hearing coverage of the role of corporate lobbying re: H-1B visas as well as workplace enforcement issues involved in the immigration bill. It's a false dichotomy to say trying to confront the issues of our two-tier labor market is something that should be taken up independently of addressing our immigration problem. They absolutely go hand-in-hand.

This is related to the discussion of immigration I've been having here... Red and I started a conversation after the "Ask A Weboy" post, which is one reason I wanted to say this and this about Leigh and her wise observations. But immigration... now there I'll stake my ground.

We Always Said We Were In Favor Of Open Source

... which of course includes the great public radio program which had the forsight to pluck me from obscurity. :)

Well, they've done it again... yesterday's show, on immigration featured several bloggers I admire and read regularly - including Ezra and Erick Erickson from RedState (the blog may be a lot for my lefty readers to take; Erickson, though is a savvy insider with a surprisingly nuanced view of the political scene, admittedly from the right) - and also featured... well, me. My comment on their site got read on air!

What's interesting to me about the discussion is that it lays bare the problems with the current immigration bill... and then everyone blithely discusses how best to get the bill passed. It's amazing how many people have been sucked into "let's pass this bad bill because the [unnamed] alternative is much worse."

I hope you will jump over there and take a listen - partly to support what they're doing, which I really think is a tremendously well thought through approach to linking talk radio and the web, and partly because the discussion helps to break down a lot of the issues I'm tracing over here.  I think what the discussion was missing - and it's a little frustrating - was someone to step back and ask, in a big picture way, if there wasn't a better way to frame the overall debate (partly this was due to the way the show's host made the discussion a bit narrowly focused on just the bill's problems). 

The most telling part of the show that I heard was when Ali Noorani and Erickson agreed that there was some way to pass the legislation - and then offered diametrically opposing views of what was needed.  Noorani in particular laid bare the theory the most ardent lefty bill pushers are selling - that this bad bill, combined with a much better bill in the House, will somehow pass both houses and wind up on the President's desk.  This is wishful - if this bad compromise squeaks through, one thing it will prove is that the Senate couldn't pass a bill friendlier to immigrants (i.e. dropping things like the touchbacks and the fines).  No conference committee could be expected to find a way to finesse that.

But again, take a listen, and then maybe glance at some of the stuff I've been talking about.

Ask A Weboy: Immigration

Red, a reader in Brighton, asks:

Is this what you mean when you talk about enforcement?

She's referring, I think, to a couple of passages I've written on immigration (here and here):

...what needs to happen here is a rethinking of how USCIS (the new acronym of INS) provides services and enforces immigration regulations.  Along with that, we should rework immigration process in a way that encourages all visitors to register with the agency and declare their intentions; from there we can determine how to best address the demands for residency and citizenship.  That, combined with basic enforcement of deporting criminal elements, visa jumpers, and businesses that tacitly or overtly encourage lawbreaking as a way to acquire cheap, exploitable labor, will encourage behavior we want, and discourage what we don't.

and:

Those who chose to enter illegally and undeclared would understand that failure to follow our processes would result in deportation, and that employers - all employers - would have to identify that workers were citizens or in some part of INS process, encouraged to help their workers become legal first, with punitive measures only as a last resort.

The Boston Globe article describes a recent raid in New Haven:

New Haven Mayor John DeStefano said he is filing a complaint with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security over a raid Wednesday that led to about 30 arrests, including many in immigrants' homes. He said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents failed to notify local authorities of the operation and lacked search warrants.

"They pushed into homes without warrants," DeStefano said. "This was just very aggressive intervention."

The city plans to forward witness statements to federal officials describing how parents were arrested in front of their children. Agents refused to identify themselves and told those in the houses to shut up, according to the statements.

The short answer is: No, that's not what I meant.

They're Still Coming To America, Today... That's Why

If I take grim satisfaction in being proved right that the Immigration Bill would fail, it's partly because my political prognostication skills are always in doubt, especially to me. I call 'em like I see 'em, but what I see, and what the nation sees, is often different.  I accept that, but I also try to learn from it.  And on this one, I just felt I had it down cold.  And I did.  Who knew?

Let's be clear: we have a huge problem around immigration in this country that needs to be addressed.  Where I think things get derailed is that the issue doesn't start with Mexico, or the 12-20 million undocumented folks already here.  Where it starts is with a fundamental disconnect about immigration policy, and using it as a means to stop entrance to the country, rather than to encourage a reasonable, understandable process wherein all applicants are considered in a timely fashion, and a process exists for at least some, if not all, to achieve their goals. Until we can face that the "immigration problem" is bigger than the narrow "debate" just held in the Senate, we can't, I think, get anywhere on this issue. And the test of how serious we are about immigration will be played out - as it probably always would have been - with the next Presidential election.

Which is why Democrats would be well served to press our candidates to start doing some of the hard work now to move the immigration discussion forward.

The Soft Bigotry Of Low Expectations

I've been trying to find a way to sum up the immigration debate lately - since last week's Memorial Day recess started - and it really only hit me this morning that the title of this piece fit.  George Bush's old campaign line about education really fits where the immigration debate is, and where it's (not) going.

Last week's break, which gave the "outside the beltway" folks around the country a chance to make their concerns more widely heard, made it clear that few people really like this bill.  Conservatives hate it, and longstanding fissures in the GOP have cracked open because of it; but trying to find an ardent supporter - outside of the sponsors - is all but impossible.

Instead, when liberals bother to talk about the bill - and, tellingly, I think, they don't talk about it all that much (though this Daily Kos series, I think, may be one of the best I've seen - if you only pick one link, pick this one) - it's surprisingly lukewarm.  Surprisingly, I'd say, because one thing conservatives insist is that the left is driving this bill through because "Amnesty" will help the Democrats in elections, bringing millions of undocumented into the process who will be anti-Republican (the argument itself a telling admission of how wrong some Republicans know they are on this).

But like The New York Times, most lefties I've seen are arguing in favor of a bill that doesn't exist, and pretending the bill we have is that bill.  "With just a few minor modifications" this argument goes, "we will have improved immigration."

Nice try.  Not likely to work.