Reader response: Are immigrants 'invading' America? (No.)

Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels

In response to my "End the Border Patrol" column for The Week, a reader who identifies himself as a retired Air Force colonel writes:

What we have on our nation's southern border is no less than an invasion. An invasion of people trying to enter this country illegally--i.e., against the law. And who makes the laws of this country? You know good and well--Congress. So, we obey the laws that exist and if Congress wants something else, than they should DO THEIR JOBS.

Attila the Hun invaded Western Europe with fewer people and this nation cannot let its borders and sovereignty be disregarded as being done by these modern day invaders.

There's more, but you get the idea.

My response, in part:

I thank you for your letter, but I must strenuously disagree with your use of the word "invasion." As a member of the military, you surely know better.

If war is politics by other means, than an invasion is pointedly and purposefully political: A concerted attempt to commandeer the rule of people and land from the current owners.

The current wave of migration we see is no such thing. People and their families are fleeing poverty and violence in order to pursue better lives. They seem willing to work for that chance at improvement; I see no evidence they are trying to usurp American self-government, that they're trying to take property that isn't theirs, or even that they're really all that organized, "caravans" notwithstanding.

If you found your family threatened by violence, and yourself unable to financially support them, I daresay you might try to move to someplace you could. You would not be invading that new place.

Anti-immigration activists try to treat migration in militaristic terms, as invaders. Actually, they more closely resemble the pilgrims whose migration to America planted the seeds for the holiday we collectively celebrate tomorrow. That's no invasion.

This is a pretty lousy argument against reparations

I'm not sure how an effective reparations program would work, but I do know that this is probably about the worst argument against it:

  The room grew raucous at times, with spectators hissing at Republican witnesses and Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the subcommittee’s senior Republican, when he spoke against the measure. In a comment that rippled throughout the hearing, Mr. Johnson suggested that great black leaders like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington thought African-Americans should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. 

“Those great leaders encouraged people to take responsibility for their own lives, because that gives every human being a greater sense of meaning and satisfaction,” he said, adding that the bill “risks communicating the opposite message.”

 It's the old "bootstraps for thee" argument, and it presumes that whites have achieved their greater wealth by dint of hard work and grit, so why can't African Americans do the same? The problem is that a lot of wealth that whites hold they hold by dint of A) government action and B) being the "right" race.

Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrated the falsity of the bootstraps argument in his "Case for Reparations" that kicked off the current debate, a few years ago in The Atlantic.

When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” 

 The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.” 

 Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.” 

 That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle.

So the bootstraps argument is just so much hooey. African Americans haven't been given access to the same types of programs that allowed whites to get ahead. Generations of white Americans didn't get a better mortgages than their black neighbor across town because they had "taken responsibility for their own life." They had the advantage of policies that reflected this country's longstanding white supremacy. That's one starting point for any honest discussion of reparations.

Are Iran and Al Qaeda allies? Prove it.

This story sounds very familiar:

Administration officials are briefing Congress on what they say are ties between Iran and Al Qaeda, prompting skeptical reactions and concern on Capitol Hill that the White House could invoke the war authorization passed in 2001 as legal cover for military action against Tehran.

Why skeptical? Well, remember...

  Iran is a majority Shiite Muslim nation while Al Qaeda is a hard-line Sunni group whose members generally consider Shiites to be apostates. The two have often fought on opposing sides of regional conflicts, including the Syrian war.

If you're of a certain age, you'll remember how the Bush Administration tried so very hard to connect Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was completely false. Some Republicans, naturally, choose to believe it anyway. But asserting that connection helped the administration make the case for the unnecessary and disastrous invasion of Iraq. Given that history, there's every reason to make the U.S. government prove this latest allegation beyond a reasonable doubt.

 For the moment: I sure as hell don't believe it.

Pelosi won't even officially *criticize* Trump

Washington Post:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Wednesday ruled out a congressional censure of President Trump, a move some lawmakers have suggested as a less divisive alternative to launching impeachment proceedings. “No. I think censure is just a way out,” Pelosi told reporters. “If you’re going to go, you’ve got to go. In other words, if the goods are there, you must impeach, and censure is nice, but it is not commensurate with the violations of the Constitution, should we decide that’s the way to go.”

Great! Let's get the impeachment process started, then! Right?

On Wednesday, Pelosi cautioned against a scenario where Trump is impeached by the Democratic-led House only to be acquitted by the Republican-led Senate. “I don’t think you should have an inquiry unless you’re ready to impeach,” she said. “What I believe is that when we go forward, if we go forward, it has to go deep. It can’t be the Democrats impeach in the House; the Senate, in his view, exonerates. . . . This president must be held accountable."

Let's be clear: Pelosi is offering paralysis and prayers, essentially, as opposition to Trump's presidency.

She's made it clear that she believes the president is in violation of the law and Constitution, but won't impeach because Senate Republicans won't convict. Censure would be a half-measure, to be sure, but it would at least put Congress on record noting the president's transgressions and criticizing him for it. Pelosi says full measures are the only way to go, but won't pursue them or half-measures. That leaves Americans with nothing but an outlaw president and a Congress to feckless to face him head-on.

Me @TheWeek: Trump is not a nationalist

My latest:

The president claims to put "America first." But in the most important sense — defending the integrity of this country's governance and elections from foreign interference — the man is a good old-fashioned globalist. There is no such thing as a "sh--hole country" if Trump himself is the beneficiary; the president will do business with anybody willing to help him profit, personally or electorally.

Me @TheWeek: Elizabeth Warren's polarizing plan to make college free

My latest:

Today's rising student debt is largely a result of policy choices. The short version of the story is that student debt is rising because college tuition is rising — and college tuition is rising, in large part, because state legislatures across the country have slowly been abandoning their commitment to fund public colleges and universities.

The Great Recession is one of the villains of this story; it prompted legislatures to cut their funding commitments to higher education, and for the most part, those cuts were never restored. According to one analysis, state funding for public colleges and universities in 2018 was $7 billion below its 2008 levels — and that is after adjusting for inflation. One way public four-year institutions have stayed in business is by raising tuition by an average of 36 percent during that decade. It is no coincidence that student debt in the United States quadrupled, from $345 billion to nearly $1.4 trillion, between 2004 and 2017.

Today's young students aren't less responsible than their predecessors. They're just getting far less help.

Me @TheWeek: Reacting to the Mueller report

My take:

The Trump White House is just a high-level version of a sleazy pawn shop where the owner traffics in stolen goods. Everybody knows the owner is profiting from crime — including the owner — but as long as as he keeps his fingerprints off the precise moment the goods are stolen, he's allowed to keep making his living off the fruits of other people's wrongdoing. 

It may not be technically illegal. But it sure isn't right.

Please read the whole thing!

John Bolton's purple prose

Man, this is some speechwriting from John Bolton, announcing new sanctions on Cuba.

I have expected him to continue: "Who knows what evil lurks within? ONLY THE SHADOW KNOWS!"

Mueller preview: Maybe the president is innocent. So why does he keep acting like a thug?

There’s a reason so many people think Donald Trump is corrupt: He keeps giving them reason.

On Thursday, a redacted version of the Mueller report will be released to the public. Perhaps the president is right: Maybe the document will exonerate him of accusations of colluding with Russia to win the 2016 election, and maybe it will further offer reason to believe that Attorney General William Barr was correct when he decided not to pursue allegations the president obstructed justice by firing then-FBI Director James Comey.

It could happen.

But if that is the case, Trump and Barr have done the worst possible job laying the ground for the president’s innocence. Instead, they’ve seemingly done everything possible to make the release of the report look like a cover-up.

For example: The principles of transparency would usually suggest that the public — or, at least, the media — have a chance to look at the report and begin to digest its findings before Barr holds his press conference.

But that’s not the plan. As of Wednesday evening, Barr’s press conference is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. ET. The report is scheduled to come out 90 minutes later, at 11 a.m. ET. That means the attorney general’s time before the press is not designed to enable accountability or to answer any tough questions that arise from reading the report itself — it is, instead, a preemptive strike, a chance to start spinning the public before the public has a chance to see and hear the facts for itself.




The release of the Mueller report, in other words, seems expertly designed to raise suspicions instead of calm them.

It doesn’t help that Barr has taken weeks to release the report. It doesn’t help that the attorney general has been giving the Trump Administration a sneak preview of its findings. It doesn’t help that the president, who has spent weeks proclaiming Mueller’s investigation found him innocent, has in recent days waged an angry campaign criticizing its release. And it won’t help if the report released to the public appears to be overly redacted.

It’s reasonable to ask: Are these the actions of an innocent man running an honest administration?

If the president has somehow avoided committing a crime during the last two years, congratulations to him. But that falls short of the standard we typically expect of our leaders: We don’t expect them merely to avoid transgression, but also to avoid the very appearance of avoiding transgression. The reason is simple: Even the appearance of wrongdoing shakes the faith of citizens in their leaders and government. Americans don’t have to believe that their leaders are good men and women; they do deserve not to have to wonder constantly if those leaders are on the wrong side of the law.

No, it’s not always the case that where there is smoke, there is fire. But the president is constantly enveloped in a smog of lies: As of March 17, he had told more than 9,000 documented lies since ascending to the Oval Office.

With regard to the Mueller inquiry: He lied during the campaign about his business ties with Russia. He orchestrated a false press release about his son’s meetings with Russian officials. He tried suggesting there were listening devices in the Oval Office when he met Comey — there weren’t. At every step of public inquiry and official investigation, he has thrown a bundle of untruth in the path of those seeking the truth.

Simply put, he keeps acting like a thug. If the Mueller report does exonerate Donald Trump, that’s too bad. Sure, it’ll keep him out of court. But the public will keep having every reason to believe in his corruption.

Netflix Queue: The Highwaymen

Three thoughts about Netflix's The Highwaymen coming up after the trailer...

 

 • This is a Bonnie and Clyde movie that, for the most part, is lacking in Bonnie and Clyde: The filmmakers figure you've already seen the classic movie and there's no reason to compete with that. So it's the case that we literally don't see fully the faces of our fugitives until the very last seconds before they're ambushed by Texas lawmen in a hail of bullets. The story concentrates, in this case, on the hunters, played by a laconic Kevin Costner and his sidekick Woody Harrelson, playing Woody Harrelson.

 • Structurally, it plays out as a cross between the fantastic Hell or High Water and Unforgiven, but without having quite as much on its mind as either of those movies. Maybe the most potent theme is about how thrall to celebrity can turn regular people into monsters. After Bonnie and Clyde are killed, local townspeople are shown in a near-riot situation, plucking souvenirs from the criminals' bodies. 20,000 people attended Bonnie's funeral, we're told at the end of the movie; 15,000 went to Clyde's. The overall outlook borders on fascist: The masses are unruly and easily thrilled; the leaders are corrupt and phony. The only hope? Men with guns and blood on their hands.

• Still, it's a reasonable evening's entertainment. I realized, watching it, that you don't really find quiet adult-oriented crime dramas like this at the multiplex anymore — they're either indie movies (like Hell or High Water) or they're shunted off to cable channels and streaming services, as is the case here. Unforgiven, meanwhile, grossed $159 million in 1992 — kind of a big deal, and good for 11th for the year at the box office. Maybe that's possible today, but I kind of doubt it. Too bad.

FilmStruck is avenged! Long live Criterion Channel!

Criterion Channel finally launched today, a replacement for the late lamented FilmStruck. I've already watched my first movie. A few thoughts after the trailer...
 

 • Since FilmStruck's demise, I've made a concerted effort to build up my DVD collection with classic movies. I'm glad that Criterion is here, but I don't trust streaming services to have many of the movies I want when I want them. Big corporations that own the rights to those movies have already demonstrated that letting the public have access is a lesser concern, profit-wise, than promoting their more recent catalog. So I'm glad to have Criterion to expand and deepen my movie education. But I'm still buying DVDs.

 • My first movie on Criterion? Drive a Crooked Road, a tight little movie from the noir collection. It reminded me of Drive, only with Mickey Rooney (!?) in the Ryan Gosling role, and if everybody spent Drive talking about how short Ryan Gosling is. Also fun: It was written by Blake Edwards, whom I associate with kinda vulgar sex farces from the 1970s and '80s.

 • Good news on the kid front: Criterion has Godzilla movies. My son is very happy.