USA Today runs an interesting article about the DREAM Act, which Senate Republicans torpedoed this week, and which would have paved the way for many illegal immigrants to become legal.

As journalist Alan Gomez notes, the “less publicized part of the [DREAM Act] is that the Pentagon is pushing for it as a means to staff the armed forces.”

When the Department of Defense published its three-year strategic plan, it listed the DREAM Act as a way it could replenish its ranks.

“If we needed to expand the pool of eligible youth, the (DREAM) initiative would be one of several ways to do it,” spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said in an e‑mail.

Retired Army lieutenant colonel Margaret Stock says a “crisis in military manpower” is looming as the population ages and the economy improves. She says the military struggled to recruit enough people when the economy was booming just a few years ago because people had more employment options.

“DREAM would give us the ability to tap into a huge number of people who grew up in the United States, were educated here, they talk like Americans, they look like Americans and their loyalty lies with America,” says Stock, a former West Point professor who teaches political science at the University of Alaska-Anchorage.

[…]

The military part of the act worries Jorge Mariscal, director of Latino studies at the University of California-San Diego.

He says many illegal immigrant families are too poor to pay for college.

“Our concern is that people are just going to get trapped for economic reasons into the military,” says Mariscal, who otherwise supports the DREAM Act.

A few thoughts on this: First, we might be experiencing a “crisis in military manpower” because we’re fighting too many wars and trying to do too much abroad, rather than as a necessary consequence of our aging population.

Second, Mariscal’s concern about illegal immigrants joining the military out of financial considerations rather than support for the nation’s wars makes them…a lot like the people who are in the military already. In a poll of active-duty military personnel published in the April 12, 2010 Defense News, responses to the question “What are the three most important reasons you would stay in the military?” were as follows:

• Job security (50%)
• Pension (49%)
• Patriotism (48%)
• Health care for my family and me (42%)
• Career satisfaction (32%)
• Pay (31%)
• Educational opportunities (21%)
• Travel, adventure (16%)
• Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (11%)

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Credit: Jamie Rose for The New York Times[/caption]

 
Finally, those in Congress who support American militarism but oppose immigration have a few contradictions to reconcile. The late Samuel Huntington, whose last book was searingly unpersuasive and draped a veneer of scholarly credibility over rank nativism, nonetheless got it right when he wrote that

[W]ars have furthered assimilation of immigrants not only by reducing their numbers but also by giving them the opportunity and the impetus to demonstrate their loyalty to America. Readiness to fight and if necessary die in war cemented their attachment to their new home and made it difficult if not impossible for nativist, anti-immigrant groups to oppose their full membership in American society.

So if you’re in any way interested in “assimilation,” getting people into the military is one of the best ways to do it.

Further, when you have DOD pushing for a bill on the grounds that it provides for a future where the nation’s armed forces can be fully staffed, and congressional war hawks spiking it because–well, for whatever variety of reasons they might have–it raises the question what the pro-war, anti-immgration folks’ plan is for perpetuating American hegemony while keeping immigrants out of the armed forces. Keeping unemployment at 10%? Cranking up pay and benefits even faster, making the military budget even less sustainable?

Actually, one additional point: Mark Haas wrote an interesting article a few years back positing a “geriatric peace” on the grounds that large and powerful countries may age so fast that they may not have concentrations of young men (or women) needed to fight and die in war. In that article, Haas wrote that

The United States is currently the youngest of all the Group of Eight nations. Because it has the highest fertility and immigration rates of all these countries, it will maintain, even strengthen, this position in coming decades.

[…]

Both the opportunities and challenges for U.S. security in an aging world are substantial. The United States’ aging crisis is less acute than in the other great powers, and its ability to pay the costs associated with this phenomenon is significantly better than most of these states. These facts, however, should not disguise the magnitude of these costs for the United States nor lull U.S. leaders into inaction on this critical issue. The more the United States maintains its enviable demographic position (compared with the other great powers) and relatively superior ability to pay for the costs of its elderly population, the more it will be able both to preserve its own position of international power dominance and to help other states address their aging (and other) problems when it is in U.S. interests to do so. A critical implication of these facts is that such domestic policies as means-testing Social Security and Medicare payments, raising the retirement age to reflect increases in life expectancies, maintaining largely open immigration policies to help keep the United States’ median age relatively low, encouraging individual behaviors that result in better personal health, and perhaps above all restraining the rising costs of its health-care system are critical international security concerns. A defining political question of the twenty-first century for U.S. international interests is whether U.S. leaders have sufficient political will and wisdom to implement these and related policies. The more proactive U.S. leaders are in minimizing the scope of its aging population and the costs associated with it, the more protected U.S. international interests will be. To ignore these costs, or even to delay implementing various reforms designed to limit their size, will jeopardize the level of global influence and security that the United States enjoys today.

Food for thought.

On the National Interest’s Skeptics blog, I have a new post about my lack of outrage over the revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book about Obama and Afghanistan.

Unlike John Bolton and Heritage, I don’t think that the President’s comment that we can withstand another terrorist attack like 9–11 is offensive. After all, we can, and saying so doesn’t mean you want to try it.

As I put it there:

What’s truly outrageous is the notion that the only valid response to terrorism is cowering fear at home and endless warfare abroad. Somehow, for much the right, crediting our enemies with the ability to wreck our society is required, and it is verboten to say that we are something other than a pathetic, brittle nation that cannot manage adversity.

I also fail to get upset about the President’s worry that expanding the war in Afghanistan would alienate his base. Politics not only doesn’t stop at the water’s edge; it shouldn’t. I’m not sure exactly when popular checks on the war-making power went out of style, but I think we could use more of that in Afghanistan, not less. If pandering to the base can get us out of there one of these years, pander away.

The solution to bad policies is better politics, not no politics, to paraphase.

*I also recommend Paul Pillar’s post on the same subject. He says that the real news here is the Pentagon’s refusal to offer the President a policy alternative between population centric counter-insurgency and exit.

That’s not just my view; that’s the view of writer Barry Estabrook, an ardent critic of the food industry (“Politics of the Plate”), writing at The Atlantic. You needn’t go along completely with Estabrook’s dim view of industrialized agriculture to realize he’s right in one of his central contentions: “the proposed rules would disproportionately impose costs upon” small producers, including traditional, low-tech and organic farmers and foodmakers selling to neighbors and local markets. Even those with flawless safety records or selling low-risk types of foodstuff could be capsized by new paperwork and regulatory burdens that larger operations will be able to absorb as a cost of doing business. (Earlier here and here.)

Things could reach a showdown any day now. The food safety bill had stalled in the Senate under criticism from small farmer advocates, as the New York Times acknowledged the other day in an absurdly slanted editorial that somehow got printed as a news article. Now Harry Reid is talking about forcing the bill through before the midterms. Significantly — as advocates of the bill trumpet — large foodmakers and agribusiness concerns have signed off on the bill as acceptable to them. Well, yes, they would, wouldn’t they?

I was on TV the other week (Hearst news service) trying to make a few of these points. I borrowed my closing line from an excellent Steve Chapman column, which I was unable to credit on air, but can credit here.

Regarding ObamaCare’s first adverse-selection death spiral, Julie Rovner posts this over at Shots, the NPR health blog:

The advocacy group Health Care for America Now was the first to bring the action to widespread attention. “Even for the insurance industry this behavior is surprisingly brazen,” HCAN Executive Director Ethan Rome wrote in a blog entry for the Huffington Post. “They don’t like the rules, so they’re going to take their ball and go home.”

But the insurance industry trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans rejected HCAN’s contention that the companies’ refusal to sell to all comers is somehow a violation of a promise made earlier this year by AHIP CEO Karen Ignagni that insurance companies would comply with regulations regarding children and pre-existing conditions.

In an interview, AHIP spokesman Robert Zirkelbach said Ignagni was responding only to promises that children wouldn’t be excluded from their parents’ plans and that if the kids are covered, the policies would include treatment of their pre-existing condition.

What emerged in the regulations, however, Zirkelbach said, was, in effect, a requirement that insurance companies accept children even if they are already sick. That, he said, would be tantamount to exactly what companies want to avoid with the adult population — letting people wait until they are sick to sign up for insurance. Which is exactly why the insurance industry is so insistent on a coverage mandate: It needs premiums of healthy people to help cover the costs of those who are not.

In effect, ObamaCare supporters said to the public, “Give the government more power over insurance companies and the government will make health insurance more accessible and secure.” These few paragraphs capture how that strategy has turned into a cat-and-mouse game with insurers, and is turning ObamaCare’s most attractive selling point — guaranteed coverage for kids with pre-existing conditions — into an empty promise.

In stark contrast stands the individual insurance market. Yes, insurers there generally (but not always) charge premiums that correspond to risk, and sometimes turn people down — but that market has also been remarkably innovative when it comes to protecting sick people from higher premiums. RAND Health economist Susan Marquis and her colleagues write, “a large number of people with health problems do obtain coverage” in the individual market: “Our analysis confirms earlier studies’ findings that there is considerable risk pooling in the individual market and that high risks are not charged premiums that fully reflect their higher risk.” Even as Congress debated ObamaCare, UnitedHealthcare introduced an innovative new product that protects people with employer-sponsored coverage from facing sky-high premiums when they leave their company plan. Economist John Cochrane predicts that further innovations can make health insurance more secure and improve the quality of medical care.

Which process seems more likely to improve quality and reduce costs? The political process, where politicians and regulators try to force insurance companies to act against their financial self-interest? Or the market process, where self-interest forces insurers to find innovative ways to give consumers more of what they want?

The Government Accountability Office released Congressional testimony this week looking at Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. TANF, which replaced unrestricted welfare in 1996, has reduced welfare rolls and encouraged recipients to obtain work. Unfortunately, TANF’s goals have been undermined.

The GAO notes that “work participation rates … do not appear to be achieving the intended purpose of encouraging states to engage specified proportions of TANF adults in work activities.”

States are required to have at least 50 percent of eligible TANF recipients from single parent families participating in work activities. However, states are given various credits and exemptions that significantly reduce the number of recipients required to work. As a result, only about 30 percent of TANF recipients engage in “work activities,” which is often liberally defined. (This has been the case before and during the recession.)

Moreover, while TANF has successfully reduced the budgetary cost of cash-welfare, overall federal spending on anti-poverty programs has increased dramatically. According to a chart from Brian Riedl, anti-poverty spending has increased an inflation-adjusted 89 percent over the present decade:

I previously discussed how TANF enrollment has dropped since its passage in 1996 while food stamp enrollment has greatly increased. A food stamp user interviewed by the New York Times indicates one reason for the trend:

‘It used to be easier to go on cash assistance,’ she said as she left a food stamp office in Brooklyn this month. ‘You didn’t have to go to work, you didn’t have to report every day to an office and sign in and sign out. Now, if you don’t go to those group job meetings in the mornings, they shut down your whole welfare case. So that’s why I just get food stamps.’

Not surprisingly, the cost of the food stamps program has gone through the roof:

The desirability of federal anti-poverty programs in the midst of difficult economic times is a sensitive topic. However, with so many Americans currently in need of assistance, now is actually a good time to discuss the role of government in taking care of the less fortunate. As a Cato essay on welfare and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families argues, the federal government isn’t the best option.

Yesterday, I mentioned a recent report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General on some potentially improper instances of FBI monitoring of domestic anti-war groups. It occurs to me that it also provides a useful data point that’s relevant to last week’s post about the pitfalls of thinking about the proper limits of government information gathering exclusively in terms of “privacy.”

As the report details, an agent in the FBI’s Pittsburgh office sent a confidential source to report on organizing meetings for anti-war marches held by the anarchist Pittsburgh Organizing Group (POG). The agent admitted to OIG that his motive was a general desire to cultivate an informant rather than any particular factually grounded investigative purpose. Unsurprisingly, reports generated by the source contained “no information remotely relevant to actual or potential criminal activity,” and at least one report was “limited to identifying information about the participants in a political discussion together with characterizations of the contents of the speech of the participants.” The agent dutifully recorded that at one such gathering “Meeting and discussion was primarily anti anything supported by the main stream [sic] American.”

Now, in fact, the OIG suggests that the retention in FBI records of personally identifiable information about citizens’ political speech, unrelated to any legitimate investigation into suspected violations of federal law, may well have violated the Privacy Act. But if we wanted to pick semantic nits, we could surely make the argument that this is not really an invasion of “privacy” as traditionally conceived—and certainly not as conceived by our courts. The gatherings don’t appear to have been very large—the source was able to get the names and ages of all present—but they were, in principle, announced on the Web and open to the public.

Fortunately, the top lawyer at the Pittsburgh office appears to have been duly appalled when he discovered what had been done, and made sure the agents in the office got a refresher training on the proper and improper uses of informants. But as a thought experiment, suppose this sort of thing were routine. Suppose that any “public” political meeting, at least for political views regarded as out of the mainstream, stood a good chance of being attended by a clandestine government informant, who would record the names of the participants and what each of them said, to be filed away in a database indefinitely. Would you think twice before attending? If so, it suggests that the limits on state surveillance of the population appropriate to a free and democratic society are not exhausted by those aimed at protecting “privacy” in the familiar sense.

Quoting great classical liberal minds such as Milton Friedman, Gary Becker and Mario Vargas Llosa, Spain’s former drug Czarina Araceli Manjón-Cabeza endorsed drug legalization today in a compelling op-ed [in Spanish] published in El País, Spain’s leading newspaper. Just a week earlier, Felipe González, Spain’s former Primer Minister, also came out in support of drug legalization.

Manjón-Cabeza takes particular aim at the UN International Narcotics Control Board for its criticisms of the different decriminalization and harm-reduction policies implemented in recent years in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Spain, among other countries. She calls the INCB’s views “inadmissible.”

She concluded by calling prohibition a “savage and inefficient instrument that is not the ‘solution’ but instead a big part of the problem.” Manjón-Cabeza says that insisting on prohibitionist policies amounts to “insanity.” Finally, some common sense talk from a former drug czar.