It’s about 3:43 into this Louis Black segment. I think my expression is … appropriate.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon — Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
Back in Black — Glenn Beck’s Nazi Tourette’s | ||||
www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
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It’s about 3:43 into this Louis Black segment. I think my expression is … appropriate.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon — Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
Back in Black — Glenn Beck’s Nazi Tourette’s | ||||
www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
|
Mark Schneider, a former National Center for Education Statistics commissioner and current American Enterprise Institute scholar, has put together a very insightful — and disturbing — four-part blog series on the oft-cited Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and its creator, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Basically, Schneider writes, the much-hyped PISA figures very prominently in the “international benchmarking” of coming national curriculum standards — which the Obama Administration is coercing states to adopt — despite the paucity of meaningful evidence that doing well on PISA actually translates into desirable educational outcomes.
Now, Schneider throws out some debatable stuff himself. For instance, he emphasizes early-grade progress on the federal, National Asessessment of Educational Progress while ignoring utterly flat results for 17-year-olds. He also reiterates several things that I have already pointed out in “Behind the Curtain: Assessing the Case for National Curiculum Standards.” Still, his points overall are generally very fresh, and very important. It is also heartening to see growing critiques, even if somewhat oblique, of the national standards that many on the left and right are hoping to impose on us in the coming months.
The controversy over America’s immigration policy does not allow for easy answers, as the post below by Roger Pilon demonstrates. Even among those of us who advocate limited government and free markets, there is room for debate about what our immigration policy should be and the order in which needed reforms should be pursued.
Roger gives a welcome nod to the argument for “a serious guest-worker program,” which I’ve argued is essential to any successful reform effort. He also acknowledges that its implementation should be in concert with serious enforcement rather than delayed indefinitely by demands that we “control the border first.”
One place where I differ with my dear colleague is in his assertion that: “We no longer control our southern border, and Congress seems unable or unwilling to do anything about it.”
I’m not sure there ever was a time, at least in recent decades, that the U.S. government exerted “control” over the southern border in the sense that illegal entry was largely prevented. Sealing a 2,000-mile border remains a daunting challenge to those who advocate it.
If anything, our border with Mexico is more under control today than at any time in recent years. According to estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Department of Homeland Security, the number of people living in the United States illegally has dropped by more than 1 million in the past two years. That strongly implies that the net inflow of illegal immigrants across the border has declined sharply.
The main reason for the drop in net illegal immigration is probably the recession, but increased enforcement has arguably played a role as well. According to a recent paper by Dr. Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda of UCLA, the federal government has dramatically increased the resources it spends to “control the border.”
Consider: The U.S. Border Patrol’s annual budget has shot up by 714 percent since 1992, from $326 million to $2.7 billion. During the same period, the number of Border Patrol agents stationed along the southwest border has grown from 3,555 to 17,415. Hundreds of miles of fencing has been constructed along the border, much of it across private property.
If this is the mark of a government “unwilling to do anything,” I would shudder at the cost and intrusion of a more concerted effort.
The bottom line is that our “enforcement only” approach to controlling the border has failed, and it will continue to fail until we create a legal alternative to illegal immigration.
With all due respect to my colleague Roger Pilon, I can’t say I share his views on immigration. This is an old, old argument among libertarians, so it should come as no surprise that someone takes the opposing view here. Roger writes,
We no longer control our southern border, and Congress seems unable or unwilling to do anything about it. It hardly needs saying that a welfare state, in the age of terrorism, cannot have open borders.
It’s never really been the case, though, that we did control that southern border. Passage has always been relatively easy, at least aside from the natural dangers. This may be a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s a matter of historical fact. We can certainly change that, but it will only be by doing something relatively new.
As to the welfare state, don’t expect me to shed any tears. Our welfare state is already well on the path to bankruptcy, with or without illegal immigrants. Compared to the damage being done by native-born U.S. citizens and their cursedly long lifespans, the immigrants’ overall effects are quite small. It would be unkind of us to set up such an ill-considered system and then pin its inevitable demise on others.
And as to terrorism, there are measures we could take that would both combat it and increase individual liberty — like legalizing recreational drugs. Without the black market in drugs, we’d have a lot less to fear from terrorists, particularly on our southern border. I can’t say I favor a liberty-restricting policy to quash terrorism when a liberty-increasing policy seems to do even better.
Perhaps you remember the case of Ricci v. DiStefano, so much discussed during Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation process? To recap briefly: The city of New Haven had used a written test to determine which of its local firefighters would be considered for promotions. When the tests came back, it turned out that the high scorers were overwhelmingly Caucasian, and so the city—fearing a lawsuit from black and Latino firefighters who hadn’t made the cut—scrapped the results. Not, mind you, because the test was in any way discriminatory on its face, but because federal law frowns on any test that has a “disparate impact” on minority groups unless it can be shown to be both closely related to the requirements of the job and less uneven in its effects than comparable alternatives. A number of the white firefighters then sued, claiming that it was discriminatory to discard the test after the fact just because the high scorers were too pale. Bracket the question of how Sotomayor, as a circuit court judge, should have ruled. Clearly as a policy question, most conservatives seemed disposed to side with the firefighters, and in general conservatives have been highly skeptical of “disparate impact” standards. If the standards are facially neutral, and were not chosen with any pernicious intent (the argument runs), we should let the chips fall where they may. Sounds fairly compelling to me.
So it’s a little odd to see folks like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol casually talk about Elena Kagan’s “discrimination against the military” during her tenure as dean of Harvard Law School. All Kagan did, after all, was enforce Harvard’s preexisting rule requiring firms wishing to recruit through the school’s Office of Career Services to certify that they did not discriminate by sexual orientation. (This is not the same, incidentally, as “banning recruiters from campus”—the military did continue to recruit on campus via a student group.) It was a neutral rule that applied to any company that wished to avail itself of the Office of Career Service’s assistance, from which the military would have required a special exemption. Kristol clearly didn’t think much of the logic of “disparate impact” in the Ricci case, so why is he so quick to adopt it here? There are many good reasons to be worried about Kagan, not least her apparent fondness for an expansive conception of executive power, but a commitment to even-handed application of the rules is not among them.
Police in New York City conducted 575,000 “stops” in 2009. The actual number could be higher–depending on the number of stops the police decided not to record on paper. The ‘stop and search’ is a legally dubious tactic that persists largely because white, middle-class people are mostly unaffected by it. It is bad enough when the officers are in uniform, but gets worse when the police are in plain clothes and approach people rapidly. The police “target” may have only seconds to determine whether he/she is facing a mugging or a police stop. More here.
Today Politico Arena asks:
Does the level of support for Arizona’s immigration law demonstrate that immigration can be a potent campaign issue in the 2010 midterms?
My response:
Few national issues produce more heat and less light than immigration, as the reaction to Arizona’s recent legislation on the subject demonstrates. And with nearly three-quarters of Americans now saying they approve of allowing police to ask for documents, according to the latest Pew Research Center poll, and the Arizona law’s approval-disapproval rating at nearly 2 to 1, it’s hard to imagine that immigration will not be a factor in the coming elections.
The issues surrounding the immigration debate — criminal, economic, social — are often complex, and not always clear. But the underlying issue is clear: We no longer control our southern border, and Congress seems unable or unwilling to do anything about it. It hardly needs saying that a welfare state, in the age of terrorism, cannot have open borders. If the failure to control is partly a function of our substantive law — the absence of a serious guest-worker program, for example — then that needs to be corrected. But it needs to be done in concert with serious enforcement.
Yet what was President Obama’s response to the Arizona law, which at bottom was a call to Washington to do something? It was to ask the Justice Department to look for any legal problems in the law and to respond accordingly. It was to play the presumed political card, that is, rather than to address the underlying issue, which he’d promised to do during his campaign for the presidency. Well if the Pew numbers are any indication, this “master politician” may have once again, as with ObamaCare, misread his mandate and the public mood. For a growing number of Americans, as recent elections have shown, November can’t come soon enough.