the old fraud

Eric Fair, a former civilian interrogator in Iraq, belatedly displays courage in a Washington Post op-ed (via Andrew Sullivan):

A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I'm afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.

That dream, along with a host of other nightmares, has plagued me since my return from Iraq in the summer of 2004. Though the man in this particular nightmare has no face, I know who he is. I assisted in his interrogation at a detention facility in Fallujah. I was one of two civilian interrogators assigned to the division interrogation facility (DIF) of the 82nd Airborne Division. The man, whose name I've long since forgotten, was a suspected associate of Khamis Sirhan al-Muhammad, the Baath Party leader in Anbar province who had been captured two months earlier.

The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.

Atrios reacts:

Aside from the obvious moral evil which led us to this place, it's also important to remember the thinking which brought us there. The people "running" this war were never capable of distinguishing between the vision of the war they were selling to the country for propaganda purposes and the reality of what was happening. Even if torturing people to get "intelligence" was something which actually worked, the premise that such "intelligence" would actually help to solve the situation was based on the fantasy vision of what that problem was. They really believed that there were some evil masterminds with evil lairs - first former Baathists and then various "foreign fighters" - and if only they could find them and kill them then the problems would go away. There was an "enemy" which could somehow be vanquished, and once we did that the ponies would arrive.

This was a cartoon version of the war they tried to sell to the American public, but it was also what was driving their truly barbaric behavior.

I’ll interject that these strategies weren’t simply a product of the benighted fantasies of right-wing wackos in power at the time, they reflect a logical extension of some fundamental premises about the U.S. and its place in the world held by most Americans. More on this below.

Ezra Klein ponders the impact of the war on American exceptionalism:

What America is going through isn't, I think, a revulsion at the physical horrors of war. Nor is it a precise analogue to the Vietnam Syndrome, wherein we question our own power. Our power is massive, our ability to salve ancient ethnic conflicts is less so, but that's a different issue. What no longer looks certain, though, is the righteousness of our cause, the morality of our mission. American exceptionalism is what's taking a beating, even among Americans. We're shocked at the moral transgression of this invasion, and the blithe ease with which the country accepted a tragic conflict which will leave, when all is said and done, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, dead. It is the ease with which we have taken those lives, and the realization that we were capable of doing so immorally and irrationally, that will be most unsettling to the American psyche.

This is probably an accurate description of what is going on in the minds of some people. But I doubt that the capacity to accept responsibility for something most Americans supported at the time extends quite as far as Ezra would like to believe.

First of all, I don’t quite understand the idea of American exceptionalism. Yes, I’d had it drilled into me almost since birth, like everyone else. It goes something like: The U.S. has never lost a war. The U.S. can do no wrong, it spreads democracy and goodness around the world and fights the forces of evil, like a nation-size version of Superman. Without the U.S., the world would be plunged into a Hobbesian nightmare of godless chaos and death.

Then I learned that many people in other countries feel more or less the same way about their own homelands. They may recognize that their nations don’t have the same power to act abroad as the U.S., but that same feeling that their country is smarter, truer, better than all the others, is certainly there. There is a nearly universal tendency, when your nation is in a conflict with another nation, to support your countrymen without question. And this is judged in most cases by most people to be the morally correct thing to do. This seems almost too obvious to waste time pointing out.

I also learned that some leaders in the past had put the love of country in the service of heinous ends. Most famously, Hitler used the supposed need to protect the Fatherland against foreign attack to justify the slaughter and displacement of millions. But he was certainly not the only one; leaders in many times and places have appealed to the sense of national pride in time of conflict to justify the use of violence against outsiders. Most importantly, we were taught, nothing Hitler, Stalin, or Mao ever did in the name of national pride should ever cause us to think twice about the patriotic feelings welling up inside every American heart upon hearing the pledge of allegiance or the national anthem.

So then I thought, what makes our version of national pride more justifiable than all the others? Why is our version of nationalism—sorry, I understand that “patriotism” is the preferred term—better than the others; why are we the One True Nation, and all the others false, or at least lacking something crucial? If there were another major war and the draft were reinstated and I were called up to active duty, how could I justify picking up a rifle and shooting another person for no better reason than that he was born in country X and I was born in country Y? Arguments like “that’s what I was ordered to do” or “that’s what has always been done” or “it’s what everyone else was doing” would not be worth much in a situation like that. The argument “shoot him or he will shoot you first” is a more convincing one, but doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Would he really have broken into my apartment in the middle of the night and shot me in my bed? Probably not. The circumstances under which he and I would have ended up at the same location with guns aimed at each other would probably have less to do with actual threats to safety than with perceived or manufactured ones.

So why should I be willing to kill and be killed in service of this, the One True Nation? Not just willing, but duty bound? Why was I taught in Sunday School to thank the Lord I was born in the land of the free and home of the brave? What makes the U.S. that much better that I should actually consider that I’m doing people in another country a favor by picking up a gun and unloading it into them? Is it because of our democratic beginnings and our 200+ years of uninterrupted republican rule? Is it because we were on the winning side of both world wars? Is it because we have a unique sense of empathy and compassion for the downtrodden of the world? Is it because, as the most powerful country in the world, we have a duty to regulate and police the actions of others for the benefit of all? Is it because we have a special obligation to promote the ideals of the free market and democratic government that will better the lives of people mired in poverty and degradation?

Back to Ezra again:

We're shocked at the moral transgression of this invasion, and the blithe ease with which the country accepted a tragic conflict which will leave, when all is said and done, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, dead. It is the ease with which we have taken those lives, and the realization that we were capable of doing so immorally and irrationally, that will be most unsettling to the American psyche.

Those words would have been even more appropriate if said about the Vietnam War. But now, having been misled into a war in a region most of us knew little about, we find ourselves in a similar situation 35 years later. Granted, we’ve done less of the actual killing ourselves this time around. But the premises that led us into Vietnam have not changed much since then.

Premises such as:

1. The U.S. when it acts abroad does so in the general interest, not simply in its specific national interest.

2. However, and this should in no way be viewed as a contradiction of Premise 1 (!), the U.S. when sending troops into harm’s way only does so to promote a specific national interest. (Any potential contradiction is resolved by assuming that the U.S. national interest and the amorphous collective best interests of the other nations of the world are the same. If any specific national interest of another country conflicts with the U.S. national interest, then the U.S. national interest trumps the other national interest with the understanding that what is good for the U.S. is good for the world, in the long run, after history has ended, at judgment day.)

3. The U.S. is the world’s oldest democracy, and since democratic countries only engage in violence when they must, and the U.S. is a very powerful and enlightened democracy, when the U.S. engages in violence, it will always and everywhere have the effect of promoting democracy.

4. Wha?

I certainly hope that Ezra is right, and that the Iraq War will lead to a widescale reevaluation of our assumptions about our country and how we interact with the rest of the world. But based on the national discourse on the war I’ve witnessed thus far, I’m not optimistic.

Here’s a stab at some new premises to work toward:

1. Each human life has equal worth.

2. Thou shalt not kill.

3. The anarchic international state system has not always existed and may not always exist. It is neither more nor less natural or inevitable than the international political systems which preceded or may follow it.

4. Nobody not a citizen of the U.S. gets any say in how the U.S. conducts its foreign policy. Therefore, the U.S. may or may not act in the interests of non-U.S. citizens, no matter how much it claims that its actions are always taken in the interests of others. It is up to each person to define his or her interests and to decide what actions promote or hinder those interests. These things are not decided by the consensus opinion of Washington punditry.

5. In the (currently) anarchic international arena, where the government of the U.S. is not democratically accountable to anyone not a citizen of the U.S., the U.S. is not a priori morally superior to any other nation-state. Being democratic or powerful does not insulate it from moral judgment. It should be (and, outside the U.S., is) judged by its actions as any other state would be. For instance, the Iranian government may be morally blameworthy because it hangs its citizens for being gay and generally oppresses women. However, on the “invading other countries for no good reason” metric, Iran is in far better standing than either Iraq or the U.S.

If there’s one good thing that could come from this war, it would be to put a dagger through the heart of that old fraud “American exceptionalism.”

death poem

From Jesus' General, a poem written by a Guantanamo detainee. I post it in honor of American exceptionalism.

Death Poem

By Jumah al-Dossari

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the "protectors of peace."

Update: Here is the link.

queer immigrants

I’m posting below in full a vision statement (via ImmigrationProf Blog) on queers and immigration formulated by an organization called Queers for Economic Justice. I support the statement except I’m still agnostic about the guest worker program. It seems to me the principal problem noted below about a guest worker program—that it would create a hierarchy of class-based preferences—is a problem more generally with the American economy. Settling for a guest worker program (sans mandatory HIV testing) may be the best chance there is for achieving comprehensive immigration reform in the near term. I haven’t yet made up my mind about the guest worker program, partly because I don’t know the details of what exactly has been proposed. [My mental model of Kieran Healy’s mental model of Dan Drezner’s mental model says: Do your homework!]

When contemplating the most hated, most marginalized groups of people in America, it is hard to imagine a less popular group than queer immigrants. But our laws should not favor the strong and the popular at the expense of the vulnerable. Visibility is the first step towards justice. I sometimes think of Mr. Robinson’s incredulity in The Graduate that there exists such things as “female homosexuals”, or Justice Powell’s incomprehension of what it means to be gay at the time of the Bowers case. The plight of queer immigrants is not well known, and this statement is way to inform people of what is going on. Here it is:

***

Two of the most divisive issues in the United States today are those concerning Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer rights and immigration. There is little discussion of how immigration is also an issue for queer people, and even less analysis of the structural similarities between queer and immigrant struggles. Queer immigrants are marginalized or invisible at the intersection of two identities. As a whole, more complex family structures -- such as those of binational same-sex couples and extended families -- are completely absent from the larger struggle for immigration reform. The immigrant advocacy movement places undue emphasis on heteronormative relationships and conceptions of normality in an effort to gain basic citizenship rights. The mainstream LGBTQ rights movement tends to focus on those immigrants who are partners of US citizens. This leaves out the predicament of, for instance, single people and/or those who do not define themselves within conventional relationships like marriage or conjugality. Both movements are depriving themselves of the power and strategic insights that LGBTQ immigrants can provide. We, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and gender-nonconforming people and allies, stand in solidarity with the immigrant rights movement. With this statement, we call for genuinely progressive immigration reform that helps LGBTQ immigrants.

We recognize that many in our community live as queers and immigrants and we are taking this opportunity, at a historic moment for both groups, to articulate our analysis of the immigration debate. We call for an end to the stigmatization of queer individuals, the recognition of our varied, unique, and flexible kinship networks, the end of the restrictive and dangerous criminalization of migrant and queer communities, and an immigration reform package that puts progressive labor reforms into practice.

The 2006 elections provided mixed results for our communities. Even though anti-LGBTQ ballots were being passed around the country, Arizona voters defeated a measure that would further stigmatize LGBTQ people (Proposition 107). Nationally, voters rejected anti-immigrant candidates running for Congress. Sadly, draconian anti-immigrant amendments were approved at the state level in Arizona (Propositions 100, 102, 103, and 300) and Colorado (Referendums H and K). These measures will have a severely negative impact on the lives of LGBTQ immigrants, virtually nullifying the positive gains of the election. We are strongly against states initiating laws that have detrimental effects on both queer and non-queer-identified people. There are many problematic aspects of these bills; we focus on a few main issues to highlight the injustices perpetuated by them:

HIV Ban

We call for an immediate repeal of the HIV ban and bar on travel and immigration. The bar forces several immigrants to hide their HIV status and into criminalization. Moreover, the HIV bar is an unscientific public health measure because it perpetuates the stigma about HIV/AIDS. In many cases, the mandatory immigrant visa-related HIV test at the time of the adjustment of status application is the first diagnosis of HIV for an immigrant who may not be subsequently offered counseling or treatment options. The ban is ostensibly designed to keep the virus out, but it only penalizes HIV positive people, many of whom are already in the country. Moreover, immigrants are often infected in the US. The ban defines them as public health risks instead of ensuring their access to health care.

Under the current ban, waivers are offered on the basis of qualifying familial relationships. The ban does not offer waivers for non-conjugal relationships/kinship networks/same-sex partnerships and perpetuates the traditional devaluing of non-heteronormative bonds. We call for the reinstating of individual hardship waivers that would allow an individual to self-petition for humanitarian reasons or reasons of public interest-similar to those in place before the 1996 reforms which instituted the familial relationship requirement.

Policing the Border

The proposal for a national wall along the 20,000 mile border between US and Mexico is economically unsustainable and takes away from programs like education and public assistance. A wall would expand the existing police state and harm inflicted upon immigrants entering at the border. As the National Immigration Forum has reported, increased surveillance only results in increased desperation as migrant workers face injury, exploitation by coyotes, and the increased possibility of dying: "From January 1995 through March 2004, more than 2,640 migrants died. In the last four years there has been on average more than one death per day. A record 460 migrants lost their lives this past year compared to 325 in 2004, according to the U.S. Border Patrol." Clearly, spending on border security drains much-needed resources from US society and is not effective. These same resources could be used to strengthen social services for all within the US and to improve the economies of countries that send immigrants. Paradoxically, the demand for the wall comes with an increase in demand and need for immigrant labor in the US (Mexicans form 40% of California's agricultural labor force). It heightens anti-immigrant sentiment among US citizens and only extends the exploitation of immigrant labor.

The proposed wall is also detrimental to Native Americans and indigenous peoples. There are 26 federally recognized Native American tribes that live between Mexico and the US. These tribes are currently allowed to move freely in the border region; the wall would drastically change their way of life. Immigrants follow a travel cycle dependent upon work demand. This cycle would be interrupted by a wall and increased security by forcing them to stay in the US when it may be in their best interests to travel back to their country of origin. The construction of a wall would be counterproductive, increasing rather than reducing undocumented migration into the US.

Family

The current definition of family in immigration law is limited to parents, spouses, and children. This definition also implies a heterosexual family structure. Unfortunately it is very restrictive because it leaves out most of the family structures in which LGBTQ immigrants live. Partners in same-sex binational couples, aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, nieces and nephews, and other extended family members are not considered eligible under this narrow definition (if recognition is granted, such as in the case of siblings, the time it takes to obtain a family-based visa is so long that it is equivalent to not having the benefit at all). As a result, the broad universe of non- heteronormative family units created by LGBTQ immigrants is automatically excluded from receiving immigration benefits. Both the LGBTQ and immigrant rights communities need to work towards expanding their narrow definitions of "family" in order to better serve all immigrants, including LGBTQ immigrants.

Asylum

Applying for asylum based on sexual orientation is the only way for some of the most vulnerable LGBTQ immigrants to legalize their status. Currently, those who apply for asylum based on sexual orientation must do so within a year of entering the country. This disproportionately affects LGBTQ immigrants since many of them are unaware of the asylum provision or are recovering from torture and persecution. Many LGBTQ immigrants are affected by homophobia and transphobia in their day to day lives. This leads to isolation and lack of access to information and resources and delays their applying for asylum based on sexual orientation. We call upon removing the one year deadline for applying for political asylum. Moreover, the category of aggravated felony is being expanded to include offenses such as shoplifting and prostitution; this expansion only applies to immigrants. Individuals charged with aggravated felony are barred from any immigration relief including asylum. This is unjust and only a way of keeping more people from applying for immigration relief.

Harboring Provisions

Harboring is the act of protecting or in any way assisting an undocumented immigrant. Harboring provisions appear in both the House and Senate Bills and target individuals and organizations that provide assistance to undocumented immigrants with financial aid, food, housing, and other basic social services. Currently individuals--friends or partners--who live with undocumented immigrants and immigrants who overstay their visas for any significant length of time are targeted under harboring provisions. US citizen partners of many foreign nationals, who are often denied legal relationships with their partners, could be targeted and prosecuted under harboring provisions and face fines, asset seizure, and imprisonment. We oppose efforts to criminalize those who assist the immigrant community, their families, and loved ones through harboring provisions.

Guest Worker Programs

The guest worker program provisions create a two-tiered system that divides our communities into "better" and "worse" immigrants depending on how long they have been in the country and what kind of work they do. It establishes hierarchies among immigrants based on their income potential and class categories. Under the guest worker program, employers may underpay and/or mistreat low-wage, temporary workers who cannot seek redress for fear of being left without employer sponsors. The program allows work-visa holders in supposedly more prestigious industries to gain citizenship more quickly. Such programs undercut and divide the labor rights movement in the U.S. by making it impossible to regulate immigrant workers' rights. This hurts US workers, especially those with fewer skills and low income. Moreover, the proposed guest worker program calls for mandatory HIV testing, making it the only non-immigrant visa worker program that actively discriminates against immigrants by requiring them to take an HIV test. We support the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and call for it to be extended to immigrants, especially since an LGBTQ immigrant may lose his or her ability to live in the U.S. if fired for sexual or gender identity.

Reforms

We demand genuine legalization and opportunities to adjust status for all undocumented immigrants. We believe that the current immigration system is broken and in need of repair. To that end, we demand the following:

· Enact genuinely progressive immigration legislation at the state level that respects the human rights of immigrants. We call for all states to opt out of the Real I.D. Act, reinstate in-state tuition fees for undocumented immigrant students, and not pass legislation that will disallow undocumented immigrants from accessing public benefits. Proposed legislation would allow for greater collaboration between local police and immigration enforcement officials. We are against such collaboration because turning police officers into immigration officials would further jeopardize the already fragmented relationship between police and immigrant communities.

· Repeal the HIV ban immediately.

· End the one year deadline for applying for asylum

· End the heightened policing and criminalization of immigrant communities, including the increased militarization of the border, the construction of any wall around the US-Mexico border, and/or the use of city and state government agencies to enforce federal immigration law.

· End the indefinite and mandatory detention of non-citizens and ensure the safety and self-determination of all people, regardless of national origin, race, gender or sexuality. Detention is particularly harsh for LGBTQ and HIV positive detainees. Rape, harassment, abuse, and denial of HIV treatment/hormone therapy are some of the routine forms of hardship that LGBTQ people face in detention.

· Strengthen labor laws and protections for all workers, native and foreign born, and end guest worker proposals that would continue the exploitation of many low-wage workers.

· End penalties imposed upon service providers and family members of undocumented immigrants.

· Repeal the Real I.D. Act, which creates a national database and makes it more difficult to obtain legal identification, thus causing hardship for thousands of people who cannot obtain identification. In addition, we demand that the Federal government not penalize states that opt out of the Real I.D. Act by, for instance, withdrawing support for educational programs. This Act is particularly hostile to transgender people who can be penalized and deported if birth records do not match current IDs. The national database is also worrisome for transgender workers who may not be open about their transitions at work.

· Eliminate the high-income requirements for immigrant sponsors.

· Eliminate the 3 and 10-year bars for so-called unlawful presence.

· Support efforts to create and affirm the broader definitions of family and kinship patterns in which LGBTQ people already live. Currently, LGBTQ US citizens and Green Card holders cannot sponsor their partners for immigration. The Uniting American Families Act would allow them to do so. We urge the passage of the Uniting American Families Act. But this is only a first step in the direction of the expansion of the definition of "family." A truly fair immigration system should recognize all families in our LGBTQ and immigrant communities, including non-immediate relatives and non-traditional families of our choice. We call for the end of immigration reform based on the notion of conjugality and instead support efforts to broaden definitions of "family" and end inequality.

· Support legalization for all immigrants, including undocumented immigrants. End the criminalization of immigrants by preventing the expansion of deportation criteria and increased penalties for minor offenses.

As LGBTQ people (both immigrants and non-immigrants) we would like to express our disappointment with President George W. Bush. In addition to promoting the Federal Marriage Amendment, he has given in to the radical elements in his party and backed down on his commitment to immigration reform by choosing to focus on enforcement. The LGBTQ community is once again let down by lawmakers who are playing with our lives.

The undersigned are coming out as LGBTQ immigrants and allies in support of genuinely progressive immigration reform. Our natural allies are the LGBTQ and immigrant rights communities and we are eager to work with you towards achieving social justice for all. We will insist that both movements' strategies address the intersection where we live and love and struggle.

List of Endorsing Organizations as of 1/26/2007:

The Audre Lorde Project
85 South Oxford Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217-1607
Phone: (718) 596-0342
Fax: (718) 596-1328

Chicago Area Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Immigrants Alliance
c/o Yasmin Nair
Phone: (773) 784-3216

Filipinos for Affirmative Action
310 8th Street, Suite 306
Oakland, CA 94607
Phone: 510-465-9876

Immigration Equality, Inc.
40 Exchange Place, 17th Floor
New York, NY 10005
Phone: (212) 714-2904
Fax: (212) 714-2973

Love Sees No Borders
P.O. Box 60486
Sunnyvale, CA 94088
Fax: (413) 502-4758

National Center for Lesbian Rights
870 Market Street, Suite 370
San Francisco, CA 94102
Phone: (415) 392-6257
Fax: (415) 392-8442

Queers for Economic Justice
16 W. 32nd St., #10H
New York, NY 10001
Phone: (212) 564-3608
Fax: (212) 564-0590

** ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ **

January 26, 2007

To Whom it May Concern,

We are contacting you from the Immigrant Rights Project at Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ). QEJ is an organization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender-nonconforming (LGBTQ) people committed to promoting economic justice in a context of sexual and gender liberation.

We recognize there is a marked lack of LGBTQ voices in the current immigration debate. Congress and the nation are presently looking toward measures of immigration reform and we recognize that several agencies are working organizationally to influence the outcome of these reforms.

We are taking this opportunity to insert LGBTQ perspectives into the national debate over immigration. LGBTQ immigrants face their own specific concerns and obstacles within the immigration process for a number of complex legal and social reasons. Attached you will find a queer and transgender vision statement on immigration outlining some of these concerns, as well as certain demands for reform which we believe to be inclusive and fair for all immigrants to the United States.

We invite your organization to sign on to this vision statement and join us as allies in our struggle. Please respond with your support for the vision statement no later than February 8, 2007.

Thank you,
Yours sincerely,

Debanuj Dasgupta
Immigration Policy Analyst

Queers for Economic Justice
16 W. 32nd St., #10H
New York, NY 10001
Phone: (212) 564-3608
Fax: (212) 564-0590
www.queersforeconomicjustice.org

derechos humanos en EEUU: desaparecidos

The US government continues its determined march away from international human rights standards. The Washington Post reports today (via Andrew Sullivan):

Representatives from 57 countries on Tuesday signed a long-negotiated treaty prohibiting governments from holding people in secret detention. The United States declined to endorse the document, saying its text did not meet U.S. expectations.

Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said the treaty was "a message to all modern-day authorities committed to the fight against terrorism" that some practices are "not acceptable."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack declined to comment, except to say that the United States helped draft the treaty but that the final wording "did not meet our expectations."

The Associated Press reported that McCormack declined to comment on whether the U.S. stance was influenced by the Bush administration's policy of sending terrorism suspects to CIA-run prisons overseas, which President Bush acknowledged in September.

. . .

The convention defines forced disappearance as the arrest, detention or kidnapping of a person by state agents or affiliates and subsequent denials about the detention or location of the individual.

The treaty, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in December, has been pushed for nearly a quarter-century by rights groups and the families of individuals who have disappeared at the hands of various governments. It also addresses the international debate over the rights of terrorism suspects.

This convention is a long overdue response to the use of forced disappearances as a tool of political repression pioneered on a large scale by Chile and Argentina in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The US can’t sign the treaty because we’ve been holding people in secret prisons around the world and doing what exactly to them, we don’t know—torture, murder, who knows—we may never know all the details. This is aside from the documented cases of torture and murder in non-secret prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is aside from the near-complete denial of human rights to prisoners held in Guantanamo.

When I interned at a human rights organization in Central America in the summer of 2002, I took complaints of US human rights abuses with a big pile of salt. Reports of abuses coming out of Guantanamo were still sketchy, or at least I didn’t pay much attention to them. After all, hadn’t Americans helped invent modern human rights law at Nuremberg and tirelessly defended and promoted human rights in the decades since? The real bad guys were the paramilitary groups committing massacres in the mountains, or vigilantes knocking off street kids throughout Latin America; any focus on the US was a distraction from more pressing issues. That’s what I thought five years ago. I don’t think that anymore.

The icing on the cake from today’s Post story:

At a separate gathering, a non-binding accord banning the use of child soldiers was signed here Tuesday by representatives of 58 countries, including African nations that have been harshly criticized by the United Nations and human rights groups for arming children. The United States did not participate, saying that it objected to some of the wording of the documents but that it remained committed to its treaty obligations on the issue.

???

Our government won’t sign a non-binding accord banning the use of child soldiers? Is there a non-laughable (in a laughing through your tears kind of way) justification for this?

???

notarios

From the AP this week:

When Salvadoran immigrant Irma Yolanda Membreno-Aleman wanted to apply for temporary asylum, she did what she would have done for any legal matter back home: She went to see a "notario publico."

It was a lost-in-translation mistake that cost her thousands of dollars, a rejection of her petition and loss of her work authorization and her job, a lawsuit claims.

In much of Latin America, most notary publics are also lawyers. In the United States, a notary public is not a lawyer and cannot give legal advice; he can administer oaths and witness signatures, and that's it.

The difference has allowed scam artists to prey on immigrants with limited English skills and little understanding of the American legal system by misrepresenting themselves as lawyers, immigration lawyers say.

It is a growing problem. But prosecutors rarely bring cases against these scam artists, in part because the victims are often in this country illegally and are afraid to come forward.

This wastes the time of government employees who have to sift through frivolous applications, and it can ruin the lives of immigrants who think they are paying to legalize their status, but instead are being swindled by scam artists. Preying on immigrants is a thriving business in New York City, and there is no shortage of “legal document preparation firms” or “notarios” with shifting addresses and rotating staff to rip people off. Recourse of the victims is severely limited, and in my experience, most of the time these shady operations are never held to account.

In Georgia, the Colombian wife of state Sen. Curt Thompson was almost deported recently after her dealings with a notary whom she said she believed was an attorney. The wife, Sascha Herrera, came to the U.S. on a visitor visa in 2003. She applied for an extension through a "notario," Tomas Vilela, but she said he filed an asylum application without her knowledge.

Because Herrera was unaware of the application, she missed repeated asylum hearings and the court issued an order for her deportation. She went into hiding briefly until a judge agreed last month to drop the deportation action.

This sort of thing happens all the time. But not everyone is the wife of a state senator, and many people find themselves in deportation proceedings or living in the shadows, unable to legalize their status.

One way to stop this kind of fraud is to promote better education within the immigrant communities. New immigrants trust people from their home countries who speak their language and seem to know how to navigate the immigration system; unfortunately, their trust is often betrayed. These wolves should be exposed within the communities so new arrivals are not channeled into disastrous situations.

Earth's future is in your hands

From the Beeb's website, an interactive experiment in policymaking:

A game where you are president of the European Nations. You must tackle climate change and stay popular enough with the voters to remain in office.

Running a country is more difficult than it looks.

butt-ass cold

It is way too cold outside. So cold the above-ground trains in Brooklyn weren’t running properly this morning—something about the signals freezing, maybe. I walked past a cat on a stoop crying to get inside, but it wasn’t my cat or my stoop so I hurried on by to get to the train.

It is butt-ass cold.

isn’t it ironic . . .

. . . that Alanis Morissette wrote a whole song about irony without understanding what it meant? A song which got widespread radio play and implanted Morissette’s misconceptions in the minds of an entire generation of youngsters. Patrick Cassels has endeavored to improve Morissette’s lyrics to make them actually ironic. Via the Editors.

Here are some attempts of my own:

It's a traffic jam when you're already late . . . to a high-stakes negotiation aimed at finding a last minute resolution to the city’s ongoing public transit workers’ strike.

It's a no-smoking sign on your cigarette break . . . as a firefighter in a Western town which a wildfire has set ablaze.

It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife . . . with which to carve a wooden spoon out of a block of oak, necessitated by your metal allergy.

It's meeting the man of my dreams, and then meeting his beautiful wife . . . who reveals that they’re both dressed in drag for Halloween.

migration in the old world

The Economist recently had a summary of a new World Bank report on migration in Eastern Europe and the former USSR that brought to light some interesting facts. For instance, in the region:

Russia is the main destination for immigrants, surpassed only by America. That is due partly to ethnic Russians returning to the motherland after the break-up of the Soviet Union, but also to Tajiks, Georgians, Moldovans and other non-Slav citizens of ex-Soviet republics moving to Russia in search of work. In the process, Georgia, for example, lost a fifth of its population in the 14 years from 1989.

Also, remittances play an important role in the economies of many countries in the region.

The money-flows from migration—around $19 billion annually, the authors estimate—are surprising too. In some countries they matter more than foreign investment. For example, remittances make up more than a quarter of Moldova's GDP—a figure exceeded worldwide only in Haiti and Tonga. For nine ex-communist countries, remittances provide 5% or more of national income.

And this was interesting:

The final misconception is about what motivates migration. “Everyone thinks it is all about income differentials, but actually it is all about expectations. Even in poor countries we can expect low levels of migration if people think that conditions there will improve,” argues Brice Quillin, one of the report's authors.

From one viewpoint, the huge migration of recent years to western Europe seems unlikely to continue. Populations are declining in all countries (except Albania) in the western half of the post-communist region. That tightens their labour markets and may stimulate migration from farther east. By contrast, populations in the southern states of the former Soviet Union—countries such as Tajikistan—will keep growing until the middle of this century. “If the typical migrant of the 1990s was a Pole moving to Britain, his successor in the next decade may be a Tajik moving to Poland,” says Mr Quillin. Even Turkey, previously a big exporter of workers, now imports migrants.

I’m wondering how continuing migration will affect the “absorption” capacity of the EU—will increased connections between the newer countries in the EU and countries of the former Soviet Union due to increased migration make further eastward expansion of the EU more likely or less likely? Will new immigrant communities in Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, etc. establish voting constituencies to influence politics in their adopted countries, or will they remain excluded from the mainstream? How long will it take for the more established members of the EU to become accustomed to the 25-nation behemoth the EU has become before they are willing to consider adding new members? Maybe if I read the whole report, I would know more about the answers to these questions, but it’s over 200 pages long so I’ll probably remain in suspense.

shifting opinions

Heartening news from the WSJ today via Kevin Drum:

A new poll from Harris Interactive found that 55% of Americans think gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the military.

This is up from 48% in 2000. And 64% of respondents aged 18-30 felt this way. It is clear where public opinion is headed on this issue, although it may take time for the government to catch up.

more on exceptionalism

The mysterious IOZ reveals himself to be of a libertarian persuasion in comment (I would say “comments,” but, well, you go to war with the blog you have … ). And it didn’t take long for a prominent public figure to confirm the IOZ thesis.

Edwards told the crowd of 500 people that the country's global has been damaged by George W. Bush and is in desperate need of repair. "I don’t mean to do this just so we can feel good,” Edwards said. "We need to do this because the fact is that when America doesn’t lead, there is no leader in the world."

That almost sounds like something our beloved president would say. Both Edwards and Bush operate from the assumption that America must lead because the world needs us to. They may have different conceptions of what proper American leadership would entail. And again, the differences between those conceptions are nontrivial. But I’ll go out on a limb here and say that most of the world does not think it needs America to lead so much as it needs America to act more like an adult and less like an insecure teenager. Many people would like America to butt out of their business. Many others would like America to act more responsibly with regard to military adventures, global warming, and other issues that impact other countries. Many people wish America would act more like an equal partner rather than a self-appointed prophet/policeman/judge/nanny. Some people would—in my opinion wrongly—like America to put a cork in its modern perverted popular culture, which tends to spread to the rest of the world like herpes at Burning Man. Foreign diplomats and world leaders may say, from time to time, placatory things like “When America doesn’t lead, there is no leader in the world,” but mostly that is to keep America from becoming depressed, getting liquored up, and doing something it will regret in the morning.

That said, Atrios has a pretty good rebuttal of IOZ’s argument while making an unrelated remark about Children of Men (MINOR SPOILERS):

I tend to react negatively to anything which floats above, or suggests that floating above, the muck is the only productive or honorable course. This is the view of David "pox on both their houses [especially the Democrats] " Broder, the "everybody but us are losers" attitude of the South Park guys, Nader's Gush and Bore, etc... And, ultimately, this is part of the message of Children of Men. The government is right wing and bad. The dissenters are left wing and bad, and so bad they team up with Islamic terrorists and see revolution as an end in itself. Salvation is to be found not within but outside the system. Only those who set up camp outside the existing order offer possible salvation.

I've got nothing against those who see the corruption of the system as an insurmountable problem, it's those who apparently see human nature as an insurmountable problem but then imagine there are Super Humans who can somehow transcend this.

I don’t remember any teaming up with Islamic terrorists, but I may have missed something along the way—maybe I got distracted by the genetically engineered giant raving street preacher who was onscreen for exactly one second.

But I agree that an Edwards/Gore/Obama/(Clark?) foreign policy would be worlds ahead of a Bush/McCain/Brownback foreign policy. Mostly due to the fact that it’s hard to imagine a Democrat doing something so fucking stupid as invading, for no apparent reason, a country in the middle of a region that hates us and upon which we depend for much of our energy supply. While I heartily endorse IOZ’s suggestion to "expand the capacity of Americans to imagine something different," I think in the interim, living as we do in world inhabited by flawed, petty, smelly, beautiful flesh and blood human beings, we are often best served by supporting the least bad option available at any given moment.

decency

Hilzoy has for us today an unpleasant reminder that the people running our executive branch are not decent people. A decent human being would not do these things to another human being.

But then a decent public would not sit by and allow these things to happen, or cheer them on.

Via Jim Henley, the mysterious IOZ has some thoughts about American exceptionalism.

The War in Iraq is not an unprecedented foreign policy disaster. It's a disaster with a distinct, observable lineage. The Bush administration is not unprecedented. Its precedents are every other presidency in the years since World War II, and several, at least, before. At the very root of the error is unthinking acceptance of the P.T. Barnum-esque premise of America as "The Greatest and Most Prosperous Nation in the World," a chestunt roasted equally by both parties. That phrase, and those like it, is shorthand for a religious--I mean that as a pejorative--belief that the United States of America, being something of a civilizational (minimum: civic, political) apotheosis has an affirmative commission to interfere in the internal developments of other nations for whatever reason we see fit. The most disastrous consequence of that belief from a purely practical standpoint is that it has decoupled our plain imperialism from plain acknowledgement that imperialism is our project. Because our moral self-illusion precludes us from really identifying what it is we seek when we send off the ships and airplanes and infantry, we make colonial policy by circumlocution and euphemism, even at the very highest levels. "The forward agenda of freedom" isn't only a phrase for public consumption. Meaningless bromides are clearly just as much the lingua franca of the governing class. The far more disastrous consequence from a human perspective is that because we believe our bromides, believe in our goodness, and believe in the legitimacy of our moral pretensions, we feel as justified as any other zealot in raining blood and fire on non-belieivers, since we believe that a failure to convert is spiritual doom anyway.

That sort of exceptionalism lead us into a militarized national security state, a garrison economy, a many-trillion-dollar military complex, a series of fruitless border skirmishes with the Soviet Union that, in their worst instance, killed millions of Vietnamese. It led to the creation of a vast nuclear arsenal which we alone reserve the right to use, should it become "necessary." It led to a quarter-century of America-funded, America-supported massacres in Latin America. (These things occured under Democrats as much as under Republicans.) It lead to the modern surveillance state, the gradual slide toward national identification, the imprisonment of two million Americans, the creation of a vast intelligence apparatus with no meaningful Congressional oversight and secret budgts. It lead to our monstrous interventionist policies in the Middle East. It lead to Bill Clinton's "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act," which lead to the Patriot Act. It lead to the articulated Clinton/Gore policy of "regime change"--a Democratic euphemism. The current contention that "A Gore presidency wouldn't have taken us to war in Iraq" is not only fanciful, ahistorical projection, it's also patently false in that we were already at war with Iraq. We were bombing the country almost daily through the final years of the Clinton administration, and Al Gore was one of the staunchest Iraq hawks in the government. It was a low-intensity conflict that we simply chose to ignore domestically under the euphemistic guise of "no-fly zones" and "economic sanctions." In Susan Sontag's famously provocative post-9/11 essay, she asked, "How many Americans are aware of our ongoing bombardment of Iraq?" You know the answer.

While I mostly agree, clearly a low-intensity war with Iraq was better than the carnage we unleashed. The differences between Gore and Bush are not trivial.

The project of altering the fundamental perceptions and premises underlying the American popular consciousness is a long one. Possibly it is futile. But the idea that the American electorate--the American mind, if such a thing exists--is currently capable of supporting or sustaining meaningful, essential, fundamental change is a fantasy and nothing more. The nature of our problems and the scope of our wrongdoing is entirely beyond the farthest boundaries of ordinary discussion in America today. The first step toward change is to expand the capacity of Americans to imagine something different. Slow, quixotic, and likely hopeless. But that is the task at hand.

Yes, much of our public discourse is based on false assumptions and is guided by a flawed methodology. The herd mentality usually prevails, and fear and ignorance frame our collective view of the world. But there are solutions, and I wonder what IOZ has in mind for reaching them. I’ve just stumbled onto this blog today and can’t tell whether it’s a libertarian or Chomskyite perspective, or something else, but I find myself largely agreeing with much of this post, at least. I’d like to hear more.

empire state

I just realized tonight for the first time that we can see the Empire State Building from our apartment. If you stand in the kitchen just right and look out the living room window, you can see it peeking out from behind a distant apartment building. Spectacular views of the city! That's got to be worth something.

Back to my taxes . . .

Oh, and I liked this from the Horse's Mouth:

Barack Obama just introduced legislation calling for all combat brigades to be withdrawn from Iraq by March 2008.

He talks purdy. Complete sentences and all. What would that be like in a president . . . it's been so long, I've almost forgotten.

tax time!

I’ve been too excited filling out my 1040 to post much of anything tonight. Refund for me!!

At the risk of supremely irresponsible speculation—rather, with the explicit goal of irresponsible speculation way too early to possibly be accurate, I’ll just note that Senator Brownback’s chances in the Republican primary are looking pretty good right now. And Hagel’s, too, if the base finally decides to turn against Bush on Iraq. But even if they do, and end up embracing the substance of Hagel’s Iraq position, they may never forgive him for disagreeing with the President so early and so vocally. So my money’s on Brownback. Until I change my mind, probably next week.

oops, our bad

Just as the U.S. government outsources torture to shady regimes, I’m outsourcing this post to Hilzoy:

Today, the Canadian Prime Minister apologized to Maher Arar:

"Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized Friday to Maher Arar for the torture he suffered in a Syrian prison and said the government would pay him and his family $10.5-million, plus legal fees, to compensate them for the "terrible ordeal."

"On behalf of the government of Canada, I wish to apologize to you ... and your family for any role that Canadian officials may have played in the terrible ordeal that all of you experienced in 2002-2003," Mr. Harper said in a letter to Mr. Arar.

Hilzoy determines that Canada’s culpability in this affair is based on the fact that they (1) provided bogus information to the U.S. government that Arar was a security threat and then (2) did not pressure the U.S. government to get him released as firmly as they could have. After the Canadian government learned of its error, it conducted an exhaustive investigation into Canada's role in the matter which was capped by a personal apology from the leader of the country and an award of $10.5 million dollars to compensate Arar for his suffering.

Hilzoy continues:

We, by contrast, actually detained him and shipped him off to Syria, where he was kept in a three foot by six foot underground cell and tortured for ten months. Unlike the Canadian government, we have not initiated an investigation of how we ended up shipping an innocent engineer off to be tortured in Syria. To my knowledge, no one has resigned. We have not apologized, nor have we made any effort at all to help Mr. Arar put his life back together after we broke it apart.

. . .

Here's what Alberto Gonzales had to say after the Canadian government's report appeared:

. . .

Some people have characterized his removal as a rendition. That is not what happened here. It was a deportation. And even if it were a rendition, we understand as a government what our obligations are with respect to anyone who is rendered by this government to another country, and that is that we seek to satisfy ourselves that they will not be tortured. And we do that in every case. And if in fact he had been rendered to Syria, we would have sought those same kind of assurances, as we do in every case.

So, in other words, we didn’t formally send him to Syria for the explicit purpose of having information extracted from him by torture, information which the Syrian government (our sworn enemies on Mondays, Wednesdays, and every other Friday) would then relay back to us (and we would do what with, exactly? . . . since we trust Syria so completely). No, we simply deported him like we would deport any Mexican who overstayed his visa or snuck over the border, but if he just happened to fall into the hands of the Syrian government, and just happened to be brutally tortured for 10 months, well then, that certainly wasn’t something we had anything to do with.

It strikes me that an easy way to deny conducting extraordinary renditions is to use the ample discretion available in the immigration system to deport someone to a country where they are likely to be tortured, ignoring our obligations under the Convention Against Torture and other treaties. The effect is the same as a formal rendition, but you avoid the bad press surrounding the term “rendition” and you don’t have to go through the process of procuring assurances from the government to which you are sending the person that they will not torture him. Since the immigration "judges" are part of the executive branch anyway, it's not that hard to get away with.

Hilzoy isn’t happy.

Think about this. We kidnap one of their citizens and send him off to be tortured. We refuse to admit that there was anything wrong with what we did. We won't allow him to enter the US or to fly over it, and we won't clear his name. When Canada rather understandably protests, some genius in Washington orders our ambassador to be gratuitously rude.

It's a wonder we have any allies left at this point.

Here's one Canadian newspaper's response:

"The Americans seem to be saying they will ban whomever they like and they won't give reasons, and that they will deport people to be tortured if that's what they feel like doing. Simultaneously, they seem to be saying Canada must share every bit of information it has about anyone who proposes to cross the border.

Well, Canada doesn't have to hand over our information if the U.S. doesn't take our concerns seriously.

That is why Harper should tell U.S. President George Bush that this lopsided take on North American security does not work for us.

In addition, the parliamentary committees that oversee Canada-U.S. security information sharing should review the entire range of co-operation in this area.

Both countries undeniably have an interest in working together to thwart terror. But if the Americans are going to be heavy-handed, we need to be correspondingly cautious."

Update: John Dean, Nixon's former counsel, is dismayed by Gonzales's recent testimony before Congress:

In the history of U.S. Attorney Generals, Alberto Gonzales is constantly reaching for new lows. So dubious is his testimony that he is not afforded the courtesy given most cabinet officers when appearing on Capitol Hill: Congress insists he testify under oath. Even under oath, Gonzales's purported understanding of the Constitution is historically and legally inaccurate, far beyond the bounds of partisan interpretation.

No wonder that with each appearance he makes on Capitol Hill, Gonzales increases his standing as one of the least respected Attorney Generals ever, in the eyes of both Congressional cognoscenti and the legal community.

through the looking glass

The NY Times reports on questionable tactics used by the DOJ in defending against civil suits brought against the government for its domestic spying program:

The Bush administration has employed extraordinary secrecy in defending the National Security Agency’s highly classified domestic surveillance program from civil lawsuits. Plaintiffs and judges’ clerks cannot see its secret filings. Judges have to make appointments to review them and are not allowed to keep copies.

Judges have even been instructed to use computers provided by the Justice Department to compose their decisions.

. . .

In ordinary civil suits, the parties’ submissions are sent to their adversaries and are available to the public in open court files. But in several cases challenging the eavesdropping, Justice Department lawyers have been submitting legal papers not by filing them in court but by placing them in a room at the department. They have filed papers, in other words, with themselves.

. . .

Soon after one suit challenging the program was filed last year in Oregon, Justice Department lawyers threatened to seize an exhibit from the court file.

This month, in the same case, the department sought to inspect and delete files from the computers on which lawyers for the plaintiffs had prepared their legal filings.

The tactics, said a lawyer in the Oregon case, Jon B. Eisenberg, prompted him to conduct unusual research.

“Sometime during all of this,” Mr. Eisenberg said, “I went on Amazon and ordered a copy of Kafka’s ‘The Trial,’ because I needed a refresher course in bizarre legal procedures.”

A federal district judge in the case, Garr M. King, invoked another book after a government lawyer refused to disclose whether he had a certain security clearance, saying information about the clearance was itself classified.

“Frankly, your response,” Judge King said, “is kind of an Alice in Wonderland response.”

The DOJ’s actions in these cases are representative of the administration’s disdain for the rule of law. The DOJ is led by a man who thinks the right of habeas corpus is dispensable and sees little need for involvement by the other two branches of government in matters of national security.

In trying to subvert normal judicial processes in these cases, the DOJ seems to be driven more by political considerations than those of national security.

In August 2004, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which was investigating an Oregon charity, al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, inadvertently provided a copy of a classified document to a foundation lawyer, Lynne Bernabei.

That document indicated, according to court filings, that the government monitored communications between officers of the charity and two of its lawyers without a warrant in spring 2004.

“If I gave you this document today and you put it on the front page of The New York Times, it would not threaten national security,” Mr. Eisenberg, a lawyer for the foundation, said. “There is only one thing about it that’s explosive, and that’s the fact that our clients were wiretapped.”

To the administration, domestic politics are a key element of any national security strategy, since the way they see it, if they are not in charge, we’ll all be killed in our sleep by the Islamofascists. But as Tim at Balloon Juice points out, by eliminating meaningful oversight by the other branches of government, the executive branch and the GOP have (a) greatly increased the likelihood of failure of their preferred policies and (b) tied those failed policies tightly around their own necks in the eyes of voters.

What baffles me is that once the GOP owned the war lock stock and barrel, someone (say, Pat Roberts) thought it would be a good idea to kill off the faintest hint of oversight. In free market terms that’s the same as a business sinking its resources and reputation into a project and then taking off to Maui for a few months while the contractor does his thing unsupervised. That suggests an awful lot of confidence in the contractor, n’est-ce pas? It suggests that Republicans considered their leader practically infallible, incapable of the quotidian failures that characterize ordinary humans, not unlike the leader cult barbs (Dear Leader etc) half-jokingly brought up by lefties like me. After all, assuming that the GOP Congress were rational beings with some vestigial interest in their political future, what other explanation makes any sense?

In the end, strongarm tactics like those used by the DOJ are counterproductive and self-defeating. But we may have to wait for new leadership in the White House and in the AG’s office to repair the damage that has been done by the current occupants.

getting things done

Another pearl from Ezra Klein:

It's far easier to take this country to war then to significantly raise its minimum wage, or reform its tax code, or fix its health system. The President, particularly in recent years, can conduct military actions without anything approaching oversight or institutional opposition. Even minor social policy changes, conversely, need a majority in the House, 60 votes in the Senate, and a favorably inclined executive.

This is a foolish way to run a country and hopefully the days of unrestrained executive power abroad are numbered.

music to my ears

[O]n domestic policy, Pelosi — not Bush — is now arguably the nation's most powerful force.

Maybe there is a god after all.

schizophrenic immigration policy

Immigration is a new front in the culture wars. The issue is heating up and it’s unclear to me how it will be resolved. Over the past year, as the issue gained more exposure, I feel that anti-immigrant sentiment has become more entrenched among many Americans. Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck hammer away at it on CNN almost every day—meanwhile I’m not aware of comparable voices on the left calling for comprehensive immigration reform, at least in English. You’ve got Spanish-language radio probably performing a similar function as talk radio does for anti-immigrant groups—rallying the troops with impassioned rhetoric. But you don’t have Keith Olbermann or Atrios talking about it every day like they do about Iraq.

What we do have is a fairly broad coalition in the Senate supporting comprehensive immigration reform. This coalition roughly tracks elite consensus on the topic. Business supports comprehensive reform, and most journalists and pundits probably view immigration favorably through an economic and cosmopolitan frame that much of the public does not share. So while Beck, Dobbs, and the talk show hosts rail against illegal immigration, the levers of power quietly move to maintain the flow of immigrants into the country.

But the Bush administration is not impervious to public opinion. So that’s why Bush can call for a guest worker program in the SOTU while simultaneously cracking down on illegal immigrants through Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE), a branch of the Department of Homeland Security.

From ImmigrationProf Blog:

In the past two weeks, ICE authorities have posed as police officers and going door-to-door in neighborhoods searching for people, or standing outside grocery stores and arresting residents who cannot provide documentation of legal residency. According to ICE out of 119 detainees in Contra Costa County, 94 were “encountered in the process”, meaning they had no deportation orders.

This is part of a broader effort that began last summer in response to the backlash against the mass pro-immigrant marches last spring. From the LA Times:

By today, when federal immigration officials announced the results of the sweep, 338 illegal immigrants had been arrested at their homes in Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Los Angeles counties. Another 423 were taken into federal custody at county jails, said Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Associated Press rode along on the first day of the secret sweeps, which began Jan. 17. Those arrested were from 14 countries, including Mexico, Honduras, Ukraine, India, Japan, Poland, and Trinidad. Of the 761 people arrested, more than 450 have already been deported, Kice said today.

The raids were a major push within "Operation Return to Sender," a crackdown that has resulted in 13,000 arrests nationwide since June. Immigration officials have also identified 3,000 inmates in state and local jails who will be deported.

The operation targets those illegal immigrants who hide after skipping their voluntary deportation proceedings and criminals who have re-entered the United States after being previously deported for crimes in the U.S.

It's an uphill battle. Despite ongoing efforts, officials estimate that about 600,000 illegal immigrants who have ignored deportation orders are still at large, Kice said.

. . .

The two dozen men -- and one woman -- brought in from other raids now sit on wooden benches, clutching paper bags filled with their personal belongings. ICE officers wind through the room interviewing them in Spanish and helping them fill out forms.

One by one, the immigrants are taken for mug shots and fingerprints. Some will be charged with illegal re-entry to the United States after felony deportation -- a federal crime than can carry up to 20 years in prison. Others, first-time illegal immigrants with no other criminal record, will be processed and deported within days.

Adan Garcia, a 29-year-old dishwasher with a wife and two young boys in Honduras, considers himself lucky to be deported and not charged with a crime. He says he won't be back to the United States -- at least not illegally.

"I came to this country to work, not harm anyone, and not expecting what happened this morning at 5 a.m.," said Garcia, who was taken into custody at the second house. "It wasn't supposed to be this way."

He most likely won’t be back in this country legally, as it’s very difficult to come in legally once you’ve been deported.

Armando Navarro, a professor and pro-immigrant activist, is glum:

"The anti-immigrant climate keeps growing and will grow anticipating the president's immigration reform. Anti-immigrant groups feel more threatened now that there is a Democratic Congress backing the president's plans for immigration reform."

A more aggressive ICE could change a lot of things about how the government interacts with the public and what the role of the government is. Immigrants already avoid the police and most government services out of fear of deportation. This creates a sphere of lawlessness in which crime can flourish. The consequences for the immigrant communities and the larger communities they inhabit can be dire. Stepped-up enforcement by ICE has already disrupted businesses in the West dependent on immigrant labor, like agriculture and manufacturing. Pushing illegal immigrants further into the shadows will exacerbate these problems.

The strategy may also push more immigrants toward urban areas where they are already concentrated and have less to fear from the feds. Currently, in Sanctuary Cities like New York, city officials are prohibited from inquiring about a person’s immigration status in non-criminal matters, and cannot divulge a person's immigration status to the federal government. This two-tier system is not sustainable.

Meanwhile, recent anti-immigrant fervor and five years of the War on Terror has brought xenophobia to new highs.

Recently three Palestinian students were attacked by members of the football team at a Quaker college in North Carolina. A racist assault perpetrated by Quakers! This does not bode well for a peaceful resolution to the immigration debate.

The pessimistic view: We are looking at a Children of Men scenario if this process accelerates, with an impoverished underclass relegated to certain lawless areas while the middle-class majority lives in fear behind fences and riot police.

The optimistic view: The Sanctuary Cities provide a model of how, somewhat counterintuitively, with less strict immigration enforcement, rule of law in an area actually improves. New York City has one of the largest immigrant communities in the country which ICE is relatively unable to penetrate, and it's also one of the safest large cities in the country. And while we have a long history of racism and nativism in the U.S., we’ve also been relatively successful at assimilating past hated groups into the mainstream. These established groups in turn join in on hating on new groups. One would hope we’ll eventually run out of new groups to hate. Or maybe we’ll discover life in space and the human race will finally be united.

reminder

Hagel and McCain are NOT moderates in any meaningful sense. They both voted yesterday to eliminate the federal minimum wage.

(Bob Geiger via Atrios)

the myth of justice

For some people, justice in our country is a fantasy. From the NY Times today:

Roy Brown, who spent 15 years in prison on a murder conviction and uncovered evidence while there that linked another man to the crime, was released from prison on Tuesday after DNA tests on the other man’s exhumed body matched saliva on a nightshirt at the crime scene.

. . .

“Changes have got to be made, man,” Mr. Brown said later at a lawyer’s office across the street, answering questions in a monotone as he rested awkwardly in a black swivel chair. “They say the wheels of justice move slowly, but you know what? The wheels of justice are flat.”

This on the heels of another exoneration in Dallas last week. Texas, our Texas. All hail the mighty state.

These are the stories that get told, but for every one of these, there are many that never see the light of day. It's not really a priority for most people, who really couldn't care less who goes to jail as long as someone gets punished for the crime.

simplicity

Matt Yglesias finds the best response yet to the SOTU. At its base, the situation we're in is simple enough for a 4-year-old to understand.

DHS rethinks "material support" laws

The Department of Homeland Security recently announced a policy change to permit certain immigrants to become asylees or refugees who were previously prohibited from doing so under national security laws on the grounds that they had provided material support to terrorist groups abroad. The laws had the perverse effect of prohibiting many victims of terrorist groups from seeking refuge in the U.S. For instance, if a victim had been forced under threat of death to feed or shelter guerillas, she could for that reason be denied asylum, detained, and deported back to her home country.

The exemption applies to material support provided to specific resistance groups operating in Myanmar, Tibet, and Cuba. In addition, Secretary Michael Chertoff will exercise discretion in allowing asylum applications from people who (1) have provided material support under duress and(/or) (2) who do not represent a public safety or national security risk to the U.S. (It’s not clear from Secretary Chertoff’s statement whether applicants must meet both conditions or only one to qualify for the exemption.

See here for more.

This is a promising development, and is the result of lobbying efforts by a broad range of religious and human rights groups. But limiting the scope of the exemption to three countries plus those whom DHS decides merit it strikes me as a potentially incomplete solution. As always with this administration, the devil is in the details of implementation. But this is certainly a step in the right direction.

Also encouraging was Bush’s continued push for comprehensive immigration reform in tonight’s State of the Union address.

Immigration advocates think this is the year to make it happen. I hope so.