Month: August 2011

by Zack Beauchamp

The above Rick Perry speech has come in for some criticism in the past few days. James Lindsay put the nicest gloss on it, saying "it was short on specifics." Dan Drezner is a bit more accurate:

I'm not sure that anything of consequence can be divined from this…. er…. assemblage of cliches that maybe, just maybe, passes the Turing Test.  Still, what Perry said is such pure, unadulterated boilerplate that, as a foreign policy commentator, one must step back and gape in wonder.

Drezner follows up here. Jonathan S. Tobin thinks the vacuity is evidence that Perry sees himelf as front-runner. I think, rather, it's evidence of a political strategy. Perry doesn't appear to know all that much about foreign policy, whereas Obama killed bin Laden. Perry would much rather talk about Obama killing jobs. So he speaks only in vague generalities about foreign policy, saying nothing all that controversial or specific to keep the conversation focused squarely on the economy. It's obnoxious, but not dumb.

by Patrick Appel

Despite what Lichtman's electoral model predicts, Obama's re-election is anything but a sure thing. Tom Jensen's latest numbers reflect that:

I wrote a blog post last week about how Democratic enthusiasm was at a year long low. Now it's at a lower year long low with only 47% of the party's voters 'very excited' about voting this year compared to 58% of Republicans.

Bernstein doesn't put much stock in Lichtman's system. McArdle, meanwhile, applies the model to Hoover.

Santiago, Chile, 3.30 pm

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

This post made me chuckle. We do charge for immigrant visas. Here is a fee schedule for USCIS. A work-based petition requires an I-140 ($580) and an I-485 ( $1070). A family-based petition requires an I-130 ($420) plus the I-485 ($1070). This, of course does not include attorneys fee.

Another includes them:

Having held 2 F-1 student visas, 2 H1-B work visas and (after 7 years) finally receiving my permanent resident card … are you telling me the $10,000 in legal fees I paid was supposed to be free?  If you think successfully obtaining a Visa to reside in the USA is "free", think again.  

Another:

… we already do.  Quite a lot actually. I'm a consular officer working primarily on immigrant visa cases in an American embassy in a country where the average income is less than $1,000 a month.  

Just to get in the door for the consular interview, there is an immigrant I-130 petition filing fee of $420 as well as a $330 processing fee and a $74 visa security surcharge.  That's per person.  A family of five coming to American would have to save for many months, sometimes years, just to get a chance to talk to me.  And that is not counting how much they'll have to pay to get their medical examinations, their court documents and criminal histories and marriage certificates.

And God help them if these documents aren't in English, because then they have to take them to the price-gouging translators across the street from the Embassy.  None of the forms provided during this process are in Arabic, so they may have to pay some cyber cafe shark to help them fill it out, which he will do poorly, sometimes resulting in disqualification of the entire case.  

Oh, and none of this is refundable.  You have to pay all of the fees upfront, whether the visa is issued or refused.

And don't forget that no one gets an immediate relative immigrant visa unless there is a marital or blood relationship with an American citizen or lawful permanent resident or some company who is petitioning for these people.  Without that relationship, there can be no petition and no visa.  If that prerequisite was done away with and anyone could apply so long as some extra fee was paid, I don't think that would change a thing.  There's already an investor visa (technically non-immigrant) that basically lets the wealthy come and spend their time and money on some industry or another in the States, so long as they have more than half a million bucks to invest.  And the fact is, with that visa, the wealthy can come and go as they please and could potentially adjust their status to lawful permanent resident if desired.

The issue is desperation and always has been.  If your situation is desperate enough, some golden ticket visa that costs however many thousands of dollars is just as out of reach as a regular immigrant visa with all of its burdensome fees.  Sneaking in or circumventing immigration law still remains the more viable option.  The problem doesn't exist outside the United States where visas are paid for and issued.  The "immigration problem" is inside the United States where people have, in one way or another, already immigrated to the U.S. and now live in a legal and cultural black hole.

Frankly, I think that a golden green card would make much more sense. Let's say $10,000 gets you a green card and that means citizenship in about five years or so.  You'd have half a million applicants in the first week, guaranteed. Might at least put a dent in the national debt.

by Zack Beauchamp

Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake make the case that Palin be Romney's best friend in the primary:

 With Palin in the race, there would be three “big” figures — Palin, Perry and Bachmann— all competing for tea party voters. Assuming none of the three run away with the support of a large number of tea partiers — and Perry clearly has the best chance to do that — the resulting fracturing of the vote would allow Romney a path to victory.

Bernstein counters:

Palin running creates a fair number of risks for both Perry and Romney. The first is that based on her record, she certainly cannot be trusted to be a loyal party soldier. We don’t know how that might play out in the actual campaign, but if I were running the winning candidate’s campaign I wouldn’t want a candidate around who is known to hold grudges and act on them, and who has shown little respect for party norms and interests. Moreover, since Palin is massively unpopular with the general electorate, having her in the news constantly would remind people why they don’t like Republicans very much these days.

by Chris Bodenner

The quitter-in-chief sounds like she's bailing on her big appearance at a Tea Party rally in Iowa this Saturday:

The person [close to Palin] said Ms. Palin’s appearance was "no longer confirmed" and cited "continual lying" from event organizers at Tea Party of America, including a recent mixup over whether former U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell of Delaware would also speak. Ms. Palin is known for last-minute schedule changes that whipsaw supporters and media across the country. But the latest decision is puzzling. Ms. Palin’s speech at the rally was viewed as her most high-profile appearance of the summer, fueling  speculation she was indeed plotting to run for the Republican presidential nomination.

So far she hasn't backed out on her appearance at a similar rally in New Hampshire on Monday. But it's only Wednesday.

by Zack Beauchamp

So sayeth Allan Lichtman, whose "keys to the presidency" approach has successfully called every race since 1984. Samuel Staley, writing in NRO, came to a similar conclusion about a month ago using Lichtman's formula:

New poll results showing disapproval of the way President Obama is handling the debt crisis might give his critics a boost, but they’re unlikely to change the dynamics of the presidential election one year from now. Right now, it looks like we are looking at another four years of Barack Obama as president. That might be hard to stomach, but if we look objectively at the factors that drive presidential election results, President Obama is not just sitting on the bubble. He’ll likely win in 2012, although not by a landslide.

Staley, feeling the need to defend his conservative credentials after that paragraph, follows up here. Kevin Drum quibbles a bit, but ultimately defers to Lichtman.

by Zack Beauchamp

SCOTUSBlog's marriage equality symposium, mentioned in passing here, appears to be wrapping up. Larry Tribe thinks a case is inevitable, and makes the argument in favor of equality:

Arguments [against equality] grounded in government expression typically allege that a state’s decisions about whether to call same-sex unions “marriages” constitute a form of government speech and thus do not implicate individual rights because the government is free to “say” whatever it wishes about what the institution of “marriage” means to it.  In the alternative, but in a similar vein, one might argue that such decisions constitute a matter of purely internal government procedures – akin to the government’s decisions about how to classify persons within the census or for various bureaucratic purposes – that cannot be deemed to implicate anyone’s “rights.”  Even assuming arguendo that expression is the proper frame of reference for constitutional analysis of same-sex marriage claims, neither of these positions withstands careful scrutiny.

Erwin Chemerinsky makes a bold prediction:

I continue to believe that the Court will rule, five-to-four, in an opinion authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, that laws prohibiting marriage equality violate the United States Constitution.  Kennedy wrote the Court’s opinions in Romer v. Evans (1996) and Lawrence v. Texas (2003), and I think that he will see his longest-lasting legacy from over a quarter of a century on the Court being in the area of eliminating discrimination against gays and lesbians.   I believe that his opinion will emphasize, as he did in Romer and Lawrence, the absence of any legitimate interest for prohibiting marriage by same-sex couples.  As in Lawrence, and other opinions, he will point to the trend across the world.

(Photo: Connie Kopelov, 84 (R) and her wife Phyllis Siegel, 76, hold up a marriage certificate and celebrate as they exit the Manhattan City Clerks office after getting married July 24, 2011 in New York City. By Daniel Barry/Getty Images.)

by Patrick Appel

Frum says no:

Obama deferred to Democrats in Congress on the writing of his fiscal stimulus. He fought for a big total, but he paid much less attention to what was included in the total. The predictable result: a stimulus that most economists condemn as very poorly designed.

New CBO numbers the complicate that argument. Jonathan Cohn summarizes:

As of June, the agency says, between 1.0 and 2.9 million more people are working because of the Recovery Act. And that figure actually seems to understates the impact. Not only did more people find jobs; more people who had jobs worked additional hours. Throwing those additional hours into the mix, CBO determined that the Recovery Act's net impact was the equivalent of between 1.4 and 4.0 million additional full-time jobs.

Last week, Dylan Matthews looked at further research on whether the stimulus worked or not.