Year: 2013

J.F. at DiA considers them:

Writing in the New Yorker, Jill Lepore makes a compelling case that the real and lasting legacy of Roe has nothing to do with abortion; instead, it has to do with how the left and right use courts. The left, seeing the backlash that resulted from the Supreme Court effectively deciding a complex and thorny social issue, has been reluctant to go that road again. The right, seeing how the Supreme Court had effectively decided a complex and thorny social issue, has, in the words of a constitutional-law scholar whom Ms Lepore quotes, “raised a generation of people who understand that courts matter and who will vote on that basis and can be mobilised to vote on that basis and who are willing to pay political costs for votes. This is completely lacking on the other side.” Never underestimate the instructive power of failure and loss, in other words.

Canada’s new bank notes need a botany lesson:

[I]t turns out that the maple leaf depicted in a prominent security feature on the new notes most closely resembles a Norwegian maple, rather than one of the country’s ten native species. … The central bank insists that it did consult an unnamed dendrologist—a specialist in wooded plants such as trees, shrubs and lianas—and that the stylised leaf is meant to represent all maples. But botanists, including one who consults with the Royal Mint on coinage, have been coming forward to say that the leaf with five main lobes on the notes is definitely from the Norway maple, an invasive species brought to North America in the 18th century which turns yellow in the autumn, and definitely not the iconic sugar maple leaf, which has three main lobes and turns a brilliant scarlet.

(Photo: A man displays Canadian 20-dollar bills in Washington on January 14, 2013. By Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images.)

A reader clarifies:

Your headline citing that Charles Kenny post is misleading. He’s discussing green cards, mere residency rights, not auctioning off all the social benefits and the status of citizenship.

Another:

We’re already doing this. The EB5 visa program is responsible for what will be one of the biggest investments in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, a portion of the state known for its beauty and natural features as well as high unemployment. Companies that arguably might not have picked Vermont to build a new plant have used the program to begin developing the Kingdom.

Readers push back:

This is a red herring if I ever saw one.  So we shouldn’t pass comprehensive immigration reform, then?  Ridiculous.  This feels a lot like bait-and-switch, divide-and-conquer Republican politics.  Let’s let the minorities fight it out amongst each other.

If that’s an unjust characterization, I suggest that if you want to get serious about black unemployment, low wages, and incarceration, you have many other tools in your toolbox, such as minimum wage increases (perhaps indexing to inflation), radically changing the prison industrial complex (especially abolishing for-profit prisons – talk about moral bankruptcy), and funding better job retraining programs.  Where do the funds come from?  Start making corporations pay taxes again, for starters.

Also, I recently saw this forum on CSPAN, and I would appreciate it if you would give it a shout-out.  Regardless of your opinions of Smiley and West, I think it’s undeniable that there’s a bipartisan agreement in Washington to ignore poverty as a public policy issue.

Another:

That Seeing Red AZ post on blacks and immigration reform was awful.  In particular, it was loaded with three assumptions, all of which were highly questionable:

1) That increased immigration has a negative effect on the unemployment rate for people born in the US;
2) That the primary impact of immigration reform will be to increase the number of immigrants in the US;
3) That African-American voters are primarily focused on narrow economic self-interest rather than any kind of broad understanding of civil rights and equality.

On the first point, the argument that immigration takes jobs away from the country is one of those points that seems logical and therefore continues to hold currency among the public even though it has been repeatedly shown to be factually wrong.  Indeed, according to the Immigration Policy Center, “the most recent economic research indicates that immigration produces a slight increase in wages for the majority of native-born workers” because immigrants are rarely directly competing for the same jobs, and because immigrants expand the economic pie and thus create more overall jobs.  See also this piece extensively documenting the non-relationship between immigration and minority employment and wages.

On the second point, the most important question on immigration reform is how our society is going to treat the ~11 million people who are currently here without legal documentation.  The current situation, in which many of these 11 million work under the table for below-market and sometimes below-legal minimum wages and conditions, is terrible not only for the immigrants themselves but also for the few native-born low skill workers who do actually compete with immigrants for jobs, as well as for anyone who is trying to organize low-skill labor.  Getting these immigrants normal, legally recognized jobs is an essential step towards improving working conditions for all people who do the kinds of labor performed by immigrants.  It may also be true that providing a pathway to legal status for immigrants will increase incentives for illegal immigration (not a bad thing!). But that view is far more speculative than the fairly clear gains that immigration reform would mean to working-class people, which is why the AFL-CIO has completely come around on reform.

The third point is perhaps more in a realm of speculative opinion, but honestly, I find it pretty offensive and kind of stupid to think that black people would look at situations such as the current dynamic in Arizona, where a white majority is imposing increasingly burdensome restrictions on a rising Latino population – many of which (such as racial profiling) are identical to some of the core historical injustices that black people have faced – and identify with the white majority.

Obviously whenever two ethnic groups are living next to each other in crowded cities and competing for attention from political leaders for their priorities there is going to be some tension, but the idea that blacks are gettable votes for Republicans on immigration reform strikes me as insane even before you consider the influence of President Obama on black public opinion.

Another:

You cite a 2006 paper by George Borjas and coauthors. But that was only one salvo in a long-running and contentious debate among labor economists. For an overview, see the section starting “A contentious debate has emerged over whether immigrants have an impact on the wages or employment levels of non-immigrants” on page 4 of this report [pdf]. For lots, lots more, Google “card borjas debate”.

Ben Birnbaum nods:

These were the first Israeli elections since the 1967 Six-Day War in which Israel’s conflict with its Arab neighbors (and with the Palestinians in particular) did not figure prominently in the public debate. While the relatively strong showing of the center-left parties is good news for potential concessions on the peace front, it’s worth noting that the only two parties that emphasized the issue—Meretz and Livni’s Movement—won a combined 14 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

Brent E. Sasley differs:

Contrary to what seems to be the conventional wisdom on the Internets, I also think the election results open up some small space to keep the peace process moving forward. Bibi has shown himself open to signing agreements in the past (Wye River, Hebron), and as I’ve said, I’d call him a “pragmatic opportunist” more than anything else. If he can keep Jewish Home out of the coalition, and bring in parties like Shas and Yesh Atid that are open to peace talks and not committed to settlements all over the West Bank, there’s a basis for discussion with the Palestinians. Bringing in Tzipi Livni—who like Lapid must do something out of the election otherwise her political career is quite possibly over—would strengthen this likelihood even more.

A primer:

Ezra Klein wishes Congress would abolish the debt ceiling:

[T]he debt ceiling is a hard, unpleasant vote that needs to be taken in good times and bad. As such, it’s a hard, unpleasant vote that can go wrong at any time, simply because the politics of the vote are completely out of whack with the necessity of the vote. Republicans are admitting that when they choose to “suspend” the debt ceiling rather than raise it — this way, no one can accuse them of raising it, even though that’s exactly what they’ve done. The only problem with their plan is it doesn’t go far enough. We shouldn’t suspend the debt ceiling for three months. We should suspend it forever, completely eliminating the threat that this hard, unpleasant, confusing vote could go wrong and unleash economic havoc.

Bouie notes that “the number of students who are suspended or expelled nationwide has been on the increase for the last decade.” He suggests that on-campus cops are one reason why:

Schools with more police might be safer from violence, but there are also unintended consequences to exposing students to law enforcement. “With the increase of police in schools, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in school-based student arrests, particularly of youth of color,” writes Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil-rights group. “Instead of addressing infrequent, serious threats to safety, police officers in schools often respond to minor student misbehavior by handcuffing, arresting, and criminalizing the very young people they are intended to protect.”

“Criminalizing” is the key word here; police aren’t arresting students for illegal behavior as much as they are detaining them for breaking rules and violating codes of conduct.