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War Will Keep Them Together

https://twitter.com/Khaleed1949/statuses/511845817125044224

Remember that schism between al Qaeda and ISIS? Well, there’s nothing like a new war with the Great Satan to help patch that up. Adam Taylor passes along some salient news and poses a troubling question:

In a two-page message posted to Twitter accounts that represent both groups, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) asked their “brothers” in Iraq and Syria to “stop killing each other and unite against the American campaign and its evil coalition that threatens us all.” It’s an unusual move. The two groups are perhaps the most notorious of the al-Qaeda-linked groups: AQAP operates in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and it has been described as the “most lethal Qaeda franchise” by the Council on Foreign Relations, while AQIM operates in Northern Africa, in particular Algeria, Mali and Libya. Analysts say a joint statement from the two is unprecedented. …

[T]he statement calls on all jihadist groups to unite against a common enemy: “crusader America” and the alliance of states backing the U.S. plan to strike the Islamic State. This language echoes the Islamic State’s own language and presents a bigger concern: Might U.S. strikes against the Islamic State cause it to reunite with al-Qaeda and other extremist groups it opposes?

Aymenn al-Tamimi translates and analyzes the statement. In his view, the answer to that question is “not necessarily”:

This statement does not mean AQAP and AQIM are getting closer to IS or warming to the idea of pledging allegiance to IS. Indeed, they have firmly rejected IS’ Caliphate declaration, and have maintained their loyalty to al-Qa’ida Central (AQC). For comparison, note that members and supporters of Jamaat Ansar al-Islam- an Iraqi jihadi group (with a Syrian branch) which like al-Qa’ida does not accept IS’ claim to be a state or caliphate- have also denounced the U.S. airstrikes etc. targeting IS as constituting war against Islam, and like al-Qa’ida would want an ideal situation where all jihadis having the end-goal of a Caliphate unite against a common enemy, while rejecting IS’ assumption of supreme authority.

Meanwhile, much though Obama takes pains to deny that there is anything religious or civilizational about this war, that’s not how ISIS sees it:

[N]o matter how delicately the White House wants to frame renewed military operations in the region, it’s serving up rich propaganda fodder for the militant group in Washington’s crosshairs. As Morning Mix’s Terrence McCoy notes, the Islamic State is all too happy to paint the coming battle as a civilizational conflict. In its own glossy publication, Dabiq, the terror organization hails its plans to fight the “crusaders in Washington” and sees its rise amid the chaos of the Middle East as an evocation of history. …

In any event, it’s all dubious propaganda for the Islamic State, which as Obama noted, spends most of its time killing fellow Muslims and faces a constellation of largely Muslim factions — Kurdish militias, Syria’s Assad regime, the Iraqi government, Iran, and the Sunni Gulf states — arrayed against it. And, given Obama’s caution, the Islamic State can’t count on the same slip of the tongue of the president’s predecessor. Just days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush warned that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”

Scotland Is Not So Easily Broken

Whatever tomorrow’s result, Alex Massie anticipates that the Scots will make peace with the result:

There will be a deep sadness in many places if Scotland votes Yes and, in other parts, some raging disbelief if she votes No. How could it be otherwise? This may be a wee country but the matter of Scotland is nothing small. Some folk will leave if we vote Yes and that, I think, will be a great pity. Others will react poorly to a No vote but at least cling to the consolation that losing a battle is not the same as losing a war. The nationalists have known defeat before and coped; they can do so again. Their faith will remain. It will be harder, I think, for Unionists to accept the song is over.

But hatred? Real hatred? How can we really hate our opponents? We may think them sorely mistaken but we can also agree – if we try to remember to do so – that they are not motivated by baser motives than we are ourselves. They are our brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters. Our neighbours too. To hate them is in some sense to deny a part of ourselves.

In that respect we really are all in it together. Today, tomorrow and Friday too. Come what may. Be not afraid. It is, probably, going to be fine. The little white rose of Scotland, so small and sharp and sweet, will still bloom.

Peyton Craighill interprets the polls:

The most recent poll using the most robust methodology will generally offer the best picture of where things will end up. In this case, that would be the phone poll from Survation completed Sept. 12 that showed 42 percent in favor of independence and 49 percent opposing, with 9 percent unsure. The survey reached respondents on both land lines and cellphones.

The 9 percent who are unsure in the Survation poll are a critical group. If they do turn out to vote on Thursday, their choices have the potential to sway the vote one way or another.

Tim Stanley would be unsurprised by a Yes victory. One reason why:

Historically, turnout in Scottish elections is low – in about the mid-sixties. But this time around some 97 per cent of Scots have registered. Now, why would someone go to the effort to register for the first time? To vote negatively (NO) or to vote positively (YES)? A local journalist put it to me that many of those new voters will be working-class Scots motivated by national passion. It’s unlikely that they’re fired up by David Cameron, Ed Miliband or the prospect of Devo-Max (which sounds like a reunited Eighties pop group).

Isabel Hardman visited both campaigns:

Which was the better operation, Labour No or the Yes camp? The two sessions I’ve attended in the past two days will not be entirely representative of their respective national campaigns, which unlike a stick of rock will vary depending where you cut. But the Labour lot seemed more organised, presumably because Labour is an experienced ground war party, while the Yes troops today were more enthusiastic and passionate. Even ‘No’ voters congratulated the two men on their impressive campaign.

Yes don’t have the media on their side – only one paper has come out in favour of independence – so their focus is so much more on grassroots support. Perhaps this makes them appear more sincere and energetic.

Peter Geoghegan is befuddled by Westminster’s mistakes:

The choice tomorrow didn’t have to be binary, but the third option – more powers for Holyrood without full independence – was left off the ballot paper. Then on Tuesday, just two days before the vote, Scotland woke to news that ‘devo max’ was back on if they voted No. The specifics of the additional powers seem both vague and unworkable, but the medium was more important than the message. The pledge, which could effectively usher in federalism across the UK, was delivered not after months of discussion, or even in person by the prime minister. Instead, ‘the vow’ was splashed across the Daily Record. If Westminster thinks that the front page of a tabloid is the best way to talk to Scotland in 2014 then it really has learned nothing from the referendum.

Ewan Morrison takes the Yes campaign down a notch:

In truth, the Yes camp is a ragged collection of factions all seeking power for themselves – a bigger slice of the political pie in a much smaller country. The unity and positivity behind the singular Yes has masked the divisions on the Yes side, between Greens who want no more drilling and the “it’s-our-oil” men; between steady state anti-capitalists and “business for Scotland”. There are even within the Yes camp factions of the old left that have long been pushed out of modern politics. The chanted “Yes”, it turns out, is as much about silencing the dissent among the ranks of Yes followers as it is about silencing opponents.

How will so many disparate and vying factions manage to create a better, more “positive” Scotland? We could have had an answer to this if months back the Yes factions had actually made concrete plans for the future and recognised their divisions, but instead they chanted the mantra of fantasised unity: Yes Yes Yes. This is why the word plastered all over our country has come to mean absolutely nothing. It’s an illusion of positivity. A hope about hope. A pure advert, selling us something we don’t need, something that does not even exist – a post-political dream of a new nation untroubled by the conflicts of the past or grim realities of the world beyond. Say it enough times and you start to believe it. Yes Yes Yes. Say it and see it too many times, and it vanishes into meaninglessness.

Clive Crook, who thinks Scotland could come to regret independence, nevertheless favors it:

It comes down to this: Scots are bound more tightly to each other — by history, culture and ethnicity – than they are to the rest of the U.K. In this sense, Scotland is, and for centuries has been, another country. Its desire for full nationhood has waxed and waned, but it certainly isn’t new. The union is hundreds of years old, but the things that make Scotland different haven’t been smoothed away, which tells you something.

What has changed in recent decades is that the U.K. has become both less hospitable to the Scots and less necessary.

And Paul Wells’ hunch is that “an independent Scotland would, in 30 years, be doing fine and maybe better than fine”:

And that the United Kingdom, whose history is rich in upheaval, could handle this one with little difficulty. There would be transition costs, and they would be borne disproportionately by people whose means are so modest they have a hard time handling any new cost, but a lot of them will vote Yes tomorrow anyway. That’s only irrational if you assume voters are, or should be, profit maximizers before all else.

All of the Dish’s Scotland coverage here.

(Photo: Ballot boxes are carried to a waiting van as ballot boxes that will be used in the Scottish independence referendum are collected from New Parliament House for delivery to Edinburgh’s 145 polling stations on September 17, 2014 in Edinburgh, Scotland. By Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Counterterrorism, Containment, Or Conquest?

Juan Cole argues that containment is the superior strategy for answering the challenge posed by ISIS, noting that “the most effective campaigns in which the US air force has been involved have been more or less defensive”:

A minimalist, defensible position for the US could have been to say that the US will intervene aerially to ensure that Erbil and Baghdad don’t fall, but that recovering the Sunni Arab areas that Nouri al-Maliki had alienated was up to Iraqi politicans and forces. And a minimalist strategy could have simply ignored the Syrian side of the border. It is true that ISIL has a big base in Raqqah and uses its Syrian assets to support its operations in Iraq. But ISIL successes in Iraq were in any case not mainly military but rather political. Since this is so, the military position of ISIL in Syria isn’t really so central to its taking of Mosul, Tikrit, etc. Nor would holding Raqqah help it to hold Mosul if Mosul turned against it.

The US was very good in the Cold War at containing Stalinism but very bad at defeating a guerrilla group like the Vietcong. It was the former that mattered in the end.

He’s right. And I say that not from any ideological position, but simply by observing US policy failure this past decade. To try and do the same thing again when it didn’t work before is the mark of insanity.

Meanwhile, former congresswoman Jane Harman wants to go to war with the ideology of extremism rather than the terror groups themselves:

What’s much more challenging is to confront—and defuse—the ideologies that underpin these groups. The jargon for this is “countering violent extremism” (CVE), a crucial part of the strategy that’s underfunded and hard as all get-out to accomplish. If we lump both al Qaeda and ISIL into one bucket labeled “terror,” we’ll never pull it off.

An example: The State Department recently put out an exceptionally violent video that used some of ISIL’s own promotional materials. The point was to highlight that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s thugs kill Muslims—which is an important point to make. Osama Bin Laden cautioned ISIL’s ancestor, al Qaeda in Iraq, that its slaughter of fellow Muslims made for bad optics. But what might have worked against al Qaeda won’t necessarily work against this new enemy. ISIL glamourizes violence, the notion that its caliphate is worth dying and killing for. The group celebrates death. We need to undermine that pitch with a positive narrative, not amplify its negatives.

Paul Pillar cautions against returning to “war on terror” rhetoric:

Names matter, even if it is not so much the term itself but associated concepts that dominate public discourse and thinking. To the extent that efforts to curb the expansion of ISIS are thought of as War on Terror II, this has unfortunate effects, including the mistaken belief that seizure of territory in the Middle East constitutes a terrorist threat to the United States, and insensitivity to counterproductive effects of the use of military force.

The Obama administration isn’t calling its effort War on Terror II, because it does not want to be seen as copying the approach and the mistakes of its predecessor. Whatever the administration’s motives, eschewing the war metaphor is good for public understanding. What the United States is doing against ISIL is a continuation—albeit more intensively for right now, because of the public alarm—of counterterrorism that has been going on for a long time and, unlike wars, will not end.

And J.M. Berger and Jessica Stern find it “hard to escape the feeling that our policies still come from the gut, rather than the head”:

Bin Laden once said, “All that we have to do is to send two mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there.” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of ISIL, may be counting on just that response, and for the same reason—to draw the United States into a war of supreme costs, political, economic and human.

A limited counterterrorism campaign may insulate us from those costs, but it is not likely to be sufficient to accomplish the goals laid out by the president. ISIL is a different enemy from al Qaeda. It has not earned statehood, but it is an army and a culture, and more than a traditional terrorist organization. Limited measures are unlikely to destroy it and might not be enough to end its genocidal ambitions. Our stated goals do not match our intended methods. Something has to give—and it’s probably the goals.

When Facebook, Twitter And CCTV Solve Crimes

Philly hate crime: pic.twitter.com/i3PBprO9nn

— Greg Bennett (@GreggyBennett) September 17, 2014

Last Thursday, a brutal gay bashing took place in the City of Brotherly Love:

Sources tell NBC10 the 27-year-old and 28-year-old victims were walking from a restaurant in the area of 16th and Chancellor around 10:45 p.m. Thursday. Suddenly they were approached by a visibly intoxicated group of two men and six women. Witnesses say someone in the group asked, “Is this your fucking boyfriend?” When one of the victims told them yes, the group allegedly attacked them, punching and kicking them in the face, head and chest.

Both men suffered shattered cheekbones and one had to have his jaw wired shut. But a combination of CCTV and social media – especially by a lone and heroic tweeter – caught the fuckers who did it:

The Philadelphia police department on Tuesday released surveillance video of the large group of suspected attackers as they walked along the Philadelphia street where the attack occurred. Within hours, the above photograph [shown in the lower-right corner of that tweet by Greg Bennett] surfaced on Twitter that purports to show many of the suspects at a dinner party taken that evening at a nearby restaurant. …

According to reports, a Twitter user named @FanSince09 turned to Facebook Graph Search to see who had checked into La Viola after it was determined that the photo first surfaced on Facebook. After matching the photo from people who called into the restaurant, he notified police. It wasn’t long after that Philadelphia police detective Joe Murray credited @FanSince09 with helping to crack the case with this tweet: “S/O to @FanSince09 This is what makes my job easy. Sure, it’s up to me to make the arrest but we are all in this together.”

Late Tuesday evening, WPVI-TV reported that attorneys representing the suspects have contacted police and are marking arrangements to turn themselves in for questioning on Wednesday.

It reminds me a bit of our Window View contest. It’s amazing what you can do with Google earth, let alone with CCTV and Facebook clues. It’s also a sign of the power of social media to replace conventional sources. In the old days, a newspaper would have had to do all the legwork – probably not as swiftly – and have far fewer resources to do it. Now, independent, social media sleuthing can make all the difference. In a pretty demoralizing and depressing time, this cheered me up no end.

Yes They Can?

Dave Brockington suspects “the current polling is overstating the estimate of the yes support.” Tomorrow he expects “at least a four point (i.e. 52% No, 48% Yes) victory for the unionists”:

We do have empirical evidence to make some reasoned, if imprecise, estimates regarding the don’t knows. As the ICM poll released yesterday still reports 14% Don’t Knows, this remains a significant chunk of the potential electorate. The literature on direct democracy, specifically referenda and initiatives in the United States (the literature about which I’m most familiar), suggests that in a yes / no dichotomous decision, the No option has some of the advantages of incumbency. I strongly suspect that of the DKs that do turn out to vote, they will break significantly to No. This makes sense. Given this is the most important and far reaching election in Scotland in a lifetime, if a voter has yet to make up their mind 48 to 96 hours before the election, the odds of them sticking with the safety of the status quo rather than the riskier unknown of independence is compelling.

But, if tweets are any indication of votes, Yes still has momentum. Mark Gilbert explains:

Karo Moilanen, a visiting academic at the university, has dissected more than 1 million tweets in the past month. The “yes” campaign has generated more than 782,000 missives, compared with 341,000 for those backing the “no” movement. Both camps saw a dive in activity yesterday, though those backing the Scottish nationalists were still twice as active as the unionists

Dan Hodges thinks the referendum has already exposed the fact that the union is essentially a mirage:

In Scotland we see that just under half the people are toying with turning their back on the United Kingdom for good, and the other half are demanding almost total autonomy as the price for remaining within it. In England there are growing calls for similar autonomy via an English parliament, regional parliaments or even individual city parliaments. In Wales support for independence is now nudging twenty per cent, and there are similar calls for the devolution of more powers and a reassessment of the funding settlement. In Northern Ireland people are currently refraining from murdering each other, which apparently represents a great success. If this is union, what exactly would fragmentation look like?

Jack Shenker frames the independence campaign as part of a tectonic shift in British politics:

What the Scottish independence referendum has exposed, unexpectedly but enthrallingly, is not so much a vein of support for nationalism, or even for independence in its own right, but rather a vein of political imagination that upends everything we’re usually told about politics today. It’s exposed a rejection of gradualism in favor of more ambitious, and even radical visions of change. As young musician Becci Wallace puts it, “it’s opened up so many people’s minds and given them a voice they didn’t even know they had.”

The hope for many is that regardless of the referendum outcome, this mental gear shift could seep across the border; as indicated by the rise in England of the self-styled “anti-establishment” U.K. Independence Party, which tacks firmly to the right, a hunger for alternatives to the political status quo can be discerned right across the British Isles.

Ishaan Tharoor highlights Thatcher’s role in all this:

Critics point to the dark corners of her foreign policy and say Thatcher’s epochal transformation of Britain — her systematic privatization of the country’s industries and wars with labor unions — hollowed out Britain’s industrial base and deepened inequities.

It’s a legacy that many in Scotland have invoked as grounds for wanting to leave, including Alex Salmond, leader of the “Yes” campaign. “That overwhelming desire among the people of Scotland to escape the economic and social bedlam of the 1980s was actually the result of the approach of Margaret,” Salmond told the BBC in 2013. “She set the ball rolling to make Scottish self-government a huge priority, and that ball is still rolling fast now. So in that respect, people should reflect that in some ways, she was the handmaiden for a return to Scottish democracy. Not what she intended, but nonetheless what happened.”

Alex Massie wants No voters like himself shown some respect:

Chafe against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland by all means, imagine a different, more glorious future all you want but at the very least – and it should not be a large thing to ask – recall, just for a second, that your opponents are not motivated by a willingness to sacrifice Scotland or do her down or oppress her or lead her to some kind of dystopian future.

Deep down most Yes voters know this. Deep down they know that if Scotland is a half-decent place to live today it will remain a half-decent country on Friday even if Scots vote No. If it is large and smart and rich enough to be independent it is also – must, in fact – be large and smart and rich enough to remain a part of Britain.

Confidence, in other words, is a two-way street and while there are a hundred, even a thousand, reasons to vote Yes or No it remains the case that many Scots are confident enough in our collective future to vote No.

James Wimberley hopes that No will prevail. But he won’t be surprised if it doesn’t:

Part of the deal for the Scots in 1707, after the failure of their own colonial venture in Darien, was to join in England’s imperial and commercial expansion, for glory and profit. They were not cheated on this. Scots played a quite disproportionate part in the British Empire, from its trading-houses to its battlefields. Glasgow became the shipbuilder to Empire. Hong Kong was created by Scots. But that’s gone now. Cameron can still offer occasional battles to the shrunken Scottish regiments; his oath of vengeance on ISIS was not just theatre. But generally, Britain is now just another peaceful European welfare state, cultivating its gardens like Candide. There is no wider vision or ambition to stir Unionist blood, not even building Europe, an unpopular project. So why can’t Scotland be its own cosy welfare state like Denmark or Slovenia? Catalans and Basques are asking the same question, with potentially graver consequences for Spain.

Previous Dish on Scotland here.

(Image: A sample ballot from the U.K. Electoral Commission via The Atlantic.)

Obama vs The Obama Administration On War

Could the messaging get any worse? Eli Lake and Josh Rogin wonder how the president will maintain his light-touch approach to fighting ISIS when his people, specifically his top military brass, keep hinting that they favor a more direct intervention:

The internal dissent is likely to intensify with Obama’s choice of John Allen to lead the international campaign to persuade U.S. allies to pony up troops, money, and arms for his new war. Allen, a retired general beloved by Washington’s neoconservatives, has called for a robust U.S. war against ISIS since June. Obama and Allen sat down together Tuesday at the White House. Soon after he retired in 2013, Allen took a veiled shot at his old and now new boss, observing that in the wake of Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq, “the body count is going up, the bloodletting is going up.”

As the details of the president’s new war plan leak out this week, many of Allen’s former colleagues and lawmakers wonder whether the president’s new special envoy will be able to convince Arab and European states to get behind a strategy they see as amounting to a half-measure.

Friedersdorf points out that if Obama didn’t want his administration going off-message and calling for more war, he shouldn’t have staffed it with hawks:

That momentum would build behind war is no fluke. What else did Obama expect when he staffed his entire administration with hawkish Iraq War proponents? Any attempt to measure the momentum for war must include Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel calling ISIS “beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” heated rhetoric from Secretary of State John Kerry, and Vice President Joe Biden vowing that the United States will follow ISIS “to the gates of hell.” Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also been a prominent hawk. This is not a surprise. Obama elevated a faction of hawkish Democrats, despite purporting to believe that they all favored a “stupid” war. Little wonder that elites seem so overwhelmingly in favor of intervention.

Mark Thompson thinks Dempsey’s statement yesterday was telling:

[W]hile he caveated what he told the panel about the escalating fight with the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria, his message was clear: if the U.S.-led effort to defeat ISIS and oust it from its self-proclaimed Islamic State straddling the Syrian-Iraq border falls short, Dempsey will go back to the Oval Office and ask Obama for a green light to send at least a limited number of American ground-combat forces to help get the job done.

What was striking was how he delivered the message. Pentagon officials are forever saying they won’t speak in “hypotheticals”—things that might happen in the future—yet Dempsey dropped an atomic what-if into his opening statement. “If we reach the point where I believe our advisers should accompany Iraq troops on attacks against specific ISIL targets,” he said, “I’ll recommend that to the President.”

And to Zack Beauchamp, it indicates that our commitment in Iraq and Syria could easily snowball:

Obama has final say on America’s Iraq policy and is free to reject Dempsey’s “recommendation” to send troops into combat. Given the president’s wariness about ground wars after George W. Bush’s Iraq War and Afghanistan, and his own consistent promise to the American public, he might reject any plan to send US troops into a direct combat mission. But here’s the third thing: this war is escalating quickly. We went from a targeted mission to protect American citizens in Kurdistan and save Iraqi Yazidis from genocide to a full-scale mission to destroy ISIS in both Iraq and Syria in the span of, roughly, a month. Despite his promises, Obama did indeed consider sending ground troops into combat to rescue Yazidis trapped on a mountain.

Internal pressure from leading advisers like Dempsey could very well push the president towards even larger escalations. So, too, could the internal logic of war.

And Obama appears as if he is a spectator to this dangerous escalation – not someone strongly tamping it down. I fear he has lost control of events – by attempting to appease them.

Drowned In Search Of Freedom

Barbie Latza Nadeau tells the ugly story of how as many as 500 Middle Eastern migrants seeking refuge in Europe were deliberately shipwrecked off the coast of Malta by their traffickers last week:

Unlike most of the traffickers who eventually either abandon the ships or meld in with the migrants, these traffickers had devised a bucket brigade plan to pass their human cargo between a series of increasingly smaller vessels mid-journey, always taking the bigger boats back for more refugees, according to survivors. … The only problem with the plan to pass the passengers was that eventually the migrants refused. According to two Palestinian survivors who spent a day and a half in the water before being rescued, the boat they had been on for just a day was met by yet another smaller vessel “for the umpteenth time” about 300 miles off the coast of Malta and the migrants, who were by then extremely tired, hungry and sea wary, were ordered to once again jump onto the smaller ship to continue the journey.

According to reports from refugee aid groups in Sicily who spoke to the survivors, when the migrants refused to transfer yet again, the trafficker from the mother ship allegedly hopped onto the waiting ship, which then rammed the vessel full of migrants until it sank. The smugglers then sped off, leaving as many as a hundred people floating in the water. Only a dozen survived, including two children who were saved when a merchant ship called the Pegasus spotted them floating in the sea. They said that the rest eventually sank beneath the surface—some after bobbing in the water clinging to debris for several hours.

Zooming out, Dara Lind explains how dangerous that voyage is:

Crossing the Mediterranean is much deadlier than crossing from Mexico into the US. The National Foundation for American Policy found that the deadliest year on record for the US/Mexico crossing was 2012, when 477 migrants were killed. That’s about 1 of every 1000 migrants apprehended crossing the border illegally. In 2011, which was the deadliest year for the Mediterranean crossing before this year, 1,500 migrants were killed: 1 in every 50 migrants who crossed. And the IOM’s initial estimates for this year indicate that 2014 will be twice as lethal as 2011: they estimate that 3000 migrants have been killed so far making the voyage.

(Map from Pew.)

A Universally Derided Idea Whose Time Has Come

Dylan Matthews argues that “the economic case that open borders would dramatically improve the well-being of the world is rock solid.” He interviews George Mason prof Bryan Caplan:

“Imagine that you’ve got a million people farming in Antarctica. They’re eking out this bare subsistence in agriculture in the snow,” [Caplan] says. “Obviously, if you let those farmers leave Antarctica and go someplace else to farm, the farmers are better off. But isn’t it also better for the world if you let people stop eking out this existence, contributing nothing to the world, and go someplace where they could actually use their skills and not just feed themselves, but produce something for the world economy?”

Alternately, think about what happened in the 1960s and ’70s as more and more women joined the workforce in the United States. Was the result mass unemployment for men, as women took all their jobs? Of course not — the economy adjusted, and we’re all better off for it. … That’s the basic argument for open borders: that you’re “moving productive resources” — people — “from places where they’re next to useless to places where they can contribute a lot.” The size of the numbers involved makes the case even more compelling. “You might think that moving from Haiti to the United States would cause a 20 percent increase in wages, but no. It’s more like a 2,000 percent increase in wages,” Caplan notes. “The difference between the productivity of labor in poor countries and rich countries is so vast, it’s hard to wrap your mind around it.” With numbers that big, the potential gains are enormous. A doubling of world GDP is a reasonable estimate.

Ezra Klein nods:

It’s intuitive to Americans that the economy benefits when there are more people around to invent, produce, and purchase stuff. As such, public opinion in America overwhelmingly favors the idea that we should make more people. But that consensus quickly breaks down when the conversation turns to letting in more people.

There are good reasons for that. A higher birth rate has very different implications for social solidarity than a spike in immigration, for instance. Plans to strengthen America’s social safety net — or, much more to the point, adopt a universal basic income — would buckle beneath a massive influx of immigrants. There are difficult questions around border security. There are very hard questions about how to integrate a lot of new people into American society (or any other society). But the reason most often given is a bad one: the idea that more immigrants will take jobs from, and depress wages for, native-born workers. There’s overwhelming economic evidence that higher levels of immigration make most native-born workers better off. There’s mixed evidence on the effect on low-skill workers, but even if there are small losses, those are better managed through transfer programs than by closing the border.

Alex Tabarrok looks at the data:

David Roodman has a characteristically careful and comprehensive review written for Givewell of the evidence on the effect of immigration on native wages. He writes, “the available evidence paints a fairly consistent and plausible picture”: There is almost no evidence of anything close to one-to-one crowding out by new immigrant arrivals to the job market in industrial countries.

• Most studies find that 10% growth in the immigrant “stock” changes natives’ earnings by between –2% and +2% (@Longhi, Nijkamp, and Poot 2005@, Fig 1; @Peri 2014@, Pg 1). Although serious questions can be raised about the reliability of most studies, the scarcity of evidence for great pessimism stands as a fact (emphasis added, AT) …

• One factor dampening the economic side effects of immigration is that immigrants are consumers as well as producers. They increase domestic demand for goods and services, perhaps even more quickly than they increase domestic production (@Hercowitz and Yashiv 2002@), since they must consume as soon as they arrive. They expand the economic pie even as they compete for a slice. This is not to suggest that the market mechanism is perfect—adjustment to new arrivals is not instantaneous and may be incomplete—but the mechanism does operate.

Matt Steinglass, meanwhile, thinks immigration advocates have learned a thing or two from the gay rights movement:

The most effective model America has seen in recent years of how an already-committed minority constituency can drive its party’s policies is that of the Tea Party, which staged rallies, won media attention, and (most importantly) ran right-wing candidates in primary elections to force concessions from incumbents. But some immigration activists are looking to a different model: the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual (LGBT) movement. Frank Sharry of America’s Voice, an immigration rights group, noted last year that one of the lessons he learned from the LGBT movement was that “we had to give our cause a human face.”

That may seem like a quixotic ambition, given the vociferousness of right-wing antipathy to undocumented immigrants. On the other hand, maybe not. On Monday, theWashington Post ran a story by Eli Saslow about a ten-year-old boy he calls Alex Ramirez, who earlier this year traveled 2,500 miles from El Salvador to Los Angeles to rejoin a mother and father he hadn’t seen in six years. If you want to assess whether immigration advocates have a shot at winning the heart of America, you need to read Alex’s story. It is by turns heartbreaking and heartwarming. When his father and, later, his mother left the coffee fields for America to earn money to send home, they left Alex with his grandmother in the bamboo house where the family had lived for generations. When Alex’s mother, Yessica, finally phoned to tell him she had paid for a “coyote” to take him north, he refused. Yessica insisted.

Poverty’s On The Decline … But Tell It To All Those Poor People

Emily Badger summarizes the news:

The official poverty rate declined from 15 percent in 2012 to 14.5 percent in 2013, although the number of Americans living in poverty remained statistically unchanged for the third year in a row. That’s largely because of population growth. Poverty is now starting to tick down as unemployment declines, and as more workers, who held at best part-time jobs in 2012, find full-time employment. Between 2012 and 2013, Census counted 2.8 million net new full-time workers in the United States, with many of those jobs marginally improving the prospects of families that had been living below the poverty line.

Jared Bernstein pours more cold water on the figures:

Yes, various indicators improved in 2013. Real G.D.P. was up, but no faster than the year before (a bit above 2 percent); same with payrolls. And while the unemployment rate fell seven-tenths of a percentage point in 2013, from 8.1 percent to 7.4 percent, more than half of that was from people dropping out of the labor force. That’s not exactly a sign of strength. In fact, the share of the working-age population with a job barely budged last year.

The real wages of low-wage workers were generally as torpid in 2013. For example, if we look at the hourly wage of those in the bottom third of the pay scale, it averaged a bit above $10 per hour over both 2012 and 2013. However, a stagnant low wage is actually an improvement, because real low wages fell sharply earlier in the recovery. And the real median hourly wage went up 1 percent last year, providing a slight bump to the middle class.

How Neil Irwin presents the figures:

This simple fact may be the most important thing to understand about today’s economy: Around 1999, growth in the United States economy stopped translating to growth in middle-class incomes. In the last 15 years, median income has been more or less flat while there was far sharper growth in, for example, per capita gross domestic product. …

But there really is no mystery as to why public opinion has been persistently down on the quality of the economy for years. You can’t eat G.D.P. You can’t live in a rising stock market. You can’t give your kids a better life because your company’s C.E.O. was able to give himself a big raise.

Jordan Weissmann considers the usefulness of the Census’ measure:

The official poverty rate is sometimes criticized as unreliable because of its odd origins and narrow definition of income. The statistic was basically MacGyvered into existence in the 1960s by a lone Social Security Administration economist who based it on cost of food for a family of three, since that was just about the only data on living standards she had to work with. Since then, the stat has only really been updated for inflation. While it counts cash payments such as Social Security towards a family’s finances, it doesn’t account for benefits such as food stamps. As a result, it vastly understates the decline of material need in America over the decades.

That said, it does provide a decent snapshot of poverty as it exists today. For several years, Census researchers have been honing an alternative statistic known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account more government benefits along with geographical variations in the cost of living for a much more sophisticated approach to quantifying need. But in 2011, the SPM was only 1 percentage point higher than the cruder, official measure we’ve been using since the Johnson days.

Ben Casselman points to a few pieces of good news:

The weak recovery has hit young people especially hard; the unemployment rate for Americans younger than 25 is still 13 percent, more than double the 6.1 percent for the population as a whole. But the “lost generation” may at last be seeing some gains. Americans ages 15 to 24 saw their household income rise 10.5 percent in 2013, the biggest increase for any group, though they are still earning 4 percent less than before the recession. Those 65 and older, meanwhile, saw their incomes rise 3.7 percent. No other age group saw statistically significant income gains.

Cassidy’s bottom line:

To oversimplify a bit, income stagnation paired with rising inequality is a recipe for political polarization and, under the American system of divided powers, political gridlock, which is what we have. Based on the latest Census Bureau figures, there’s no sign of that changing anytime soon.

Free Music Rage

Last week, Apple pissed off quite a few music fans by automatically adding the new U2 album Songs Of Innocence to the libraries of 500 million iTunes users. In the face of a mounting backlash, the tech giant launched a help page Monday with instructions on how to remove the album. Writing this weekend, Peter Cohen spoke for those who didn’t get the outrage:

[T]he inordinate amount of actual anger directed at Apple and U2 over this is so disproportional to the actual event, I’ve started to wonder about the mental state of some of those complaining. It’s really been off the charts. If you fall into that camp, let me speak very plainly: I have no sympathy for you. I have trouble thinking of a more self-indulgent, “first world problem” than saying “I hate this free new album I’ve been given.” For the past few days I’ve seen screeds posted on blogs and remarks on social media attacking Apple and U2 for invading privacy, for their NSA-like invasion of the sanctity of people’s music collections, claims of fascism, and a host of other utterly imagined insults. The resulting outrage has been disproportionate and more than a little sad.

Dan Wineman couldn’t disagree more:

Music collections are deeply personal, and to young people, they can be surprisingly wrapped up in identity. Back when CDs and cassettes were the thing, my friends and I would collect and proudly house them in elaborate alphabetized racks. Every cramped freshman dorm room had several cubic feet devoted to this purpose. You wouldn’t visit a friend for the first time without spending at least a few minutes arms folded, waist bent, scanning tiny lettering on 25 or 50 or a couple hundred plastic spines. It was smalltalk; it was a courtship display. Wait a sec, you’re into Genesis?! Oh, just the early stuff. Cool, cool.

We’ve surrendered the physical trappings, but the connotations remain. And I think Apple didn’t see this because — no matter how deeply they insist music runs in their DNA — from the perspective of the iTunes Store, “library” means licensed content the user is currently authorized to stream or download. But due to various design decisions Apple’s made over the years, that’s not what it means to anyone else. I’d wager that to a majority of iTunes users, “library” means my personally curated collection of stuff that I enjoy and feel comfortable associating with my identity. Messing with that is, to be frank, nothing short of a violation.

Meanwhile, Vijith Assar is struck by the sheer novelty of Apple’s move:

[H]ere’s a very simple reason why this is unprecedented, and that is because it doesn’t make any sense. Never before has such a major technology company also operated as publicist for a creative artist. The whole endeavor yearns desperately to be a landmark new innovation for the music industry, perhaps something along the lines of Radiohead’s legitimately earth-moving In Rainbows, which was self-released with variable pricing in 2007 and remains the gold standard against which music industry innovation is measured.

But this is not In Rainbows, and as such should instead be remembered primarily as a monumental blunder by the tech industry. The delivery mechanism amounts to nothing more than spam with forced downloads, and nothing less than a completely indefensible expansion by Apple beyond its operational purview. This company makes hardware and operating systems – even if it’s one to which I’ve more or less entrusted the management logistics of my personal music collection. It has, demonstrably, no competence in the sort of social and cultural thought that should have gone into a well-orchestrated version of this same gimmick, like, say, a free album as a birthday gift. It also certainly has no business forcing files of any sort onto my computer without my permission.

Marco Arment adds, “The right way for Apple to do a big U2 promotional deal like this would have been to simply make the album free on the iTunes Store for a while and promote the hell out of that”:

Instead, Apple set everyone’s account to have “purchased” this album, which auto-downloaded it to all of their devices, possibly filling up the stingy base-level storage that Apple still hasn’t raised and exacerbates by iOS’ poor and confusing storage-management facilities. And when people see a random album they didn’t buy suddenly showing up in their “purchases” and library, it makes them wonder where it came from, why it’s there, whether they were charged for it, and whether they were hacked or had their credit card stolen.