Pay them and they will come

There's a fairly interesting article in today's NYTimes about employers' reactions to the recent spate of immigration raids.

The article, written by the Times' immigration beat reporter, Julia Preston, dances around an issue that I think has garnered much too little attention: that employers, not workers, bear most of the responsibility for the "problem" of illegal immigration, as they're the ones driving the market forces that make it happen.

One of the most revealing passages appears early in the article:

Though the pushback is coming from both Democrats and Republicans, in many places it is reopening the rift over immigration that troubled the Republican Party last year. Businesses, generally Republican stalwarts, are standing up to others within the party who accuse them of undercutting border enforcement and jeopardizing American jobs by hiring illegal immigrants as cheap labor.

What is strangest about this is that it is the Nativist wing- in standard, MSM terms, the wingnuts- that, ostensibly carry the flag of anger over wage suppression, a legitimate, and, in some ways, liberal position.

I think this issue basically reveals the cynicism and selfishness of the major forces at work in the immigration debate. Employers, terrified of a cost to their bottom line, or even worse, being accused of actively soliciting undocumented employees, want either no enforcement of current laws or some sort of guest-worker program, a solution that would deliver a steady population of docile workers whose very right to stay in the country would depend on their bosses' say-so.

Employers could do the right thing-- campaign for amnesty and drastically increased legal immigration quotas-- but their standard-bearer Chamber of Commerce party, the GOP, just isn't willing to spend that kind of political capital.

As a side note, look how the employers, according to Preston, use the "market" to defend their position:

Mike Gilsdorf, the owner of a 37-year-old landscaping nursery in Littleton, Colo., saw the need for action by businesses last winter when he advertised with the Labor Department, as he does every year, for 40 seasonal workers at market-rate wages to plant, prune and carry his shrubs in the summer heat. Only one local worker responded to the notice, he said, and then did not show up for the job.

and then...

“I can’t replace those people,” the executive said. She said that despite offering competitive wages from $9 to $17 an hour, the company had failed over the years in repeated efforts to attract non-immigrant workers because of the state’s tight technology labor market and because of the nature of the work, exacting and tedious. If the workers were fired or arrested, she said, she could fail to meet her contracts.

What do terms like "market rate" and "competitive wages" mean in this context? Shouldn't "market rate" or "competitive" refer to the price you'd actually have to pay a legally protected employee to do a job? Why do we accept the employers' definition, which seems to be a Platonic notion of what they feel they ought to pay?

More later...

Ain't no one gonna change my Jersey mind

I love posts like this that expose the hidden architecture of our political system. Who knew it was such a bear to run a modern presidential campaign in Jersey? Or Delaware?

But it does make me a little mad that Nate Silver is always so goddamn smart. Who does he think he is?

A scandal to run with

You can be a peace-loving freedom warrior, and, because you're a little bit of a lefty, you get thrown on the terror watch list. But support batshit crazy right-wing terrorist death squads and no one really cares. This shit is mind-boggling.

Question for the Neighbors

Is 7 a.m. really the best time to be operating your chainsaw?

A fun fact I learned today...

Over the past couple days, I've been doing preliminary reporting on a couple stories relating to immigration that I'm hoping to write this summer, and I've already stumbled across some harrowing facts about our jalopy of a national immigration system.

Did you know, for instance, that citizens from any country that has seen over 50,000 people immigrate to the U.S. in the last 5 years are forbidden from taking part in our visa lottery? (There are other ways to get in, but the lottery is the only one available to people without family connections, a highly marketable skill, or a documented case for asylum).

Excluded countries include Mexico, Canada, India, China, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Colombia, El Salvador, Jamaica, Haiti, Russia, the UK and Poland, i.e. the world's two largest countries, the entire northern hemisphere, and most of our closest allies.

WTF?

This also means that when people say Mexican construction and agricultural workers should "just get in line," they are asking them to do something that is, in many cases...impossible.

Another perspective on Heller

In the midst of all the hoopla, I was reminded of a beautifully written essay by Garret Keizer that appeared two years ago in Harper's (which, unfortunately, doesn't make its archives available to the ragtag viewing public).

Keizer makes the progressive argument against gun control, and, coupled with the questionable efficacy of local gun bans, it's one that I find quite convincing. A choice excerpt:

As the living embodiment of progress itself, a progressive is beyond rage, beyond "the politics of yesterday," and certainly beyond anything as retro as a gun. More than I fear fundamentalists who wish to teach religious myths in place of evolution, I fear progressives who wish to teach evolution in place of political science. Or, rather, who forget a central principle of evolutionary thought: that no species completely outgrows its origins.

Like democracy, for example. What is that creature if not the offspring of literacy and ballistics? Once a peasant can shoot down a knight, the writing is on the wall, including the writing that says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

...

If the Second Amendment is a dispensable anachronism in the era of school shootings, might not the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments be dispensable anachronisms during a "war on terror"?

(Another) Quote of (Another) Day

With age comes wisdom:

"If I was a kid, I'd be into those shoes with wheels..." - Philip Brooks, my father.

Quote of the Day

Gotta love a presidential candidate with a love for hoops:

"I think Derrick Rose is the man. He's Jason Kidd with a jump shot. I think he'll be a great point guard in the NBA, and he's from Chicago." - Barack Obama, on Fox Business News (via Ben Smith).

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that high-rise!

A couple weeks ago, the Atlantic published a Hannah Rosin article, attributing the increase in violent crime in mid-sized cities like Memphis and St. Louis to the destruction of public housing projects and the dispersal of their former residents, using Section 8 housing vouchers.

Though some of my favorite bloggers linked favorably to the article when it came out, it left me feeling uneasy. The article flirts a little too closely to justifying the kind nonsense you see on the Corner and here on the libertarian America’s Future Foundation blog:

…poverty isn’t the problem, at least not the central problem. The real problem is culture. The culture that says the biggest sin someone from the ‘hood can commit is forgetting his friends….This is the culture that the people involved in the Section 8 program are bringing out of the projects and into the ‘burbs. And until they decide to ditch that culture, there’s no realistic way to help them.

Read the whole post and you’ll find the author has also managed to use Rosin’s article to show why Javon Walker, a receiver for the Oakland Raiders, bears responsibility for the fact that a stranger robbed and beat him. Or something like that.

My major problem with Rosin’s argument is its confusion between good theories and good intentions. She professes a certain bafflement— both on her own behalf and that of the housing and crime experts she profiles— as to why Chicago’s Gautreaux program was so successful in placing families in Section 8 housing and lifting them out of poverty, while other programs that copied the model seem to have failed.

But from my vantage point, Rosin, as the J-School professors say, has buried her lede here. The Guatreaux program worked because the participating families were strongly counseled and carefully screened at every step of their relocation process, as Rosin reports much too deeply in her article. The program, in other words, was well run and based on actual needs. How were the other relocation projects administered? Well, Rosin doesn't say.

You can read between the lines though. In 1991, Rosin tells us, the federal government appropriated over $6 billion for the demolition and redevelopment of public housing projects across the country. What do you think tends to happen when massive amounts of money are thrown around for "urban renewal" projects? I haven’t done the reporting, but read this next section of the article with a proper sense of cynicism, keeping the number $6 billion firmly in mind:

The program was launched in the same spirit as Bill Clinton’s national service initiative—communities working together to “rebuild lives.” One Chicago housing official mused about “architects and lawyers and bus drivers and people on welfare living together.” Wrecking balls began hitting the Chicago high-rises in the mid-1990s. Within a few years, tens of thousands of public-housing residents all over the country were leaving their apartments. In place of the projects, new developments arose, with fanciful names like “Jazz on the Boulevard” or “Centennial Place.” In Memphis, the Hurt Village project was razed to make way for “Uptown Square,” which the local developer Henry Turley declared would be proof that you could turn the inner city into a “nice place for poor people” to live. Robert Lipscomb, the dynamic director of the Memphis Housing Authority, announced, “Memphis is on the move.”

What happened, almost certainly, is that developers started to see green and rushed people out of their homes without providing proper support, for which there is typically little financial incentive. Does “Jazz on the Boulevard” sound like the title of a project conceived by former residents of the Henry Horner homes or Cabrini-Green? Not the ones I’ve met (though I do keep missing the CHA’s annual production “Cabaret”).

Imagine you lived in a public housing high-rise in the mid ’90s. Yes, your home was built on the premises of faulty and even malevolent urban planning, replacing more diverse housing stock and commercial streets that would have given you and your neighbors a better chance to lift yourselves up over the generations. But, over time, your building had developed some of the fixtures of a vital city neighborhood, like long-standing friendships between neighbors and reliable social welfare institutions. Though some of these friendships and institutions might also, at times, drag you down, at least you have somebody to rely on when the inevitable crises of poverty strike.

Now imagine you’re told you have three months— or six months, or even a year— to clear out, and that the government will give you a section 8 voucher to help you pay rent on a new apartment of your choosing.

Sounds nice, but you don’t have a car or much money, so unless you find readily available help, you’re not likely to find a house too far from where you already live, far enough to actually provide your child genuinely expanded horizons. How would you even get out to the suburbs if you wanted to? Two buses and a train? That would take two hours, and you work during the school day, so who would look after the kids while you’re gone? I know from experience that one trip isn't usually enough to find a good apartment. Five, or even ten, would be a more realistic number.

Sure, all these challenges could be confronted, with good information and a benevolent, well-run counseling system. But in the absence of that, wouldn’t you end up moving nearby? Doesn’t it make sense that you’d end up getting an apartment near people you already know, and that many of the problems that existed in the high-rise would follow you to your new neighborhood? Would it be your fault that some pie-in-the-sky program, executed by politicians and developers, whose interests are most likely not your own, had managed to move you around again, just like they moved your grandparents to build the high-rises from which you were just vacated?

Here’s the thing: when civic leaders use false paternalism to justify rushing people out of their homes, usually so politically connected developers can get a chunk of a huge project and city councilmen can expand their tax bases, social disorder tends to result. The theory— that public housing projects are a particularly malignant form of urban housing and should be phased out— isn’t wrong. It’s the execution that should be questioned. That should have been Rosin's lede.

The silver lining, as Rosin begrudgingly admits, is that even a worst-case disperal scenario is still probably preferable to the old concentrated-public-housing status quo. If crime persists in a single, ghettoized district, as it did in so many public housing developments over the last few decades, it eventually becomes ignored. This leads to counter-intutive policy. In Chicago, for example, low crime white neighborhoods have long had a higher per capita police presence than poor, public housing-concentrated neighborhoods with high crime rates, because leaders in the poorer neighborhoods are comparably easier to isolate or buy off.

When the problem of is dispersed, however, causing medium levels of crime across large parts of a city, it becomes a city-wide problem. A city-wide problem is not a good thing, obviously, but it does have one major advantage over a ghettoized, institutionally accepted problem: it's a problem that politicians and police chiefs have to give a fuck about. And, just maybe, try to solve.

Why isn't Larry David driving a 1994 Geo Metro XFi?

Ah, the power of the internet.

Not 72 hours ago I was sitting between two cantankerous twin sisters as they argued about this very question— whether it's more noble and correct, environmentally speaking, to buy a new Prius or a sensible, fuel-efficent used car— and today the tubes, in the form of a Matt Power article in Wired magazine, provide at least the outline of an answer:

If a new Prius were placed head-to-head with a used car, would the Prius win? Don't bet on it. Making a Prius consumes 113 million BTUs, according to sustainability engineer Pablo Päster. A single gallon of gas contains about 113,000 Btus, so Toyota's green wonder guzzles the equivalent of 1,000 gallons before it clocks its first mile. A used car, on the other hand, starts with a significant advantage: The first owner has already paid off its carbon debt. Buy a decade-old Toyota Tercel, which gets a respectable 35 mpg, and the Prius will have to drive 100,000 miles to catch up.

Better yet, buy a three-cylinder, 49-horsepower 1994 Geo Metro XFi, one of the most fuel-efficient cars ever built. It gets the same average mileage as a 2008 Prius, so a new hybrid would never close the carbon gap.

My initial feeling is that there's another layer of complexity that Power overlooks. I'm no economist, but I can think of at least one crucial way the used car market is different from the new car market: it's fixed. There are no new 1994 Geo Metro XFi's rolling off the assembly lines. There are no Japanese car executives weighing whether or not to build more of them based on consumer demand for low-carbon-emission cars.

What this means is that my personal choice to drive a used car will not actually change the amount of carbon spewed into the atmosphere. It's more like a shell game: it will just be me driving the already existing car instead of someone else, who may have been able get it at a slightly lower price if I hadn't allowed my sense of personal virtue to increase pressure on the finite used car market. That other person will now be forced to purchase and maintain another car, almost certainly less fuel efficient.

If I buy a Prius, however, my purchase will have some small effect on a living, breathing manufacturing economy. Some executive in Tokyo or Detroit may decide to produce fewer gas-guzzlers and more fuel-efficient cars based, in part, on my decision as a consumer. With many, many replications of this process, the nature of the entire world fleet of cars could change.

The Wired article also fails to grapple with another salient point: if the 1994 Geo Metro XFi was so fuel-efficient and inexpensive to produce, why aren't car manufacturers dusting off the old blueprints and rolling more of them off the assembly lines? Why did innovation, along the lines of making conventional, non-hybrid cars really, really fuel-efficient, dead-end when I was still training for my bar mitzvah?

I invite anyone with a background in economics or ethics to poke swiss-cheese holes in anything written above. Just keep it clean, or at least carbon-neutral.

Hot enough for murder

So a rash of summertime murders hits Chicago, and now cops are going to have to record the temperature whenever a crime's reported? Sounds like a clever way to shift the blame to the one thing in the world no one can control: the weather.

Second City Cop is unimpressed. Jimmy McNulty would be pissed too.

Obama/Omar '08

Remember when Hillary Clinton said her favorite t.v. show was Grey's Anatomy? Ugh.

God I'm glad Obama's the nominee.

On Productivity...

The blogosphere, chockful as it is with disaffected journalists, has been all over the emerging story of Sam Zell's nittering capitalocrats bleeding the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune dry.

In the latest depressing development, a Zell underling told a group of creditors that the Tribune Company exeucutives had figured out a new way to measure the productivity of its writers, and, hence, cull the chaffe in a new, forthcoming round of newsroom cuts: just see who's writing the most words, and that person is the most best journalist!

Editor & Publisher has the specifics:

Michaels told listeners that in Los Angeles the average journalist at the Los Angeles Times produces about 51 pages a year, while in Hartford, Conn., the average is more like 300 pages a year....

...."You find you eliminate a fair number of people while not eliminating very much content," Michaels explained about the strategy.

Bearing this definition in mind, I went back to the Chicago Journal's archives to see where I'd fit in on Sam Zell's scale of efficiency during my brief stint as a reporter, in 2005. Before learning about Zell’s new analytical tool, I’d assumed I’d been an inexperienced, fairly naïve reporter, missing the point of my assignments or burying my lede about half the time. But maybe I’d been thinking about it all wrong.

Making my analysis was a little harder than I would've hoped: as Michael Miner points out, its unclear what Zell's lackeys mean by a "page" of journalism. Simple math rules out the definition you'd most likely expect from newspapermen: a page of newsprint. But most of these Tribune Company guys cut their teeth in radio, not newspapers, so that’s understandable.

Instead, I figure the execs probably meant a typed page of text, a measure they’d mostly like had to deal with in their college expository writing seminars. Using this definition, along with single-spaced, Times New Roman, 12-point, I found that a “page” works out to be about 600 words.

The results of my self-survey were relatively heartening. During a typical week, I'd been able to get about 6800 words into the paper, usually spread across 6 or 7 articles. Seeing as I'd been contracted to work 51 weeks out of the year, this meant I was on pace to produce about 580 pages a year.

The numbers don't lie: though I might have felt like a po-dunk, over-assigned cub reporter with little time to think deeply about much of what I was reporting on, I’d actually been quite brilliant. I was about twice as good as some random jerk from the Hartford Courant and six times as good as an LA Times writer! And that’s a national newspaper!

Never leave your post

So I go out of town for a single lousy week, and I miss the biggest story to come to Chicago's 14th District in months. A disappointing day for a professional blotter writer.

D-Bag Award Nominee

This is the most disturbing thing I've seen in a while. The moral rot has truly set in.

What Hillary meant...

Melinda Henneberger is right, of course, about RFK-gate:

I agree she didn't mean to say it. But that's not the same as not meaning what she said.

It's seemed obvious to me, for a while, that Hillary's entire end-game strategy is a play at the margins, an attempt to wait around in case something even worse than Jeremiah Wright happens to Obama. Check out this two-week-old Terry McAuliffe interview on Meet the Press. I've transcribed the relevant exchange below:

McAuliffe (with a hint of malice and incredulity): Let me ask you, I know it's your show, but...you think it's impossible for Hillary Clinton to be the nominee? Impossible?

Russert (with light, melancholic dismay and a touch of condescension): Let me, uh...I'm gonna stick with the questions...

McAuliffe (holding his hands up, looking slighlty wounded): Okay, but well, I'm just saying, it's not impossible.

McAuliffe is indisputably correct. Nothing, technically speaking, is impossible. There is the uncertainty principle, first of all, and one must consider that a hamburger could actually be a ham sandwich, and, of course, Barack Obama could, at any point, be eaten by wolves.

If Hillary is sticking in the race because, as McAuliffe says, "anything can happen" then one of the most likely scenarios leading to her nomination would be Obama's assassination. It is a possibility that many in my parent's generation, along with at least one overeager New York Times reporter, have been quietly raising for months now. It's hard to believe that Clinton is oblivious to this fear, especially when she's constantly sending out surrogates to remind us just how unpredictable life can be.

None of this means that Hillary Clinton wishes Obama harm. It only means that if she continues to linger around, long after logic and good manners require her to leave, people will naturally wonder what kind of contingencies she is planning for.

A final point is worth mentioning: if Hillary did simply wish, as she has asserted, to remind voters that nominations often aren't wound up until later in the summer, wouldn't there have been be a better way to say it?

Hillary could have simply pointed out, for instance, that McCarthy and Humphrey were still battling for hearts and minds all through the summer of '68, avoiding mention of RFK's shooting altogether. Or she could have closed her argument one talking point sooner, highlighting her husband's 1992 battle through June.

Alas, there are problems with these arguments as well. First, the rifts in the '68 Democratic party led directly to the calamitous election of Richard Nixon, showing exactly why Hillary should drop out. It was the rifts in the Democratic Party, after all, that allowed this to happen. It was the Party's difficulty in uniting around a nominee that bequeathed the world a uniquely toxic Republican presidency.

Her first argument, then, would seem to be the better justification: if Bill didn't wrap it up until June, why should Barack get a pass? Only one major sticking point: it's not really true. Bill Clinton himself refutes this interpretation of the 1992 primaries deep in the bowels of his bloviating, 1008-page autobiography (as Andrew Sullivan pointed out):

On April 7, we also won in Kansas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. On April 9, Paul Tsongas announced that he would not reenter the race. The fight for the nomination was effectively over...

So yeah, Hillary didn't mean to say that she was staying in just in case Barack gets shot. But it's hard to believe that the basic thought- that Hillary would be waiting in the wings, that "anything can happen"- wasn't at the root of her comment.

Ballin' Obama

Sorry Michelle, I don't mean no disrespect, nor any double entendre.

But audience, please, if any of you get advance notice of an Obama-involved, Chicagoland basketball game like this one at the East Bank Club on Tuesday, let me know first. I'm dying to be watch the big man play.

Rockers watch your back!

For the second time in as many years, the City Council has backed off on plans to force Chicago concert promoters to get prohibitively expensive licenses before throwing events, an ordinance that would dampen the vitality of the scruffy independent music scene we know and love.

Under the scrapped set of rules, as I understand them, any Joe like me would have to purchase a $500 to $2000 license and purchase $300,000 worth of disaster insurance before throwing a single rock show anywhere in the city. Like fast rock 'n roll in cheap dives? Expect a lot less of it if this law ever passes, as many of the small fries who put these shows together just wouldn't be able to scrape together that kind of lettuce or bother with the headache.

This latest City Council retreat notwithstanding, these proposed rules likely aren't going away, and neither should the voices of protest. As the Reader's Ben Joravsky explains in the article linked to above, the ordinance will now go back to committee. Daley, who seems increasingly power-hungry and irascible, will demand action, seeing as he promised to do something, anything in the wake of the E2 fire. Rather than get his fingernails dirty with the actual details of the situation- that no new law is needed, only enforcement of laws already on the books, that other cities are killing themselves to get the free publicity a healthy indie rock scene brings with it-he and his lackeys in the Council will surely attempt to ram a similarly bad ordinance through in the coming months.

This is just one tiny, tiny example of how true city bosses, to whom voters and council members have ceded their power, function. Grand schemes occupy these bosses' daily schedules, not the delicate tapestry of the city's neighborhoods and scattered communities. If a boss says publicly he's going to do something, no matter how unnecessary, it must be so. Ego and the politics of power demand it.

The moral? If you care about this issue, be vigilant. Sometimes these fake-outs have the combined effect of dissipating and confusing the opposition. And if you don't like the way this is being handled, remember that there are scores of other constituencies that Daley is treating the same way.

Rabbi vs. Rabbi

A little surfin' on the Postville situation led me to this classic rabbinical smackdown. Turf war, muthafuckas!

Chris Paul and Tyson Chandler, BFF or MTF?

Is there anything more heartwarming than when two grown men love each other?

Dept. of Disturbing Symbolism

So after raiding a kosher meat plant in Iowa and arresting 400 undocumented workers (and exactly zero employers), the federal government is now holding the detainees on the grounds of an agricultural fair, where, one presumes, cattle are normally housed.

Hmm...

Dumb as I wanna be...

Sometimes Mickey Kaus makes steam come out of my ears. He's got a classic contrarian's case of asinine solipsist syndrome (figure out the hidden acronym if you want!), mistaking originality for truth and pseudo-intellectual browbeating for intelligent scrutiny. Another frequent Slate contributor, Christopher Hitchens, suffers from the same affliction, though exhibits slightly different symptoms.


On Saturday, Kaus decided that the mainstream media wasn't doing enough to bring the following Obama "gaffe," regarding his poor prospects in tomorrow's Kentucky primary contest, to light:

"What it says is that I'm not very well known in that part of the country," Obama said. "Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it's not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.*"

*His boldface, not mine.

Can you imagine being sincerely concerned about this? Does Kaus really feel like wiling away his years on earth by advocating the media make a BIGGER deal out of this kind of meaningless crap?