Archive for the ‘Trade and Immigration’ Category
Slouching Towards a New Supreme Court Term
We’re now three weeks away from the new Supreme Court term – I know you’re as excited as I am — and after a summer that included big opinions from The Nine, more confirmation hearings, and front-page district court decisions (on ObamaCare, immigration, and gay marriage), we roll into a fall full of even more legal intrigue. Indeed, the first Monday of October that marks the first high court arguments of the new season is pretty much the first day of school for us Court-watchers. And what better way to go back to school than to attend Cato’s ninth annual Constitution Day symposium this coming Thursday?
But don’t think that Constitution Day marks my re-emergence into the public sphere after a long six weeks slaving away at the Cato Supreme Court Review. No, that moment, when I opened my office door, shook off the cobwebs, and went forward into our glorious future came last week, with panels on ObamaCare and immigration reform at the University of Virginia and Liberty University, respectively. Those two law schools did a wonderful job in organizing and publicizing their events. And here’s the rest of my schedule through the end of October, many of which continue my ObamaCare debate challenge (events sponsored by the Federalist Society are asterisked):
- Sept. 13 at 1pm at Boston University Law School – Preview of the New Supreme Court Term*
- Sept. 14 at noon at Harvard Law School – Debate on the Constitutionality of Obamacare against Prof. Mark Tushnet*
- Sept. 17 at noon at Rayburn House Office Building B-340 – Capitol Hill Briefing on the Supreme Court and Economic Liberty
- Sept. 20 at 5pm at Loyola University Law School (Chicago) – Panel on the Constitutionality of Obamacare*
- Sept. 21 at noon at Northwestern University Law School (Chicago) – Preview of the New Supreme Court Term*
- Sept. 22 at noon at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – Debate on the Constitutionality of ObamaCare*
- Sept. 25 – George Mason law professor and Cato adjunct scholar Ilya Somin‘s wedding – Please do congratulate him!
- Sept. 28 at 12:30 – University of Kansas Law School – Debate on the Constitutionality of ObamaCare*
- Sept. 29 at lunch – Kansas City Federalist Society Lawyers Chapter – ObamaCare and Missouri’s Prop C*
- Sept. 30 at 8:30 – Missouri Bar Association Annual Meeting - Panel on the Supreme Court
- Sept. 30 at 1pm – University of Missouri Law School – The Constitutionality of Obamacare*
- Oct. 4 at 10am – U.S. Supreme Court – First Monday!
- Oct. 5 at 5pm – Widener University Law School (Delaware) – The Constitutionality of Obamacare*
- Oct. 9 at 7pm – Washington Capitals home opener against the New Jersey Devils (I’m a season-ticket holder)
- Oct. 12 at noon – Lewis & Clark University Law School (Portland, OR) – TBD*
- Oct. 12 in the evening – Portland Federalist Society Lawyers Chapter – TBD*
- Oct. 13 at noon – Willamette University Law School – TBD*
- Oct. 16 at 6pm – University of Toronto Schools Centennial Gala (Go Blues!)
- Oct. 19 at noon – University of Southern California Law School (L.A.) – Immigration*
- Oct. 20 at noon – Chapman University Law School – Immigration*
- Oct. 21 at noon – Orange County Federalist Society Lawyers Chapter – TBD*
- Oct. 22 all day – Chapman University Law School Nexus Journal of Law & Policy Symposium – “Citizens Divided on Citizens United: Campaign Finance Reform and the First Amendment”
- Oct. 26 at lunch – Stanford University Law School – TBD*
- Oct. 27 at noon – University of the Pacific Law School (Stockton, CA) – Debate on the Constitutionality of Obamacare*
- Oct. 28 at 12:45 – University of California at Berkeley Law School – Debate on Judicial Activism*
If you come out to any of these events, please do come up and introduce yourself.
Gov. Barbour Breaks with GOP on Immigration
OK, the headline may be a bit overstated, but recent comments on immigration by Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi are different enough from what most of his fellow Republicans are saying to be newsworthy.
In a video interview released earlier this week (see link below), Barbour expressed appreciation for the Hispanic immigrant workers who helped rebuild his state after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and for the need to be more open to highly skilled immigrants from countries such as India.
Barbour is an important figure in the GOP. He is in his second term, chairs the Republican Governors Association, and led the Republican National Committee back in 1994 when the party swept into power in Congress.
When asked what he would say to people in California who are upset about illegal immigration, Barbour responded:
Let me just tell you, I’ve had a different experience than perhaps some other governors. I don’t know where we would have been in Mississippi after Katrina if it hadn’t been for the Spanish speakers that came in to help rebuild, and there’s no doubt in my mind some of them weren’t here legally. Some of them were, some of them weren’t. But they came in, they looked for the work—if they hadn’t been there, if they hadn’t come and stayed for a few months or a couple of years, we would be way, way, way behind where we are now.
Every country—I don’t care if it’s the United States of America or Papua New Guinea, every country has gotta have a secure border. If you can’t secure your border, you’re not much of a country, and we’ve gotta secure our border. But we’ve gotta do so with the recognition that even in our lifetime we’re gonna have a labor shortage in the United States. We don’t want to be like Japan, where the aging population is supported by fewer and fewer and fewer and fewer.
So there’s gotta be a way—a) we gotta secure the border, but b) we’ve got to work through how are we gonna make sure we’ve got the labor we need in the United States. H1B visas—a huge, huge thing. My idea is everybody from Stanford who’s from India that gets a PhD, we oughta stamp citizenship on his diploma, so instead of him going back to India and starting a business that employs 1,800 people, that he’ll start a business that employs 1,800 people in Des Moines, Iowa, instead of India. A lot of this is just common sense, and common sense tells us we’re not gonna take ten or twelve or fourteen million people [currently here illegally] and put them in jail and deport them. We’re not gonna do it, and we need to quit—some people need to quit acting like we are, and let’s talk about real solutions.
What’s Behind the Decline in Illegal Immigration? It’s the Economy, Stupid
A Pew Hispanic Center report released today confirms what has been widely known, that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has dropped sharply since 2007. The real argument is over what’s behind the decline.
According to Pew’s Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn, the annual inflow of unauthorized immigrants dropped by two-thirds during 2007-09 compared to 2000-05. That plunge has contributed to an overall decline in the total number of illegal immigrants in the United States from a peak of 12 million in March 2007 to 11.1 million in March 2009. Pew calls this “the first significant reversal in the growth of this population over the past two decades.”
Advocates of more restrictive immigration policies have been quick to credit increased enforcement for the decline, but that thesis doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. While enforcement efforts have indeed been ramped up in the past couple of years, the change has not been dramatic. Resources devoted to border and interior enforcement have been increasing pretty steadily since the early 1990s.
It seems implausible that more recent, incremental increases would have such a visible effect when years of increased enforcement efforts before now so visibly failed. In fact, the same restrictionists who constantly complain that nothing has been done to enforce our immigration laws are among those now praising that supposedly non-existent enforcement for the drop in illegal immigrants. They can’t have it both ways.
The more obvious explanation is the steep economic recession that began to bite in 2008. The downturn has been especially brutal in the housing and construction industries where many illegal immigrants found employment during the previous boom. As evidence, the decline in the number of illegal immigrants has been steepest in those states, such as Nevada, California, and Florida, where the housing downturn has been the most severe.
When the economy revives, I predict the inflow and population of illegal immigrants will begin expanding again, too. This problem will not be solved until Congress and the president work together to enact comprehensive immigration reform that widens opportunities for legal immigration.
The Rumors of Manufacturing’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
“US manufacturing grows for 13th straight month” is the headline of an AP newswire story posted around noon today. This statistic doesn’t surprise me, since I’ve been following developments in U.S. manufacturing for many years now, and have published analyses of public data that refute the myth of deindustrialization and manufacturing decline.
With the exception of the recession of 08-09, when all U.S. economic sectors took a hit, U.S. manufacturing has been breaking its own record, year after year, with respect to output, value-added, profits, returns on investment, exports, and imports. U.S. factories are the world’s most prolific, accounting for 21.4% of global manufacturing value added in 2008 (China accounted for 13.4%).
But I bring the AP headline to your attention for one reason: so that you can judge for yourself who has any credibility on Capitol Hill, within the executive branch, in the media, among organized labor, in industry, in the think tank world, and within the international trade bar, as Nancy Pelosi tries to stuff a ruinous anti-China trade bill down our throats in the name of supporting our floundering manufacturing base. Look for the columns, the op-eds, the press releases, and the floor statements between next week and November.
Who among them will continue to cite our suffering manufacturing sector as the justification for protectionism? They should never again have any credibility.
Travel after the Fall of the Iron Curtain
In the sumer of 1992, I lived and studied in Prague. I was keen on seeing life in Eastern Europe after the end of Soviet domination.
It was invigorating to think that my local law professor headed over the Vltava River in the afternoons to work on the new constitution in the Prague Castle. It was fascinating to learn of the “lustration” process by which participants in Soviet-era wrongs were penalized but not ostracized. Out of habit, no Czechs ever talked on the subway. Americans did.
There were other reminders of the old order. My overnight train to Katowice, Poland, from which I planned a connection to Krakow, stopped in the middle of nowhere. In the pitch black night, the sound of border guards throwing open train compartments and making demands in a foreign tongue brought forth fearsome movie-memories of life under totalitarianism.
They pulled a young man from my compartment and took him off the train. I don’t remember if it was a Central or South American passport, but it was one that doesn’t afford its bearer the luxury of easy international travel that Americans enjoy.
I honestly don’t remember if he was allowed back on the train. I’m just glad that era is over.
Free Trade Consensus Remains Intact in Australia
As many of you may know, Australia had a federal election on August 21 that yielded an at-time-of-blogging inconclusive result. As a consequence, the Liberal-National coalition (currently in opposition) and the Australian Labor Party are both wooing the Green and Independent members in the hope of securing their support. A Canberra-based friend sent me a link to an article in today’s (or, strictly speaking given the time difference, yesterday’s) Australian about the trade-related aspects of the current negotiations to form a minority government.
I’ll admit, the story had me worried. I’ve bragged before about Australia’s bipartisan political consensus on free trade, and it looked as though that was under threat. According to the article, Labor — the party responsible for much of the unilateral trade liberalization undertaken in the 1980s – was considering “re-erecting tariff walls”:
Yes, modern Labor has degenerated to the point where the Treasurer allows the prospect of protectionist horse-trading to be part of the equation for forming Australia’s next government. And so Australia’s political deadlock threatens to encourage the rise of a new industry protectionism driven by the anti-capitalist Greens in cahoots with left-wing trade unions and rural populism…
A few hours later, a new, happier story was filed on the Australian‘s website:
…Ms Gillard used her press club speech to offer continuity and certainty, but made clear she would not seek [Independent] Mr Katter’s vote by pandering to his passionate rejection of free trade, which he believes has ravaged sectors such as the sugar industry in his north Queensland seat of Kennedy.
“You’re talking to the leader of the political party that literally went to hell and back to modernise the Australian economy, including reducing tariff barriers,” Ms Gillard said.
“That is our heritage, that is our belief, that is in us.
“We would not have the modern resilient Australian economy we have now if Labor had not built it.
I’ll ignore that last preposterous statement about a political party building an economy, and instead focus on the main thrust of Ms. Gillard’s comments, which should come as a relief to free-traders everywhere, especially in Australia.
Let’s Open a Wireless Window to Cuba
Three of the world’s largest companies involved in wireless telecommunications—Nokia, AT&T, and Verizon—this week asked the Obama administration to further loosen the U.S. embargo against Cuba. According to a Bloomberg News story this morning:
Nokia, the world’s biggest mobile-phone maker, is urging the U.S. to ease its 47-year-old trade embargo so it can sell handsets to Cuba. AT&T and Verizon, the largest U.S. wireless providers, urged regulators to make it easier for U.S. companies to directly connect calls to and from Cuba.
The almost half-century-old embargo no longer serves any legitimate national security purpose, as I’ve argued before. The remaining restrictions on providing wireless communication services only demonstrate how the embargo actually undermines our stated goal of bringing more freedom to the long-suffering people of Cuba.
To President Obama’s credit, he has done more than most presidents to ease the embargo, including modest steps such as easing travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans and authorizing telecommunications firms to offer limited service in Cuba. In practice, however, President Obama’s efforts have had little effect, and they have not gone far enough.
If the basis of current U.S. policy toward Cuba is democratic empowerment of its people, then removing telecommunications restrictions would be a logical and healthy next step. According to the Bloomberg story, Cuba still has the lowest mobile-phone penetration rate in Latin America. What better way to empower nearly eleven and a half million people than by easing restrictions on their communications with free residents of the democratic United States?
President Obama himself argued in a White House statement in April 2009 that two of the best ways to promote Cuban democratization were by “facilitating greater contact between separated family members in the United States and Cuba” and “increasing the flow of … information to the Cuban people.”
Here is an opportunity to translate those sound words into action.
Obama Team Sounding the Right Notes on Export Controls
Certain headlines seem to re-appear in one form or another on a regular basis, such as “North Korea Threatens Military Action” or “Myanmar Junta Tightens Grip.” A leading example from the world of trade is, “Congress Weighs Export Control Reform.”
For the past 20 years, variations of that headline have appeared regularly, yet Congress never gets around to actually reforming our Cold-War-era restrictions on what U.S. companies can sell abroad. This week, in a welcome move, the Obama administration plans to announce administrative changes that will help to bring our export control regime into the 21st century.
As part of their constitutional duty to provide for the national defense, Congress and the executive have the legitimate power to regulate the sale of sensitive military products and technology to foreign entities. The problem is in the implementation. Export controls today cover products that have no real connection to national security, but the controls do make it more difficult for U.S. companies to compete effectively in global export markets.
The Obama administration has an extra incentive to reform export controls. In his State of the Union speech in January, the president announced the National Export Initiative, with the ambitious goal of doubling U.S. exports during the next five years. But as I pointed out in an op-ed a few weeks ago, our current export-control regime is a significant impediment to that goal.
The administration has been sounding the right notes. In a speech in April by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and an op-ed today by National Security Adviser James L. Jones, the administration has signaled that it will allow a wider range of products to be sold abroad without special licenses while more effectively controlling the sale of technology that really would pose a danger in the wrong hands.
The next few days will tell us whether this administration is willing to take the steps necessary to make the long-promised reforms a reality.
More on the Expansion of ‘Human Rights’
POLITICO Arena asks a second question today:
Is Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer right to complain about the Obama State Department’s inclusion of Arizona’s new immigration law in its report to the U.N. on human rights conditions in the U.S.?
My response:
Quite apart from Gov. Brewer’s complaint, the Obama State Department’s first report on human rights conditions in the U.S., submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council last week pursuant to a U.N. mandate that members conduct self-assessments every four years, reads like a politically correct campaign brochure, touting everything from the administration’s stimulus spending to ObamaCare to financial reform legislation as promoting “human rights.”
We’re told, for example, that America falls short on “fairness, equality, and dignity” in such areas as education, health, and housing. And what’s the evidence? Among other things, it’s that unemployment for blacks and Hispanics is higher than for whites, that there’s racial and ethnic disparity in home ownership rates, and that “whites are twice as likely as Native Americans to have a college degree.” Or consider this claim: “Asian-American men suffer from stomach cancer 114 percent more often than non-Hispanic white men.” That’s a “human rights” problem?
What the administration has done here is conflate real human rights — the rights protected under the U.N. Convention on Civil and Political Rights, to which the U.S. is a party — with specious “rights” — the claims found in the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights — which the Senate has refused to ratify. And all of this is submitted in a doument to be scrutinized by such human rights exemplars on the council as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba.
After the U.S. ambassador walked out of the predecessor U.N. Commission on Human Rights in 2004, following the admission of Sudan to the commission in the midst of ethnic cleansing in Darfur, we did not join the commission’s replacement in 2006, the new U.N. Council on Human Rights, not wanting to lend that body any credibility. Last year, however, the Obama administration joined the council — part of its outreach to the world. Enough said.
Media Feeds America’s Skepticism about Trade
As usual, Dan Griswold does an excellent job today correcting fallacies about trade and the trade deficit that continue to be perpetuated in the mainstream media (particularly at the Washington Post).
I just want to add my two cents without belaboring any of Dan’s succinctly-made points. (Besides, I’ve harped on and on and on and on and on about the problem of trade reporting this year.) It’s a shame that so much time and energy has to be diverted to cleaning up messes left by reporters and editors, who should know better by now.
The bottom line is that neither imports nor trade deficits cause U.S. job loss or slower economic growth. If anything, the charts below (all compiled from BEA and BLS data) support the conclusion that imports and the trade deficit rise when the economy is growing and creating jobs, and they both fall when the economy is contracting and shedding jobs.
Is the Trade Gap to Blame for Slowing GDP Growth?
What had been a recurring story line buried in the business pages has now burst onto the front page: “Economic growth slowed by trade gap,” the Washington Post reports this morning in an above-the-fold headline.
The lead sets the stage for a story long on generalizations: “A widening U.S. trade deficit has become a substantial drag on economic growth as the country’s exports struggle to keep pace with the swelling sums that Americans are again spending on imported goods.”
The half truth in the story line is that exports fell by $2 billion in June compared to the month before, and that this has a negative effect on overall GDP growth. In our more globalized world, the rising wealth of our trading partners translates into more production in our own economy, and vice versa.
The fatal flaw of the story line (as I tackled recently here and at greater length here) is that it assumes that rising imports slow economic growth. That assumption, in turn, rests on a simplistic Keynesian view that if a portion of domestic demand is satisfied by spending on imports, that means less demand for domestically produced goods, thus less output and lower employment.
That view neglects the supply-side role of imports. More than half of what we import consists of goods consumed by producers—capital machinery, raw materials, parts and other intermediate inputs. Those imports help us produce more, not less. The Keynesian view also confuses cause and effect: Imports usually grow in response to RISING domestic demand. Consumers more eager to spend “swelling sums” on imports typically buy more domestically produced goods as well.
The bean counters at the Commerce Department “subtract” imports from GDP, not because those imports are a drag on growth, but to avoid double counting. If we want to count the number of widgets and other goods added to the economy in a quarter, we would obviously not count those that have been imported. But this does not mean the economy would have been that much larger if the widgets had not been imported.
Federal Bailout of GM Still Horribly Wrong
Our friends at The Economist magazine usually talk good sense about free trade and free markets, which makes their retrospective endorsement of the government bailout of General Motors all the more disappointing.
In a leader in the current issue, the editors write that critics of the bailout (count Cato scholars among them) owe President Obama an apology. “His takeover of GM could have gone horribly wrong, but it has not,” they opine.
The Economist argues that, in contrast to state coddling of industries in, say, France, President Obama has driven a hard bargain by requiring GM to fire top management, cut jobs, close plants, and reduce its brand names. The magazine grants that the president’s labor-union allies won special concessions that came at the expense of bondholders, but “by and large Mr. Obama has not used his stakes in GM and Chrysler for political ends.”
First, it’s a pretty low bar to say an intervention was right because it did not go horribly wrong. The editors then too quickly brush over the horrible injustice of stiffing the taxpayers of Indiana and others who bought GM bonds and should have been in line ahead of the more politically connected United Auto Workers union.
To curry favor with organized labor, President Obama put $50 billion of taxpayer resources at risk. A post-bankruptcy GM turned a profit last quarter, along with most other automakers, but it is doubtful its anticipated IPO in the next few months will raise anything like the $80 billion or more needed to return the “investment” to taxpayers.
On top of that, the bailout of GM went far beyond any valid power granted to the federal government by the U.S. Constitution, and it blatantly favored two companies over a multitude of others in the very competitive automobile market.
Remind me again who owes whom an apology?
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
