The Federal Trade Commission has no jurisdiction over government entities so when it looks with concern at the use of facial recognition technology, it’s looking at the private sector.

Facial recognition is only one of many biometric technologies, of course, and Congress is pushing hard for biometrics that can help track and control us for various purposes. If anyone should be looking with concern, it should be us looking at the federal government.

There are legitimate uses for biometrics, of course, and well-designed implementations will undoubtedly benefit us all. But biometrics programs implemented for the government will tend to prioritize hoovering up federal cash over striking delicate balances among cost, effectiveness, privacy, and civil liberties.

So let’s look at how Congress is pressing—and in one case insufficiently restraining—the rapid advance of biometrics.

H.R. 658, the FAA Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2011, has passed the House and awaits action in the Senate. It says that “improved pilot licenses” must be capable “of accommodating a digital photograph, a biometric identifier, and any other unique identifier that the Administrator considers necessary.”

H.R. 1690, the MODERN Security Credentials Act, establishes that air carriers, airport operators, and governments may not employ or contract for the services of a person who has been denied a TWIC card. “TWIC” stands for “Transportation Worker Identity Card,” the vain post-9/11 effort to secure transportation facilities from bad people. TWIC cards use biometrics.

The Army deploys biometrics. Public Law 112-10, the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011 (cost per U.S. family: $13,500+) allowed spending on Army field operating agencies “established to improve the effectiveness and efficiencies of biometric activities and to integrate common biometric technologies throughout the Department of Defense.”

There are lots of biometrics plans in the immigration area. H.R. 1842 is an immigration bill called the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act of 2011. (Senate version: S. 952) It would allow an otherwise qualified immigrant to get conditional permanent resident status only after submitting biometric and biographic data for use in security and law enforcement background checks. (Alternative procedures would be available for applicants unable to provide such data because of a physical impairment.)

S. 1258 does roughly the same thing with regard to any lawful immigration status. This bill is called the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2011, one of many attempts at comprehensive reform. In addition to requiring immigrants to submit biometrics, it also requires the government to issue “documentary evidence of lawful prospective immigrant status” that includes a digitized photograph and at least one other biometric identifier. The bill would also reinforce the use of biometrics in employer background checks and at the border.

H.R. 2463, the Border Security Technology Innovation Act of 2011, calls for continued study of mobile biometric technologies at the border. The Under Secretary for Science and Technology of the Department of Homeland Security would coordinate this research with other biometric identification programs within DHS.

H.R. 2895, the Legal Agricultural Workforce Act, would create a nonimmigrant agricultural worker program. In the program each nonimmigrant agricultural worker would get an identification card that contains biometric identifiers, including fingerprints and a digital photograph.

S. 1384, The HARVEST Act of 2011, is similar. In providing for the temporary employment of foreign agricultural workers, it calls for “a single machine-readable, tamper-resistant, and counterfeit-resistant document” that verifies the identity of the alien through the use of at least one biometric identifier.

There’s more than just immigration. Pursuing waste, fraud, and abuse, H.R. 3735, the Medicare Fraud Enforcement and Prevention Act of 2011, would establish a biometric technology pilot program. The five-year pilot program would use biometric technology seeking to ensure that Medicare beneficiaries “are physically present” when receiving items and services reimbursable under Medicare. How many biometric scanners would have to be out there for that to work?

S. 744, the Passport Identity Verification Act, calls on the Secretary of State to conduct a study into whether people applying for or renewing passports should provide biometric information, including photographs that facilitate the use of facial recognition technology. I bet the answer they get back is “Yes!” That’s how you build programs in the federal government: do a study, then a pilot program, and then—bingo—you’ve got a full-fledged, permanent drain on the public fisc.

Speaking of money, S. 1604, the Emergency Port of Entry Personnel and Infrastructure Funding Act of 2011, establishes a grant program in which the Department of Homeland Security would give cash out to state and local law enforcement for the purchase of various technologies including “biometric devices.”

I mentioned that there is a bill that would restrain biometrics insufficiently. H.R. 654 is the Do Not Track Me Online Act. It would direct the Federal Trade Commission to prescribe regulations regarding the collection and use of information obtained by tracking the Internet activity of an individual. The bill would treat unique biometric data, including fingerprints and retina scans, as “sensitive information” while allowing the FTC to modify its definitions.

And the FTC would have to modify the definitions because one’s face is unique biometric data, meaning that anyone who stores photographs online would be subject to regulation under the bill—oh, except the government.

The bill specifically excludes “the Federal Government or any instrumentality of the Federal Government, nor the government of any State or political subdivision of a State.” Too bad biometric sensors don’t pick up hypocrisy.

So there you have it. The Congress is quite engaged in pushing biometrics, including facial recognition. The one bill I found to restrain their use doesn’t apply to the federal government or the states. I’ll be keeping an eye on all this, while the government uses lasers and infra-red scanners to watch all of us….

Congress Pushes Biometrics is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Supreme Court has agreed to review Arizona v. United States, the case regarding SB 1070, the Arizona law (only) four sections of which have been enjoined by the lower courts: requiring police to check the immigration status of anyone they have lawfully detained whom they have reasonable suspicion to believe may be in the country illegally; making it a state crime to violate federal alien registration laws; making it a state crime for illegal aliens to apply for work, solicit work in a public place, or work as an independent contractor; and permitting warrantless arrests where the police have probable cause to believe that a suspect has committed a crime that makes him subject to deportation.  For my previous analysis of SB 1070 and the legal challenges to it, see here, here, here, and here.

By taking up this case, the Supreme Court is wisely nipping in the bud the proliferation of state laws aimed at addressing our broken immigration system.  One way or another, states will know how far they can go in addressing issues relating to illegal immigrants, whether the concern is crime, employment opportunities (providing or restricting them), registration requirements, or even so-called sanctuary cities.

Of course, states wouldn’t be getting into this mess if the federal government — elected officials of both parties — hadn’t abdicated its responsibility to fix a system that serves nobody’s interests: not big business or small business, not the rich or the poor, not the most or least educated, not the economy or national security, and certainly not the average taxpayer.  For their part, SB 1070 and related laws in Alabama, Georgia, and elsewhere are (with small exception) constitutional — the state laws are merely mirroring federal law, not conflicting with it or otherwise intruding on federal authority over immigration — but bad public policy.  (For more on both these conclusions, read my SCOTUSblog essay from last summer.)

What this country needs is a comprehensive reform that obviates the sort of ineffectual half-measures the states are left with given Congress’s shameless refusal to act.  It’s not very often that Cato calls for the federal government to do something, but the immigration system is quite possibly the most screwed-up part of the federal government — which of itself is a significant statement coming from someone at Cato — and one that is so incredibly counterproductive to American liberty and prosperity.

The Court will hear Arizona v. United States in the spring.  For more immigration-reform developments, see this note in today’s Wall Street Journal and my blogpost on Utah’s plan, which the federal government has also since sued to enjoin.

Supreme Court Takes Up Arizona Immigration Law is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The issue of border security has made its way into the 2012 GOP presidential race and candidates are jockeying to separate themselves from the pack. The topic garnered some attention at the Republican national security debate on November 22. An Associated Press story today examines the candidate’s platforms on the topic and as the title implies, rightly concludes securing the border is impossible. I am quoted in the article and make exactly that point:

Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have promised to complete a nearly 1,950-mile fence. Michele Bachmann wants a double fence. Ron Paul pledges to secure the nation’s southern border by any means necessary, and Rick Perry says he can secure it without a fence — and do so within a year of taking office as president.

But a border that is sealed off to all illegal immigrants and drugs flowing north is a promise none of them could keep.

“Securing the border is a wonderful slogan, but that’s pretty much all it is,” said Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Even to come close would require measures that would make legal commerce with Mexico impossible. That’s an enormous price for what would still be a very leaky system.”

The bottom line is the border is simply too big to control. Attempting to fully police the border must pass a simple cost-benefit analysis, and it is not clear that our current policy passes that test. And yet, the candidates all agree securing the border is necessary to combat terrorism, illegal immigration, and drug violence stemming from Mexico.

The candidates have little reason to reexamine that assumption. Not only is it politically advantageous to call for securing the border, but it is a convenient one-size-fits-all solution to those three broader policy issues. They have calculated that this is what voters want to hear.

But it is an illusory solution. Laws protecting the border must exist and be enforced, but it is not clear that this alone, even if done more effectively or efficiently, will prevent terrorists or illegal immigrants from entering the United States. And the “securing the border” panacea certainly will not end the flow of drugs into the United States.

Curiously, while the GOP candidates all express worries about terrorism and illegal immigration, the subject of the war on drugs has hardly been discussed.  Although drug violence in Mexico is the only major security problem the Untied States faces on any of its borders, the issue has not produced serious consideration thus far.  Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) has been the only candidate to offer a thoughtful, consistent approach the issue, calling for an end to the failed policy.

The candidates should be pressured to answer why Washington continues to spend billions of dollars to wage the war on drugs each year with little to show for it. The power of the drug cartels has reached the point that the Mexican government no longer controls some areas of the country. And there are worrying signs that the violence is beginning to bleed across the border into the United States.

Our prohibitionist efforts have failed and a new policy is needed. Only by removing the lucrative black-market drug trade and thus effectively defunding the Mexican drug cartels can we begin to end the violence and illegal activity that plagues Mexico and the southern U.S. border region.

That is the substantive discussion that should be taking place in the GOP debates, rather than the posturing and repeated faux policy prescriptions to secure the border.

Border Security, the War on Drugs, and the 2012 GOP Presidential Race is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I spent the morning at The Atlantic‘s Washington Ideas Forum. Before the big names were to do their spiels during the afternoon today and tomorrow morning, there were a series of breakout sessions, among which was one on “Technology Innovation.”

Our suggested “points to ponder” were:

1. Can our nation regain our competitive edge through innovation?
2. Will our knowledge and information-based workforce continue to offer cutting-edge technologies to improve the way we live and work?
3. What measures can we implement to foster creativity and encourage companies to grow intelligently? and
4. Will the paradigm of how people work, think and communicate be meaningfully transformed as a result of technology? Or is this another short-term trend, with no long term changes?

At least one of the other participants thought the summary of the discussion I gave in the latter half was pretty good, so I’ll share my takeaway here roughly as I did there—maybe sounding just a little more “Cato-y” here.

First, note the conspicuous use of collective pronouns in the first three discussion points. They obscure the goals and actors quite nicely, summarizing to: There is an undefined group out there that we want to have do an undefined set of things amounting to innovation.

I was reminded of the metaphor for spurring economic progress (if I recall, and I don’t recall where I first heard it): Spurring economic progress is like pushing a rope. You really can’t do it. Someone has to pull it, and the job of policymakers is simply to not pull on the wrong end.

In our brainstormy session, the ideas generally focused on pushing our end of the rope. “We” need more basic research and R&D. “We” need more and better education in science and technology. “We” need more inspired leadership, the spur of a new Sputnik.

These things are all probably inputs to innovation in some sense. None of them, I don’t think, will produce innovation as a matter of course. And nobody knows where to direct these efforts so that they do produce innovation.

A few other ideas emerged, ways that public policy can stop pulling on the rope. One was letting immigrants stay in this country—particularly the ones who have just earned advanced degrees—and welcoming them to stay. Another one was reducing the role of patent strategy in tech-business decision-making. Patents seem no longer to be primarily a spur to innovation, but a strategic arsenal used offensively or defensively by tech giants. A third idea that nearly surfaced was tax cuts, but its author in the conversation pivoted from what other countries are doing with tax policy to “national competitiveness,” never actually saying that U.S. tax cuts would spur business activity and innovation.

Arriving back at the office, I chanced to come across some thinking that would have contributed mightily to the discussion: NYU professor of economics Bill Easterly talking about the relationship of individual rights to economic growth, development, and innovation:

[I]ndividual rights is also a way to mobilize all the knowledge in society that we need to make the economy work. It’s the individual that has the particular knowledge so that they know how to run their factory, to employ people, to be a worker themselves, to start new businesses.

We’ll talk later about examples—like the guy in Rwanda, who stumbled upon a very unexpected success. He figured out—this is not something anybody would have predicted—that Rwanda could prosper by exporting gourmet coffee, which you can find in New York’s best coffee shops.

One reason that worked so well for Rwanda, is they have a tremendous infrastructure problem. It’s very hard to get heavy stuff shipped abroad because they are landlocked, they’re surrounded by countries with lousy roads, lousy ports. But gourmet coffee is something that you can create with lots of labor, which Rwanda does have a lot of, and it has very high value-to-weight ratio. So you just put it on the airplane, and ship it to New York.
…
So, there was no expert economist that flew in and told Paul Kagame, the autocrat of Rwanda, “Here’s the plan: Identify gourmet coffee as the growth industry worldwide. That’s the recipe.” None of that happened.
…
These successes are always a surprise. That’s why the expert top-down plan doesn’t work. You need the entrepreneur, you need the consumer, you need the market feedback, you need the democratic feedback, and all of this is built on this large edifice at the bottom of individual rights.

Defend people’s rights to own and use their property, however they might imagine to do that, then watch them deliver their surprises. That’s innovation policy. Stop pulling on the rope.

To Spur Technology Innovation, Stop Pulling on the Rope is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

If having more maids, valets, and drivers uplifted the world’s poor, could you do it? Or does maintenance of your egalitarian sensibilities require them to stay in their place?

A Challenging Question is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

My Washington Examiner column this week looks at the rush to score partisan points over the horrific slaughter in Norway last Friday.

In it, I argue that blaming Al Gore for the Unabomber, Sarah Palin for Jared Loughner, or Bruce Bawer for Anders Breivik makes about as much sense as blaming Martin Scorcese and Jodie Foster for the actions of John Hinckley. In general, “invoking the ideological meanderings of psychopaths is a stalking horse for narrowing permissible dissent.”

And right on cue, here’s today’s New York Times editorial on Breivik, decrying “inflammatory political rhetoric” about Muslim immigration in Europe:

Individuals are responsible for their actions. But they are influenced by public debate and the extent to which that debate makes ideas acceptable — or not. Even mainstream politicians in Europe, including Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France have sown doubts about the ability or willingness of Europe to absorb newcomers. Multiculturalism “has failed, utterly failed,” Mrs. Merkel said last October.

Oh, Grey Lady: you had me at “individuals are responsible for their actions,” but you lost me after “but.”

Because, maybe there are, in fact, limits to the ability or willingness of Europe to absorb newcomers. And perhaps multiculturalism has failed. I don’t know—I don’t live in Europe, and I don’t follow its immigration debates closely. But contra the Times‘ editorialists, it seems to me that these ideas are “acceptable,” in the sense that they might actually be true, and that you ought to be able to debate them without thereby becoming morally responsible for the actions of lone psychotics.

Virtually every European immigration skeptic manages to participate in that debate without resort to violence, just as vanishingly few hard-core environmentalists try to promote their ideas by means of armed assault. The actions of the deranged few don’t tell us much about what’s wrong with those political stances.

As others have pointed out, the notion that you should “watch what you say” in political debates amounts to giving a sort of “heckler’s veto” to the biggest nutjobs within earshot.

As a means of avoiding horrifying—but thankfully rare—events like mass shooting sprees, it doesn’t seem terribly promising. But it might help you temporarily intimidate your ideological opponents—which is why it’s a perennially popular tactic.

The New York Times on Anders Breivik is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

That’s the title of an essay I wrote for SCOTUSblog as part of their symposium on United States v. Arizona.  This is the big immigration case that will hit the Supreme Court’s doorstep later this month when Paul Clement, recently hired by Arizona, files his cert petition.

Here’s an excerpt:

…state governments, feeling tremendous pressure from their citizens to address the consequences of the federal failure to meet this nation’s immigration needs, are acting for themselves.  Arizona happens to be the “tip of the spear,” but we’ve also seen various other immigration-related laws passed in states as different as Utah, Georgia, and California.  Whether related to enforcement, expanded work permits, sanctuary cities, or other types of policy innovations, Congress’s abdication of its duty to manage our immigration system has spawned a host of federalism experiments.

And so we come to S.B. 1070 (as amended by H.B. 2162), which exemplifies the crucial distinction between law and policy that both liberals and conservatives tend to forget.  A law that is good policy might be unconstitutional or preempted by some higher law.  Here we see the converse: while S.B. 1070 is (with the exception of one provision) constitutional, it’s bad policy.

Read the whole thing.

SB 1070: Constitutional But Bad Policy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This weekend, New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat wrote a piece full of common sense thinking about immigration control and the E-Verify federal background check system.

“Common sense”—or “what most people think”—is an interesting thing: When generations of direct experience accumulate, common sense becomes one of the soundest guides to action. Think of common law, its source deep in history, molded in tiny increments over hundreds of years. Common law rules against fraud, theft, and violence strike a brilliant balance between harm avoidance and freedom.

When most people lack first-hand knowledge of a topic, though, common sense can go quite wrong. Such is the case with ”common sense” in the immigration area, which is not a product of experience but collective surmise. Douthat, who has the unenviable task of leaping from issue to issue weekly, indulges such surmise and gets it wrong.

Take, for example, the premise that American workers lose when immigration rates are high: “Amnesty,” says Douthat, would “be folly (and a political nonstarter) in this economic climate, which has left Americans without high school diplomas (who tend to lose out from low-skilled immigration) facing a 15 percent unemployment rate.”

On the whole, American workers do not lose out in the face of immigration. To the extent some do, it is penny-wise and pound foolish to retard our economy (in which displaced workers participate) and overall well-being (which affects displaced workers, too) in the name of protecting status quo jobs for a small number of native-borns.

Full immigration reform that includes generous opportunities for new low-skill workers is not folly, whatever its political prospects may be.

But I want to focus on Douthat’s conclusion that E-Verify is the way forward for immigration control. He cites a study finding that Arizona’s adoption of an E-Verify mandate caused the non-citizen Hispanic population of Arizona to fall by roughly 92,000 persons, or 17 percent, over the 2008–2009 period, and concludes:

[M]aybe — just maybe — America’s immigration rate isn’t determined by forces beyond any lawmaker’s control. Maybe public policy can make a difference after all. Maybe we could have an immigration system that looked as if it were designed on purpose, not embraced in a fit of absence of mind.

Though tentative, his implication is that a national E-Verify mandate is the solution. Everything that came before was the product of fevered impulses.  Maybe E-Verify is the most practical solution. Douthat’s calm tone sounds like common sense.

Ah, but neither Douhtat or the authors of the study have thought that problem all the way through (and the study doesn’t claim to): The decline in Arizona was not produced simply by moving illegal immigrants from Arizona back to Mexico and Central America. They went to Washington state and other places in the United States that are less inhospitable to immigrants. A national E-Verify mandate would offer no similar refuge, and the move to underground (or “informal”) employment would occur in larger proportion than it did in Arizona.

The report also cautions that the honeymoon in Arizona may not hold:

[T]he initial effects of the legislation are unlikely to persist if actors in the labor market learn that there are no consequences from violating these laws. Hence, for long-term effectiveness, policymakers should also consider the role of employer sanctions, which have not played a large role in Arizona’s results so far. However, policymakers must weigh the sought-after drop in unauthorized employment against the costs associated with shifting workers into informal employment.

That’s antiseptic language for: investigations of employers, raids on workers, heavy penalties on both, and growth in black markets and a criminal underground. “Balmy” is a way of describing the temperature potatoes pass through in a pressure cooker.

It’s hard, on analysis, to see Arizona’s experience being replicated or improved upon by an E-Verify mandate that’s national in scale without a great deal of discomfort and cost. I surveyed the demerits of electronic employment eligibility verification in “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”

There is more not to love in the Douthat piece. Take a look at this shrug-o’-the-shoulders to the deep flaws in the concept of “internal enforcement” and E-Verify:

Arizona business interests called it unfair and draconian. (An employer’s business license is suspended for the first offense and revoked for the second.) Civil liberties groups argued that the E-Verify database’s error rate is unacceptably high, and that the law creates a presumptive bias against hiring Hispanics. If these arguments sound familiar, it’s because similar critiques are always leveled against any attempt to actually enforce America’s immigration laws. From the border to the workplace, immigration enforcement is invariably depicted as terribly harsh, hopelessly expensive and probably racist into the bargain.

We should disregard these problems because they’re familiar? With regard to E-Verify, they’re familiar because they are the natural consequence of dragooning the productive sector into enforcing maladjusted laws against free movement of people from a particular ethnic category to where their labor is most productive.

Problem-solving is welcome, and columnists like Ross Douthat have to at least point to a solution with regularity. But this effort, sounding in common sense, does not rise to the challenge. The solution is not even more enforcement of laws inimical to human freedom. The solution is reforming immigration laws to comport with … common sense!

E-Verify and Common Sense is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Credit: Chiapas state government website

Authorities in Mexico intercepted two semi-trucks on Tuesday containing more than 500 migrants being smuggled across the border from Guatemala and presumably headed for the United States. An x-ray of one of the trucks that revealed the migrants struck me for its resemblance to those 18th century woodcarvings of slave ships crossing the Atlantic.

That analogy shouldn’t be taken too far, of course. According to the news reports, the migrants voluntarily paid $7,000 each for the chance to be smuggled into the United States. But like the slave ships, the conditions in the trucks were horrific, putting the lives of the men, women and some children in real danger.

People across the spectrum will try to make hay from this, but to me it argues that the status quo is unacceptable. No respectable party is in favor of illegal immigration. The real debate is over how to reduce it and all the underground pathologies that accompany it.

We can continue to ramp up border and interior enforcement, as we have relentlessly for more than a decade, driving low-skilled migrants further underground while driving smuggling fees higher and higher. Or we can expand opportunities for legal entry into the United States, and by doing so shrink the underground network of smuggling and document fraud.

Like the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, real immigration reform would go a long way to eliminating the human bootlegging that was exposed in Mexico this week. A robust temporary worker program would allow foreign-born workers to enter the country in a safe, orderly, and legal way through established ports of entry. It would allow resources now going to smugglers to be collected as fees by our government and otherwise put to work in our economy. It would save the lives of hundreds of people who needlessly die each year trying to re-locate for a better job.

If Congress enacted the kind of immigration reform we have long advocated in my department at Cato, our economy would be stronger and the human smuggling networks a lot less busy.

The Consequences of Our War on Low-Skilled Immigrant Labor is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama is making his first visit to the U.S.-Mexican border today to deliver a speech in El Paso, Texas, on the need to reform America’s immigration laws. I’ll be eagerly awaiting the president’s plan, but in the meantime, the Cato Institute has released a new study this week that examines the major objections to comprehensive immigration reform.

Titled “Answering the Critics of Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” and authored by Cato adjunct scholar Stuart Anderson, the new study draws on the latest research to address five common objections to expanding opportunities for legal immigration. The issues addressed in the study include the effect of immigration reform on government spending, welfare use, culture and language, unemployment, and incentives for illegal immigration.

After carefully weighing all those concerns, the study concludes that the arguments continue to weigh heavily in favor of expanding legal immigration as the best way to reduce illegal immigration. Here is the study’s conclusion:

The status quo is not acceptable. There is no evidence that continuing—or expanding—the current “enforcement-only” policies on immigration will be successful. The best approach is to harness the power of the market to allow workers to fill jobs legally, rather than to rely on human smuggling operations for workers to enter the United States. Addressing the situation of those now in the country illegally will achieve both humanitarian and economic objectives, including raising the wages of those now working as illegal immigrants. The primary arguments employed against comprehensive immigration reform do not stand up to a review of recent history and predictable social and economic behavior.

Here is the short-form Cato blueprint for immigration reform, and here is the long-form version (PDF).

Responding to Critics of Immigration Reform is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Given President Obama’s speech today in El Paso, Texas, is immigration a winning issue for Democrats?

My response:

Immigration will be a winning issue for Democrats only if Republicans allow it, which they’re quite capable of doing. Where’s the anti-immigrant part of the Republican base going to go — to the Democrats? Hardly. With so much else at stake, will they sit out the 2012 elections, over this one issue? Please.

If Republicans play it right, this can be a winner. No one seriously believes that the estimated 10 to 12 million illegal immigrants in the country, most working, can or should be sent back to their countries of origin. So the main issues are paving the way to legalization, better securing the borders, and providing for a rational guest worker program. If Republicans got behind a package like that, immigration would cease to be a Democratic issue. This isn’t rocket science.

Will Republicans Come to Grips With Immigration? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The legal battle over SB 1070 is far from over, so neither side should cheer or despair. The upshot of the Ninth Circuit’s splintered and highly technical opinion is merely that the district court did not abuse its discretion in enjoining four provisions. The court could not and did not rule on the legislation’s ultimate constitutionality and, of course, SB 1070’s remaining provisions—the ten that weren’t challenged and the two on which Judge Bolton rejected the government’s argument—remain in effect.

But the legal machinations are only half the story. While I personally think that all or almost all of the Arizona law is constitutional, at least as written (abuses in application are always possible), it’s bad policy because it harms the state’s economy and misallocates law enforcement resources. But I also understand the frustration of many state governments, whose citizens are demanding relief from a broken immigration system that Congress has repeatedly failed to fix. Whether it’s stronger enforcement (Arizona) or liberalizing work permits (Utah), states should not be forced into the position of having to enact their own piecemeal immigration solutions while living within a system where the regulation of immigration is a federal responsibility. Congress has dropped the ball in not passing comprehensive immigration reform, despite facing a system that doesn’t work for anyone: not big business or small business, not rich Americans or poor ones, not skilled would-be immigrants or unskilled.

The federalism our Constitution establishes sometimes demands that the federal government act on certain issues. This is such a time and immigration is such an issue.

Arizona Immigration Decision Underlines Need for Fundamental Reform is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As expected, President Obama’s speech on Latin America, given on Monday in Santiago, Chile, was full of rhetoric but short of substance. He briefly mentioned the willingness of his administration to “move forward” with the pending free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama, but didn’t say when he’s submitting them for a vote in Congress. He recognized (again) that drug consumption in the U.S. is fueling drug violence in Mexico and Central America, but stayed away from saying how his more-of-the-same policies will change anything.

Obama’s only tangible pledge was the announcement that his administration will work to increase the number of Latin American students in the U.S. to 100,000. This is laudable, but still unambitious. According to the Institute of International Education (IIE), last year there were already over 65,000 Latin Americans studying in this country. This poorly compares to other regions and countries. For example, South Korea alone has over 72,000 students in the U.S. Increasing the number of Latin Americans studying here to 100,000 would still leave the region behind China (127,628) and India (104,897). These countries each may have populations greater than that of Latin America, but, as President Obama said yesterday, Latin America and the U.S. share a common history, heritage and values. One would thus expect that the U.S. would be especially open to students from the region.

Of course, the number of Latin Americans studying here doesn’t depend exclusively on the United States. It depends mostly on the ability of people in the region to afford pursuing a degree in a U.S. college or university. However, it’s telling that, despite Latin America’s growing incomes, fewer people from the region come to the United States to study than a decade ago. The IIE shows that in the school year 2001/02 there were over 68,000 Latin Americans studying in the U.S. After 9/11, new visa requirements had a negative impact on the ability of Latino students to come to the United States.

President Obama should be commended for looking at an area where the U.S. can help Latin America. Still, the U.S. should be more welcoming to students from south of the border. The region is at an important stage in its road towards economic development, and having more U.S. educated Latin Americans can have a significant impact on the region’s fortunes. Just ask Chile’s Chicago Boys, for example.

Allow More Latin American Students into the U.S. is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• America’s unemployment rate has nothing to do with immigration.
• It’s possible to cut waste in government without succumbing to the Washington Monument ploy.
• Does this anti-obesity crusade make me look fat? (No, the junk science behind it shaping policy does.)
• Did Wall Street greed create the housing crisis? Or did government subsidies incentivize subprime lending by buying up 40% of new private-label subprime mortgages during the height of the housing boom?

Wednesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Do illegal immigrants take jobs away from Americans? With unemployment still at 9 percent, that’s a question Republicans were asking at a hearing Tuesday before the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration policy and enforcement.

Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) certainly thinks so. In a statement at the hearing, he noted that there are still 7 million illegal immigrant workers in the country while the unemployment rate among legal Hispanic workers is 12 percent and among blacks 16 percent. “These jobs [held by illegal workers] should go to legal workers, many of them minorities,” Smith said.

The math sounds simple, but it is not the way our economy works. In testimony before the same subcommittee in January on a related topic, I tried to explain to the members that

It may produce a good sound bite but it is misleading to assert that every low-skilled immigrant we can round up and deport will mean a job for an unemployed American. The real world economy doesn’t work that way. Low-skilled immigrants, whether legal or illegal, do not compete directly with the large majority of American workers. American companies hire immigrant workers to fill millions of low-skilled jobs because there are simply not enough American workers willing to fill those same jobs. The pay and working conditions for many of these jobs do not match the qualifications and aspirations of the large majority of Americans currently looking for employment in our recovering economy.

I go on to explain why there is no negative connection between immigration and levels of employment among native-born American workers, including black Americans. In fact, immigration creates employment opportunities for Americans.

You can read my full testimony here.

Will Americans Line Up to Fill Jobs Now Held by Illegal Workers? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yet another front has opened in the battle over illegal immigration, this one involving birthright citizenship. According to today’s New York Times and other news outlets, Republicans at the state and federal level are gearing up to re-open the question of whether children born in the United States to parents who are here illegally should be granted automatic citizenship under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

James Ho makes a strong case in this morning’s Wall Street Journal that the 14th Amendment as written after the Civil War was intended to include the children of resident aliens whatever their legal status. The former solicitor general of Texas, Ho describes a series of Supreme Court decisions since then that have consistently upheld the principle that birthright citizenship applies to the children of illegal immigrants. He offers this sobering advice to those who want to retest the case in court:

Opponents of birthright citizenship say that they want nothing more than a chance to relitigate the meaning of the 14th Amendment. But if that is so, state legislation is a poor strategy.

Determining U.S. citizenship is the unique province of the federal government. It does not take a constitutional expert to appreciate that we cannot have 50 different state laws governing who is a U.S. citizen. As a result, courts may very well strike down these state laws without even invoking the 14th Amendment. The entire enterprise appears doomed to failure.

At a Cato Hill Briefing event in October, I spelled out additional reasons why the principle of birthright citizenship has served our nation well since the Civil War amendments. Attorney Margaret Stock reviews the legal and constitutional arguments underpinning birthright citizenship, while I examine the practical policy arguments for not tampering with the established interpretation. (My segment starts at the 25:11 mark.)

Is Birthright Citizenship Challenge “Doomed”? Let’s Hope So is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to consider bills such as the DREAM Act, approved by the House last evening and on tap for a vote in the Senate as early as today.

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act would offer legal status to students who came to the United States illegally before they turned 16 and have lived here for more than five years. To gain legal status they would need to complete high school, and then two years of college or military service. Once implemented the act would legalize about 65,000 students a year.

If our immigration policy was more in line with what I’ve been advocating for years, we would not have the large population of illegal immigrants that we do today because more legal alternatives would have been available. And access to in-state tuition would not be such a big deal if our education policies more closely reflected the sound arguments of my colleagues at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom. Alas, that is not the world we live in yet.

The DREAM Act would improve a less-than-ideal situation by legalizing a population that is primed to live the American dream, and is virtually guaranteed to bestow real blessings on our economy and society.

Critics of the DREAM Act, such as Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA), paint these kids as nothing but expensive liabilities and the act as nothing but a backdoor amnesty. Both charges are false.

Young immigrants eligible for the DREAM Act are a low-risk, high-return addition to America. Because they came here at a young age, they almost all speak English fluently and are at home in American society. The fact that they have completed high school and will be attending college makes it likely they and their descendants will pay more in taxes than they consume in government services during their lifetimes. With the U.S. birthrate hovering at the replacement level, these assimilated, immigrant students at the beginning of their careers will help the United States maintain a healthy growth rate in our workforce.

It is wrong to label the DREAM ACT “amnesty.” These kids did nothing wrong. In fact, most of them simply obeyed their parents when the family immigrated to the United States. They should not be punished for the actions of their parents.

The DREAM Act, like most other immigration-related bills, has become charged with partisanship. House Democrats voted overwhelmingly in favor of the bill last evening, Republicans lopsidedly against. Democratic leaders in Congress are certainly open to the charge that they are using the bill to attract Hispanic voters even though the chances of it passing the Senate and becoming law are, at the moment, slim. But Republicans are open to the more serious charge that they are ignoring the more optimistic and inclusive vision of our country articulated by former President Ronald Reagan.

DREAM Act a Low-Risk, High-Return Option is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Immigrants are a voting block worth courting, but it seems both Democrats and Republicans aren’t terribly concerned about earning immigrants’ allegiance. The sometimes-dehumanizing rhetoric hurled at immigrants by a small, vocal minority of Republicans would seem to push immigrant voters into the loving arms of Democrats. But Democrats have been in charge of two branches of the federal government for two years and have done nothing to reform our immigration system. For his part, President Obama pledged that 2009 would bear witness to comprehensive immigration reform.

Dan Griswold discusses the rhetoric surrounding immigration in light of today’s election for today’s Cato Daily Podcast (subscribe, already!):

Immigration and Election Day is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Here’s a poor, unsuccessful letter that impressed the relevant New York Times reporters, but not their editorial overlords:

It may seem counter-intuitive that bleeding-heart anti-hunger groups and “Big Food and Big Beverage” would ally to oppose Mayor Bloomberg’s request to prevent New Yorkers from using food stamps to purchase sugary sodas [“Unlikely Allies in Food Stamp Debate,” October 16].  Yet the “bootleggers and Baptists” theory of regulation explains that this “strange bedfellows” phenomenon is actually the norm, rather than the exception.

Most laws have two types of supporters: the true believers and those who benefit financially.  Baptists don’t want you drinking on the Lord ’s Day, for example, while bootleggers profit from the above-market prices that Blue Laws enable them to charge on Sundays.  Consequently, both groups support politicians who support Blue Laws.

Baptists-and-bootleggers coalitions underlie almost all government activities. Defense spending: (neo)conservatives and defense contractors.  President Obama’s new health care law: the political left and the health care and insurance industries. Ethanol subsidies: environmentalists and agribusiness. Education: egalitarians and teachers’ unions. The list goes on.

It’s easier to illustrate the theory (and sexier) when the bootleggers are non-believers who cynically manipulate government solely for their own gain.  Yet one can be both a Baptist and a bootlegger. The Coca-Cola Company may sincerely believe that society benefits when the government subsidizes sugary sodas for poor people.  Even so, a bootlegger-cum-Baptist can still rip off taxpayers.

This morning, NPR reported on another bootleggers-and-Baptists coalition: anti-immigration zealots and the prison industry.

Bootleggers & Baptists, Sugary Soda Edition is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today is the first Monday in October, the traditional start of the Supreme Court term.  While we have yet to see as many blockbuster constitutional cases on the docket as we did last term—which, despite the high profile 5-4 splits in McDonald v. Chicago and Citizens United actually produced fewer dissents than any in recent memory—we do look forward to:

• Two big free speech challenges, one over a statute prohibiting the sale of violent video games to minors, another the offensive protesting of a fallen soldier’s funeral;
• An Establishment Clause lawsuit against Arizona’s tax credit for private tuition funds (an alternative to educational voucher programs);
• Regulatory federalism (or “preemption”) cases involving:
  • safety standards for seatbelts;
  • an Arizona statute regarding the hiring of illegal aliens; and
  • the forbidding of class-arbitration waivers as unconscionable components of arbitration agreements;
• Important ERISA and copyright cases;
• A case examining privacy concerns attending the federal government’s background checks for contractors; and
• A criminal procedure dispute regarding access to DNA testing that may support a claim of innocence.

Cato has filed amicus briefs in several of these cases—and in various others which the Court may decide to review later this year—so I will be paying extra-close attention.

Perhaps more importantly, we again have a new justice—and, as Justice White often said, a new justice makes a new Court.  While her confirmation was never in any serious doubt, Elena Kagan faced strong criticism (including from me) on a variety of issues—most importantly on her refusal to “grade” past Court decisions or identify any specific limits to government power.  The 37 votes against Kagan were the most ever for a successful Democratic nominee, which is emblematic of a turbulent political environment in which the Constitution and the basic question of where government derives its power figure prominently.  

Given Kagan’s political and professional background, it is safe to assume that she’s not the second coming of Clarence Thomas.  And because she replaces the “liberal lion” Justice Stevens, her elevation from “tenth justice” (as the solicitor general is known) to ninth is unlikely to cause an immediate change in issues that most divide the Court—particularly because she is recused from nearly half the cases this term.  She could, however, add an interesting and nuanced perspective on a variety of lower-profile issues.  Only time will tell what kind of justice Kagan will be now that she is, seemingly for the first time in her ambitious life, unconstrained to speak her mind.

Here’s to another interesting, varied, and (hopefully) liberty-enhancing year!

Another New Supreme Court Term, Another New Justice is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog