Obama’s Risky Policy for Immigration

While the public waits anxiously for President Obama to unveil comprehensive immigration reform, the Administration has already adopted a good deal of the Bush Administration immigration enforcement regime which is bound to taint the impact of any subsequent reform.

Since his inauguration, President Obama has 1) added $420 million dollars in supplementary spending to the militaristic Merida Initiative in Mexico; 2) committed to the completion of the 700 mile border wall at $3.9 million dollars per mile, and a several billion dollar virtual fence outsourced to Boeing; 3) hoped to rebrand the Real ID program, which intended to turn state issue drivers licenses into a national ID and which 24 states have rejected, into Pass ID, a slightly less egregious proposal which accomplishes essentially the same exclusionary goals; and 4) supported E-verify, an electronic verification system that screens job applicants, but has a high error rate and cannot account for fraud and identity theft.

These seemingly disparate policies are all part of a high tech immigration enforcement regime that criminalizes immigrants and has been a catalyst for domesticating the war on terror with dataveillance technologies.  The Merida Initiative militarizes the Mexico side of the border, which, along with the wall and virtual fence, sends a message to potential emigrants in the Americas that the golden door is closed.  Such deterrence messages aside, however, militarization doesn’t deter.

According to scholars the only effective deterrence to undocumented immigration during the past several years has come from economic recession, not from an18-foot wall that immigrants traverse with ladders, shovels and human chains or just plain walk around.  As Secretary Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security has said, “You show me a 50 foot fence and I’ll show you a 51 foot ladder.”

Quite frankly, even members of congress are hard pressed to define success regarding a border wall.  The same goes for the virtual fence and other technology-driven projects.  The virtual fence, a network of surveillance towers, sensors and cameras fails to distinguish among human beings and wildlife.  Although “Project 28,” the pilot 28-mile stretch of virtual fence in Arizona was a dismal failure, Obama seems eager to continue the project.

Further, in doubling down on such high tech policies that include Real ID, E-Verify, and US VISIT, the Administration wastes billions of taxpayer dollars on what a broad consensus of experts suggest are failed projects and so plagued with technical kinks that it is unlikely they would ever achieve their deterrence objectives, unless of course they are not supposed to.

In short order, the Obama team has bought into the risk approaches to governance that have accompanied the recent rise in government using high tech gadgetry as policy responses to complex social issues. They have also bought into the canard that enforcement practices could replace good social policy.  Like his predecessor, the Obama approach to immigration control continues to define undocumented immigrants as prey, which is highly problematic, but then nets everyone who ever applies for employment, a drivers’ license or goes to an airport or federal building, even more problematic. In exchange for going about their everyday activities all individuals must now hand over a good deal of their personal privacy so that the government might construct simulated identities that are inputted and kept in government databases.

With such an overbroad approach to undocumented immigration, everyone is considered guilty until proven innocent by data mining technologies.

This also amounts to the sort of invasive national ID system that civil libertarians have feared for decades; it has become a reality hidden within the new Administration’s immigration agenda.

The shame of the new Administration’s approach is that it disappoints the hopes and expectations of millions of Obama supporters, myself included.  Obama could have recalibrated the immigration debate along human rights and civil liberties grounds.  Instead, if one follows the allocation of funds rather than lofty rhetoric as the more accurate guide of Administration priorities, human and constitutional rights for immigrants won’t get much of a hearing in this Administration.

Obama Should Walk Back new Drug Cartel Policy

President Obama should ‘walk back’ his March 24 announcement to further militarize the border and instead focus on the prevalence of guns and the violence caused by the illegal drug trade. Border militarization will not end drug cartel violence; putting an end to the source of gun and drug violence might.

 In 2008, over 6,000 people died as a result of violence caused by warring drug cartels in northern Mexico.  This is just another costly mess that President Obama inherited from the previous administration.  It is a mess that allows the new president to respond in one of two ways.  First is the way he has already responded, which is to double down on some egregiously bad border control policies enacted by his predecessor. The other response would be one that would prove much more effective, speak truth to power, and advances a social justice agenda that many of his supporters had hoped Obama would follow as president. 

 On March 24, the Obama Administration announced it would respond to the cartel violence by committing hundreds of millions of dollars for additional law enforcement, surveillance technology, and perhaps also send the national guard to Texas and Arizona as requested by the governors from these two states.

 The problem with this response is that it won’t work and that perpetuates an extra-legal approach to immigration and border control.  The Bush administration spent multiple billions of dollars during the last eight years militarizing the border with beefed up staffing, military presence, bricks and mortar border walls and virtual border fences. Embedded biometric and rfid technologies in passports and smart drivers licenses don’t work on their own terms as they violate the personal privacy the persons carrying them.  During the last several years, the GAO has criticized most of these projects for insufficient management and being replete with technical kinks, and cost overruns.  Investigations by civil liberties and human rights organizations point to police-state-like conditions that are created in many border communities.  At root these projects were poorly conceived and are incompetently administered.  They cropped up profitable opportunities for military contractors eager to domesticate Iraq war technologies.  Problem is they compromise constitutional norms of due process and flat out don’t work.  The military presence and beefed up border enforcement presence failed to deter undocumented immigrant crossings.  Only economic recession managed to accomplish that, temporarily.  In the meantime, the border fence has destroyed wildlife, evicted property owners including land grant families; threatened university campuses and public parks; ruined local economies and for what?  As DHS Secretary has said, “Show me a 50-foot fence and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder…”

 Now the Obama administration might well say the new technology is designed only for the purpose of helping to stem caret related violence, is it is likely that this is their intent.  But much of the surveillance technology under consideration is infrastructural and permanent; it will remain along the border long after this crisis subsides.  And once the surveillance technology exists, it remains and the federal and local governments will make use of it, directing it against border residents as it has done for many years.

 The alternative is not politically popular but does cut to the chase of a problem that border militarization cannot get close to solving.  First, close down the 7,000 or so gun shops that dot the border with Mexico that sell guns everyday to folks bringing them down into Mexico for the cartels. Two, surveillance along the border already exists. Use it to track gun purchasers (particularly assault weapons buyers)  headed back into Mexico. 

Next, consider (drug) legalization alternatives.   Hillary Clinton today said that the US assumes its share of responsibility in the current crisis, citing the insatiable demand for drugs coming the the US.  Clinton also pegged the availability of assault weapons and spoke of the difficulty of taking of the NRA to reverse the repeal of the assault weapons ban.  A surprisingly rational take on the current mess.  How to diminish demand for illegal drugs?  the lesson from Prohibition is legalization, education and government regulation.  The end of prohibition was a horrible thing for organized crime.  And  gun control and assault weapons bans?  Clinton is suggesting at the least that the time has come for this dialogue to get going, and that just perhaps, these two things would be the most dramatic and effective way to stem drug related violence along the border and in our cities as well.

Obama Seeks to Stem Mexican Drug Violence with Bush Policy

When he was running the president, there was little hint that Obama’s first important address on immigration would have him doubling down on some of President Bush’s most troubling social control policies.  The Administration announcement March 24, 2009 has helped usher in a new era of intelligence-led policing at the border. 

Border militarization under Obama continues Bush policies that failed on their own terms and include:  beefing up border security, advancing the federalization of immigration control, public/private counter-intelligence projects, and moving forward with state of the art virtual fence and counter-intelligence technologies.

This new policy  runs counter to the more progressive pro-immigrant rights speeches heard during the  campaign particularly during the primaries. Few would have imagined, for example, that Obama would have doubled the size of border enforcement task forces and violent criminal alien teams; triple the number of intelligence analysts along the border; and quadruple the number of border liaisons working with Mexican law enforcement officials. (as the NYT reports this aft.)  This new border security initiative follows $700 million Congress had already committed to the region to support Mexican law enforcement and judicial capacity, helicopters and a surveillance aircraft to the Mexican military, and inspection technology.

On March 25, Obama committed to adding security teams that combine local, state and federal officers; 16 new DEA positions at the border; 100 officials from the ATF; and possibly the National Guard.  

 Few question the severity of the violence in northerm Mexico with some 6,500 deaths caused by warring drug cartels. According to DHS Secry Napolitano, “Mexico right now has issues of violence that are a different degree and level than we’ve seen before.” And as Mark Koumans, Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Affairs testified before Congress earlier this month,  “The sustained levels of violence that we observe in Mexican border cities like Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, and Nogales threaten private citizens, tourists, workers, and businesses alike The approximately 6,000 drug-related murders in Mexico last year were more than twice the previous record…” 

 The problem, however, here has to do with the unintended consequences of a policy that picks up where the abject failed policies of Bush left off. Obama has not only inherited SBInet, the border wall, US-VISIT biometrics, smart passports and drivers licenses and counter-intelligence schemes that were hatched during the years of post 9/11 shock.  Looks like he is about to  give them new life.  

 

What Obama’s Inaugural told me about His Immigration Policy

With all his rhetorical might, Barack Obama in his Inaugural Address endeavored to pull the country back into the realm of the rule of law.  Although this sisyphusian task will require a great deal more work than rhetoric, this is where it starts and already perhaps this indicates a reverse of course. It certainly feels good to see the new president playing to his strength and using his force of his words to serve notice on the planet that the false choice between security and liberty is over and the constitution has returned.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.  Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations.  Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.  And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born:  know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

 Similarly, Obama also served notice that

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, not does it entitle us to do as we please.  Instead they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

Such is his attack on the sovereignist approach to power that is derisive of the rule of law. Obama reminds us that such power is doomed because it is discordant with the “justness of our cause, the force of our example.” Obama here is referring to the integrity of our institutions in their treatment of individuals when integrity is measured against the American character which is recognizes is rooted in the immigrant and slave experience.

Obama also reclaimed the immigrant basis for its own identity, appealing to the small town in Congo where his father was born.  The ideal for Obama is to be found in the immigrant experience.

His use of the immigrant experience in this speech is anathama to the immigrant control system that has been developed over the past eight years.   Put simply, Obama entered office with a strong commitment to end the injustices experienced under the Bush Administration.

It seems clear that an Obama Administration will use much different tropes when framing the immigrant.  than the ones the country has been forced to endure under Bush.  The question I have is whether this is enough of a commitment to actually reverse course, given the inordinant amount of government resources already exhausted on immigration control.  Keep in mind his address bore no refere3nce to immigration reform; it spoke of cleaning up other messes in concrete terms but his references to immigration were vague and abstract.  America’s greatness lies in its immigrant past; its character built on the backs of immigrants and slaves.  But will his appreciation of immigration translater into concrete policies that reverse the Bush abuses of power?   It remains to be seen if the President’s attack on sovereign approaches to power will translate into concrete efforts to extend constitutional law into the immigration field. 

Napolitano Confirmation at DHS

Janet Napolitano will be easily quickly confirmed as the new Secretary of Homeland Security, according to Joe Lieberman and ranking member Susan Collins.

Napolitano promises to help create a system for border control at homeland security that will consist of three parts: boots on the ground; technology: ground sensors and SBInet; and interior enforcement.

This is incredibly disappointing because it promises more of the same dangerous militarization of the border that the border has endured for the past 8 years.

Napolitano’s “system” is almost entirely enforcement-oriented.  If the right track is adhering to constitutional norms and treating border crossers like human beings,  Napolitano’s track is to continue treating them as “other” and seeking to discipline, detain, monitor and control immigrants coming into this country.  It’s the wrong track. 

She would like to rely on a national guard presence at the border, and says she will work with Defense Secry. Gates to find a way to create a permanent national guard presence. This mix of military and domestic law enforcement was outlawed over a century ago by posse comitatus.  In Arizona where Napolitano was one of the first governors to call for the national guard,  the national guard presence also presented serious chain of command problems and ended up wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. Napolitano says it was a deterrent. It wasn’t. the number of undocumented entries in and around arizona entry points increased during the national guard tenure.  So much for boots on the ground.

Next, Napolitano also favors SBInet, which according to Congress, the GAO, CBP and independent observers, has been an abject failure.

Finally, interior enforcement is code for federalizing border enforcement. In her state, such efforts endangered the rights of undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants and US citizens. 287(g) programs in Arizona resulted in hundreds of vigilante volunteers raiding hispanic neighborhoods at rooting hispanic people out of their homes and places of employment.

I would hope that prospective Secry Napolitano  re-imagines the mission of DHS with a commitment to the constitution and rule of law being front and center. I didn’t hear this commitment   during her testimony today.

Her current three-pronged approach is all too likely to continue  condoning abuses of power  that we saw under Chertoff and Ridge.

That’s not the “change” I want to believe in.

Whiners and the Banking Crisis: Bad Day for McCain

Another bad day for McCain.

Could it be the walls are closing in just a little bit more on John McCain?  The polls hint at it. The national polls show Obama once again barely taking a lead while the state polls lag a little.

First, the ready-to-be-commander-in-chief-on-day-one guy doesn’t know who the prime minister of spain is. Bad enough, but McCain hears the name Zapatero and thinks Emiliano Zapata, or else he imagines it’s some left wing latin american dictator and we are still in the 80s or something.  Anyway, he says he is not sure this Zapatero fella would be welcome in a McCain White House.

Next, is a video interview floating around the web with McCain being asked questions about the economy and looking scared and dumbfounded before pleading near absolute ignorance on the issues.  All the more reason to fear a McCain presidency during economic crises, and all the more reason to talk more about Phil Gramm, the guy lurking behind the candidate and likely his most trusted economic advisor and future secretary of treasury.

The key here is that Gramm is the one person, if ever there could be just one, who is responsible for this week’s banking crisis.  It was Gramm’s bill in 1999 that repealed the depression era banking regulation law that would have prevented this collapse.  Gramm wanted and got deregulation, deregulation and more deregulation and along with that, more mergers among the nation’s top investment houses.

anyone who didn’t like this was a whiner. 

Interesting point here is that the “whiner” narrative is tied to 1990s tort reform which prevented mainstream americans from filing grievances against banks and investment houses that lost their life savings.  McCain/Gramm thinking: regulation is bad and  lawyers who defend people screwed by the deregulated market are bad.

BTW, lawyers are good when they defend right wing neoliberal/ deregulator coups against democratic governance (such as elections in 2000 and sunshine laws in Alaska right now).

Bottom Line: McCain wants the rich and wealthy to have complete access to courts to defend their dishonest holds on power while denying ordinary americans a chance to recoup losses caused by the actions of McCain crony Gramm.  

Gramm’s nation of whiners today were the anti tort reformers of the 90’s, the same folks who will be denied their day in court when they endeavor to recover losses caused by the evil doing of the McCain economic team.

All this goes to make John McCain Wednesday a bad day for John McCain.

Immigration Judge Appointments Political?

Heads ought to roll in the DOJ as a result of today’s OIG Report about DOJ hiring practices. But they probably won’t. There simply is no accountability left in the Bush Administration, and once again, Congress and the Courts are likely to shrug this one off, as they have so many othr impeachable offenses revealed during the last several years.

DOJ hires are supposed to enforce federal law, so imagine what happens when DOJ hires are found breaking federal law. It goes to the DOJ.

The outcome?  Rather than be held to a higher standard, most DOJ lackeys likely will continue legal or consulting careers in the lucrative private sector. Perhaps Monica Goodling will lose her law license, but unfortunately she likely will be the only one held accuntable, and she is but the tip of this immense iceberg (larger than anything you’d see around the North Pole these days) of Bush corruption inside the DOJ.

Consider one example revealed in today’s Report.

Her cohort Kyle Sampson was behind DOJ appointment of Immigration Judges, top level civil service appointments (GS-16), who are hired to adjudicate immigrant removals and relief from deportation, not to serve the sitting president in a partisan way.

Even more lamentable is the following:   As egregious a broach of law as such appointments undoubtedly are, this isn’t the first time that immigration judges were hired for their political affiliation or policy sympathies.

Under Ed Meese, the Reagan DOJ issued the “Meese Memo” which instructed the OIJ to consider Nicaraguan applicants for political asylum to be refugees while applicants from El Salvador were considered economic migrants.  Further, it was widely believed during those years that extremely well qualified immigration lawyers democrats were being passed over for less well qualified republican sycophants.

Regrettably, the immmense amount of discretion that immigration law gives to IJs, coupled with the enormous gravitas of many asylum claims, gives many unqualified Bush appointments the sovereign powers of life and death over immigrants who have few rights to appeal adverse IJ decisions.

The issue of whether Monica Goodling loses her law license should pale before the amount of blood on the hands of the architects of this policy, both during the 1980s and now. If this is the Reagan that Bush had hoped to emulate, may the history books record that it was one of Reagan’s most shameful policy initiatives, and keep in mind, there were many.

Obama Address Raises Two Questions

If Barack Obama had one obstacle to the presidency before the vote in November it was to appear presidential, and pass the commander in chief test. Today he crushed these obstacles. It was that good.  His speech in Berlin could have been given by John Kennedy, and was better than the one that Reagan delivered.

The speech was eloquent and fluid; it commanded respect and drew great favor with the crowd of more than 100 thousand. This is the first time I have seen live television shots of people in Europe waving american flags rather than wearing paper mache masks.

In terms of symbolism, Obama won the day on two counts: 1st, he passed the presidential threshold with aplomb; 2nd, he took substantial strides towards repairing america’s image on the world stage. if only he wins.

The speech leaves two challenges to consider:

1st has to do with the wall metaphor Obama used repeatedly, following Reagan. Reagan said to tear down the physical wall separating west and east; and the metaphorical wall of ideology separating these two hemispheres.

Obama echoed the sentiment that walls should and could come down; sounding a metaphor for race, religion and ethnic divisions around the globe. The challenge for Obama during this campaign is to propose a similar call to Boeing to take down the wall it is constructing along the US-Mexico border, with the ethnic and class divisions that coincide with construction of the virtual and physical fences to our south.

Second, is a challenge to the American people, which I think is an important subtext to the Obama speech.  Since it has become abundantly evident that Obama represents the sort of candidate that Americans say they are ready for, even crave: one who will replace the republican disaster of the past 8 years; one who can string together more than a couple half sentences that McBush passes off as a speech; one that appeals to the hopes and dreams of americans while regaining some respect in the world; one who pledges to end the war in Iraq…..  The challenge here is obvious: would americans elect a man whose father was born Kenyan.

The latest polls just released showing McCain having pulled ahead in Colorado and edging closer in minnesota and Michigan and this despite the horrendous gaffe-filled; competency questioning couple weeks McCain has had, well this speaks the challenge for americans to dig a little deeper here to see the real choices before them.

Supreme Court Stops Review of Executive Powers over Border Fence

When the Supreme Court refused to stop Secretary of Homeland Security today from ignoring more than 30 mostly environmental laws pertaining to the construction of the border fence with Mexico, the Court, in effect, gave Michael Chertoff’s plenary powers to Chertoff’s ‘waiver authority’ over the border.  By refusing to hear the case on the merits, the Court is also contributing to the Bush Administration’s growing legacy of eviscerating constitutional separation of powers and the rule of law.  In these waning days of the worst presidency ever, this case is yet another example of John Yoo’s failed unitary executive thesis in action

But alas, because the fence deals only with immigration law, long the unwanted stepchild of administrative law; with immigrants the demonized other in american politics since 9/11; and since it deals with only a border fence in a desolate part of Arizona/Senora (San Pedro Riparian National Conservation near Naco), few people will spend much ink condemning this nondecision, but condemnation is what this act today deserves.

But according to Oliver Bernstein, Sierra Club spokesperson,

“This decisions leaves one man—the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security—with the extraordinary power to ignore any and all of the laws designed to protect the American people, our lands, and our natural resources.” (NYT David Stout)

When any one human power has such power, that person is a sovereign– a monarchical tyrant who stand outside the rule of law. Such exceptions to constitutional norms should not be countenanced by the Court, and certainly not by the American people.  This is some, horrible legacy being left to the Bush successor and to the american people who will be forced to endure exceptions to constitutional norms tucked away in increasing numbers of of laws, regulations and policy.  

Blackwater Opens new Facility at US-Mexico Border

Within view of the Us-Mexico Border Fence in San Diego, Blackwater just opened its latest “training facility,” as per its $400 million government contract.

It’s been a long slog for Blackwater to open shop near the border, having been forced to abandon plans in Potrero, Ca..  As in Potrero, Blackwater is once again fighting local ordinances, activists (Raymond Lutz), congressional opposition (Rep. Bob Filner) and litigation.  Why such perseverance? According to its own PR, even the Navy is no match for its counter terrorism training.  A more rational answer, however, would suggest the federal government remains bent on hollowing out national and homeland security while it still can.

The surreal nature of this spectacle is revealed by seeing that such advanced and ostensibly essential counter terrorism training must rely on existing amusement park ride permits in order to open Its “mock warship area” within the boundaries of existing local ordinances.   Beat that Pentagon!  Hey Border Patrol, your next!

See Truthout for more details

 

for more info. on Blackwater, see