Author: Jacques Delacroix

Immigration in the Time of Joe Biden: What to Do (Part 9 of 11)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , ,

American Sub-Consulates in Mexico

To avoid falling again into the same swamp of ineptness, the US might approach Mexico with a request to open twenty or so sub- consulates whose sole function would be to examine refugee applications, most of which – again – we know to be phony. Such establishments might be acceptable to Mexican authorities because they would not need to be under ultimate US sovereignty, unlike traditional consulates and embassies. By the way, the US has only two consulates in Mexico while Mexico has about forty consulates in the US. Perhaps, a Mexican administration could be induced to believe that a partial evening out would be only fair. The new sub-consulates would have to be placed fairly far south of the US-Mexico border, for two reasons. First, the Mexican side contiguous to the border is notoriously dangerous, not a good location to make innocent people and their families wait their turn. Second, the closer to the border the first examination of refugee claims, the greater the temptation to try and jump into the US. The further from being valid theses refugee claims,also the greater the temptation to jump in.

Such a new disposition by itself would have a big dissuasive effect on would-be refugees from the Northern Triangle without a serious claim. I mean that it would help expedite the backlog, avoid the release of large numbers into the general US population but, more importantly, it would also cut down on the large numbers now eager to gamble on being eventually admitted because of the vagueness, not in the relevant laws, but in the manner of their application.

[Editor’s note: this is Part 9 of an 11-part essay. You can read Part 8 here, or read the essay in its entirety here.]

Immigration in the Time of Joe Biden: What to Do (Part 8 of 11)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , ,

A Different Way to Process Refugees

The current policy for would-be refugees consists in inviting them to apply inside or very near the country followed by catch-and-release with an honor-based request to appear for final legal disposition, at a distant and undefined date, or never. It’s as if designed for failure. It’s not really part of an immigration policy because it predictably manufactures illegal immigrants.

The policy ignores the obvious fact that would-be illegal immigrants and their carriers and facilitators are continuously alert to American immigration related events and policies. This is difficult for many Americans to believe because they are habitually uninterested in and indifferent to happenings beyond our borders but there are whole subcultures nearby that are vitally concerned about what goes on in the US. They are well equipped to stay informed thanks to the internet and to cellphones. Every anodyne comment on immigration by a high level American politician or public servant is immediately interpreted – and over-interpreted – as the forerunner of a policy change (as we saw in the first three months of the Biden administration with respect to child refugees). In brief, immigration controls begins much before anyone reaches the border. Even loose words often appear as de facto policies. They may signal that doors into the US will be more or less open, or at least ajar.

The current official policy combined with its soft application must unavoidably act as a powerful attractant for very poor people living under conditions of chronic insecurity and within traveling distance of the southern US border. Look at it from the standpoint of a parent of a 14-year-old, say a Honduran: Bad schools leading to unemployment or to very poorly paid employment; lives lived in constant fear of gangs; no expectation of any sort of happy future.

You are told by people whose knowledge you trust the nearly incredible news that if you can manage to move your child to the US-Mexico border, there is a better than even chance that he will end up inside the US. There, he will be allowed to attend school, (no questions asked) and he will be given at no cost better health care than he has ever had in his life or, that he has any right to expect in Honduras. As soon as he is eighteen or, likely sixteen (no one really checks), he will be able to earn more in two hours than skilled adult men earn back home in one day. You are aware that the endeavor is both dangerous and a little complicated. You probably underestimate both danger and complexity because your main sources though well informed have no interest in emphasizing them. (I wonder about charitable organizations with no financial interest in the process. I don’t know if they publish warnings nor how frequently.)

The true news is that your son or even you if traveling with him, may apply for refugee status calmly at many designated points on the border with little fear of anything. Failing this, they say, you will be able simply to surrender to any member of the Border Patrol and be taken care of. I can’t see how such information can help but act like a powerful advertisement enticing you to begin moving north. Finally, and, repeating myself, the fact that most of those who say that they are seeking refuge status, when caught, or surrendered, are shortly released inside the US, probably sounds too good to be true. But, even the very poor have cellphones and the whole happy truth gets around quickly.

Under the current system, the authorities are forced to practice catch- and-release with would-be refugees who have little chance of being formally accepted in the end. That is because there is a huge backlog, a backlog of several years, in finally disposing of refugee applications. This is difficult to understand in light of the seeming broad consensus that only a small percentage of those who apply have a valid case that would eventually gain them official refugee status if their case were examined properly. I am also told that laws pertaining to refugee or asylum status are not especially difficult or complicated. If that is correct, the federal government should be able to recall hundreds of retired judges, and to draft many attorneys to act as pro tem judges to adjudicate thousands of cases within a short time. One the backlog is removed in this manner, the original small contingent of professional judges could finalize positive decisions.

[Editor’s note: this is Part 8 of an 11-part essay. You can read Part 7 here, or read the essay in its entirety here.]

Immigration in the Time of Joe Biden: What to Do (Part 7 of 11)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , ,

Open the Southern Border to Mexican Citizens

A high degree of flexibility would follow a measure that I advocated in 2009 : “If Mexicans and Americans could cross the border freely” (pdf). (Formerly: “Thinking the unthinkable: illegal immigration; The bold remedy.” ), with Sergey Nikiforov, The Independent Review, 14-1: 101-133 (Summer)). That is, to allow Mexicans (and Americans, of course) to come and go across the southern border at will. Such a policy might do little to relieve worker shortages in high tech fields in the short run. Yet, it would probably be enough for lower skilled labor to transport itself where needed entirely according to demand. Of course, no implied promise of citizenship would be attached to this free border policy. Before the new open border policy is implemented a strong, loud announcement should be made to the effect that no change toward citizenship and no “amnesty” will take place. There would still be some leakage, of course, in particular because Mexican citizens would marry American citizens they would encounter in the course of their daily lives working in the US. A black market in phony marriages might also develop. That would probably be managed easily.

There are two big objections to such a policy of free movement. First, incoming Mexicans would be competing with Americans and effectively place a ceiling on the wages of the least skilled among them. Of course, I understand this Econ 101 argument but I believe it mostly does not apply here for the simple reason that the stereotypical comment is correct and there are jobs Americans just won’t do. There are crops rotting in the fields three miles from where I live in central California, for example. Yet, the downtown retail employees laid off by COVID and who used to earn $11 an hour are not rushing to try and earn $18 or more picking Brussels sprouts. Most Mexican immigrants (legal and illegal) come from rural agricultural areas and they are used to hard, dirtying physical labor. We simply don’t have a reservoir of such population in the US anymore.

To understand why Mexican citizens performing any work they like in the US would probably not undermine much the native born’s wages requires a small dose of cynicism. Coming from rural areas as most do, those people have little opportunity to study English. Working more or less full time, it takes most of them many years to reach a level where they are more or less functional in English. Accordingly, it takes them many years really to compete realistically with the native born. If my hypothesis is correct, many would have saved enough and gone home before they reached that stage.

Incidentally, and contrary to a belief widespread among my fellow conservatives, Mexican immigrants and other temporaries are well aware of the fact that their earning capacity would shoot up if they knew English well. Accordingly, none resists learning English. The reverse fairy tale that they do originates in an American collective belief about learning languages that verges on mental illness. I wrote about this phenomenon in: “Foreign Languages and Self-Delusion in America.”

I think that few Mexicans really want to move to the US permanently. Many are trapped here because we make coming and going so difficult and so dangerous. Instead, most of them just want a chance to earn five or six times more than they earn back home, take their savings and go home there to buy a farm or to open a restaurant, or to set up a car repair shop. I realize this is merely anecdotal evidence, but I have met enough Mexican returnees in Mexico who explain with clarity that they like Mexico more than they like the US and that they wish to live among their relatives. This is not absurd, of course. It’s at least plausible.

The second main collective argument in favor of the establishment of such free circulation zones is this: The existence of so many economic hostages in the US would give any Mexican government an additional motivation to guard its southern border more carefully. The obvious is not said often enough: Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan pretend-refugees and potential illegal immigrants into the US have no practical way to try their luck without first entering Mexican territory and crossing a large portion of it with immunity.

More objections to such partial but permanent border opening are predictable. Some will argue that it would give free rein to numerous different kinds bandit enterprises based in Mexico, including drug cartels. I think the reverse is true. If a level of funding broadly commensurate to the present were still dedicated to the southern border, many more resources could be diverted from checking on innocent Mexican manual workers seeking honest employment to diverse varieties of gangsters. Furthermore, any Mexican administration, however corrupt, would understand that the free roaming policy could be rescinded any time, causing much disturbance inside Mexico. This would encourage it to try and keep a better lid on trans-border illegal activities, including terrorism. Lastly and, I think, most importantly, the policy would turn many of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of border crossing Mexicans eager to keep the policy alive into law enforcement informers.

In passing, of course, if an international agreement existed to permit such free movement some Americans would go and try their luck in Mexico. Many are already there, working on commission, selling real estate and part-time rentals. More would follow. It makes sense to think of this as a good thing for both Mexico and the US. This happens, in spite of significant bureaucratic barriers that such an agreement would tend to lessen or eliminate under the international principle of reciprocity.

[Editor’s note: this is Part 7 of an 11-part essay. You can read Part 6 here, or read the essay in its entirety here.]

Immigration in the Time of Joe Biden: What to Do (Part 6 of 11)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events ,

Work Targeted Immigration

Of the roughly 1,2 million admitted in 2016, only a little more than 10%, 140,000 were granted admission on the basis of some occupational qualification or other work-related fact. This is a small number for a mostly prosperous population of 320,000,000. The possibility that this small number outstrips either our economic capacities or our economic needs is difficult to consider.

One important problem is which workers to admit. The federal government cannot, in principle, determine by itself what categories of foreign workers are required. The current system, under which industry associations and sometimes single companies lobby the government for foreign visas is probably the best we can do. I mean that every other system imaginable is liable to be worse in some respect or other. It’s liable to be worse, in particular because it could induce the creation and/or growth of even more eternal government bureaucracies. Congress can help by quickly enlarging the number of such work visas available in any given year. (As it has done recently, in late 2020.) Greater flexibility than is current, trying to map quickly changes in real labor markets are desirable. I have not thought about how to achieve such flexibility. I don’t think though that the federal government should indirectly, through targeted visas predict winning and losing economic sectors.

We do know from experience that loosely defined “high tech” fields as well as agriculture are perennially short of workers. There must be others. The most efficient and least expensive way to provide such would be a system that is not a system in a government sort of way but a situation where foreigners find and walk to waiting jobs as needed. This non-system violates some of the strictest requirements of sovereignty, of course. Yet, it may be preferable to the current situation. A single inventive alteration in our immigration policies would go a long way toward helping fill low-skilled labor skills, including agricultural ones.

[Editor’s note: this is Part 6 of an 11-part essay. You can read Part 5 here, or read the essay in its entirety here.]

Immigration in the Time of Joe Biden: What to Do (Part 5 of 11)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , ,

Closing All the Borders

I focus on the southern border because Canadians do not tend to emigrate in mass to the US, being rather disdainful of their loud and agitated American cousins. Canadians also guard their border rather competently. Moreover, the southern border is the access route for a potential hundreds of millions of destitute people from Latin America. It may be also that it’s becoming increasingly the entry point for many others from underdeveloped countries everywhere, including terrorists. That would be because the countries of Latin America do not guard their own borders rigorously, as a rule. Violent jihadists from Yemen can easily enter Mexico as tourists, for instance. (Maria Anastasia O’Grady reports in the Wall Street Journal of 4/26/21 that 20,000 “undocumented immigrants” entered Panama through its physically very rough southern border in 2020. She says the number appears to be increasing in 2021. She asserts also that these migrants largely originate from outside continental Latin America.)

Closing our southern border is not that difficult in principle. Former President Trump showed the way. A physical wall supplemented in places by sophisticated electronic devices (especially in remote areas where allowing wild life to circulate between the US and Mexico forbids a solid wall) would work fine. This can probably be done at a long term cost that compares favorably to the expenses occasioned right now, for example (April 2021) by the necessity to deal in a panic mode with large immigrant surges. What’s required is the political will to do so. It has been lacking for a long time in a large fraction of the US population or, at least, the Democratic Party thinks so.

If the political will to enforce the border were more widespread, we would find penalties against employers of illegal immigrants imposed more frequently and systematically than is the case now. The penalties applied to employers would also be high enough to be more frightening to them. We also indicate our lack of collective seriousness by keeping low the personal penalties imposed for illegal border crossing. It’s now a misdemeanor associated with a $50 to $250 fine. This is not much to people – even poor people – who pay thousands for help crossing the border.

There is a second border issue that almost never makes the news. It’s likely that as many immigrants, and as many illegal immigrants come by plane and even by ship as walk or drive across the southern border. Controlling these should not, in principle, be difficult either. It has long been the practice to hold carriers who bring travelers to the country responsible for their possessing a proper visa. Presumably, the practice has withstood legal challenges. It could be enlarged to make carrier responsible also for foreign visitors not overstaying their visas. There is no reason why the carriers could not be compensated for this service. Tax credits come to mind. It would be cheaper than any other, civil service-based, solution.

We now have a kind of system of randomly open borders. It’s probably possible to bring sufficient numbers of citizens and of their elected reps to agree that there is border and that it should normally stay closed through a Grand Bargain on immigration. First, the Republican Party should come forward finally to solve the problem of illegal residents brought to the US by their parents when they were children (the so-called “Dreamers”). This continuing issue is a blotch on American honor, to my mind.

The Republican Party could also offer to trade cooperation on the matter of closing the border against the acceptance of greatly increased numbers of refugees and asylees. (Those who want to be here and whom we don’t necessarily want.) The Republican Party has nowhere to go but up in this respect anyway. Those refugees admitted in 2019 and in 2020 were a ridiculously low number for a US population of about 320 million. There were a total of 76,00 refugees and asylees admitted in 2019; only 18,000 refugees were permitted in 2020; I have no information about the number of asylees in the same year. (The Biden administration announced in mid April 2021 that the cap on numbers of refugees would remain the same as in 2020. Then he seemed to walk the position back. As of this writing, we don’t know what his administration will do. Does it?) By way of comparison, Canada admitted 102,000 refuges in 2018. Its population is 37 million. Germany with a population four times smaller than ours took in 101,000 refugees in 2019. Tiny Switzerland admitted almost as many. These figures are for illustration only. One must keep in mind that refugee admissions numbers can vary greatly from year to year depending on geopolitical events.

In general, the recipe for success in controlling nation-states’ borders is straightforward: Keep the doors closed until there is a legal reason to open them. Be clear and thorough about what legal reasons are. Don’t confuse again pity and necessity. This formula does not solve the problem of walk-in refugees who avoid legal entry points. A wall largely supplemented by making all applications take place outside the country – with a few exceptions – would solve that problem. I deal with this issue [here] under: “A Different Way to Process Refugees:…”

[Editor’s note: this is Part 5 of an 11-part essay. You can read Part 4 here, or read the essay in its entirety here.]

Immigration in the Time of Joe Biden: What to Do (Part 4 of 11)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , ,

The Nation-State and Borders

Nation-states have to possess immigration policies or they cease to exist. I mean any number of things by “cease to exist,” including falling apart organizationally and economically, to the point of being unable to provide a minimum degree of order, of predictability. (This last sentence might rub pure libertarians the wrong way. I am willing and eager to engage them on the topic of nation-states, societies, and social order.) This failure to function can be the result of an influx of large numbers of immigrants unable to provide for themselves, obviously. I am not suggesting that this is the only possible cause. It’s one cause and it’s staring us in the eyes as I write (April 2021, three and half months into the Biden presidency).

More prosaically, but also a little mysteriously, “cease to exist” may simply refers to the nation-state becoming something else, subjectively less desirable than what it was. The insulting word “nativism” does not do justice to the complex and subtle issues involved here.

Right now, for example, many French people believe that the large presence in their midst of un-assimilated Muslim immigrants endangers the fundamental building blocks of their society’s ethics and laws. These would include, for example, the separation of church and state (of religion and government) and the equality of men and women. Many French people who are not “white supremacists,” (or, more pertinently perhaps, not Christian supremacists) are calling for an end to all Muslim immigration. (Note that I have said nothing about whether I believe their fears are justified.)*

Guarded national borders have been the conventional way to protect the nation-state since the mid-19th century. They don’t have to be but other available methods are even less palatable to those who love freedom. If, for example, every resident of the US carried a personally identified GPS that it is illegal to turn off, it would be easy to monitor the totality of the population. Those moving about without an authorized GPS would stand out. Legal immigrants might be given a GPS with a different signal. Legal visitors who are not immigrants would get yet another with a signal set to come off on or just before their visa expiration. Illegal immigrants would carry no authorized GPS. This absence would designate them the attention of immigration authorities. (Of course, fake GPS would soon be for sale but they would be more difficult to create than are current SS card and other such paper or plastic documents.) And, thinking about it, a microchip painlessly implanted under each person’s skin might work even better! See what I mean about guarded borders not being so repugnant after all?

*The French left-wing media do not offer substantive arguments to calm the widespread alarm raised by the center, by the right, by many others. Instead, they try to make the alarmed feel guilty of “Islamophobia,” supposedly a close cousin of racism. This accusation quickly losses forces because many people realize that Islam is a set of beliefs and of values that Muslims are free to abandon, unlike race. At least, they may abandon it in the French legal context. (In several Muslim countries, such “apostasy” is theoretically punished by death.) By the way, a month before this writing, I talked on a Santa Cruz beach with a pleasant young French Muslim, a pure product of French public schools born in France. He told me calmly that he believed French law should forbid blasphemy.

With all the agitation and all the negative emotions, people with Muslim names appear well represented at all levels and in all sectors of French society. (Firm numbers are hard to come by because the French government does not allow its various branches to collect information on religious affiliation nor on ethnicity.) And, by the way, I just love what Arabic influence has done to French popular music and songs.

[Editor’s note: this is Part 4 of an 11-part essay. You can read Part 3 here, or read the essay in its entirety here.]

If We Ignore Climate Change Horrible Things are Gonna Happen…

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , ,

There is a good chance American society will soon be committed to huge new expenditures based on the urgency to do something about the anticipated ravages of climate change. Some of the monster amounts (in trillions) the Biden administration is asking for will, in fact, be spent on making everything in sight electric, especially (but not limited to) automobiles. This is happening at a time when fossil fuels prices are near a historical low and we, in the US, are awash in clean energy in the form of natural gas and nuclear power. There is no “proven reserves” limitations on either as there was in my youth with respect to petroleum, for example. (You read that right. When I was thirty, the “proven reserves of petroleum,” oil in the ground, were a fraction of the amount of petroleum we have actually extracted and used since then!)

As a fairly idle retired old dude, I follow a variety of media almost copiously. I do it daily in two languages, English and French. In both languages, the news and a wide variety of programs, including practically all documentaries, take the reality of “climate change” as unquestioned and unquestionable. In my heart though, I am sure the French anchor and the American news commentator who casually mention “climate change” have only the vaguest idea of what the two magic words mean. I would bet large amounts on my guess.

This whole thing puzzles me because it seems to me the quasi-religious zeal that used to accompany the mention of most climate topics has abated a lot in, say, ten years. Perhaps, it’s because successful religions need not be clamorous. Still it perplexes me that millions, in America and world-wide, are accepting the prospect of multi-generational debt and probably of a reduced standard of living in the absence of a clear explanation of what events/developments they are avoiding through such meek assent.

I, for one, have not come across an explanation although I almost certainly spend more time with the media than most well educated people. I am aware that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change threatens us with a one degree centigrade rise in mean global temperatures before the end of this century if we don’t mend our collective ways. (Or, is it 1.5 C? I don’t care to check. See why below.) I tend to think that that which cannot be expressed with figures probably should not become the object of government policy. And if it does, it should only come to the attention of local government whose subjectivity I understand best. But the warnings on climate change are often in fact expressed in a quantitative manner. This one, at least, satisfies my criterion, this criterion, this way: one degree centigrade (or, maybe, 1.5 C).

What is discreetly but stubbornly missing in the associated narrative is this: Why should I care? If the +one C. change happened even suddenly, say, within ten minutes, it wouldn’t be enough to cause me to go and get a sweater. I doubt it would even be sufficient to get me to roll down my sleeves.

So, please, Ms. and Mr. Media (and yous and theys) try to remember to remind me of what horrors are awaiting us if we don’t mind climate change enough. Please, limit yourselves to whatever noxious effects have clear and fairly abundant scientific backing (say, two published studies in double-blind refereed journals). Please, include the references or, better, links, so that I and my fellow “deniers” can try and read the studies if the spirit so moves me and us. And no, I shouldn’t have to be on my own to go searching for the scientific backing that you keep implying supports your (your) beliefs that I, we, don’t share, at this point. If you don’t do so, at least once in a while, it proves that your ideas are bankrupt. It also means that the giant expenditures you are forcing on us are based on wanton lies.

One last thing: Don’t bother lecturing me on clean air and clean water; I am in favor of both. And, I agree that we use too much plastic.

Immigration in the Time of Joe Biden: What to Do (Part 3 of 11)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events ,

Numbers Matter

Numbers have a way of sobering the imagination while dispelling some absurd beliefs. In 2016, about 1,200,00 people were admitted into the US. (Some had been physically in the country for a long time, due to technicalities not worth discussing here.) This is all about being a legal immigrant. If there were only 200 annual candidates to admission to the US, for example, no one would be speaking about immigration. But the figure of legal admissions has been consistently over one million in past years, with many candidates rejected. The proportion of the population born abroad is currently as high, – or as low – as it has ever been, somewhat under 15%. Many people, especially conservatives, vaguely feel that it’s too many. (The fact that many of those tell themselves fairy tales about the quality of past immigration in contrast to current immigration makes matters worse, of course. This is another story, something we can talk about if anyone asks.)

Quantitative limitations on immigration ought to be subject to cold- blooded assessments. First, there must be a mental recognition that the world’s misery is immense and that the US cannot take care of all of it however much Americans would like to. (Personally, I think it’s honorable for us Americans to take charge of our share of misery and of a little more than our share; it’s good for our collective soul and we can afford it.) Second, as I will explain below, the numbers of immigrants we agree to accept for reasons of either the mind (those we want) or the heart (those who want us) are subject to a near automatic multiplier. I explain this [here] under: “The Family Multiplier:….”

[Editor’s note: this is Part 3 of an 11-part essay. You can read Part 2 here, or read the essay in its entirety here.]

Immigration in the Time of Joe Biden: What to Do (Part 2 of 11)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , ,

Does America Need Immigrants?

By way of honest introduction, let me say that I think American society needs immigrants. I also think it will draw them either through an orderly process or through a disorderly one. Two big reasons US society needs immigrants. (There are other reasons.) First we have chronically unmet labor needs. As I write, more than a year into the pandemic, the unemployment rate of 6.2 is unusually high (not very high) as compared to mean unemployment for the past 70 years. Yet, many jobs are going unfilled according to newspapers, national and local, and to other media, including Fox News, repeatedly. I know the overgenerous subsidization of unemployment during COVID plays a role in the lack of responsiveness to job offers. I don’t think it explains everything, especially toward the top of the income structure and also toward the bottom where many just don’t qualify for benefits.

The second reason American society needs immigrants is that it is aging fast. It’s aging fast enough to threaten the future viability of such essential social programs as Social Security and Medicare unless we have an unprecedented rise in per worker productivity (which is not out of the question given fast technical progress, and a greater acceptance of artificial intelligence and of robotization). The bad news is that the current mean number of children per US woman (including permanent immigrants with a superior fertility) is only 1.7. That’s much below the generally recognized replacement rate of 2.1. If current trends continue, we will be seeing dwindling numbers of physically active younger people struggling to support a growing population of old people. (Current trends do not have to continue, I know.) I realize that there are solutions to this problem other than immigration including making many or all work latter into their lives, or even earlier. Still immigration looks like the quickest solution. In the short term, its concreteness, its immediacy, makes this solution pretty much irresistible. One more reason to think it through.

[Editor’s note: this is Part 2 of an 11-part essay. You can read Part 1 here, or read the essay in its entirety here.]

Immigration in the Time of Joe Biden: What to Do (Part 1 of 11)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , ,

Mike B., a Facebook friend and an immigrant like me, invited me to give my views about what should be the US immigration policy. I can only do a little here but, it’s worth the effort. Let me point out first that I have a fairly up-to date, reasoned description of American legal immigration (legal) posted here. I mention this because I have learned through the social media and also, by watching Fox News, that American conservatives are often ill-informed about the relevant laws and facts. I will pretend below that I have been selected by a Republican partisan Congressional commission to make immigration policy recommendations (unfortunately, on a pro bono basis). Below are some disparate thoughts on the topic. (I am not worried because the competition appears to be today sparse and shallow.) Here they are, more or less in order of priority.

Lightly Rethinking the Main Issues

First things first. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t hear a fellow conservative, a local or a national pundit, even a Congressperson, declaring directly or by implication, that there are proper, legitimate, legal ways to emigrate to the US that contrast with the illegal kind. That’s mostly not true. There is nearly zero way for the average unmarried Mexican, for example, to move to the US. It’s not a racial issue: The average Norwegian is even less likely to be able to do so. (See my longform essay here at NOL for a classification of different kinds of admissions.) Incidentally, an unmarried Mexican has a better chance because one quick way to be admitted is to marry a US citizen. (Has to be a real marriage. You may be fined for not sleeping in the same bed as your supposed spouse!)

Next, two changes in our collective ways of thinking about it must precede any significant reform of our immigration system, I believe. First, Americans, and especially, their lawmakers, must free themselves from an important conceptual confusion that’s obvious in the public discourse. It’s about the relationships between American society and potential immigrants. We must remember to distinguish clearly between immigrants we want to come in and immigrants who want to come in. The two categories should be treated differently as a matter of policy. The fact that there is always some overlap between the two – there are foreigners who want to join us that we would like to have – does not change this fact. Ignoring the distinction causes us too often to treat the ones with more sympathy than is warranted, and the others insultingly. It muddles our thinking.

Put another way: We should respond differently to the same 26-year- old male stranger in the strength of his age with no English when we think he has come to eat from our plate and when he is the guy who arrived to move the truck parked across our driveway.

Secondly, it’s useful to frame the problems (plural) that immigration poses as a balancing act between our economic and other societal needs (think bilingual au pair girls), on the one hand, and the requirements of sovereignty, on the other. The first force opens doors, the second tends to close them. At any rate, there are doors. Doors can be shut or open; there is nothing in-between.

[Editor’s note: this is the first part in an 11-part essay. You can read the essay in its entirety here.]

Francophonie et connerie

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events , ,

Comme c’est souvent le cas le soir, je lézarde devant TV5, la chaîne francophone internationale. C’est l’heure du journal télévisé. L’annonceur, francais selon sa diction, annonce gravement que ce jour est l’anniversaire de la mort des époux Rosenberg, exécutés en 1953 “parce qu’ils étaient Communistes”. Comme, à cette époque, il y avait au moins 100 000 Communistes aux Eats-Unis, ces deux-là n’auraient vraiment pas eu de chance!

Un autre jour, je regarde un documentaire français: “Gharjuwa, épouse de la vallée.”  C’est sur une ethnie népalaise qui pratique la polyandrie: une femme, plusieurs maris. Le sujet est intrinsèquement intéressant, Et puis, le fait que la femme polygame ait le gros sourire aux lèvres tout le long de l’interview confirme pas mal de mes à-priori sur ce qui rend les femmes heureuses, en fin de compte! (Ce n’est pas sorcier.) Et puis, le tout se passe dans un environnement montagneux magnifique. Comme c’est le cas pour la plupart des documentaires français que je connais, la photo est excellente.

L’une des tâches de la femme polygame est de préparer la bière. Une voix masculine dit le commentaire en Français. Soyons francs: je ne sais pas si c’est le commentateur qui a rédigé le texte. En tous cas, il nous avise de ce qu’au Népal, la bière ménagère se prépare en faisant “cuire ensemble” une céréale (ou plusieurs; maïs ou blé noir, ou les deux, je ne suis pas sûr) et de la levure. Je fais un retour en arrière mental. C’est bien ce qu’il a dit. Mais, la levure, c’est ce qui transforme les sucres des céréales en alcool et en CO2. Mais la levure se compose d’organisme vivants qui trépassent vite à la chaleur. Pas question de la faire cuire avant qu’elle ait fait son travail. Ou alors, on a de la bouillie plutôt que de la bière. La description qu’on nous donne  est donc aussi fausse qu’absurde.

A priori, selon son accent et sa diction, le commentateur est français ou belge. Il vient donc d’un pays célébré dans le monde entier pour ses vins et aussi pour ses bières, ou alors, massivement, seulement pour ses bières. Des pays respectés aussi pour la supériorite de leur boulangerie et de leurs pâtisseries levées. Vins, bières, pains, pâtisseries exigent la maîtrise des levures. Comment peut-on être aussi ignorant d’une partie aussi importante de sa culture materiélle pourtant séculaire? Et puis, je sais bien qu’en principe, l’ignorance et la connerie sont des choses différentes. Pourtant, il y a des cas où on a du mal a distinguer l’une de l’autre. Je me demande comment on peut avoir été élevé dans la culture française ou la culture belge et être si profondément mal informé, à moins d’être également stupide.

Mais j’éprouve aussi de l’indignation comme ainsi dire au second degré: Comment les public francais et autres francophones peuvent-ils laisser passer de telles manifestations d’ignardise grossière sans se plaindre, sans réagir? Le fait est courant, répandu selon mon usage de l’éventail, il est vrai limité, de media francophones à ma disposition. J’ai d’ailleurs inventé la formule suivante, (en Anglais) : “Si vous voulez apprendre rapidement quelquechose de faux, suivez simplement les cinq premières minutes d’un documentaire en Français!”

J’ai du mal à souscrire à l’idee que la langue francaiss, la langue de Diderot, serait intrinsèquement porteuse d’insouciance vis-à-vis de la vérité toute simple bien que cela ne soit pas complètement impossible.

Je m’interroge donc sur les possible causes sociologique de ce qui me paraît plus qu’un accident. Je veux parler de l’apparente indifférence aux faits associée à l’usage de la langue française contemporaine. Je ne sais pas s’il s’agit vraiment d’ un phénomène culturel en profondeur: Les faussetés ne dérangent simplement pas beaucoup les Francais. (Il me semble, subjectivement, que les autres francophones, Canadiens, et Belges, par exemple, sont moins coupables.) Je me demande si les causes des ces frequentes débâcles factuelles sont plus tortueuses et donc, moins directement culturelles:

“France 2 fait un documentaires sur les Népalaise à plusieurs maris. C’est chouette. Je vais téléphoner à Robert pour lui demander s’il peut prendre mon neveu Charlot pour le narrer. Justement, en ce moment, il ne fait pas grandchose.”

De vraies questions. Toutes les réponse m’intéressent, celles provenant de France autant que celle émanant d’autres pays francophones. Ecrire à jdelacroixliberte@gmail.com.

Le beau et ignare documentaire en question sort de chez Atmosphère  Production  avec le concours du Centre national du cinéma. (“Evidemment”, j’ai envie de d’ajouter.)

My Mother and my Sex Life

Jacques Delacroix Culture , , ,

Don’t worry, this is not another tawdry tale of life among the hillbillies. I was raised in France in the fifties. We had a respectably long list of usual turpitudes including sexual practices that still don’t have a name in English but incest was low on that list. Instead, I am referring to my mother’s life-long but indirect influence on my sex life.

My mother – who had six children total – was always extremely optimistic about human sexual potential. When the first blue-jeans appeared in France, she swore none of her sons would ever be allowed to wear this new garment. She stated with finality that blue-jeans were expressly designed to mold a man’s intimate tool-kit in order to inflame otherwise chaste, sedate, and retiring young women. Raised in an all-female household herself, she took a keen interest in the magical transformation from sweet, lovable little boy to big, loud, brash, uncouth, sex-crazed semi-adult male. She wanted to be sure she would not screw up insofar as she had a part to play. She took the pragmatic path, almost the scientific path, you might say. From age 12 until we left home, the three boys were served red meat every evening at dinner. We ate lunch at school, or maybe skipped lunch altogether, so my mother worried we might be short of the raw material for testosterone, pure protein. There were five living children. The family lived on a single small public servant’s salary. Meat was expensive, except one kind of meat. That’s how the boys ended up with a mess of bloody, barely singed horse meat on their plate every night.

Perhaps, my mother’s physiological theory was approximately correct. Or, possibly, it was the power of suggestion: If you eat a lot of horses knowingly, you end up acquiring in your mind some of the attributes of horses. In any event, there was never any motor failure in her sons nor any lack of fuel in their motors.

As far back as I remember, there were whispers and even loud comments bordering on exclamations about the questionable behavior of some married women in our village-like area of Paris. There were even more in the small resort town where we went on vacation. That was a place where youngish married women were dropped by their husbands for months on end in close proximity to randy students in their early twenties. (Idleness is the mother of all vices, including that one!)

My mother spoke about those women from both sides of her mouth. On the one side, she condemned conjugal betrayal in the strongest terms. On the other side, she would declare,“The poor woman is a prisoner of her senses. What can she do?” In this, she differed markedly from her lower middle-class married girlfriends among whom the consensus was that you could forgive infidelity only if it was the result of “le grand amour,” the one great love that happens only once in a lifetime. My mother was not merely Lifetime Channel-like soft on gooey love; she was openly open-minded about erotics, specifically.

Her attitude was a big asset for her sons, I realized later. It gave us a goal in lieu of the vague unfocused, rutting search of adolescent males in general. From an early age, we had a clear goal: Among desirable girls (that would be 95% of them), identify those with a potential for becoming prisoners of their senses, cut them from the herd, and perform the needed to enslave them. The search was long but not really painful or boring. When I finally found one, I felt I had arrived at one of life’s major destinations.

The Best Coffee Shop in the People’s Green Socialist Republic of Santa Cruz, California

Jacques Delacroix Culture , , , , , , ,

At nine, two flows of humanity cross each other in front of Lulu Carpenter’s, the upscale coffee shop at the top of Pacific Avenue. Pacific Avenue is the main walking commercial thoroughfare, surprisingly well re-designed after the destruction 1989 earthquake. It’s nothing like the collection of cheap motels leading to the Boardwalk that greets the casual tourist entering Santa Cruz from high-traffic Ocean street.

Down Pacific comes the cortege of the houseless, walking from the shelter toward breakfast at the Salvation Army, a mile away. I don’t call them “homeless” because ownership of a house does not guarantee a home, and because it’s possible to make a home without a house. Also, I am sick of the sanctimoniousness of the word. Most of the houseless carry a large backpack. The smart ones also carry a guitar, or a guitar case, one of the best weapons against the city’s repressive ordinances. (See below.)

It would not take much to convince me that some of the houseless have a hangover. They are mostly silent. Those who are not harangue loudly society at large, or God, or no one in particular. One talks into a cell-phone she does not have. I know for a fact that one houseless woman in her thirties can speak perfect French with the (to me) quaint diction of what is probably a Swiss finishing school. (Trust me, I don’t have the talent to make up a detail like this.)

Up Pacific Avenue from the bus depot march Mexicans on their way to work. They converse loudly in Spanish. Many laugh or guffaw. The Mexicans all wear thick sensible jackets in dark colors, black, navy blue or gray. The houseless tend to be elaborately dressed, layer upon layer. It’s not all about the morning cold: Many women, and quite a few men, wear colorful Indian, or otherwise “ethnic” dress on top of jeans and sweaters. Every single one of the houseless is an Anglo. Perhaps, race matters, after all.

Much of residential Santa Cruz is littered. (I believe my own street is never swept by the city.) Pacific Avenue, however, the showcase artery, is cleaned every day or nearly so. There are two distinct street crews. You can tell which is coming from afar. The first crew is large, youngish, noisy and enthusiastic. It’s composed entirely of mentally handicapped people and of their minders. They make noise because they are invariably in good spirits, kidding one another endlessly and throwing good-humored insults around. When they are through, hardly a single cigarette butt has managed to conceal itself in a crack.

The other crew comprises mostly people in their forties and fifties in green uniforms who work slowly, with the dignity befitting their status as tenured city employees. They are said to be the best paid municipal employees anywhere in America. I think this is probably fair because, I suspect, most of them hold a Master’s in Comparative Literature, or of Fine Arts, from the University of California. They contribute to the gravitas of the community.

Lulu’s, the coffee shop, manages to maintain a steady truce between environmentally militant, abstemious, vegetarian types who hate tobacco, and smokers. I think this is because almost all the smokers are alternative lifestyle youths with pierced body parts, and existentialist graduate students from UCSC. No one really wants to find out how tough the pierced ones really are, and the graduate students earn respect by appearing to be in possession of profound truths that don’t even have a name in English.

By and large, the smokers are pigs: They throw cigarette filters with a half-life of twenty years on the ground although they are only ten feet from a litter box. Nobody ever complains about the littering because neatness is a bourgeois virtue incompatible with the community’s revolutionary spirit. (I think most city elections are disputed between Maoists and Trotskists, who have been in the closet elsewhere since 1971, and a few left-leaning liberals, all prosperous shopkeepers.) Besides, Lulu’s owner, who runs a tight ship, makes sure most of the butts are swept from his vicinity every night.

Shortly after nine, people come in for take-out coffee. The young ones are mostly workers from neighborhood shops who got up too late to fix their own coffee. (The result of a recurring epidemic: The young believe something tremendous will happen if only they stay up late enough.) A few customers sit down to read the paper in solitude, or they chat in groups of two or three to kick off the day with conviviality. No one knows what they do for a living. The young are probably students; the middle-aged may be teachers (like me), or independently wealthy. (Santa Cruz’ own dangerous secrets: Who is a trust fund baby? Who made a real estate fortune in the seventies?) One can easily tell the well-off from the poor because, for the former shabby clothing is de rigueur.

There are some old codgers who have probably been awake for hours. I avoid them like the plague because I suspect them of wanting to induct me into their mutual misery society: You let me tell you about my colon; I will listen about your arthritis. Among those who sit alone, reading a newspaper is common. They read the local give-away sheet (surprisingly good though uneven), or the Santa Cruz Sentinel (bad spelling, good local coverage, bad international coverage), the San Jose Mercury News (there are a few techies left after the dot.com debacle), the San Francisco Chronicle (for bottom feeders like me), or the New York Times, of course. No one has the cojones to read the Wall Street Journal in public. (There is no free lunch; there would be a Hell’s worth of shunning to pay.)

The serving staff is young, friendly, and sunny. Most of them nurture a creative sideline: painting, writing, music, the pursuit of esoteric beliefs. They are all avid readers, making Lulu’s a much better literary café than Saint Germain-des-Prés ever knew. By the way, one young guy reads big post- Modernist books of French origin. I am dying to warn him. (Bad French never translates into good English.) I resist the temptation because youth must be allowed to make its own mistakes. I think the young people on the staff worry sometimes about what being the butt of customers’ jovial moods and gracious thankfulness is going to do to their long-term creativity which requires a dose of misery, as everyone knows.

There is a punk rocker who works in the kitchen. His temples are shaved and a silver stud pierces his upper chin. He is a real conservative who works two jobs so his wife can stay home and take care of their child. He is against drugs, except tobacco. I swap him stories for cigarettes. What a deal!

For months, I have been trying to devise a sociologically valid taxonomy of beverage choices. It’s tough going. The green tea drinkers are probably followers of Buddhist mysticism, and hypochondriacs to boot. The chai drinkers would like to travel; they are sure they love India because they have never been there. Once, I forced my brother-in-law, a tea-trader visiting from Calcutta, to taste Lulu’s chai. He told me that what we call “chai” in America, “tea” in most Indian languages, is a good beverage for those allergic to tea.

You can tell the hard-line leftists by the fact that they load every beverage with prodigious amounts of sugar, or often, of honey. (Self- indulgence has a way to assert itself in roundabout paths.) I can’t figure out those men who order espresso or complicated Italianate coffee drinks. (Raspberry latte? Menthe mocha?) The women who do so require no explanation: All heterosexual women are naturally chi-chi (and many who are not). Hot honey and milk is probably for those who coddle their inner child. I can’t begin to tell you how many are hairy, 200 pound, rugged-looking guys. The presence of soy milk on the menu is not surprising though: It’s the politically correct accompaniment to organically grown coffee. The drinkers of regular coffee are probably solid citizens who ended up in Santa Cruz by happenstance. I suspect they have regular jobs and pay taxes regularly; the brew helps them stay regular. A few might be closet conservatives. You never know.

I have been marveling at a classificatory mystery: Lulu’s offers simultaneously, caffè latte, café con leche, and café au lait. I believe the three sets of words mean exactly the same thing. I could try each concoction in turn, of course, in a spirit of scientific experimentation. I refrain because I am charmed by the reliable mystery of three perfectly parallel universes neatly delineated by three mutually intelligible languages.

The Moulin Rouge, San Francisco, a Fragment of Memoir

Jacques Delacroix History , , , , ,

When I was 22, I lived at the Moulin Rouge, a French bar in North Beach, San Francisco, California. Not all the time, only when I was not hitch-hiking to and from the community college with almost a view on San Quentin Prison, and when I was not attending classes there, or working. The Moulin Rouge was run by a spiffy well-coiffed older French woman. I always thought she was a retired madam from Marseilles. I don’t say that to blacken her name for she was a real sweetheart. And anyhow, I don’t know this for a fact.

I was a good student who did his assignment efficiently and who drank too much every night at the Moulin Rouge. It was a good plan to meet new people, some who were interesting, some who could be useful. The regulars were a mixture of French immigrants and of American Francophiles. Some of the latter were single women of an uncertain age in the low light of the bar. I met a middle-aged French woman who owned an expensive hairdresser’s shop and who tried to make me her chauffeur/gigolo. She failed (we failed,I failed).

I had emigrated to the US with no skills and no money. That’s no money, not a cute way to say “little money.” Through the Moulin Rouge, I landed a succession of part-time jobs, not all as unimportant as you might imagine. One job was editing a small, largely local French language newspaper. I always wanted to make it more hifallutin. The publisher, a Frenchman who only lived in San Francisco part of the year, objected. We had a final falling out when he fired me with these exact words, “We don’t need intellectual shit in this paper. Fifty per cent of our readers are Basques; the Basques are stupid. I know because I am Basque.” ! At the time, I slept in a small room in a Basque hotel precisely, also in North Beach. The other tenants were Basque shepherds on vacation from their lonely jobs in the Sierras. They did not seem stupid to me although they were not what you would call real literati. Plus, they cooked great six-egg plus smoked ham breakfasts.

A middle-aged gay customer who was an interior decorator – I am not kidding – heard of my predicament. He introduced me to a rich old lady who would have me occupy her basement apartment on Pacific Hill and pay me a little stipend in return for “some work.” She called the lodgings: “the Chinaman’s flat.” (Again: Would I make this up?)

The old lady, a widow, drove a hard bargain. She thought she had a right to be demanding because she often brought down for me her surplus cooked vegetable. That was a misplaced concern, of course: Young men use beer for both fiber and vitamins. I did not enjoy the job of a houseboy much and bringing girls down into the basement was hellishly difficult because the old lady never slept. She did not even take naps in the afternoon, I know this for a fact. After a couple of months, she fired me. She told me to my face she would replace me with an Asian boy who would be “more docile.” It made a lot of sense since her main offer was the “Chinaman’s flat.”

I kept spending my long winter evenings at the Moulin Rouge. I kept meeting interesting characters there. One was a Frenchman in his forties who told me he was a pirate on leave. He said he owned an old Navy PT boat with a machine gun he used to prey on Chinese ships in the Celebes (Indonesia). “How come you are not in prison for 20 or 25 years? How about the police, the local coast guard, the navy?” I asked. “Nobody cares about the rich Chinese in Indonesia; besides, we never, never kill anyone. We wave big guns at them, my crew and I, and they always pay up. Sometimes, they bargain with me. I am not unreasonable,” he explained. He invited me to join him in a piracy campaign on my next summer vacation. I told him that I would like too but I would probably have to study in the summer too. I had my values down straight: junior college before piracy.

Evidently, the pirate had detected my criminal fiber before I had. “How about spring break – he said – I have a contact in Columbia. We could go quickly and smuggle back pre-Columbian artifacts. I know some collectors. Actually they come to his bar once in a while. I have heard you speak Spanish. Your Spanish is good. You could be very helpful and make enough money to support yourself for a whole year.”

Before I had time to really consider his tempting offer, he changed the subject. He told me that today was “El Dia de la Raza.” I did not know what that was then. Anyway, it’s not really about race. It’s just a day when Spanish speakers from all countries celebrate their “hispanidad,” whatever that is. He said there was a big dance at the Masonic auditorium. He added that it would be full of tarted-up Hispanic women on the make. (Here is a rule of thumb: Like a hunter who has lovingly cleaned and oiled his gun, a woman who has gone to great expenditure of time and money to make herself sexy for a special event hates to return empty-handed.)

So, we went to the ball and it was just as he had said. For some reason, women visibly outnumbered men. Now, a neutral, scientific note about Frenchmen: They may look like any northern Europeans but many can dance like Puerto-Rican pimps. The reasons why this is are interesting but too complex for this story. In this case, we both also spoke Spanish with ease which is not uncommon among French people. Quickly, the pirate and I did very well. I met a short but shapely brown, black-eyed Central American woman with hair down to her waist. She wore a bare-back dress and her skin under my right hand was the smoothest and the softest I had ever felt. She liked that I was twice her size and she raised herself on her toes to reach me. After a decent hour or so, she took me to her apartment in a taxi she called herself. Turned out she was twice my age. CUT! This may be read at a family gathering!

My friend the pirate had met a very sweet Mexican-American woman half his age at the dance and he had immediately fallen hard for her. She had the kind of sweetness that caused her to keep worrying about who was doing my ironing since I was a bachelor living alone. She thought that was not right. The pirate told me it was time for him to abandon his evil practices and to return to France where his old mother was still alive. He and his Mexican-American sweetheart began traveling West to East toward our shared native country. The girl had never been outside the Bay Area. Together, they hitched-hiked and worked their way on ships toward Singapore. That included a two-month stay in Australia where the pirate made good money killing rabbits. Then, he worked as a cook and she as a maid on a freighter that took a few passengers. They made it to France by various means in a little under a year.

“Why stop in Singapore?” I asked the pirate when I met him and Maria again briefly in Paris. “Why, it has the biggest and the most beautiful Catholic cathedral in Asia. That where I wanted to marry Maria. That’s where I married her,” he said simply. Real or not, the pirate had great style. I am sorry I don’t know what became of him or her. I imagine they lived in a nice farm in the beautiful French countryside and that they have had many children who look like pretty Maria.

Soon afterwards the Dia de la Raza, I moved to Sausalito where I had found a gardener’s job on the sole strength of my French name. After that, I only returned to the Moulin Rouge infrequently. In Sausalito, every night, I would attend the No Name Bar, right downtown. It was an intellectual sort of place. There was wallpaper in the restroom that showed scenes from the Trojan War. Someone had drawn a bubble coming out of a hoplite’s mouth with words in Greek letters. Another graffito said: “Schwartz is a neo-classic.” Schwartz must have been devastated! Soon, I found that the Moulin Rouge had played out its part in my destiny. I was steeped in American life and on my way to becoming a scholar, not a little thanks to the No Name Bar. Staying on the academic straight and narrow was not always easy though because of the pirate’s bad example.

Seljouk!

Jacques Delacroix History , , ,

His ancestors had fought their way from Central Asia slaughtering, looting, burning, and worse. At night, they often slept in the saddle, on their horses that looked as wild as they did.

He was a large, muscular man with a fierce face, a slick mustache, and hairy forearms. First, he put his long sharp blade to my throat, then, he set me on fire; finally, he tried to break my cervical vertebrae with his bare hands.

“Tesekkur ler,” I said, handed him fifty million liras.

I had not had the time to visit the barber before leaving California. That’s how I got a straight razor shave and haircut, my ear and nose hair singed with flaming alcohol, and a vigorous cricking of the neck to finish. It all happened in the open air, in a street lined with rug shops, in Seljouk, the tourist town next to the great ancient archaeological site of Ephesus, Turkey.