Illegal Immigrants, Tribunals, and Circus Inspectors

View 703 Wednesday, November 30, 2011

If you haven’t been following Fred, he has a neat satire: http://fredoneverything.net/LLA.shtml

It will also lead you to a description of the toughest undergrad math class in the country. Fred’s piece is satire, but it’s true enough that Math 55 classes do not look like America.

I really don’t want to spend a lot of time on the election, but I weary of the nonsense being said about the immigration issue. The immigration hawks always bring up the gang members and their molls, and the specter of amnesty as a magnet to draw people in, Amnesty certainly is a magnet, but given the flow into the US just now it’s clear we don’t need a magnet to have a steady flow of illegal immigrants seeking work.

The first thing, then, is to close the border. Build fences. Build moats. If you’re really serious build a mine field. Go look at der Grenze, the border control system of the USSR in Europe: it was intended to keep people in, but it worked to keep them out, too; and as to magnets, the lure of free Austria and West Germany was quite strong. Yes, some got across those borders, but it wasn’t that many. If we’re serious about closing a border we can do it, just as if we are serious about controlling employment of illegal immigrants that can be done too.

But I do wonder: what proportion of those insisting that all eleven million – 1.1 x 10^7 – illegal immigrants have got to be deported have an undocumented nanny, or really know the immigration status of all the members of their gardening crew? But assume that they are all serious, what do we do with, say, a 70 year old man who has been the janitor in a church for 25 years, has two citizen daughters who are members of that parish and four grandchildren, also all citizens. It is now his retirement party. He’s going to go live with one of his children. Do we send a federal agent to his retirement party to handcuff and deport him?

Eleven million people is a lot of people. We can probably get about a million to self-deport by offering rewards for voluntary deportation. Start with $1,000, and when that is done raise the stakes to $2,000. When those cherries are picked you look at the immigration status of everyone arrested on suspicion of a felony, and act accordingly. That will probably get another million burglars, at probably about $2,000 each, plus a few expensive law suits to establish that we’re not interested in whether or not they are guilty of the felony that got them arrested, they are clearly guilty of being illegally in the US, and yes, we really did check the immigration or citizenship status of everyone arrested for burglary (or whatever) in that jurisdiction for the past few weeks, etc. If we’re really lucky the self-deportations and automatic deportations for felony arrests will get us down to, say, 7 million illegal immigrants in the US. That’s still a lot. Now what? Expand the program to check status of everyone arrested for anything? Think of the law suits when someone gets deported for jumping a turnstile. And of course there’s driving without a license as an automatic deportation for illegals. Now we go after anyone using someone else’s social security number, and after that anyone who uses a fake SS #.

And when you have done all that you will still have 4 to 5 million illegal aliens present in these United States. Some of them are likely to be solid citizens. Others may well be ne’er-do-wells. Shall we go examine the documents of every ne’er-do-well in the country? But don’t people who haven’t committed any crime but are generally just not considered desirable have some kind of rights? Do we go back to vagrancy laws? When I was young “No visible means of support” was a valid reason for someone to be arrested, and it was often used to shake down young people hitchhiking across country. Happened to me, once. Easier to pay the ten bucks than stay in the Podunk cooler while they verified my student status and that I had a place of residence in Iowa City. Of course no one hitchhikes any more. Worse, the courts have hammered away at the vagrancy laws, but we could perhaps find a way around that?

My point is that a few minutes’ thought will show that dealing with the eleven million illegal immigrants already here is not as simple as “Send out enough agents, round them up, and throw them out!” We all know that. Perhaps Newt Gingrich brought it up precisely to set the boundary at “road to legality but not citizenship” as opposed to full amnesty. He may be looking past the primary to the general election.

Brian Hall’s Perfect Climate Irony

Jerry,

You should know that the article that Brian Hall references did not look at the complete data set published to date by JAXA (which can be found here: http://www.gosat.nies.go.jp/eng/result/download/GOSAT_L4_Release_en.pdf), but focuses on one graph for July 2009. Not much can be gleaned just from the full set of graphs alone — just that there are months when various regions are net sinks for CO2 and other months when those same regions are net sources. Net sourcing over land seems to predominate over time, but that does not mean that that the few months of net sink do not out weigh the many months of net sourcing.

My advice is for everyone to read the full article at the link I have provided. This debate over AGW will not get settled by ignoring or misconstruing data.

Keegan

Kevin L. Keegan

I agree. This probably ought to be paired with the original mail comment. What we are trying to do here is conduct a rational discussion of a topic that has become anything but rational. I am convinced that CO2 has been steadily rising since 1850 or so; the question is what effect does that have, and whether the rise is great compared to the frequent injections of CO2 by volcanic events, ocean current circulations bringing up warmer/colder water, and such. The evidence seems to be clear that there have been wide CO2 swings in the past.

Arrhenius did some back of the envelope calculations on CO2 effects back around 1900. They seem to be as good a model as the billion dollar computer simulations we now rely on.

In another conference we got to wondering what the difference between courts martial and military tribunals might be, and I wondered what rules, if any, the 1942 tribunal that President Roosevelt set up to deal with the 8 Nazi saboteurs landed by submarine in Long Island and in Florida operated under. They found all eight guilty and six were summarily executed. I have been unable to find anything about the composition of this tribunal or what rules it followed. It sentenved all eight to death, including two who had cooperated with the FBI and made their capture possible. What evidence it heard (did it know that two of them were in fact turned and worked for the FBI to help catch the other six?), what the ranks of the tribunal members or indeed how many there were, and what instructions it operated under seem to have been suppressed successfully. It’s all mysterious even though the US Supreme Court QUINN decision, which affirmed the President’s right to act in this case, is now used to support the argument for the use of tribunals in the War on Terror.

We do know how the Tribunals operate now. Comparison of Rights in Military Commission Trials and Trials in Federal Criminal Court, by Jennifer K. Elsea, Legislative Attorney, January 26, 2010 discusses this in detail. It is published by Congress.

I still don’t know anything about the 1942 Tribunal.

Subject: USDA fines Ringling Bros. Circus over treatment of animals

Looks like the bunny inspectors have moved on to bigger targets. Based on the explanations, this sure looks like a spurious lawsuit by animal protection activists who couldn’t get their agenda supported through their normal methods.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/29/us/ringling-bros-fine/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Tracy

Thanks. We may add that to bunny inspectors as jobs that probably don’t need doing, and certainly are not so vital that we must borrow the money to do them. The US is simply not serious about cutting spending or reducing the deficit, and few of the candidates are either. Why?