Afterbirth: Accurate Analysis is an Essential Part of Democratic
Self-Government. The Triumph of Racism in the Republican Party is the Root
Cause of the Recession
The birther
movement, Barack Obama’s birth certificate controversy, is the issue that just will
not disappear. Why? There is an adage among practitioners of
electoral politics that the candidate who takes the wrong stand on the right
issue will defeat the candidate who takes the right stand on the wrong
issue. Ergo, the first task of every successful
politician is to identify the issues that matter.
One reason the birther movement lives is that it is the socially
acceptable face of racism. As the
mono-cultural societies of the West diversify, the former privileged classes
panic and become xenophobic as they see their incomes and status decline. Saying Obama was not born in the United
States is another way of saying if you’re black, stay
back. It is code. The same thing is happening in Europe: the
Netherlands, Finland, and France, to name three. So, this factor is not unique
to the United States.
Donald Trump rocketed to the lead in the Republican
presidential race on his aggressive demands for Obama to release his birth
certificate. Once produced, Trump
tanked, but the birthers march on.
The reason is that the issue
of being a “natural born” American happens to be important at this moment in
history, and not just in the immigration issue.
One of the major reasons that Obama was able to cruise to victory in the
2008 presidential race (aside from the collapsing economy) is that Arnold Schwartzenegger, the Governornator
of Califoornia, was born in Austria and is
consequently ineligible to be president.
In a normal political year,
the Republican Governor of California, a moderate to progressive state, would
be considered a front runner for the Republican nomination. After all, California contains about 20% of
the electoral votes needed to be elected President. So, the governorship of Arnold Schwartzenegger created a huge political vacuum in
Republican presidential politics.
California was missing. The
Republicans had to settle for John McCain, whose state of Arizona borders on
California. So, the issue of natural
born citizenship had a major impact on the 2008 presidential race, but not because
of Obama’s birth certificate. It was
Arnold’s ineligibility for the presidency.
This is an important if little mentioned factor in understanding Obama’s
victory. The fact that it is still
ignored is the reason for the media frenzy over Arnold’s out of wedlock
child. Arnold is in the news. Natural born citizenship is in the news. Obama’s re-election campaign and the search
for a Republican opponent is in the news. Can the
mainstream media connect the dots so the country can move on?
Another reason the birther issue
refuses to die is related to immigration and the anchor baby controversy. The racists redux
are panicked by the families of Hispanics with their three or four children
under the age of five cruising the Targets and Wal-Marts
while the white people cohabitate, are childless, are gay, or transgender, or
workaholics. They fear the United States
is being overrun. Like the boy with his
finger in the dike, they now want to deny citizenship status to the offspring
of illegal immigrants, citing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution
as the source of this outrage.
The 14th amendment, however, was designed to
reverse the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision which
held that blacks could never be citizens. The source of “natural born”
citizenship is the Second Article of the Constitution which defines the
qualifications for president as: “No
person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the
time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of
President;”
The Oxford English Dictionary give the etymology of the word
natural as coming from the French “naturel meaning produced by nature, without human interference (early
12th cent.), innate.”
This makes it pretty clear that there is a
natural way to become an American, and because natural means the same for everyone
without human interference, it is the qualifications for president and not the
14th amendment that confers citizenship on people naturally born in
the United States. I wonder if
citizenship could be denied to people born by caesarean section on the basis
that it’s not natural?
So the birther issue remains active
because its effect on the 2008 presidential election and the true source of
natural born citizenship. The issue is
real, but the birth certificate vehicle is the wrong one.
Also, the issue of who can be
president is germane because the most recent president who was ineligible was
George W. Bush, who lost the 2000 election.
Not everyone agrees with democracy.
Some people believe in the innate superiority of some people over
others. In fact, this may be a majority
opinion.
There is a relationship between democratic elections and
government policy. It is important to
remember that at the end of Clinton’s presidency, the federal budget was in
surplus. Once Bush, who was rejected by the
voters by more than half a million votes, was installed in office by a corrupt
Supreme Court, taxes were cut for the rich and the country was plunged into two
wars. The United States had become
another Banana Republic, with the current predictable
consequences.
But the Bush supporters who do not believe in democracy but
do in a robust offense as a good defense, instead of accepting the blame that
Bush stole the election in 2000, they now claim the Obama is ineligible because
of his birth. No wonder the country is
going down the drain. Politico-religious
belief is taking priority over fact. The
consequences are serious. The popularity
of racism in the immigration debate is one of the major reasons the economic
issues can not be resolved.
Here is an article from the Monday, May 16, 2011 Financial Times by Clive Crook called: Fixing America’s
Immigration Mess.
“In a speech last week and at a series of other events,
President Barack Obama renewed his call for comprehensive reform of a US
immigration system that everyone agrees is broken. He called it an ‘economic imperative’. He is
right – more right, perhaps, than he knows.
“If you sat down to design an
immigration policy to erode US prosperity, you would struggle to come up with anything
better than the current rules. What impresses is the system’s coherence – the
steady direction of so many moving parts to the single goal, so it seems, of
reducing US living standards.
“In effect, the immigration
of skilled workers is especially discouraged - perhaps more so than in any
other industrialized country. Critical
shortages of labor in engineering, computer science and other
technology-related disciplines go unmet.
Firms such as Intel and Microsoft complain about this endlessly. One way or another, the rationing of
essential skills is defeated by moving work abroad. Then the country wrings its hands about
foreign high-tech competition.
“Unskilled workers,
meanwhile, arrive through the country’s permeable borders (which will never be
sealed, short of making the US a prison along East German lines). Unlike highly
educated workers, who consent to be turned away, many unskilled immigrants take
their chances in the illicit economy. Estimates vary, but there might be 11
million in the US today.
“Like legal immigrants, they create income and employment,
but living below the radar imposes costs on them and on the wider economy.
Smugglers and other service providers take their cut; enforcement efforts (a
losing battle) take another. Failure to
comply with immigration rules leads to failure to comply with other systems –
taxes, driving licences, workplace regulation and so
on. Illegal immigrants invest less in developing their skills and other kinds
of capital accumulation. Not to be discounted, they also live in fear.
“These deadweight losses, shared by the immigrants and
their neighbors, are hard to measure but surely huge. Most could be captured in
the form of income and taxes of the illegal immigrants were instead legal guest
workers – or, in due course, citizens.
“Are those losses a price worth
paying to preserve jobs for Americans? That is the organizing principle of the
entire mess and it is the oldest economic error in the book: the lump of labor
fallacy. There are only so man jobs to
go around, according to this view; let in more, or indeed any, immigrants and
you are taking jobs away from Americans. The idea is nonsense. The US refutes it more plainly than any other
country in history. The quantity of jobs is not fixed. Immigrants bring their
jobs with them. Roughly speaking, each new immigrant creates one new job.
Immigration expands the economy.
“What about wages? This is more complicated. Increased
immigration, in the first instance, puts downward pressure on wages in the
affected occupations. But many factors
push the other way, raising average real incomes for US workers.
“Remember that lower wages in
the affected occupations equate to lower costs for US consumers. Also, an
increase in the supply of legal unskilled immigrants would tilt the
occupational mix of US workers toward better paid employment, partly by
increasing the overall size of the economy, boosting the demand for
higher-skill jobs. Again, this is not idle speculation: the pattern has been
clear for much of US history.
“Increased legal immigration
raises the productivity of immigrants; encourages capital accumulation; and
broadens the tax base. Research has shown that the additional tax revenue from
expanded legal immigration outweighs the additional burden of providing public
services to immigrants. Studies that try
to gather all these factors together show a clear net benefit for US citizens
in the aggregate. The best policy of all for US citizens, it turns out, would
be more liberal immigration rules for guest workers combined with a moderate
visa tax.
“It is true that not all US workers would gain. An increase
in legal unskilled immigration might not make US house-cleaners and gardeners
better off. But international trade does not make everybody better off, either,
nor does labor-saving technological progress.
The current US immigration system is not that different, in its effect
on US living standards, from a tax on labor-saving technological change –
except that, unlike a tax, the policy raises no revenue to pay for better
public services. Is anybody proposing a
tax on innovation, to protect American wages and jobs?
“The politics of all this is difficult, to put it mildly.
Advocates of comprehensive reform – easing the curbs on skilled immigration, an
expanded guest-worker program, a path to legal status for illegal immigrants
already in the US – have their work cut out. The idea of “amnesty”, seen as
condoning law-breaking, is especially resisted. Nobody expects a breakthrough
soon. Timid incremental progress might be the best Washington can do.
“Mr. Obama could achieve more of that than he is willing to
admit by executive initiative without new laws. The government has a lot of
discretion in how vigorously it enforces its rules. Even if Congress will not act,
the administration still has options. As well as calling for the big remedy, as
he is right to, the president should also seek ways to liberalize by executive
action. It is, as he says, an economic imperative.”
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