Languages: A Gateway Skill

The peace sign between my church
and my campus is in many languages.

Most people who know me know that although I am not fluent in any language other than English (and that one is debatable), I regularly use other languages to the extent that I can, and that I have benefited greatly from being able to do so.

I understand why some students resist studying foreign languages; I declined to do so the first time it was an option for me, in 8th grade. My next opportunity was in 10th grade, and I loved it! In my senior year, I took German III, Spanish II, and Latin I, and enjoyed all three. 

Below is a statement I presented as part of current debates about bringing a language requirement back to my university, where it was removed about a decade ago. 

-----------------------------------------------

Buenos tardes. Boa tarde. Guten abend.

If you understood any of that, you can thank the general-education program at your own undergraduate institution.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak about proposed changes in general education. Because general education is about half of my teaching load and about half of what makes teaching worthwhile to me, I have a great deal of interest in how it is organized. For this reason, I am grateful for the great effort that the committee has devoted to the work of revising general education at BSU.

I am convinced that many of the most important outcomes of general education can be achieved, however, by inclusion of courses in foreign languages.

Because of a general aversion to foreign languages in the United States – and an increasingly hostile climate to anything at all that seems foreign – students who are not required to study a foreign language are not likely to do so.

The current Core Curriculum has been an experiment – without I.R.B. approval – in giving students more choice in the area of foreign languages, among other things. The promise of choice has been a false one; a decade without a requirement has resulted in fewer choices. In other words, a university without a foreign-language requirement is, to a great extent, a university without a foreign-language option.

And a university without a robust foreign-language option is not a university in any meaningful sense of the term.

Many of my colleagues and I have spoken or written at every available opportunity about the need for any revision in BSU’s general-education program to reverse the mistake of the Core Curriculum – which we fought doggedly at the time – by expanding foreign-language opportunities. 

A lack of competence in languages places unnecessary limitations on what my students can gain from my geography classes. More importantly, it places sharp limits on the value of their degrees.

Especially in these xenophobic times, it is malpractice to recommend monolingual students for baccalaureate degrees. In our gateway cities, in global businesses, and in graduate schools, they need to have studied at least one foreign language at the college level. Instead, many of our students are graduating with weaker language skills than those with which they enter.

Thank you. Gracias. Obrigado. Vielen Dank.

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See more of my thoughts on the value of language learning on my Small World page, which I created during the last round of foreign-language debates on our campus.

Lagniappe

Whatever happens at the university level, I am proud to say that my department will soon be requiring a foreign language for all students completing B.S. or B.A. degrees in geography.

Lawyering Coffee

UPDATE: On March 30, Peter Giuliano -- an industry leader I have seen in coffee documentaries and in the coffeelands of Nicaragua -- issued a strong statement on behalf of the Specialty Coffee Association in response to the legal ruling. He cites several medical authorities in objecting to the legal decision I discuss below.

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"But that's a very low animal!" my friend exclaimed (in Portuguese), as he tried once again to get me to explain the plethora of lawyer jokes in the United States.

He was referring to the use of the word "snake" to describe lawyers, which he had heard from American television or movies, probably more than once. Throughout the first several weeks of my 1996 research project in Rondônia, he would ruefully regale me (if that is possible) with the latest examples of lawyer jokes he had heard, and would even allow me to tell him a few more.

He was, as readers may guess, a lawyer himself, married to one of the professors I was working with. In Brazil, he asserted (and I've been given no reason to doubt him), lawyers are generally respected. A lot of education is required to become a lawyer, and they are considered comparable, he said, to other professions.

Early in the visit, my Portuguese was good but not great. I could communicate necessary things, but jokes and subtleties were beyond me. So I considered it a personal linguistic breakthrough when I explained one thing about lawyering in the United States that made him nod, "Ohhhhhh. Entendeu." "I understand." 

I have been thinking of this over the past week, as many friends have asked me to comment on the latest coffee story to be making the rounds. The acrylamide story appears to raise questions about coffee and health, but it is mainly a story about lawyers. As reported by Reuters and many others, Los Angeles judge Elihu Berle has ruled that Starbucks must display a warning about possible cancer risk arising from the acrylamide that is created in the roasting process.

This case is similar to those whose explanation finally allowed me to make the connection for my lawyer friend in Brazil. It has deep-pocketed defendants, disinterested but numerous plaintiffs, and a lawyer who has figured out how to capture a hefty fee from "organizing" one to sue the other. I put the word organizing in quotes because the class of plaintiffs in such a suit have no idea they are going to be plaintiffs until the suit is under way. Each plaintiff has a very small stake in the case, but the fee each of them shares with lawyers can add up to real money. I recalled a case in which airlines were shown to have been overcharging customers. I "won" that case along with thousands of other passengers; we each received coupons toward future travel, which eventually saved me dozens of dollars. The attorneys involved won millions, of course.

The current case is not exactly analogous, because plaintiffs will not receive compensation, but attorney Raphael Metzger almost certainly will. California law is written -- with the laudable intention of protecting public health -- in such a way as to create irresistible incentives for such legal action. Of course, it is unlikely that no lawyers were present when the relevant legislation was drafted.

I am not prepared to let the defendant's lawyers off the hook without some criticism, though. It seems that they are prepared to comply and even pay fines in order to avoid delving too deeply into the potential -- though small -- risks posed by acrylamides.

The Coffee

The defendants include 90 coffee roasters and retailers, though Starbucks is the largest of these and the most often cited in media coverage. Interestingly, acrylamides are associated with darker roasts, for which the company sometimes known as Charbucks is most famous. (My spell-check did not even flag that pejorative nickname just now!)

Although the company added medium roasts (which it calls "Blonde") to its menu in recent years, it is still best known for super-dark roasts. The reasons are several; I'm not sure which of these is most important:

• Howard Shultz starts each day with a very dark Sumatra.
• His original idea with the brand was to mimik the cafés of Italy.
• The darker the roast, the easier it is to maintain consistent flavor over a wide geographic range of sources and over many crop years. In other words, charcoal is charcoal. 

That last snide remark notwithstanding, I do like very dark coffee at times, but a lighter roast often brings out more subtle flavors, particularly among my favorite coffees from Latin America.

The Risks

So what about the actual risk? The National Cancer Institute provides a readable acrylamide fact sheet, with links to original studies. The research does indeed connect acrylamide to cancer, though it cites only mouse-model studies and offers several reasons that human-model studies have been inconclusive. It also explains how acrylamide is created in the roasting of coffee, as it is in the high-temperature cooking of several other fruits and vegetables. Similar risks are posed by "French fries and potato chips; crackers, bread, and cookies; breakfast cereals; canned black olives; [and] prune juice." Higher risks are produced by cigarettes, and workers in certain manufacturing industries are required to wear protection against respiratory exposure.

To date, if colleagues at the Vanderbilt Institute for Coffee Studies have written on this acrylamides, they have not posted it on our web site, which does include quite a articles on coffee and health, mostly positive.

Acrylamides are not, incidentally, the same compounds that are created in the grilling or processing of meats. Laboratory studies and limited epidemiological evidence suggests that PAH and PAA compounds may also be related to cancer. I have not heard much about these since last summer; though they may become part of an annual grilling-season clickbait ritual.

Bottom Line

For now -- like the lawyer who brought this case -- I will continue to enjoy my coffee.

Across Many Aprils

When I was in elementary and middle school in Virginia in the 1970s, we learned about the Civil War from many sources, including battlefield visits. The title of one book has stay with me, because Across Five Aprils is a very handy mnemonic for the dates that bracket this horrible rift, from Fort Sumter to the Appomattox Court House: April 22, 1861 to April 9, 1865.

In many ways, of course, the war never ended. I first learned of the war through a southern lens, but neither my teachers nor my community embraced the Lost Cause continuation of the conflict, as I later learned many thousands still do. Even where I live today, in a part of Massachusetts where nearly every town boasts a Union Street and an honor roll of those who defended the United States against its most serious (to date) insurgency, the Confederate Battle flag sometimes flies ... and more so since the 2016 ascendency of white supremacists.

As odd as it is to have "traitor" flags this far north of the Mason-Dixon line, it is even stranger to know that the Confederacy is somewhat widely celebrated several thousand miles south of the South, in Brazil, where "refugees" of the war's end moved in order to continue their "right" to enslave others. At the time the war ended and the 1863 de jure emancipation took effect, slavery was still legal in Brazil, as it would be until 1888. Of course, nobody knew how long it would last, nor that it would last longer there than anywhere in the Americas, but it seemed to these deplorable folks that it was a place where they could their "lifestyle," as this form of oppression came to be known.


The government of Brazil encouraged this migration by offering free land in parts of São Paulo and elsewhere, mainly in that first decade following the end of the war. It was already illegal to import people in bondage to Brazil, but some of the migrants brought with them "servants" who were free only in name and others managed to enslave people who were already in the country. Following the success of Brazil's emancipation movement in 1888, of course, those who had not returned home or moved elsewhere found some way to adapt to a new reality without legal slavery.

I was thinking of this strange history yesterday, as I was exploring a large-format map of Brazil with a Brazilian friend who did not know the story. He did know the city of Anápolis, Goiás, which I had read was the main target of the migration. As I looked for information about it, I learned that the São Paulo towns of Santa Bárbara D'Oeste and Americana were more important destinations.

I also learned some of the details mentions above, and one more startling fact: the Confederado culture is still widely celebrated among descendants of those migrants! Two recent articles describe the persistence of the annual commemorations of the confederacy -- more than 150 Aprils later: Dixie Roots and A Slice of the Confederacy describe the celebrations and questions of racism of both the past and the present in both countries.

Photo: Associated Press. Apologies for inclusion of the insurgency flag, which I usually avoid sharing because of the racist intent with which it is usually displayed. The juxtaposition with U.S. and Brazil flags, however, captures this story perfectly. It brings to mind the thought I always have when I see the Confederate and U.S. flags together: "Choose a side!"

Lagniappe (added July 2020)

More photos from the Lost Cause settlements in Brazil are shown in Melia Robinson's 2017 Americana photo essay on Business Insider. As she warns readers, these images can "cause discomfort." I would go a bit further, since they are intentionally disturbing icons. But with that caution, I make them available to those who wish to see them in context.

In September 2019, the NPR Podcast Throughline featured the story of the Confederados in American Exile, an episode about inter-American migration. The program begins with the contemporary story of the tragedy and travesty of Central American migrants interned, abused, and killed near my former homes on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Attention then turns to two much earlier tales of migration away from the United States. One is a flight to the north to get away from slavery; the other is the flight far to the south to get away from the lack of slavery. Among those interviewed for the story is geographer and Latin Americanist Cyrus (Sonny) Dawsey (with whom I was not previously familiar), editor of the 1995 volume The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil. A copy of this book is now on its way to me; as an educator I am particularly interested in seeing the worksheets it includes.

Democracy Geeks

Image: HOTLITTLEPOTATO for Wired magazine.

From Schoolhouse Rock and whatever amount of civics classes have survived the regimes of high-stakes testing in our schools, many of us have gained the impression that in the United States, voters choose their politicians. If we have a more sophisticated understanding, we understand that the first draft of the Constitution disenfranchised most of the population, but that amendments expanded the franchise, first by race and then by sex. We might remain (rightfully) cynical about the manipulation of voters and by the insidious advantages of incumbency, but we think of the general direction of influence to be:

voters --> politicians

Frequent readers of this blog will know that I have written quite a lot about the pernicious effects of gerrymandering, a way of manipulating district boundaries to gain partisan advantage, so that the selection process is reversed:

politicians --> voters

I encourage those with curiosity and perhaps insomnia to browse all of my gerrymandering posts (this link is chronological and will include this post).

More importantly, though, I want to point to two outstanding resources about the brilliant people -- teams combining mathematical, statistical, legal, and geographic expertise -- who are fighting back. And it is a fight, especially in Pennsylvania, where some state legislators are defying courts at all levels, setting up a constitutional crisis that borders on a coup d'état in my opinion.

The first of these is the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group at Tufts University, led by Dr. Moon Duchin (shown left). I learned of the group when our BSU Department of Mathematics arranged for her recent visit to our campus. She took time out from a very busy day of working with the governor of Pennsylvania to present a talk entitled Math, Data Algorithms, and Voting Rights. She explained her group's very sophisticated approach to the problem of demonstrating that a given pattern voting districts is unfair in a statistically significant way.

She is an ideal spokesperson for this work; in just an hour she presented her group's approach in a way that was simple enough that students with no prior background in the subject understood her, but sophisticated enough that I now understand the problem at a much higher level. And I can tell that there is a lot more to learn! Writer John Winters of our own University News team in turn did an excellent job of capturing the key ideas of her presentation in the article I cite above.

For me, the greatest take-away from Dr. Duchin's talk was the idea that mathematicians can generate millions of alternative districting maps and compare any given map to that population of possibilities. This method definitively identifies schemes that are contrived for partisan benefit. We also learned that the benefit is up to 2x a party's actual vote share. That is, the theoretical maximum number of seats a party can gain by manipulating the maps is two times their share in the population. A party with a 30-percent share of votes can win 60 percent of seats, and a party with 50 percent or more can get ALL of the seats.

This leads to an excellent article that explains the Pennsylvania situation in some detail. Wired journalist Issie Lapowski's profile of The Geeks Who Put a Stop to Pennsylvania's Partisan Gerrymandering is a cogent lesson on the interactions of geography, history, politics, law and mathematics in this sordid and important story.

Update (June 25, 2018)

Today a U.S. Supreme Court whose 5-4 majority was made possible only by the racial bias of Sen. Mitch McConnell upheld race-based gerrymandering in Texas, by that 5-4 majority.

The Fraught Fifty

Map by Neil Freeman, 2012
Click to enlarge

When Neil Freeman's imaginative map of the United States was first tossed over my digital transom last week, I noticed the names of some of the larger areas. I was aware that he had divided the territory in such a way as to make them all equal in population. But I mainly noticed the names of some of the larger imagined states, such as Ogallala, and was immediately put in mind of other continent-scale efforts at regionalization, including the famous Nine Nations of North America.

Although the names he applies to the map reveal a profound understanding of what geographers call sense of place, Freeman began his project with something more practical in mind: addressing a somewhat subtle aspect of voter suppression. On his presciently-named blog Fake is the New Real, he explained the iterative process by which began to define his states, and goes on to describe some of the detailed considerations. Although he insisted that the map is primarily a work of art, he was careful to provide a very cogent, geographically-informed list of advantages and disadvantages were the map to be adopted.

I learned of the map from a much more recent article by blogger Josh Jones, who discusses the map in the context of more recent conversations about gerrymandering. Together, the two writers provide a lot of thought-provoking observations about the reasons for the original two-senator-per-state rule and about its implications for presidential elections. Their work exemplifies geography in plain sight -- a reality that seems so simple that it escapes notice, but that is in fact deeply complicated and even fraught.

Crunching the As-Is Numbers

I had long ago been introduced to the idea that the disparate size of the states results in wide disparities in the degree to which residents of each state are represented in the Senate. Relative to Californians or Texans, for example, residents of Wyoming have a much greater likelihood of having met a senator in person, and they certainly have a greater likelihood of gaining the attention of a senator's staff members.

It was not until reading Jones' article that I realized that with a few minutes on a spreadsheet, I could quantify the effect of these disparities on the representation by party. Some academics dismiss Wikipedia as a resource, but for this exercise it was perfectly appropriate. I looked up the current membership of the Senate, which lists members in a tabular format that was easy to copy into a spreadsheet. Those wishing to check on this list after end of this year will need to check the permanent entry for the 115th Congress, but the current list can always be used to update this exercise. Ambitious and curious readers could even work their way backward through previous years to get a sense of how the patterns I have quantified may have changed over time.

The spreadsheet is available to view, and is entitled Is the Senate -- In Effect -- Gerrymandered? I use the phrase "in effect" because the imbalance I describe does not result from gerrymandering in the widely-understood sense of manipulating the boundaries of voting districts to gain disproportionate representation. Nor does it fall into the more widely-used sense in which experts use the term: the manipulation of other aspects of voting regulations to gain partisan advantage. So the situation lacks the element of intentionality that we see in such notorious cases as are currently being contested with respect to seats in the House of Representatives.

So what is the imbalance like? It turns out that the two major parties tend to represent states of different sized populations. Each represents some big states -- Republican Texas but Democratic New York and California. Each also represents some very small states -- Wyoming Republican and Rhode Island Democratic, for example. Quite a few states of various sizes have split representation in the Senate -- Colorado, South Dakota, and Vermont, for example. This was the situation when I lived in Maryland years ago, and I think it can have real benefits for voters and for the decorum of the legislature.

In aggregate, though, the fact that one party tends to dominate states with smaller populations means that residents of those states have relatively greater representation in the Senate. In the spreadsheet, I allocated the populations of each state to the party of its senators, splitting the population evenly in those 1-1 states. The result is representation of 141.4 million residents by Republicans and 173.1 million residents by Democrats.

Because there are fewer Democrats than Republicans in the Senate (45 versus 53), each Senator represents a very different number of residents -- 3.8 million versus 2.7 million on average. Even more dramatically, the two independent senators represent just under a half million residents each.

What does this mean for policy, and for the idea of government of, by, and for the people? In practical terms, it means that a minority party has majority representation in both houses of Congress. Because votes in the Electoral College are allocated according to the allocation of these seats, the diminished influence of voters from large-population states directly affects presidential elections as well.

Lagniappe: DC & PR

These calculations do not include citizens in two major jurisdictions who get no Congressional representation at all -- my home town of Washington, D.C. and the internal colony of Puerto Rico. With 646,000 and 3.7 million people respectively, these unrepresented areas are equivalent in population to quite a few of the smaller states. Lack of representation has resulted in decades of annoyances, inconveniences and humiliations for the citizens of D.C., and has recently become a matter of life and death for citizens of Puerto Rico.

When this design became available, the mayor gladly sent me a sample.
To this day, the political affiliation of driver can be ascertained with some certainty by whether or not they use this tag. The slogan, of course, refers to a bit of a set-to we had in Boston in 1773.

A non-partisan approach to the rights of these citizens would result in statehood, and this would likely diminish the partisan imbalance currently found in both houses. It is for precisely this reason, however, that statehood will likely not be granted to either colony in my lifetime.

A Modest Proposal

(With apologies to Jonathan Swift.)

In a hail of bullets, students at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida were thrust into the role of activists. Within hours, it became clear that they were to become the most determined, effective, and articulate public citizens we have seen in our country in a very long time.

The fact that they were responding to a terror attack in our most politically benighted state made their achievements all the more remarkable. They drew attention to Senator Marco Rubio's misplaced priorities more effectively than anybody of my generation has done, shaming him into endorsing a reduced limit on ammunition magazines. They caused the famously inflexible Gov. Rick "Skeletor" Scott to make a small concession on the question of whether someone too young to buy a Bud Light should be able to buy an assault rifle. The even convinced the president of the United States to speak out in favor of universal background checks, so that terrorists would no longer be able to hide behind private gun sales, and a ban on bump stocks. It remains to be seen whether any of these statements were sincere, and whether they will be enacted while Wayne LaPierre still walks the earth and signs the big checks.

But these young people moved the debate on gun violence, and were not intimidated by the scurrilous smear campaigns that predictably ensued. Politicians who are known to be on the industry payroll had the nerve to suggest that these young people were being paid to speak, as if watching the deaths of their friends and siblings and teachers were not enough. They watched as their state legislators ignored their pleas and their courage, voting down all relevant legislation before voting to codify the empty rhetoric of "thoughts and prayers" in the form of a clearly unconstitutional requirement to install "In God We Trust" signs in all of the schools of the Sunshine State.

Image: New York Times

All of this has me thinking about the voting age. When the Founders of our nation established ages for voting and for holding certain offices, they could not have foreseen the Baby Boomers. There have been more of us than any prior or subsequent generation, and we have made some pretty big mistakes. We have allowed voting districts to be gerrymandered to the very limits of mathematics, ensuring the repeated election of people who are not only unqualified for the jobs they hold, but in some cases not honest enough to hold any job I can think of.

We have allowed -- nay, encouraged -- those politicians to be ruled by the political fetishes of Grover Norquist, a privileged, unelected counter-patriot who somehow gained the allegiance of both major parties, resulting in broken infrastructure, unfunded education, declining life expectancy, and the increasing concentration of wealth.

The Parkland youth are setting an example of
civic engagement for all of us. 

In short, as a group we have had our chance at governing the country, and we have not shown ourselves very capable. If Lincoln is to have his wish that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" we need to do something drastic.

Which leads to my proposal.

The 26th Amendment was passed in 1971, when Boomers were showing our political prowess and actually getting some things done (shortening wars, cleaning the environment, broadening civil rights). It lowered the minimum voting age from 21 to 18, though it left the maximum voting age in place, because the problem of a completely dysfunctional electorate was not foreseen.

It is time to lower the minimum again, and to impose a maximum. Some local elections are already open to 16 year olds, and I would support making that the minimum for federal elections. I think a maximum of 35 or 40 would be appropriate, so that people with a bit more life experience are included, while still avoiding the excesses of the Baby Boomers. At the very most, voting should not be extended to those born prior to 1965.

As for the age restrictions on federal office, I would lower the minimums by 5 years and make the maximum age double the minimum age. So, instead of:

• Congress Critter: currently eligible from 25 until promised bribes and kickbacks have accumulated to ensure a seven-figure income for life
• Senator: currently eligible from 30 through rigor mortis
• President: currently eligible from 35 until golf or brush-clearing consumes every waking moment

... I would suggest:

• Congressional Representative: 20 to 40
• Senator: 25 to 50
• President: 30 to 60 (but this would make me eligible, so we'd better keep this at 52 until the Boomers have aged a bit more)

Under this scheme, those of a certain age can participate, just as those under 18 do now. We can pose in photos when our children or students run for office, we can hold signs on street corners or stuff envelopes. Our financial involvement would need to be similarly limited: donating no more to a campaign than we can carry to a campaign rally in coins with our bare hands, like a kid donating their allowance.

#28thAmendment 

The Gini Is Out of the Bottle

PRI journalist Jason Margolis reports that even with recently rising wages, the United States remains one of the world's most inequitable nations, by several measures.

The report alludes to two prominent measures of income inequality -- the Gini coefficient and ratios of executive pay to that of average workers. By either measure, the United States is either in poor company or in no company at all.

That is to say, a broad measure of income distribution puts the United States in the company of relatively underdeveloped countries -- certainly not any of the countries of Europe. And the stratospheric pay of CEOs compared to ordinary workers cannot be found anywhere in the world.

As other studies have found, sharp inequalities are bad for public health. In countries with highly concentrated wealth, increased stress and other factors mean that even the wealthy are less healthy than they would be in more equitable societies.

The problem in the United States, of course, is that "equitable" is immediately presumed to be the same as "equal." Lingering fears of the deleterious effects of Communism on gumption have resulted in generations of policy-makers -- and voters -- who chose wealth-concentrating policies at every opportunity, from the free-speech rights of corporations to tax and wage policies to the rules for organizing unions.

Hard work is no longer associated with prosperity or even with economic security.

The result is a society in which hard work is now completely disconnected from economic security.

Caveat: The report uses one common term to which I always object: unskilled labor. Use of the term reinforces the myth that executive pay is correlated solely with high levels of skill, discounting the effect of executives staffing each other's compensation committees. It also is used to justify such anti-worker nonsense as "training wages" in place of living wages by which work leads to dignity. Those who use the term "unskilled labor" should spend some time actually trying to do the jobs they think the term covers.

Ill Eagle

Library of Congress researcher Shameema Rahman discusses several failed efforts to count federal laws, and does not offer an estimate. Blogger Dave Kowal argues that there are "too many" and provides a rough estimate of 4,500 criminal violations, with thousands of additional laws throughout the U.S. Code. Neither writer estimates the number of state and municipal laws, but presumably they number in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Image:
Puntifications

In other words, many things are illegal (adj.) in our country -- literally more than we can count. And yet ... and yet! There is one very narrow category of legal violations that will cause the perpetrator to be known as an illegal.

As if the word were a noun. It is not rape, murder, jaywalking, tax evasion, burglary, arson, or treason. People who do these things are described by very specific nouns usually ending in -ist or -er. But the perpetrators of these crimes are understood as distinct from the crimes themselves.

What is the exception? What is the one kind of crime so serious that its perpetrators are labeled as the crime itself? The answer of course, is the breaking of rules related to migration. Sneak across the border, and you are an illegal. Cross with a visa but violate its terms, and you are an illegal.

Not a trespasser or a paperwork-not-filler-outer, but an illegal (n.). The same does not apply, incidentally, to those who hire undocumented workers -- only to those who are undocumented.

If the economy is growing and unemployment is low, this is not such a big issue. But if an economy is shrinking, or if it is growing slowly, or if it is growing quickly but not providing jobs -- then perpetrators of these crimes are castigated as the illegals and become the target of ire, vitriol, and of course demagoguery.

Even so, during the 2016 presidential campaign, the far right invoked the specter of undocumented migrants who have committed other crimes -- such as murder -- as the focus of eventual stepped-up enforcement. But as Slate journalist Jamelle Bouie writes in ICE Unbound, the distinction between criminality in the narrow sense of being undocumented and criminality in the more common-sense sense of committing crimes against people or property is now guiding federal enforcement actions.

Even people who have documents and are required to check in with immigration agencies are now being arrested and deported, rending families apart. Perhaps this is why we do not hear the phrase "family values conservative" so much these days -- the hypocrisy would be too obvious, even on Fox.

Bouie mentions a sharp shift away from "border removals" -- which strict enforcement under President Obama had already sent into decline -- and toward "internal removals." He hints at one of the reasons for the shift, aside from ideology: many of the removals involve private prisons. With an Attorney General deeply invested in the prison industry and growing number of politicians using it as a source of donations, raids throughout the interior of the country are needed to keep the funds flowing to this sector.

Nationalism

What is often really at work in discussions of immigration is confusion between the notions of patriotism and nationalism. The positive kind of patriotism is something I remember witnessing in the days and weeks -- but not so much the months and years -- following the attacks of September 11, 2001. For a short while, people even in New England started driving more courteously. They treated neighbors more kindly, donated more to charities, and volunteered more in their communities. They even appreciated the outpouring of sympathy from people throughout the world that lasted from the time of the attack until the re-invasion of Iraq.

But in tough times the good energy of patriotism can easily cross over to the bad energy of nationalism, and the bankster-led economic meltdown of 2008 seems to have ushered in just that kind of bad energy. Searching for scapegoats, too many victims of financiers have turned their attention to "others" in their midst and seeking isolation from the "others" outside.

Source: Found online; I'm seeking the name of the cartoonist

Related Stories

As I mentioned several years ago on this blog, my old neighbors in Tucson have long recognized that migrants frequently die in the desert. While this seems to please some of my fellow citizens, others find the compassion to maintain life-saving water stations near the border. Attention has returned to these efforts as news emerged that some border agents have sabotaged water stations. In a recent interview, the Tucson section chief argued that this is against the protocols of the agency itself, and that many agents are actually trained in emergency medicine.

NPR journalist Claudio Sanchez recently reported that among hundreds of thousands of residents currently waiting for relief under DACA are almost 9,000 teachers. The deportations that were discussed during the 2016 presidential campaigns were to be of "bad hombres" who were threats to public safety. Caught in the dragnet, though, are military veterans, teachers, and others who live in and serve the only country they call home: the U.S. of A.

As the White House expands its anti-immigrant program from the "bad hombres" to all undocumented migrants to migrants from places he does not like, the consequences are beginning to emerge in the broader economy. As reported by Forbes journalist Chris Morris, California Crops Rot as Immigration Crackdown Creates Farmworker Shortage.

Writing for Common Dreams, Juan Escalante goes a step further. Citing the influence of white nationalists in the current administration, he plausibly argues that the DACA compromise now under discussion amount to a "racist ransom note" because it ties the fate of DACA applicants to a wish list of policies that would have the effect of whitening the population.

Roger Rocha, president of League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Latino civil rights organization, did support the administration's position in recent days, as he explains in an interview with NPR journalist Ari Shapiro. He withdrew his letter to the president, however, after significant backlash from members of his organization. In explaining his reasons for supporting the administration, it is clear that the administration positions have been shifting frequently. More troubling is that even in explaining points of agreement, he describes the Dreamer population as hostages to the legislative process.

Consent of the Governed

Extreme measures to limit the rights of migrants are part of a set of strategies by which politicians endeavor to select their constituents, rather than allowing the reverse to happen. Long-term resident of the country are -- clearly -- among the governed, and they are among those who pay taxes. Measures that unduly deny them citizenship and personhood run counter to the ideals of the original (and illegal at the time) American Revolution. We had a bit of set-to with King George, after all, about taxation without representation, and enshrined "consent of the governed" in our Declaration of Independence.

2024 Follow-up: This has only gotten worse

Sadly, I still have to stand by this post six years after I wrote it. I could add another small book here, but I'll point out just a couple of things.

• I mentioned treason among the crimes one can commit withiout being called illegal. I had no way of knowing about the events of January 6, 2021. If any kind of sanity prevailed in our country, the perpetrators and fomenters of those attacks would be the ones known as illegals. But instead they continue to run for high office.
• As mentioned above, inflation tends to correlate with the scapegoating of migrants, even though they have nothing to do with it.
• Shortly after I wrote this post, the government of Nicaragua turned on its people. Shortly after that, some of my dear friends started to make the journey north and some of them are here now -- legally awaiting asylum hearings, but assumed to be illegal by many because they are bilingual and have brown skin.
• Migrants of all kinds continue to Make America Great.

And finally, some patriotic thoughts from Emma Lazarus and Irving Berlin, along with a sculpture Édouard de Laboulaye. Patriots are proud of both of these. 

Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Send these the homeless tempest-tost to me

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Send these the homeless tempest-tost to me

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Hot Island Hotspot

Avery Island, Louisiana is very high on the list of places I have never been but to which I feel a strong connection. Since I started getting serious about chili in middle school, I have never been far from a bottle of Tabasco. One of the nice things about my three-year stint in the specialty food industry is that our packaging plant always had hundreds of thousands of tiny (1/8-ounce) bottles of the pepper-mash sauce, because we put one in every Meal, Ready-to-Eat that we packaged. When we had meetings in the office, it was often the case that every man in the room was wearing a Tabasco necktie, as we each had a small collection. I remember my boss there admonishing me when I returned from a meeting in New England and complained about the bland food. "What were you doing traveling up there without Tabasco in your pocket?" she scolded.

Its Louisiana home has loomed large in my imagination for years. Even though my parents have visited -- and they did bring me some nice gifts -- I have not yet been closer than a quick zip along Interstate 10 during our 1997 move from Texas to Massachusetts.

I recently learned a lot about the environmental geography of the island from a beautifully illustrated essay by Times-PIcayune journalist Tristan Baurick. As the title implies, his article Tabasco's homeland fights for survival in Louisiana against storms and rising seas is in part the all-too common story of a coastal community defending against the effects of climate change. It is also, however, a richer story of a family that has developed a complex relationship with its land for a century and a half.

The island is more of a hill, a salt dome that is one of the highest points along the Gulf coast, and that continues to provide not only a home for the production of Tabasco Sauce but also one of its three ingredients: salt. Its status as an island is as vague as the land-sea boundary of Louisiana itself, about which I wrote in Tough Shape a couple of years ago.

Image: Justin Secrist USDA

Baurick's profile of the island includes a biographical history of the family business and several stories about the good and bad results of its efforts in the area of wildlife management. It is one of several places where the South American nutria (a varmint similar to a groundhog) was raised for its fur. At a particular point in the 20th century, the economics of the fur industry and the mathematics of nutria reproduction made this a very tempting business prospect. Nutria are apparently adept at escaping confinement, however, and their rapid reproduction makes them quite an aggressive invasive species. The damage done to coastal wetlands -- including those the McIlhenny family have long tried to protect -- is incalculable. I first learned of nutria farming far from Louisiana, when I visited the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. It gives the McIlhenny family a small bit of comfort to know that they were not the only culprits in the century-long nutria fiasco.

The family may have redeemed itself in the wildlife area with its efforts on behalf of the snowy egret, whose feathers were once in such demand that it was hunted nearly to extinction. It would not have been the first abundant bird to have been extirpated by overuse, as was the fate of Martha and the passenger pigeons. The family's introduction of egrets and its ban on hunting them in just its small Louisiana property is credited with the eventual restoration of the species.

At the time of this writing, an even more important "ark" for birds is under threat elsewhere on the Gulf Coast. The Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge -- near my former home on the Rio Grande -- is currently threatened by hostility toward wild lands in general and a foolhardy plan to build a border wall in particular.

Our cooking blog Nueva Receta makes fairly frequent mention
of the sauce, most recently as a very minor ingredient
in a baked scallop dish.