I found Lind's kiss off to the Right, "Why The Right Is Wrong, " a good
expose, esp. the chapter on Pat Robertson's sourcing anti-semite, conspiracy
theorist, Nesta Webster, author od Red-Web spinning books like, "World
Revolution." Have yet to read, "The First American Nation." Publishes wide
and far, from National Review to New Left Review, responding to Daniel
Lazere.
http://www.newamerica.net/
Michael Lind - Senior Fellow
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Michael Lind has previously been an editor or staff writer for The New
Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and The National Interest. He has written for The
New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, The Los
Angeles Times and other leading publications, and has appeared on CNN's
Crossfire, C-SPAN, National Public Radio, and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.
Mr. Lind's three books of political journalism and history, The Next
American Nation (1995), Up From Conservatism (1996), and Vietnam (1999) were
all selected as New York Times Notable Books. He has also published several
volumes of fiction and poetry, including The Alamo, which the Los Angeles
Times named as one of the Best Books of 1997.
As a Senior Fellow in 2001, Mr. Lind will continue to write a series of
articles on political and economic reform, and the search for a viable
political philosophy in an increasingly post-ideological nation. In
addition, he will publish a book co-authored with Ted Halstead to explore
the social, economic and political implications of America's transition to a
post-industrial era, drawing lessons from the upheavals and social
dislocations that occurred during the previous transition from an agrarian
to an industrial era. This book, to be published by Doubleday in 2001, will
propose new approaches to economics, governance and civil society for the
21st century.
Articles by Michael Lind
(39 articles, the NLR one that was previously there, not anymore.)
Liberal Nationalist, is right. Oh, but, dreadful book, Cold War
Liberal/Realist screed, "The Necessary War, " on the Vietnam War. Read that.
If I wanted to read a defense of the Vietnam War, I'd read, "America in
Vietnam, " by Guenter Lewy! Masochism is not one of my kinks...(Though, then
why do I always look at Commentary at the library!)
Michael Pugliese
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 12:19:00 -0400 (EDT)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Commentary: Say no to guest-workers
Michael Lind
United Press International
July 6, 2001
With the election of Mexico's president Vicente Fox, a dynamic and
charismatic reformer, a new era in U.S.-Mexican relations has begun.
To reinforce his effort to bring Mexico into the 21st century, Fox is
seeking closer ties with the United States. Many of his ideas for
promoting closer collaboration across the border are excellent.
One of his ideas, though, is terrible. Fox has proposed to alleviate
the poverty problem in Mexico by dramatically increasing the number
of Mexican nationals who labor in the United States as temporary
guest workers.
The Bush administration has said that it is open to the possibility
of admitting many new guest workers from Mexico on temporary visas.
On the American side, the guest-worker idea is being pushed hardest
by politicians on the right of the Republican Party, like Sen. Phil
Gramm and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, both from Texas.
Behind Gramm and DeLay are powerful agribusiness interests, which
claim that the United States is suffering from a shortage of
agricultural workers. This is a myth. The truth is that there is only
a shortage of American workers willing to accept miserable conditions
and wages that are low and steadily declining. According to the Labor
Department, the real wages of agricultural workers have dropped from
$6.89 an hour to $6.18 an hour between 1989 and 1998. If the farm
labor market is so tight, then why are wages going down?
If there really were a labor shortage in agriculture, then the proper
solution would be to let market forces solve the problem.
Agribusiness firms should be forced to choose between attracting more
workers by paying higher wages, investing in labor-saving machinery,
or both. Consumers worried about higher prices for their produce
should favor importing agricultural products -- not poor, exploited
agricultural workers -- from low-wage countries like Mexico.
A combination of higher wages for citizen workers, mechanization and
freer trade in agriculture can eliminate the need to import desperate
foreigners to work in American fields in conditions of virtual
slavery for starvation wages. (Ironically, many of the agribusiness
firms that claim that they cannot afford to hire American workers at
American wages are already subsidized by the taxpayers through
federal government programs.)
Even without a guest-worker program, mass immigration of unskilled
workers from Mexico and other countries is hurting low-income
Americans. According to numerous studies, including one by the
prestigious National Academy of Sciences, the American working poor
suffer the most as a result of competition with unskilled immigrants
- -- most of whom are legal immigrants, not illegal aliens.
Competition with a new category of underpaid guest-workers would
further reduce the job opportunities and wages of America's least
fortunate workers, as they struggle to keep their families out of
poverty.
Ominously, Gramm -- perhaps the biggest fan of the idea of replacing
American workers with underpaid Mexican guest workers -- has proposed
introducing foreign guest workers into the construction, restaurant
and hotel industries and many other sectors where they inevitably
would squeeze Americans out of jobs. If the guest-worker program in
agriculture is expanded, then what is to prevent employers in every
sector of the American economy from claiming that imaginary or
exaggerated "labor shortages" should entitle them to use foreign
workers as well?
If Gramm gets his way, then before long business lobbyists on Capitol
Hill might demand that Congress allow guest-workers to work as
hospital orderlies, taxi drivers, janitors, security guards,
truckers, hair stylists. Under the terms of their contracts, the
guest-workers would not be able to strike, to sue, or to work for
another employer.
Since enforcement of the rules would be all but impossible, some
unscrupulous businesses no doubt would fire Americans in order to
hire foreigners at lower wages. Why not fire unionized workers and
replace them with helpless, powerless foreigners? Why hire any
American citizen at all, if it is cheaper to get a foreign
guest-worker to toil as a virtual slave?
And why stop with impoverished Mexicans? Almost all of the population
growth in the 21st century will take place in the poorest regions --
Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab world, Central Asia,
South Asia. Surely it is only a matter of time before someone like
Gramm suggests extending the guest-worker program to bring in unfree
contract labor from poor countries other than Mexico.
Advocates of a huge guest-worker program claim that it will solve the
problem of illegal immigration. In reality, it is likely to make it
worse. The history of guest-worker programs both in the United States
and Europe suggests that many of the "guests" do not go home when
their contracts are up. Instead, they stay on in the host nations as
illegal immigrants, swelling the resident population that uses public
goods like emergency health care without paying income or payroll
taxes.
As a result, any money that American consumers saved from the use of
guest-workers to pick lettuce or spread asphalt might well be lost by
higher taxes for public services, once guest-workers join the
expanding illegal immigrant population.
Already both legal and illegal immigration from Mexico are
exacerbating America's social problems, because so many Mexican
immigrants are uneducated and poor. Mark Krikorian of the Center for
Immigration Studies -- a non-profit which advocates tightening
immigration laws -- claims that 31 percent of immigrants from Mexico
are dependent on at least one major federal welfare program.
Like poor people in general, poor immigrants from Mexico are also
disproportionately likely to commit crimes. Because many of the
guest-workers who overstay their visas will go on welfare or end up
in jail, a guest-worker program will only make the situation worse.
Of course, to prevent guest-workers from deserting their jobs and
blending into the illegal alien populations of major American cities
like Los Angeles and Houston, they could be confined to remote rural
agricultural and manufacturing compounds. Maybe they could be fenced
in with barbed wire and patrolled with German shepherds, to prevent
them from running away to San Diego or San Antonio.
Are we now, in the 21st century, going to recreate the slave
plantation in the form of guest-worker labor camps on American soil?
It is ironic that the sinister policy of replacing American citizen
workers with foreign indentured servants is being promoted by the
leadership of the Republican Party, which was founded in the 1850s by
reformers like Abraham Lincoln, who championed free citizen labor.
The United States fought a Civil War to replace two rival labor
systems on American soil with a single system of free wage labor by
citizens with equal rights.
In the generations that followed, Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt
continued the fight by seeking to outlaw coolie labor from Asia, the
use of prison gangs by industry, and other forms of unfree labor that
undercut the wages and the rights of American workers.
It is no coincidence, however, that Gramm and DeLay -- the strongest
champions of the guest-worker program -- come from the Deep South,
the region of the country where wealthy, ruthless elites have been
most hostile to the interests of ordinary working people in both the
19th and 20th centuries. The disturbing plan of today's Southern
Republicans to create new plantations, manned by Mexican guest
workers rather than black slaves, is more Southern than Republican.
Today as in the past it is unfair to force struggling American
workers to compete on American soil with foreign workers lacking
benefits and civil rights and tied to a single employer -- just as it
was wrong to force free American workers in the past to compete with
African slave labor and Asian coolie labor.
Mexico, a nation with a hard-working population and rich natural
resources, remains poor because of centuries of misgovernment and
corruption. We Americans should do all that we can to help our
neighbors in there to democratize and modernize their society -- but
not by sacrificing the interests of American workers in having good
jobs at decent wages in reasonable conditions with adequate benefits.
The proposal to unload Mexico's surplus poor on the United States may
seem like a good idea both to idealistic Mexican politicians like Fox
and to cynical American business elites and their political servants
like Gramm and DeLay. But a guest-worker program large enough to have
more than a minor effect on Mexico's poverty would be a clear and
present danger to the jobs, wages and rights of the working men and
women of the United States.
(Michael Lind is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, an
independent, non-partisan, non-profit public policy institute. He has
written for many major magazines and newspapers, and has published
three books of political journalism and history: The Next American
Nation (1995), Up From Conservatism (1996) and Vietnam (1999).)
Wall Street Journal - July 2, 2001
Thinking Things Over
Open Nafta Borders? Why Not?
By ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Reformist Mexican President Vincente Fox raises eyebrows with his
suggestion that over a decade or two Nafta should evolve into
something like the European Union, with open borders for not only
goods and investment but also people. He can rest assured that there
is one voice north of the Rio Grande that supports his vision. To
wit, this newspaper.
We annually celebrate the Fourth of July with a paean to immigration,
the force that tamed this vast continent and built this great
Republic. This is not simply history; immigration continues to
refresh and nourish America; we would be better off with more of it.
Indeed, during the immigration debate of 1984 we suggested an
ultimate goal to guide passing policies -- a constitutional
amendment: "There shall be open borders."
The naysayers who want to limit or abolish immigration look backward
to a history they do not even understand. Each new immigrant group
has been derided as backward, unclean, crime-ridden and so on; each
has gone on to adopt the American dream of a free and independent
people, and to win advancement economically, politically, socially.
The ability to assimilate is the heart of the American genius,
precisely the trait that sets the United States off from other
nations. Immigration makes the U.S. what it is.
On this Fourth of July we celebrate this history more forthrightly
than we have in two decades. Anti-immigrant hysteria peaked in 1996,
when the California Republican Party self-destructed with
anti-immigrant themes. Today the GOP is led by George W. Bush, who
told campaign audiences "family values do not stop at the Rio
Grande." The employer sanctions in the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli bill are
now recognized as windmill tilting. Congress has repeatedly raised
the limits on H-1B visas for engineers and such, to 195,000 a year
from an original 65,000. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court twice held
that aliens are people too, entitled to such basic rights as the
presumption of innocence, petty 1996 legislation notwithstanding.
At the same time, the U.S. is gradually relearning the secret of
assimilation -- every informal recognition of cultural differences
but no formal ones. "Bilingual education," which trapped
schoolchildren in a Hispanic ghetto for the benefit of ethnic
politicians and a few teachers, is on its way out. Racial quotas
generally are under increasing suspicion. In the next census, in
2010, increasingly meaningless and irritating questions about
ethnicity may be abolished. This too bodes well for future acceptance
of immigrants.
Immigration now runs about a million a year against a population of
275 million, a rate that remains below the historical average. The
proportion of immigrants with postgraduate education is three times
the native rate. New immigrants are no longer eligible for welfare,
removing that bugaboo. A study by the National Research Council in
1997 found that while unschooled immigrants are net recipients of
taxpayer money in the first generation, their children repay these
costs.
About half of current immigrants are Hispanic, though the Asian
component is projected to grow rapidly. By far the largest single
source is President Fox's Mexico, a Third World nation of nearly 100
million inhabitants sharing a 2,000-mile border with the U.S. The
opportunity north of the border is inevitably a huge magnet for the
poor but ambitious. There is no realistic way to stop the resulting
flow of people -- certainly no way that would be acceptable to the
American conscience.
This was headlined last May when five sunburned and dehydrated
survivors staggered up to Border Patrol agents in a desert called
"The Devil's Path" about 25 miles north of the Arizona-Sonora border.
Searchers found six more survivors, then 14 bodies. Smugglers had
abandoned the group in 115-degree heat without water. This is no
isolated instance; last year 491 souls perished trying to immigrate.
With the U.S. Border Patrol doubled by the 1996 act, these victims
were forced to risk death in increasingly desperate corridors.
Sealing the border against people willing to risk death is not a
practical option, let alone a morally attractive one. The only hope
is to manage the flow of people in a constructive and humane way. As
President Fox says, "By building up walls, by putting up armies, by
dedicating billions of dollars like every border state is doing to
avoid migration, is not the way to go."
Item one in any agenda to ease border problems would be rapid
economic development to provide opportunity within Mexico. It's
entirely possible that Mexico will become the next tiger economy. It
has the huge advantage of free trade with the world's largest market.
For all its poverty, it has a large first-world economic sector and a
technocratic elite educated at the best American universities.
Contrary to stereotypes, the general population is exceptionally
hard-working. Politically President Fox promises a fresh start after
ending 71 years of one-party rule. If Mexico can avoid the currency
depredations that have marred its last quarter-century, the
immigration problem may start to fade.
North of the border, the solution to the problem of illegal
immigration is to make it legal, or at least to normalize the
movement of people. A program of temporary work visas would allow
Mexicans to go home; the incentive for undocumented aliens now is to
stay rather than face the border barrier a second time.
Laws and regulations can generally be made more generous. The 1996
Border Patrol expansion is a dubious expense, expanding a
cops-and-robbers game that sometimes turns deadly. After the 14
deaths in May, the Mexicans promised to patrol their side of the
border in especially dangerous areas, while the Border Patrol
promised to arm agents with pepper balls rather than bullets. During
the campaign, President Bush talked of dividing the Immigration and
Naturalization Service into two agencies, one to police the border
and another to aid immigrants already here.
Another amnesty for undocumented aliens is already in the air; every
decade or so Congress somehow or another faces this reality. Even
opening Nafta borders completely, I would dare to suggest, might not
unleash a new flood of immigrants. There is a limit to the number who
actually want to come, and experience suggests that many of those who
do already can find a way. And after all, we did have a long history
of unlimited quotas for Western Hemisphere immigrants, ending only in
1965.
President Fox is nothing if not a visionary. Many scoffed at his
ambition to unseat the machine that had run Mexico for generations;
now they scoff at his proposals on immigration. But over the decade
or two he mentioned, a Nafta with open borders may yet prove not so
wild a dream.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Max Sawicky" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2001 5:21 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:15322] RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: The US Dollar (spend it fast as
you can)
> Lind is not a nativist. He is a liberal
> nationalist. He may be a Listian, but
> to me that is not necessarily a Bad Thing.
> The idea that he is a right-wing plant is
> hallucinatory.
>
> mbs
>
>
> . . . Michael told me not to insult anyone, so I will hold back my
comments
> on the neo-nativist and self-proclaimed Listian Lind, who was hidden
> in a trojan horse offered to the left by Buckley and co. But once it
> was brought within the gates, I for one was not surprised that out
> came another faux intellectual windbag like Jim Sleeper whose good
> friend he is.
> Yours, Rakesh
>
