Supply and demand versus illegal immigration

One of the advances of 20th Century business policy is the post-Depression concept of using government to assist rather than hinder the law of supply and demand. It has been observed that human beings have the propensity to resort to sneaky and often illegal methods to increase profits or reduce costs, and that those practices tend to interfere with what might be called the inside-the-box application of market forces.

I hasten to note that if we view the system globally, those sneaky and illegal methods can well be viewed as manifestations of the same laws, and that getting caught and punished may, in the (very) long run cause adjustments in the system. In fact, the laws I want to talk about could well be seen as exactly the kind of adjustment predicted by global supply-and-demand processes.

The specific set of laws of interest here are labor laws, laws passed to better the lot of workers. These include minimum wage laws, laws regarding unions, laws regarding medical care and on-the-job safety, and laws regarding discrimination.

Normally, if you have a class of job that is viewed by workers as very undesirable because it is physically strenuous and dangerous and seasonal, the benefits given to individuals who do that work would have to go up. This is simple supply and demand in the labor market. In some types of undesirable jobs, we already see those pressures at work. For example, plumbers and sanitation workers have been paid well in most places in the US for quite some time.

However, there is a large set of jobs where pay and benefits have remained very low, even illegally low, namely, the jobs filled by illegal immigrants.

Employers, given a choice between remaining in our "box" of labor laws and saving a lot of money by hiring illegal undocumented workers for substandard wages, tend in large numbers to break the law.

In effect, this practice has forged a leaky connection between many different "boxes", or economic systems, the largest two being Mexico and Canada, our immediate neighbors. These leaks allow the substance of each system to invade the others, and all of the systems are distorted by these invasions.

In our system, the natural cycle of movement among the various economic levels is impeded, because there is an increasing lack of viable low-end jobs for our native workers. If all of the jobs taken up by illegal immigrants had to be filled by legal residents, and therefore at competitive levels of pay and benefits, two things would happen. Efficiencies would be made to reduce the number of workers needed and to improve the experience of doing the work, and a large number of jobs would be available at the low end of our economic ladder, but jobs with benefits, healthcare, and middle-class salary levels. People who now go into crime or on the dole would be able to earn a good living by doing those jobs.

The solution to all this is not to tighten the immigration system, to build fences and so on. The solution is to enforce existing labor standards and hiring laws. In other words, we need to plug this enforcement hole so that it is no longer viable to seek workers who get less than a legal, living wage with the kinds of benefits that Americans should be able to expect.

Some might object: paying farm workers or day laborers enough money to attract legal residents might increase illegal immigration because they could make more money. This could be true, if the change is done in a half-assed way, for example, forcing employers to increase wages, but not enough to entice legal workers, and/or by not enforcing labor and hiring standards.

In order to be effective, employers at every level, from people who might hire a day laborer to build a fence up to agricultural giants who hire lettuce pickers, have to understand that it will personally cost them more to break our labor laws than they could ever save by doing so.

I would say that the best way to approach the problem is through a tax. That is, even though it is not legal to hire an undocumented worker, the practice could be taxed enough to increase the cost to that of the competitive standard, plus a penalty of, say, 10% for each year from the time the offense occurred to the time the tax was paid. Under this system, there would be no tax on hiring illegal workers, if they were paid enough money in wages and benefits. This is the case because that practice does nothing to encourage illegal immigration. The normal enforcement of laws regarding hiring of undocumented aliens would still apply as it does now, but in parallel to the tax system.

This tax would normalize the application of labor market supply and demand; it would in effect plug the holes in our economic system that is sucking in so many undocumented workers and leaking out money and jobs for our legal residents. I would rather deal with those leakages at the legal/conceptual level than try to create physically impermeable borders.

UPDATE

I just saw this article describing how employers who want to hire legal workers do not receive the support they need to actually allow workers to be checked. Apparently, these are employers who are already paying a fair, competitive wage, who have been hiring workers who use false documents. Under the proposal I am making here, there would be no penalty for those employers. From my perspective, they are not increasing the flow of illegal immigration. In this case, the problem is solely with the government to enforce its laws regarding immigration, including the obvious computerized cross-checking of records.

One area where I have not been in step with my colleagues on the left has to do with a good national identity card. I am in favor of this and always have been. It needs to have cutting-edge security technology, and it must be backed with a good sample of demographic and physical data. However, it must also be convenient and free of charge to all legal residents. The reason I am in favor of this is that once it is in place, a number of items on the long-standing left agenda will be facilitated (lower-cost, more standard healthcare coverage; less intrusive border crossings; better checking of gun purchasers...). And, in this case specifically, it could allow us to dispense with things like border fences and sweeps of factory floors by the Migra.

Greg Shenaut

Doing away with retirement

There is a standard way of looking at work versus leisure wherein if someone has worked "long enough" or "until they have reached a certain age", that the "leisure years" begin, in other words, that the person can retire. I think we need to re-examine that idea.

Start from the concept that our society will support, at a reasonable level, all who cannot support themselves. In the United States this is less true than in most other developed countries, but let's take it as a starting point. A corollary is that someone who can partially support himself might still receive a graduated supplement, but that someone who is fully self-supporting at an average economic level should receive no supplemental support from the government.

Next, let's take it for granted that someone who is rich enough not to need to work can retire whenever they want, whether society considers them to have worked enough or to be of retirement age. The corollary is that someone who is rich enough, who has a high salary level, or who gets support from their family, can decide not to work full time whenever they want.

Based on those premises, there are then several different categories of retirement: people of any age who can no longer work due to physical or mental incapacity; people of any age who can no longer work full time or at high enough level to support themselves; people who are above age 60 or 70 who can still work enough to support themselves in full or in part; people of any age who have saved or inherited enough so that they no longer need to work if they ever did to support themselves.

I argue that no mechanism of retirement per se is needed to account for any of those cases. If you can't support yourself, social programs will take up the slack. If you can support yourself, then social programs do not need to be involved.

What about pensions? I would say that a pension should not be viewed in terms of retirement. It should be viewed in terms of a bonus for long service, in other words, as part of the compensation package. No company should be required by the government to provide a pension to its employees, but obviously those that do will be more attractive.

This view of retirement is seen very clearly with military pensions. In the United States, a young man or woman can enlist in the military at age 18 (or 17 under some circumstances). If they continue to serve until age 38, they can retire with a 50% pension for the rest of their lives. I am an unusual case, but I (finally) finished my PhD when I was 35. If I had done so as a member of the armed forces, I would have begun my work life with a substantial pension from the military. Some might find the idea of a fat pension at such a young age obscene, but I don't, because to me, it is only the name "pension" that is inappropriate. In fact, it is very much part of the compensation package for members of the military, and it is one of the most attractive aspects of military service. If it were eliminated or postponed until, say, age 65, you would see re-enlistment rates dwindle to a trickle.

I think that this concept should be embraced explicitly by all employers--why not give employees a reward for long service, that they can start to enjoy after, say, 20 years on the job? Just like in the military, the amount could be increased beyond this, up to (say) 100% after 40 years. Whatever. My only objection to this is that it be thought of in the context of retirement.

Few military retirees (other than those who can no longer work for some reason) actually retire. Instead, using the security and cushion of their long-service bonus, they go into a wide variety of fulltime careers, be it ranching/farming, writing, technical careers, mercenary work, police work, and so on. After all, at age 38 or so they still have 25 or more years even in the traditional view of "retirement age" to work, and if we set no such years, they could have perhaps in some cases twice that long.

So, I say let's get rid of retirement as a concept. Instead, let's support all of our citizens with a quality level of life (including, by the way, all childcare and medical needs). The only very important thing is that the entire system must be seen as fair, and must be accepted by everyone. For example, there must always be work for the able, even if it's WPA-style make-work. No one who is able should ever receive a free ride from the state. Given that all must work, most will prefer to choose their job rather than be assigned one by government administrators.

OK, I know, there are issues with this idea, so why did I write down?

My starting point was with the changes that are occurring with birthrates. I had just read a comment that adjusting the retirement age will not suffice to support the large number of retirees that we will soon have. Perhaps small adjustments can't succeed, but a system that eliminates the concept of retirement could do it. That is, someone who at age 80 is still working and earning a living will pay taxes, along with his fellow workers of all ages, to support those of all ages who can't do so. It seems to me that that is the kind of approach that we need. The other reason is that I am 60, and as long as I continue to be healthy, I have absolutely no interest in retirement (as in not working), and I have no problem helping to support, say, a young man of 30 who is disabled and cannot support himself.

Greg Shenaut

The Error of "War" on Terror

Much has been made about the infelicity of making war on something as vague as "terror". There are probably several reasons why this nomenclature stuck. First and foremost, metaphorical phrases like that, combining a word like "war" or "struggle" or "battle" or "fight" and a broad, vague term like "tyranny", "oppression", "Communism", or "fascism" to characterize actual military actions, have been seen for a long time. It shouldn't seem too odd, and it doesn't, for a people who grew up "fighting Communism" to embrace a "war on terror". Second, just as when in the Cold War we were "fighting Communism" rather than (explicitly) the Soviet Union and Red China, and except for a few relatively brief spans of time, Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, and so on, we are engaged in a "war on terror" instead of a war with al-Qaeda, a war with the Taleban, a war with Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Tamil Tigers, the Aryan Brotherhood, and so on. It is easy to forget the Cold War rhetoric of "fighting Communism", but in fact, although the Cold War was declared "over", Communism is still alive and ticking in many places around the world, from a left-wing faction in most western European nations to actual governments and officials in eastern Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. The third reason, and the one that I think has doomed the War on Terror to the same ultimate oblivion suffered by Johnson's War on Poverty, is that it militarized our response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Once again, there has been considerable debate about whether what we are doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo is really a "war". In both Afghanistan and Iraq, there was a fairly brief and fairly conventional invasion of a nation by another nation which cast out the former government and installed its own. What this resembles the most--strictly at the level of what happened rather than of motivations--is the classical invasion such as that of Germany of Poland and France, and that of Germany by the Allies. That is, we went in, blasted the hell out of the place, kicked out the government, and took over. But that phase was very short, and its connection to our motivations and goals was never very clear.

When Hitler invaded Poland, his motivation was lebensraum, space for Germans to spread out in the manner to which they wanted to become accustomed. When the Allies invaded Germany, the goal was to "make the world safe for Democracy", a goal that shares a surface similarity with our goals in invading Afghanistan and Iraq. But after VE day, the Allies had expended the resources necessary to own Germany. There was an immense military presence there, one that had cost mind-boggling amounts of money and lives. Very few people objected to this because of the horrendous events of the past ten or so years. In the beginning, the Allies hand-picked people to run the German government, and no trace of Naziism was tolerated there during the occupation. By sweetening the deal by providing heavy-handed security, economic prosperity, and hope for the future, even the conquered Germans were on board (and those who weren't were thrown in jail). The extent of the Allied control of Germany is perhaps best seen in the fact that the Soviet Union kept it up in East Germany and East Berlin for fifty years(!) until the end of the Cold War and reunification. That is what a military occupation looks like. And make no mistake, immediately after the war, the Americans occupied their portions of Germany just as thoroughly as the Russians did theirs; we simply differed in our goals, motivations, and interests, and acted accordingly.

Our goal in invading Afghanistant and Iraq was to kill or capture the band of murderers who attacked us, and/or to prevent subsequent attacks on us using weapons of mass destruction. Obviously, that goal is an ambiguous one, and one that has received some, but not much, public debate. Killing or capturing murderers is, after all, something that our police do every day. And preventing attacks from other nations is something that a strong defense coupled with competent diplomacy has succeeded in more often than not. But we made the decision to militarize our response rather than use conventional civilian and diplomatic methods.

However, compared to the war with Hitler, this was never anything more than a half-hearted militarization, even though the Bush administration managed to scare--or freak out--a lot of people. Osama, Omar, and Saddam were no Hitler and the American people, or many of them, understood that from the outset. For one thing, Germany had an immensely powerful military machine that had already invaded and gobbled up most of Europe. The people who attacked us were outsiders, losers, thugs, who basically took advantage of a window of inattention on the part of the still-fairly-new Bush administration. In other words, they blind-sided us with a one-time lucky shot. Their goal was never conquest, it was simply to attract attention, even very negative attention, to their movement and its aims. Once the attack took place, their goal had already been achieved.

Obviously we can't allow people to kill thousands of people on our soil with impunity, and this takes us back to the main point. The Bush administration and Republicans in general had been floundering since the end of the Cold War's "fighting Communism" meme. Perhaps they assumed that they could replace it with the "war on terror" concept, thereby uniting the nation largely behind them. In any case, they rejected the specific pursuit of al Qaeda in favor of military adventures against Afghanistan, where they were located, and against Iraq, which had been a thorn in George Bush's side for more than a decade.

However, their error was in grossly overestimating the nation's interest in a new war. In fact, there never was any desire for war. We wanted more than anything to understand what happened on September 11, and we wanted the perpetrators brought to justice. In the early phases of each war, I think we were expecting those things to happen, and at many of us were willing to accept the Bush administration's assertion that we could achieve those goals through military action. However, the whole wartime sociology, such as what the world has experienced in all previous sustained engagements, never came about. In effect, the government was attempting to blend the "life goes on" aspect of the Cold War with the "any means to the end" aspect of World War II, and it simply could not be sustained over the years. Furthermore, the nation's real interests--security and justice--were not met. In order to support the pretense of a war footing, the government has had to resort to the creation of an environment of fear. Most Americans feel much, much less safe than they did on September 10, 2001, and not much safer than they did on September 12, 2001. As for justice: instead of bringing the perpetuators to justice, we have largely imprisoned a group of assorted bearded coreligionists of the perpetuators in an initiative characterized more by gross injustice than by anything recognizable as justice.

I believe that the fundamental error in all this was to militarize our response to the September 11 attacks. Our military works best when is is used as an adjunct of diplomacy, and the best way to bring criminals to justice is through competent and vigorous law enforcement. Although it is painful to remember now, virtually the entire world was behind us after September 2001. If we had marshalled a diplomatic effort coupled with a very strong police investigation of the facts in order to make a case that would have succeeded even under the strictest Sharia law, we might have taken out al Qaeda without firing a shot. And even if we had needed to go into Afghanstan or Pakistan to get them, we could have done that with immense international support and without starting a war. A non-military response would have achieved our goals (which have not yet been achieved!), would have bolstered our position as a world leader, and would have supported world peace rather than the use of military force. An opportunity that lamentably has now been lost. Perhaps the lesson will be remembered, though.

Greg Shenaut

Re-reading

All my life, I've been a heavy pleasure reader. At times, it has seemed like an addiction, and there is little question that it has affected the course of my life in negative ways. However, that's not what this post is about. I want to talk about one of the greatest pleasures available to the lifelong reader: the rediscovery of books read and enjoyed long ago.

What prompted this post was my recent reading of the Glencannon stories, written from around 1925 to around 1950 by Guy Gilpatric. I have come into contact with Colin Glencannon, Chief Engineer of the SS Inchcliffe Castle, during three periods of my life.

When I was a child, my parents had a fairly small collection of books in the house. Several volumns of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, the Encyclopedia Americana, other miscellania, and Mr. Glencannon Ignores the War. I would say that by the time I was out of elementary school, I had read all of their books several times over, and Glencannon many times. 

I should add that my father was a Marine who had fought in the South Pacific in World War II, and that the book was given to him by my mother, probably because the story was placed there. The Glencannon book, along with other fare such as Robert Sherrod's "Tawara: the Story of a Battle", along with war souvenirs like a Japanese sword & flag, gave me a glimpse into the world as it was for my parents during the War (I was born a bit more than two years after VJ day).

Perhaps it is a tribute to my shallowness, but I related to the fictional universe created by Gilpatric much more than the real one written about by Sherrod, and while I remember almost nothing about Tawara, Glencannon and the other characters in Mr. Glencannon Ignores the War have stayed with me all my life.

When I was in college, my father died. I don't think it's an accident that some time after that, I thought of that Glencannon book, and decided to see whether the university library had a copy. I was extremely pleased that not only did it have a copy of Mr. Glencannon Ignores the War, but there were copies of a Glencannon Omnibus and a "Best of" Glencannon collection. I devoured all of those with great pleasure.

Last spring, my mother died. I have no idea if there is a connection, but I recently began to have the desire to re-read some Glencannon. I am associated with a different university now, and I was able this time around to get my hands on all three of the Glencannon Omnibus volumes. I just finished them, and it was a wonderful experience. For one thing, the effect was much greater to be able to read all the stories, but without question, the peak was in ending right where I started more than 50 years ago, with Mr. Glencannon Ignores the War.

There is no question that this is a great story and a great series. I would have enjoyed them even had I not been exposed to them as a child. But because of the linkage with my earlier life, I feel flooded with nameless emotions and memories. I suppose that this may be similar to other kinds of nostalgia -- going back to old places, smelling old smells, and so on, but I can't help but think that there is a kind of synergy from the experience of reading the story, already a kind of escape from the here and now, with the re-reading of such a familiar story from my childhood, and one that had such strong personal associations for me.

If you are a lifelong reader, I encourage you to go back over some of these old tales. If you aren't, then it's not too late to get started now, so hop to it.

Greg Shenaut

P.S. For a taste of Colin Glencannon, there are etext versions of three stories here.

Toward a more rational public education system

I have been a student far more than most people: it took me 29 years to get through school from first grade to the PhD (with various twists, turns, and interruptions along the way). I also spent ten years teaching music privately, and later, several years homeschooling my two daughters. I often have randomly philosophized on the question of education, and over the years have developed a few ideas and opinions on the subject.

The first main difference between my ideas and the conventional view is over who controls the pace of learning. In the conventional approach, the teacher and school district/department/college control the pace, and the student must keep up, along with all of the other students in his class. Those who work more slowly are lost, and those who work more quickly are bored. I think that a critically important component of a rational educational system is that the student work at his own pace through a structured curriculum.

The second big difference between my approach and the conventional one has to do with what it means to "pass" a course or a grade. The conventional approach is to set a certain average level of performance--generally what is called a "C" grade--and to pass those with C or better averages and fail those with less than C averages. Note that a C average can be attained either with Cs in all subtopics, or with an A in half and an F in the other half of the subtopics. That is, a C average means that there are certain subtopics that have not been mastered; yet, the student must advance to the next level and do work that presupposes this mastery. As one moves through 12 grades, there is an accumulation of nonmastery such that students who graduate highschool with an overall C average will have mastered, on average, only half of the subtopics in the courses that they passed. I think that a second critically important component of a rational educational system is that students must master each and every subtopic that they study, in a structured curriculum. By "master", I mean that there should be no misunderstanding, basically performance at the "A" or "A+" level.

Finally, a third significant difference between my ideas and conventional education is that all students must end up at the same point. That is, there is something called a highschool diploma, or a bachelor's degree, that all students must achieve within a certain period of time. Those who don't, fail; those who do, pass. My idea is that, given a properly structured curriculum through which students pass at their own pace, but in which each and every subtopic must be mastered before advancing, the proper outcome measure is not a single diploma/no diploma, but rather, an index that represents just how far they have progressed--with complete mastery, remember--through the structured curriculum, at any given point in time.

The structure of the curriculum is extremely important, however, there is already wide general agreement, at least for the core subject areas, as to this structure. There is no reason why extra, less-structured, non-core subjects can't be incorporated into the core curriculum as such, as long as the well-structured core is available. For example, if performance ability on the violin is not part of the core (and why should it be?), there is still no reason why a student should not add a violin performance component to his individual curriculum.

So there should be a national core curriculum broken down into a network of interrelated subtopics such that the dependencies are encoded into the curriculum in the form of prerequisites. When a student has mastered all prerequisites, then he advances to the next set of obligatory and optional subtopics, in an ongoing process.

This means that students will work much more independently than in a conventional classroom. There are two relevant precedents for this. The first is so-called "open education" which was popular in the 1970s (and in which my elder daughter participated for two years). The second is the style of "unschooling" used in many homeschooling families. In both cases, chaos can result in the absence of knowledgable, well-trained teachers or parents, and the training must include how to let students work as independently as possible, as well as how to convey the information in the curriculum. The approach is also found in Montessori schools, whose emphasis on properly prepared manipulables and other structured materials is an excellent example of how to carry out this approach.

It is true that under a fully-implemented version of this approach, some students would make their way very quickly through most of the curriculum, "graduating" while still elementary school age, while others, even after 12 years, will still not be at what is currently known as the "high school level". Is this a bad thing? I would argue that it is much bettern to master each aspect of basic skills than never to do so, but by occupying a seat, to receive credit for "passing" more advanced ones.

The largest problems in using this approach are (1) to create the curriculum along with all supporting materials, and (2) to train (or de-train) teachers and parents in the method so that they strike the right balance of support for the students.

Greg Shenaut