Illegal Immigration Myth of the Day

Posted on December 1st, 2007 in Crime, Healthcare, Immigration by Kyle
Illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries are 50% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to use hospital emergency rooms in California, according to a study published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.The cost of providing healthcare and other government services to illegal immigrants looms large in the national debate over immigration.

In Los Angeles County, much of the focus of that debate has been on hospital emergency rooms. Ten have closed in the last five years, citing losses from treating the uninsured, and those that remain open are notorious for backlogs.

By federal law, hospitals must treat every emergency, regardless of a person’s insurance — or immigration — status. Illegal immigrants, who often work at jobs that don’t offer health insurance, are commonly seen as driving both the closures and the crowding.

But the study found that while illegal immigrants are indeed less likely to be insured, they are also less likely to visit a doctor, clinic or emergency room.

Story here. Overestimating the costs of illegal immigration is pretty easy to do. Even pro-immigration types can succumb to inaccurate biases.

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Laws, Millets, and Privacy

Posted on October 17th, 2007 in Crime, Development, Ethics and Morality, Law, Middle East, Property Rights by Will

This ongoing series on Slate.com discusses a number of things which frequently come up on BeardofWisdom, but I’m on an Ottoman kick today so I’m going to concentrate on Wu’s discussion of Mormons and the Amish. He’s certainly right that our treatment of these groups isn’t precisely consonant with a law code based on the individual (and the centralized state). We don’t do very well accommodating intermediary organizations, largely because we tend view these as putting unwarranted restrictions on their members’ rights. In some ways they have to, or else postmodernity, by breaking down geographically bounded communities (even as it creates purely voluntary un-geographic communities), will be the death of them–as Wayne has pointed out, this will probably happen to the Gnostics/Mandeans soon.

Ironically, it’s also postmodernity that allows the Amish and the FLDS to survive. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the (successful) government attacks on the Mormon Church, and the less successful moves against the FLDS and the Amish, all came between the late 19th century and the mid 20th century. This was the heyday, especially in the US and Europe, of the drive toward consolidated, monopolistic, uniformly sovereign nation states–which can’t tolerate smaller intermediary institutions. Since the ’60s, we seem to have become disillusioned with this effort, and hence the tolerance for the FLDS or the Amish. But really this is just returning to the pattern of states throughout human history–there has always been this tolerance of autonomous communities, sometimes even institutionalized (also in Russia), by empires which couldn’t impose their will uniformly on all their subjects. Now we have the means, but apparently not the will.

There’s also a lot of historical precedent for the situation Wu describes with pornography laws in the US. I know there’s some history of Catholic states tolerating prostitution better than Protestant ones, but I’m more familiar with the Ottoman case. In theory, it was illegal for Muslim subjects (though not for Christians) to consume alcohol, but usually no one was bothered for drinking in their own home–not just because there wasn’t a sufficient police force to monitor this, but because there was an assumption of the sanctity of the home. (Ah, those backward anti-modern Muslims!) Exactly the same combinations of reasons we don’t prosecute “normal” pornography on the internet.

So I don’t think any of this is really new, just a return to premodernity and the natural state of human societies. As long as I’m wandering all over the place, I’ll return to the Amish/FLDS situation: don’t the benefits of federalism also apply here? And isn’t federalism just a rationalistic, codified, modern recognition of this ancient tendency toward divided sovereignty?

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Belated Che Day.

Posted on October 10th, 2007 in Crime, Development, War by Will

I would say, “Happy Che Day,” but unless you plan to overthrow the US government or execute hundreds of prisoners without trial, then it’s unlikely your celebration would be very true to the legacy of Che Guevara. Maybe as passive participants in bourgeois oppression, we could commemorate him by shooting ourselves in the head?

This Robert Scheer article in The Nation is fascinating. First, because the only negative words about Guevara are asides that he was “flawed” and that it’s “fortunate” that current revolutionaries “prefer” the ballot to the gun. The linguistic sleight of hand is also classic Nation material: “Little was reported about…why someone who claimed to be obsessed with helping the poor was executed, gangland style, on the order of a CIA agent.” There’s no evidence in the article that Guevara actually tried to help the poor in any way except by killing their alleged oppressors, but that doesn’t matter to Scheer. He has no trouble creating an equivalency between an empirical fact and an unjustified, self-serving claim by Guevara.

But the best example of Scheer’s shell game is in the fourth and fifth paragraphs: “Che was a Cuban Communist” trying to “spread his evil message…right?” No, because “Che was not a Communist in what we think of as the heavily entrenched, bureaucratized Cuban mold.” Catch the fallacy of equivocation there? “Cuban Communism” just changed meanings! In the first example it means an evangelical ideology dedicated to spreading itself, while in the second it means a conservative, immobile tyranny. So what we’ve just been told is that Guevara was NOT trying to “spread his evil message”… as proven by the fact that he became disillusioned when Castro STOPPED trying to spread the “evil message.” Something’s wrong with that logic. (The second definition also makes me think that Scheer’s one of those who believes Communism never really existed, so it can’t be blamed for Communists’ atrocities.)

But this is all immaterial, because if you read the article again, you’ll see that it isn’t really about Guevara at all. It’s about the horrible misdeeds of the US, and the point of the article is for Nation readers to nod in sympathy as Scheer confirms what they’ve already known, that the US is stupid and evil. Guevara has no independent existence or agency—and certainly his victims don’t—because he’s only there to show up US crimes and mistakes. Talk about dehumanizing the Third World.

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Saggy pants = jail time

Posted on September 16th, 2007 in Crime, Law by Victor

At least in Delcambre, Louisiana, where you can get fined $500 or spend 6 months in jail for showing underwear in public.

Several cities and towns have decided low-riding pants is enough of an issue to warrant new laws. Personally, I think the scariest punishment is in Trenton, New Jersey.

And in Trenton, getting caught with your pants down may soon result in not only a fine, but a city worker assessing where your life is headed.

“Are they employed? Do they have a high school diploma? It’s a wonderful way to redirect at that point,” said Trenton Councilwoman Annette Lartigue, who is drafting a law to outlaw saggy pants. “The message is clear: We don’t want to see your backside.”

Having a government bureaucrat evaluate your life and give you direction? That should be frightening enough to get anyone to pull their pants up.

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