The Central American Immigration Machine

Illegal immigration from Central America begets more immigration.  Anthopologist David Stoll explains this in a recent WSJ op-ed: Behind the Border Pile Up.   Remittances sent back by U.S. immigrants--about $12 billion a year to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, or about 10-15 percent of their national incomes--distort the local economies by making land prices higher.   So more young men have to travel to the US to find work to afford the rising prices, and the cycle continues.  Stoll:

But migration itself produces victims, such as wives hoping for the deportation of their husbands, and they are far from the only ones. Where I work in Guatemala, remittances have inflated the price of land to astounding levels; most families are unable to buy property unless they can place at least one wage-earner in the U.S. So every family is under pressure to send someone north. Migrants must borrow at least $5,000 to pay human smugglers. Many pay 10% monthly interest and put up family land as collateral. So they're betting the farm. When something goes wrong, they lose it.

Certainly the remittances help improve the local standards of living in these poor countries.  But they come at a human cost: family break-up, etc.  Reuniting the family in the US often leads to more problems:

One way to hold the original family together is for the mother and children to come north. But family reunification is no panacea even when it can be done legally. When an earner remits to his wife and children in Central America, the money goes much further than it does in the U.S. Once everyone reaches El Norte, even two parents working for the minimum wage may not be able to support a family. So their children get an education in downward mobility and relative deprivation, which is one reason immigrants brought here as boys run a high risk of being sucked into gangs. [My emphasis.]

 

Border Crisis Destroys Amnesty Bill

Poor border enforcement and Obama's 2012 decision to not deport some illegal immigrants has killed the Senate's amnesty bill and the so-called "Dream" Act.  The Democratic party has suffered heavily from a big influx of illegal immigrants in the past.  Two flotillas of boat people from Cuba in 1980 and 1994 hurt President Carter and then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.  In the following article,  Michael Barone explains how the fallout of the illegals is extending to other states; governors are refusing refuge:  Political Fallout from Illegals

At least some politicians are rediscovering that the United States is a sovereign nation with a responsibility to its citizens.  That's one happy consequence of this sad episode.

Maybe another happy consequence is that the open border crowd has been silenced, for a while. 

Don't believe the reports that all of the sudden Central Americans are fleeing gangs, poverty, and crime.  Those have been constant factors for years.  So, what has changed?  The decision to not deport and the promise of amnesty.

Something to consider:  our country is not growing full-time jobs anymore. See this piece by Mort Zuckerman last week: The Scandal of Part-Time America We can't guarantee the American dream even for longtime citizens, let alone unskilled immigrants.  That's the dispiriting reality of the post-industrial US economy.

Cheap Money Bad for the Poor, Good for the Rich

Rich Karlgaard argues here that only the superrich are really benefiting from the global boom in cheap money.  (Not just a boon for the rich, but for overleveraged governments too.) If you aren't in a position to ride the stock market wave, you're out of luck.  Here, he uses columnist Paul Krugman as a punching bag.  Why aren't people on fixed incomes getting up in arms about this?  Perhaps they will with the next bust. 

Paul Krugman Is Dumber Than We Thought

Krugman’s July 11th NYT laugher provides yet more evidence the Nobel Prize winner … just … makes … stuff … up.

Consider this Krugman assertion:

The really big losers from low interest rates are the truly wealthy — not even the 1 percent, but the 0.1 percent or even the 0.01 percent.

Krugman says the rich sock their money in low-yield bonds. But he fails to consider the obvious. Stocks have almost tripled since March 2009. Urban real estate is in a boom. Art is in a boom. If you believe Krugman, it must be the poor folks who are feeding these asset bubbles. Because the rich, Krugman says, are stuck in low-yield bonds.

This is utter nonsense. The excess liquidity created by U.S. monetary policy does not wind up in the hands of the poor. It winds up in the hands of the rich. The rich then put it into stocks, real estate, hedge funds, and art.

It’s actually the poor and lower middle classes whose wealth — such as it is –lies fallow in no-interest bank accounts (or wealth-eroding cash if they have no bank account at all). It’s not the rich, but middle-class retirees that try to eke out a living on low-yield interest rates.

Krugman has it exactly, 180-degrees wrong. Cheap money is a transfer payment to the rich. It is a tax on the poor. The rich-poor divide grew vast under the cheap money policies of Ben Bernanke. This trend will surely accelerate under Janet Yellen.

I recently spoke at a global real estate conference in Singapore. Around the world, large cities are seeing inflated prices. The investment bankers who attended the conference, and who represent the interests of the global rich, didn’t know whether to pinch themselves in glee or dig a shelter for the coming bust. But for now, cheap money has fueled a boom.

 

How many poor people invest in REITs, Dr. Krugman?

Krugman has so twisted himself in defending the Obama Administration’s fiscal and monetary policies that he is now 180-degrees opposite of truth. He looks to Antarctica and sees the North Pole.
Cheap money has been terrible for the poor. It has been God’s gift to rich asset holders. Just the opposite of what Krugman says it is.

Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?

NSA Vacuums Up Info on Average Folks

The Washington Post analyzes the information Snowden stole about how the NSA's PRISM program--which targets terrorists--also captures communications from private citizens guys:  Ordinary Americans Targeted.  To its credit, the article mentions how some terrorist networks were uncovered by this method. A few comments:

--Anyone using the internet should proceed with the understanding that his information is being used, constantly.  When I use my email in a foreign country, I always expect that the local intell service can look at it whenever it wants to. 

--I don't care that the NSA finds out information about innocent foreigners.  No one is targeting them, accusing them of anything, or using this info against them.    But they don't have a "right" to privacy based on our laws.

--I am not particularly concerned about the NSA incidentally looking at my email communications.  I know what my rights are, and what legal barriers it operates under.

--I am much more concerned about what Google does with the information it stores on me.  But in the US, we give private companies at lot more leeway than we do the government.  

No one in the US wants the NSA to stop targeting terrorists' networks.  But we haven't figured out a way yet to order this important function and ensure Americans' liberties are being respected.

Does Moscow Control the Anti-Fracking Movement?

Hydraulic fracturing has been a game changer for the oil and gas industry.  It has been a huge boom to the gas industry, which has led to significantly lower carbon emissions.  But it is a major industrial operation, and it arouses criticism.   A propaganda film from 2010 "Gasland" caused many people to equate fracking with drinking water igniting into flames.

Russia wants to preserve its monopoly on supplying gas to Europe. A few weeks ago the Secretary General of Nato Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Russia is secretly working with Green NGOs to spread disinformation about fracking in order to stop European domestic production:  NATO Chief Says Russia Teaming with NGOs.  The excellent Bjorn Lomberg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist," lays out the geopolitical stakes here: Break Putin's Gas Monopoly

Glad someone finally said it.  Why else would Romania of all places have one of the most activist anti-fracking movements in Europe?   Russia must be reviving its old networks.  Of course, ideologically, the Marxist left intellectually emigrated to the green movement a long time ago.

  

Marijuana: Really a Wonder Drug?

Marijuana has undergone a remarkable image makeover: from dangerous drug to miracle cure. States are now legalizing it without any regard for the harm it causes, which have long been known.  Here's a good article from the New England Journal of Medicine that reviews what we know about its health effect, what we might suspect but can't prove, and what might be beneficial about the drug.  Marijuana's Adverse Health Effects 

One thing that has stood out to me: marijuana today is responsible for lots of emergency room visits, and is far more powerful (higher THC content) than it used to be. 

Snowden Aided by Russia From the Start?

Edward Jay Epstein is hard on the Snowden trail, destroying the myth of the lone, improvising whistleblower.  More and more, it appears he had help from a foreign power, probably Russia, to facilitate his trip to Hong Kong.  (This is the thesis of British intelligence reporter, Edward Lucas, too.) Publicly, Putin has admitted Snowden got in touch with Russian diplomats when he came to Hong Kong in May last year.

Snowden's work for the NSA probably from the start was intended as a penetration operation.  Here's a lengthy quote from Epstein's latest piece:

While important details about Edward Snowden's activities in Hong Kong remain shrouded in secrecy, the conventional portrait of his stay there and in Russia as one of improvisation and serendipity is at odds with the precision of his well-planned thefts. 

Until March 15, 2013, Mr. Snowden worked at the NSA base in Honolulu for Dell, the outside contractor which supplied technicians to work on the NSA's backup system. From this vantage point, he had access to the NSA Net, from which he pilfered most of the documents he later gave to journalists including the ones about NSA domestic operations that have preoccupied the world's media. 

But he quit Dell and moved to Booz Allen Hamilton, the outside contractor that ran the computer systems in the NSA's Threat Operations Center. Here he could get access to the crown jewels, the lists of computers in four adversary nations—Russia, China, North Korea and Iran—that the agency had penetrated. He later told the South China Morning Post that his whole reason for making the job switch was to get "access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked."  

He carried out that theft, which included stealing passwords that gave him access to secret files, with great precision. There is no reason to assume that his getaway was any less deliberately planned.

Read the whole piece here:Snowden's Hong Kong Getaway