Reason Magazine - Staff > Kerry Howley

Talk of the Town

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:58:00 EDT

As it turns out, Benjamin Franklin did not have 69 children out of wedlock. Nor did the thrice-widowed Betsy Ross kill her husbands. Philadelphia tour guides have been known to add some extra flavor to their bite-sized history lessons for visitors, producing an entertaining if distorted history of the former U.S. capital. The City of Brotherly Love is not amused, and it has a plan.

As of October, men and women who make a living talking about the Constitutional Convention and the Liberty Bell will be required to take a city-issued test and obtain a touring license. The test had not been released when this issue went to press, but three rebellious tour guides had already launched a lawsuit. They will be represented by the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm.

“The city council made this decision eight blocks away from where the forefathers guaranteed my right to free speech,” says Ann Boulais, a plaintiff who gives sports history, haunted history, and general history tours of Philadelphia. Mike Tait, a tour guide who is also a plaintiff, says the law discriminates against the very companies that give the most in-depth information. Some larger companies have been granted exemptions because they offer training programs for their employees, and Tait says these companies tend to give superficial, sanitized tours rather than the “hard-core history” he prefers. Tait tells tourists that Benjamin Franklin may have been involved in the slave trade, for instance, which is not the kind of information you’re likely to hear while riding a duck.

The mayor’s office maintains that the tour guide test is a benign consumer protection measure. Tour guides in New York and Washington, D.C., already face similar requirements. “Tourism is a major art
of our local economy,” mayoral spokesman Douglas Oliver told the Associated Press. “It is reasonable to ensure that tourists are getting accurate information.”

Attorney Bob McNamara, who will argue the case for the Institute for Justice, says the city should not get to decide which version of Philly history is accurate. “That’s sort of the heart of the absurdity,” he says, “the conceit that there is one official history and that the government is supposed to be deciding” which version it is. Among the historical disputes McNamara’s clients have with the city, one looms largest. “They disagree over the First Amendment,” he says. The plaintiffs “think it means something.”

The One-Man Wall

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Russell Pearce was far from home the day his son got shot. Minutes from the White House, the state legislator was preaching the Pearce gospel. "They're taking jobs away from Americans," he told a small audience at a prominent DC think tank. "Health care systems are failing. The education system has imploded. Eighty percent of the violent crimes in Phoenix are involving illegal aliens." Pearce speaks softly, and he has a sad-puppy look about him when he mentions the men and women he has devoted his life to pushing back behind the Mexican border. "You can't continue to pander and have pathetic policies that hurt America."

Moments later, a Brookings Institution staffer handed Pearce a note instructing him to call his wife LuAnne—"now." Pearce's son Sean, a sheriff's deputy in Arizona's Maricopa County, was being airlifted to a hospital with a bullet lodged in his abdomen. Plane delays and red lights slowed an excruciating trip to a crawl. LuAnne called back with an update. "You're not going to believe this," she said. "Sean was shot by an illegal alien.' "

Rep. Russell Pearce talks little about himself and much about state politics, but his personal life has an uncanny way of colliding with his political obsessions. Like his son, Pearce bears a wound from his days in law enforcement: 30 years ago a Latino gang member put a bullet in his right hand, leaving it permanently disfigured. In a state where most people—Latino or otherwise—are transplants, the Republican lawmaker can honestly say that he has been observing the transformation of Arizona since the day he was born. For decades, he has watched, horrified, as his native city spread like syrup over the pancake-colored desert. Arizona is now the second fastest growing state in the nation, and the Phoenix-Mesa metropolitan region, where Pearce was born, raised, and elected, is the fastest growing region in the state.

Sun-seeking natives drove most of that growth, but over the last decade Arizona has become a major corridor for unauthorized immigrants. In the mid-1990s, federal authorities took Vietnam-era landing mats and erected a steel wall between Tijuana and California. Border agents, once a rare sight, began to dot the more populated Texas and California borders. So those who aspired to work in America charted a course right through the middle, braving the Sonoran Desert in hopes of avoiding armed guards. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 10 percent of Arizona's work force in 2005 was undocumented, twice the national average.

Pearce aims to change that, one way or another. He has been a state legislator for only eight years, but he has used nearly every political position he has held, from deputy sheriff to director of the Arizona Department of Transportation's Motor Vehicle Division, to crack down on undocumented workers. He wants to end birthright citizenship, slash immigration quotas, and throw up more walls. He has proposed that officials at the state's Child Protective Services be required to root out undocumented children. The representative of a city named Mesa, Pearce co-authored an initiative to ban the use of Spanish in most official communications. Most of all, he thinks anyone who puts "profits above patriotism" ought to be kept from doing business in the state of Arizona. In the summer of 2007, Pearce finally got his wish.

In July of last year the Arizona legislature passed Pearce's Fair and Legal Employers Act, also known as the Legal Arizona Workers Act, the most severe state-level anti-illegal immigration measure in the country. Under the bill, any company caught "knowingly" hiring someone not authorized to work could have its business license suspended. A second offense would bring permanent revocation. All employers would be required to use E-Verify, a federal electronic verification that is voluntary in the other 49 states. (See "Get in Line!," page 38.)

Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, had already vetoed "13 or 14" of his bills, so Pearce had a press release ready to go for when Napolitano rejected this one. But the veto never came. Napolitano called one of the provisions a "business death penalty," then signed anyway.

At a time of economic downturn, Pearce has volunteered the state for a radical experiment in state-level border control, an initiative emulated with varying degrees of success by state legislators in Oklahoma, Colorado, Kentucky, Mississippi, and elsewhere. On the national level, Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) wants to force every American employer to check federal databases before hiring anyone. Shuler's bill is in limbo, and several state laws aimed at punishing employers of undocumented workers are tied up in the courts. But punishing employers polls well among the electorate, draws bipartisan support, and continues to tempt politicians in search of a movement.

Supporters of sanctions say they are the most effective way to keep undocumented workers from flooding the country; opponents say they will cripple legitimate businesses and force immigrants underground. No one really knows the full effect sanctions will have on an economy that has come to depend on Mexican builders, servers, janitors, nannies, and day laborers. Thanks to Russell Pearce, Arizona is about to find out.

Sheriff Joe and His Rival Ex-Deputy

Maria (her name, like those of other immigrants, has been changed for this story) is leaving Phoenix. It's not that she lacks papers. She is a permanent resident employed by the local school district, and she has lived in the U.S. for 17 years. But like many Latinos working legally, she has a close relative who is undocumented—her teenage son, Luis.

Last year, Luis witnessed a hit-and-run accident that left a Phoenix bicyclist on the side of the road. Maria says her son got out of the car, ran to the victim, and called the paramedics and police. When the police arrived at the scene, they asked for Luis' account of the accident. They then inquired into his immigration status and promptly arrested their witness. Luis was eventually released, but Maria resolved to go somewhere more welcoming—Utah perhaps, or Canada. She won't be leaving alone.

While it is difficult to know how many immigrants are packing up and moving on, Phoenix residents see evidence of a minor exodus. Apartment complexes that cater to low-income Latinos tell the local press that vacancies are up. Nancy Nicolosi—co-owner of Nicolosi & Fitch, which manages 3,000 apartments in Tucson—told the Arizona Star in January that the number of people disappearing with rent unpaid had jumped more than 300 percent during the previous year. A month later The New York Times reported that school districts in heavily Latino districts had seen sudden drops in enrollment, a sign that parents may be pulling their kids out of school and heading out of state.

In theory, the employer sanctions bill was meant to rid the state of illegal, not legal, immigrants. In practice, legal workers are the husbands, wives, parents, and children of the undocumented. As with a tumor surrounded by healthy tissue, it is impossible to excise the unauthorized without losing the productive, legal workers attached to them.

Sanctions aren't the only reason an immigrant in Arizona, with or without papers, might abandon his apartment, grab his kids, and find a new place to do business. In 2006 the state's economy was growing at a rate of 6.7 percent, double the national average. In 2007 growth slowed to 1.8 percent, and in 2008 it's expected to slow further as housing prices drop and once-plentiful construction jobs grow scarce. For her part, Maria is leaving neither because of the law nor because of the economy. She is simply tired of being harassed by a county that has turned its sheriff 's deputies into immigration informants.

It is Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio who unleashes Pearce's legislative efforts upon Arizona. Typically, local sheriff 's deputies would not be empowered to enforce immigration law, a responsibility specific to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but Arpaio has an agreement with the federal government allowing 160 of his 750 deputies to arrest and detain thousands of undocumented workers. When Pearce passes a sanctions law allowing investigation of businesses suspected of hiring illegal immigrants, Arpaio can show up and begin arresting amusement park employees by the dozen. When Arpaio needs more funding to enforce a state "human smuggling" law aimed at workers themselves, Pearce can arrange it. The sheriff says he has turned over 15,312 men and women to ICE so far.

Pearce and Arpaio may seem like natural allies, but this cozy arrangement follows more than a decade of personal strain between the two public servants. Arpaio has been talking about "illegals" for only a few years. He first became famous for his harsh treatment of prisoners in the mid-1990s when he dressed Maricopa County's inmates in cartoonish black and white striped uniforms, shackled female prisoners in chain gangs, forced male inmates to wear emasculating pink underwear, and fed his charges green bologna. When federal law required that he give each inmate more room but the county refused to grant funds for a new brick-and-mortar jail, Arpaio built an internationally notorious "tent city" with barbed wire and surplus army tents donated by the Pentagon. The sheriff was unworried by the prospect of exposing inmates to 115-degree desert afternoons; if the tents were good enough for U.S. soldiers, he figured, they were good enough for convicts. Today, at the entrance of the still-standing jail, images of American soldiers in Iraq hang over a warning not to complain.

When he first ran for sheriff in 1992, Arpaio vowed not to serve more than four years. Russell Pearce, a decorated former officer with ambitions to succeed Arpaio, agreed to be his chief deputy for a single term; he says he was promised a fast track to the top slot. But Arpaio liked playing chief, and references to his one-term pledge dropped off considerably during his first year in office. Pearce eventually left in 1993, disappointed but unwilling to wait for the immensely popular Arpaio to tire of the job.

According to Pearce, Arpaio's attention-grabbing tent city jail was not the sheriff 's idea but his. It was Pearce who thought to use military surplus left over from Operation Desert Storm, Pearce who "refused to hang a ‘no vacancy' sign on the county jail," Pearce who saved taxpayers millions while keeping them safe. "Sheriff Arpaio ran to be a one-term sheriff, and he changed his mind," he recalls. "In fact, I have an affidavit in my safe where he committed to [serve] one term, and so that was part of the deal, but you know what? I'm not an ego-driven guy, and like I told him, it doesn't matter to me."

The sheriff 's star continued to rise throughout the '90s, fueled not a little by his universally acknowledged yen for publicity. He espoused a militarized version of community policing, greatly expanding an existing network of volunteer posse members and acquiring an army tank to ride during Phoenix parades. He was engaged and unsubtle. But unlike Pearce, Arpaio was not a born border warrior, and he did not become one until public anti-immigration sentiment in the state reached a peak late in 2005.

After leaving the sheriff 's office, Pearce bounced around for a while, serving as the director of the Motor Vehicle Division until Republican Gov. Jane Hull canned him. One of the agency's employees had erased a driving under the influence charge from a woman's records as a political favor, and Pearce took the fall. (His then-20-year-old son Justin also left the division in disgrace, after printing state-issued IDs for his underage friends.) In 2000, Pearce was elected as state representative of Mesa, a conservative, Mormonfounded city east of Phoenix, on a platform of low taxes, strong values, and closed borders.

Four years in, thanks in part to term limits, Pearce managed to position himself as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, giving him crucial leverage over other legislators. He wasn't a publicity hound like Arpaio, but he would gladly stop and talk to anyone about immigration. And Arizona residents were ready to talk. "Russell did what bright lawmakers do: found an issue, made it his own," says Howard Fischer, a Phoenix-based journalist who covers the state legislature for Capitol Media Services. "He built a popular base of support, and he has found a willing audience throughout most of the rest of the state, much the same as the sheriff has found an audience."

Tapping into frustration over crowding, crime, and identity theft, Pearce found resonance in his own district while convincing his state colleagues that their constituencies, too, demanded action on immigration. Public anger was rising, and Republicans who would rather have treated immigration as a federal responsibility found themselves sidelined as Pearce hammered away. In the Arizona Republic, moderates accused the party of running a "dictatorship" and blacklisting dissenters.

Pearce's first important anti-immigration trophies were Proposition 200, a 2004 voter initiative that forced residents to prove their citizenship before registering to vote, and Proposition 103, a 2006 measure establishing English as the official language of Arizona. Prop 200 passed with 56 percent of the vote, and Prop 103 with 74 percent. "There was a lot of dry wood ready to catch fire, and Pearce was a spark," says Rodolfo Espino, an assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University. "Couple that with the failure of comprehensive immigration reform and a housing boom that created a tremendous need for workers."

The Fair and Legal Employment Act, which had faced stiffer opposition, was not, in the end, everything Pearce wanted. His initial proposal would have revoked business licenses on the first, not the second offense; anything less, he suggested at the time, would be "amnesty." But when the slightly less severe act finally passed, the man who had long languished under the shadow of "America's toughest sheriff" suddenly found himself on national news shows, talking up what he liked to call "the nation's toughest immigration law."

Employers or Enforcers?

Sheridan Bailey won't argue with that description. The sanctions law took effect on January 1, so the 64-year-old president of Ironco Enterprises, a steel fabrication firm in Phoenix, axed 30 percent of his work force just before Christmas of 2007. Most had families. One was an iron fitter who "could work circles around any other fitter" in the joint. Another had been in the United States his whole adult life. "He has been here since he was 5," says Bailey, with visible frustration. "He looks and talks—well, not exactly like me, but he's as American as anybody else."

To attract replacement talent, Bailey raised wages for some workers as much as 35 percent, but he says a labor shortage remains the greatest constraint on Ironco's growth. He tried forming a training program that recruited native-born Arizonans for the position of project manager, which pays $75,000 a year. "‘Look,' we said, ‘we'll train you to be welders and fitters; if you're sharp and hardworking, you can become a project manager,' " he recalls. "But none of those guys lasted more than 90 days. They couldn't show up on time. They couldn't park their car in the right place. They couldn't follow direction, so what we learned is you can't just go to recruit young people to do this kind of work."

Bailey turned to Alongside Ministries, an organization that helps ex-convicts find work. He tried U.S. Vets, an organization that helps ex-soldiers who are having trouble adjusting to civilian life. He asked a missionary friend for help recruiting refugees. "No matter what you raise the wages to," he says, "there aren't enough warm bodies." Construction delays are costly, so contractors can't take jobs if they aren't sure they'll have an adequate work force. Unable to find enough capable laborers stateside, Bailey eventually tried outsourcing metalwork—to Mexico.

In 2000, when the last U.S. Census was taken, 20 percent of Arizona workers in construction-related trades were non citizens. While an estimated one in 10 employees in the state are undocumented, the percentage in residential construction, tourism, food service, and commercial construction is much bigger, so that's where the sanctions law is hitting hardest. Mike Sutter, who owns a masonry business in El Mirage, says he "easily" could have doubled his business last year had he not faced a shortage of ready workers. "I can't tell you how many high school career days I have been to," says Sutter. "We offer kids $13 an hour with no experience. That's a good wage. But it's hot out here."

Employer sanctions have been a boon to at least two occupations: employment law and human resource management. Jason LeVecke, co-owner of 60 Carl's Jr. restaurants in Arizona, has hired two national law firms to audit each of his 1-9 forms, the documentation required to verify an employee's identity. Both Bailey and Sutter used to employ part-time H.R. people; now the position is full time, though Sutter comments that the "girls in H.R. are scared to death they're going to make a mistake and get fired or go to jail."

None of Sutter's office employees are currently doing time in Arpaio's tent city, but it's no easy task to decide which Latinos are eligible to work in Arizona. Employers who too zealously investigate potential hires will violate laws meant to protect privacy and guard against discrimination. Employment attorney Julie Pace, who represents businesses attempting to overturn Pearce's law, says the legal situation is so complicated that most immigration lawyers do not understand it. She represents employers who are being simultaneously charged by ICE for having hired undocumented workers and by the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division for racial profiling in an effort to avoid hiring undocumented workers. Going over and above the demands of any one law can mean fines, a license suspension, and, increasingly, asset seizure.

An uncertain business climate creates its own problems, apart from any actual enforcement. LeVecke, the Carl's Jr. franchisee, is part of a group of business owners who have challenged the law in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. He says he'd like to expand in his native Arizona but doesn't want to risk his business license on the chance that an irresponsible manager will make a bad hire. "Businesses through-out the country have heard that Arizona is a place where you can lose your license," he says. "Even if we undo the law, the reputational damage is going to take 10 years to turn around."

The Scars of Enforcement

Pearce has a historical analogy handy for those who might worry about his law's economic impact. "The arguments they're using—it's kind of interesting—are the same arguments that were used when we tried to abolish the horrific, barbaric practice of slavery," he says. "Who'll bring in the crops?" The comparison casts Pearce as an abolitionist, but he prefers to portray himself as a soldier standing alone against invasion.

As a child, Pearce says, he and his 12 brothers and sisters ran around the streets of Mesa barefoot, too poor to buy shoes and too oblivious to know they were poor. He describes his childhood in sharply Manichean language: His mother was an "angel," his father an unreliable drunk who stole from saintly Mom. His mother, a bank teller, kept house from before her children awoke until after they'd gone to sleep; his father dallied as a mechanic "when he worked at all."

The family lived in central Mesa throughout his childhood, though the elder Pearce's inability to hold a steady job kept them from settling into any one residence for very long. "It kind of offended him that every month somebody'd want rent," the legislator says dryly, not without affection. "We moved a lot." They didn't move far; by Pearce's count, they lived in seven houses on one street alone.

It's impossible to know to what extent Pearce's childhood affected his politics and to what extent his politics affected the way he tells the story of his childhood. But as a legislator, Pearce has been almost fanatical about the right to keep what you earn. In 2007 the Arizona Federation of Taxpayers named him a "hero" for his near-perfect voting record as a fiscal conservative. The immigration issue, as he sees it, is in the same vein; he is convinced that undocumented workers are leeching off hard-working, salt-of-the-earth Arizonans. "The Mexican government," he says in a typical crowd pleaser, "is in their 12th edition of their little book of how to break into America and get free stuff." He carries at his fingertips numerous factoids to this effect, most of them culled from papers by the conservative Heritage Foundation and studies commissioned by the restrictionist Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Pearce signed up with the Maricopa County Sheriff 's Office in the early 1970s. He took naturally to law enforcement and the charge of upholding respect for rightful authority. Eight years on the job, he walked up to a Tastee Freez and confronted a teenager who happened to have a Maricopa County Sheriff 's Deputy patch on the seat of his pants. Pearce ordered the adolescent, whom he remembers being named Armando, to remove it; Armando said he couldn't. So Pearce "helped him take it off with one good rip." Standing with the offending patch in his hand, Pearce noticed six Latino adolescents—he calls them "little gangbangers"—at an adjacent park.

The kids were carrying paper bags, which Pearce figured weren't covering bottles of Pepsi. He asked for their names and addresses, and when they failed to cooperate, he pulled out his handcuffs and shoved one against his patrol car. Another responded by unleashing his Doberman on the deputy. Still restraining the kid that he was handcuffing, Pearce whacked the dog with his flashlight. The dog yelped, a shotgun went off, and Pearce felt a bullet pierce his chest and lodge into his back.

"My first reaction was, these guys aren't going to get away with this," Pearce says. He placed a hand on the wound and tried to chase them down, but the only kid he snagged was Armando—a witness who was familiar with the shooter. Shoving him into the cop car, Pearce noticed blood and demanded to know where the kid was hurt. Armando kept insisting that he wasn't hurt at all. Pearce realized that the blood was his own, and that he'd just lost his right ring finger.

No one has ever accused Russell Pearce of insufficient zeal in rooting out lawbreakers. Even today, from his perch in the statehouse, Pearce prefers to view himself as an enforcer of laws rather than a maker of them. "We're not trying to create new laws," he explains. "We're just trying to put into place a process that ensures the rule of law, that people follow the law and do what's right."

Like fellow Arizonan John McCain, a man he has called "treasonous" for his support of comprehensive immigration reform, Russell Pearce bears the physical scars of total commitment to a creed. But while his obsession with law and order cost him a finger, his son's shooting probably says more about what's it like to be Arizona's most notorious anti-immigrant legislator. Once again Pearce's personal and political lives collided in a bizarre public spectacle, and once again he found himself thrown into an awkward partnership with Joe Arpaio.

On November 22, 2004, three weeks after Arpaio's fourth re-election, more than 300 sheriff 's officers were transferred to new positions. As the East Valley Tribune's Mark Flatten later reported, the transfers followed a curious pattern. According to the Mesa paper, almost no one who had openly supported or contributed to the campaign of Arpaio's challenger was promoted. Many were transferred to less desirable jobs—from patrol to property room, or detective to patrol.

The transfers extended to the SWAT team that employed Sean Pearce, an elite unit manned by experienced deputies. "When you look at a lot of these transfers," former SWAT team member Keith Frakes told the Tribune, "they were punitive in nature. I think they kind of lumped the whole SWAT team into that a little bit."

In place of experienced team members, Arpaio assigned to the SWAT team Joel Fox and Dave Trombi as commander and lieutenant, respectively. Fox had served as a part-time SWAT member years before, and Trombi had no SWAT experience to speak of.

In December 2004, Sean Pearce and other members of the team broke down the door of a Mesa mobile home and stormed into the trailer to serve a warrant. They were greeted with gunfire. From behind a Christmas tree, 22-year-old Jorge Luis Guerra Vargas hit Sean in the abdomen and deputy Lew Argetsinger in the hand. Chaos ensued. Fox called in the wrong emergency code, gave dispatchers the wrong address, and failed to tell paramedics that Pearce and Argetsinger had been shot. "We [were] left bleeding in the street for way longer than we should have been," Argetsinger later told the Tribune.

Arpaio came to visit Sean in the hospital, where his mother LuAnne was waiting by his side. She reportedly refused to shake the sheriff 's hand, a hostility that would be echoed by her recovering son. Sean recovered fully from the wound but was publicly critical of the department transfers, telling local journalists that it was a mistake to rob the team of experienced men. A day after he and Argetsinger spoke to the Tribune, they were both placed under internal investigation, ostensibly to determine whether they had followed procedure during the raid. As officers under investigation, they were prohibited from talking to the press.

So Sean's wife talked instead. She told the Tribune that her husband was being "treated like a criminal by the sheriff 's office" and was having a hard time adjusting to his new desk job. Sean filed a complaint with the Industrial Commission of Arizona accusing the sheriff 's office of creating an unsafe work environment.

Rep. Pearce was notably quiet. Never one to seek out the media, he did not do so now. He continues to wave away questions about whether the country sheriff placed his son in mortal danger. Arpaio would soon be taking a more public stance on immigration, and the men are publicly supportive of one another. "Shame on folks who can't set aside their difference where there are big issues like immigration on the table," Pearce told the Tribune in 2007. "The No. 1 issue is immigration, and [Arpaio] has been in front on that." As late as April 2005, Arpaio told the Arizona Republic that "illegal immigration is not a serious crime," but he was about to have a change of heart. Today "Illegal immigration stats" appear prominently on the Maricopa County Sheriff 's Office website, right under a picture of Sheriff Joe's tank.

Turn Off the Lights

Pearce is not far off when he claims to be simply an enforcer of a regime that preceded him. Undocumented immigrants are here illegally, and the businesses that hire them do so unlawfully. The sanctions bill simply increases existing penalties for activities that have long been illegal. And yet for immigrants and small business owners, the law represents a violent break with the existing consensus, a ripping apart of a vital, delicate network of mutual cooperation.

Phoenix, which sits in the center of the state, has always had a fluid relationship with cities to its south. John "Jack" Swilling, who founded the town site in the 1860s, was married to Trinidad Escalante, a native of the Sonoran state of Mexico. A full half-century passed before Arizona became a state, and the peripheral, free-wheeling territory reflected its boundary status: In 1870, according to the first federal census that measured Arizona territory, the city was about half Mexican. Today Phoenix maintains tight economic and familial ties with Sonora and the wealthier Mexican state of Chihuahua; Mexican Phoenicians are very likely to have family in one of these places, and the flow of people to and from rises and falls with Arizona's economy.

When government intervenes, that flow is disrupted and distorted. The deserts separating Arizona and Mexico are not an especially inviting place to cross the border, but federal authorities drove immigrants into the state by raising the number of border patrol agents to the east and west. By increasing the costs associated with crossing, the federal government encouraged the rise of paid smugglers, known as coyotes, and the violence that came with their ascendance.

The United States allots exactly 10,000 visas a year to low-skilled workers in occupations that require less than two years of training or experience and who want to stay permanently. Beyond that, there is no legal way for a low-skilled foreign laborer without naturalized American family members to seek permanent residence in the United States. There is no line in which to wait. (See "What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand?," page 32.) Temporary visas for low-skilled nonagricultural workers, known as H2Bs, are capped at 66,000 a year. Yet Arizona alone, by Pew's estimates, employed between 260,000 and 292,500 undocumented workers in 2005. Many of them have been working in Arizona for years and have become an integral part of the economy as it functioned until January 2008. Employers looked the other away, paid occasional fines when ICE came knocking, and largely saw such penalties as a cost of doing business.

Americans moving from California and the Midwest require men to build their new homes and landscapers to maintain them. They create new demand for servers and busboys, janitors, and nannies. The majority of the low-skill foreign workers they attract have no avenue through which to seek legal documentation, but they require the same social services as native-born Americans: public schools, law enforcement, and roads. Deporting hundreds of thousands of undocumented low-skill workers would save Arizona taxpayers on emergency room care, but would likely raise prices and slow economic growth. "You have to look at a budget comprehensively," says Jason LeVecke. "I could look at the costs of the electricity used to run my business and say, ‘Gosh, it's gotten really expensive. If I just turned it off, we'd save a lot of money.' "

Scholars have long attempted to quantify the costs and benefits that come with undocumented immigrants. Workers without status, in addition to using schools and emergency rooms, pay sales, excise, and property taxes (sometimes indirectly, through rent). A 2007 study by University of Arizona researchers found that noncitizens, most of whom are undocumented in the Copper State, cost Arizona $140 million a year in health care and $89 million in law enforcement. The price of educating every student classified as an "English language learner," which includes some citizens, was another $540 million. All told, the study said illegal immigrants are costing the state about $1.4 billion a year. But the economic activity they generate provides $1.5 billion in tax revenues, yielding a net benefit to the public treasury, the study concluded.

Arizona's Coming Ghost Towns

Not everyone accepts those findings. Also in 2007, a study from the Congressional Budget Office found that "the tax revenues that unauthorized immigrants generate for the state and local governments do not offset the total cost of services provided to these immigrants" (italics added). The study concluded that undocumented immigrants had a "most likely modest," but decidedly negative, impact on state coffers.

How much do state-level budgets tell us about the impact of immigration on the economy? According to the Harvard economist Gerald Jaynes, not much. Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Immigration in 2007, Jaynes deemed "analyses that purport to measure the benefits of immigration by comparing taxes paid by immigrants to the cost of public services they consume" to be "egregiously incompetent and misleading." There is more to wealth creation than tax receipts; noncitizen immigrants are woven into Arizona's economic life, responsible for 8 percent of the state's economic output. They lower the costs of new housing, tourism, and food service. In 2007, before the employer sanctions law took effect, University of Arizona researchers estimated that a 15 percent reduction in immigrants in the construction sector would result in a loss of 56,000 fulltime jobs (for both citizens and noncitizens) and $6.6 billion in output. A 10 percent reduction in immigrants in the manufacturing work force would result in the loss of 12,000 full-time jobs and $3.8 billion in output. When immigrants leave, they take jobs with them.

As the threat of national employer sanctions looms, policy makers will look to Arizona to see how well an economy can adapt to an overnight loss of workers. Right now, good data are hard to come by. The state has seen a decline in home prices sharper than most, but it is difficult to assign responsibility to Pearce's legislation. "Clearly there is an effect," says Arizona-based economist Elliot Pollack, "but we do not yet know how to measure it. My expectation is that when the economy does come back, it will be difficult getting construction workers, and prices will be higher than they otherwise would have been for labor." Masked by a weak economy, the effects of Pearce's law may reveal themselves when the market picks up again and employers are once again attempting to hire in droves.

Researchers at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University are working on a two-year study that will attempt to quantify the economic impact of the nation's most punitive employer sanctions law. But it is highly unlikely that even the most damning results will deter Russell Pearce. By his own logic, entrepreneurs ought to be hurting; every going-out-of-business sale is just more evidence that Arizona is overcoming its addiction to cheap, illegal migrant labor. "Businesses are closing," he proudly told a correspondent from NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in June. He's forcing Arizona to quit cold turkey, and not every mom-and-pop operation will survive the painful withdrawal.

"Just like Disneyland or any other theme park learned a long time ago," Pearce likes to say, "if you want the crowd to go home, you've got to shut down the rides, turn off the lights."

Jason LeVecke of Carl's Jr. is not impressed. "I prefer not to think of my business as a ride," he says. "And I prefer not to turn it off." LeVecke won't get to decide whether his or any business survives; voters will. Pearce is running for state Senate this year, and he is being challenged by another conservative Republican Mormon who wants to roll back Pearce's sanctions before more immigrants flee and more businesses close down. Come November, Arizonans will have to decide whether they like the looks of their new state—lights dim, park closed, neighbors well out of sight.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor of reason.

Get in Line!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:19:00 EDT

When comprehensive immigration reform crashed in 2007, federal and state legislators searched the remains for salvageable pieces. Some picked up the border wall, others legalization of undocumented workers. In Arizona, lawmakers seized on E-Verify.

Formerly known as Basic Pilot, E-Verify is a federal program that employers can use to check the employment status of new hires against federal databases run by the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. For most employers, it's just an option, but in January the state of Arizona began forcing everyone within state lines to run new hires by the feds. The state is ahead of the game; in June President Bush signed an executive order requiring that all federal contractors sign up, and various congressmen are pushing to make E-Verify mandatory for the nation's 6 million employers.

Francisco Romero thinks everyone ought to consider slowing down a bit. Romero is a legal Arizona resident who says he has been fired-twice-based on E-Verify-related blunders. "I have been a citizen for 12 years!" exclaims the construction worker, who spent months shuttling between the Social Security Administration and human resource offices trying to obtain permission to work. He was able to get back on the job site only after a community advocate took up his case and hacked through the verification labyrinth.

The federal data, as Romero could tell you, have some problems. The Social Security Administration estimates that 17.8 million (or 4.1 percent) of its records contain discrepancies. About 5.3 percent of queries to E-Verify come back as "tentative nonconfirmations"; workers must then either schlep to the Social Security Office to prove their status or go underground. Many of the citizens forced to request federal permission to work will be women who took their husbands' names and thus have outdated Social Security records; others will simply be victims of bad Social Security data, bad Homeland Security data, or their employers' fat fingers. While native-born workers have had their share of problems, foreign-born citizens like Romero are far more likely to be incorrectly flagged.

Because the databases are dodgy, employers are not supposed to fire workers until they've given them eight days to contest E-Verify's "tentative nonconfirmations." But a 2006 report from the Office of the Inspector General and the Social Security Administration found that almost half of employers using the program were "prescreening" potential employees before hiring, meaning they might never be given the chance to challenge erroneous disqualifications.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, which now cheerleads for the program on its own website and in public service announcements splattered across city buses, employment verification is a perfectly pleasant experience for most people. That might well be true. But those most likely to be victims of its errors are the least equipped to contest the findings or challenge their employers. Romero speaks little English. He does not have a lawyer. Arizona's Social Security Administration offices are open only from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays, when most construction workers are, well, working.

On the department's blog, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Stewart Baker says the idea that employers will fire people without giving them time to correct data problems is a "myth," because, after all, E-Verify "prohibits" employers from prescreening or firing employees right away. The arrogance of that reasoning, and the faith it displays in frictionless compliance with government diktat, does not bode well for the next American who has to fight for his right to work.

Kerry Howley (khowley@reason.com) is a senior editor of reason. Astrid Arca provided translation services for this article.

Lipstick Libertarians

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:00:00 EDT

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Course Correction

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:00:00 EDT

State Rep. Russell Pearce (R-Mesa) wants to clarify what kind of content is acceptable in Arizona’s classrooms, so he has called for a ban on public school courses that are contrary to “western civilization.” Pearce’s proposal would prohibit a public school from including content deemed to “promote, assert as truth or feature as an exclusive focus any political, religious, ideological or cultural beliefs or values that denigrate, disparage or overtly encourage dissent from the values of American democracy and western civilization, including democracy, capitalism, pluralism and religious toleration.” The bill would also ban race-based groups, such as Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, from operating on public campuses. The legislation follows a controversy over Tucson Unified School District’s “Raza Studies” program.

“This bill basically says, ‘You’re here. Adopt American values,’ ” Rep. John Kavanagh (R-Fountain Hills) told The Arizona Republic. “If you want a different culture, then fine, go back to that culture.” The House Appropriations Committee approved the measure by a vote of nine to six, but Pearce told PBS the measure is probably “written too broadly” and would be revised before it goes up for a vote.

The Politics of Exclusion

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:00:00 EDT

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What Women Want

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:30:00 EDT

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Tyranny of the Old

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) info@reason.com (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:15:00 EDT

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Striking Distance

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In the tough-on-crime wave of the ’90s, more than 20 states passed “three strikes” legislation, which subjects repeat offenders to increasingly harsh penalties. Few enforced the law with as much zeal as California, which has slapped more than 40,000 residents with a strike or two. But thanks to perverse incentives built into the legislation, the law may encourage some of those offenders to commit more-violent crimes in the future.

California criminals receive their first strike by committing an “aggravating offense,” which covers a broad range of crimes, including burglary and rape. After that first strike, any felonies count as second and third strikes, with the latter carrying three times the normal sentence. To determine how the law affects criminal behavior, Harvard economist Radha Iyengar compared criminals who had committed the same crimes in a different order. He concluded that people who commit the aggravating offense first, triggering the law, behave differently than those who commit the aggravating offense after a series of other crimes.

Iyengar found that the law had a significant deterrent effect, just as intended; criminals were less likely to reoffend after they triggered the law. But those who did reoffend, she found, were motivated to commit more-violent crimes. Criminals eligible for a third strike face the same punishment whether they simply rob a man or rob and kill him. Because the penalty for that third strike is equally severe whether a criminal commits a nonviolent or a violent crime, Iyengar hypothesizes, offenders opt for the latter.

Prosecutors might argue that the law’s deterrent effect more than compensates for the violent crimes it encourages. But even if Californians are happy with the outcome, Nevadans may beg to differ. Iyengar found that criminals with prior convictions are more likely to cross state boundaries before they strike again.

Rent-a-Pet

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Massachusetts state Rep. Paul K. Frost (R-Auburn) owns two dogs—Reese’s and Snickers—and they’re not for rent. Frost is a co-sponsor of An Act Prohibiting the Rental of Pets, now in committee in the state legislature, and he has the support of many members of Boston’s animal welfare community in his fight to render part-time pet ownership illegal.

Frost authored the bill after discovering that Flexpetz, a dog rental service that caters to wealthy professionals, planned to expand to Boston. From its current locations in Los Angeles, San Diego, and New York, Flexpetz adopts dogs from shelters and from families who say they can no longer care for them, and it rents them out for hefty fees.

How much is that doggy in the window? Clients pay $280 a month for the privilege of spending four days a month with the rescued canine of their choice. The service caters to dog-loving urbanites who, for a variety of reasons, cannot take care of a dog full-time, and the dogs are also available for adoption to renters who eventually want to commit.

Company founder Marlena Cervantes wants to bring Flexpetz to D.C. and London as well as Boston, but opponents are galvanizing in the Bay State. “Renting encourages us to think of all pets—rented, adopted or purchased—as ‘things’ we enjoy till they’re no longer cute, fun or convenient, then return, like DVDs or cars,” writes Brian Henderson at the webzine DogBoston. For his part, Frost told the Worcester Telegram that he normally “sides with the free market” but feels this is different. “I know what kind of bond there is with a dog. You don’t rent out members of your family.”

Baby Bust!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Dr. Love is struggling. Oh, the business side of things is going well. There’s the couples cruise, the magazine, the singles nights, the self-authored sex ideology he calls “bio-communication.” And the international media still can’t get enough of him: A few years back, seemingly every wire service in the world had a story on the young gynecologist’s forthcoming “super baby making show,” which would pit 10 couples against one another to see who could conceive first in a public assault on Singapore’s shockingly low fertility rate. As a government-backed baby booster for the island city-state, Wei Siang Yu just wants couples to work less and fornicate more. But try as he might, the good doctor can’t seem to coax Singapore’s child-free twentysomethings into bed.

Ask young women about Dr. Love, and you’ll get derisive giggles. Ask for his allegedly widely available pro-sex DVD at the local entertainment megastore, and the seller won’t have a clue. Ask one of the assistants at his home office whether young lovers actually rent out his bally-hooed procreation pad, which is dominated by a complicated looking “sex swing” and other accoutrements of venturesome lovemaking, and he’ll change the subject.

Dr. Love’s allies in the war on childlessness have fared no better. The Singaporean government’s official matchmaking agency, the SDU—the initials stand for Social Development Unit, but it’s known to snarky islanders as “Single, Desperate, and Ugly”—is situated just off the city-state’s main shopping thoroughfare, and it doesn’t seem nearly as popular as the nearby Emporio Armani.

These days the official slogan of Singapore’s baby-making campaign is “Three or More.” But Singaporeans of childbearing age grew up listening to an altogether different appeal: “Stop at Two.” As in much of East Asia, the tiny island’s population exploded after World War II—by more than 90 percent between 1957 and 1970 alone. In the Age of Aquarius, billboards and posters warned young couples “the more you have, the less they get” and “girl or boy, two is enough.” Parents who agreed to be sterilized after having two children got priority placement for their kids in elementary school.

Since then, demographic conditions have changed radically, but the state has maintained its intense interest in procreation. Singapore’s “total fertility rate,” a crude prediction of how many children a woman will bear in her lifetime if current patterns persist, is among the lowest in the world at 1.07, but the baby bust is not a future the island faces alone. From Hong Kong (0.98) to Italy (1.29) to Russia (1.39) to Canada (1.61), most of the world’s population will soon live in nations where the fertility rate is below the “replacement” level of 2.1. Governments far less authoritarian than Singapore’s are intruding into childbearing choices. After 200 years of exponential population growth, and just four decades after overpopulation doomsaying began filling the bestseller lists, the First World is suddenly gripped with underpopulation hysteria.

And everyone has an explanation for it.

“Europe is facing a demographic disaster,” said quondam Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in his February concession speech. “That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life, and eroded morality.”

The late Pope John Paul II agreed with America’s most famous Mormon, speaking of a “crisis of births.” On the liberal side you can find demographic thinkers such as Phillip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle, and the Australian demographer Peter McDonald, who argue that we’re headed for a dark future unless governments begin bestowing mothers with some serious baby shower gifts.

Books like P.D. James’ 1992 novel The Children of Men (made into a bleak film in 2007) join Mark Steyn’s America Alone in depicting a harsh and violent babyless landscape. Even in the United States, where population growth remains uniquely irrepressible among wealthy nations, ideologically driven concerns about demography have crept into the national conversation. They appear in the 2004 science fiction comedy Idiocracy, in which intelligent women and men, by failing to produce children, have doomed the world to collective mental incapacity by the 26th century (when the U.S. president is a porn star and the most popular TV show is Ow! My Balls!). They appear in the hysterical 2008 documentary Demographic Winter, in which we can watch a lone, naked boy shivering in an empty warehouse.

The developed world is experiencing a wave of pro-natalist sentiment that threatens to bully the childless, tax the single, and reorient states toward the production rather than the protection of citizens. In most developed nations with below-replacement fertility, governments are attempting to align incentives so that women will use their bodies for the purpose of childbirth. In the U.S., right-wing religious groups are calling for a rollback of contraceptive freedom and a return to patriarchal arrangements, all in the name of something called “demographic balance.”

It may sound like a movement of sorts, but it is far from cohesive. Although pro-natalists share an obsession with procreation, they are driven to this anxiety by a host of different fears. As a group, they worry that their countries are admitting too many immigrants, and too few; that we have liberated women too much, and not enough; that welfare states are too strong, and too weak. Pick any divisive social issue—a lack of religiosity, say, or an excess of the same—and you can find someone to draw the connection to demographic decline.

Modern fertility panic stems from a desire to reshape polyglot cultures, to regain control over women’s reproductive choices, and to locate a single, easy-to-understand culprit for disparate social problems. As they have for hundreds of years, societies are projecting their deepest anxieties onto empty wombs.

Bye-Bye Baby
If you’re a woman of childbearing age in a developed country, there’s a good chance your government will pay you to reproduce at the currently desirable rate. Russian women who opt for a second child receive a lump sum of 250,000 rubles ($9,200)—not bad compared to Poland’s going rate of a measly 1,000 zloty ($460) per kid. France and Sweden combine pro-natalist incentives with more traditional social welfare schemes. Fecund couples in Sweden, for instance, receive a combined 13 months of parental leave, 11 of which can be taken by one parent, and during which the government provides 80 percent of a parent’s former income. Parents collect 900 euros ($1,410) per year; bosses then must allow their employees to work part time for prorated pay once they become parents.

In May 2004 the Australian government tried to boost its birthrate of 1.76 by announcing that the parents of children born after July 1, 2004, would receive 3,000 Aussie dollars ($2,800). As Australian economists later noticed, pregnant women due in June did not leave it up to nature whether the maternal stipend would come to them; more babies were born on July 1, 2004, than on any day in the previous 30 years.

Singapore’s SDU offers a free government dating adviser who interviews young singles about themselves and their ideal partners. The adviser chooses a match, and the eligible bachelors watch videos of one another before agreeing to the date. Before the big night, both are offered makeovers, and the SDU gives free lectures on personal grooming. “Personal hygiene doesn’t end with a shower and clean clothes,” reads a helpful dating guide. “For close encounters between the sexes, oral hygiene cannot be ignored.…Extreme halitosis may require medical attention.” The largesse extends well past date night. First and second children bring in baby bonuses of 3,000 Singapore dollars ($2,200) each, while third and fourth children garner 6,000 Singapore dollars ($4,400) each. The government also matches parental investment in special children’s savings accounts, which can be used for day care or other child-related expenses, dollar for dollar.

In Singapore and elsewhere, the shift from baby boom to baby bust effected a remarkable role reversal among those obsessed with procreation. Pro-family conservatives went from reliably urging calm in the face of books like William Paddock’s Famine 1975!, which proposed a system of triage for dealing with inevitable mass starvation; to fanning the flames of birth-rate fear. Allan Carlson, the head of the World Congress of Families and long one of the most virulent opponents of United Nations population control policies, began telling audiences that “the demographic problem facing the twenty-first century is depopulation, not overpopulation.”

Of all the possible American narratives to explain fertility decline, none seems to hold more power than a story of leftist values leading inexorably to extinction. In March the Illinois-based Family First Foundation released a documentary called Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family. As a variety of experts explain our descent into extinction, the producers lay out their hypotheses in bullet points: Divorce, Working Women, Prosperity, The Sexual Revolution, and what’s termed “Ideologies.” Frolicking children fade and disappear into nothingness—a rapture of sorts visited upon us repeatedly throughout the film. Cohabitation, feminism, and pop culture do not fare particularly well. Our economies will fall apart—“Who will man the factories?” asks a tag line, a thought that should keep you up at night only if you suspect producers will die off while consumers live on. The Fall of Rome is invoked, the rise of “the East” mentioned more than once. Kay Hymowitz, a conservative social critic, describes the advent of the “man-child,” more interested in Maxim than procreation, as the film cuts to a man playing his Wii intently, his presumably childless wife looking on gloomily from the side.

Across the Atlantic, the British press is full of self-loathing op-ed pieces about a people too self-absorbed to reproduce. Representative articles include a Sunday Times article headlined “Sorry, baby, but our lifestyles come first” and a Daily Mail piece more directly entitled “Why ARE We Too Selfish to Have Children?”

Are lad mags and the Nintendo corporation responsible for a global decline in birthrates? Broadly, nations that are more developed (and therefore more likely to produce video games and men’s magazines) produce fewer children than less developed nations. But while Demographic Winter uses Europe as the ultimate cautionary tale, Europe’s current demographics largely contradict the idea that more socially conservative societies tend to produce more children.

Religion? It is the most religious European countries, such as Italy, that have the continent’s lowest fertility rates; secular Norway is just under replacement level. Working women? European countries with the highest work force participation rates, such as Sweden and Norway, tend to have higher fertility than those with a comparatively small percentage of women working, such as Greece.

Cohabitation? France, where shacking up is a social norm, has a higher fertility rate than any of its immediate neighbors. Family instability? In a forthcoming book, Demographic Challenges for the 21st Century, the demographer Tomas Sobotka argues that divorce rates in Europe might be positively correlated with birthrates. “Many countries which have advanced furthest in the decline of traditional family and the spread of less conventional and less stable living arrangements,” he writes, “record relatively high fertility when judged by contemporary European standards.” Low levels of economic development coupled with social conservatism may well produce high fertility levels; but in modern Europe, it seems that the combination of a modern economy and social conservatism may produce some of the lowest fertility levels on Earth.

In the first half of the 20th century, demographers generally held that urbanization, industrialization, and education were the chief determinants of fertility decline. Later, neoclassical economists hypothesized that the rate of decline would correlate with the rates of increase in the opportunity cost of women staying out of the work force and in the relative cost of raising children.

The latter theory is useful “as a way to structure thinking,” according to the American Enterprise Institute demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, but, as with nearly every theory of fertility, there is much that it fails to explain. The relative cost of having children is indeed very high in Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States, but these countries have markedly different birth rates. Nor does it explain why the birthrate is lower north of the Canadian border than south of it.

Strangest of all, total fertility rates are dropping most rapidly in predominantly rural countries with low female literacy rates and few work force opportunities. Dramatic drops in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, absent much economic development, have come as a surprise to economists and demographers alike. In 1970, according to the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, Bangladesh’s total fertility rate was 6.4. In 2006 it was 2.9. Zimbabwe’s rate dropped from 7.4 to 3.3 during the same period.

The theory that economic development leads to fertility decline breaks down at the very first demographic data point on record. The first country to enter a sustained fertility decline was not England, the cradle of the industrial revolution. “It was France!” exclaims Eberstadt. “France was rural and poor and was very largely illiterate and, not to put to fine a point on it, it was Catholic. That kind of confutes a lot of things we think are supposed to connect between modernization and fertility change.”

The Baby-Welfare State
The conservative narrative of fertility decline is part of the right’s culture war weaponry, engineered to find praise in the pages of Human Events and criticism in the pages of The Nation. But it’s more nostalgia than political program, a generalized condemnation of progress rather than a plan for the future. After a screening of Demographic Winter at the Heritage Foundation, a socially conservative D.C. think tank, a panel of enthusiastic commentators was asked how to achieve the massive cultural rollback required to stop collective extinction. Judging by the film’s logic, this would involve reversing the sexual revolution, bringing women back into the home, curtailing an ethic of individualism, and ending the welfare state. Most of the panelists had little to say. One piped in with “virtues education.”

Practically speaking, on the policy level, demographic panic is only useful for one purpose: the promotion of social welfare programs many social conservatives would oppose. From France to Poland to Singapore, governments are responding to low fertility with policies social democrats have always favored. Almost any aspect of the welfare state can be construed as encouraging procreation; more to the point, low fertility can be blamed on the lack of any particular social welfare program. A dearth of pregnancies is evidence that protections for workers are too few, social welfare allowances too small, public school days too short, mandated maternity leave too limited. Women want to fulfill their natural roles as mothers, goes the assumption, but dog-eat-dog capitalism stands in the way.

“Evidence reveals that, in most countries, most young people aspire to an enduring intimate relationship and to having children,” wrote Peter McDonald in an influential 2005 paper on fertility policy. “However, faced with the realities of the new social and economic world, many do not achieve these aspirations.” McDonald blames deregulation and “neoliberalism” for an environment hostile to procreation. “States,” he concludes tidily, “must be principal players in restoring the social balance.”

The contention that women aren’t having as many children as they’d like to is rooted in “desired fertility,” or the number of children women say they want as they enter their childbearing years. In Europe, as women increasingly choose to go childless, they continue to tell surveyors that they want two children. That disparity is sometimes deemed “unmet demand”; governments, goes the theory, must assist women in the quest to produce the children they say they want.

When the concept is framed this way, most of us have “unmet demand” for any number of goods—flat-screen televisions, yachts, MacBooks—that taxpayers fail to help us acquire. No one doubts that it is possible to structure incentives such that more women will use their bodies in the way politicians prefer, which is why many liberal arguments for pro-fertility policies are suspiciously self-affirming. Offered millions of dollars per birth, women would indeed go into labor more often. Pregnant women can then be cast as responding rationally to incentives or as “achieving their aspirations” to become a mother. The more relevant question, and the one rarely broached, is whether women who choose not to have children should be forced to subsidize those who do.

There is an alternative explanation for the behavior of young women who declare a desire for two children yet go on to have one or none: Women may be telling pollsters what they think the pollsters want to hear, or simply reciting lines memorized from cultural scripts. “The answers may reflect mere stereotypes,” wrote the demographers Gustavo De Santis and Massimo Livi Bacci in a 2001 study, “and not constitute any reliable guide of people’s true preferences or intentions for the future.” The two-child norm, they add, “generally prevails in our times.” Men and women may continue to idealize the nuclear family—one boy, one girl—well beyond its heyday.

At the moment, small cash handouts do not appear to be doing much to increase birthrates across Europe and Asia. More-sophisticated attempts to reduce the burdens of working mothers, such as subsidized day care or regulations regarding the status of part-time workers, may raise birthrates very slightly, but there is no consensus on whether they are effective. Birthrates rise and fall, and it’s difficult to establish causality even when fertility rates shoot up after a policy goes into effect.

Michael Teitelbaum, a historian of demography, says he knows of only two places where pro-natalist policies have achieved real long-term results. One was communist East Germany, where wages were kept so low that the government could afford to pay baby bonuses that amounted to one-third of what a woman would have made working that year. The other was communist Romania, where dictator Nicolae Ceausescu outlawed contraception and abortion in October 1966 without warning. The resulting spike in birth rates was the largest in recorded history. That worked for about a decade, says Teitelbaum, “until people reconstructed their illegal ways of controlling their fertility.”

Birthrate Pangs
Depopulation panic isn’t new. It’s merely making a comeback after a long, anomalous period of overpopulation panic. Waves of birthrate anxiety swept through France at the beginning of the 19th century and the United States between the world wars. Today’s developed-world worries are in one sense very understandable: No one alive today can remember a time when the global population was not on the rise. Growth has become the norm, and that norm may change in the foreseeable future. “When [growth] goes negative even a tiny amount,” says Teitelbaum, “some people immediately say, well, this is a quantum, dramatic shift in what it means to be a human society.”

Quantum or otherwise, a demographic shift does require adjustment, notably of pension programs that are built on faulty assumptions of endless expansion. Fertility declines alter the basic age structure of a society, much as the baby boom did a half-century ago. Neither gradual declines nor gradual increases in population need be destructive, but the former will require concrete changes in redistribution schemes and a reshuffling of resources.

For those who, with good reason, worry about the solvency of transfer programs in an age of population decline, replacement immigration looks like a partial solution, and therefore xenophobia is part of the problem. But for many if not most of the people preoccupied by fertility rates, immigration is no solution at all. The question isn’t about whether the United States, Singapore, or France will be without people in 2100; it’s about what kind of people will populate those countries: what they will look like, what they will teach in their schools, what God they will bow before. Mark Steyn’s America Alone warns that within a few generations Europe will be a Muslim continent. When Pat Buchanan discusses depopulation in The Death of the West, he does not proceed to suggest we replace children of European descent with Mexican laborers. Pro-natalist policies in Quebec, Singapore, and until recently Israel implicitly target a preferred ethnic group, attempting to fill the future with the demographics desired by the current political class.

Michael Teitelbaum and Jay Winter have another explanation for the current fertility panic. “Such worries seem to crop up at predictable moments,” they wrote in a response to Phillip Longman in the September 2004 Foreign Affairs, arguing that “when a dominant political or economic power begins to feel unsure of its mastery and uncertain about the future, many thinkers turn to demography for an explanation of its plight.”

In times of collective insecurity, empty wombs are cast as either a cause or a symptom of a state supposedly in decline. In their 1985 book The Fear of Population Decline, Teitelbaum and Winter say pro-natalism became a French obsession after Germany invaded France in the late 19th century. Emile Zola’s 1899 novel Fecondite is a 19th-century version of Demographic Winter, no less subtle in its message or gentle in its warning. Zola tells the story of a factory worker named Mathieu Froment and his wife, Marianne, who reproduce at a rate that alarms their individualistic, selfish, and more prosperous neighbors. A bourgeois accountant at the factory equates fertility with poverty. Naturally, his wife dies during a botched abortion. Mathieu’s employer mocks the highly fertile, avoids reproduction, and espouses neo-Malthusianism; his single son becomes a murderer and his wife goes mad and dies. The Angelins, a pair of individualists, decide to put off parenthood; Mme. Angelin dies childless, penniless, and thoroughly disgraced. Through it all, the noble Froments continue to multiply. “At one point,” Teitelbaum and Winter note, “Marianne delivers at the rate of one child every two pages.”

Fear of invasion is a theme running straight through the historical narrative of fertility alarmism. It’s no coincidence that the first great wave of American immigration coincided with a period of heightened maternalist rhetoric. President Theodore Roosevelt was particularly concerned about the “race suicide” of white Protestants. “The severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility,” he said in 1910, shortly after his second term had ended. “The first essential in any civilization is that the man and woman shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease.”

Periods of anxiety over “race suicide” are rarely good times for women. Protestants who were worried about the rising tide of foreign Catholics passed anti-abortion laws in the 1880s that endured until 1973, when Roe v. Wade limited their scope. Embracing historical continuity with the nativists who came before him, Mark Steyn takes time in America Alone to blame women for aborting the generation that might have stood between us and the coming Islamification of the West. It’s not surprising at all that the single greatest social anxiety of our time has been reduced to crude demographic projections that pin the blame on empty wombs.

Slippery Science
In 1960 Princeton demographers sought to buttress current population theory in one of the most ambitious demographic projects ever. The European Fertility Project, led by Ansley Coale, collected massive amounts of data from city registers and church basements and mapped fertility rates in 600 European provinces.

The problem: No extant theory would hold the disparate results together. “They ran into a lot of brick walls,” says Eberstadt. “This pattern of diffusion of fertility decline didn’t make a lot of sense to labor force specialists or to industrialization specialists. Then some specialist said, ‘Oh! I see what you have there; you have a map of the language families of modern Europe.’” People who spoke the same language, the researchers found, tended to enter fertility decline at around the same time. Women were having fewer children because their friends were having fewer children. It’s a completely fascinating and utterly question-begging conclusion. What domino sets off the cascade of childlessness?

“The problem,” the historian Charles Tilly writes in the introduction to Historical Studies of Changing Fertility, “is that we have too many explanations which are individually plausible in general terms, which contradict each other to some degree, and which fail to fit some significant part of the facts.”

The result is a plethora of explanatory narratives, some with more predictive power than others but none totally satisfying. What’s more, the “ideal fertility rate” itself is a matter of ideological preference. “It’s not obvious to me what the ‘right’ level for birthrates is for any country,” says Eberstadt. “It is obvious to me what the right direction for mortality is. The right direction is down. But fertility is a much more complicated story.” There isn’t even a consensus about the relationship between population growth and economic growth. Theoretically, individual incomes can continue to rise as the population falls.

The answer is likely to be a complex combination of theories we already have—sociological, anthropological, and economic. In the midst of so many plausible causes, it’s tempting to search for a narrative that conforms to previously held convictions or confirms long-held anxieties. The search for a valueless science of demography continues to be conducted in vain, and the very language we use to discuss falling birthrates is loaded with unscientific judgment. Nations are not just depopulating; they are “dying,” “decaying,” even “autogenocidal.” Fertility rates don’t just decline; they “collapse.” Our future is “barren,” a “demographic winter” marked by “sterility” and “senescence.”

Bogus fears about fertility decline don’t preclude justified ones, and current rates of fertility pose real, though not obviously catastrophic, challenges. In a shrinking society that refuses to welcome more immigrants or reform population-dependent social programs, something will have to give. Cash handouts for kids are a far cry from the more coercive pro-natalist policies of Ceausescu and Mussolini, and pro-fertility policies will cease to provoke charges of totalitarianism when they are wrapped into larger social welfare policies. Many changes sold as supportive of working women, such as extending the public school day to conform with work hours, are often defended on their own merits as well.

But as pro-baby policies are inevitably sold as pro-mother, and by extension pro-woman, it’s worth recalling the sentiment behind the Australian birth premiums and Singaporean matchmaking schemes. At the heart of any fertility incentive lies an attempt to encourage a particular group of women to orient their bodies in a traditional way. Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society’s ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation. From Poland to Singapore, swollen wombs are a bulwark against change.

There is a reason we speak of “Mother Russia” and “Mother India.” Feminist sociologists such as Nira Yuval-Davis refer to women as the “boundary markers” of a state or society. While men may leave, fight, and be compromised, women represent purity and continuity. Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys’ motto was: “Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing.” For girls: “Be faithful; be pure; be German.” Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.

In times of great social anxiety, we see new calls for women to return to home and hearth—calls alternately cast as a return to tradition and as a progressive leap forward, but efforts, nonetheless, to enlist women in a national project while defining the boundaries of national inclusion. Depopulation is not a given, but ideologically fraught and scientifically questionable debates about gender, race, and culture will be with us no matter which way the population swings. “To know what demography is, we need to know what a population is,” the French social scientist Herve Le Bras wrote in The Invention of Populations. “That is where the trouble begins.”

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at reason.

'Our Flag Is Hip-Hop'

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Kids' Stuff

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

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Kidneys for Sale

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

“What can Iran teach us about good governance?” is not a question often posed in Washington. But according to Benjamin Hippen, a transplant nephrologist in North Carolina, the Iranians have managed to do something American policy makers have long thought impossible: They’ve found kidneys for every single citizen in need.

As Hippen explains in a March report for the Cato Institute, the Iranian government has been paying kidney donors since 1988. To avoid potential conflicts of interest, donors and recipients work through an independent organization known as the Dialysis and Transplant Patient Association. Donors approach the association on their own; they cannot be recruited by physicians or referred by brokers with financial incentives. They receive $1,200 and limited health coverage from the government, in addition to direct remuneration from the recipient—or, if the recipient is impoverished, from one of several charitable organizations. The combination of charitable and governmental payments ensures that poor recipients are treated as well as wealthy ones.

Critics of organ markets often claim that where payments are permitted, altruistic donation will drop off. Hippen found this is not the case in Iran. The country’s deceased donor program, started in 2000, has grown steadily alongside paid donation. (Posthumous donations are not remunerated.) During the last eight years, deceased donations have increased tenfold.

Data on the long-term health of Iranian kidney doors is mixed and inconclusive, so Hippen recommends that any U.S. system closely track donors and provide them with lifelong health care. Since many potential kidney recipients are currently surviving on vastly more expensive dialysis treatment (paid for by Medicare), providing donors with long-term health care is probably more cost-effective than the status quo.

American critics continue to lament that Iran failed to adopt the U.S. policy of banning payment for organs in the mid-1980s. “Carrying this reasoning to its conclusion,” writes Hippen, “would entail admitting that in so doing, Iran would have also incurred our current shortage of organs, our waiting list mortality, and our consequent moral complicity in generating a state of affairs that sustains an international market in illegal organ trafficking.” No other country has managed to eliminate its kidney waiting list; the U.S. has a list 73,000 patients long. Who should be advising whom?

Collectivist Genes

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Are bullying, haranguing, collectivists just expressing adaptive evolutionary behavior? A new paper in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B suggests that when societies are hostile to individualism, sexual selection may be to blame.

Jumping off a growing body of research linking cultural traits to disease risk, the study’s lead author, University of New Mexico biologist Corey L. Fincher, hypothesizes that collectivist behaviors evolved to protect populations from illness. Both ethnocentricism, which discourages contact with disease-carrying outsiders, and conformity, which encourages the transmission of risk-averse behaviors, can serve as buffers against disease. Individualism may be adaptive in that it encourages innovation, but safe, wary behavior could prove more important where pathogens are prevalent.

Fincher and his three co-authors compared data on individualist vs. collectivist values across the globe with data on historical and contemporary measures of disease transmission. Controlling for other factors that may cause cultures to become more individualistic, such as income and urbanization, the researchers found that “worldwide variation in pathogen prevalence substantially predicted societal tendencies toward individualism/collectivism.” In other words, societies living in regions where infectious diseases historically have posed the biggest threats were most likely to discourage individualism. Societies most open to contact with outsiders live in regions where such contact poses the least threat of infection.

The correlation doesn’t explain how these behaviors are passed along through generations. Transmission may be cultural, as with methods of food preparation that guard against infection, or heritable, as a selection process weeds out anti-collectivist tendencies. Either way, the effect is likely to weaken as medicine reduces the risk of infection—good news for individualists, or anyone who dares stray from the tribe.

Cyclones and Sanctions

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

In the mid 1950s, denizens of Burma, Thailand, and South Korea were about equally wealthy, but one nation seemed especially likely to prosper. In contrast to the others, Burma was already an exporter of rice and oil, had a relatively high literacy rate, and seemed well on its way toward a parliamentary system of government. It was full of teak, gems, and rich soil. As David Steinberg points out in Burma: The State of Myanmar, any observer “would have pointed to Burma as the potential economic and political leader of the three.” War-torn, resource-poor South Korea “would not have been a contender in anyone’s imagination.” In 2006, South Korea’s GNP per capita was $24,500; Burma’s was $1,800.

Look closely enough at the pictures of destruction wrought by Cyclone Nargis, and you begin to realize how very little there was to destroy. There, a bamboo house in shambles; here, a thatch roof torn off; there, a dirt road obscured by scattered palm fronds. When the cyclone struck, tens of thousands of people had no solid structure to cling to, and the cyclone’s ghastly death toll is as much a function of the country’s poverty as is the storm’s strength. Had the same cyclone hit the prosperous Burma that might have been, the death toll would have been far less dramatic.

The South Korea comparison matters because Burmese poverty is so often treated as an inevitability rather than a byproduct of bad governance. The imprisonment of activist Aung San Suu Kyi is well known and roundly denounced; the junta’s punishing monetary policy, which maintains an official exchange rate 200 times lower than the market rate in order to benefit state-owned businesses, is less often noted. Burma’s banking system is barely functional, and the government tightly controls trade. According to the Progressive Policy Institute, Burmese rice exports have dropped by 99 percent since 1950. The junta says it is committed to a market-oriented economy, but it has reversed most of the gestures it has made in that direction.

No one is nominating Than Shwe, Burma's military leader, for Administrator of the Year, and it’s not news that the junta has been the cause of suffering. But Burma’s poverty, and the deaths it causes in the best of monsoon seasons, is at the center of a significant debate about the way the West should approach Myanmar. The most extreme advocates of Burmese sanctions, among them Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), tend to assume that the lives of Burmese people cannot improve without regime change. Economic development is being held hostage to political reform, but there is little reason to expect political reform any time soon.

“I am new to work on Burma, but in my eight weeks of involvement to date I am finding the world of Burma advocacy rigid and doctrinal,” writes Joel Charny, Vice President for Policy at Refugees International, on the organization’s blog. “There is just one overarching narrative: the struggle of the Burmese democracy movement, led by Nobel Peace Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, against the repressive Burmese generals.”

Based on the assumption that Burma must change politically before it can engage economically, American Burma activists support sanctions and isolation, and many are skeptical of independent humanitarian work. “The Burma solidarity adherents often evoke ‘the courageous Burmese people’ to support the aid embargo,” Charny continues. “This is an easy rhetorical device, and may sound plausible, but it is based on discussions with a narrow set of political actors, most of them outside the country.”

On the flip side, development advocates claim that sanctions and aid restrictions have had no discernible benefit for the Burmese, the majority of whom make less than $200 a year. The National League for Democracy is weak and disorganized, and so dependent on Suu Kyi that it seems unable to operate when she is under house arrest. Our refusal to trade with the Burmese has brought democracy no closer to realization.

Sanctions are a sacrifice we make on behalf of other people; we have volunteered the Burmese to undergo painful economic deprivation in the hope that poverty will drive them to a better future. It hasn't worked, whether because Burma's neighbors have rejected the U.S. approach or because the United States never had much economic leverage in the first place. An alternative approach, one that does not assume the Burmese people’s assent in a scheme to impoverish them, involves coaxing the regime toward basic economic reforms that would at least allow Burma’s rice farmers to move out of their bamboo-and-thatch homes in preparation for the next monsoon season.

Cyclone Nargis is no longer just a natural disaster, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared on May 17^th as the junta continued to refuse to allow food and medical supplies to reach victims: “It is being made into a man-made catastrophe.” But Cyclone Nargis was a “man-made catastrophe” the moment the first shoddily built shack was swept out to sea. Burma is poor because it has been made so, and the military has been isolating and impoverishing the country for 45 years now. Why are we helping them?

Kerry Howley is a reason senior editor.

Sin Tax Creep

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:45:00 EDT

Led by the state’s Sierra Club, New Mexico’s “No Child Left Inside” movement aims to provide school kids with a variety of outdoor education programs. Since the fund will need money, environmental groups are looking to taxpayers for support. And since public health programs are increasingly funded through sin taxes, states have gone fishing for a sin.

Instead of piling on the usual culprits, alcohol and tobacco, the coalition wants to impose a 1 percent tax on television sets and video games, agents of vice that presumably leave children inside. (Other politicians want to use such gimmicks to require kids to stay inside. In December a Wisconsin state senator proposed a video game tax to fund a juvenile detention program.)

Supporters of the proposed New Mexico tax say it will raise $4 million, which would go toward busing students to state parks and training teachers to integrate outdoor learning into their lesson plans. The boost in visitor numbers would be conveniently timed for state parks, where attendance has been waning nationwide. Kids are a captive audience during school hours, which means they’re available to boost meager attendance numbers—and park budgets. Prying them from their video games after hours, though, will be a tougher sell.

Data: Arrivals Down, Panic Up

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

A new report from the Immigration Policy Center reminds us that immigrant arrivals have been down since well before the current eruption of nativist sentiment. The annual flow of immigrants to the United States was at its height in 2000. The Census Bureau and Social Security Administration predict it will continue to decline until at least 2015.

According to the study’s author, University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers, “proponents of the negative story of the immigrant future have ignored this recent leveling and decline. Instead, they have averaged data from the last 12 to 14 years and concluded that immigration is continuing at record levels.” Myers notes that the flow to gateway states like California is way down. Immigrants are instead heading straight to places such as Missouri and the Carolinas, where they’re finding jobs and forming small communities.

Walls of Paper

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

“There is a smart way to protect our borders, and there is a dumb way to protect our borders,” Hillary Clinton explained at a February debate in Austin. Obama agreed. The smart way, he added, involves “deploying effective technology.” The “dumb” way, which both Obama and Clinton voted for, involves building a hideous steel barrier on land taken from inconveniently situated Texans.

Thus has advanced our immigration debate since the great failure of comprehensive reform in 2007. Walls are for neanderthals. Civilized people do not try to keep poor, entrepreneurial, much-needed workers out of the country with bricks and mortar; rather, they achieve this through the use of technology. On this, all three prospective presidential candidates agree. Each supports an expanded employment verification program, which would involve a hugely expensive surveillance apparatus and bureaucracy in order to monitor the employment choices of every American and foreign national. What an appalled ACLU calls “a permission slip to work” has come to represent the middle ground, though it’s likely to be far more devastating than any fence.

A bill known as the SAVE Act (Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act of 2007) represents an extreme version of this fantasy, a barrier built of paper and databases rather than mere concrete. The bill’s co-sponsors, Democrat Heath Shuler and Republican Tom Tancredo, are currently attempting to force a vote on the issue by collecting signatures for a discharge petition. If they succeed, they’ll force reluctant legislators into the awkward position of voting on an unworkable bill that seems, at first glance, a reasonable attempt to enforce the law.

Fewer than one percent of American employers currently use the E-verify system, which checks the immigration status of American and foreign workers against imperfect federal databases. By all accounts, the Social Security Administration is struggling under this burden; SAVE would increase the number of users by around 13000 percent (pdf). Every employer would be forced to send information about every potential hire, citizen or otherwise, to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which would send the information on to the Social Security Administration, which would send the information back to USCIS. In cases where either agency finds a discrepancy, USCIS will issue a “temporary non-confirmation” that the worker can in theory contest within eight days. Given the 4.1 percent error rate of the SSA database, millions of legal workers may have to fight for the right to accept a job. According to the agency, 17.8 million of its records contain discrepancies, and most of those pertain to citizens.

Employers are not supposed to act when presented with a “temporary non-confirmation”; they’re supposed to relay information to employees, allow employees to contest the finding, and wait for another response from DHS. But the costs of E-verify are significant even when it functions properly, and waiting around while potential hires wrestle with data snags is even costlier. From the perspective of an employer with a bunch of interchangeable potential hires, it's most efficient to simply run everyone through the system and fail to hire people with problematic records. Pre-employment screening is illegal, but a study commissioned by the DHS last year found that nearly half of participating employers were ignoring at least some mandated worker protections.

While undocumented workers probably contribute more in federal taxes than they consume in federal services, no one doubts that they pose some fiscal burden to border communities where they arrive. Still, you’d have to take an improbably extreme view of these costs to deem the SAVE Act fiscally rational. According to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf), the act would decrease federal revenues by $17.3 billion between 2009 and 2018 as formerly tax-paying workers go underground. The costs of expanding E-verify and a bunch of other goodies stuffed into SAVE (thousands more border agents, a program to recruit former members of the armed forces to join the border patrol, more SUVs and unmanned aerial vehicles, hundreds of full time immigration investigators, expanded immigration detention centers) come to $23.4 billion in discretionary spending during the same period. And that doesn’t touch the cost to individual employers, who are being slapped with a huge regulatory burden in the midst of impending recession.

No presidential candidate has come out in favor of Schuler’s bill, most likely because the bill includes no avenue for undocumented workers who wish to become legal. Herein lies the ambitious stupidity of SAVE: If the bill works as intended, it will instantly turn the population of 12 million undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal into 12 million unemployed undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal. For a political constituency constantly worried about “anarchy,” this does not appear to be an ideal situation.

The SAVE Act may or may not come to a vote this session, but employment verification will almost certainly be a part of future compromise legislation on immigration reform. That's worrying. Walls offend us aesthetically and symbolically; they’re clumsy and primitive and cruel. But they’re also easy to tear down; far easier than a slowly metastasizing system of total employment surveillance, of growing databases and expanding bureaucracies.

In the end, E-verify will not “turn off the tap,” “dry up the pool of jobs,” or “turn off the magnet.” It will simply encourage workers underground, where they will be more vulnerable to abuse and less likely to pay taxes. But SAVE’s supporters may be doing more than they know to slow the flow of willing workers into the United States. Rises and falls in the flow of undocumented immigrants do not track enforcement efforts; they track the state of the U.S. economy. If legislators manage to quicken the onset of recession by reducing the flexibility of American employers, draining billions in tax revenue, and preventing Americans from going to work, they'll get exactly what they've been wishing for.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor of reason.

"Our Flag is Hip Hop"

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

At the beginning of the documentary Planet B-Boy, as several hip-hop veterans offer a breezy history of breakdance, a not-to-be-messed-with French street dancer describes a transformational filmic experience. “Flashdance,” he says, and pauses to hold back tears, “It’s personally emotional for me.” A Japanese b-boy, recalling his first viewing of the film, is reduced to “wow.” An earnest German promoter confirms that the 1983 film, which includes scenes with the breakdance pioneers Rock Steady Crew, had pan-European influence. In bringing an urban American art form to Seoul, Paris, and Capetown, Flashdance planted the seeds of a subculture all over the map. Jennifer Beals, apparently, is an effective conduit for the culture of the South Bronx.

The term b-boy identifies hip-hop-obsessed dancers who have devoted themselves to breakdancing. Today, that word holds currency in a number of languages, and Benson Lee’s Planet B-Boy follows French, Japanese, Korean and American dance crews from their home countries to a global competition in Braunshweig, Germany. Whereas The Freshest Kids, another recent documentary on b-boy culture, located the history and early evolution of breakdancing in the black and Puerto Rican communities of the South Bronx, Lee is less interested in where that culture came from than where it has gone. New York figures only as a dusty museum for the form’s history.

Instead of New York’s Rock Steady Crew, then, we meet Phase-T, a crew from the working class suburb of Chelles, France. The crew includes nine solid French North Africans and one tiny white kid dubbed “Lil’ Kev,” a freakishly talented dancer whom they toss around like a beach ball. Sitting beside her son, Lil’ Kev’s mother explains what she first thought of his new friends in hip-hop: “noir, noir, noir!” As he cringes beneath a cocked baseball cap, she explains that she’s not as racist anymore, and she no longer fears his friends or his chosen life trajectory. But she and her husband would be “very proud” if he decided to be a fireman instead.

Battle of the Year, the competition that grounds the film, forces a post-national phenomenon into a nationalized framework. Preliminary competitions take place at the country level, so each team bears the responsibility of representing its respective country. Phase-T is a team of chiefly African descent that has mastered an American art form to perform under a French flag. As charming a story of globalization as that might be, there is something profoundly incongruous about performing as anti-authoritarian and expressive an art as breakdancing under any flag at all. That tension emerges throughout the film, as b-boys alternately embrace the competitive playbook handed them and struggle under its weight. “We can’t say the phrase ‘French culture’ really represents us,” says one of Phase-T’s dancers. “Our flag is hip-hop.”

Cho Sung Gook knows something about national pride; his disapproving, working class father works as a flag distributor for the Korean government “to help establish our national identity.” And for Cho's crew, Last for One, the burdens of national identity are something like a ticking clock. Each will have to serve Korea’s required two years of military service, and like any athletes at the top of their form, they won’t be able to simply pick up where they left off. “You lose everything you work for when you go to the army,” explains a crew member, “so we have to take it to the extreme before we go.”

The crew feels dismissed and ignored by mainstream Korea, by parents who think they are “cleaning the floor or something” when they’re handspringing through subways. And given their living conditions—six to a room in Seoul—cleaning floors might seem a safer financial strategy than hoping that Korea suddenly starts paying to watch its breakdancers.

Ambivalent as the dancers are, they’re clearly brimming with national pride as they gear up to compete with Japan. When the film was shot, the Koreans were the reigning world champions, a showy Korean crew called Gamblerz having won the year before. The Gamblerz 2005 show may qualify as the oddest performance in the history of hip-hop. The crew splits into two groups and reenacts “the history of Korea” through six minutes of b-boy battling, one side representing the South and one the North. In the end, the sides are reconciled, and the crew springs into the eerily perfect synchrony that only the Koreans seem able to pull off.

Cho's father is deeply worried about his son’s financial prospects as a dancer; an American crew member’s father, by contrast, simply advises him to “rip that shit.” The locus of American breakdancing has shifted to Las Vegas—arguably where natural born showmen belong—and most of the crew is Hispanic. The Americans, too, feel the pull of national pride, and their relationship to national identity is no less complex. They don’t seem to register any dissonance when one of them argues that “we created this thing” and “it’s time to bring it back to the U.S.” Nor should they: That the descendents of Hispanic immigrants from the Southwest are defending the mantle of a culture developed by blacks in the Bronx of the 70s makes a kind of sense.

Like any great, populist dance film, Planet B-Boy ends with a battle. For nearly two decades, unremarkable Braunschweig has been home to the “battle of the year,” where crews from 20 or so nations fling themselves across a stage in tightly choreographed interpretations of American street battle. All share a superhuman athleticism; they’re as comfortable windmilling around on the palms of their hands as on the soles of their feet, jumping backward onto their forearms and springing forward in synchronized slow motion. The French, in the words of one promoter, have an unmatched sensitivity for music and flow. The Japanese dream up the most innovative, conceptually complex show. The Americans have a knack for individualizing their dancers, shaping characters out of movement. The Koreans dominate the competition with a combination of robot-like synchrony and gymnastic prowess. And the founder of the competition, the guy in charge of the logistics? German.

Clearly, Americans no longer own the dance. Some of the most poignant moments of the film come as Korean crew perform in Germany and the camera lingers on the Vegas crew’s faces. Their eyes are tinged with fear, their mouths slightly open. Afterward, one manages to offer a half-hearted pep talk. Their show is just “different,” he explains, “Hopefully the judges don’t just want to see…some amazing shit.”

The judges do want to see some amazing shit, which is why the Korean team "Last for One" emerges victorious. A first place finish at the competition at last gives Cho's crew some commercial viability, and in the film’s last scenes, the crew is shown flipping its way through shows in front of Korean crowds, at the World Cup, and—improbably—in a commercial for Korean tourism.

Planet B-Boy starts out as a film about the postnational flag of hip-hop, but its avatars are too adaptive to let a tidy narrative of global unity win the day. In the end, they manage to stretch the boundaries of old identities, finding room for a bastardized version of an American ghetto art form in the very definition of contemporary Korean culture. It’s surely possible to argue that a once-defiant art form is really and truly dead when it has been vetted by the Korean tourism board. But as one of breakdancing’s pioneers describes hip hop’s early days, “We were naming moves on the spot, making up the rules as we went along.”

When the old moves go stale, new ones emerge. There will be more b-boys, from more cultures, to dream up new rules in post-national street battles to come.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor of reason.

Cigar Bar

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:48:00 EST

In 2003 President George W. Bush ordered the Department of Homeland Security to tighten enforcement of the U.S. embargo against Cuba. Now the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the effort going into policing Cuban cigars might be reducing the security of the homeland.

A November GAO report finds that Miami International Airport personnel are so occupied by seizing “small amounts of Cuban tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical products” that they have little time left to look for “terrorists, criminals, and inadmissible aliens.” While only 3 percent of non-Cuban international arrivals are subjected to secondary inspections at the airport, 20 percent of Cuban arrivals wait in line to be searched again. The eight daily flights from Cuba demand most Homeland Security resources at the airport, one of the busiest in the nation.

Yet the Bush administration keeps demanding tighter controls, worsening the strain on Miami’s airport. In addition to the 2003 order requiring additional inspections, the administration broadened the scope of the embargo in 2004. Permitted family visits were slashed from once every 12 months to once every three years. Americans visiting family in Cuba were required to obtain licenses to travel and were told they could spend only $50 per day. A special license allowing extra family visits in case of humanitarian need was eliminated. A $100 limit on the importation of Cuban products for personal consumption was cut to $0. The new restrictions increased the chances of embargo violations, creating more work for Homeland Security.

It’s not that officials aren’t finding plenty of contraband. In a six-month period between 2006 and 2007, they seized small amounts of tobacco and other Cuban goods on 1,500 occasions—three times the number of non-Cuban seizures. One reason for the widespread noncompliance is what the GAO diplomatically calls “divided public opinion” about the increased restrictions.

But the administration doesn’t seem concerned about objections to its policies. Fifty-five years into the Cuban embargo, it is now exploring ways to further tighten the trade and travel ban.

Huzza for Commerce!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:10:00 EST