Rad Geek People's Daily

Listening to: 1A (25-Jan-2020), Get In Line: What It Takes To Legally Immigrate To The United States

… But every day, millions of people contend with the U.S.’ legal immigration system. Many have been living and working in America for years, stuck in residency limbo as they contend with an alphabet soup of visas and green cards and a system congested with red tape and long wait times.

An immigrant [from India] who applies for a green card today can expect to wait in line for 50 years.

— NPR, Get In Line: What It Takes To Legally Immigrate To The United States
1A, 25 January 2020

The half-century queue for permanent legal status is, of course, the direct result of the predictable, runaway overwhelming of an insanely restrictive system of immigration caps and national quotas. In the early 1920s, the U.S. created a madly restrictive system of immigration limits organized around a nativist and racist system of national-origins quotas.^[1] This was widely understood to have been a mistake by 1965 — so in order to fix the system, they kept the insanely low caps on the total levels of authorized immigration, but they (thankfully finally) permitted Asiatic nations like India and China finally to claim their shares^[2]; then they also (for the first time) imposed the same system of insanely restrictive caps on Mexico and the rest of Latin America.^[3] Then, just to make things fair, they reallocated the national quotas so that every country, from Liechenstein to Honduras to the entire Republic of India, gets an equal sliver of the total. The completely predictable result has been that high-emigration countries have been accumulating runaway backlogs of applications. In theory there is a queue; in practice, the queue has become so mind-breakingly long that many 25 year olds seeking legal status now cannot reasonably expect to ever get a shot at naturalization unless they survive years beyond the average human life expectancy.

There is some discussion in the show about proposed ways to fix the system; mostly in the form of debates about how to reallocate the shares of the insanely low limit on total immigration so that countries with more demand for permanent-residency visas can get access to more permanent-residency visas per year. But the problem is not the allocation of shares among different nationalities of immigrants. The problem is that immigration is deliberately kept to a minuscule level that is wildly, completely out of touch with the realities of global migration, the number of people who are looking to come to the U.S. and with the level of demand and number of opportunities for immigrant workers, students and families within the U.S. The solution is not to reallocate the quotas again, according to some other rule, but to get rid of the caps and quotas entirely. There is no good or sensible way to triage something that people can and ought to have by right. There’s no fair method for rationing access to something that shouldn’t even be scarce in the first place.

1. ^[1]1921: The national-origins system was debuted in the Emergency Quota Act; 1924: The system was regularized and made even more restrictive under the Immigration Act of 1924. The idea behind the act was, explicitly, to reduce the rate of demographic change in the U.S. and to keep undesirables out of the country, notably Asians and Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and the Weimar Republic.↩
2. ^[2]Nearly all immigrants from every Asian country had been barred entirely under a pair of racist provisions of the old system — one of them forbidding immigration from China or from anywhere in the Asiatic Barred Zone, and another forbidding immigration by any alien ineligible to citizenship, which under the racial prerequisites embedded in U.S. Naturalization laws amounted to forbidding Asians on racial grounds.↩
3. ^[3]Immigrants from Western Hemisphere countries used to be non-quota immigrants under the old system. Although they were subjected to a number of other costs and restrictions, which allowed for frequent large-scale harassment, round-ups, and deportations during times of anti-immigrant backlash, they were not subject to any hard cap on numbers, in the way that Eastern Hemisphere countries were, until after the 1965 reform.↩

The Preface of Lyrical Ballads (1800) is best known and most quoted for its declaration that all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. This is often taught mistakenly as if it were a definition of poetry (it’s not intended as a definition of what poetry is, but as a description of how good poetry is supposed to be composed). It’s also usually mentioned as a sort of campaign-button slogan for literary Romanticism, and in particular for the Romantics’ tilt toward the indulgence of emotion or raw passion over thought and consideration. But re-read it in context: the Writer of the Preface^[1] really first introduces the phrase to make quite a different point, — if not exactly the 180-degree opposite point, then at least one at a very obtuse angle, — to the usual English lesson-plan take on Romanticism’s literary manifesto:

I cannot be insensible of the present outcry against the triviality and meanness both of thought and language, which some of my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical compositions; and I acknowledge that this defect where it exists, is more dishonorable to the Writer’s own character than false refinement or arbitrary innovation, though I should contend at the same time that it is far less pernicious in the sum of its consequences. From such verses the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at least by one mark of difference, that each of them has a worthy purpose. Not that I mean to say, that I always begin to write with a distinct purpose formally conceived; but I believe that my habits of meditation have so formed my feelings, as that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; but though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply. . . .

— Preface (1800) to Lyrical Ballads, Vol. II. (Boldface mine.)

The Writer goes on to argue for a nuanced view of the interrelation of thought and feeling under the influence of long-cultivated habits:

. . . For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to men, so by the repetition and continuance of this act feelings connected with important subjects will be nourished, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much organic sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced that by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits we shall describe objects and utter sentiments of such a nature and in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, his taste exalted, and his affections ameliorated.

— Preface (1800) to Lyrical Ballads, Vol. II.

He believed that it was necessary to assert this view against a problem of over-stimulation and over-indulgence, and that a great deal of the problem was down to cities and down to nations (or, down to urban ways of living and down to the absorbing clamor of national politics):

I will not suffer a sense of false modesty to prevent me from asserting, that I point my Reader’s attention to this mark of distinction far less for the sake of these particular Poems than from the general importance of the subject. The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know that one is being elevated above another in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. . . .

— Preface (1800) to Lyrical Ballads, Vol. II.

He had some opinions on what this meant for contemporary trends in popular entertainment, but remained hopeful:

. . . The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespear and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse. — When I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble effort with which I have endeavoured to counteract it; and reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonorable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it which are equally inherent and indestructible; and did I not further add to this impression a belief that the time is approaching when the evil will be systematically opposed by men of greater powers and with far more distinguished success.

— Preface (1800) to Lyrical Ballads, Vol. II.

1. ^[1]William Wordsworth. The first volume of Lyrical Ballads was issued anonymously; the second was printed under Wordsworth’s name, with an acknowledgement of Coleridge’s contribution of poems.↩

I’ve been listening to Weed the People, an episode from late last year on Latino USA about the development of legally licensed marijuana markets — mainly with reference to California — and the way it interacts with local entrepreneurs, booming but hindered state and national markets, and the shadow of the racialized war on drugs for black and Latino weed dealers who bore the brunt of the war on drugs.

Proviso: the NPR story admits that, as far as their reporters were able to determine, there isn’t much hard data to prove racial disparities in access to or profits in legalized weed markets. I wish there were some effort to gather the hard data; until there is some, take this as the usual anecdotal reporting — it seems like there might be a racial disparity here; here are, definitely, some anecdotes of black and Latino weed dealers who have had to put up with a lot more crap in their lives than they ever should have had to put up with, and who now face a lot of obstacles that don’t serve any obviously beneficial purpose in the effort to go legit. (Even if there isn’t a systematic racial disparity when you tally everything up, there are lots of individual cases of injustice; if there is a systematic racial disparity, so much the worse, and if so that would tells us something about how policing and legalization work in American society.)

Obviously, no matter what ends up happening here, it’s hard to deny that the situation now — whatever its flaws — is not as bad as the situation that proceeded liberalization; obviously, nobody should want a halt to the process or a return to Drug War policing. But there’s also a sort of Against Legalization point that needs to be made here — about the effects that unsurprisingly, naturally occur when liberalization is only allowed to happen when and where it can be refracted through an elaborate, expensive, in some ways highly conservative regulatory regime for permitting and controlling the sale of weed to willing customers — something which, need we recall, is really just fine, and does not actually need to be controlled by the state, and should never have been treated as a crime in the first place.

The city government in Oakland has approached the issue by trying to manipulate the issuing of permits — by implementing a priority queue that’s explicitly intended to benefit racial minorities, and operationally designed in favor granting licenses more quickly to people who had been arrested for drug crimes and people from neighborhoods where a lot of other people were arrested for drug crimes. But what if the permits themselves — and the drive to maintain social and economic control behind those permits — are part of the problem?

There are really a couple of different angles from which you might look at this story. (a) A social justice-oriented Leftist is probably going to see this story mainly from the angle of racial justice.^[1] People like Ram?@c3;b3;n Garcia are struggling to make their way into above-ground cannabis market, whereas white-owned dispensaries and well-financed businesses^[2] are moving in much more easily. If you want to know why, a lot of the reason has to do with the white privilege, with the history of racist motives behind Nixon’s or Reagan’s War on Drugs and mass incarceration policies, and with the long shadow of racist overpolicing and imprisonment in communities of color — black and Latino folks like Ram?@c3;b3;n Garcia have faced decades of racist drug policies, generations of criminalization, violence, police harassment, etc.; they are disproportionately likely to bear criminal records and to bear economic costs that make it harder to go into business, harder to meet the permitting requirements, etc. You’re going to look at the fears that caused regulations on legalized weed and dispensary licensing to be written in the narrow, restrictive way that they have been written; on the disparate legacies of drug policies in different communities; and on the micro-scale effects of police and prison, as well as the macro-scale structural factors, which conspire to make it hard to access funding or do the other things that you would need to do to start or expand any kind of business.

(b) A market freedom-oriented libertarian is probably going to look at the same story and see it mainly from the angle of overregulation and barriers to entry. Weed could have been legalized by just getting the government out of the business of policing and controlling weed sales. Prohibition could have been replaced by freedom and governmental indifference. But instead, prohibition was replaced by regulation and permitting. Part of the reason for this is for the government to make sure it can extract sin tax revenues from weed sales. Part of the reason is a busy-bodying regulatory state trying to control how the legal weed market shaped up. So if you want to know why well-funded, big businesses are moving into this market so rapidly, while smaller-scale entrepreneurs like Ram?@c3;b3;n Garcia are struggling to make their way into the above-ground cannabis market — even though many of them, like Garcia, have extensive pre-existing acumen, resources and business connections from their years as underground weed dealers — then you’d look to the punitive legal legacy of drug prohibition, and to the extent and invasiveness of the regulations that now screen who can enter the formal industry and who can’t. Ram?@c3;b3;n was arrested 20 years ago because of an over-aggressive police search and a bullshit gun control charge, and he had to keep his business in the shadows for years because he didn’t have the capital to meet the state’s marijuana regulations until only a couple of years ago. The state and city governments limit the number of permits that can be given out. Keeping your permit requires dealing with a lot of complex and expensive regulations — many of them about some really chickenshit requirements.^[3] The state legalizes cannabis only so long as you get in the queue for a tightly limited number of permits, pay inspection fees and taxes, pay out for a storefront location and insurance, and lay out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars at a go because you’ve just been informed that you have to make sure your weed van is street-legal, up to a standard set by some state policy. It’s not too surprising that this hurts bottom-up entrepreneurship and helps people who are ensconced within existing formal business worlds and who have access to extensive funding. Regulation and licensing mean overwhelming complexity barriers to entry, tight rationing barriers to entry, and huge financial barriers to entry. That helps the well-resourced and formal businesses, and it hurts the poor, marginalized, and informal-sector entrepreneurs.^[4]

In either case, it’s hard to deny that a whole lot of black and Latino people have been victimized by the racial politics and the police violence of the drug war. The state owes them reparations for the years of damage that it has done. And the way they’ve tried to go about legalization risks excluding many of them from a market where — despite the risks and the costs and the violence unjustly inflicted on them under Prohibition — they had at least made something of a living up to now. But the best thing to do is not to try to tweak the licensing scheme to favor a different class of legal weed dealer; it’s to get rid of the restrictions and licensing entirely — to let as many people as possible enter the legal weed market, with a minimum of interference or monitoring by police, city governments and state regulators.

See also.

• GT 2010-01-27: The State of the Debate #2: Against legalization
• GT 2010-02-04: Against legalization (cont’d)

1. ^[1]You could also see it from the standpoint of socioeconomic class, but in America these are going to be all tangled up together, and most of the time a social justice ideology is going to go more quickly to race than to class as a default way of understanding problems of power and criminalization in American history.↩
2. ^[2]Some of these are incumbents from the Medical Marijuana market; others are new green-rush startup businesses.↩
3. ^[3]For example: Check the segment beginning at 16:06, at a trade show for the legal weed business in Oakland. The city government in Oakland is sponsoring a trade conference to try to help POC weed entrepreneurs show off their wares and meet up with investors; but meanwhile Ram?@c3;b3;n’s business is stalled. He hasn’t been able to distribute any weed recently, because the state started enforcing a rule that requires compliant distribution vehicles. Or in other words, Ram?@c3;b3;n needs a new van — with specs the state approves — before he can distribute any more weed. He was supposed to have the van already but it took a while to raise the money. Man, all the paperwork is signed. We were supposed to get it delivered yesterday; now they’re telling us early next week, man… It’s the issues of doing business, right? …↩
4. ^[4]The typical thing to say here from a libertarian standpoint would be that it helps incumbents and hurts startups — and to point to the problem of regulatory capture — but that needs to be taken with a certain amount of nuance, since erstwhile illegal drug dealers are incumbents in the weed market; while many green-rush investors are newcomers. It would be better to say that licensing and regulation help incumbents within the formal business world, and hurt people who are trying to break into that world, even if it’s in a line of business they’ve been practicing for years in the informal or illegal sector.↩

No war against Iran. No more escalation. Not another war in the Middle East. Not again.

Get U.S. soldiers out of Iraq. Get U.S. soldiers out of the Middle East. Get U.S. soldiers out of everywhere.

Get people, and the world, out of harm’s way.