| | | | The GOP's "Nativist" Folly: Smith | | America's immigration system isn't perfect. But the "strongly nativist" reforms being proposed by Republicans in the House of Representatives are bad for the US economy – and America's standing in the world, writes Noah Smith for Bloomberg View.
The House bill "would end the green-card lottery program, which gives out 50,000 visas a year to people from countries that don't send many migrants to the US," Smith says.
"In both substantive and symbolic terms, this would be a big step back for the US. The diversity visa lottery program is small, and is therefore not that important to the economy – ending it, however, broadcasts an image of a nation that has closed its doors to the world. Border security, at this point, wouldn't have much of an effect on immigration numbers, since net illegal immigration effectively ended a decade ago."
"But the biggest change would be the curbs on family reunification immigration, to which Republicans have now assigned the more ominous-sounding epithet of 'chain migration.' Disallowing young working people from bringing their elderly parents to live with them would discourage many talented foreigners from coming to work in the US. And barring older residents from bringing in their adult children would deprive the US of young workers at a time when it needs them to sustain its pension and Social Security systems." "Despite significant support for family visas, public opinion on immigration could well change, particularly given the agenda-setting power of the White House. By using the misleading…'chain migration,' President Trump is pushing public support away from family-based visas." - The language allegedly used by the President suggests "a profound misunderstanding about America, about the American experiment," Fareed argued during a panel on Sunday's show. Watch his reaction here.
| | Why Hawaii's False Alarm Should Worry Us | | The missile false alarm in Hawaii at the weekend underscores just how real the threat of miscalculation is. And how easy it would be for the United States to trigger a war, suggests Paul McLeary in The Atlantic.
"The United States operates a series of radar and missile-defense systems across the Pacific. It includes satellites monitoring the Korean peninsula and fleets of American and Japanese warships equipped with the Aegis system, a powerful computing network that detects and tracks missile launches and aircraft. Those systems are tied to the US Strategic Command's Global Operations Center, buried deep underground in Nebraska, which monitors events around the world in real time and pumps that information to the Pentagon and the White House," McLeary writes.
"In the Hawaii incident, there was little danger of the United States firing off a nuclear response. Military officials knew within minutes of receiving the alert that there was no threat to US territory; none of the Pentagon and US spy satellites or the ground and sea-based radars detected any sign of missile launches from North Korea, government officials told me.
"But with a president obsessed with cable news and Twitter, the erroneous alert could have easily triggered an angry or provocative tweet, which could have been interpreted by the North Koreans or Russians as an imminent threat…While the United States has a series of sophisticated early warning systems, potential adversaries do not, making initial statements from American officials critical in tense situations." | | Why a Trade War with China Would Be So Dangerous | | | China's record trade surplus with the United States, announced last week, could be the catalyst for a trade war between the two countries. America hasn't geared up for anything like this since Ronald Reagan was president, writes Andrew Browne in the Wall Street Journal. Things would look a lot different this time.
"A trade war isn't a certainty, but if it comes, it will look nothing like the battles that raged in the 1980s over Japanese semiconductors, cars and TV sets."
"The forces are more evenly matched this time: America has never faced off in a trade skirmish with an opponent like China in terms of economic size, industrial capabilities and global ambitions," Browne writes.
"Global markets seem remarkably unprepared for what could turn into a clash of the titans. Outside of North Korea's nuclear threat, a US-China trade war is the biggest potential economic spoiler of 2018.
"Once under way, the effects of a trade war would be felt well beyond the combatants themselves. US friends and allies along Asian supply chains would be early collateral damage. China is still to a large extent the final assembly point for imported high-tech components from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
"If it escalated far enough, a trade war could take down the entire global trading architecture." | | No, Iran Can't Dominate
the Middle East | | America's foreign policy toward the Middle East appears to be largely defined by a desire to contain Iran, writes Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy. The main problem with that? Tehran isn't nearly the hegemonic threat that the Trump administration appears to believe.
"Iran presently lacks the hard power a state would need to dominate the Middle East's vast and deeply divided set of countries. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Iran has a population of about 83 million; as of 2016, its GDP was more than $400 billion; and its annual defense budget is almost $16 billion...Many of its tanks, aircraft, and other major weapons systems date from the era of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and are in poor repair," Walt argues.
"When confronted with these realities, Iran's foes typically warn that it is using local proxies to spread its influence and take over the region. There is no question that Iran has backed a number of local actors in recent years, including the Lebanese Hezbollah, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, various militias in Iraq, and, to a lesser extent, the Houthis in Yemen. These moves have marginally enhanced Iran's power — but mostly because it has been able to take advantage of its opponents' blunders, such as the George W. Bush administration's decision to topple Saddam Hussein. But these advances still leave Tehran far short of regional domination."
| | 2017 Was (Another) Really Bad Year for Freedom: Report | | Democracy is facing its biggest crisis in more than a decade, with the number of countries suffering net declines in political rights and civil liberties rising to nearly twice the number seeing improvement over the past 12 years, according to the latest Freedom in the World report.
Last year saw the "accelerating withdrawal of the United States from its historical commitment to promoting and supporting democracy," writes Michael J. Abramowitz, president of Freedom House, which produces the annual report.
"[A]t the same time, the world's leading autocracies, China and Russia, have seized the opportunity not only to step up internal repression but also to export their malign influence to other countries, which are increasingly copying their behavior and adopting their disdain for democracy. A confident Chinese president Xi Jinping recently proclaimed that China is 'blazing a new trail' for developing countries to follow. It is a path that includes politicized courts, intolerance for dissent, and predetermined elections."
"Perhaps worst of all, and most worrisome for the future, young people, who have little memory of the long struggles against fascism and communism, may be losing faith and interest in the democratic project. The very idea of democracy and its promotion has been tarnished among many, contributing to a dangerous apathy." | | | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment