Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

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The Times article on Bush’s immigration agenda is now up here. It confirms the relevant details –

Under Mr. Bush’s proposal, which effectively amounts to an amnesty program for illegal immigrants with jobs in the United States, an undocumented worker could apply for temporary worker status here for an unspecified number of years, with all the employee benefits, like minimum wage and due process, accorded to those legally employed. Workers who are approved would be permitted to travel freely between the United States and their home countries, the officials said, and would also be permitted to apply for a green card granting permanent residency in the United States.

– as well as the dangers:

Administration officials acknowledge that the wait for a green card could take up to six years or longer, meaning that some guest workers who apply for green cards but do not receive them before their guest worker status expires would face the prospect of being forced to leave the United States. In that case, critics of the proposal said Tuesday night, workers would be better off remaining illegal and staying indefinitely in the United States, rather than revealing themselves to immigration officials when they sign up for a program that may, these critics assert, lead to their deportation.

“They’re asking people to sign up for a program that is more likely to ensure their departure than ensure their permanent residency,” said Cecilia Muñoz, a vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy organization…

Other critics say that the guest worker program could lead to the exploitation of immigrant workers. “If you are dependent on an employer filing a petition on your behalf, that employer has a tremendous club over you,” one person briefed on the president’s proposal said.

Nonetheless, this represents real significant progress.

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Josh Marshall just posted a transcript of a conference call between journalists and “senior administration officials” about the contours of the immigration policy President Bush plans to propose tomorrow. I’m glad to see a shift back towards the White House’s September 10, 2001 position on immigration, and have no doubt that the organizing coalition and voting bloc mobilized most visibly through the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides has been vital in that achievement. The framing of the problem – the imperative of family reunification, the centrality of undocumented labor to our economy, the humanitarian crisis – is improved, and the approach is certainly more consonant with the Freedom Riders demands than it once was. A “temporary worker” status, however, opens up new avenues for abuse and exploitation, and simply creating a legal process for undocumented workers to go “above ground” and air labor grievances does little to change the facts on the ground about employers’ power over immigrant workers. That would require the right to organize, which is conspicuously absent from the discussions of “senior administration officials.” Josh Marshall closes by asking whether “the president expects to or even wants this ‘policy’ to pass.” We’ll have to see. Meanwhile, the coalition for progressive immigration reform will have to keep fighting for an immigration policy that truly enshrines the best values of this country.

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Andrew Sullivan is gloating over this column, perhaps because it exemplifies one of the most pernicious and persistent stereotypes of the left. Or at least, that’s why I’m groaning over it.

I do have some modest suggestions that might provide a start for discussion: an intelligence test to earn the right to vote; a three-significantly-stupid-behaviors-and-you’re-out law; fines for politicians who pander to the lowest common denominator and deportation of media representatives who perpetuate such actions.

…We can stop this sapping of our national integrity but we must do it soon, lest the morons become the norm and those of us who use our brains for more than memorizing advertising jingles are ourselves ostracized from society.

Such arguments play into the hands of the right. They belong in a Charles Murray rant, not under the flag of anything identifying itself as the left.

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Bill Bradley today became the latest high-profile Democrat to endorse Howard Dean. The prospect of Bradley and Gore, who fought a bitter primary struggle four years ago, coming together to endorse a candidate in this one is a peculiar and interesting one. I think, as I suggested before, that it shows less about Bradley than it does about Gore – who was castigated in 2000 for failing to run the kind of aggressive populist campaign Bradley and now Dean is associated with.

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Mother Jones has an excellent piece on Grover Norquist, the Washington’s premier deregulatory guru. It’s further demonstration that while many in the Democratic party have forgotten how to build broad-based political coalitions which stake out strong stances on difficult issues, the Republicans certainly haven’t.

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Looks like the Mad Cow scare has brought on much-needed regulatory reforms in the beef industry. As the Times notes:

…some large American companies that process and sell beef had already abandoned those more controversial practices, which had been a rallying point for food safety advocates since mad cow disease appeared overseas nearly two decades ago. While a schism developed in the industry, the current crisis reveals how government regulators sided with companies that adhered to those methods of operation.

This touches on a larger point, one which many have made before: There are high-road and low-road approaches between which companies choose how to make a profit. The high-road includes greater investment in human capital, quality control, investments in local community, and such. It has benefits for workers, capital, and consumers, but has a great deal of difficulty competing with low-roading firms. In earlier decades, a regulatory government and an empowered labor movement helped pave the high-road – now, both are in need of revival. But Mad Cow disease viscerally illustrates the failures of the low-road system. An argument that manufacturers who kill their customers will be punished with decreased sales, while attractive in a college Economics course, depends first on the premise that there’s an acceptable number of preventable deaths and second on the contention that consumers have accessible to them the information necessary to determine which meat is safe and which is not. It’s time to reject both.

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One of the more interesting moments I caught in the Iowa Debate was the Kucinich-Dean exchange on single-payer universal healthcare. Dean, to his credit, was up front in stating that voters whose primary issue was single-payer should vote for Kucinich, and then touted the virtues of his plan which, Kucinich rightly argued, would maintain the strangehold of the insurance industry on the practice and policy of healthcare. What perhaps was most surprising about Dean’s defense of his plan, however, was its central argument that it was simply the best the Democrats could get away with – that his plan “was written to pass Congress.” Dean cited the failures of the Carter and Clinton healthcare plans to buttress his claim.

I think Michael Tomasky, in Left for Dead, offers a more convincing reading of the Clinton healthcare failure:

…the A.M.A. and the insurance lobbies fought the Clinton proposal with the same intensity they’d have have brought to a fight against single-payer. A political calculation to trim the sails is useful and defensible if, without sacrificing too much in the way of principle, it gets you more votes. The Clinton calculation did not do that. And in this instance, given the number of co-sponsors single-payeralready had in the House of Representatives and the appeal of the plan’s salient features, it may actually have been the case that a single-payer system could have been sold to the public. The seller, though, had to be willing to confront one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies – something the Clintons weren’t up to; but this, too, is something people clearly say they want their leaders to do more of.

Among the people calling on their leaders to do more of that? Howard Dean. Kucinich was right to ask him who, if not the President of the United States, would be in a position to stand up to the insurance industry. Dean, unfortunately for those of us drawn by the strength of his organizing and the clarity of his alternative vision, was left looking not for the first time like what he’s referred to rightly as “the Republican wing of the Democratic party.”

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More compassionate conservatism:

“…the president’s proposed budget for the 2005 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, would control the rising cost of housing vouchers for the poor, require some veterans to pay more for health care, slow the growth in spending on biomedical research and merge or eliminate some job training and employment programs.”

And tax cuts.

Don’t hold your breath for corporate subsidies or the Pentagon budget to go under the knife.

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Also in the LA Times, this argument

[If Republicans] stand back and allow Democrats to be identified as the sole preservers of environmental values, the GOP could soon return to the minority status it occupied for most of the last 70 years. And that, however unfortunate for the party, would be a good thing for eagles, turkeys, ducks and rainbow trout.

is most interesting because of who the author is.