Back to the Bell Curve

James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, has made the news recently by saying, and then trying to unsay, that the natives of Africa and their descendants are almost certainly less intelligent than Europeans and their descendants. I'm perfectly happy to leave that part of the argument to the experts in genetics, who seem to be doing a fine job on their own. But in the course of his unfortunate pronouncement, Watson also referred to The Bell Curve as a fine book. I don't know as much as I should about genetics, but I know a lot about The Bell Curve, which I taught in a couple of college courses and reviewed for a small newspaper. So following is that review, somewhat fine-tuned and updated:

The Bell Curve: an Idea Whose Time Has Come--and Gone

Premises: 1) There exists such a thing as “g” (or “general intelligence”), which is heritable in considerable part

2) g can be accurately measured by several tests, including some of the ones to which children and adults in this country are most commonly exposed

3) To a considerable degree, g is immutable

4) Which is to say that Head Start and similar programs designed to increase g are a waste of money

5) g correlates, not only with academic and occupational success, but with numerous character traits essential to the maintenance of a civil society

6) People with low cognitive ability are out-breeding people with high cognitive ability in the US

7) Both the “cognitive elite” and the “cognitive underclass” are isolating themselves from the rest of society

Conclusion: What society should do in response to these phenomena is to put the underclass on a relatively comfortable reservation, give them useful non-taxing work to do, and subject them to the discipline of a simplified legal system.

I think I’ve got all of that right. But I’m not altogether sure, because my cognitive ability may have been seriously eroded by reading the book. It can’t be good for the reasoning faculties to spend hours absorbing a book that repeatedly says things like “The evidence shows intelligence is most likely 40 - 60% heritable,” and then draws political conclusions based on a presumed 100% heritability. Again and again, the authors lay out the scientific data, explain it, and then ignore it. Again and again, they tell us that statistical data about the behavior and characteristics of populations tells us nothing about individuals--and then they draw political conclusions based entirely on the presumption of individual incompetence and depravity. They caution us repeatedly that the available data are partial and unclear--and then draw political conclusions that would be only barely acceptable based on 100% certainty. And they do all this in a writing style which (speaking of cognitive ability) would earn them (and their editors and proofreaders, if any) no better than a C+ from a competent English composition teacher. For instance, on p. 145, the authors state “...the first decades of the [twentieth] century saw American high school education mushroom in size without having to dip much deeper into the intellectual pool....”, and, on p. 157 “...the long-term employment trend of [young men’s] employment has been downhill....”

Arguably, this is really two books--a scientific treatise which (some scientists tell us) has serious faults in its collection and treatment of data, and a political treatise which purports to be based on the science, but in fact bears only the most tenuous relationship to it.

Aside from its flimsy scientific basis, the political treatise has serious logical problems of its own, mainly resulting from the authors’ unwillingness to follow their own argument to its ultimate conclusions. For instance: they admit that, whatever g is, East Asians have more of it than white Americans. Granting the premise that g correlates with various socially necessary character traits, would a Japanese reader not be justified in attributing various Western character traits of which the Japanese have always disapproved--our individualism, sloppiness, imprecision, poor manners, and tendency to violence--to our deficiency in g, and proposing to put us on a reservation where we can stay out of the way of the people most qualified to do the world’s brainwork, the East Asians? Obviously, despite their repeated references to East Asian cognitive superiority, the authors don’t really believe in it, or they would have raised such questions. On the contrary, the whole book is suffused with a “we happy few” tone of self-congratulation, extending from authors to readers, and presuming that both, being most likely white American, are and deserve to be, the “cognitive elite.” The East Asians are merely a statistical blip located in an interesting but minimally consequential place.

Secondly, if g is fundamentally genetic, why do the authors not confront the problem of cognitive sexual differentiation within ethnic groups? That is to say, the genetic endowment of the average woman of any given ethnic group is in most part identical to that of the average man in the same group. Black men are no blacker than black women. It would follow from that that the spread of measured g should be identical in men and women of the same ethnic group. In fact, it is not. The range is the same, but women cluster much more strongly in the center of that range. Genetics could not possibly account for that. The only genetic differences between men and women lie in the material on the sex chromosomes. We don’t, of course, know exactly what genes are to be found on those chromosomes, nor can we fully explain sexual differentiation in areas other than g. But if intelligence were mostly genetic, it would have to be sex-linked to account for the gender differences in g within ethnic groups. And those differences would then be much greater than in fact they are. If intelligence were sex-linked (assuming as usual that the male is the norm) women would barely be able to drool and breathe at the same time. Obviously this is not the case. The only hard data suggesting a major gender difference in intelligence is the well-established fact that women, generally speaking, marry men, whereas men, generally speaking, marry women. This can easily be accounted for by environmental factors.

But seriously, folks--looking at the book from a purely textual/editorial viewpoint, the fact that it is the acknowledged work of two authors is significant, particularly since one of the authors is now deceased. It is tempting to hypothesize that Herrnstein (may he rest in peace) did all the science and Murray did all the politics, and that the latter never seriously read the former’s work. It would certainly explain the non-sequiturs with which the book is littered.

But what concerns me most about the book is not the exiguous link between the scientific and political material, but the even scantier connection between the premises of the political argument and the concluding proposal supposedly drawn from them. If I seriously believed that the increasing isolation of the elite and the underclass from each other and the rest of society were a problem, I would not propose to remedy it by putting the underclass on a reservation. And Murray’s proposal that members of the underclass should be given some “valued place” in such a reservation means nothing at all without some concrete link to the real job market, which Murray never draws. This general shoddiness in the conclusory section suggests strongly that these are not Murray’s real conclusions at all, but only the ones he feels pressured to write to avoid being completely discredited by the sinister forces of political correctness. If Murray had the courage of his convictions, he would be advocating forced sterilization and genocide, which are in fact the only social policies that follow logically from his premises. Murray may intend his overt proposals to be taken seriously long enough to be tried and proved useless (the way General Motors first tried installing cumbersome and unworkable seatbelts after being mandated to by law), or he may have meant them as an in-group joke shared with the other members of the cognitive elite. But anyone as smart as Murray thinks he and his readers are should have no trouble figuring it out.

Finally, Murray is actually missing a much more factually substantial bet, if he is really serious about wanting to find a variable that correlates with occupational and academic success, high socio-economic status, and most of the pro-social character traits he talks about. There actually is one, and we can measure it with absolute validity, with a lot less controversy and at negligible cost--namely physical height. Which is heritable up to a point, but can be strongly influenced by well-known environmental factors. Of course, using it for the purposes for which Murray proposes to use intelligence testing would eliminate a lucrative service industry, whose lobbyists may have influenced Murray to leave them alone.

Intelligence, Merit, and Rank

But, assuming it is possible to get past the literary and editorial drawbacks of the book, what happens when we look more closely at the thinking behind it? Murray and Herrnstein talk not only about “g” but about a closely related phenomenon, merit. They, and most of us, have taken for granted, without seriously examining it, the notion that there is some real quality called “merit”, which we can and should usably define, accurately measure, and appropriately reward. Only by doing so, we believe, can we encourage the achievements necessary to the survival of our society.

This principle goes back at least as far as Plato’s Republic. Plato was willing to grant that merit might not be directly inherited and might even turn up among the children of the less meritorious. Nonetheless, once found out, the meritocrats should be encouraged to reproduce, preferably in conjunction with other meritocrats. Which suggests that Plato had already figured out most of the little we really know today about merit: that the children, and the parents, of meritorious people are more likely to possess similar merit, than those whose parents and children lack it. We still don’t know why. Which means we still don’t know how to increase the proportion of meritorious people in the population, should we choose to do so.

Let’s begin with definition--is merit equivalent to intelligence? Neither term is especially precise, but merit generally includes attributes of character as well as ability. On the other hand, many authorities, including the authors of the Bell Curve, presume that intelligence usually correlates with positive character traits such as sexual morality and law-abidingness. They also presume that “intelligence”, whatever it is, is something our society needs more of. If they defined intelligence only in terms of intellectual competence, the ability to perform certain cognitive tasks, then they might pay more attention to making better use of the intelligent people we know we already have. But they generally presume that society would be better off if everyone were “intelligent”--which suggests again that they are really concerned with the characterological dimensions of “intelligence.” So, for the moment, let’s stick with “merit”, and presume that it includes both cognitive and characterological dimensions, which are visibly related to each other in some as-yet-unclear way.

To the extent that we have elevated the testing of human abilities to a science, we are able to link certain test behavior in certain populations with certain other behavior patterns, including academic success and, in some cases, occupational competence. In larger populations, the same kinds of test performance may correlate with better socio-economic status and more conventional social behavior. As mentioned earlier, so does adult physical height, especially in males. (By the way, test performance in females is less closely linked to almost all other outcomes than it is in males.) If what we are looking for is a predictor of socio-economic success and lawful behavior, could we not save a lot of money and time (and eliminate a major service industry) by simply measuring and rewarding height, and doing everything we can to increase the height of the next generation? Since height correlates with good childhood nutrition and especially with high prenatal and childhood protein intake, we actually know how to achieve that end. Which gives us the opportunity to think about whether we want to. As Gilbert and Sullivan’s Duke of Barataria pointed out, when everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody. A society of people equally endowed with what we now define as merit would have no way to decide who takes out the garbage and who directs the fate of major corporations. In all likelihood, it would waste no time coming up with some other criterion--amount of melanin in the skin, for instance.

Face it, what Murray and Herrnstein actually want is not a society in which everyone is more or less equally intelligent, but one in which there are slightly fewer unintelligent people and slightly more intelligent people than we now have, and in which that ratio remains constant over the generations. They are aghast at what they seem to consider a recent development--that the underclass is out-breeding the intelligentsia. So was Caesar Augustus. So were the eugenicists and their predecessors beginning in the 17th century. All of them are dealing with a phenomenon only secondarily related to intelligence: people who have enough access to resources to have some control over their own lives are likely to exercise that control, inter alia, in the area of family life, and specifically how many children they will rear. If they perceive children, or more than a few children, as a liability for any reason, they will therefore have fewer of them. While the people with less access to resources, and less control over their own lives, will have all the children they can, and raise all of those that survive. The vagaries of history and geography may make poor people and peasants more fertile (this also correlates with diet, to some extent) and infant mortality lower in some places than in others, while making the birth and rearing of upper-class children more or less expensive. An additional factor in some cultures has been the amount of personal involvement in child-rearing required of the upper-class mother. In most pre-20th-century cultures, upper-class women could and usually did have their children reared by lower-class women, which considerably decreased the disincentives of large families for them. But once lower-class women found ready employment in factory and service work, they were less likely to be willing to spend their lives raising other women’s children. Upper-class women are now required to invest a lot more time and energy rearing their own children than their grandmothers ever did. Which makes them far less inclined to do so more than once or twice. Apparently, Murray and Herrnstein, without ever talking about it explicitly, have already accepted that fact (unlike the earlier eugenicists, who wasted a good deal of energy trying to persuade upper-class women to have more children.) Murray and Herrnstein are concentrating on the other side of the equation exclusively: there will never be any more of Us, so we must do something to reduce the number of Them.

On the other hand, how many fewer of Them do We really want? I suspect strongly that what Murray and Herrnstein really want isn’t a world full of Einsteins, but one in which it is possible to sign and send out one’s secretary’s letter without having to proofread it first, or in which one can hop in a cab and give the driver the address of one’s destination without having to instruct him on how to get there. And that, it seems to me, is a function not of the general level of intelligence in a society, but of where the market directs that intelligence. Just about all the really competent legal secretaries I have ever known were born before 1935. Younger women with the same interests and aptitudes went to law school instead--not because they were “too smart” to do secretarial work, but because they were smart enough to refuse to work for a secretary’s salary, and lucky enough to live in an era when they had other choices. Similarly, the omniscient and omnicompetent cabbie who could find any address in New York and deliver babies, was also either a full-time Yellow Cab employee with benefits, or an entrepreneur with a medallion of his own. Today, most cabbies are lessees who have to work the first 8 hours of their shift just to cover lease fees and insurance, and then make their own living in the next 5 hours or so. Anybody with the intelligence, the knowledge of English, and the citizenship or immigrant status to do anything else is doing it.

In short, before we complain about the lack of intelligent people in our society, we should pay closer attention to what the intelligent people we do have are doing. In far greater proportions than in other industrialized countries, they are practicing law; if they are doing scientific research or engineering, they are very likely to be doing it for the military; they may even be high school dropouts if they are African-American or Hispanic (yes, Virginia, smart people drop out too. They also commit crimes, engender children out of wedlock, and in general engage in antisocial behavior.) If they are female and their parents never went to college, they may be cashiers or waitresses. In general, if their parents never went to college, smart people may be virtually indistinguishable from the people they grew up with, except perhaps that they have an unusual grasp of sports statistics, or the Civil War, or model boat-building or some other quirky autodidactic fascination. Murray and Herrnstein presume that current social realities make it possible for more of the highly intelligent to achieve the rank they “deserve”--but accepting at face value their caveat that data about populations tells us nothing about individuals, we have to presume that there is still a lot of cream on the bottom, where it is either totally wasted or, worse still, put to antisocial uses. And if we really want a greater role for intelligence in our society, shaking up the bottle is still a faster and less expensive way to do it than either the solutions The Bell Curve overtly proposes, or the ones the authors probably really had in mind.

Nomads, Migrants, and People on the Move

The Jewish annual round of scripture led us, last Saturday, to the part of Genesis where the Holy One tells Abraham to "get yourself out...from the land of your birth and from your father's house." This comes out of the blue to Abraham, and his swift and unquestioning compliance is one of the things that makes him a biblical hero. And, yes, at least until the end of Deuteronomy, the bible is a history of nomadism and migration. And of course, anyone steeped in the history of Europe from the classical age through the Turkish conquest of Constantinople knows that it is all about the migration of one tribe after another out of someplace in Asia into Europe.

Migration is different from nomadism, though we tend to see them as identical. Nomadism is usually cyclical. Nomads usually go over the same track, often at the same times of year, and always with the same people, usually in the same order of march. There is nothing "rootless" about that kind of nomadism. The roots are just distributed over a wider area. Migration, on the other hand, means leaving a place forever, usually because it has suddenly become inhospitable, often because some other tribe has migrated into it, leading ultimately to a domino series of migrations, always straight out in one direction, rather than in the circular path of nomads. But, like nomadism, most migrations also involve a group of people who stay together on the march, rather than individuals.

I think what we are experiencing now is different from both nomadism and migration in their historical sense, and that the change was brought about by the birth of the nation-state with its non-porous borders. Nation-states deal with individual immigrants, with varying degrees of competence and organization; they never deal with mass migrations. And within any given nation-state, mass migrations happen one person or family at a time (we find out they were "mass" only in retrospect, as with the Okies, and the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South.) The Roma (and the Tinkers and the Travelers) are the only exceptions to this pattern, and they have become pariahs as a result.

According to the Bureau of the Census, 40% of us do not live in the states where we were born. The median duration of residence (how long a person has lived at his/her current residence) was 4.7 years as of 1996 (the most recent data I could find in a hurry.) Older people, married people, people without children, people with a high school education or less, people with very little money, and people with lots of money tend to stay put longer than the rest of us. And people with lots of education tend to move around more than the rest of us. Hispanics moved more often than the rest of us, and 14% of us moved last year.

The stats don't tell us much about why people move. Common sense tells us that a move can result from good things, like making more money and therefore being able to get a bigger house in a better neighborhood, and from bad things, like losing a job and being evicted or even becoming homeless. It can result in being farther away from one's extended family, or in moving back in with them. It can cause stress, or alleviate it. It can result in accumulating more "stuff," or in losing a large proportion of it (an aunt of mine used to say that three moves were the equivalent of one fire in terms of loss of household goods.) It can create a "home base" for an extended family or constellation of friends, or destroy one.

We may be unduly nostalgic about "going home again." We Americans are, after all, a nation of runaways. We are the descendants of people who decided the Old Country was no longer a viable home for them. "Lighting out for the territories" is practically programmed into our genes. When the going gets tough, the tough get going--and they keep going until they are safely out of town. Recent DNA studies of human genetics only underline the fact that almost everybody belongs to a family that comes from someplace else, just as the earlier history of migrations only underlines the fact that almost every indigenous people gets to be indigenous only by displacing somebody else.

We don't usually think about these issues much until they hit us on either the personal or the political level. Until, that is, somebody's elderly parent 2000 miles away becomes unable to live alone any more. Or until a nation formed by a bloody and forced migration out of Europe suddenly becomes a target for indignation and violence from the "locals," and its denizens are urged to "go back where you came from."

A part of us yearns to do just that, to recover the places and people of our brightest memories, or maybe of the memories of our parents or grandparents. But another corollary to the harsh reality of life on the move is that if we do get a chance to go back, we are likely to find that those people and places have vanished, and only the vaguest outlines of the geography remain. The hospital I was born in closed down long since. The place I went to kindergarten has been paved over and turned into a shopping mall. The school building in which I attended first through seventh grade burned down, though a new school was erected on the same spot. My high school was torn down for condominiums. My college has been amalgamated into a larger university. The street on which I lived during my last year of college--not merely the building, the street--has disappeared. So far, all five of my graduate schools are still pretty much intact, but it is obviously only a matter of time before they too slide off into nothingness or radical transformation. After all, I spent most of my childhood in southern Florida, and there is a good chance that most of that state will be under water by the time I myself slide off into nothingness or radical transformation.

And I'm one of the holdouts, the exceptions. My husband and I have been married to each other for 43 years, and have lived in the same place for 38 of them--almost half the time our building has been in existence. While we stayed put, most of our contemporaries were moving into "starter homes" and then having kids and moving on to larger homes in better school districts, and maybe getting divorced and moving apart, or following jobs around the country a couple of times, and are just about now starting to think about "downsizing" or retiring to someplace in the Sunbelt.

The Buddhists may have the best handle on all this: Everything changes. Everything vanishes. Maybe nothing was really there in the first place. You may as well accept impermanence, because you yourself are impermanent too. Not only is there nothing to hold onto, you have no solid hand to hold onto it with.

Or maybe the physicists have it right. We are, all of us, made of the first matter that was ever created. Everything changes, but nothing vanishes. Everything moves around, but nothing moves out.

CREATIVE RUMOR-MONGERING 101

Things we'd like to get more people to believe:

The last three digits of Dick Cheney's Social Security Number are 666
It is possible to make a recreational drug out of broccoli, carrot peels, and dog manure
Watching Reality TV brings on premature Alzheimer's
Leonard Nimoy is the messiah
Wearing fur makes women look fat
It makes men look even fatter
AT&T and Wal-Mart are actually wholly-owned subsidiaries of Al Quaeda
Reading scientific reports causes cancer
The GPS satellites are programmed to navigate your car to a takeoff port for the Klingon slave camps
Wearing an aluminum foil hat makes your hair fall out
When people close their eyes and raise their arms at evangelical church services, an usher goes around stealing their rings and watches
Voting Republican causes erectile dysfunction and divorce
Driving an SUV causes obesity
Sexist men are lousy lovers
Under-tipping causes gastric reflux

Give Me Your Tired...

of arguing over immigration. Like me. I guess it's better than arguing about poor Terry Schiavo, may she rest in peace. Or late-term abortions, or gay marriage. Immigration is actually a substantive issue with implications for the lives of ordinary Americans. Given that we are a nation of immigrants, we probably need to talk about it every so often.

But it would be useful not to schedule that recurring debate in a presidential election bi-year (yes, let's admit it, the election campaign season now lasts two years.) Then we could actually talk about reality, rather than set up a field of straw men and take turns knocking them down.

Conservatives claim to worry about terrorists sneaking in from Tijuana and Vancouver, while liberals think anybody who wants to set any kind of limits on immigration is an anti-Latino racist.

Full disclosure: I'm a Latina, sort of. Both my parents were born in Cuba. Spanish was the language they told their secrets in. I'm more or less bilingual and bicultural. One of the great trials of my life is my current inability to find canned cascos de guayaba in any grocery store, even the ones in Latino neighborhoods. (I mention that here in hope that some reader can help me out with a well-placed comment.)

Does that give me any kind of license to talk about immigration? Dunno. Most of my ruminations on the issue arise out of (a) recurring arguments with Mr. Dissociated, an Anglo with four immigrant grandparents, and (b) a long-standing family feud with INS (now ICE), which screwed around with my mother's citizenship and has thereby become my least favorite federal bureaucracy, ahead of even Selective Service. I used to practice a bit of immigration law--the simple stuff, green card and citizenship applications, re-entry permits and so on. Now none of it is simple, the stakes are very high, and I refer all inquiries about it from my clients to experts who practice nothing else and are very very good and very very expensive.

And, as usual, I like to look at the history of the issue before coming down to current events. The history of immigration law is pretty short. There wasn't much of any immigration law before 1900 or so. People who found their current residence economically or politically uncomfortable just migrated. Wherever they migrated to, the locals might welcome them, or passively accept them, or ignore them, or riot against them, or massacre them. The quality of their reception, and the severity of the situation they had fled from in the first place, would determine whether the migrants would stay, go home, or move on to someplace else. But law had nothing to do with it.

That changed as the United States suddenly realized that its population was becoming ethnically different from the way it had been in the era of its founding. We looked around at ourselves and discovered "we" were no longer the "us" we had been in 1776, or even 1865. That led to the establishment of Ellis Island and other screening ports, where immigrants were checked out for criminal records, moral character, and physical and mental health. There were racial restrictions. You had to be "white," whatever that meant. Not African or Chinese, at any rate. It was a binary system--you either passed inspection and got to stay, or failed and had to leave. Whichever happened, happened fast, at most within weeks, usually within minutes.

When Mr. Dissociated, and many other who insist they aren't anti-Hispanic or even anti-immigrant, they're only anti-lawbreaking, talk about how their grandparents came here "legally," that's what they mean. Those grandparents were "white," more or less healthy, and unencumbered with criminal records. Bully for them.

It was World War I that changed all that, all over the world. Two generations later, INS was interrogating my mother about how many of her "formative years" she had spent in the States. This was still something of an improvement on what happened to my paternal grandmother, born and brought up in Marietta, Georgia, a generation earlier, who lost her US citizenship automatically for marrying a Brit. In between, anarchist Emma Goldman's husband was deprived of his naturalization after his death, so that she could lose her citizenship and be deported to Russia.

The legal system with which current would-be immigrants are expected to comply is cumbersome, complex, and arbitrarily and often abusively administered. It is underfunded and understaffed. Its personnel are badly undertrained in "people skills." Things that should take weeks take years. To add insult to injury, the process has now been made outrageously expensive by piling four- or five-figure processing fees on top of the costs of the high-powered legal representation that is now almost essential for most immigrants, and the usually-required trip back to the Old Country.

And, worse still, immigration is the one area of our national legal system in which the influence of high-ranking people is openly available and routinely applied for the benefit of those who know the right people. That is, if all of your attempts to immigrate legally into the US have failed, but you know the right people, you can get naturalized by a special bill passed in Congress by your influential buddies, all open and above board, without so much as a "wink-wink nudge-nudge."

But for the ordinary working immigrant trying to make a decent life in the US, compliance with the law is always difficult, usually expensive, and often impossible.

Nonetheless, many conservative opponents of illegal immigration insist that illegal immigrants, specifically because they are violating the law, belong in the same circle of Hell as Al Capone. Which is fairly remarkable, since most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, aren't all that crazy about legality, except where they can use it as a lock on the moral high ground against people they don't like anyway.

I found that out most recently when a dear friend of mine was killed by a truck that crashed into his van at an illegally high rate of speed, after running a red light, and with gravely defective brakes. Once it had been established that the trucker was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, even the good sympathetic people we knew all said, "Speeding isn't a crime. Running a red light isn't a crime. Everybody does that. It was just an accident." So far, the State's Attorney of DuPage County, Illinois, seems to agree with them.

Is it fair to conclude that most of the opponents of illegal immigration are really opposed to immigration in general regardless of legality, or even to the presence of ethnic Hispanics on our soil, regardless of their legality? Dunno. It's hard to tell, sometimes. When the same people declaim against illegal immigration and allowing anybody to speak Spanish in public, that does make one wonder. When they deplore illegal immigration, or immigration in general, because immigrants will take the bad jobs that "Americans won't do" and thereby drive down wages and working conditions for native-born and legal-immigrant workers, and because they will take good jobs that Americans deserve, and because they will take no jobs, and sponge off the American taxpayer instead, it's hard not to suspect some kind of prejudice at work. The poor immigrant can't win.

And, on the other hand, the orthodox liberal position seems to be that anyone who comes to the US to improve his economic prospects has the right to do so, regardless of legality. Regardless of the effect on wages and working conditions? Dunno. The mostly-Hispanic United Farm Workers union used to oppose illegal immigration. Now, understandably, they are more worried about the general prejudice against illegal immigration/ immigration/Hispanic visibility. The newer labor unions (SEIU, UNITE HERE, and the American Federation of Teachers, for instance) seem to be heading in the same direction. The older, bread-and-butter unions have always opposed illegal immigration and been somewhat dubious even about legal immigration. But their influence is waning.

So much for the bad arguments on the subject. Are there any good ones? If, as seems obvious to almost everybody, the current system is broken and fixing it will cost a lot of time and money, should it just be shelved in the meantime? Or should the whole idea of immigration regulation be thrown back into the dustbin of recent history? After all, the nations of the world got along without it pretty well for several thousand years.

Broaching this argument, even tentatively, has gotten me some very strange bedfellows. Julian Simon, the conservative economist, for instance, who once wrote me a very flattering letter about an earlier article I wrote on the subject of immigration. He and his "let the market do everything" pals oppose regulating immigration because it prevents willing workers and willing employers from finding each other, and keeps wages "artificially" high for American workers.

Or at least they used to. Now, "small government" conservatives like Simon seem to be parting ways with "big gun" conservatives. Republican orthodoxy has trouble deciding whether it's more important to keep wages low, give American workers somebody to hate, or keep potential terrorists out. They haven't thought this through

At the same time, as mentioned earlier, Democratic orthodoxy isn't sure whether the rights of Hispanics not to be hassled are more important than maintaining the standard of living of American workers. They haven't thought this through either.

One of my favorite speculative fiction novels has a character who comes from a planet where "you have not thought this through" is a deadly insult.

We should be so lucky.

Odd Lots # omigod I can't remember

Jerry Ford, Gary Hart, and Vladimir Putin--what do they have in common that one wouldn't expect?