f/l DACA DA
A lame-duck DACA deal is almost certain but new legal immigration debates would
disrupt negotiations
Melanie Zanona 10/17/18, The Hill, “Conservatives fear Trump will cut immigration deal,”
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/411763-conservatives-fear-trump-will-cut-immigrationdeal?userid=124956
Conservatives are growing worried that President Trump
and GOP leaders will strike a slimmed-down immigration deal
during the lame-duck session when Democrats won back the House in November. Republicans fear that Trump, who
relishes in the role of dealmaker, will be eager to provide protections for hundreds of thousands so-called Dreamers
in exchange for a $25 billion border wall, and that he might do so without getting any other concessions from
Democrats if he thinks it’s his last chance to secure funding for the wall. But a potential agreement over the hot-button issue of immigration fell apart in June,
and it’s highly unlikely that immigration hard-liners like White House senior adviser Stephen Miller would back legislation that trades Dreamers for the wall. Still, as
conservatives start to grapple with the possibility of life as the minority party next year, they are sending
up flares about the possibility of a wall-for-Dreamers deal and warning it could backfire with the GOP base. “Personally, I would
oppose that deal, but it would not surprise me to see some kind of wall, DACA deal,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), a member of
the far-right House Freedom Caucus, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. “It’s hard for me to imagine that would play well with the
base.” A GOP aide said one concern is that retiring
lawmakers may make a deal on immigration. “If we lose the House,
the temptation from a lot of retiring members will be to buy the wall with an amnesty giveaway, and we
cannot let that happen,” the aide said. “The reason the American people want a wall is precisely because they want to stop illegal immigration, not encourage it.”
Further stoking GOP fears is the fact that some Republican
lawmakers are already starting to float the idea of an
immigration deal that only funds the wall and provides legal protections for recipients of DACA, which
protects from deportation young immigrants, dubbed Dreamers, who came to the country illegally as children. Trump announced last year he was ending DACA,
though courts have temporarily blocked the president from rescinding the Obama-era program while cases work their way through the legal system. “I’d like to do a
deal: Full wall funding for DACA,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill, told Fox News on Tuesday. When
pressed on
whether cuts to legal immigration should also be addressed in an agreement, Graham pushed back. “Keep it
simple,” he said. The White House has been making new overtures to Democrats about working
together next year on some of Trump’s core campaign promises, such as infrastructure and drug pricing, a change in tactics that
could prove necessary to secure major legislative victories if Republicans lose their majority in the House during the midterm elections. Building the wall
along the U.S.-Mexico border is a campaign promise Trump has been itching to fulfill, but Congress has thus far
failed to deliver the $25 billion the president is seeking for its construction. Two Republican-backed immigration bills that included wall funding
failed to pass the House this summer. The White House outlined four pillars that they say any immigration framework
should include: enhanced border security, including a border wall; a permanent solution for DACA; new limits on family migration
and the elimination of the diversity visa lottery program. But some immigration hard-liners worry that Trump, who
has wavered on some of his immigration positions in the past, will be willing to nix some of those pillars
if it means getting full funding for his wall, especially if Democrats are poised to take over the House for
the next two years. “[The wall] is the biggest symbol of Trump. It’s something he really, really wants,” said Chris Chmielenski, deputy director for
NumbersUSA, a group that supports reducing immigration. “And that’s our biggest fear, is that he’s going to give up amnesty to get a
border wall.” “He could lose some support from Trump die-hards over that,” Chmielenski added. Congress is gearing up for a lame-duck showdown over the
wall, with government funding expiring on Dec. 7 for the Department of Homeland Security, which has jurisdiction over the border. House GOP leaders have
indicated they are willing to go to the mat for the issue, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tamped down talk of a government shutdown over the
wall. “We haven’t talked about shutting down the government, we have talked about getting the wall funding for a year,” McConnell told Bloomberg News on
Tuesday. “The Speaker and I both want to achieve that.” One
way to secure wall funding without shutting down the
government is to strike an immigration deal with Democrats. While such an agreement has remained
elusive, it could be an easier lift in the lame-duck session when lawmakers no longer have the pressure
of an election looming over them. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) last week opened the door to a
possible deal by saying Democrats are not opposed to strengthening the U.S. border. “We Democrats
believe in strong border security,” he said, noting that the Senate immigration reform bill backed by
Democrats in 2013 included billions of dollars for border security. “We’re going to keep fighting for the strongest, toughest
border security.”
DACA success is critical to effective readiness and latent force capacity
Ballasy 17. Nicholas Ballasy--journalist based in Washington, D.C. “Veterans to Congress: U.S. Military
Readiness Requires DACA Recruits,” December 25, 2017. https://pjmedia.com/news-andpolitics/veterans-congress-u-s-military-readiness-requires-daca-recruits/
The National Immigration Forum and Veterans for New Americans are calling on congressional leaders to pass a “permanent solution” for
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) beneficiaries before the Christmas recess begins. In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (RKy.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), veterans argued that DACA recipients are needed in the military. “DACA
recipients and other DREAMer enlistees have critical skills helpful to our military. For example, DACA recipients possess
language skills and cultural competencies that support our global strategic interests. They also have critical
medical skills and training. To date, over 900 DACA recipients have enlisted in the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI)
recruitment program because of their valuable language and medical skills,” the veterans wrote in a letter released a week ago. “Without legislation, about 350 of
these DACA recipients in the MAVNI program may lose their ability to join the military if their DACA protections expire while they continue to wait for background
checks to be completed,” the letter continued. “Thousands more are
expected to volunteer and enlist once legislation is
passed. The outlook of our military readiness and national security in 2018 would both greatly benefit from these
new recruits. Our years of service in defense of this country also compel us to support a permanent, legislative solution for DACA recipients who wish to
serve America.” On a conference call, retired Army Lt. Col. Margaret Stock, co-chairman of Veterans for New Americans National, said Congress should at least allow
DACA beneficiaries currently in the armed services and those waiting for the completion of background checks to remain in the United States while lawmakers
debate a solution for all DREAMers. “I think they should act to fix the problems for the ones who are already in the military – just to clarify though, the Obama
administration, they severely limited DACA,” she said in response to a question from PJM. “There
were thousands of them who wanted to
join the military when the DACA program started but the Obama administration said they wouldn’t
allow them to come in unless they could qualify for the MAVNI program, and very few DACAs can meet
those strict requirements or could meet the strict requirements of the MAVNI program – about 900 of
them did meet the requirements of MAVNI.” President Trump has rescinded the DACA program, which was instituted via a directive from
President Obama. It officially expires in March. Trump has urged Congress to come up with a legislative solution to allow beneficiaries to remain in the country.
Stock described the entire debate over legislation to legalize DREAMers as “ironic” since undocumented immigrants are required to register for the Selective
Service. https://www.sss.gov/Registration-Info/Who-Registration “The irony of this debate is all these young people who are males anyway are required to register
for the draft, and if we had a draft we would draft them – but we bar them from enlisting voluntarily. And, of course, we don’t have a draft today – we have an allvolunteer force, but they are still required to register for the draft,” Stock said on the call organized by the National Immigration Forum. “Many of them are hoping
for the draft because they would like to serve, but we don’t have a draft. I’m not in favor of a draft. I think the all-volunteer force is great, but it is ironic that people
who are required to register for the draft are barred from enlisting voluntarily – that doesn’t make any sense and I really wish Congress would fix that,” she added.
According to the Selective Service, “if an undocumented immigrant ever gets the chance to become a citizen – and he failed to register with Selective Service
System before age 26 – he cannot become a citizen before age 31. He can also be permanently barred from many opportunities that could be essential to building a
successful life in the United States.” Retired Navy Rear Adm. Jim Partington, co-chairman of Veterans for New Americans National, said DREAMers, who were
brought to the U.S. illegally as children, would be a valuable asset to the U.S. military. “ The
quality of these DACA youth that we meet
daily here in trying to support legislation to legalize their status, they are just a truly impressive group
and would be very valuable for the military in the future and make a great contribution,” he said.
That’s increasingly key to avoid nuclear escalation
Dowd 15, senior fellow with the Sagamore Institute Center for America's Purpose (Alan, “Shield &
Sword: The Case for Military Deterrence”, https://providencemag.com/2015/12/shield-sword-the-casefor-military-deterrence/)
Surely, the same principle applies in the realm of nations. Our world teems with violent regimes and vicious men. And something precious—our notion of peace,
sovereignty, liberty, civilization itself—sits exposed to all that danger. In a world where might makes right, the
only thing that keeps the peace,
defends our sovereignty and liberty, and upholds civilization is the willingness to use our resources to keep the dangers at bay. Yet too many policymakers
disregard the wisdom of military
deterrence, and too many people of faith forget that the aim of deterrence is, by definition, to
prevent wars, not start them. Some people of faith oppose the threat of military force, let alone the use of military force, because of Christ’s
message of peace. This is understandable in the abstract, but we must keep in mind two truths. First, governments are held to a different standard than individuals,
and hence are expected to do certain things individuals aren’t expected to do—and arguably shouldn’t do certain things individuals should do. For example, a
government that turned the other cheek when attacked would be conquered by its foes, leaving countless innocents defenseless. A government that put away the
sword—that neglected its defenses—would invite aggression, thus jeopardizing its people. Second, all uses of force are not the same. The sheriff who uses force to
apprehend a murderer is decidedly different from the criminal who uses force to commit a murder. The policemen posted outside a sporting event to deter violence
are decidedly different from those who plot violence. Moral relativism is anything but a virtue. Some lament the fact that we
live in such a violent
world, but that’s precisely the point. Because we live in a violent world, governments must take steps to deter those who can be deterred—and neutralize those
who cannot. In this regard, it pays to recall that Jesus had sterner words for scholars and scribes than He did for soldiers. In fact, when a centurion asked Jesus for
help, He didn’t admonish the military commander to put down his sword. Instead, He commended him for his faith.[i] “Even in the Gospels,” soldier-scholar Ralph
Peters reminds us, “it is assumed that soldiers are, however regrettably, necessary.”[ii] They are necessary not only for waging war but, preferably, for maintaining
peace. It’s a paradoxical truth that military
readiness can keep the peace. The Romans had a phrase for it: Si vis pacem, para bellum. “If you
wish for peace, prepare for war.” President George Washington put it more genteelly: “There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet
an enemy.” Or, in the same way, “We infinitely desire peace,” President Theodore Roosevelt declared. “And the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not
afraid of war.” After
the West gambled civilization’s very existence in the 1920s and 1930s on hopes that war
could somehow be outlawed, the men who crafted the blueprint for waging the Cold War returned to
peace through strength. Winston Churchill proposed “defense through deterrents.” President Harry Truman called NATO “an integrated international
force whose object is to maintain peace through strength…we devoutly pray that our present course of action will succeed and maintain peace without war.”[iii]
President Dwight Eisenhower explained, “Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk its own
destruction.” President John Kennedy vowed to “strengthen our military power to the point where no aggressor will dare attack.” And President Ronald Reagan
steered the Cold War to a peaceful end by noting, “None of the four wars in my lifetime came about because we were too strong.” Reagan also argued, “Our
military strength is a prerequisite for peace.”[iv] Even so, arms alone aren’t enough to deter war. After all, the great powers were armed to the teeth in 1914. But
since they weren’t clear about their intentions and treaty commitments, a small crisis on the fringes of Europe mushroomed into a global war. Neither is clarity
alone enough to deter war. After all, President Woodrow Wilson’s admonitions to the Kaiser were clear, but America lacked the military strength at the onset of war
to make those words matter and thus deter German aggression. In other words, America was unable to deter. “The purpose of a deterrence force is to create a set
of conditions that would cause an adversary to conclude that the cost of any particular act against the United States of America or her allies is far higher than the
potential benefit of that act,” explains Gen. Kevin Chilton, former commander of U.S. Strategic Command. It is a “cost-benefit calculus.”[v] So, given the anemic
state of America’s military before 1917, the Kaiser calculated that the benefits of attacking U.S. ships and trying to lure Mexico into an alliance outweighed the
costs. That proved to be a grave miscalculation. In
order for the adversary not to miscalculate, a few factors must hold. First,
consequences must be clear, which was not the case on the eve of World War I. Critics of deterrence often cite World War I to argue that arms
races trigger wars. But if it were that simple, then a) there wouldn’t have been a World War II, since the Allies allowed their arsenals to atrophy after 1918, and b)
there would have been a World War III, since Washington and Moscow engaged in an unprecedented arms race. The reality is that miscalculation lit the fuse of
World War I. The antidote, as alluded to above, is strength plus clarity. A second important factor to avoid miscalculation: The adversary must be rational, which
means it can grasp and fear consequences. Fear
is an essential ingredient of deterrence. It pays to recall that deterrence comes from the
Latin dēterreō: “to frighten off.”[vi] Of course, as Churchill conceded, “The deterrent does not cover the case of lunatics.”[vii] Mass-murderers masquerading as holy
men and death-wish dictators may be immune from deterrence. (The secondary benefit of the peace-through-strength model is that it equips those who embrace it
with the capacity to defeat these sorts of enemies rapidly and return to the status quo ante.) Third, the
consequences of military
confrontation must be credible and tangible, which was the case during most of the Cold War. Not only did Washington and Moscow
construct vast military arsenals to deter one another; they were clear about their treaty commitments and about the consequences of any threat to those
commitments. Recall how Eisenhower answered Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s boast about the Red Army’s overwhelming conventional advantage in Germany:
“If you attack us in Germany,” the steely American commander-in-chief fired back, “there will be nothing conventional about our response.”[viii] Eisenhower’s
words were unambiguously clear, and unlike Wilson, he wielded the military strength to give them credibility. Discussing military deterrence in the context of
Christianity may seem incongruent to some readers. But for a pair of reasons it is not. First, deterrence
is not just a matter of GDPs and
geopolitics. In fact, scripture often uses the language of deterrence and preparedness. For example, in the first chapter of Numbers the Lord directs Moses
and Aaron to count “all the men in Israel who are twenty years old or more and able to serve in the army.” This ancient selective-service system is a form of military
readiness. Similarly, I Chronicles 27 provides detail about the Israelites’ massive standing army: twelve divisions of 24,000 men each. II Chronicles 17 explains the
military preparations made by King Jehoshaphat of Judah, a king highly revered for his piety, who built forts, maintained armories in strategically located cities “with
large supplies” and fielded an army of more than a million men “armed for battle.” Not surprisingly, “the fear of the Lord fell on all the kingdoms of the lands
surrounding Judah, so that they did not go to war against Jehoshaphat.” In the New Testament, Paul writes in Romans 13 that “Rulers hold no terror for those who
do right, but for those who do wrong…Rulers do not bear the sword for no reason.” Again, this is the language of deterrence. Those who follow the law within a
country and who respect codes of conduct between countries have nothing to fear. Those who don’t have much to fear. Likewise, to explain the importance of
calculating the costs of following Him, Jesus asks in Luke 14, “What king would go to war against another king without first sitting down to consider whether his
10,000 soldiers could go up against the 20,000 coming against him? And if he didn’t think he could win, he would send a representative to discuss terms of peace
while his enemy was still a long way off.” In a sense, both kings are wise—one because he recognizes that he’s outnumbered; the other because he makes sure that
he’s not. Put another way, both kings subscribe to peace through strength. Again, as with the Centurion earlier, Jesus could have rebuked the martial character of
these kings, but he did not. This is not just description but commendation. We ignore their example at our peril. Secondly, it is not incongruent if we
understand military deterrence as a means to prevent great-power war—the kind that kills by the
millions, the kind humanity has not endured for seven decades. We know we will not experience the biblical notion of peace—of shalom, peace with harmony
and justice—until Christ returns to make all things new. In the interim, in a broken world, the alternatives to peace through strength leave much to be desired:
peace through hope, peace through violence, or peace through submission. But these options are inadequate. The sheer destructiveness and totality of great-power
war testify that crossing our fingers and hoping for peace is not a Christian option. Wishful thinking, romanticizing reality, is the surest way to invite what Churchill
called “temptations to a trial of strength.” Moreover, the likelihood that the
next great-power war would involve multiple
nuclear-weapons states means that it could end civilization. Therefore, a posture that leaves peer
adversaries doubting the West’s capabilities and resolve—thus inviting miscalculation—is not only
unsound, but immoral and inhumane—unchristian. “Deterrence of war is more humanitarian than anything,” Gen. Park Yong Ok, a longtime
South Korean military official, argues. “If we fail to deter war, a tremendous number of civilians will be killed.”[ix] Peace
through violence has been tried throughout history. Pharaoh, Caesar and Genghis Khan, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Mao, all attained a kind of peace by employing
brutal forms of violence. However, this is not the kind of “peace” under which God’s crowning creation can flourish; neither would the world long tolerate such a
scorched-earth “peace.” This option, too, the Christian rejects. Finally, the civilized world could bring about peace simply by not resisting the enemies of
civilization—by not blunting the Islamic State’s blitzkrieg of Iraq; by not defending the 38th Parallel; by not standing up to Beijing’s land-grab in the South China Sea
or Moscow’s bullying of the Baltics or al-Qaeda’s death creed; by not having armies or, for that matter, police. As Reagan said, “There’s only one guaranteed way
you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender.”[x] The world has tried these alternatives to peace through strength, and the outcomes
have been disastrous. After World War I, Western powers disarmed and convinced themselves they had waged the war to end all wars. By 1938, as Churchill
concluded after Munich, the Allies had been “reduced…from a position of security so overwhelming and so unchallengeable that we never cared to think about
it.”[xi] Like predators in the wilderness, the Axis powers sensed weakness and attacked. In October 1945—not three months after the Missouri steamed into Tokyo
Bay—Gen. George Marshall decried the “disintegration not only of the Armed Forces, but apparently…all conception of world responsibility,” warily asking, “Are we
already, at this early date, inviting that same international disrespect that prevailed before this war?”[xii] Stalin answered Marshall’s question by gobbling up half of
Europe, blockading Berlin, and arming Kim Il-Sung in patient preparation for the invasion of South Korea.[xiii] The U.S. military had taken up positions in Korea in
1945, but withdrew all combat forces in 1949.[xiv] Then, in 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced that Japan, Alaska and the Philippines fell within
America’s “defensive perimeter.”[xv] Korea didn’t. Stalin noticed. Without a U.S. deterrent in place, Stalin gave Kim a green light to invade. Washington then
reversed course and rushed American forces back into Korea, and the Korean peninsula plunged into one of the most ferocious wars in history. The cost of
miscalculation in Washington and Moscow: 38,000 Americans, 103,250 South Korean troops, 316,000 North Korean troops, 422,000 Chinese troops and 2 million
civilian casualties.[xvi] The North Korean tyranny— now under command of Kim’s grandson—still dreams of conquering South Korea. The difference between 2015
and 1950 is that tens of thousands of battle-ready U.S. and ROK troops are stationed on the border. They’ve been there every day since 1953. The lesson of history
is that waging war is far more costly than maintaining a military capable of deterring war. As Washington observed, “Timely disbursements to prepare for danger
frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it.” Just compare military allocations, as a percentage of GDP, during times of war and times of peace: In
the eight years before entering World War I, the United States devoted an average of 0.7 percent of GDP to defense; during the war, U.S. defense spending spiked
to 16.1 percent of GDP. In the decade before entering World War II, the United States spent an average of 1.1 percent of GDP on defense; during the war, the U.S.
diverted an average of 27 percent of GDP to the military annually. During the Cold War, Washington spent an average of 7 percent of GDP on defense to deter
Moscow; it worked. Yet it seems we have forgotten those hard-learned lessons. In his book The World America Made, Robert Kagan explains how “ America’s
most important role has been to dampen and deter the normal tendencies of other great powers to
compete and jostle with one another in ways that historically have led to war.” This role has depended
on America’s military might. “There is no better recipe for great-power peace,” Kagan concludes, “than
certainty about who holds the upper hand.”[xvii]
Miller ptx DA
Secretary of Defense Mattis is successfully maintaining the NATO Alliance now, but
he’s walking a tightrope. Staying out of Trump’s cross-hairs is key.
Torres-Bennett and Gawel 8/30 — Aileen Torres-Bennett, Contributing Writer at The Washington
Diplomat, and Anna Gawel, Managing Editor at The Washington Diplomat, 2018 (“Defense Secretary
Mattis Quietly Survives Trump’s Purges with Mixed Record,” The Washington Diplomat, August 30th,
Available Online at
https://washdiplomat.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=18106:defense-secretarymattis-quietly-survives-trumps-purges-with-mixed-record&catid=1574&Itemid=428, Accessed 09-272018)
Every industry loves its insider baseball. Politics is no exception The Trump administration has been
catnip for Washingtonians who relish the “Game of Thrones” plot twists that play out on a daily basis.
What will Trump do
next? Who will be fired? Who will make the cut in the seemingly relentless D.C.
version of “The Apprentice?” Amid the daily drama stands Secretary of Defense Mattis
The seasoned military careerist
has managed to hold onto his job in an
.
, or tweet,
James
, who was the head of U.S. Central Command during the Obama administration,
, President Trump’s stalwart, quiet soldier.
administration plagued by the highest turnover rate in modern White House history
. There are two nicknames for Mattis: “Warrior Monk”
and “Mad Dog.” He earned the former by being an insatiable student of war and remaining unmarried. He earned the latter by being, as Trump so enthusiastically called him, a “killer” on the battlefield. Mattis supposedly prefers to be known as a “Warrior Monk” than “Mad Dog.” Being a
How much longer he stays, however, is another matter.
The president is reportedly frustrated by what he sees as his defense secretary slow-walking many of his
proposed initiatives
Speculation is also rife about how much influence Mattis
wields in a revolving-door Cabinet, particularly with the addition of prominent hawks such as
Bolton and Pompeo
The rumors are nothing new. From the beginning,
observers wondered whether the retired four-star Marine general would mesh with his boss, given how
different the two men are in temperament and experience
Beyond their
personal and professional differences, Mattis and Trump diverge on key policy issues, including NATO,
Russia, Syria, Afghanistan, the value of diplomacy and alliances, how to run the Pentagon and America’s
role in the world But Mattis has been deft at downplaying his disagreements with Trump while
studiously working behind the scenes to blunt the edges of his boss’s harsh rhetoric Mattis must be
both military man and diplomat, especially when it comes to NATO, an area where he has
demonstrated skill in maneuvering to preserve the security bloc without stepping on Trump’s toes. He
must often calibrate his actions to counterbalance Trump’s public denunciations, laying a soothing hand
on traditional allies’ shoulders after his boss lashes out at them
Mattis has for the
most part reassured nervous NATO allies that the U.S. remains committed to their defense
“killer” may have gotten him into the administration, but being a cool and levelheaded intellectual is helping him stay there.
, such as banning transgender troops from openly serving in the military.
National Security Advisor John
Mike
, who has taken the reins of the North Korea portfolio as secretary of state.
. Whereas Trump made billions as a real estate magnate and reality television star, Mattis steadily moved up the ranks of the
military over four decades, becoming a battle-hardened veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whereas Trump avidly consumes TV headlines minute by minute, Mattis rep ortedly has a personal library of over 6,000 books.
.
.
, while also guarding against the re-emergence America’s old adversary Russia after the president welcomes
Vladimir Putin with open arms. In some areas, Mattis’s head-down, deliberative approach has succeeded; in others, the internationalist scholar has failed to sway a president who won office on an isolationist America First platform.
. The picture is more mixed with
Russia, which Mattis sees as a long-term threat. On the one hand, the administration has agreed to an array of sanctions against the Kremlin; on the other, the president is often reluctant to concede that the Kremlin is responsible for the transgressions behind those sanctions, most
notably election meddling. Trump also reluctantly agreed to Mattis’s advice to send several thousand U.S. troops to Syria and Afghanistan, a huge concession given the president’s disdain for foreign entanglements. It’s a concession that could easily be taken back. In April, Trump abruptly
announced he would withdraw U.S. troops from Syria as soon as possible, taking military leaders by surprise. But a few weeks later, Mattis quietly reversed course, saying the U.S. was in it for the long haul in Afghanistan, where Americans are training local forces to fight the Taliban, and
in Syria, where the Pentagon wants to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State and curb Iran’s rising influence. It wasn’t the first time Trump has caught Pentagon leaders off guard. After the president’s meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Trump announced a suspension of U.S.South Korean joint military exercises, which the Pentagon considers vital to maintaining readiness on the volatile Korean Peninsula. According to a June 25 NBC report, Mattis was blindsided by the move. Nevertheless, Mattis dutifully defended the decision, saying it increased room for
diplomats to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the North’s nuclear weapons program. Ironically, when Mattis served under Obama, many Democrats pegged him as a warmonger for his hawkish views on Iran and Islamic extremism. Today,
Dem s see Mattis as their best hope to pacify Trump’s combative instincts
ocrat
many
of those same
. Despite his qualms about the Iran nuclear agreement, for instance, Mattis
argued — to no avail — that it was better for the U.S. to remain in the agreement than to abandon it altogether. He also differed with his boss on withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, cutting the State Department’s budget, imposing tariffs on
allies and creating a so-called Space Force branch within the military. Trump’s supporters say these disagreements are a normal part of policymaking and reflect the fact that while the president takes his defense secretary’s opinions into account, he ultimately makes his own decisions as
Trump’s critics
have called Mattis one of the “grown-ups” in the room who keeps the
president’s whims in check
One of the reasons Mattis has retained his job could simply be that he refrained from calling
the president an “idiot”
Maybe
Mattis learned a lesson from Tillerson and McMaster’s missteps, or perhaps he is more self-disciplined
and patient, keeping his venting contained to an ironclad few and adapting to his boss’s temperament
and sensitivities
commander in chief.
, however,
. Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster used to be among those “grown-ups,” but he, like former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, got on the wrong side of the boss and were axed, depriving Mattis of two
close allies in the administration.
with the intelligence of a “kindergartner,” as McMaster reportedly did when Trump wasn’t around, or a “moron,” as Tillerson did, also when Trump wasn’t around. In a typical office, such remarks might be normal water-
cooler venting. But in administration where private gossip is routinely leaked and the boss is notoriously thin-skinned, Tillerson and McMaster’s days were numbered. It didn’t help that neither seemed to ever develop a genuine rapport with the president.
. “I’m not paid for my feelings. I save those for my girlfriend,” Mattis said at a press conference in February. He was referring to his feelings about Trump’s idea to stage a grand military parade in Washington, D.C., a display critics say would be a
waste of money. Trump was eager to move ahead with the parade until he found out the cost would be nearly $100 million (inacc urately pinning the blame for the price tag on local city officials). But the parade flap is merely a sideshow to the meatier issues Mattis confronts, namely
So far, he has handled NATO with skill
NATO’s Protector
Mattis and Trump have sharply differing perspectives on NATO. The secretary of defense has maintained
a low profile
while trying to assuage fears that Trump will irrevocably weaken the
alliance Trump
has repeatedly derided NATO member states for not spending enough on defense and only begrudgingly
committed to
Article 5
Mattis
is a strong
supporter of NATO
But instead of publicly contradicting
his boss, Mattis has gone to work quietly shoring up America’s participation in the alliance
Mattis was put to the test early on after Trump’s condemnation of
NATO as “obsolete” rattled allies
German Defense Minister von der Leyen immediately called
Mattis after Trump’s inauguration He managed to distance himself from everything
Trump had said
without appearing disloyal
When Mattis arrived in Brussels
for a NATO gathering, he
implored U.S. allies to spend more on defense — but he never threatened to pull out of the alliance if
reassuring allies while repelling adversaries.
and is treading carefully with Russia while overseeing a larger defense budget.
, as usual,
the bloc’s
69-year-old
collective defense clause that an attack on one member is an attack on all.
.
, who headed NATO’s Supreme Allied Command for Transformation from 2007 to 2009,
. “History is clear,” Mattis said at his Senate confirmation hearing. “Nations with strong allies thrive, and those without them wither.”
. According to a May 29, 2017,
report in The New Yorker titled “James Mattis, A Warrior in Washington,” Dexter Filkins wrote that
. Filkins wrote that
Ursula
.“
,” von der Leyen told Filkins. “
President
a few weeks later
they didn’t
Mattis is walking a very fine line While that line is getting tighter
and tighter, Mattis has notched several significant achievements under his belt
he has
shepherded through additional funding to improve Europe’s deterrence capabilities and fortify its
eastern flank in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its muscle-flexing in the region
at
the NATO summit senior national security officials pressed ambassadors to finish a formal policy
agreement before the summit began in an effort to prevent Trump from scuttling it
Mattis, Bolton and Pompeo were all keen to avoid the kind of breakdown that occurred
at the contentious G7 summit
when Trump refused to sign the final communiqué
the efforts are a sign of the lengths to which the president’s top advisers will go to protect a key
and longstanding international alliance from Trump’s unpredictable antipathy
,” Filkins wrote, noting that one former defense official told him that
“
.”
. Among other things,
. More recently,
in July,
, according to an Aug. 9 New York Times article by Helene
Cooper and Julian E. Barnes. The article said
a month earlier,
. “Described by European diplomats and
American officials,
Mr.
,” they wrote, noting that the communiqué ensured that allies “could
push through initiatives, including critical Pentagon priorities to improve allied defenses against Russia.” That includes formally inviting Macedonia to join the alliance and a pledge to support the “30-30-30-30” agreement spearheaded by Mattis. That plan would require 30 land battalions,
Threats to our collective security have not waned
Mattis said in a press conference
He told reporters that the alliance “has made
significant progress” on burden sharing
Like Trump
Mattis wants other NATO countries to
increase their spending on collective security, although he has relied on praise and pressure over
outright threats to persuade allies to shoulder more responsibility
30 air fighter squadrons and 30 warships ready to deploy within 30 days. “
the east,”
, whether terrorism to the south or Russia’s aggression and hybrid threats to
in June at the NATO Defense Ministerial in Brussels.
in the last year.
(and Obama),
. “On the burden sharing, in 2014, it was a watershed year in NATO, when only three nations’ military
spending was at 2 percent of GDP,” Mattis said. “By 2017, all nations had reversed the downward trend … in defense spending, and last year we also saw the largest across-NATO increase in military spending in a quarter century. “Now, in 2018, eight nations are already meeting the 2
Mattis wrapped up his press conference by asserting that the
U.S. is committed to the NATO alliance that, for nearly 70 years, has served to uphold the values and the
principles on which our democracies were founded
percent pledge benchmark, and I salute the 15 allies who are on track to reach 2 percent by 2024,” he added.
“
.” The Russia Threat NATO was formed in 1949 to stave off aggression by the Soviet Union. After the Cold War, NATO redefined itself to stay
relevant, with members banning together to, for instance, fight terrorism in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks (the only time, incidentally, that Article 5 has ever been invoked). Today, Cold War-era tensions are back, as a resurgent Russia threatens European nations from the Baltics to
the Balkans with everything from airspace incursions to fake news. In some ways, Russia is also a dire threat to the administration, which is fending off charges of collusion that could, in theory, lead to Trump’s impeachment. Yet the president has remained steadfast in his belief that the
U.S. could partner with Vladimir Putin to cooperate on areas such as Syria. Still, it’s hard for anyone to get a read on Trump’s Russia strategy. Trump is loath to admit that Russia meddled in the U.S. election despite overwhelming evidence by his own intelligence agencies that it did. At the
same time, Trump kicked out (albeit reluctantly) 60 Russian diplomats and closed a consulate in response to Moscow’s alleged poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil. He also agreed to provide lethal weaponry to Ukraine to fight Russian-backed separatists in
the east (a move supported by the Pentagon), and his administration has imposed a slew of tough sanctions against the Kremlin (albeit largely under pressure from Congress). The Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki, which followed the NATO summit in Brussels, further muddied the waters.
Only translators were present with Trump during his two-hour sit-down with Putin, so no high-level officials know exactly what transpired during the tête-à-tête. Critics argue that Mattis should have been in the room because of all the Russia-related national security issues involved, from
cyber hacks to nuclear weapons. The meeting supposedly resulted in agreements, but no details have surfaced. Mattis has long been clear that he views Russia as a geopolitical threat. Weeks before the Helsinki meeting, he warned tha t Putin seeks to “undermine America’s moral
authority” and “shatter NATO.” “For the first time since World War II, Russia has been the nation that has redrawn international borders by force in Georgia and Ukraine while pursuing veto authority over their neighbors’ diplomatic, economic and security decisions,” he said. Trump,
however, stunned allies with his deferential appearance next to Putin in Helsinki, where he sided with the Russian leader over his intelligence agencies’ conclusion that the Kremlin interfered in the U.S. election. The controversial performance came just days after Trump blasted NATO
allies such as Germany for being “captive” to Russia. Once again, Mattis found himself in the role of peacemaker, putting a positive spin on the Helsinki meeting when asked by reporters whether the U.S. should hold more direct talks with the Russians. “It’s essential that leaders talk with
Mattis
has been remarkably successful in maintaining linkages with the allies despite skepticism by the White
House said Cancian, who served with Mattis in Iraq and is currently a senior adviser in the
International Security Program at
CSIS
NATO allies have put their trust in Mattis despite worries not only
over Trump’s embrace of Putin, but also his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and imposition of
tariffs on E U member states. But concerns are mounting that Mattis is not a strong enough voice in
Trump’s ear
the biggest fear of all: a potential Mattis departure In an
administration that has seen a high degree of turnover, former NATO official
Vershbow said some of
his European contacts ask him from time to time about the possibility that Mattis might leave the job
That’s the nightmare scenario for the Europeans, that Mattis could depart
Report
Card Many experts say Mattis has fared well in an exceedingly difficult position. The blunt-talking but
generally press-averse Marine still appears to have the respect of the president, and if he disagrees with
Trump’s calls, he refrains from commenting on it in public There has been speculation that Mattis has
fallen out of favor with Trump and is no longer in his inner circle. That is debatable, said Townsend, a
former deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy and currently an adjunct
senior fellow in the Center for a New American Security’s Transatlantic Security Program I don’t think
Mattis was ever in Trump’s inner circle. That’s a pretty exclusive and eclectic group
But there have
been stories that Trump is relying more on his own instinct and close circle of friends and less on
experts/professionals, including Mattis. But that has quieted down. I don’t think military issues are a top
priority or interest for Trump, except as political props As long as Mattis keeps his head down and
remains totally focused on the U.S. military and its mission, which is what he does so well, he will stay
one another,” Mattis said. “It’s most important that we talk with those countries that we have the largest disagreements with. I mean that’s how you repair those disagreements… I’ve always said diplomacy leads our foreign policy. This is diplomacy in action.” “
,”
Mark
the Center for Strategic and International Studies (
). “For example, U.S. efforts in Eastern Europe, called the European Deterrence Initiative, have increased to $6.5 billion in the FY 2019
budget, even though there has been great concern about the level of contributions by the Europeans.”
uropean
nion
, according to a July 9 Reuters article by Phil Stewart and Robin Emmott. But
.“
Alexander
,” Stewart
and Emmott wrote. “
,” Vershbow told Reuters.
.
Jim
.“
,” he said. “
.“
out of Trump’s crosshairs
Townsend, who worked for more than two decades on European and
NATO policy at the Pentagon, said Mattis’s major accomplishments as defense secretary to date include
keeping the transatlantic defense community together, both bilaterally and at NATO, while also being
tough with allies to increase defense spending
,” Townsend said.
“
.”
The plan breaks the truce between Stephen Miller and other White House officials
that gave him total control over immigration policy. He’ll respond by demanding more
influence in other areas.
Toosi 8/29 — Nahal Toosi, Foreign Affairs Correspondent at Politico, 2018 (“Inside Stephen Miller’s
hostile takeover of immigration policy,” Politico, August 29th, Available Online at
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/29/stephen-miller-immigration-policy-white-house-trump799199, Accessed 09-26-2018)
When the White House held a series of meetings to discuss how to deal with nations that refuse to
take back their citizens whom the U.S. is trying to deport, one voice in the room was louder than all the
others: Miller It was odd that Miller, a powerful senior policy adviser to
Trump focused on
slashing immigration
was even there The issue
has traditionally been handled by the
N S C
because it overlaps with sensitive foreign relations matters
and Miller is not a
part of the NSC But Miller
led several of the meetings
last year
Stephen
.
President Donald
to America,
ational
ecurity
.
of so-called recalcitrant countries
ouncil, in part
, such as fighting terrorism —
.
,
, who recently turned 33,
. And he would launch the sessions with horror stories about Americans being victimized by noncitizens, such as a 25-
year-old Connecticut woman stabbed to death by a Haitian man who should have been deported earlier. The tone left some in the room feeling anxious about trying to argue against him, according to current and former U.S. officials. “‘What are we doing to save American lives? We must
save American lives! We must save Americans from these immigrant criminals!’” a former NSC official recalled Miller saying in one session. “He would tell these stories to make it clear t here was no room for anything other than to come down hard on these countries, even if we had other
Miller’s hard-charging approach to the discussion offers a glimpse into just one of the
many tactics
he has used to secure an iron grip on Trump’s immigration policies, surviving
blowups such as the initial blowback over the
travel ban and the
fracas over
family
separation One major reason Miller remains a powerful player on immigration is that he’s so close to
Trump, who agrees with many of his hard-line views. But
Miller also
has managed to set the agenda on Trump’s signature campaign issue through
sheer bureaucratic
cunning He has installed acolytes across agencies
He has inserted himself into NSC
deliberations to an extraordinary degree
He takes care to limit his paper trail
He has cajoled and bullied some career staffers into implementing his vision of radically
tighter borders — a vision that
even Trump has privately suggested can be extreme.
Even when he doesn’t get everything he wants,
he manages to dramatically alter the
boundaries of the debate
national security interests to consider.”
— psychological and otherwise —
president’s
more recent
the migrant
policy.
according to nearly a dozen current and former U.S. officials and others who deal with migration,
another quality:
.
key U.S.
, such as the State Department.
for someone not in that elite group’s ranks.
, avoiding email and keeping his
name off documents when possible.
U.S.
, according to a former White House official,
such as with the recalcitrant countries,
. The latest test of Miller’s power is underway, as he tries to slash the number of refugees the U.S. accepts next year to 25,000 or fewer, according to former officials and advocates for refugees. That’s even lower than
the historic nadir of 45,000 he helped pull it down to last year, and Miller is playing a major role as the State Department, Pentagon and other agencies try to reach a consensus before Sept. 30. Miller also is behind other immigration-related policy initiatives in the works, including ways to
make it harder for people to obtain legal status in the United States. The White House did not make Miller available for an interview, but deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley defended Miller as just doing what his boss wants. “Everything Stephen Miller does is the result of first asking the
Miller is a gifted behind-the-scenes operator whose obsession with
immigration is shaping Trump’s agenda
question: What does President Donald Trump want done?” Gidley said. Others, however, said
. “We thought good policy arguments, good bureaucratic arguments — that if we just did the right thing and told the truth, that we would win,” the former NSC official said of the
bureaucratic wrangling with Miller. “But he was playing a totally different game than we were.” ‘An intimidation session’ Miller’s combative style quickly spilled into public view within days of Trump’s inauguration, when he, working with a coterie of like-minded colleagues, rolled out
Trump’s infamous travel ban: an executive order barring from U.S. soil the citizens of several Muslim-majority countries. The order had not gone through the usual interagency review, leading to widespread confusion about its implementation. The result: scenes of refugees, elderly
women and even children detained at U.S. airports as protests emerged nationwide. In the days afterward, as the travel ban hit obstacles in the courts, Miller publicly and forcefully defended it, bolstering his national notoriety in the process. “There is no constitutional right for a citiz en in
a foreign country who has no status in America to demand entry into our country. Such a right cannot exist. Such a right will never exist,” Miller said on ABC News. “This is an ideological disagreement between those who believe we should have borders and should have controls and those
who believe there should be no borders and no controls.” Behind the scenes, Miller was surprising and rankling his colleagues. The day after the ban was unveiled, a Saturday, NSC staffers were asked to convene a “principals committee” meeting to discuss the fallout. Such meetings are
attended by Cabinet secretaries and other specially designated U.S. officials who deal with national security, and they are typically chaired by the national security adviser. But the team that assembled that day was a mix of officials at varying ranks — and it was Miller who chaired the
meeting. (A White House official pushed back on this, arguing that because Miller chaired the gathering, by definition that made it not a meeting of the “principals committee.”) After spending a few minutes leading a discussion of murky legal issues around the travel ban, Miller pivoted
Stephen was like, ‘This is the way it’s going to be. This is the president’s
will.’
That really set the tone
Stephen just had this
aura about him. People realized
Stephen is the president of immigration
to what one senior administration official said felt like “an intimidation session.” “
That Trump was ‘heartened, encouraged,’ something like that, by what’s happening at the airports,” the official said. “
at that point this guy —
,” the official added. “
—
.” ‘You’re so tough on this stuff, Stephen’ Miller’s fixation on
immigration is something of a mystery to many people who know him. He has often been described as a contrarian who rebelled against his liberal upbringing in Santa Monica, California. He has been a conservative activist since at least his high school days, and his writings portray a
young person deeply shaken by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He grew his reputation for antagonism at Duke University, where — as a columnist for the student newspaper — he defended lacrosse players falsely accused of rape and warned that multiculturalism poses a threat to American
identity. Miller later worked as a communications aide to Jeff Sessions, then a Republican senator from Alabama whose far-right anti-immigration views Miller shared. Miller joined the Trump campaign in early 2016, finding in the president a fellow anti-immigration crusader. Their
relationship is what some of Miller’s defenders point to when discussing his tactics. “He has been very effective at navigating the office politics of the West Wing, but the idea that Stephen is some Svengali is ridiculous,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration
Studies, which seeks more restrictions on immigration. “Part of his success is that he’s simpatico with Trump — there’s nothing he’s promoting that the president is actually against.” Over time, though, even Trump has become aware of how far to the right Miller is on the issue, and he
listens to other voices, a former White House official said. “Trump will sometimes say, ‘Well, yeah, but you’re so tough on this stuff, Stephen,’” the former official said. Still, Trump also sees how well the hard-line stance plays with his Republican base, and he relies on Miller to flesh out
much of his immigration policy.
Despite his high rank of assistant to the president and broad title of senior policy adviser, it
quickly became clear to people in Trump’s orbit that immigration wasn’t just the singular issue Miller
truly cared about, it was also, by far, the subject he knew the most about. Other officials couldn’t keep
up with his grasp of the details The backlash over the travel ban didn’t deter Miller from pursuing
seismic immigration policy changes
Because of his mind-meld with Trump, Miller from the start wielded tremendous
sway over the Domestic Policy Council, a White House-based forum of top officials and staffers who
deal with issues such as health care, education and other domestic topics aside from the economy Some
elements of immigration policy are among the DPC’s portfolios. But there are other aspects of
immigration that have been traditionally dealt with by the NSC, such as refugee resettlement and
recalcitrant countries
under Miller, the DPC proposed that it take the lead on all
immigration matters, including what was supposed to be handled by the NSC NSC staffers raised
concerns. But Miller pushed then-national security adviser McMaster and Bossert, the homeland
security adviser at the time, to effectively cede control of immigration policy to him,
saying
that in exchange, he wouldn’t get in their way on other matters
He’s
willing to cut deals implicitly and explicitly with people: If you give me free rein on immigration, I will
leave you alone on a bunch of other stuff
Due to his machinations, Miller began
unofficially co-chairing meetings on refugees, recalcitrant countries and other topics that used to be in
the NSC’s domain, but in which the DPC was now given a major role. An NSC unit known as BATS
largely came under Miller’s control
.
in the weeks that followed, officials said. Instead, he learned that he needed the stamp of the interagency process to successfully implement and validate the changes he sought. So he looked
for ways to gain more control of that process. Without a trace
U.S.
.
. According to multiple former officials,
.
H.R.
Tom
two former officials said,
. (Bossert declined comment, and McMaster did not reply to a request for comment.) “
,” the former White House official said.
— Border and
Transportation Security —
, current and former officials said.
Miller will push Trump to abandon NATO. That crushes U.S. deterrence and risks a
U.S.-Russia nuclear war.
Rothman 17 — Noah Rothman, Associate Editor of Commentary Magazine, holds an M.A. in
International Relations from Seton Hall University, 2017 (“The Bannon Wing: From Liability to Threat,”
Commentary Magazine, June 5th, Available Online at https://www.commentarymagazine.com/donaldtrump-bannon-wing-from-liability-to-threat/, Accessed 09-27-2018)
Bannon’s wing of the administration has already done this presidency immeasurable harm on
the domestic front. By entering the realm of foreign affairs, the Bannon wing is now a menace to global
security
Trump delivered remarks at the opening
ceremony of NATO’s headquarters
Those remarks pointedly did not include any reference to
America’s continued support for
Article 5 America’s allies were listening closely for a
repudiation of Trump’s campaign rhetoric
Senior strategist Steve
. For nearly two weeks, administration officials have been insisting that what seemed like a scandal was no scandal at all. On May 25, Donald
new
in Brussels.
the Atlantic Alliance’s mutual defense provision:
.
, in which he so often flirted with the prospect of abandoning the responsibilities of a global superpower. In a July 2016 interview with the New York Times, Trump was
asked if he would honor America’s obligations to its allies “if Russia came over the border into Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania.” Rather than offering a perfunctory or even qualified “yes,” Trump bloviated about the need for these nations to have “fulfilled their obligation to us.” If he meant
that these countries need to contribute more to their own defense, he chose the wrong targets. Estonia, arguably the nation most threatened by Russia, was one of five NATO members (as of 2015) that met the alliance’s defense spending threshold of the equivalent of 2 percent of its
this was part of a convoluted strategy to satisfy
the “America first” base
Trump’s failure to reassure America’s NATO allies of his
commitment to their defense wasn’t part of the plan. A reference to Article 5 had been in the speech
text. The text was reviewed and approved by
McMaster
Tillerson and
Mattis
endorsed the affirmation. But, somehow, the expression of support for that bedrock principle
didn’t make the final cut The president appears to have deleted it himself
Miller played a role in the deletion
GDP. It may be that this comment and those like it were not merely expressions of ignorance on the president’s part. It seems more likely now that
. According to the reporting of Politico’s Susan Glasser,
National Security Advisor H.R.
. Secretary of State Rex
Defense Secretary James
uniting 29 North Atlantic
nations in defense of each other’s security
.“
,” Glasser reported, citing one plausible
version of events. “[A]nother version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trump’s nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen
.” The administration
appears to recognize the scope of the president’s blunder. National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton—the author of a despicably nihilistic essay contending that 2016 America was a doomed airplane that was going down anyway, so why not vote for Trump?—insisted the
president’s support for Article 5 is beyond question. McMaster co-authored an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal with National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn insisting that America’s allies heard Trump defend America’s commitments. This clean-up effort is necessary but misses the
mark. What America’s adversaries heard from Trump is of less immediate concern than what our adversaries internalized. Contrary to some expectations, bilateral relations between the United States and Russia have cratered since Trump took office. This was a predictable outgrowth of
Trump’s misapprehensions. Donald Trump entered office with the desire to pursue rapprochement with Moscow. So did George W. Bush and Barack Obama, but Trump came in without even an elementary knowledge of American grand strategy, national interests, or a range of
appropriate concessions. Through inference or, perhaps, explicit assurances made behind closed doors, Trump promised Moscow the world with no means of delivering. More disturbing, the president left the Kremlin with the impression it would have greater freedom of action in a postObama world.
Trump’s ambiguity regarding what the U S would and would not defend with force undermines
nited
tates
a credible American deterrence. It invites Putin to test the parameters of Trump’s resolve, which could
be disastrous. In that probing process, the Kremlin could stumble into an international incident from
which there is no face-saving off-ramp. It could cross a line the U S cannot allow to be crossed and
stumble into a potentially disastrous global conflict
Miscalculations by great powers and the sheer inertia of a geopolitical crisis have plunged the
world into terrifying wars before, and it may well happen again
also
nited
tates
. Putin has intensified his policy of conducting diplomacy through airstrikes on U.S.-backed militias in Syria, or even dangerously close to U.S.
forces proper.
. The Bannon wing of the Trump administration is an embarrassing liability for this president. Whether it’s the
original “travel ban,” the revised “travel ban,” the executive order targeting “sanctuary cities,” or the pronouncement that new oil pipelines be constructed with domestically-produced steel despite the fact that such quantities of domestically produced steel do not exist; President Trump
Toying with the notion that the U.S. would not honor its obligations to the NATO alliance
is
dangerous. Once again, the White House is reduced to cleaning up the mess the Bannon wing
has left behind
is routinely done injury by his nationalists.
beyond discomfiting. It’s
. You would think that, at some point, the president would tire of being humiliated.
1NC Shell neolib
Immigration is a tool of neoliberalism used to establish immigrants as commodities
that can be degraded and exploited for economic gain. Understandings of
neoliberalism must come prior to understandings of citizenship.
Agyemang et al 16
(Gloria, Professor of Accounting at Royal Holloway, University of London. Contributions from Cheryl R. Lehman (professor at
Hofstra University and accounting academic) and Marcia Annisette (Associate Professor of Accounting; Associate Dean,
Students; Program Director, Master of Accounting at the Schulich School of Business in Ontario). "Immigration and
neoliberalism: three cases and counter accounts", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 29 Iss 1 pp. 43 – 79.
Published 03-15-16. Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-09-2013-1470) AJN
The immigration policies that we explore in this paper should be considered part of wider state
apparatus designed to harness and extract life forces according to market principles of efficiency and
competitiveness (Walsh, 2011, p. 862; Ong, 2006, p. 4). Under neoliberalism there is an erasure of immigrants as
social and moral agents; they are recast as primarily economic agents or commodities whose main
purpose is to benefit the economy (Pallitto and Heyman, 2008). By objectifying the immigrant as a commodity,
the immigrant is seen to hold resources (skills) that are “limited and separable from their bodies:
Seemingly skills can automatically be transformed into labour power and traded like oil” (Goldberg, 2012,
p. 126). Conceived of this way immigrants are immediately rendered available for economic measurement and
manipulation via a range of calculative technologies, including accounting. The ultimate effect of neoliberal
immigration practice therefore confounds prior understandings of citizenship. As Ong (2006, pp. 6-7) points out:
[…] citizenship elements such as entitlements and benefits are increasingly associated with neoliberal
criteria so that mobile individuals who possess human capital or expertise are highly valued […] citizens
who are judged not to have such tradable competence or potential become devalued and thus
vulnerable to exclusionary practices. Immigration policy under neoliberalism is thus framed as a
platform for national competitiveness struggling over resources defined as skills and talent, and illustrative
of what Ilcan and Phillips (2010) refer to as “the neoliberal mentality”, an incessant extension of market logic and rules into all spheres of social
life (see also Gold, 2005; Li, 1992; Menz, 2009; Shelley, 2007). Brown and Tannock (2009) describe it as a “global competition for talent” (p.
381) defining people in terms of potential for profit maximization (see UK Government, 2006; Pottie-Sherman, 2013; Watt et al., 2008). In this
manner neoliberalism articulates
immigration as satisfying market efficiency doctrines while practices
develop into wider state apparatus controlling life (Foucault, 2003). Longazel and Fleury-Steiner (2013) suggest
“immigration law and politics under neoliberalism has been characterized by an encouragement of
increased immigration to satisfy economic imperatives on one hand and punitive laws, which, on the
other hand, criminalize these very populations” (p. 360). As neoliberal practice ignores the structural
realities that immigrants confront, our concern is that constructed panics divert attention from broader
structural inequities of neoliberalism and normalize neoliberal power relations. Market principles of efficiency
and competitiveness obscure that immigration is a complex social problem and a worked-out discourse and practice (see Papademetriou et al.,
2008; Watt et al., 2008).
{Specific link}
The affirmative is a neoliberal strategy to promote mass forced migration by
improving structural conditions in the US to be contrasted with the countries of origin
of migrants which are typically victims of mass economic exploitation. The affirmative
loosening of immigration law is merely promoting mass influx of cheap skilled labour,
further incentivizing mass exploitation of the global south and mass migration of
workers away from their own territories to the United States thereby further
impoverishing their native territory and intensifying exploitation.
Wise 13 (Raúl Delgado Wise, The Migration and Labor Question Today: Imperialism, Unequal
Development, and Forced Migration, https://monthlyreview.org/2013/02/01/the-migration-and-laborquestion-today-imperialism-unequal-development-and-forced-migration/, 2013)//robf
It is impossible to disentangle the migration and labor question today without a deep understanding of
the nature of contemporary capitalism, namely, neoliberal globalization. One of the main features of
the new global architecture, boosted by the emergence of one of the most distressing global crises
since the Great Depression, is the assault on the labor and living conditions of the majority of the
global working class, and in particular the migrant workforce, which is among the most vulnerable
segments of this class. This essay will analyze some key aspects of the system that contemporary migration is embedded in, with emphasis on the process of segmentation and the growing
precariousness (precarization) of labor markets worldwide. The aim is to unravel: a) the re-launching of imperialism (policies of global domination)
in search of cheap and flexible labor, as well as natural resources from the South; b) the growing
asymmetries among and within countries and regions; c) the increase and intensification of social
inequalities; d) the configuration of a gigantic global reserve army of labor associated with the
emergence of severe forms of labor precarization and exploitation; and e) the predominance of forced
migration as the primary mode of human mobility under conditions of extreme vulnerability. From this
perspective, the migration and labor questions are two sides of the same coin, whose currency translates into unbearable conditions of systematic oppression of the working class. To combat this, there must be, among other
In the neoliberal era, the
capitalist world system revolves around the monopolization of finance, production, services, and
trade—as well as labor exploitation and environmental degradation. In expanding their operations,
monopoly capitalism’s agents have created a global network of production, finance, distribution, and
investment that has allowed them to seize the strategic and profitable segments of peripheral
economies and appropriate their economic surplus. Monopoly capital has become, more than ever, the central player. Through megafusions and mega-strategic alliances, monopoly capital has reached unparalleled levels of
concentration and centralization: the five hundred largest multinational corporations concentrate
between 35–40 percent of world income.1 Closely associated with this trend is that the “top one
hundred global corporations had shifted their production more decisively to their foreign affiliates
[mainly in the South], which now account for close to 60 percent of their total assets and employment
and more than 60 percent of their global sales.”2 This means that, “A ‘new nomadism’ has emerged within
production, with locational decisions determined largely by where labor is cheapest.”3 In opposition to the myth of “free
markets,” at least 40 percent of world trade is subject to such operations.4 Two key landmarks characterize the current capitalist restructuring
process: The creation of global networks of monopoly capital as a reorganization strategy led by the
large multinational corporations, who through outsourcing operations and subcontracting chains extend
parts of their productive, commercial, and services processes to the South in search of abundant and
things, a unity of social organizations and movements in alliance with progressive intellectuals in order to foster a process of social transformation. Imperialism Today
cheap natural and human resources. This strategy entails the establishment of export platforms that
operate as enclaves in peripheral countries, such as the maquiladora plants installed in the northborder states of Mexico. It is estimated that between 55 million and 66 million workers from the South
work in such plants.5 Additionally, monopoly capital helps to avoid direct price competition among multinational corporations by searching for low-cost positions through taking advantage of low wages.6
The restructuring of innovation systems. This aspect of neoliberal capitalism involves the
implementation of mechanisms such as outsourcing (including offshore-outsourcing) in the sphere of
scientific and technological innovation (for example, innovation-based firms in Silicon Valley and Route
128 in the United States and IT-export platforms in Bangalore, India), allowing multinational
corporations to have southern scientists at their service, reduce labor costs, transfer risks and
responsibilities, and capitalize on the benefits of purchasing and concentrating patents. Closely related to the two
aforementioned aspects, we also find: The unleashing of financialization as a major consequence of the new global
architecture, aimed at increasing the power of financial capital by extending the supremacy of its
institutions over a slowly but increasingly deregulated global economy. The end result has been a
disconnection between the “real” economy and a ballooning economy of “fictitious capital” based on
the operations of speculative funds. An intensification of environmental degradation, which, with the
deterioration of ecosystems and the emergence and deepening of climate change due to the
privatization of natural resources and irresponsible deregulation, is reaching or has reached crisis
proportions. Neoliberal capitalism is facing a profound multidimensional crisis that undermines the
main sources of wealth creation—labor and nature—to the point that it can be characterized as a
crisis of civilization, with a potentially catastrophic outcome. It is crucial to realize that this crisis demands both that we engage in a process of radical social
transformation and in the construction of a social transformation agent capable of confronting the current dominant imperialist power. These responses are all the more needed because the responses to
the crisis by the governments of developed countries and by international agencies are greatly
constrained by the fact that they are still promoting neoliberal globalization. As a result, their
approach has been short-sighted, elitist, and exclusive. Instead of addressing the root causes of the
crisis, they have implemented limited strategies that seek to rescue financial and manufacturing
corporations facing bankruptcy. And since key elements in their response have been the promotion of
labor flexibilization and regressive fiscal adjustments, the living and working conditions of most of the
population have been negatively impacted. These measures are desperate attempts to maintain an
ever-more predatory and unsustainable form of capitalism and prolong the privileges and power of the
ruling elites. The Labor Question Today One of the main engines of the new imperialism at the heart of neoliberal
capitalism is cheap labor. Corporate strategies, enhanced by government policies, aim to lower the cost
of labor by any means, so that businesses can take advantage of the massive global oversupply of
labor. With the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the ascent of China and India in the world economy,
and the “freeing” of labor through the implementation of structural adjustment programs in the
periphery of the system (the global South),7 the labor available for capital’s exploitation over the last two
decades has more than doubled (from 1.5 to 3.3 billion). This has led to the disproportionate growth
of a global reserve army of labor, which absorbs between 57 and 63 percent of the global labor force.8
The outrageous dimension of this reserve army of labor is dialectically interrelated to the abysmally
low wages and chronic insufficiency of decent employment that characterizes contemporary
capitalism. According to estimates of the International Labor Organization, the number of workers in
conditions of labor insecurity rose to 1.53 billion in 2009—encompassing more than half of the world’s
labor mass—with 630 million receiving a salary of less than $1.25 per day. These workers find themselves in situations of extreme
poverty. Meanwhile, the global number of unemployed has risen to 205 million. 9 This in turn has led to
growing pressures to emigrate internally and/or internationally. The quest for cheap labor, and the
mechanisms employed to create it, has reconfigured the global working class: There has been the
creation of a dispersed and vulnerable proletariat attached to the global networks of monopoly
capital. A covert “proletarianization” of highly qualified scientific and technological workers has taken
place. There has been the real or disguised proletarianization of the peasantry. The reserve army of
labor has greatly expanded. With this has been an increase in new forms of poverty and an underclass
of workers without hope or possibility of any (let alone decent) work, many of whom have been disabled or
made ill through the process of capital accumulation and economic growth. There has been the semiand sub-proletarianization of migrant workers forced to migrate by the capitalist development of
production.10 Under these circumstances, when the labor conditions of so many workers are eroded and
much of the working class is excluded from the social welfare system—such that the subordinate
classes cannot fulfill the most basic of their social needs, and are unable even to secure basic
subsistence—then we may say that capitalist development entails the superexploitation of labor. We
have, in other words, a situation of systemic violence and human insecurity affecting the majority of
the world’s population. In human terms, this is what the new imperialism has wrought. The Mushrooming of Unequal Development A major and inescapable feature of neoliberal globalization and the
new imperialism that is such a major feature of it is unequal development. The global and national dynamics of capitalist development, the
international division of labor, the imperialist system of international power relations, the conflicts
that surround the capital-labor relation, and the dynamics of extractivist capital have all made
economic, social, political, and cultural polarization more extreme between geographical spaces and
social classes than ever before in human history. This inequality is reflected in many kinds of data. For example, a conspicuous outcome
of this unequal development is the disproportionate concentration of wealth and power in the hands
of a small elite within the capitalist class. Nowadays the richest 1 percent of the world’s population
controls 40 percent of total global assets.11 Moreover, there is an enormous disparity in growth rates
between core and peripheral countries. “From 1970 to 2009, the per capita GDP of developing countries (excluding China) averaged a mere 6.3 percent of the per capita GDP of the
G8 countries.”12 Global labor arbitrage has become a key element of this new global architecture. This refers to
the advantage of pursuing lower wages abroad. Capital in the rich nations “earns” enormous
monopolistic returns (imperial rents) by taking advantage of the relative immobility of labor and the
existence of subsistence (and below) wages in much of the South. Hourly wages in China are but 4
percent of hourly wages in the United States and 3 percent of those in the European Union. Wages in
Mexico are a mere 16 percent of those in the United States. Through labor arbitrage, geographic
asymmetries are reproduced on an ever broader scale.13 Social inequalities are one of the most
distressing aspects of unequal development. The unprecedented concentration of power and wealth
in a few hands forces a growing segment of the world’s population to suffer poverty, exploitation, and
exclusion (from schooling, healthcare, housing, leisure, and the like). Increasing disparities are also
expressed in forceful racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination; reduced access to production and
employment; a sharp decline in living and working conditions; and the progressive dismantling of
social security systems. A fundamental mechanism in the promotion of the new global economic
structures and the trend toward unequal development has been the implementation of structural
adjustment programs. These have been the vehicle for breaking apart or disarticulating the productive
apparatus in the periphery and, in effect, making it a part of (re-articulating it to) the core economies,
under sharply asymmetric and subordinated conditions. The direct and indirect exportation of labor is a key element for conceptualizing this process. On the one
hand, the indirect or disembodied exportation of labor is associated with the establishment of global networks of monopoly capital in the South through outsourcing operations, as previously mentioned.14 In this case, the main
the direct exportation of labor refers to
international labor migration, mainly composed of South-North and South-South flows. In fact, 156
million migrants of the existing 214 million (72 percent), come from the periphery.15 The exportation of
labor in its two forms shapes a new international division of labor that resembles a new edition of
input of national origin in exported commodities is the labor used in the assembly (or service or commercial) process. On the other hand,
enclave economies in the periphery, and encompasses the emergence of new modalities of unequal
exchange, much more severe than in the past: the net transfer of revenues to the North through
outsourcing operations in the South, and the South-North transfer of the educational and social
reproduction costs of the migrant labor. For example, estimates of the educational costs and social
reproduction costs of the Mexican labor that emigrated to United States during the NAFTA era
(considering only public education expenses and basic consumption goods), were twice the
accumulated amount of remittances received by Mexico in the same period.16 Forced Migration Under the New International Division
of Labor Migration has acquired a new role in the labor division of neoliberal globalization. Mechanisms of unequal development produce structural
conditions, such as unemployment and inequality, which catapult the massive migration of
dispossessed and marginalized people. Compelled by the need to have access to means of subsistence
or at least minimal opportunities for social mobility, large segments of the population are in practice
expelled from their territories to relocate within their own country or abroad. Labor oversupply and
worsening living conditions turn migration, particularly from peripheral countries, into a form of forced
displacement.17 Forced migration flows have four characteristics: a) they take place on a national and international level, and move mainly from deprived peripheral regions toward
relatively more advanced areas in peripheral or core economies; b) they primarily affect the vulnerable, poor, and marginalized, who are
barred in their place of origin from satisfying basic material and subjective needs; c) they generate an
oversupply of cheap and disorganized labor, exploited by employers and corporations interested in
keeping costs down; and d) they fuel mechanisms of direct and indirect labor exportation, both among
low- and high-skilled workers. The number of migrants (most of whom come from peripheral regions) has increased over the last
three-and-a-half decades, from 84 million in 1975 to 215 million in 2010. The main flows are in a South-North direction (82 million),
followed by South-South (74 million). There is also a significant contingent (750 million) of domestic (within the same country) migrants. Taken together, these migrations have reshaped
the labor map and turned migration into a keystone of the capitalist restructuring process.18 Documented migration
that flows in a South-South direction, including transit migration at an intranational level in peripheral countries, exposes migrants to conditions of utmost vulnerability. These migrants occupy the lowest echelons in the
displacement dynamics generated by the processes of accumulation by dispossession, that is, where peasants are forced from their lands. In line with the above considerations, it is possible to distinguish four types of forced
migration: Migration due to violence, conflict, and catastrophe. Smuggling and trafficking of persons. Migration due to dispossession, exclusion, and unemployment. Migration due to over-qualification and lack of opportunities.
The first category involves 43 million refugees and internally displaced people; the second 2.45 million victims; the third, 72 million, not counting the bulk of internal migrants; and the fourth, 25.9 million.19 The conditions under
which forced migrations develop involve multiple risks and dangers, particularly in the case of the most vulnerable groups. These involve permanent exposure to conditions of labor insecurity and instability, and social exclusion in
host societies. Furthermore, as has been mentioned, international migration is increasingly subjected to criminalization policies and practices, racialization, and race- and gender-based discrimination, which not only increases
vulnerabilities and risk, but also often endangers life itself.20 The safeguarding of human rights is still a pending issue for most governments in countries of origin, transit, and destination. Few nations are exempt from this
responsibility. Either because of the stigma of illegality or due to racial prejudices—and, in fact, mainly because of economic interest—destination countries espouse tacit ignorance regarding the labor and human rights of
migrants. They also put up obstacles that hinder or bar them from easily obtaining legal residence and citizenship. Countries of origin or transit function under a double-standard: while governments denounce violations of the
rights of their citizens in destination countries, the rights of foreigners in their own land are systematically violated. Even though international migrants have certain legal means of protection, such as the 1990 International
Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families—still not ratified by any of the important migrant destination countries—there are still no effective mechanisms for their
implementation. And, unfortunately (but expectedly), instead of adequately categorizing migrants in terms of the problems to which they are exposed, governments classify these groups as “economic migrants,” in a context that
The relationship between migration, development,
and human rights is a topic of growing interest among international organizations, academics, and civil
society organizations. To varying degrees, international organizations such as the World Bank and the
International Organization for Migration see remittances from migrants back to their families as an
essential tool in the development of migrant-sending, underdeveloped countries. They also envisage international migration
management as a core element in the design and implementation of migration policies that are apparently beneficial for all parties. This perspective, which has dominated
both academic and policy agendas, has multiple flaws. It is essentially one-sided, decontextualized, and
misleading. It overlooks the neoliberal globalization and unequal development in which contemporary
migration is embedded. It also disregards human and labor rights as central and intrinsic elements of coherent migration and development policies, as well as the exploitation, social exclusion, human
insecurity, and criminalization suffered by international migrants. In addition, it masks most of the fundamental contributions made by migrants
to the destination countries and ignores the costs of migration for the countries of origin, costs that
greatly outweigh the overemphasized “positive” impact of remittances. Despite the insistence of
international bodies and governments regarding the alleged positive effects of migration and
remittances as detonators of development in countries of origin, there is no empirical evidence to
warrant this assumption.
presupposes the existence of individual liberty, social mobility, and a truly free market.21 The Win-Win-Win Fiction
The alt is to adopt movements from below – only bottom up politik can reenergize the public sphere
and dismantle transnational capitalism
Giroux 16 Henry A. Giroux currently is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo
Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. He also is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University. His most
recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New
Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015) and coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age
of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015). Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is
www.henryagiroux.com. “Henry A. Giroux | Radical Politics in the Age of American Authoritarianism: Connecting the Dots”,
Truth-out. April 10, 2016.
There has never been a more pressing time to rethink the meaning of politics, justice, struggle, collective action,
and the development of new political parties and social movements. The ongoing violence against Black youth, the impending
ecological crisis, the use of prisons to warehouse people who represent social problems, and the ongoing war
on women's reproductive rights, among other crises, demand a new language for developing modes of
creative long-term resistance, a wider understanding of politics, and a new urgency to create modes
of collective struggles rooted in more enduring and unified political formations. The American public
needs a new discourse to resuscitate historical memories and methods of resistance to address the
connections between the escalating destabilization of the earth's biosphere, impoverishment, inequality,
police violence, mass incarceration, corporate crime and the poisoning of low-income communities. Not
only are social movements from below needed, but also there is a need to merge diverse single-issue
movements that range from calls for racial justice to calls for economic fairness. Of course, there are
significant examples of this in the Black Lives Matter movement (as discussed by Alicia Garza, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and
Elizabeth Day) and the ongoing strikes by workers for a living wage. But these are only the beginning of what is
needed to contest the ideology and supporting apparatuses of neoliberal capitalism. The call for
broader social movements and a more comprehensive understanding of politics is necessary in order to
connect the dots between, for instance, police brutality and mass incarceration, on the one hand, and the diverse crises producing
massive poverty, the destruction of the welfare state and the assaults on the environment, workers, young people and women. As Peter
Bohmer observes, the call for a meaningful living wage and full employment cannot be separated from demands "for access to quality
education, affordable and quality housing and medical care, for quality child care, for reproductive rights and for clean air, drinkable water,"
and an end to the pillaging of the environment by the ultra-rich and mega corporations. He rightly argues: Connecting
issues and
social movements and organizations to each other has the potential to build a powerful movement of
movements that is stronger than any of its individual parts. This means educating ourselves and in our
groups about these issues and their causes and their interconnection. In this instance, making the political
more pedagogical becomes central to any viable notion of politics. That is, if the ideals and practices of
democratic governance are not to be lost, we all need to continue producing the critical formative
cultures capable of building new social, collective and political institutions that can both fight against the
impending authoritarianism in the United States and imagine a society in which democracy is viewed no
longer as a remnant of the past but rather as an ideal that is worthy of continuous struggle. It is also crucial
for such struggles to cross national boundaries in order to develop global alliances. At the root of this notion of
developing a comprehensive view of politics is the need for educating ourselves by developing a critical
formative culture along with corresponding institutions that promote a form of permanent criticism
against all elements of oppression and unaccountable power. One important task of emancipation is to
fight the dominant culture industry by developing alternative public spheres and educational
institutions capable of nourishing critical thought and action. The time has come for educators, artists, workers, young
people and others to push forward a new form of politics in which public values, trust and compassion trump neoliberalism's celebration of selfinterest, the ruthless accumulation of capital, the survival-of-the-fittest ethos and the financialization and market-driven corruption of the
political system. Political responsibility is more than a challenge -- it is the projection of a possibility in which new modes of
identification and agents must be enabled that can sustain new political organizations and transnational anti-capitalist movements.
Democracy must be written back into the script of everyday life, and doing so demands overcoming the current crisis of
memory, agency and politics by collectively struggling for a new form of politics in which matters of justice, equity and inclusion define what is
possible. Such struggles demand an increasingly broad-based commitment to a new kind of activism. As Robin D. G. Kelley has recently noted,
there is a need for more pedagogical, cultural and social spaces that allow us to think and act together,
to take risks and to get to the roots of the conditions that are submerging the United States into a new
form of authoritarianism wrapped in the flag, the dollar sign and the cross. Kelley is right in calling for a politics
that places justice at its core, one that takes seriously what it means to be an individual and social agent
while engaging in collective struggles. We don't need tepid calls for repairing the system; instead, we
need to invent a new system from the ashes of one that is terminally broken. We don't need calls for
moral uplift or personal responsibility. We need calls for economic, political, gender and racial justice.
Such a politics must be rooted in particular demands, be open to direct action and take seriously
strategies designed to both educate a wider public and mobilize them to seize power. The left needs a
new political conversation that encompasses memories of freedom and resistance. Such a dialogue would build
on the militancy of the labor strikes of the 1930s, the civil rights movements of the 1950s and the struggle for participatory democracy by the
New Left in the 1960s. At the same time, there is a need to reclaim the radical imagination and to infuse it with a spirited battle for an
independent politics that regards a radical democracy as part of a never-ending struggle. None of this can happen unless progressives
understand education
as a political and moral practice crucial to creating new forms of agency, mobilizing a
desire for change and providing a language that underwrites the capacity to think, speak and act so as to
challenge the sexist, racist, economic and political grammars of suffering produced by the new
authoritarianism.The left needs a language of critique that enables people to ask questions that appear unspeakable within the existing
vocabularies of oppression. We also need a language of hope that is firmly aware of the ideological and
structural obstacles that are undermining democracy. We need a language that reframes our activist politics
as a creative act that responds to the promises and possibilities of a radical democracy.
The alternative solves – the Zapatistas prove
Routledge 03 (Paul, Researcher at the School of Geography, A Companion to Political Geography,
BlackWell Publishing) JA
Through their spokesperson, Subcommandante Marcos, the
Zapatistas engaged in a "war of words" with the
Mexican government, fought primarily with rebel communiques (via newspapers and the Internet), rather than bullets. Through
their guerrilla insurgency and this war of words the Zapatistas have attempted to raise awareness concerning
the unequal distribution of land, and economic and political power in Chiapas; challenge the
neoliberal economic policies of the Mexican government; articulate an indigenous worldview which promotes Indian
political autonomy; and articulate a call for the democratization of civil society. They have also been able to forge an international solidarity
The success of the
Zapatista struggle has lain in its ability, with limited resources and personnel, to disrupt international
financial markets, and their investments within Mexico, while exposing the inequities on which
development and transnational liberalism are predicated (Harvey, 1995; Ross, 1995).
network of groups and organizations. They have thus posed both material and representational challenges.
Links
Human Trafficking
Wadley 09
(Jonathan, PhD in IR from Florida and currently professor of IR and sexual politics at San Diego. “SEX
TRAFFICKING AND THE REPRODUCTION OF EUROPE: IDENTITIES, INTEGRATION, AND THE POLITICS OF
PROTECTION,” pg 17. Published by the University of Florida in 2009, accessed @
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UFE0041207/00001 on 7-21-18.) -AJN
Refugee/humanitarian
Humanitarian justifications for immigration policy are neoliberal calls to harvest a
select few immigrants as sources of moral value to bolster the credibility of the host
country- it transforms human rights and compassion into limited commodities
bestowed on a select population
LUCA MAVELLI in 2018
University of Kent, Citizenship for Sale and the Neoliberal Political Economy of Belonging, International
Studies Quarterly (2018) 0, 1–12
New Zealand’s stance reflects a
well-established distinction between refugees and economic migrants. Whereas
the former should be assessed and helped according to principle of need, the latter should be evaluated
solely in economic terms. New Zealand has also a tradition of welcoming refugees with disabilities (Saker 2010, 25–26). For instance,
in welcoming Asian refugees from Uganda in 1973, Prime Minister Norman Kirk insisted that New Zealand should be ready to accept “a
significant proportion of ‘handicapped’ cases” (Beaglehole 2009, 107). This argument would seemingly lend support to Ong’s (2016b, 22–24)
view that contemporary rationalities of inclusion and exclusion encompass two contending paths: neoliberalism and ethical traditions of
solidarity variously grounded in “religion . . ., feminism, humanitarianism and other schemes of virtue.” These traditions may challenge the
economic rationality of neoliberalism by prompting states to welcome potentially “defective” refugees in terms of human capital, who would
constitute a burden for the welfare state. However, as I argued in the first section, this argument neglects how forms of
inclusion
based on human rights, shared humanity, and common solidarity may be colonized and corrupted by
neoliberalism. It neglects how these values may have undergone a process of economization and how—given that
economization cannot be reduced to monetization—entrepreneurial states may try to maximize not just their
economic growth, but their non-monetary and non-economic value. Hence, they may evaluate prospective
citizens—a few hundred Syrian refugees, in this case—as capital that may enhance their cultural, emotional, and
reputational value, even if this implies an economic cost. This argument appears particularly relevant in the aftermath of
Alan Kurdi’s death. In New Zealand, “Amnesty, the United Nations, Catholic bishops, former Prime Minister Helen Clark and local mayors
publicly urged the Government to do more” (Vance 2015). Yet, the rationale for “doing more” was not solely framed as necessary in order to
relieve the suffering of Syrian refugees. For Labor leader Andrew Little, “Kiwis” should keep up with their “track record” of open borders for
those in need because “[t]here is something in our nature—we are people of conscience and compassion—[committed] to offer help” (Vance
2015). Similarly, for then prime minister John Key, New Zealand should do more because “people want us to respond with extra people, they
definitely want us to respond for Syrians” (New Zealand Herald 2015). These remarks invite us to consider how responding
to the
demand of compassion stemming from the emotional wave provoked by Alan’s death required supplying New Zealand with
Syrian refugees in order to reproduce an ethical and compassionate self-understanding of New Zealanders.
Alan’s death, in other words, contributed to turn Syrian refugees—specifically, a few hundred Syrian refugees with mental and
physical disabilities—into a source of emotional capital which would contribute to strengthening the selfunderstanding of the moral value of the country. To further explore this argument, it is necessary to consider how the last
few years have witnessed a progressive shift from human rights to humanitarianism. This means that
provisions of care for “precarious lives” such as “the lives of the unemployed and the asylum seekers, . . . of
sick immigrants and people with AIDS, . . . of disaster victims and victims of conflict” (Fassin 2012, 4) are increasingly linked and
subordinated to their recognition as “victims.” Abetted by the protean development of visual culture and social media
consumption, humanitarianism has introduced a new language of compassion and emotions revolving
around notions of “suffering” and “trauma” that has resulted in the construction of a “new humanity”
made of individuals who are legitimate as long as they are recognized as “suffering bodies” (Ticktin 2011,
4–5). Miriam Ticktin (2011, 2), for instance, explores the French so-called “illness clause”: a humanitarian principle that grants residence to
migrants already in the country who suffer from a life-threatening condition that would not be properly treated in their home country. This
clause endows the government with the power to decide what constitutes “legitimate suffering” and has contributed to turn the “suffering
body” into a “means to papers” (Ticktin 2011, 4). For Ticktin (2006, 35), this clause is the product of and contributes to reproduce a selfunderstanding of France as a “global moral leader” and as the “home of human rights.” It has engendered “a new politics of citizenship in
France, a humanitarian space at the intersection of biopolitical modernity and global capital, in which contradictory and unexpected diseased
and disabled citizens emerge” (Ticktin 2006, 35). Humanitarianism
institutes a new global “meritocracy of suffering”
favors the establishment of humanitarian corridors for certain
categories of refugees—such as women and children, particularly if affected by physical and mental conditions—and the
hardening of borders for able-bodied refugees. Ticktin’s argument resonates with Mezzadra and Neilson’s notion of
“differential inclusion.” This term captures how the modern process of “disarticulation of citizenship”
results in a condition in which “inclusion in a sphere, society, or realm can be subject to varying degrees of
subordination, rule, discrimination, and segmentation” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 159). However, whereas Mezzadra and Neilson deem
(Clifford Bob, quoted in Ticktin 2006, 34) that
differential inclusion a function of the neoliberal political economy of labor—that is, of the capacity of laboring bodies to be inscribed in and
contribute to neoliberal mechanisms of production, accumulation, and dispossession—Ticktin alerts us that inclusion may also
be a
function of humanitarianism. For her, humanitarianism represents a partial degeneration (my term) of the
human rights regime since it subordinates the universalism of human rights to the more particularist
and selective discourses of emotions, charity, and compassion. Building on Ticktin’s argument, my contention is that
humanitarianism and, specifically, the establishment of humanitarian corridors for vulnerable refugees are
a product of a neoliberal political economy of belonging that deems vulnerable refugees as a source of
emotional capital that can strengthen the humanity capital of the country. This argument is well illustrated by the
United Kingdom’s decision, shortly after the death of Alan Kurdi, to commit to take twenty thousand Syrian refugees over a period of five years
directly from camps in Syria’s neighboring countries. Then prime minister David Cameron (cited in BBC News 2015) explained that the refugees
would be selected on the basis of need: “We will take the most vulnerable: . . . disabled children, . . . women who have been raped, . . . men
who have suffered torture.” Even more than in the case of New Zealand, the British government—which had withdrawn its support for searchand-rescue operations in the Mediterranean in 2014 and refused to accept any refugees under the European Union emergency resettlement
program in 2015—came under heavy pressure to open its borders to those in greater need. Revealingly, the
flurry of calls urging the
government to act questioned how, by failing the test of compassion, the United Kingdom was betraying
its identity, undermining its status as a moral nation capable of abiding by its obligations, and losing its moral value (Mavelli
2017b, 826–27). The United Kingdom, in other words, was irredeemably damaging what could be described as its
humanity capital. To avert and reverse this process, in the framework of a logic of economization of emotions, the
country decided to invest in a small number of refugees who could undeniably be recognized as
“victims.” To this end, the pledge was to not just take “women and children” refugees—the embodiment of defenseless, apolitical, and
innocent victimhood as per Cynthia Enloe’s famous definition (see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2017, 207). The United Kingdom raised its moral
investment by committing to take the suffering (and emasculated) bodies of disabled children, raped women, and men who had been tortured
in order to produce the emotionally valuable, deeply racialized, and gendered figure of the “ideal refugee” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2017, 209). The
fact that this choice may be potentially costly for the health system lends support to the argument advanced in this article. The
market
value of prospective citizens may not be reduced to their human, economic, or financial capital and to their capacity to
contribute to the economic growth of the country. The process of neoliberal economization turns
emotions into a valuable source of capital, with the effect that inclusion may become a function of
prospective citizens’ capacity to strengthen the emotional identity and moral self-understanding of the
country. From this perspective, the physically and mentally disabled refugees taken by the United Kingdom and New Zealand should be
considered an investment and the embodiment of an emotional capital instrumental to preserving and promoting a national sense of collective
pride, self-esteem, and moral righteousness. This neoliberal political economy of belonging makes it possible that, while residency to an autistic
child from a relatively wealthy family is denied on the grounds that he would be a burden to taxpayers, a few hundreds or thousands of
disabled refugees are welcomed, despite their potential cost, as a testimony of the country’s humanity. Simultaneously, the
neoliberal
political economy of belonging decrees that hundreds of thousands of refugees may languish in refugee
camps in North Africa, Turkey, and Europe, or in offshore locations such as Christmas Island, and that hundreds may die every
day in the attempt to cross border zones such as the United States–Mexican border or the Mediterranean. The
reason for these diverging responses is that, as Ticktin emphasizes, the universalism of human rights is
subordinated to the particularism of the politics of emotions.
1NC---AT: Skills Gap
No skills gap & employer coordination dooms the aff
Weaver 17 (8/25, Andrew, assistant professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “The Myth of the Skills Gap”, MIT Technology Review,
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608707/the-myth-of-the-skills-gap/)
The idea that American workers are being left in the dust because they lack technological savvy does not
stand up to scrutiny. Our focus should be on coordination and communication between workers and
employers. The contention that America’s workers lack the skills employers demand is an article of
faith among analysts, politicians, and pundits of every stripe, from conservative tax cutters to liberal
advocates of job training. Technology enthusiasts and entrepreneurs are among the loudest voices declaiming
this conventional wisdom (see “The Hunt for Qualified Workers”). Two recent developments have heightened debate over
the idea of a “skills gap”: an unemployment rate below 5 percent, and the growing fear that
automation will render less-skilled workers permanently unemployable. Proponents of the idea tell an intuitively appealing story:
information technology has hit American firms like a whirlwind, intensifying demand for technical skills and leaving unprepared American workers in the dust. The mismatch between high
This view of the nation’s economic
challenges distracts us from more productive ways of thinking about skills and economic growth while
promoting unproductive hand-wringing. The problem is, when we look closely at the data, this story doesn’t
match the facts. What’s more, this view of the nation’s economic challenges distracts us from more productive ways of thinking about skills and economic growth while promoting
unproductive hand-wringing and a blinkered focus on only the supply side of the labor market—that is, the workers. Although much research touches on this topic, almost none of
the existing studies directly measure skills, the key quantity of interest. I have conducted a series of
nationally representative skill surveys covering a range of technical occupations: manufacturing
production workers, IT help-desk technicians, and laboratory technologists. The surveys specifically target managers with
knowledge of both hiring and operations at their businesses. The basic strategy is to ask: what skills do employers demand, and do
the employers that demand high skill levels have trouble hiring workers? The results yield a number of surprises. First,
persistent hiring problems are less widespread than many pundits and industry representatives claim.
employer requirements and low employee skills leads to bad outcomes such as high unemployment and slow economic growth.
A few years back, Paul Osterman of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and I found that less than a quarter of manufacturing plants had one or more production-­worker vacancies that had
have
looked for signs of hiring trouble in IT and clinical laboratory occupations. Given a tighter labor market
and higher educational requirements for these entry-level technical jobs, it would be reasonable to
expect hiring to be more difficult. Not so. Only 15 percent of IT help desks report extended vacancies in technician positions. While the results do show
lasted for three months or more. By contrast, industry claims at the time were that three-­quarters or more faced a persistent inability to hire skilled workers. More recently, I
higher levels of long-term lab-tech openings, it turns out that many of these are concentrated in the overnight shift and thus reflect inadequate compensation for difficult working conditions,
not a structural skill deficiency. A little over a quarter of clinical diagnostic labs report at least one long-term vacancy. The survey results do show some hiring challenges, but not for the
reasons posited by the conventional skill-gap narrative. In fact, the data reveal that high-tech and cutting-edge establishments do not have greater hiring difficulties than other establishments.
It is quite common to
hear advocates—and even academics—assert that the answer to the nation’s labor-market and
economic-growth challenges is for workers to acquire more science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics (STEM) skills. However, my data show that employers looking for higher-level computer
skills generally do not have a harder time filling job openings. Manufacturers requiring higher-level math
do sometimes have more hiring challenges, but math requirements are not a problem for IT help desks
or clinical labs. So what are the skill requirements most consistently associated with hiring difficulties? In
manufacturing, it’s higher-level reading, while for help-desk technicians it’s higher-level writing. Proponents of
Furthermore, the data imply that we should be careful about calling for more technical skills without specifying which skills we are talking about.
the skill-gap theory sometimes assert that the problem, if not a lack of STEM skills, is actually the result of a poor attitude or inadequate soft skills among younger workers. But while demand
for a few soft skills—like the ability to initiate new tasks without guidance from management—is occasionally predictive of hiring problems, most soft-skill demands, including requirements for
cooperation and teamwork, are not. This is not to say that STEM or soft skills are not enormously useful. However, specific recommendations and courses of study need to be tightly connected
to particular occupational requirements and employer needs. For example, although it may seem safe to recommend that students go learn some kind—any kind—of computer programming,
following that advice won’t necessarily open up a job opportunity as, say, an IT help-desk technician, a position that happens to be the second-largest computer/mathematical occupation in
America. Only 15 percent of computer help desks demand programming, a number that is slightly lower than the percentage of manufacturing plants that require programming skills for their
production workers.
Knowledge of networking processes and operating systems, along with writing skills, is far
more likely to meet the requirements of help-desk hiring managers. There is also a lot of variation in skill
levels demanded within each occupation. For example, only about a third of IT help desks and manufacturing plants require higher-level math, such as
algebra or statistics. Thus, we cannot assume that a single occupational skill requirement applies to all establishments, or that workers in every market are getting a consistent signal about skill
, employers are surprisingly capable of designing jobs in
different ways to make use of different skill sets. We would ultimately like to ratchet up both employer
skill requirements and employee skill levels (and the corresponding productivity and wages), but doing so requires that we think
not only about adjusting worker skill levels, but also about changing employer behavior. This points up
the danger in the way we currently discuss the “skills gap.” Thinking about the nation’s economic and
workforce challenges this way encourages us to believe that the root of all labor-market problems lies in
the low quality of labor supply—that is, in workers’ lack of skills. However, pushing students and new workers
to unilaterally make expensive investments in generic skill categories (or, worse, to just get “more education”) is likely to
result in inefficient investments, mistaken choices, and a large number of dead-end paths. Even economists and
­requirements. As a variety of results in economic and management research have shown
labor-market experts don’t know the exact mix or level of skills that particular occupations demand. No regularly administered government survey can tell us, say, the percentage of clinical
laboratories that require lab techs to know probability or statistics (55 percent, according to my research), or the percentage of IT help desks that demand knowledge of mobile operating
systems (76 percent). Ultimately, there is no substitute for coordination between the supply side of the labor market (workers and their skill investments) and the demand side (employers and
their skill requirements). Rather than blaming workers and schools, we should be focusing on labor-market intermediaries such as employment agencies or trade associations, employer
relationships with technical colleges or other institutions, and employer-provided training. In this regard, my survey results do give cause for concern. The manufacturing survey data indicate
that only half of U.S. plants provide formal training to their production workers. By contrast, in the 1990s—the last period for which nationally representative survey data on training are
available—70 to 80 percent did so. Meanwhile, only 52 percent of IT help desks have relationships with institutions from which they hire workers or receive training services. For clinical labs,
the absence of a local training institution is a significant predictor of hiring difficulties. Instead of fretting about a skills gap, we should be focused on the real challenge of knitting together the
supply and demand sides of the labor market. Thinking about the real financial and institutional mechanisms necessary to make, say, apprenticeships work is far more productive than
perennially sounding alarms about under-skilled workers. A final point is worth making on technology and the fear that robots will steal all the jobs. Occupations evolve as technology
advances. Help-desk technicians once spent more time on tasks like password resets than they do today. Despite the automation of such functions, computer problems—and the occupation
The danger is not that we will run out of tasks humans can usefully perform or
that required skill levels will be catastrophically high; it’s that misguided anxiety about skill gaps will lead
us to ignore the need to improve coordination between workers and employers. It’s this bad
coordination—not low-quality workers—that presents the real challenge.
that tackles them—continue to expand.
1NC---Turn: Growth
Growth now makes war more likely—globalization is becoming militarized
Capie, prof IR, 11—Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington,
New Zealand, Visiting Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University,
Research Associate in the ASEAN Studies Centre at American University, co-editor of the journal Political
Science, member of the editorial board of Asian Politics and Policy (David, 7/16/2011, “Welcome to the
dark side? Mittelman's encounter with global insecurity”, Global Change, Peace & Security, Volume 23,
Issue 2, Taylor and Francis, AL)
The book's thesis is that there are two systemic drivers of contemporary security and insecurity. The first
is what Mittelman calls hypercompetition, the ‘intensified competition that agglomerates markets’.
Accelerated by ‘new technologies, the rise of transnational capital and increasing labour mobility’,
national production systems are giving way to global firms with supply chains extending across the
world. The language of war has permeated commerce, with corporations embracing aspects of a
Hobbesian ‘warre of all against all’ as they seek to cut costs, raise efficiency and dominate markets.
Hypercompetition is ‘heavily but not totally American’ in several of its facets, including the long reach of
US markets, investment in R&D, the prevalence of neoliberal ideas about the ordering of the economy
and society as well as the prevalence of American popular culture.
The second is the concentration of power in an historically unprecedented hegemonic actor: the United
States of America. The book puts aside the traditional vocabulary of geopolitics, arguing that the USA is
not a superpower or even a great power enjoying a unipolar moment. Rather, ‘in light of the large
distance between the United States and the other major powers in a globalizing world’, the preferred
term is hyperpower.3 The idea builds on the notion of hyperpuissance coined by French foreign minister
Hubert Vedrine in 1998, but, drawing on Gramscian notions of consensual hegemony and Foucauldian
biopolitics, Mittelman gives it more precision and extracts greater analytic leverage from it. Notably, in
his vision, although there can be only one hyperpower, the concept extends beyond the USA as a state.
Instead, hyperpower is imperial in character, a ‘weblike structure, including a net of overseas military
bases, a clutch of allies, aspects of ideological appeal, and an educational system that widely propagates
values associated with those at the epicentre of globalization’.4
When hypercompetition and hyperpower converge (or coincide), the conditions point to the book's
third core concept: hyperconflict. This arises ‘out of the tension between the logic of statecentric and
polycentric worlds’ and when ‘a medley of nonstate actors both accommodates and more assertively
resists state initiatives’.5 Although only in a ‘nascent’ phase, hyperconflict expresses itself as
‘heightened coercion and weakening consensus’, ‘pervasive uncertainty’ and ‘a rising climate of fear’.6
Contrasting the ‘old’ order of war with the ‘new’ order of militarized globalization, Mittelman argues
that the old order was ‘permeated by wars between states and within them, as well as partial
safeguards with rules to manage them’. This has been ‘partly supplanted by hyperpower enmeshed in
various conflicts, but the most flagrant conflicts deny military solutions. In fact, the application of more
and more coercion inflames tensions, emboldens unconventional enemies, and inspires recruits for
their causes.’7 The three concepts serve less as a model or formal explanation of contemporary
insecurity and work more as a heuristic, ‘a grammar for thinking about evolving forms of world order’.8
The author seeks to provide a vocabulary through which the links between globalization and insecurity
can be understood holistically and critically explored. One of Hyperconflict's most significant
contributions is the wide-ranging theoretical discussion that fills its first two chapters, offering a
sophisticated distillation of the vast literatures on globalization and peace and conflict to form a
compelling and provocative account.
Econ resilient and flexible – sector decline irrelivent
Joseph Lazzaro 13 (international business times, “Is The 'Great American Job Creation Machine' About
To Rev Up?” http://www.ibtimes.com/great-american-job-creation-machine-about-rev-1130505)
The good news is, historically, the
U.S.’s economic system has proven to be remarkably flexible and resilient -- able
to withstand losses of whole sectors and, via ingenuity and new technologies, create new engines of both
GDP growth and job growth.
Trump can still restrict immigration – courts and congress can’t check him
Bier 7/10 – David J. Bier is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global
Liberty and Prosperity. He is an expert on visa reform, border security, and interior enforcement, and his
work has been cited in the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Politico,
and many other print and online publications. ("Why the Legal Immigration System Is Broken: A Short
List of Problems," Cato Institute, https://www.cato.org/blog/why-legal-immigration-system-brokenshort-list-problems) jbb
The president can ban any immigrants that he doesn’t like. In 1952, Congress passed a statute that
authorizes the president to suspend “the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” if he finds them to be
“detrimental.” This power is untethered by any constraints, and as the travel ban case proves, the
Supreme Court is willing to allow the president to ban immigrants based on the thinnest of pretexts.
23.
Sweeping power of this kind is incompatible with the rule of law and cedes lawmaking power to the president in a way that would shock our founders. Congress should require courts to use
strict scrutiny when evaluating these types of actions by the president.
Immigration courts are subject to Trump’s political pressure—there’s no checks
Kim 18 (Kim, Catherine Y—University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill - School of Law. “The
President's Immigration Courts” (April 28, 2018). Emory Law Journal, Forthcoming; UNC Legal Studies
Research Paper. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3144100//sabín)
The statutory provisions governing administrative adjudication in the immigration context do not share these characteristics. Unlike
the
APA, the INA vests the power to conduct removal proceedings in “immigration judges” personally,
rather than delegating such power generically to agency leadership to be sub-delegated. Moreover, the INA
contains no analog to the APA provision awarding an agency’s political leadership authority to review
and reverse the initial decisions of hearing officers. Indeed, it does not contemplate any form of review
except to federal courts in certain types of cases.130 Nonetheless, the INA’s implementing regulations not only create the
Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) to review the decisions of immigration judges,131 but also allow
further appeal to the Attorney General himself, who may refer cases to himself for potential reversal.132
The Attorney General has exercised this refer-and-review power repeatedly to reverse BIA decisions perceived to depart from the President’s
political agenda.133 Indeed, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently co-authored a law review article championing the exercise of
this authority “as a powerful tool through which the executive branch can asserts its prerogatives in the immigration field.” 134 3. Limits
conventions as a barrier to political control The permeability of legal barriers to political influence
to
suggests that the only real protection against presidential interference in agency adjudications may
rest on soft “conventions.”136 But it is not at all clear that these soft norms will be sufficient to
counterbalance the President’s incentives to control agency adjudications. Attorney General Gonzales’s recent
article demonstrates that the convention of independence does not prevent agency leadership from celebrating,
much less exercising, its power to reverse the decisions of lower-level adjudicators. Political scientists have
documented a similar willingness to exercise such review authority in other agencies. 137 Perhaps more disturbing, political
actors appear to exert pressure on agency adjudicators directly, without even having to exercise formal
review power, 138 although a series of empirical analyses across different agencies found no evidence that case outcomes were
responsive to changes in political leadership.139 Finally, even if conventions were effective in restraining prior
administrations, the current President is perhaps singular in his willingness to defy such soft norms. If
conventional norms were the primary reason why prior Presidents refrained from exercising control
over agency adjudications, we should not be surprised if such restraint dissipates in the current
administration.
1NC---AT: Trump Diversionary War
No diversionary war
Bershidsky 17 (Jan. 25, Leonid, Bloomberg View Columnist, “Trump's Forever War of Diversion”,
Bloomberg News, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-25/trump-s-forever-war-ofdiversion)
There's even a term for the tactic: "
diversionary conflict." Faced with economic difficulties or other problems potentially threatening to its survival, the regime starts a war
somewhere or sharpens domestic ethnic divisions. Since the oil price plummeted in late 2014, the Putin regime has kept Russians on a steady diet of war news from eastern Ukraine and Syria
(Russia and its allies have been winning). With the Syrian operation, Putin sharply raised his international standing, but a big reduction in protests against worsening economic conditions has
probably been more important to him. In neighboring Ukraine, every time a government finds itself in trouble and particularly unpopular, the matter of the country's linguistic division
surfaces, with various groups trying to promote or ban the Russian language. Former President Viktor Yanukovych used the language matter as cover for passing other unpopular legislation.
Now, with president Petro Poroshenko's popularity at a nadir, reforms stalled and the cost of living rising sharply, Ukrainians are distracted by the discussion of a new language law that would
Trump doesn't need to start wars: He and his team know how
emotional many Americans are about him. He can choose what he wants to be hated for -- preferably for
something silly and unrelated to his actual priorities at the moment. He used this to his advantage during the
campaign: His alleged sexual misconduct took up so much media time and public attention than issues like his business history, his tax returns and his proposals. As the
inauguration attendance argument played, Trump has been busy. Apart from starting the Obamacare
rollback and withdrawing from the TPP, he has frozen a reduction of mortgage insurance premiums,
allowed the Keystone Pipeline to go ahead and prepared to sign an executive order to begin
construction of a border wall. Well aware that some of these important actions might cause indignation
and targeted protest, Trump has tossed out another meaningless football for the media and the public
to fixate on. "I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and even those registered
make Ukrainian obligatory in public life, under threat of fines.
to vote who are dead," he tweeted. Sure enough, at the time of this writing, the CNN story about this was the most shared in the last 24 hours, with news about the border wall order coming a
it doesn't matter at all at this point whether
undocumented immigrants actually voted last November and whether any votes were cast for dead people. No one is
challenging the results of the election. The wall and the Keystone Pipeline matter, yet are much smaller
stories in terms of readership. Trump and his team are already showing a flair for diversion. Is it enough to
distant second. Just as it was unimportant how many people attended the inauguration,
discourage the kinds of mass protests that such aggressive moves on lightning-rod issues might spark? We'll know in the coming days and weeks, though protesters' energy was certainly
Trump's and his team's
communications look awkward, inept, gallingly primitive. It's time to wise up: These people know what
they're doing. They want their political opponents to be confused, to flail at windmills, to expend
emotions on meaningless scandals to distract them from any targeted, coordinated action against
specific threats. There are going to be many of these: Trump appears intent on keeping his promises.
Calm concentration is needed to counteract dangerous policies.
sapped by the massive women's march, which took place before Trump actually did anything damaging to women's rights.
1NC – Visas: Skills Neolib K (L)
“skilled workers” is just a politically tasteful euphemism for “the ones we like” and it’s
part and parcel with a global talent war within the information economy to maintain
competitiveness at all costs.
Hirschl and Shachar 13 Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies Volume 20 | Issue 1 Article 4 Winter
2013 Recruiting "Super Talent:" The New World of Selective Migration Regimes Ayelet Shachar
University of Toronto Faculty of Law, ayelet.shachar@utoronto.ca Ran Hirschl Dept. of Political Science,
University of Toronto, ran.hirschl@utoronto.ca
These landmark amendments opened up a number of skills-based admission categories, in addition to various family-based preferences. In
signing the 1965 amendments, Lyndon
Johnson famously stated, "from this day forth, those wishing to emigrate
into America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills."30 This designated skills-based admission route,
along with a traditionally lax approach that permitted adjustment from temporary to permanent ("green card") status with relative ease, has
for years served as a tremendously successful formula for attracting the best international "knowledge
migrants."'31 But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States is no longer the sole, or even the
most sophisticated, national player engaged in this global race for talent. 32 Other countries have joined
the game. Across the seven seas, from Australia to China, from Canada to Denmark to Singapore, nations are already taking bold steps to
ease the admission process at various levels of the talent pyramid. From freshly minted international students all the way up to industry
leaders, these countries
are working to leverage individuals' energy, dreams, and innovations in order to
maintain or gain a relative advantage in the competitive knowledge-based global economy. 33 The next
major step in the genesis of the current race for talent occurred in 1967, when Canada introduced its pioneering "point system," a novel and
influential set of admission criteria for the highly skilled.34 The point system grants admission to "a person who by reason BEGIN
FOOT
NOTE LABOR MARKET (Barry R. Chiswick ed., 2010); Charles B. Keely, Nonimmigrant Visa Policy of the United States, in FOREIGN TEMPORARY
WORKERS IN AMERICA: POLICIES THAT BENEFIT THE U.S. ECONOMY 95 (B. Lindsay Lowell ed., 1999); Stephen Yale-Loehr & Christoph HoashiErhardt, A Comparative Look at Immigration and Human Capital Assessment, 16 GEO. IMMIGR. L.J. 99, 99 (2001) ("[T]he United States should
enact a points-based system for selecting economic-stream migrants."). As Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) succinctly put the point:
'There is too broad a consensus in favor of this policy to settle for gridlock." Julia Preston, Bill to Keep Graduates in the U.S. Fails in the House,
N. Y. TIMES, Sept. 20, 2012, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/ us/bill-to-keep-graduates-in-us-fails-in-the-house.html. This
proposal was later included in the President's 2013 key principles for immigration reform: '"Staple' green
cards to advanced STEM diplomas. The proposal encourages foreign graduate students educated in the
United States to stay here and contribute to our economy by 'stapling' a green card to the diplomas of
science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) PhD and Master's Degree graduates from qualified U.S. universities who have
found employment in the United States. It also requires employers to pay a fee that will support education and training to grow the next
generation of American workers in STEM careers." White House, Office of the Press Secretary, Fact Sheet, Fixing our Broken Immigration
System so Everyone Plays by the Rules, January 29, 2013, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov /the-press-office/2013/01/29/fact-sheetfixing-our-broken-immigration-system-so-everyoneplays-rules. For an overview of recent congressional efforts on this subject and a transcript
of Senators Schumer, McCain, Durbin, Graham, Menendez, Rubio, Bennet, and Flake's proposal, Bipartisan Framework for Immigration Reform,
see Julia Preston, Senators Offer a Bipartisan Blueprint for Immigration, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 28, 2013, available at http://www.nytimes.c END
FOOTNOTE of his [or her] education, training, skills or other special qualifications is likely to become successfully established in Canada. '35
The point system was explicitly designed by the Canadian government as a "selective immigration policy...
[that] must be planned as a steady policy of recruitment based on long-term considerations of
economic growth."36 Those selected through the point system are invited to settle in Canada permanently. 37 Over the past fifteen
years, the federal skills-based migration stream, with the point system at its apex, has accounted for more than 50 percent of Canada's
permanent resident intake, reaching a colossal 69.3 percent in 2010.38 The Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism recently
reaffirmed Canada's ongoing commitment to the permanent skills based migration program, which "remains the principal avenue for
permanent immigration to Canada." 39 In a classic example of inter-jurisdictional policy emulation, Australia introduced a new selection system
for skilled migrants in 1973.40 This new system "was similar to that adopted by Canada in 1967" and was
"[d]esigned to make
selection more objective and less open to the discretion of officials." 41 The principles of this selection system were
later expanded into a full-blown point system, called the Numerical Multifactor Assessment System (NUMAS), which was formalized into law in
1979. Australian immigration officials
often describe the point system as a "transparent and objective
method of selecting skilled migrants with the skills and attributes" that are valued by the admitting
society. 42 These permanent skills-based programs accounted for over two thirds (67.4 percent) of Australia's permanent migration intake in
2010-2011. 43 New Zealand then followed suit, adopting its own variant of the point system to attract the highly skilled. The technique of
engendering targeted and selective skills-based admission and settlement routes has since been "exported" to the four corners of the world.
New competitors, including some that until very recently did not define themselves as immigration nations (Germany is a prime example), have
become more agile and more focused on recruiting global talent.44 In 2000, European
leaders reached agreement on the
Lisbon Agenda, committing European Union nations "to the goal of becoming 'the world's most
competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy,' particularly in "the competition for people." 45
Since 2000, the share ofresearchers in the EU-27 countries has grown at double the pace as it has in both the United States and Japan, although
the EU still lags behind these competitors in absolute numbers. 46 The focus has been on making the transition to EU countries smoother for
skilled professionals and on easing the rules affecting the recruitment of international students, especially those excelling in the fields of
science and engineering-the very same talent pool that is already the target of fierce competition. 47 Within the first decade of the twenty-first
century, some of the more dynamic Asian economies, such as Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, began to recruit globally. Once emigration
countries, they are now trying to lure back their most eminent national scientists by extending them generous resettlement offers. China and
India, the major sending countries of highly-skilled migrants, are also weighing in. India has seen the skyrocketing growth of new technology
hubs such as Bangalore, often referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.48 The economic impact of India's technology-inclined services is huge,
making it attractive for bright young engineers and entrepreneurs to stay at home rather than seeking better fortunes abroad, while at same
time enticing the country's extensive scientific diasporas in North America and Europe to return. China, for its part, has adopted a multipronged
strategy, a key feature of which is tremendous governmental investment in basic sciences and their commercial applications. It is now the
world's second largest producer of scientific knowledge, measured by indicia such as number of articles published in peer-reviewed scientific
journals, trailing only the United States. 49 As part of its One-Thousand-Talent program, China
is also aggressively using financial,
taxation, and membership perks to attract high-caliber international scholars and returning Chinese
citizens to lead key laboratories, projects and disciplines in China.50 Perfecting the technique of targeted admission routes, China is also
adopting a more flexible approach that allows mid-career scholars to spend part of the year in China, and the rest in the West. In this way, the
country is gaining significant knowledge transfers without insisting on permanent settlement as a precondition for repatriation benefits.51
These changes in policy and in attitude, along with stronger growth prospects in emerging markets, have created a pattern of "return
migration" by successful emigrants who have settled in richer countries abroad. 52 The
economic crisis has generally seen a
slowdown in labor migration. 53 Unexpectedly, however, it has also furthered, rather than hindered, the
attractiveness of skills-based categories. Policymakers increasingly draw a connection between highlyskilled migration, job creation, capital investment, and boosting competitiveness. 54 Politically, the
admission and settlement of the highly skilled is accepted more readily by the public in comparison to
other immigration streams and
policies. 55
1NC – Visas: Booster Neolib K (L)
Just changing VISAs doesn’t change discriminatory practices or thoughts
-
Policy doesn’t correlate to practice
Internalized bureaucratic subjects actually responsible, can’t be change w policy.
Slater 6 Mark B. Slater, School of Political Science University of Ottawa “The Global
Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies,
Biopolitics.
This part of the mechanism for the creation of the modern subject who knows himself in relation to the
confessionary state is a function of
"unconditional obedience, uninterrupted examina- tion, and exhaustive confession" and "appears as an
indispensable component of the government of men by each other."61 Though not traced by Foucault himself, the
confessionary complex (obedi- ence, examination, confession) provides a crucial link between the "political economy of the body"62 and the biopolitical
governmen- tality of international management of populations. It is not simply that the international population is managed, but that we come to manage ourselves
through the confessionary complex. Foucault Mark B. Salter 181 describes the importance of "the
way by which, through some polit- ical
technology of individuals, we have been led to recognize our- selves as a society, as a part of a social
entity, as a part of nation or of a state."63 Balibar relates the governmental function of the bor- der as the limit of community to the process
of identity-formation: "The normality of the national citizen-subject ... is also internal- ized by individuals, as it
becomes a condition, an essential refer- ence of their collective, communal sense, and hence of their
iden- tity. ... As a consequence, borders cease to be purely external realities."64 The confessionary
complex is a structure framed by law and instantiated in various practices at the border (and in the faces of
agents of the state) . This is doubly true in the case of terrorism, which is not vis- cerally visible. The exceptional
application of law in this instance is also revealing of the weakness of Agamben in explaining the moment of decision. In US vs. Montoya de Hernandez, the
Supreme Court held that for offense for which there will be "no external signs... inspectors will rarely possess probably cause to arrest or search, yet governmental
interests in stopping smuggling at the border are high indeed."65 As with general searches at the border, the standard of probable cause is held in abeyance at the
body/border. Terror is similar to alimentary canal smuggling (swal- lowing balloons of cocaine in this instance), in that the signs of the bad intent are secondary:
nervousness, discomfort, anxiety. This confessionary
complex is also written on the body in terms of embodied anxiety
and the signs of untruth: "a ... mechanism of shame that makes one blush at expressing any bad
thought."66 Thus, reasonable suspicion must be visible not only in the body but in the mind of a border guard. The examination at the border
is a corporeal documentary affair. As Gillian Fuller suggests, "States don't deal with strange peculiarities
of networked and virtualised individuals, they prefer to keep the subject within the more know- able
constraints of identity."67 Thus, at the border the document is compared to the body which is compared to
the story. If the iso- morphism between this body-dossier-narrative tests the guard's credibility,
exclusion looms. This lighter "reasonable suspicion" standard is applied to other travelers at the airport. In US v. Sokolaw, the court argued that adherence
to a law enforcement profile, which does not meet the standard of probable cause, may meet the standard of reasonable suspicion. The case revolved around a
drug smuggler detained due to a number of suspicious activities that met a particular profile. The court upheld that meeting an established profile would lead to
reasonable suspicion and thus grant law enforcement the to stop the traveler.68 Consequently the test of reasonable suspi- cion, tied with the exceptional state of
the border, leads to the rule by decision. However the moment of decision must be disaggre- gated. What are these profiles? How are they managed? How are
decisions made? Since Agamben neglects this moment of decision, focusing as he does on the capacity for decision, we must turn to anthropologists or sociologists
of the border. This leads to consideration of the agents of discretion. Timo- thy Mitchell, Heyman, and Mountz have discussed the ways that governmental
bureaucracies enact specific roles within an admin- istrative structure, so that we may not infer
practice from policy documents alone.69 Gilboy charts how immigration inspectors in- formally share
experiences that lead to the supplementing of offi- cial risk profiles with national stereotypes.70 Heyman
describes the "thought-work" of immigration officers, consisting of developing conceptual schema through
which to apply abstract rules to spe- cific cases.71 In his evaluation of the thought-work of officers on the US/Mexico border, Heyman
develops a broad model, with some specific implications for the policing of populations. In addi- tion to a legal superstructure, he points to "covert
classifications" used by officers to structure their discretionary decisions.72 The covert classification is made
according to perceived "moral worth," "national origins stereotypes" similar to those elaborated by Gilboy, and
"apparent social class."73 These ethnographies of the bureau- cracy suggest there is a slippage between
risk profiles and stereo- types. Didier Bigo suggests that within the European context the emergence of a cohort of migration managers has shifted
policing "from the control of and hunt for individual criminals ... to the surveillance of so-called risk groups, defined by using criminology and statistics."74 The
reliance on technology to cope with the rapidly increasing number and variety of risk profiles should be
viewed with skepticism: "Notwithstanding the increasing appeal to sophisticated computer-based models within geodemographics, the systems persist
in relying on stereotypical images, and on small-scale narratives of dispositions and their intended consequences."75 The credibility of the
entrant's story becomes crucial to the decision to admit or reject, a decision that is always made on the
basis of insuf- ficient evidence and mistrust of the speaker, and complicated by an incomplete
documentary trail. It is clear that the right to be pre- sumed innocent or to have a fair trial must be held in abeyance at the border under the twin rubrics
of efficiency and security. These social scripts are reached through the auto-confession of the body, through the presumption in training that the examined body
will confess even if the soul is reluctant. This auto-confession
happens through the interpretation of body, face, teeth,
clothes, posture, and language skills as evidence of class, social group, eth- nicity, gender, sexuality. It
also is assumed to happen through the examination process. Psychologist Paul Ekman trains law enforce- ment officials and others in his theory of "microexpressions," by which interrogators can learn the self-confessing secrets of facial expressions that last one twenty-fifth of a second.76 Training for Canada Customs
agents in the past has focused on this kind of visual acuity, described by one agent as training in "one of these things is not like the other." Other technologies on
offer to the security apparatus of the state include heat cameras that detect blush responses around the eyes during deception and motion sen- sors that detect
awkward or abnormal movement. Thus, a
corpo- real lens makes visible to us the ways in which the body comes to
testify, along with our documents, about our intentions, character, utility, moral quality, and social and
economic origins. If we do not confess in a way that echoes with the story that the examiner has told him/herself about us, then we are suspect. The
confessionary dynamic is illustrated by the ubiquitous "no joking" rule now posted at most airports. In the
words of the Cana- dian Air Transport Security Authority, "you should never joke or make 'small talk' about bombs, firearms or other weapons while going through
pre-board screening."77 Small
talk and jokes are dangerous because they express untruths. But border examiners
rely on the anxiety of the passenger and themselves to affect obe- dience, examination, and confession.
Like doctors, judges, and teachers, we must all tell the truth to agents of the state: not just the truth from a certain point of view, but the whole, entire, selfpolicing truth. These
regulations against joking and small talk train travelers to self-police their speech and
behavior to present a low-risk profile toward the authority figure. The ritual of obedi- ence, confession,
and examination thus binds the mobile subject to
the sovereign, but does not accord him/her rights.
Neoliberalism
OV
1min
Neoliberalism is where the lines between business and government are blurred.
Where the interests of big business and government are intertwined and all powerful
while the rest of us are simply consumers or laborers with little to no value. In many
instances it deals with how social movements and culture shifts are coopted to
manipulate the populace to embrace evolving neoliberalist
policies/candidates/institutions.
Two links: The first is the plan; Menra card is neoliberal as they try to recruit a
professional class of migrants to sustain capital. The second is rhetorical; they try to
integrate migrants into the neoliberal system for “economic benefit,” that’s
Agyemang et al 16.
Our kritik the structure of capitalism tends toward economic stagnation – their
fantasy of endless growth is impossible. Their impacts are inevitable and they can’t
solve for them with the plan.
The Agyemang card outline multiple impacts that neoliberalism perpetuates.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Structural disparities.
Poverty Neoliberalism
Global and locally long-term resources depletion
Environmental destruction
Human rights violation in and out of the round the work place
The persistent economic oppression
Devaluation of human life
The alt is to adopt movements from below. Our alt looks for change in society brought
from the bottom-up, otherwise known as bottom up politik. Such an approach is
necessary to bring about effective activism to overthrow neoliberalism.
Links
The AFF makes citizenship contingent on employability – immigrants only “deserve” to
come to the US because they’re able to make corporations richer.
Oliveri ‘15(Federico Oliveri is a research fellow at the University of Pisa Sciences for Peace
Interdisciplinary Centre, “Subverting neoliberal citizenship, Migrant struggles for the right to stay in
contemporary Italy”, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2015, 14(2), 492-503)
The current governance of migration deserves the label of neoliberal because migrants’ fundamental rights
and freedoms are linked to the right to entry and stay in the country, which essentially depends on their
employability and usefulness according to market rules. Under neoliberal ideology even arguments for
free movement are made with the only purpose of “moving people with lower status into positions
from which they can serve the needs and meet the demands of people with higher status more easily ”
(Gill 2009, 117). Moreover, in the frame of contemporary global migration, populations are no longer fixed
entities tied to a specific national territory, but flexible resources that can be selected and manipulated
through entry quotas, points-based visas, administrative and penal detentions, expulsions. Italian immigration
laws, in particular, require would-be non-EU immigrants to have jobs already waiting for them in order to receive a valid visa, and only if there
are no EU workers available for those jobs, and within quotas based on the national origin and the skills of workers. The Bossi-Fini law currently
requires migrants to leave Italy if unemployed for more than a year, giving therefore enormous power to employers, who may prefer immigrant
workers exactly because of their higher precarity. The same law allows migrants without valid permit to stay to be hold in so called
Identification and Expulsion Centers (CIE) for up to 18 months, with the declared but largely unattended aim to return them to their country of
departure. Under
neoliberal governance of migration, irregularity is not an accident or a failure but is
systematically produced by immigration policies: “irregularization” (Hiemstra 2010) and everyday “deportability” (De
Genova 2002) reinforce the risk of severe labour exploitation, for regular and irregular migrants as well. The
majority of migrants are required to go through a period of irregularity, including possible incarceration,
during which time they are tested: only those who accept to live with no or few rights in precarious
conditions will be admitted to the rank of the regulars (Santoro 2008; Conlon and Gill 2013). Especially in Italy, legalization
programs have been periodically launched during the last twenty years for those who entered illegally, or over-stayed after their residence
permits expired, and were trapped in underground economy. Nevertheless, these programs offer only temporary legal status, contingent on
being employed in the formal economy, having no criminal records, including violations of immigration penal laws, and matching several socioeconomic criteria such as revenue and housing standards.
The AFF subscribes to market logic – it treats migrants as a form of capital that can be
bought and sold to advance US interests. This unsustainable form of commodification
eventually leads to violent collapse.
Castles ‘11(Stephen Castles is an honorary professor at the University of Sydney, “Migration, Crisis,
and the Global Labour Market”, Routledge, June 2011, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 311–324)
Central to the political economy of the global labour market is an understanding of the changing character of the welfare state.
The notion
of human labour power as a commodity that can be bought and sold like other commodities is essential
for individual capitalists, as Marx pointed out in Capital (Marx, 1976). Yet as Karl Polanyi argued, the idea of a self-regulating market
economy was utopian. By treating human beings and nature as commodities subject to the laws of the market,
capitalism would inevitably destroy society and nature—and thus the conditions for its own existence.
Polanyi therefore called labour a ‘fictitious commodity’ and argued that movements against this
commodification were essential if human society was to survive (Polanyi, 2001). The origins of the welfare state in
capitalist countries lie in the need to safe- guard labour to ensure the long-term sustainability of society. Historically it has been the labour
movement which has fought for the welfare state, but a partial de-commodification of labour has also proved crucial to capitalism as a system.
However, the forms of commodification and de-commodification of labour vary across both time and regions. ¶In the South, the
commodification of labour required both the dissolution of pre-industrial forms of protection and the abolition of more modern state welfare
provisions. Stiglitz (2002) has
shown how enforcement of the ‘Washington Consensus’ on privatisation,
deregulation, and free trade by the IMF and the World Bank led to social transformation and to the
destruction of public services. Similarly, Davis (2006, ch. 7) has documented the ways in which the
structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and 1990s led to massive increases in poverty in Latin
America, Asia, and Africa, while destroying public services essential to poor people. The Nigerian scholar
Adepoju (2000) argued that structural adjustment programmes, which eliminated the jobs of teachers,
doctors, and government officials, helped drive large-scale northwards migration of the highly skilled. ¶In
the North, economic expansion from 1945 to the early 1970s was linked to the rise of the welfare state, which meant a partial decommodification of labour: a situation of full employment and the existence of a strong social safety-net made it possible for workers to refuse
jobs with sub-standard wages and conditions. By contrast, neoliberal economic
restructuring and globalization since the
late 1970s has involved the partial destruction of the welfare state. The re-commodification of labour
through the weakening of social protection allowed the differentiation of labour markets and reduction
of wages and conditions in many sectors.5
***AT: World Getting Better
1. Neoliberalism is producing accelerating inequality, environmental destruction, and conflict in
the squo – statistics showing the world is getting better only illustrate the positive impact of
Latin American and Chinese resistance to the neoliberal model
Milne 15(Seumus Milne, Guardian columnist and associate editor, “The Davos oligarchs are right
to fear the world they’ve made,” 22 January 2015,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/22/davos-oligarchs-fear-inequalityglobal-elite-resist)
The scale of the crisis has been laid out for them by the charity Oxfam. Just 80 individuals now
have the same net wealth as 3.5 billion people – half the entire global population. Last year, the
best-off 1% owned 48% of the world’s wealth, up from 44% five years ago. On current trends,
the richest 1% will have pocketed more than the other 99% put together next year. The 0.1%
have been doing even better, quadrupling their share of US income since the 1980s.¶ This is a
wealth grab on a grotesque scale. For 30 years, under the rule of what Mark Carney, the Bank of
England governor, calls “market fundamentalism”, inequality in income and wealth has
ballooned, both between and within the large majority of countries. In Africa, the absolute
number living on less than $2 a day has doubled since 1981 as the rollcall of billionaires has
swelled.¶ In most of the world, labour’s share of national income has fallen continuously and
wages have stagnated under this regime of privatisation, deregulation and low taxes on the
rich. At the same time finance has sucked wealth from the public realm into the hands of a small
minority, even as it has laid waste the rest of the economy. Now the evidence has piled up that
not only is such appropriation of wealth a moral and social outrage, but it is fuelling social and
climate conflict, wars, mass migration and political corruption, stunting health and life
chances, increasing poverty, and widening gender and ethnic divides.¶ Escalating inequality
has also been a crucial factor in the economic crisis of the past seven years, squeezing demand
and fuelling the credit boom. We don’t just know that from the research of the French
economist Thomas Piketty or the British authors of the social study The Spirit Level. After years
of promoting Washington orthodoxy, even the western-dominated OECD and IMF argue that
the widening income and wealth gap has been key to the slow growth of the past two neoliberal
decades. The British economy would have been almost 10% larger if inequality hadn’t
mushroomed. Now the richest are using austerity to help themselves to an even larger share of
the cake.¶ The big exception to the tide of inequality in recent years has been Latin America.
Progressive governments across the region turned their back on a disastrous economic model,
took back resources from corporate control and slashed inequality. The numbers living on less
than $2 a day have fallen from 108 million to 53 million in little over a decade. China, which also
rejected much of the neoliberal catechism, has seen sharply rising inequality at home but also
lifted more people out of poverty than the rest of the world combined, offsetting the growing
global income gap.¶ These two cases underline that increasing inequality and poverty are very
far from inevitable. They’re the result of political and economic decisions. The thinking person’s
Davos oligarch realises that allowing things to carry on as they are is dangerous. So some want a
more “inclusive capitalism” – including more progressive taxes – to save the system from itself.¶
But it certainly won’t come about as a result of Swiss mountain musings or anxious Guildhall
lunches. Whatever the feelings of some corporate barons, vested corporate and elite interests –
including the organisations they run and the political structures they have colonised – have
shown they will fight even modest reforms tooth and nail. To get the idea, you only have to
listen to the squeals of protest, including from some in his own party, at Ed Miliband’s plans to
tax homes worth over £2m to fund the health service, or the demand from the one-time
reformist Fabian Society that the Labour leader be more pro-business (for which read procorporate), or the wall of congressional resistance to Barack Obama’s mild redistributive
taxation proposals.¶ Perhaps a section of the worried elite might be prepared to pay a bit more
tax. What they won’t accept is any change in the balance of social power – which is why, in one
country after another, they resist any attempt to strengthen trade unions, even though weaker
unions have been a crucial factor in the rise of inequality in the industrialised world.¶ It’s only
through a challenge to the entrenched interests that have dined off a dysfunctional economic
order that the tide of inequality will be reversed. The anti-austerity Syriza party, favourite to win
the Greek elections this weekend, is attempting to do just that – as the Latin American left has
succeeded in doing over the past decade and a half. Even to get to that point demands stronger
social and political movements to break down or bypass the blockage in a colonised political
mainstream. Crocodile tears about inequality are a symptom of a fearful elite. But change will
only come from unrelenting social pressure and political challenge.
AT: Solves Inequality
Rising tide wrong – high unemployment and lack of labor investment prove gains all distributed towards top
– standard of living decreasing not increasing
Black & Reich 13 (Eric, writes Eric Black Ink for MinnPost, he is a former reporter for the Star Tribune and
Twin Cities blogger, Robert, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy
at the University of California, Berkeley, “Could any concentration of wealth at the top be too much?”,
http://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2013/03/could-any-concentration-wealth-top-be-too-much)
When lefties rail against the ever-increasing concentration of wealth in the top 1%, the right tends to rely
on some variation of the “rising tide” logic. It’s wrong for the poor to begrudge the rich their riches because they are the “job creators” whose job-creating is
the means by which the rising tide help the unrich rise. It’s really a logical dodge. The left isn’t saying that there should be no rich people (although that seems to be what the rich hear). They are
talking about the increasing inequality of wealth distribution. The right seldom responds on point and seems to have nothing to say about concentration/maldistribution of wealth. It would be a
Is there no amount of concentration of
wealth at the top that would worry them? As Reich’s data suggests, the rising tide metaphor loses its
power when the water is rising under only one percent of the boats. Reich, an economist and former labor
secretary, suggests four factors that have helped separate the fortunes of the few from the many: “First,
productivity gains. Corporations have been investing in technology rather than their workers. They get tax
credits and deductions for such investments; they get no such tax benefits for improving the skills of their
employees. As a result, corporations can now do more with fewer people on their payrolls. That means
higher profits. Second, high unemployment itself. Joblessness all but eliminates the bargaining power of
most workers – allowing corporations to keep wages low. Public policies that might otherwise reduce
unemployment – a new WPA or CCC to hire the long-term unemployed, major investments in the nation’s
crumbling infrastructure – have been rejected in favor of austerity economics. This also means higher
profits, at least in the short run.
good thing if the smartest and most intellectually honest righties would directly address the concentration issue.
Inequality DA
Best empirical evidence proves neoliberalism causes concentrated inequality – monopoly power,
income disparity, and unequal distribution of gains to trade and automation
Smith 17 (Noah Smith, Bloomberg View columnist, former assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook
University, “Centrism Takes On the Extremes,” May 23, 2017, Bloomberg,
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-23/centrism-takes-on-the-extremes)
neoliberals should take caution. Recent decades have exposed flaws in
standard centrist ideas that need to be addressed in order to neutralize the threat of extremism in the long term. For example,
economists are finding that workers displaced by forces like trade and technology are much slower to find new
jobs than had been previously assumed. Standard neoliberal answers -- for example, that the government should compensate those who lose
their jobs because of trade, or provide them with retraining assistance -- have proven either politically untenable or have failed outright. A better
method of protecting workers from career-destroying shocks is needed. Another issue is wealth inequality. Though some European scholars like economist Thomas
Piketty have called attention to the problem, their counterparts in the U.S. and U.K. have shown much less interest. Wealth disparities have risen steadily, in
good times and bad. Instead of assuming that this inequality isn’t a problem, neoliberals should talk more
about how to combat it. A third problem is monopoly power. For reasons not entirely known, a few superstar companies
are coming to dominate their industries, fostering inequality and threatening to reduce economic output. Neoliberals
But even as they rediscover their confidence and their voice,
should be thinking about how to use law and regulation to halt the menace of industrial concentration.
AT: Resilient/Self-Correcting
Neoliberalism has run out of rope for self-correction – past strategies for maintaining the resilience of
neoliberalism are impossible because both ecological space and inequality are stretched to their limit
– jumping ship from neoliberalism is key
Li ’10 (Minqi, Chinese Political Economist, world-systems analyst, and historical social scientist, currently
an associate professor of Economics at the University of Utah “The End of the “End of History”: The
Structural Crisis of Capitalism and the Fate of Humanity”, Science and Society Vol. 74, No. 3, July 2010,
290–305)
In 2001, the U. S. stock market bubble started to collapse, after years of “new economy” boom. The Bush
administration took advantage of the psychological shock of 9/11, and undertook a series of “preemptive
wars” (first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq) that ushered in a new era of intensified inter-state conflicts.
Towards the end of 2001, Argentina, which was regarded as a neoliberal model country, was hit by a
devastating financial crisis. Decades of neoliberalism had not only undermined the living standards of the
working classes, but also destroyed the material fortunes of the urban middle classes (which remained a
key social base for neoliberalism in Latin America until the 1990s). After the Argentine crisis,
neoliberalism completely lost political legitimacy in Latin America. This paved the way for the rise of
several socialist-oriented governments on the continent. After the 2001 global recession, the global
economy actually entered into a mini–golden age. The big semi-peripheral economies, the so-called
“BRICs” (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) became the most dynamic sector. The neoliberal global
economy was fueled by the super-exploitation of the massive cheap labor force in the semi-periphery
(especially in China). The strategy worked, to the extent that it generated massive amounts of surplus
value that could be shared by the global capitalist classes. But it also created a massive “realization
problem.” That is, as the workers in the “emerging markets” were deprived of purchasing power, on a
global scale, there was a persistent lack of effective demand for the industrial output produced in China
and the rest of the semi-periphery. After 2001, the problem was addressed through increasingly higher
levels of debt-financed consumption in the advanced capitalist countries (especially in the United
States). The neoliberal strategy was economically and ecologically unsustainable. Economically, the debtfinanced consumption in the advanced capitalist countries could not go on indefinitely. Ecologically, the
rise of the BRICs greatly accelerated resource depletion and environmental degradation on a global scale.
The global ecological system is now on the verge of total collapse. The world is now in the midst of a
prolonged period of economic and political instability that could last several decades. In the past, the
capitalist world system had responded to similar crises and managed to undertake successful
restructurings. Is it conceivable that the current crisis will result in a similar restructuring within the
system that will bring about a new global “New Deal”? In three respects, the current world historical
conjuncture is fundamentally different from that of 1945. Back in 1945, the United States was the
indisputable hegemonic power. It enjoyed overwhelming industrial, financial, and military advantages
relative to the other big powers and, from the capitalist point of view, its national interests largely
coincided with the world system’s common and long-term interests. Now, U. S. hegemony is in
irreversible decline. But none of the other big powers is in a position to replace the United States and
function as an effective hegemonic power. Thus, exactly at a time when the global capitalist system is in
deep crisis, the system is also deprived of effective leadership.4 In 1945, the construction of a global
“New Deal” involved primarily accommodating the economic and political demands of the western
working classes and the non-western elites (the national bourgeoisies and the westernized intellectuals).
In the current conjuncture, any new global “New Deal” will have to incorporate not only the western
working classes but also the massive, non-western working classes. Can the capitalist world system afford
such a new “New Deal” if it could not even afford the old one? Most importantly, back in 1945, the
world’s resources remained abundant and cheap, and there was still ample global space for
environmental pollution. Now, not only has resource depletion reached an advanced stage, but the world
has also virtually run out of space for any further environmental pollution.
AT: Neoliberalism Good – UQ
We control uniqueness – Its now actively harmful for economic efficiency and human welfare –
multiple structural trends prove
Smith 16 (Noah Smith, Bloomberg View columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony
Brook University, “Free-market ideology: a reply to some replies,” August 22, 2016,
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/08/free-market-ideology-reply-to-some.html)
free-market
ideology seems - to many Americans, and also incidentally to me - to have mostly hit a wall in terms of its ability to improve our lives, and
I recently wrote a Bloomberg View post about political-economic ideologies, and how society is quicker to change than individual human beings. The upshot was that
so society will inevitably embrace an alternative, despite the protests of diehard free-marketers. Bryan Caplan is flabbergasted at the notion that free-market ideology (aka "neoliberalism") has
actually been tried in the U.S.: The claim that "free-market dogma" is the "reigning economic policy" of the United States or any major country seems so absurd, so contrary to big blatant facts
(like government spending as a share of GDP, for starters), that I'm dumb-founded. This is pretty much exactly the attitude I described in my post! "Of course neoliberalism hasn't failed; we just
never really tried it." David Henderson has a longer and more measured response. He challenges the idea that free-market ideology has demonstrated any failures at all. Now I could simply make
a weak claim - i.e., that free-market ideology seems to have hit a wall, and that in the end, that general perception is much more important than what I personally think. But instead, I'll make the
free-market ideology has, in fact, really hit a wall in terms of its effectiveness. Exhibit A: Tax cuts. Tax
cuts, one of free-marketers' flagship policies, appear to have given our economy a boost in the 1960s, and a
smaller boost in the 1980s. But any economic boost from the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 was so small as to be invisible
much stronger claim - I'll defend the idea that
to all but (possibly) the most careful econometricians. Notably, a number of attempts to encourage savings - capital gains tax cuts, estate tax cuts, and the like - have not halted the steady
Financial deregulation and light-touch regulation. It seems clear to me that under-regulation of
derivatives markets and mortgage lending played a big role in the financial crisis. The counter-narrative, that government
intervention caused the crisis, has never held much water, and has been debunked by many papers. This was a private-sector blowup. Exhibit C: Light-touch
regulation of monopoly. The evidence is mounting that industrial concentration is an increasing problem for
the U.S. economy. Some of this might be due to intellectual property, but much is simply due to naturally increasing returns to scale. Exhibit D: The China shock.
While most trade booms seem to lead to widely shared gains, the China trade boom in the 2000s - which free marketers
consistently championed and hailed - probably did not. High transaction costs (retraining costs, moving costs, and others) lead to a very large
number of American workers being deeply and permanently hurt by the shock, as evidenced by recent work by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson.
Exhibit E: Faux-privatization. True privatization is when the government halts a nationalized industry and auctions off its assets. Faux-privatization is when the
government outsources an activity to contractors, often without even competitive bidding. Fauxprivatization has been a notable bust in the prison industry, and school voucher programs have also been
extremely underwhelming. Charter schools have fared a bit better, but even there the gains have been modest at best. Exhibit F: Welfare reform.
Clinton's welfare reform saved the taxpayer very little money, and appears to have had little if any effect on
poverty in the U.S. Exhibit G: Research funding cuts. The impact of these is hard to measure, but cuts in government funding of
research appear to have saved the taxpayer very little money, while dramatically increasing the time that scientists have to devote to
writing grant proposals, and increasing risk aversion in scientists' choice of research topics. Exhibit H: Health care. The U.S. health
care system is a hybrid private-public system, but includes a proportionally much larger private component than any other developed nation's system. Free-marketers have
fought doggedly to prevent the government from playing a larger role. Our hybrid system delivers basically
the same results as every other developed country's system, at about twice the cost. Private health care cost growth has
been much faster than cost growth for Medicare and other government-provided programs, indicating that much of our excess cost has been due to the
private component of our system, not the public part. I could go on, but these are the big ones I can think of. In some of these cases, free-market
policies seem to have produced some gains in the late 20th century, but by the 21st century all appeared
to be either having no effect, or actively harming the economy.
decline in personal savings rates. Exhibit B:
Accounting
Systems of organizing and accounting for immigrants allow the neoliberal state to
categorize and exploit them
Agyemang et al 16
(Gloria, Professor of Accounting at Royal Holloway, University of London. Contributions from Cheryl R. Lehman (professor at
Hofstra University and accounting academic) and Marcia Annisette (Associate Professor of Accounting; Associate Dean,
Students; Program Director, Master of Accounting at the Schulich School of Business in Ontario). "Immigration and
neoliberalism: three cases and counter accounts", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 29 Iss 1 pp. 43 – 79.
Published 03-15-16. Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-09-2013-1470) AJN
Under neoliberal governance many advanced
capitalist states (such as Canada, the UK and the USA) have adopted a
variety of strategies for attaining a competitive advantage in the global economy – an economy
increasingly characterized by markets-are-best ideologies and the extension of market logic to all
arenas of social life. We argue that immigration policy and practice in these countries are an integral part
of this neoliberal restructuring (Bauder, 2008) and that accounting is a vital technology in the tool box of
neoliberal governance used to implement and sustain these immigration policies and practices (Miller
and Rose, 1990; Hansen, 2012; Miller, 2001; Power, 1996; Rose et al., 2006). Immigrants are accounted for in government
reports that attempt to document, classify and value them in economic terms. We show how government
audits, administrative inspections and systems of accounting are employed by state and non-state
actors to manage migration, to sift and sort out the acceptable from the unacceptable. In making our
arguments we define accounting very broadly to include all possible accountings (Broadbent and Laughlin, 2013; Gray et al., 1997; Zhang et al.,
2012) and we illustrate these multiplicities of accounting (including accounting techniques, audit practices, accounting logic and accountabilities)
to show how the neoliberalist project utilizes and privileges accounting in the field of immigration policies. We “pay attention to the mutually
constitutive nature of accounting, organizing, and economizing. This means viewing accounting as much more than an instrumental and purely
technical activity” (Miller and Power, 2013, p. 557)