Street vending can no longer be dismissed by policymakers and privileged residents as an underground economy, or an aberration, or a burden to the nation’s second-largest city. Street vending is, economically and geographically, at the heart of the Los Angeles experience and economy. But the state, county, and city have yet to figure out how to govern this fact of L.A. life, to the detriment of the 50,000 micro-entrepreneurs involved in street vending.

Some of them sell merchandise, such as clothing and cell phone accessories. Others—an estimated 10,000—sell food, like fresh fruit, bacon-wrapped hot dogs, tamales, and ice cream. These sellers are deeply interconnected and interdependent with the city’s formal economy: They purchase supplies from other businesses and spend their income elsewhere, providing tax revenues for local, state, and federal government. Street vending, and its related small purchases, sustain 5,234 jobs in Los Angeles, according to that Economic Roundtable report.

These impacts have been 150 years in the making. In Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, journalist Gustavo Arellano, citing a 19th-century Los Angeles Herald article, traced tamaleros selling tamales from wagons as far back as the 1870s. And in Los Angeles Street Food: A History From Tamaleros to Taco Trucks, food writer Farley Elliott documented the city’s initial attempts to regulate street vending, which not only included Mexicans, but also Chinese vendors: “By the 1890s, there were city government-sanctioned attempts to either severely limit or curb these tamaleros altogether, by restricting either their movement or their window for being able to sell,” he writes. These initial enforcement efforts failed due to the popularity of street food, a pattern that continues today.

By the 1980s, LAPD officers were ticketing and conducting regular sweeps of day laborers and street vendors to deny both groups access to public sidewalks and street corners. Immigrants’ rights advocates worked with street vendor leaders to push back against this harassment—and to try to legalize street vending.

Their organizing efforts led to a city ordinance in 1994 that instituted a two-year pilot program with street vending districts in eight designated areas throughout the city. Only one district was ever created—in the MacArthur Park neighborhood—and in many ways, the geographic limits proved to be a failure. Street vending is a competitive business, and vendors outside of the designated areas undercut those in the program who had higher overhead. Street vending remained illegal, and the L.A. City Council failed to take up this issue again for another 25 years. This inaction resulted in the further criminalization of street vendors, who faced a constant—but unevenly enforced—threat of fines, tickets, and confiscation of their equipment and goods.

In 2008, LAPD enforced a major crackdown on Boyle Heights street vendors, leading a group of community leaders connected with East LA Community Corporation (ELACC) to organize resistance. They brought together a coalition of community, legal, immigrants’ rights, and food justice organizations to fight back against the draconian and anti-immigrant attacks.

In 2010, this coalition held its first vendor community forum, followed by town hall meetings with thousands of vendors throughout Los Angeles. Two years later, street vendors worked with this group and others to launch the Los Angeles Street Vendors Campaign (LASVC) to pursue the legalization of their business. In 2018—after nearly a decade of organizing, popular education, participatory policymaking, advocacy, protests, and major mobilization—they secured major policy victories.

The biggest of those: state legislation decriminalizing and legalizing street vending throughout California. This law also eliminated previous charges and convictions for street vending, and provided immediate protection to tens of thousands of immigrant entrepreneurs and workers in the informal economy.

At the same time, the legislation provided a foundation for local reform. California cities were forced to remove their criminal bans, and most established first-ever permitting programs for legal street vending, including Los Angeles. In November 2018, L.A. City Council formally rescinded the criminal ban on street vending and adopted a set of rules and regulations for legal vending on sidewalks and in parks, requiring vendors to obtain a city permit in 2020.

These groundbreaking policy wins are only the beginning. The LASVC is now working to reform state and county retail food regulations that keep many food vendors mired in the informal economy.

Prior to applying for a permit from the city of Los Angeles, a food vendor must first secure a “county health permit” from the L.A. County Department of Public Health (DPH). The Community Economic Development Clinic at the UCLA School of Law recently analyzed this permitting process and found it to be riddled with barriers.

The combined costs for permits, inspection fees, commissary leases, and code-compliant equipment can total tens of thousands of dollars. There are no standardized cart design blueprints or operating procedures that vendors can utilize to procure a code-compliant cart from a manufacturer. Commissaries—facilities used for food preparation and equipment cleaning and storage—are scarce, and DPH does not permit the use of underutilized kitchens in restaurants, schools, and places of worship.

The largest barriers, however, stem from equipment design standards developed with food trucks, not smaller scale carts, in mind. In one example, following state and DPH requirements would yield a 700-pound taco cart larger than most sidewalks; another example would require a hot dog vendor to have refrigerated space to store 6,000 hot dogs. The state requires most carts to include a three-compartment sink, adding considerable weight, size, and cost. While the state offers some flexibility—allowing use of auxiliary sink units in lieu of integrating sinks on the primary unit—DPH has not yet embraced this option for low-income street vendors in Los Angeles.

The state retail food code also creates barriers, including prohibiting the slicing of whole fruits at a vending cart and keeping most pre-cooked meats hot-to-order. This has led to a de facto ban on the legalization of two iconic L.A. cart vendors: fresh fruit and tacos.

Rather than eliminating the police crackdowns of previous decades, in some ways the new rules have given law enforcement another means of intimidation and criminalization. Police officers, code enforcement, or health officers from the county and city (often armed) enforce these impossible rules, resulting in expensive tickets, fines, and property confiscation. This hurts vendors, excluding them from the formal economy, and consumers—who want to safely enjoy L.A.’s renowned street food.

This ongoing battle illustrates the paradoxical dimensions of local governance. Our laws and regulations exclude many of the same people who make public spaces safe, lively, and inclusive. Government leaders say they want permanent businesses and temporary ones, but make existence difficult for both.

These paradoxes can be resolved, and the state and county can develop legislation that balances economic opportunity and public health. Los Angeles, too, needs innovative strategies to support vendors—including improving working conditions and providing entrepreneurial opportunities—to fully integrate them into life and business here. Ultimately, recognizing the significance of the informal vending economy will create better, healthier lives for the tens of thousands of low-income individuals (most of whom are immigrants with roots in Mexico, Central and South America) and families who work on the streets of L.A. And the entire region will reap—and eat—the benefits.

The post How Los Angeles Can Govern Street Vending With the Respect It Deserves appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ramirez began by recounting her early career at Bell Labs, the powerhouse research and development company known for decades of inventions that characterize the world we know, her work developing small-scale materials there, and the challenges and aims of materials science more broadly.

Their conversation quickly turned to the unintended real-world effects of various inventions, such as the blue light-emitting diode (LED), which won a Nobel Prize in 2014. “The blue LED is a wonderful invention, but it also highlights a deficiency in science itself, which is that we don’t look at the broader issues of our invention,” Ramirez said.

Despite the technology’s notable achievement in offering a more efficient alternative to incandescent light bulbs, there have been broad, unforeseen consequences of its application. For one thing, older people have a harder time seeing blue light, meaning LED-based traffic lights can create more dangerous conditions for older drivers (and for others on the road). In addition, the lights have powerful effects on human circadian rhythms that remain unaddressed for the most part.

One of Ramirez’s larger concerns around innovation today stems from the “siloing” of different scientific fields. “What we have is a lot of flowers but no garden,” Ramirez said, calling for more frequent connection between fields, in addition to greater oversight of scientific innovation and its applications and effects more generally. She suggested that more federal regulation, or stronger independent consumer testing and reporting organizations would help address unintended consequences of inventions. Lastly, she called for better training; as it stands, scientists receive little counsel when it comes to considering the broader environmental or societal contexts of their work (such as materials’ sources and what processes are required to produce them).

“It seems like we put a lot of pressure on the inventor in part because we don’t have any other backstops,” Margonelli said, pointing out the constant risk inventors face that their work will be used in damaging ways. She cited, for example, how the botanist Arthur Galston’s research helped lead to the herbicide Agent Orange, the toxic chemical sprayed by the U.S. military across Vietnam, which has had a lasting impact on those who came in contact with it. Ramirez agreed, recalling a conversation with Jim West, inventor of the foil electret microphone, where he expressed regret that the U.S. military used the technology for surveillance.

However, scientists have also been able to affect how their work has been applied. Galston, for example, after realizing what the military was doing with his research led a campaign that halted the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Another example is Caroline Hunter, a Black chemist working on Polaroid film in the 1970s who co-founded the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PRWM). Through the PRWM, Ramirez said, Hunter successfully protested the Polaroid company’s efforts to produce film for apartheid passbooks for the government of South Africa. “There’s a long tradition of workers pushing back, saying ‘this is not right, my labor should not be used in this way,’” she said.

Before wrapping up the conversation, Margonelli asked Ramirez: What else can be done to build a better future of innovation?

“In other countries, they actually have dialogues between scientists and the general public,” said Ramirez, describing spaces where scientists and community members gather and offer input and feedback to create a real conversation. “If we had more of that,” she speculated, “[scientists could better] consider the bigger picture.”

The post How Can Inventors Respond to the Real-World Effects of Their Inventions? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s useful to understand the new interest in the Fairness Doctrine as a form of nostalgia for an era in U.S. media regulation in which the “public interest” ostensibly guided policy decisions. But this longing overlooks the actual role of the “public interest” in U.S. broadcast regulation over the first 75 years of its history. The “public interest” was always buffeted by business, political, and technological forces. The Fairness Doctrine itself was unevenly enforced, its applicability was unclear, and its effectiveness was uncertain. Its promise was always far greater than its performance.

Broadcast regulation in the United States historically faced limitations. Congress passed its first substantive regulation of radio after the tragedy of the Titanic—which had been exacerbated by the presence of a nearby ship that did not receive its distress signal, and by allegations that radio amateurs had spread false information about the scale of the disaster. The Radio Act of 1912 created a regulatory structure for the new medium that sought to assure responsible radio airwave use, reconstituting such use as a privilege to be bestowed through a license, not a right accessible to everyone. The act created a hierarchy: The Navy would get access to the best frequencies, corporations the next most valuable, and amateurs the least desirable. The law gave the Commerce Department the authority to issue licenses, but no power to deny them to qualified applicants.

Congress updated federal oversight as radio broadcasting expanded in the 1920s. The Radio Act of 1927 created the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), a temporary entity that was empowered to limit the number of radio licenses awarded, based on technical considerations, and to determine who would get them. Congress instructed the FRC to consider the “public interest, convenience, and necessity” in awarding radio licenses. Reasoning that serving the public interest required serving the largest possible number of people, the FRC favored large commercial stations, especially those owned by or affiliated with burgeoning national networks such as NBC and CBS. The agency’s policies sidelined and marginalized the non-profit stations run by educational institutions, unions, immigrant communities, and faith organizations.

In 1934, Congress created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to replace and expand upon the FRC. In exchange for the privilege to use an increasingly scarce public resource—the airwaves—the FCC reasoned (and federal courts concurred) that it could impose regulations in the public interest to promote competition within the broadcasting sector, assure diversity of viewpoint, and encourage local programming. Federal statutes required licensees to provide equal time to candidates seeking political office and prohibited them from airing obscene, indecent, or profane language (and, later, content). Beginning in 1941, the FCC also prohibited broadcast stations from editorializing. This policy, known as the Mayflower Rule, was adopted amidst anxieties about the use of radio as a tool of propaganda, from the virulently anti-Semitic broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin in the U.S., which reached a domestic audience of around 40 million people, to radio’s deployment by Hitler in Germany. In an environment in which very few controlled the instruments of shared communication, the FCC held, government had an affirmative role to assure that those entities did not bend public discourse to their will.

But the regulatory structure created by Congress did not always address on-the-ground broadcast practices. Though national networks distributed a great deal of programming, federal authority primarily regulated the recipients of broadcast licenses—local stations. If a network distributed a program containing indecent content, it was the stations who aired the program who were liable for violating an FCC rule. What’s more, even though the FCC had authority to revoke or not renew a broadcasting license if a station’s programming record failed to serve the “public interest”, the agency rarely exercised this power. After World War II, the FCC signaled it would base licensing renewal decisions on the public service record of stations and issued guidelines, known as the “Blue Book,” that outlined programming expectations for local stations. But the Blue Book was never enforced; the red-baiting commercial broadcast industry successfully tarred the FCC’s interventionist approach as anti-American, akin to a communist approach to media.

In this context, the FCC revisited the Mayflower Rule, replacing it with the Fairness Doctrine in 1949. Broadcasters, under the new guidelines, no longer had to shun editorializing; in fact, they had an affirmative obligation to address controversial topics of interest and to provide diverse perspectives on the air. The new policy struck a middle ground between competing ideas about the editorial responsibilities of broadcasters. Some had advocated for a retention of the Mayflower Rule, seeing in it a protection from broadcasters using their stations to advocate solely for pro-corporate policies; others called for its complete repeal, arguing for the absolute editorial freedom of local stations. The Fairness Doctrine provided broadcasters editorial discretion, but mandated that they air competing views on controversial topics, not just those that reflected the perspective of the licensee.

In theory, the Fairness Doctrine was supposed to assure listeners had access to a robust marketplace of ideas. In practice, it was clunky and confusing. Enforcement relied on listeners filing complaints with the commission when a station failed to comply. Stations and complainants alike confused its provisions with the equal time rules that applied to candidates for political office. Whether broadcast addresses by elected officials required stations to provide time for responses was unclear, as was whether issues of national import, but not directly related to local communities, activated Fairness Doctrine requirements. Some stations ignored the affirmative obligation to address controversial topics and avoided tackling them altogether. Broadcast networks tightened their control over their news divisions, asserting that airing documentaries produced by independents or non-U.S. media companies could render affiliates vulnerable to Fairness Doctrine complaints. Paradoxically, the rule may have diminished the marketplace of ideas while shoring up network control over national public affairs programming.

The Fairness Doctrine, importantly, was a tool that enabled a range of communities to pressure stations to include their perspectives on the airwaves, and to program with the diversity of their publics in mind. Symbolically, if not always in practice, the rule exemplified a view of media regulation that put the interests of the public above the editorial freedoms of media companies. It was a reminder to stations of the ostensible precarity of their licenses and their obligations to program responsibly.

But the Fairness Doctrine was not a panacea. Much of the rule’s power came from activists who monitored local stations and requested time to respond to broadcasts on controversial topics. Like much of U.S. media policy, its enforcement hinged on individuals and communities equipped with the informational and social capital to level a complaint. While it required stations that discussed civil rights activities to include voices beyond segregationists, it did nothing to address the extraordinary paucity of people of color in control of or employed by local stations. While it required opposing perspectives, it gave broadcasters discretion as to what constituted a legitimate viewpoint and who was a capable spokesperson to articulate it.

In the end, the Fairness Doctrine’s impact was questionable. The FCC jettisoned it in 1987, as part of a broader sweep of media deregulation championed by broadcasters, the Reagan administration, and their allies in Congress. Regulators abandoned the scarcity rationale for broadcast regulation, as the commission asserted that the expansion of cable, an increase in local stations, and the availability of the VCR portended an abundant and diverse media ecology. The end of the Fairness Doctrine also marked the end an interpretation of speech rights that understood the First Amendment as enabling democratic self-governance and that required, in the words of education reformer and philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn, “not that everyone shall speak, but that everything worth saying shall be said.”

In its place, U.S. regulators have adopted a view of speech rights that prohibits the government from restricting anyone’s speech, corporations and people alike. The result is a media environment defined by fragmentation, misinformation, and informational siloes. It is an arena in which the greatest threat to free speech is understood not as the wide distribution of disinformation, the prevalence of corrosive hate speech and threats, the disproportionate power of corporations and the wealthy in political campaigns, or the escalation of conspiracy theories that threaten democratic institutions—but rather, any government action to curb them.

It is logical that some Americans desire a return to a perceived simpler era, in which media companies operated in the public interest and produced shared knowledge about the world we collectively inhabit. The call for a revitalized Fairness Doctrine perhaps speaks more to a desire not for the reinstatement of a sometimes ineffective and insufficient rule that emerged in a very different media environment, but to a nostalgia for an imagined regulatory system that was responsive, in policy prescription if not always in practice, to the public interest; one devoted to making media enable, rather than dismantle, the capacities for democratic processes.

The post Why Bringing Back the Fairness Doctrine Won’t Cure What Ails Modern Media appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These two companies alone suck up an astounding 60 percent of all online advertising in the world (outside China). With Amazon taking another 9 percent, that leaves a mere 30 percent of global digital ad revenue to be split among tens of thousands of media outlets, many of them local publications. With digital online advertising now comprising more than half of all ad spending (and projected to grow further), this domination has greatly contributed to underfunded and failing news industries in country after country.

Australia’s situation is typical. Its Competition and Consumer Commission found that for every hundred Australian dollars spent by online advertisers, $47 goes to Google and $24 to Facebook.

Most Australians who access their news online don’t go to the original news source. Instead, they absorb the gist of the news from Facebook and Google’s headlines and preview blurbs. With fewer people clicking through these links, the digital media platforms effectively have turned thousands of publishers and broadcasters into little more than uncompensated ghostwriters of content.

That’s why Facebook and Google receive the lion’s share of revenue from digital ads, rather than the original news sources. Platforms could tweak their design and algorithms to purposefully drive users to the original news sources’ websites; but they don’t. They prefer to repackage and monetize product from the original producer without paying for it. In other industries, that’s called theft.

Australia decided to fight this thieving duopoly with some rules-setting of its own. A new law approved by the Australian Parliament requires large digital media companies to compensate Australian news outlets fairly for their proprietary content, and to submit to binding arbitration with news publishers if they can’t agree on terms. Media outlets around the world are watching to see how this plays out.

Google initially fought the proposal, but finally negotiated deals with Australian news publishers. But Facebook flexed its muscle by cutting off Australia entirely from its platform for several days. This prevented Aussie news publishers and everyday users—including important government agencies like health, fire and crisis services—from posting, viewing or sharing news content.

The result was jarring, the proverbial “shot heard ’round the world.” Facebook censored Australian users more effectively than the Chinese communist government ever could, prompting charges of “big tech authoritarianism.” Facebook finally relented to Australia’s requirement, in return for some vague and uncertain concessions. But the flexing of raw, naked platform power was unmistakably clear.

Now a similar battle is playing out in the state of Maryland. Over the last 10 years, U.S. newspapers’ advertising revenue decreased by 62 percent, and without that source of funding, newsroom employment dropped by nearly half. That decline coincided with a huge increase in digital media use and, according to Pew Research Center, today more than half of U.S. adults report often receiving their news from social media, search, or podcasts, and only a third from news websites or apps. Those numbers zoom off the charts for young people 29 and under.

Squeezed by these economics, Maryland approved America’s first tax on digital ad revenue earned inside its borders, targeting companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. The measure is projected to generate as much as $250 million annually, dedicated to schools. The tech giants are threatening lawsuits against Maryland, even as Connecticut and Indiana legislators have introduced similar measures.

But the real battle is just beginning. One of the most important, unsettled debates of the Internet Age is whether digital media platforms like Facebook, Google/YouTube, and Twitter are the new “public square,” a kind of global free-speech Agora, or just the latest techno variety of old-fashioned publishers and broadcasters. Or a hybrid of these.

With each crisis revealing the gap between the tech companies’ public-square pretentions and their very real publishing power, the debate has intensified. Following the U.S. Capitol ransacking, Facebook, Google, and Twitter all decided to discontinue “publishing” the president of the United States. Before that—as the platforms tried to contain their toxic pipeline of pandemic and election disinformation and racial tension—they slapped warning labels on posts and removed the content of certain users.

Now, in response to Australia’s law, Facebook pulled the plug on an entire country. That’s something only a giant monopoly publisher can do. In 2014, when Spain enacted legislation requiring Google to pay Spanish news outlets for the article snippets in its search results, Google bullied the government and ultimately closed its new service there.

Even before the past year’s seminal events, Facebook, Google, and Twitter acted as publishers by allowing their “engagement” algorithms to make critical decisions about which content is featured at the top of users’ news feeds, and what is promoted and amplified. Their sophisticated “long tail” publishing machines precisely target niche users, showing different content to different people, including political ads.

These are not passive online chat boards, and the Big Tech platforms are not merely managers of the digital public square. They are “robot publishers,” in which algorithms do the essential duties of an editor. From a liability or accountability standpoint, it should matter little that there is a supercomputer behind the curtain, instead of a human.

So it’s pretty difficult to argue credibly that these platforms are not in some sense publishers, deciding what content and sources should disappear or be amplified. These companies have more in common with the New York Times, CNN, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp than they do with an online Wikiboard or free speech corner in London’s Hyde Park.

Indeed, Facebook’s and Google/YouTube’s algorithmically curated machines, with 2.6 billion and 2 billion users, respectively, are the two largest publishers and broadcasters in human history. Yet existing law does not treat these companies as either, when it comes to being liable or answerable for their mistakes and abuses. The digital media platforms, seeking to avoid accountability and its costs, hide behind the fact they have billions of users generating content. But that should not obscure the centrality of their publisher role.

Critics of the Maryland and Australian approach claim that treating Facebook and Google as publishers threatens the principle of an open internet, which views the internet as an infinite free speech zone for information sharing, consumer choice, and global connection. It’s a beautiful but outdated dream, and it must be balanced by the “copyright principle,” which was established years before the internet was even invented. Copyright law mandates that any person or organization cannot swipe someone else’s content and monetize it without paying for it.

There is something inherently basic and fair about digital media giants paying for the original news content they use to drive traffic to their sites. But the open internet principle essentially demands that traditional news sources bear the financial burden of continuing to produce quality news without fair compensation, much as it demanded that Napster be allowed to distribute copyrighted music for free without compensating musical artists and record companies.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the open internet principle will cannibalize what’s left of the news media. With no credible news sources to steal from, Facebook and Google would be even more overrun by disinformation. They are eating their own seed.

Canada says it will adopt the Australian approach, possibly India, too. And France and Austria have passed similar laws. The U.S. is known for encouraging competition, so you would think regulators would jump into action. Yet the Biden administration has been silent on this subject. Will the United States, a longtime champion of the free press, step up?

The post The Real Battle Between Big Tech and the Free Press Is Just Beginning appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Jahn, who is currently a project manager at DARPA, visited Zócalo on Tuesday with Issues in Science and Technology editor-in-chief Daniel Sarewitz to discuss why food security has been left out of national security debate and planning, and her efforts to account for food security in the national defense agenda. Their conversation covered the scope of Jahn’s career, from her team’s invention of the popular Delicata squash, to her work responding to agricultural crises in other countries, and her focus today on food policy and national security.

Throughout the discussion, Jahn emphasized how her attention to larger systems, and her willingness to question both her industry’s conventions and her own assumptions, has been fundamental to her most important insights and successes. Take, for instance, an incident where the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) called her to respond to a whitefly-transmitted disease destroying tomato crops in West Africa. By taking an alternative, participatory approach, and distributing experiments across a broad network of local farmers, her team rapidly found and scaled a tomato variety that could survive the blight. However, she said, they’d failed to account for the system’s other limitations. There was a tomato cannery in West Africa, and it could accommodate the harvest—but there was one significant issue: it did not have electricity. “The tomatoes rotted on the loading dock,” she recalled. That story, which Jahn now refers to as “the tomato parable,” incited a crucial moment of reflection for her. “I began to think about what I was really after in systems,” she said, “and it wasn’t raw abundance.”

It punctuated to her the importance of understanding the broader, systemic contexts for local phenomena, rather than a linear, “pipeline”-based approach.

Jahn explained how the insights she gained working with developing countries to understand how their agricultural strategies, and workarounds resulting from lack of industrialized infrastructure, could be implemented in the U.S. One such strategy, she described, is participatory plant breeding, a form of citizen science in which farmers and scientists collaborate to test new crops.

She also cautioned how the current emphasis on food yields and efficiency at the sake of crop diversity and the use of energy and water resources was setting the planet up for disaster.

“We made a fundamental error with equating abundance with stability,” she said. As a plant breeder, she came to realize “the more, more, more is better, better, better hypothesis” was coming at a huge price, as she explained in a recent Issues article. That spurred her on to make the U.S. food system a policy issue, which ultimately led to the inclusion of Section 1075 in the National Defense Authorization Act.

Quoted with Molly Jahn:

“Driving at efficiency, driving at productivity—when we use those as our North Stars, we tend to drive diversity out… That’s fine, if you’re not concerned with properties of the system that have to do with the functions of diversity in that system, like resilience or stability.”

The post ‘Equating Abundance With Stability’ Is an Existential Threat to the U.S. Food System appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One afternoon in July 1985, President Ronald Reagan met with his domestic policy council in the White House cabinet room. The question: should he keep pushing legislation to offer amnesty to undocumented migrants?

Some Reagan aides wanted him to drop his support for amnesty, the term for granting legal status to people in the country illegally. Reagan’s pollsters had told him that the public opposed amnesty. And the president’s championing of amnesty had produced defeats. Reagan’s first bill to legalize immigrants failed in Congress in 1982. In 1984, Reagan had convinced the House and Senate to pass a bill, only to see the legislation fall apart in conference committee.

But amnesty had one stalwart supporter in the room: Reagan himself.

Recently, at Reagan’s presidential library in Simi Valley, I read through the records on the legislation that became the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Today, IRCA doesn’t get much respect; it’s long been dismissed across the political spectrum as “the failed amnesty law.” Its central idea, of broad forgiveness and quick legal status for undocumented immigrants, is completely out of political fashion today.

But while studying the records, I was struck by the difference between the reality of the 1986 amnesty and its 2018 reputation. The 1986 law was carefully conceived, realistic, and humane—reflecting the practical wisdom of a California president.

The records show that Reagan, despite his reputation for avoiding details, was personally engaged on immigration. When aides talked about the supposed peril to public safety of immigrants, Reagan shifted the conversation to specific stories of undocumented immigrants in California who suffered because of their lesser legal status. “The president cited past cases of exploitation of illegal aliens,” according to the minutes of that 1985 meeting.

Reagan ended the meeting by saying he wanted to talk more with the legislation’s co-sponsor, a Republican U.S. senator from Wyoming named Alan K. Simpson. In those conversations, Reagan and Simpson determined to go forward with the legislation, for two big reasons.

First, they saw legalization as essential to protecting and integrating immigrants. “The work to be done is to avoid seeing this nation populated with a furtive illegal subclass of human beings who are afraid to go to the cops, afraid to go to a hospital…or afraid to go to their employer,” Simpson wrote Reagan in a private note that began, “Dear Ron.”

Second, and more important, both men were old enough to have seen immigrants used as scapegoats; they urgently wanted legislation to preempt divisive politics. “If we do not choose to have immigration reform in the near future, the alternative will not just be the status quo,” said Simpson while reintroducing the legislation in 1986. “No, the alternative instead will be an increased public intolerance—a failure of compassion, if you will—toward all forms of immigration and types of entrants—legal and illegal; refugees, permanent resident aliens, family members and all others within our borders.”

The bill did pass, and it forestalled Simpson’s nightmare—but only for a while.

Immigration restrictionists blame the 1986 law for today’s bitter conflicts over immigration. But they have it backward. Today’s immigration problems result not from amnesty but from our collective failure to understand what made the 1986 law successful.

IRCA actually had two big pieces. One—the successful piece—was amnesty, which was limited, fatefully, to immigrants who had been continuously in the U.S. since January 1, 1982. But the bill’s other big piece drew more attention and was more influential in turning immigration into an American quagmire: a new enforcement regime that prohibited hiring and employing the undocumented.

Familiar figures from today’s politics show up in the records in ways rich with irony. President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, Trump legal spokesman Rudolph Giuliani, and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts—all then in Reagan’s employ—worked on amnesty’s behalf. The politics around this new enforcement were scrambled and did not break down along party lines. Many Democrats opposed the bill, with some arguing that hiring restrictions would lead to discrimination against all Latinos. Labor unions worried that the bill would be too lenient on employers, particularly in agriculture, while some Republicans opposed it because it might be too tough on businesses.

Compromises pulled the bill to passage. To reassure those worried about employment discrimination, an amendment prohibited, for the very first time, employment discrimination on the basis of national origin. And, crucially, California’s own U.S. Senator Pete Wilson—who as governor in the 1990s would embrace anti-immigrant politics—helped lead negotiations that led to the creation of a special legalization category for agricultural workers.

IRCA should have been celebrated as a tremendous legislative victory. But the bill’s passage was overshadowed by news of the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Reagan didn’t sign the bill until after the November 1986 election, in a small ceremony subdued by the fact that Republicans had lost control of the U.S. Senate. Reporters in attendance asked about the Iran-Contra scandal, not immigration.

But in his remarks that day, Reagan unabashedly emphasized the benefits of the bill for the undocumented. “The legalization provisions in this Act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society,” he said. “Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.”

Under the two-step amnesty process, more than 3 million people applied for temporary residency, which lasted 18 months, in the first phase. In the second phase, 2.7 million people received permanent residency as a result of the law. This was the largest legalization in the country’s history, but it should have been larger. An estimated 2 million people did not legalize their status.

Why not? The law was not generous enough. It excluded newer immigrants who had come between 1982 and the law’s 1987 implementation. Some undocumented immigrants feared making themselves known, while others didn’t know about the program, because publicity and outreach came late in the window for legalization. Some were discouraged by the federal government’s bureaucratic and time-consuming legalization process of security checks, document checks, and requirements for competency in English and American civics.

In retrospect, the process should have covered all undocumented immigrants and should have established a regular amnesty process every few years, since the demand for immigrant labor was certain to keep attracting people to the country. But in many ways, amnesty was a government success story—it gave millions of people the legal status they required to have a better life. It even turned a $100 million profit for the government through the $185 fees it charged applicants.

But amnesty’s successes didn’t stop immigration restrictionists from criticizing the law and scapegoating immigrants, especially after the economy went south in the early 1990s. The main attack on the law continues to this day: Amnesty encouraged more undocumented immigrants to come, critics say. In fact, the opposite is true. Studies show that amnesty produced a small decline in the number of illegal entries into the country.

Restrictionists also have persistently claimed that only tougher border security and immigration enforcement will reduce illegal immigration. The 1986 law’s hiring enforcement provisions, and the ensuing three decades of additional border security and tough-on-immigration laws have not worked to reduce illegal immigration. Instead, the endless deluge of new laws and restrictions have made it nearly impossible for undocumented persons to legalize their status or establish themselves in the country, thus adding to the numbers of people who stay in the shadows. Even migrants who arrive legally and apply for legal status can be effectively turned into lawbreakers by the immigration system. This is pure Kafka: In the name of stopping illegal immigration, we make all immigrants illegal.

President Trump represents not a new approach but rather a nasty extension of our longstanding obsession with criminalizing immigrants; his innovations are to reclassify refugees and children as immigrant terrorists, who need their own concentration camps. This is stupidity in service of stupidity, and hatred for hatred’s sake. Today’s immigration reformers aren’t much smarter. Their proposals combine more failed border security policies with legalization plans so full of bureaucratic obstacles and delays—some proposals require a 20-year wait to achieve legal status—that they are worthless.

Sadly, both advocates and opponents of immigration now follow the same failed script of increased spending on border security, increased illegalness, and offering a narrow path to legitimacy.

It’s time to flip that script. Make amnesty, not border security, the starting point on immigration. The stance should be: not one penny for enforcement or walls until we have amnesty for all our undocumented neighbors.

Amnesty is wise policy for reasons that go beyond immigration. The United States is not just anxious and polarized now: It’s downright unforgiving. In our public sphere, we never forgive a single sin of those who trespass against us.

The Bible says this is wrong: “Forgive as the Lord forgave you,” it advises. Our lack of forgiveness is also a sign of national decline. “The weak can’t forgive,” Gandhi said. “Only the strong can.”

Americans need amnesty not to forgive our immigrants. We need amnesty so that we might forgive ourselves.

The post Why Amnesty Remains America’s Best Immigration Policy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Hilarious as this scene may be in the film, it recurs frequently in real life, not simply in classrooms but in many other settings, whenever the subject of tariffs comes up. It is both ironic and unfortunate that many Americans find tariffs too boring to care about when, as our history shows, their most critical consequences—nationally and globally—are often wholly unanticipated.

One of the first major pieces of legislation enacted by Congress after the ratification of the Constitution was the Tariff of 1789, which, with import duties averaging about 8 percent, was meant to raise revenue for the new republic while safeguarding New England’s nascent manufacturing economy. But even then, rumblings in the Southern states about protecting one regional economy to the detriment of another showed that tariffs could become a serious source of sectional friction, and so they did, as overall tariff rates shot up to roughly 25 percent by 1820.

At that point, Northern manufacturers were clearly benefiting from protections against competition with foreign imports, while the Southern cotton, rice, and tobacco planters who accounted for more than two-thirds of the value of all American exports were doubly disadvantaged by the tariffs. Not only were they paying tariff-inflated prices for the implements and supplies needed to produce their crops, but they were also forced to sell them in foreign markets depressed or rendered hostile by American import duties.

The controversy came to a head after the Tariff of 1828 jacked up rates to 50 percent on certain goods likely to compete with New England manufacturers. Though he was then serving as Vice President of the United States, South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun was so outraged by federal laws that blatantly protected the interests of a single region at the expense of his own that he moved to have both the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 declared “null and void” within his state. There were even threats of secession if federal authorities sought to enforce the tariffs. But when President Andrew Jackson secured congressional authorization to take military action, if need be, to ensure collection of the import duties, South Carolina backed down.

At that point, sectional clashes over tariff policies seemed more of a direct threat to the Union than disagreements over slavery. This had changed by the election of 1860, when Republican opposition to further expansion of slavery was the critically polarizing issue, but the party’s platform also promised formidable tariff protections for industry and trade that were likely to benefit the North more than the South. The Republican commitment to tariffs did not falter during the Civil War and became a staple of GOP politics well into the 20th century.

Though proponents lauded tariffs as forces for prosperity and stability, rising rates helped to spark third-party insurgencies by American farmers in the 1880s and ‘90s. U.S. tariff policy also sowed the seeds of revolution abroad.

When the McKinley Tariff of 1890 removed duties on imported raw sugar and granted subsidies to domestic producers, it destroyed the advantages enjoyed by Hawai‘i’s sugar planters under previous preferential trade agreements. In response, the powerful American owners and investors who dominated this industry began to agitate for U.S. annexation of Hawai‘i, which would automatically qualify their sugar for the subsidy and immunize it from future tariffs. Formal annexation would not come until 1898, by which time American-led insurgents had succeeded in overthrowing the indigenous Hawaiian monarchy.

Meanwhile, the stage had been set for the Spanish American War by Spain’s attempts to quash a popular uprising in Cuba. That uprising had been fueled in no small part by the economic hardships imposed by the Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894, which cut sharply into American purchases of Cuban sugar by abruptly restoring import duties of 40 percent.

The Democratic resurgence under Woodrow Wilson between 1912 and 1920 brought lower tariffs and an income tax that made tariff duties less critical to federal revenue. When Republicans regained power after World War I, however, protectionism was again the order of the day.

The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 was supposed to stimulate recovery from a postwar economic downturn. In reality, its extended duties on agricultural imports actually cost American farmers dearly in already depressed European markets. At the same time, its higher duties on many other imports denied war-ravaged European nations precious income from trade that they needed to boost their economies and repay the U.S. for loans and credits issued during World War I.

The new tariff law made recovery doubly difficult for Germany, which bore the additional burden of making punitively high reparation payments to its former adversaries. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff was hardly responsible for all of Germany’s woes, but it exacerbated the sustained economic distress and public discord that paved the way for the ascension of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party a decade later.

Things got no better at home or abroad when Congress reacted to the onset of the Great Depression with the record-high rates of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930, which confronted already struggling American farmers and manufacturers with yet another round of retaliatory tariffs and depressed overseas markets. Meanwhile, as the value of American exports to Europe fell by 67 percent between 1929 and 1932, a proportional drop in the value of European exports to the U.S deepened the economic uncertainty that made fascism seem less threatening than communism to many, and heightened the political risk of diverting scarce government funds from welfare programs to national defense.

If it was difficult to foresee all the potential ramifications of tariffs nearly 90 years ago, it’s even harder in today’s more complex and intertwined global economy. The increasing mobility of industrial capital and technology and the segmentation of production have substantially reduced the significance of national boundaries or affiliations for major manufacturers. President Donald Trump now proposes to reverse this trend—or at least shake his fist at it—by espousing an aggressive economic nationalism that has already left some corporations pinned down in a tariff crossfire.

The nation’s leading automotive exporter by value is a BMW manufacturing facility that opened in 1994 near Spartanburg, South Carolina, where it now accounts for 10,000 jobs and 1,400 vehicles (primarily SUVs) per day, roughly 70 percent of them destined for foreign markets.

After flourishing for a quarter-century, BMW’s South Carolina operations now seem to face cloudy future. Trump’s threatened tariff on imported auto parts, which account for roughly 70 percent of what goes into BMW’s SUVs, would inflate production costs. Also, roughly one-third of the BMW vehicles assembled in Spartanburg go to China, which has boosted tariffs on American-made vehicles to 40 percent in retaliation for Trump’s increased duties on Chinese imports, forcing the company to announce 4 to 7 percent price increases on some of its China-bound SUVs.

China has long maintained a trading advantage over the U.S. by strategically devaluing its currency in order to hold down the prices of its exported goods. Ironically, since Trump announced tariffs on Chinese imports, the yuan has fallen to an 11-year low against the dollar, helping to keep those imports cheaper for American consumers and, temporarily at least, blunting some of the effects of Trump’s tariffs. The yuan cannot be allowed to fall forever, of course, especially with China’s massive debt bubble threatening to burst. Beyond that, a sustained trade war featuring higher U.S. tariffs on more Chinese goods would take a much bigger bite out of China’s GDP and dampen its growth rate significantly.

What is bad for China isn’t necessarily good for the U.S. or the rest of the world, however. As the largest national consumer of foreign-made products, China has been projected to account for nearly one-third of all economic expansion between 2016 and 2021; so if it should sink into a major recession, the effect on the global economy may be more toxic than salutary.

Smaller “emerging market” economies around the world can be affected more critically by tariffs imposed by major trading nations. President Trump’s ostensible effort to force the release of an American hostage by doubling tariffs on steel imported from Turkey has dramatically accelerated the decline in value of the Turkish lira. This has rattled many emerging market investors, including the Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System for public employees, which is the largest institutional shareholder in a Turkey Exchange-Traded Fund that has lost half its value since the year began.

If Trump’s tariffs are more than a temporary ploy and really here to stay, a depressed market for exports and higher prices for U.S. consumers are the devils we can expect. But, as our history with tariffs makes abundantly clear, it is the devils we don’t expect that might do the most damage, both at home and abroad.

The post Why Tariffs Have Backfired Throughout American History appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You are far too kind: I never imagined a bureaucratic nightmare this cruel, absurd, and surreal.

I don’t know exactly how I got to California, or even how I came back to life. But I appeared here some weeks ago, in the form of an insect, like my protagonist in The Metamorphosis. And I’m glad I did. If I’d known weather like this in my lifetime, I might not have died of tuberculosis in Prague in 1924, shortly before my 41st birthday.

In my prime, I was a master of conveying oppressive and intangible systems that trap humans and defeat attempts at reform. California, and its housing markets, do indeed fit that bill. But I never had any idea that a dystopia could be as beautiful and wealthy as yours.

Indeed, California’s talent for self-deception and absurdity leaves me in awe. You know, I thought I portrayed myopia pretty scarily in The Trial when my character K goes into the dark cathedral and can see only one piece of the painting, leaving its true meaning in pitch black. But I couldn’t have conceived of a fantastically rich place of 40 million people that claims it is open and welcoming to the whole world, while refusing to house people.

You Californians talk a big game about how you support the environment. But by a surreal trick, the laws that supposedly protect the environment also make it so difficult to build housing—especially near your transit hubs—that people are forced to live and work on the periphery, where the environmental costs are actually higher. You have enough land—and the right zoning—to have housing, but you give NIMBYs and lawyers all this power to stop housing and development even where it’s legal.

While I am proud of my ability to create nightmares of labyrinthine illogic, I never managed to dream of anything so diabolical as your California Environmental Quality Act, which you call CEQA. One lawyer, Jennifer Hernandez, who has written about this CEQA with scary flair, put it this way:

Imagine spending five years and $5 million to defend against a lawsuit challenging a plan for where to put transit improvements and other infrastructure, and critically needed housing and related public services—and then to get sued again, and again, and again, and again, for trying to implement the plan…. And then imagine that the reason for this “process” is a handful of construction trade leaders who don’t care a bit that their workers can’t live near their jobs, and can’t afford to buy a home anywhere within 2 hours—along with enviro advocates who define the “environment” as the view outside their kitchen window. And then imagine that the lawsuits can be filed anonymously, at a near zero cost, and without an iota of legal merit [and] can kill a project for 3-5 years by ending access to financing.

That surpasses my most chilling passages!

Californians have forgotten just how fundamental housing is—not merely as shelter from life’s cruelties but as a place that creates space to rest and think. As I once wrote, “It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.”

I portrayed the paradoxical isolation of an overcrowded city in The Trial, which, by the way, starts in a lodging house (the sort of housing your state could use more of). Your state is reminiscent of that, but at a scale—of escalating homelessness and housing prices far beyond the median income—that exceeds my horizons.

And oh, the terrible price you pay! I had some real health problems in my life—not just tuberculosis but migraines, insomnia, constipation, and boils. Modern scholars have concluded I also endured clinical depression and social anxiety. But your housing crisis is making you sicker than I ever was.

Millions of you have moved far from your jobs to find affordable housing that suits your family, but now your commutes are ruining your health. I know about commuting, too—while writing timeless works of literature, I had a day job with insurance companies—but I couldn’t imagine the traffic you endure or the hyper-crowded buses and BART cars you squeeze into.

All these pressures can put households in, well, Kafkaesque predicaments. I know about families—I had a tyrant of a father, and lost my two younger brothers to childhood disease. In my story, “The Judgment,” a father won’t make any room in the world for his son, who at the end hops over the railing of a bridge and plunges to his death.

But younger Californians have it worse: They can’t even have a child. So many of you are delaying marriage and child-rearing because you can’t afford a home that your state’s birthrate just fell to the lowest ever recorded—even lower than during the Great Depression.

Even those of you who have housing often have to do without very important things—like education—to pay for a roof over your heads. My father didn’t provide me much, but I got sent to good German schools, and got a law degree. You live in a 21st-century world where education is even more important, and yet your education levels are stalled, and not enough of your people can afford college.

Worse still, your schools don’t capture the full value of this huge run-up in housing values because you have limited your property taxes. When I buzzed about this to Californians, they started talking about how you all worship a strange and immortal god named “Prop 13.” And people think my stories are weird!

In this and other ways, your housing crisis has turned your sunny state into a prison I never could have conceived of in gloomy Prague. Now, I did once describe an apartment as a prison in my unfinished novel Amerika. But, by not building enough housing, you’ve created a run-up in prices that traps people in your own homes. Millions of you—perhaps most of you—live in places that you could not afford to buy or rent now if they came on the market. So you can’t move and follow prospects for jobs, education, and love.

And yes, I know that many of our civic and political leaders are proposing ways to address the crisis. But so many of the ideas (Mandatory solar! Higher affordable housing requirements! Rent control!) would only add to the costs of housing. Your local leaders don’t approve housing because politics and financial incentives run against it. And instead of changing the calculus by encouraging them to do the right thing, your state legislators suggest new laws to coerce them.

When listening to those lawmakers, I thought of an old line of mine: “It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.”

Do I have any suggestions for you? Nothing that isn’t obvious. As I once wrote, “start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.” Creating enough housing, whether it’s in Prague in the 1910s or Pleasanton in the 2010s, requires creating enough housing.

If you don’t, I fear you Californians will lose your taste for your very sweet land, just as the salesman-turned-insect in The Metamorphosis loses his taste for his former favorites of bread and milk.

I’d suggest that all Californians pick up my final, unfinished, and posthumously published novel The Castle, in which the protagonist K arrives in a village but struggles to get the permission to live there.

I never wrote the ending, but I planned to have the village grant him the right to make his home there only when he was on his deathbed.

California, do you really want to come to an end as Kafkaesque as that?

The post Even Kafka Couldn’t Dream up California’s Surreal Housing Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In asking that, I don’t mean that earthquakes will turn California into an island. Instead, what California and Taiwan share is a problem—the predicament of the halfway country.

Taiwan is in reality an independent nation—in its ambitions, its advanced economy, its democratic government. But many of the world’s countries refuse to recognize it as a separate nation, deferring to mainland China, which claims Taiwan as a possession and responds with bullying and threats whenever Taiwan goes its own way.

California shares some aspects of this half-country conundrum. Our state has the ambitions, economy, and democratic government of one of the leading nations of the world. But it remains very much a part of the United States, which responds with bullying and threats whenever California goes its own way.

Yes, Californians fervently hope that our current conflict with the American government is temporary, a result of the Madness of King Trump, and that once the president is gone, we will return to being full members in good standing in the United States. But the hard truth is that California’s differences with the rest of America predate Trump, and so our status as a halfway country—in the United States, but not quite of it—is likely to become the new normal.

I spent last week in Taiwan, and the major lesson I learned (while planning a 2019 conference on democracy) is that it is exhausting to be a smaller country in the shadow of a larger power. The challenges there resemble those of California, and of younger siblings everywhere. When you’re often having to defend against a bullying big brother, how do you develop yourself into a success, much less a model whose examples might change the world—and even change big brother?

Of course, comparisons only go so far, because although Californians may chafe at our troubled relationship with the federal government—not to mention the relentless verbal attacks by the president—the Chinese government has repeatedly threatened to attack Taiwan militarily, seizing the island nation by force if it becomes too independent.

Still, Taiwan and California share some striking similarities. Both have advanced in education, technology, and culture, and punch well above their weight on the international stage. California has the world’s sixth largest economy, though with just 40 million citizens, it ranks 35th by population. Taiwan, likewise, has the world’s 22nd largest economy, even though its population of 23 million puts it at 55th most populous worldwide.

Even in an era of rising nationalism, both Taiwan and California go their own ways, remaining stubbornly internationalist, committed to free trade and immigration. Taiwan recently liberalized its immigration laws to attract more skilled workers and take advantage of mounting immigration restrictions around the world.

Despite struggling to forge diplomatic relations, Taiwan has built trading relationships all over the world, and stays close to other China neighbors—especially Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea—in the hopes that they will help Taiwan deter any Chinese attack. California, in a different context but a similar spirit, works with other states in a legal defense against the federal government, and has made alliances with other countries to address climate change, which the leaders of the American government consider a hoax.

It is precisely because Taiwan and California are so distinctive that they face threats. Just as President Trump has called California “out of control” and falsely accused Californians of engaging in massive election fraud, President Xi Jinping’s propagandists have raised constant questions about the legitimacy of Taiwan’s own free and fair elections.

Even though the economies of both California and Taiwan are tethered to these larger countries, both places see themselves as defenders of openness and democratic values that are at odds with the increasingly authoritarian governments of their national big brothers.

That authoritarianism has sparked resistance in both places. Taiwan and California each have independence movements that want a more formal split—which adds to the risk of greater conflict. Last week, two former Taiwan presidents and the head of a broadcasting company announced a campaign to force a referendum for Taiwanese independence. Back in California, different groups have filed ballot initiatives seeking votes on California independence.

Both movements pose the same question: How many threats must we suffer from Beijing or Washington before enough is enough?

There are many Taiwanese answers to this. The mainstream response is to stay the course. “We don’t want to be in conflict with China,” Taiwanese premier Lai Ching-te said at a Taipei forum. “But we won’t bend to pressure either.”

But I also heard more robust, provocative answers.

First, be opportunistic in building solidarity. Whenever the Chinese issue threats, point that out to the world, and use it to develop a shared sense of identity. Taiwan has been adept at this. A generation ago, most Taiwanese told pollsters they saw themselves as Chinese. Now, after decades of Chinese bullying, most Taiwanese see themselves as primarily Taiwanese.

Second, never miss an opportunity to expand your autonomy when the larger power leaves an opening. To imagine how that logic might apply to California, consider President Trump’s recent suggestion that he might remove federal immigration enforcement from California. Our state’s political leaders reacted by condemning the president or disregarding the comments as Trumpian nonsense. Perhaps, instead, they should have taken his statements as an offer—and accepted it, declaring the state would happily take control of immigration enforcement and asking him for a date by which ICE would leave California.

Finally, success is the best revenge. The conflict with the larger power is a competition, so do everything you can to be friendlier, more democratic, and more attractive than the larger power menacing you. The most interesting conversations I heard in Taipei were about whether Taiwan should respond to China’s militaristic behavior by declaring itself officially an island of peace—a neutral country, like Switzerland, unwilling to participate in wars outside its boundaries. Such a stance might make it harder for China to attack, and win Taiwan more international support.

And just imagine how popular it might be if California, perhaps through ballot initiative, declared its own official neutrality and said it no longer would support America’s costly and endless wars.

It is possible to take the California-Taiwan comparison too far. “The mainland has missiles pointed at us,” one Taiwanese journalist reminded me. “Does America have missiles pointed at you in California?”

No. But I took heart that Taiwan and California are pursuing strategies based on a similar faith: that a smaller place doesn’t have to be at the mercy of the larger place. That a smaller place, through the power of its own example, can reshape the larger place.

California’s long history of leading America to the future suggests there is real wisdom in such an approach. People in Taiwan—whose foreign investment-based economic revival inspired China to open itself up to foreign investment decades ago—can see this too.

In Taichung, I visited a new Literary Museum located in an old police dormitory from the Japanese colonial period. In one courtyard, I encountered the most magnificent tree you’ll see outside Sequoia National Park. It’s a banyan that has grown so many different roots, that it now appears to be multiple trees with a couple different trunks.

“In this way,” said a guide, “a tree becomes a forest.”

The post Can Taiwan Teach California How to Thrive Under an Authoritarian Power? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The things Donald Trump is saying about immigrants sound very familiar to those of us Californians who have been involved with immigration issues for the better part of our adult lives. Substitute former California Governor “Pete Wilson” for “Donald Trump” as the author of some of these quotes, and you could convince me that we are living in 1994 California, not 2017 America. We just got there sooner.

In 1994, California was still mired in recession, lagging behind the rest of the country in what would become the remarkable economic recovery of the 1990s. Instead of focusing on housing, job creation, higher education, or retraining workers for the burgeoning information economy, some prominent Republicans decided it was easier to blame “illegal” immigrants, despite persistent statistics that immigrants use fewer public services than native-born residents. And so, Proposition 187 was placed on the ballot.

Arriving at a time when Latinos were beginning to reach critical mass in California, Prop 187 was almost perfectly (if unintentionally) designed to galvanize a generation of activists—which is exactly what it did.

For those too young to remember, Prop 187 would have barred all undocumented immigrants from using public health care facilities, public education, and many other publicly funded services. Yes, you read that right: It would have barred hospitals, schools, and other vital services from people who needed them. Worse, it required various public officials in public agencies to report people whom they “suspected” were not documented to authorities. Essentially, not only would it have kicked millions of Latinos out of hospitals, schools, and other public places, but it would also have created a witch-hunt atmosphere, allowing for people to be turned in for simply “seeming” illegal.

I was 27 years old in 1994, working at a nonprofit helping immigrants navigate the difficulties of life in Los Angeles, alongside some friends including Gilbert Cedillo and Kevin de Léon. We immediately saw this for what it was: an attempt to lay the blame for persistent economic uncertainty at the feet of a growing minority—the “Other.” So, we did what we were good at: We organized people; we rallied; and we tried to show that the Latino population couldn’t be taken for granted.

What surprised Pete Wilson and his Republican colleagues was that their plan to push people to the margins of society achieved the exact opposite. People were so outraged, so motivated, and so galvanized by this blatant attack on their American Dream that they moved out of the shadows and pledged to show the world that they were real people with real hopes and real aspirations.

To prove that, we organized two marches. The first, on February 28, 1994 in Los Angeles, was 20,000 strong; many of the attendees were people who, just a few short months earlier, were nervous about attending parents’ night at their child’s school for fear of running into authorities who would deport them. But at the march, they were fighting for their rights in front of television cameras.

On October 16, just a couple of weeks before the election, we staged another march, from Boyle Heights to City Hall. And this time, it wasn’t just Latinos. It was religious and civic and elected and community leaders, marching in solidarity with us. And this time, we were 100,000 people—standing up for the American Dream, and standing up to say that American opportunity isn’t just for the few able to get through an arcane, Byzantine, broken immigration system. It’s for everyone.

I’ll never forget one telling moment: When that march was over, people didn’t just go home. They took a few minutes to pick up the trash around them. Just as we were demanding not to be taken for granted, we were not taking our community and our country for granted. We were demanding respect and dignity, and were committed to showing respect and dignity. We wanted to leave our community cleaner than we found it.

We lost the battle: Prop 187 passed, though it was later deemed unconstitutional and was never implemented. In retrospect, not all of our tactics were as politically astute as they should have been, but we were passionate, and we were angry.

With the benefit of two decades of hindsight it’s obvious that Prop 187 planted the seed out of which Latino activism and political power began to grow. I was eventually elected to the Assembly and became the longest serving Speaker since Willie Brown. Gil Cedillo was elected to the Assembly, Senate, and now serves on the Los Angeles City Council, championing immigrant rights during his entire career. My good friend Kevin de Léon is the current President Pro Tem of the State Senate. Many other Latino political pioneers—from the legislator Richard Polanco, to former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, to the late labor chief Miguel Contreras—came of age during the fight over 187.

And, more broadly, because of Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s high-profile support for 187, Latinos were cemented firmly to the Democratic Party during a time when the Latino vote was still up for grabs. In 1994, Latinos were 28 percent of the population, but only eight percent of the electorate. By 2016, Latinos were 38 percent of the population and 31 percent of the electorate. For anybody wondering why Republicans can no longer win statewide offices in California, look no further than the legacy of this blatant attempt to disenfranchise Latinos.

As I’ve listened to Donald Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants in general and Latinos in particular, I hear what many California politicians were saying 23 years ago. Like them, Trump is appealing to people with very real economic concerns by scapegoating an entire class of people who are not the cause of it. Just as 187’s backers avoided the very real and very difficult challenges of adapting to a new kind of economy, Trump is evoking a past that never really existed as somehow “great again.” He is also ignoring data as he pursues demagoguery. He is exploiting fears over safety, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of terrorist acts now—and more localized crimes then—are perpetrated by native-born residents.

This approach is cheap; it is disingenuous; it is simplistic; and, worst of all, it doesn’t actually solve anything. We could build a wall on the Mexican border tomorrow AND ban all Muslims from entering the country, and none of the issues that Donald Trump is claiming to solve, or protect us from, would change or be resolved. Just like turning California into some sort of heartless police state in the ‘90s wouldn’t have helped an unemployed oil worker in the Central Valley get a job.

Trump’s rhetoric, and the 187 rhetoric before it, share one very nasty characteristic: both are deeply pessimistic. California’s progress since 1994 shows that the best way to adjust to economic change is by confronting challenges head-on. Our state has shown that a tough-minded, optimistic and inclusive spirit can create more prosperity.

So, what does the Trump era mean for immigrant L.A.? First, we have to remember that days that seem dark now can turn much brighter tomorrow. If we stay focused. If we stay organized. If we stand in solidarity. And if we stay out of the shadows.

The post How Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Drove My Generation into Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.