End Campus-wide E-Verify at Northwestern University, Letter to the Editor and Petition

Below is the Letter to the Editor of the Daily Northwestern from representatives of undergraduate and graduate student groups and faculty at Northwestern University.  It includes a link to a spreadsheet US Citizenship and Immigration Services produced listing the institutions of higher education that signed MOUs obligating them to use E-Verify for all employees, including student research assistants, and not just those working on a federal grant or contract.  (Some institutions are obligated to do so because of state laws.)

Please consider signing our petition. 

Daily Northwestern - NU leaders endanger students, employees through E-verify

 February 3, 2019

Since 2009, Northwestern faculty, staff and students have voiced concerns about NU implementing a discretionary program that turns over private data from students, staff and faculty to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through a program called E-Verify. As the timeline on this matter shows, in the last decade, various NU legal and administrative officials have responded to our concerns by misrepresenting the necessity of E-Verify for those not directly employed by government contracts. We now have proof as to the shocking scope of individuals affected at NU and the false claims shared with us about the University’s need to participate.
In response to litigation under the Freedom of Information Act, we received the Memorandums of Understanding NU signed to initiate and renew its participation in E-Verify, which then-General Counsel Philip Harris refused to release last spring. Through this litigation, we received national data revealing that NU is the only research university in Illinois to participate campus-wide and that its participation is an extreme outlier: fewer than 1 percent of institutions of higher education have in fact signed these MOUs obligating campus-wide participation.
The MOUs with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services prove that NU is under no legal obligation to force the vast majority of its community to provide their personal data to a Homeland Security database that, according to the ACLU, poses threats to our privacy and that violates the national criteria proposed for campuses seeking to welcome noncitizens.
In sharp contrast with hundreds of research universities in states not obligated to participate in E-Verify, NU forced over 76,000 students, staff and faculty to submit personal information to databases that share their information with third parties. Anyone employed by NU since 2010 is in this database. Our analysis of the USCIS Excel sheet itemizing NU’s submissions of our data reveals that over 190 individuals were specifically targeted by NU for Homeland Security as attempting to work without authorization approved by E-Verify. The final determinations are not yet clear; we expect to receive additional data from this litigation shortly.
As the MOUs clearly state, NU can after 30 days notice stop reporting data on all new hires who are not directly working under federal government contract. At that point, everyone who is working on a federal contract will have been already included in the E-Verify database.
The only new hires whose data would need to be submitted would be those working directly on a federal contract, which is exactly the situation of our peer institutions. If the University of Chicago (and over 99 percent of other institutions of higher education) can target only new hires working on federal contracts for E-Verify, then there is no logistical impediment to prevent NU from doing this as well.
We have been sharing our concerns with President Morton Schapiro and Provost Jonathan Holloway since last spring. On Jan. 8, 2019 we wrote a letter to them stating that, in light of NU’s stated intention to protect the educational opportunities of its noncitizen community and this new information proving the inaccuracy of claims about NU’s obligations to USCIS, we wanted them to reconsider their earlier position. We requested that NU immediately send the 30-day notice of an intent to withdraw from campus-wide participation in E-Verify. President Schapiro and Provost Holloway did not reply, though they regularly opine to The Daily their support of DACA students, a population NU’s own attorney has agreed is at special risk from E-Verify.
We write now to ask others to join us in sharing with Schapiro and Holloway your concerns by signing this petition.
Students Organizing for Labor Rights (SOLR)
Seri Lee, Weinberg 2020
Allyson Bondy, Weinberg 2020
Erykah Nava, Weinberg 2020
Sharmain Siddiqui, Weinberg 2020
Natalie Vega, Weinberg 2019
Jessica Wang, Weinberg 2019
Northwestern University Graduate Workers, nugraduateworkers@gmail.com
Jorge Coronado, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
President, NU-AAUP
Alessandra Visconti, Assistant Professor of Instruction, Department of French and Italian
Vice President, NU-AAUP
Jacqueline Stevens, Professor of Political Science
Secretary, NU-AAUP

Added on 2/7/2019: For links to the General Dynamics piece of the NU E-Verify story, please see this 2016 Letter to the Editor. 

How Many Errors are in this Graphic on U.S. Citizens in ICE Custody Published in the Los Angeles Times?

A few days ago a reporter from the Los Angeles Times reminded me of what journalism looks like when it works.  And that reminded me of what it looks like when undertaken by his colleagues Paige St. John and Joel Rubin.  Their article makes bogus claims about ICE reviews of claims of U.S. citizenship and announces breaking news on immigration court adjournments of cases of U.S. citizens that another reporter broke eight months earlier.

My analysis of their article and some new information from ICE attorneys reviewing claims of U.S. citizenship is here.

The primary audiences for this are the Los Angeles Times editor, journalists covering deportation, and folks interested in operational information on how ICE reviews claims of U.S. citizenship.

Q and A on "When Migrants are Treated Like Slaves," New York Times

For those who have seen the opinion piece in today's New York Times, here's a quick Q and A.

Q.  The work is not at gunpoint.  People are signing up for $1/day.  Why isn't this "volunteer" labor, like GEO and CoreCivic claim it is?
A.  First, some of it is coerced, e.g., the crews for janitorial cleaning of showers or ad hoc work ordered by guards on threat of punishment.  Second, the paid work doesn't meet the definition of a "volunteer" in our labor law.  A federal regulation defines a "volunteer" as someone who is donating time for no pay to a government organization or a nonprofit.  Nothing about people working to earn money to pay for phone calls or food in a private prison meets this definition.

Q.  Who are the 18 Republicans who favor forced labor?
A.  Here's the letter they sent.  See for yourself.

Q.  Why is this happening now?
A.  Because a brilliant team of civil rights attorneys and nonprofits took a risk and initiated this laborious and expensive litigation, beginning in Aurora, Colorado.  For the appeal, a number of organizations wrote amicus briefs.

Q.  Why am I just learning about this now?
A.  There has been a smattering of press coverage about this but our country suffers from chronic legal illiteracy.  This makes it tough for most journalists to cover the nuts and bolts financing of private prisons, and kleptocracy in general.  Reporters may not understand the law and the lack of public common sense on these matters means a lot more details are required to explain the litigation.  Matt Casler and Anya Patel, Eva Jefferson Paterson Fellows at the Deportation Research Clinic, will be writing a letter responding to the one signed by the 18 Republicans and explain their errors in more detail, as well as the relation between investment firms and private prisons.

Plus, ICE has most of the information and is not eager to share.  It took years of FOIA requests and litigation to obtain the information presented in the opinion piece.  (Thanks to Andrew Free for all his work on this, and on these cases.)

Q.  Is it really "slavery"?
A.   The labor typically is not outdoors and people are not being lashed with whips. That said, guards do round up details of those in ICE custody to work under grim conditions (back-breaking manual labor, toxic chemicals, no breaks) and refusals elicit punishment.  Also, most of the history of slavery was not plantation slavery.  There was early modern prison work, work deported vagrants performed in the colonies, e.g., building fortresses in Georgia, and, of course, the Nazi labor camps readers have mentioned in email to me today.  Until the fifteenth century, slavery was the work required of captured foreigners.  This form of slavery was practiced pervasively and for most of the history of the world.

Q.  Where can I read more about the harms of birthright citizenship, and the connections among nation-state, slavery, and war?
A.  For a critique of birthright citizenship, see Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness (Duke University Press, 2017).  You can download it courtesy of Knowledge Unlatched at no cost.  For a critique of intergenerational identity politics, especially nationalism, and analysis of the connections among the nation, slavery, and war, see States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals (Columbia University Press, 2009).
And if you're into political theory and want to understand political membership -- in the nation, ethnicity, race, the family, and religion -- see Reproducing the State (Princeton University Press, 1999).

FOIA-ing the FOIA Manual! The Inside Scoop on USCIS and DHS Data Entry and Databases

From USCIS FOIA Search Training Manual

      A couple months ago, fed up with the randomness of Freedom of Information Act rote rejection letters from certain agencies--the State Department is the worst and USCIS had just lost a remand responsive to my appeal--I got off the phone with the USCIS employee and FOIA-d their FOIA manuals.  (UPDATE 9/3/2016-link fixed!)

     The response, uploaded here, is over 4200 pages.   

1 of 6 COW-2016-000509, pp. 1-750.

2 of 6 COW-2016-000509, pp. 751-1499.

3 of 6 COW-2016-000509, pp. 1500-2249.

4 of 6  COW-2016-000509, pp. 2250-2999.

5 of 6 COW-2016-000509, pp. 3000-3749.

6 of 6 COW-2016-000509, pp. 3750-end.

The information could be helpful for FOIA litigation (next up: other agencies) and also provides insights from actual agency examples that might be helpful with due process litigation.  I'm still scrolling through it... 

Ret. Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry Praises Rwandan Government and Military, Ignores Assassinations and Civil Rights Abuses

Karl Eikenberry, who may run Northwestern's Buffett Institute for Global Studies, center, January 29, 2015, source: Rwandan Ministry of Defence

Universities might have formed an effective counterweight to the military industrial complex by strengthening their emphasis on the traditional values of our democracy, but many of the leading universities have instead joined the monolith, adding greatly to its power and influence. 

-- Senator William Fulbright, 1967 speech introducing concept of the "military-industrial-academic" complex. 

 Northwestern University community reviewing appointment of Ret. Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry to lead Buffett Institute for Global Studies, new questions raised

(For background, please see Deanna Isaacs, Northwestern Wants to Hire a Former Afghan Commander, and Professors are Pissed, Chicago Reader, March 15, 2016.  For additional information, please see petition. For current status of debate, see Kelli Ngyun and Matthew Choi, "ASG, Faculty Senate Debate Eikenberry Appointment," Daily Northwestern, April 7, 2016.) 

 Believing that Karl Eikenberry's arrival in September will stay on track, despite intense faculty and student opposition, some faculty have come forward to endorse him.  With little direct information about his background, they have been relying on their private conversations with him over beer or other meetings, or have yielded to administration pressure as well as inaccurate statements about his time at Stanford and the search process, the position criteria, and the position responsibilities.

The information here is addressed to them, including the colleague who told me last week that unless evidence comes out that Eikenberry is a war criminal, the appointment likely will stay on track.  I disagreed, hoping that "not-a-war-criminal" is not the  standard for the keys to the Buffett Intitute's largest office.  More to the point, at the time he said this, my colleague was not aware that Eikenberry, while not shown to be a war criminal, is cheerfully in league with them.  These entanglements and possibly others --  Eikenberry and the NU administration will not release his c.v. -- cannot be erased, nor should they be ignored.

Eikenberry Goes to Rwanda

Last year, during and after a visit sponsored by the Rwandan Defense Force Command Command and Staff College, Eikenberry repeatedly and enthusiastically endorsed without qualification the brutal regime of President Paul Kagame.

In Eikenberry's own words:

What I’ve seen on [the] ground has far exceeded in terms of performance of this country I could imagine ... and [I] come here to find how this country and the people, the military has been able to rise from the ashes, sorry [sic] to speak, and see a vibrant society which is coherent, prosperous, and a sense of unity. I look at Rwanda serving as a very great example not only for this region of Africa, but actually globally.  (Ministry of Defence (MOD) emphasis added)

The trip encompassed several cities in Rwanda.  On February 2, 2015, Eikenberry met with Minister of Defence, James Kabarebe.  Kabarebe and Rwanda's President Paul Kagame are both named in a 2010 United Nations report as responsible for the genocide of Congolese and Rwandans.

Eikenberry shakes hands with Rwanda's Minister of Defence, James Kabarebe

A February 4, 2015 article covering the visit states:

[Eikenberry] further noted that he discussed with the Minister of Defence “the ways to institutionalise and legalise our military to military ties”, he said. He reiterated that deepening educational ties was investing in future relationship between people, faculty to faculty, soldier to soldier.  The Minister of Defence underlined that the military education was very promising both for Rwanda and the United States.

source: http://eng.imirasire.com/news/all-around/in-rwanda/article/gen-james-kabarebe-receives

uncaptioned photo from MOD report on Eikenberry visit, Eikenberry on right

The MOD report notes that Eikenberry would "recommend to the United States to continue maintaining good relations with Rwanda diplomatically, politically, economically and militarily."

It appears as though Eikenberry was specific enough that the training benefits promised were a "package [that] is really quite helpful," according to Major Oyoo Peter.

At no point does Eikenberry indicate any interest in obtaining educational opportunities for Rwandan students who are not in the military.

What's Wrong With Rwanda's Government and Military?

This is a topic for a course or book.  Here's a quick summary of expert views on Rwanda, and below is a discussion of the relevance of this for the Northwestern appointment.

Congressional testimony by State Department Assistant Secretary Steven Feldstein in May, 2015, shortly after Eikenberry's glowing reports, reveals an entirely different story about Rwanda:

When it comes to the human rights situation in Rwanda, we see three trends of note. First, political space in Rwanda and the overall human rights environment continues to shrink. There are reports of targeted killings, and an increasing number of reports of disappearances and harassment of civil society groups and opposition parties. Second, this trend is reinforcing the wrong lessons for Rwanda– particularly that a country can continue to experience robust economic growth and foreign investment even while repressing its citizens further and reducing democratic space. This is not a sustainable path. At some point – if unchecked - human rights violations will begin to affect Rwanda’s economic performance, stability and the willingness of foreign investors to pump in outside capital and do business. Third, Rwanda’s human rights records is setting a disturbing precedent for the region and continent. Other countries are carefully watching Rwanda’s model of economic liberalization and political repression. In my discussions, counterparts frequently point to Rwanda and question whether protecting the rights of their citizens matters if they can achieve substantial economic development.

Either Eikenberry is clueless about Rwanda, thinks it's fine for autocrats to assassinate, disappear, and jail citizens who press too hard for accounability and democracy, or he is deliberately misrepresenting Rwanda's record and its lessons for the region (possibly for pay), or some combination of the above.

Here's how one journalist describes Rwanda's current president, who changed the Constitution to remain in office:

Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian scholar whom many consider the world’s foremost expert on Rwanda, describes Kagame as “probably the worst war criminal in office today.” In an interview, Reyntjens told me that Kagame’s crimes rank with those perpetrated by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein or Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.  (Howard French, "Is Kagame a War Criminal?" Newsweek, Jan. 14, 2013)

A 2010 article discusses Kagame's role in more recent jailing and assassinations of dissidents:  "[W]henever Hutu politicians have started to gather power or criticise the government, it has usually meant their imprisonment, exile, disappearance or, in the case of Seth Sendashonga and a few others, unsolved assassination."

The 2015 World Press Freedom Index ranks Rwanda 161 out of 178 for press freedoms.

Of note is that Kagame was trained at the US Army Command and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in 1989, clearly implicating the military training partnerships Eikenberry is cultivating today with the ongoing cycle of bloodshed in Africa and elsewhere. 

Since 2013, the same Rwandan army Eikenberry is defending has been jailing and killing dissidents, and flaunting the rule of law, according to Human Rights Watch: "The authorities detained people unlawfully in unofficial detention centers, including in military custody; some were held incommunicado and ill-treated."  Here are links to recent posts:

Rwanda Turns the Clock Back on Access to Justice, March 11, 2016

East Africa: Little Progress, Worsening Repression, January 27, 2016

Why Not Call This Place a Prison? Unlawful Detention and Ill Treatment in Rwanda's Gikondo Transit Center, September 24, 2015

Rwanda also has offered its services as a dumping ground for African refugees from elsewhere transferred there by Israel.  A 2015 report by the International Refugee Rights Initiative finds Israel forcing Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers into Rwanda and Uganda, in violation of international law and United Nations mandates.

This list could go into much more detail about specific, recent assassinations to which Kagame's government has been linked, along the lines of Putin's Russia.  Do Northwestern faculty and students want their leader of global studies to be an apologist for perpetrators of genocide and assassinations?  If this information had come out earlier, would his appointment have gone this far?  What does this tell us about the search process and Henry Bienen's and the university's due diligence? 
 

Why Does this Matter for the Eikenberry Appointment? 

My hunch is that some of my colleagues, especially in political science will claim that Eikenberry is doing his best to work with a bad government to make it better.  That was my first thought when I heard about the visit.  But if one thinks of the photos taken and disseminated -- making Kabarebe and the military seem diplomatically palatable -- as well as the spin about Rwanda being an "exemplary" country, it starts to seem as though Rwanda has hired Eikenberry to improve its international reputation, obtain U.S. military training, and acquire weapons.

This recent and possibly ongoing work on behalf of the Rwandan military -- Eikenberry has not responded to questions about this -- with or without compensation, seems to completely rule out allowing Eikenberry to lead the Buffett Institute, especially in the context of Eikenberry's expertise on mililtary and civilian education as inducements for arms sales, discussed below.

Not only in Rwanda, but also when on return to Stanford, Eikenberry remained silent on abuses by the Rwandan government and military.  In a March 13, 2015 in-house interview with Stanford's Institute for International Studies, Eikenberry speaks only glowingly of Rwanda.  Why publish pro-Rwanda propaganda on a Stanford website and omit any reference to the military's unlawful violence? For instance, of the military officers whom he met:

They had an extraordinary grasp of the political, security, and development problems that their civilian leaders were attempting to solve. Most realized that without regional cooperation that the prospects of their own country prospering were quite limited. So I was impressed with how they viewed security as having both national and collective dimensions.

Of course other analysts, including the U.S. government, have understood Rwanda's interest in "regional cooperation" to mean selective organizing among militias to raid neighboring countries and silence critics.  Even if this is not what Eikenberry has in mind, failing to hold Rwanda accountable for any wrong-doing at any point in any of his statements, particularly those published under his control at Stanford, smacks of being on the Rwandan payroll, a possibility that a release of an accurate resume would either confirm or falsify.  Eikenberry and the NU administration continue not to release the c.v. on which they relied when hiring him.

Eikenberry also did not reply to a February query about his speaking engagements and fees. I am waiting for a reply to a late request for more details about his ties to the Rwandan government, thus far unanswered.  (Any responses from Eikenberry will be appended here.)

Up until now we've debated Eikenberry's use of soft power on behalf of the U.S., but here he's advancing soft power for Rwanda. 

If a health expert about to assume leadership of a medical institute were touting baseless claims about the health advantages of Coca Cola and refusing to release his resume or answer questions about employment by the beverage industry, Northwestern presumably would find this a deal-breaker.  Why cut a potential employee slack when he misleads people about a government causing death and not sugar?

In the context of Northwestern's control by large weapons and military equipment manufactuers (Boeing, General Dynamics, and Caterpillar) and Eikenberry's long-standing interest in U.S. arms sales, this is worrisome.   (The GD link is to a recent article about Northwestern trustee and GD CEO Phebe Novakovic, also a former CIA employee, speaking of the military-industrial-academic complex--Smith College students didn't even want her on campus for a visit, and yet she helps run Northwestern.)

Eikenberry Has Expertise in Foreign Military Sales

Putting someone with a keen interest in foreign weapons sales and the use of university educations to cement poses additional problems.

Eikenberry writes:

For instance, prospective foreign purchasers of United States equipment may be convinced not only by the quality of the particular hardware in question, but also by such factors as impressive and credible American security guarantees, access to much needed technology through offset agreements, and opportunities to study in advanced civil and military institutions.* [Emphasis added.] ....

* Offsets are defined as "compensatory, reciprocal trade agreements arranged as a condition of the export sale of military material and support services. They are, in effect, countertrade in the defense sector." See Grant T. Hammond, "The Role of Offsets in Arms Collaboration," ed. Ethan B. Kapstein, Global Arms Production: Policy Dilemmas for the 1990's (New York: University Press of America, 1992), p.205.

Source: Karl Eikenberry, "Explaining and Influencing Chinese Arms Transfers," McNair Paper 36, Institute for National Strategic Studies, February 1995.

Military Offsets -- with citations to be added 

Northwestern has been singled out as a recipient of student enrollments responsive to U.S. government or private firm side agreements since at least 1973, when Northwestern took students from Portugal in exchange for the U.S. receiving rights to use the Lajes airfield in the Azores, then occupied by the fascist Portuguese government.  (The State Department paid Northwestern to effect a secret US 1971 agreement with the Portuguese government. In the late 1970s, the funding was distributed through the same program, but disguised as Fulbrights.)

In more recent years the use of student scholarships for U.S. study to incentivize weapons sales has flourished.   Shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq, the payments by private military firms for university, college, or professional schools admissions in exchange for foreign military sales was valued at over $100 million/year.

A Chicago-based consultant specializing in these transactions explained in a 1995 publication that many weapons sales match up on price and quality, leaving these side arrangements as enticements, including illegal but obscure and hard to punish bribes.  If a firm can promise a country rep that his child has a guaranteed entrance into a U.S. university, that's a game-changer.   That firm now is based in Evanston.

If you put this background information together with the make-up of Northwestern's board and Eikenberry's avowed commitment to Rwanda's military, this raises questions.  The leader of the Buffett Institute is the perfect position for implementing military sale offset arrangements that use university placements.  This arrangement also makes Eikenberry's lack of PhD important in a way that has not been previously discusssed.  The fact that Eikenberry has no problem advocating for Rwanda bodes poorly for how he will use his platform at the Buffett Institute, which likely would draw criticism for being run by the guy who's shaking hands with Kabarebe.

Without a PhD and tenure, and with an extremely lucrative compensation package, Eikenberry lacks the conventional protections of academic freedom and could not easily turn his back on requests by the trustees.   (For instance, without tenure, my colleagues and I could never publish about these matters.)  Eikenberry's lack of intellectual freedom of course affects the institutional arrangements of those working under him, not to mention the independence of the Buffett Institute, part of which seems destined to be turned over to foreign and military policies that violate academic integrity and other values as well should he take over.

  

CODA:  Last Week

NU Provost Dan Linzer's intimidation of students -- warning them last Wednesday evening just before the Associated Student Government debate about bogus "defamation" problems with their resolution urging withdrawing the Eikenberry appointment -- and Linzer's instigation of the Faculty Senate's Executive Committee to rush putting together a one-sided package of information and faculty endorsements released with no advance notice less than three hours before the Senate meeting will be scrutinized later.   

These actions are further evidence that NU's engagements with Qatar, and now Rwandan, dictators have proven inspirational for our administration.  Northwestern is being run increasingly like a Gulf State, and not just on their behalf; meanwhile, Qatar shows no signs of democratizing since the founding of "Education City," and remains notorious for its labor trafficking violations, jailing dissidents, and media repression (ranked in 2015 #115 out of 163, well behind poor countries such as the Dominican Republic (#63) and Togo (#80); and there is no sign of progress--Qatar is down five places from 2013 despite the eight year presence of the Medill Journalism school.

Petition on Behalf of Academic Integrity-Sign Here

Please Support Northwestern Faculty Trying to Stop NU Board from Appointing Ret. Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry to Run Global Studies Institute

Ret. Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, Former Ambassador to Afghanistan (2009-11), speaking to Rwandan soldiers.  

See Edison Akugizibwe, "Rwanda, U.S. Strengthen Military Ties," Feb. 4, 2015

Please read, sign, and circulate this petition of NU President Morton Schapiro and Provost Daniel Linzer circulated today by Northwestern Faculty, Staff, Students, and Friends in Support of Academic Integrity, an ad hoc group seeking your support to stop Boeing, General Dynamics, Caterpillar, and Abbott Laboratories from installing their guy to run the premiere global studies research institute at Northwestern. (These are the firms whose CEOs and directors dominate the Northwestern Board of Trustees.)

My colleagues and I will be making a presentation to the Faculty Senate on Wednesday, March 2 and would love your support.

Here's the link to the petition to "Withdraw Appoint of Ret. Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry to Run NU Buffett Institute"on change.org:

The Deportation Research Clinic is part of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern.  So is a research working group on the Global Research University, of which I am a co-convener.  Eikenberry could and appears likely to discontinue both.

The details are in the petition. Please sign and spread the word on Facebook and other social media.   Thank you!!!

Slate's Reihan Salam Engages States Without Nations' Feminist Analysis

Most public discussion of States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals centers on a practical discussion of the first of its four proposals: eliminating birthright citizenship and allowing free movement and citizenship based on residency, along the lines of requirements for state residency in the United States. The overarching historical and theoretical framework tends not to receive much attention.  So I was pleasantly surprised to see journalist Reihan Salam's recent article on Slate "The End of Pregnancy and the Inevitable Rise of the Artificial Womb" explore the book's analysis of pregnancy envy.

Stevens suggests that our society is screwed up in large part because men have created myths, rituals, and laws that entrench their power as a way to compensate for a profound sense of inadequacy instilled early in life.

Salam explores the technological changes that may topple the current reproductive practices and thus the compensatory policies responsive to these, at least for elites working at Apple who have their eggs stored, thus readying them for the near distant future's possibility of ectogenesis. 

Salam claims that paternity testing also changes the compensatory rationales of inheritance and other policies.  But my argument is about the effects of early childhood fantasies boys have about the significance of their inability to give birth.  Empirical claims about new assessments for genetic paternity or men's actual contributions to child-rearing are not relevant to understanding the causes of the structures instantiating through law intergenerational families and nations.  Still, fun to think with Salam about new reproductive technologies and practices.  

For more on the relation between reproductive technologies and the feminist revolution, check out Shulamith Firestone's classic The Dialectics of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution (1970).  Firestone wrote this at age 23, while a student at the Chicago Art Institute.  This reminds me that Gayle Rubin developed the central analysis in her classic essay, also theory-heavy, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" (1975) when she was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and active in the feminist movement there. So here's a shout-out to the Midwest and campus activism in the 1970s for these two brilliant, iconoclastic feminist thinkers.

Are the APSA President and Executive Director Hypocrits? An Open Letter Responding to their Open Letter to Senators

The American Political Science Association is still issuing alarmist statements about Congress voting to defund political science research along the lines of the rhetoric that inspired me to write "Political Scientists are Lousy Forecasters," an opinion piece published in the New York Times Sunday Review on June 24, 2012.

I have never endorsed the Congressional proposals to defund political science research, but in the June opinion piece, and in other correspondence and posts on this blog, I have argued that the apoplexy about this is irrational; that our country would be better served by funding priorities other than those currently used by NSF grant adjudicators; and that the APSA needs to have an open conversation about the criteria we believe are reasonable for assessing grant proposals, including entertaining the possibility that distributing research funding at random to proposals that are coherent and have sound budgets might be a strategy most likely to yield robust research agendas and knowledge that isn't just a hot finding for a few years and then displaced by the next election or war or spurious correlation announced as a breakthrough in discovering a new causal mechanism.

A colleague this morning brought to my attention that Sen. Tom Coburn quoted from the Times article in his floor speech in support of defunding the discipline.  He is not a very good reader.  I wrote:

To shield research from disciplinary biases of the moment, the government should finance scholars through a lottery: anyone with a political science Ph.D. and a defensible budget could apply for grants at different financing levels. And of course government needs to finance graduate student studies and thorough demographic, political and economic data collection. I look forward to seeing what happens to my discipline and politics more generally once we stop mistaking probability studies and statistical significance for knowledge.

Still, I understood when I wrote the opinion piece that it might be misused in exactly the way Coburn misused it and decided that these consequences and any debate about this would be preferable to business-as-usual.

For that discussion to occur, however, requires that the APSA stop worrying about protecting democracy in Congress and start practicing it in our own organization.  What follows is a letter I sent via email this morning to Jane Mansbridge, President, APSA and Michael Brintnall, Executive Director, APSA.

Dear Professor Mansbridge and Mr. Brintall,
I hope this finds you well.  I am writing because a colleague just brought to my attention that Senator Tom Coburn cited in his floor speech last week an opinion piece I wrote last summer in which I questioned whether quantitative political science research of the sort prioritized by the NSF contributes to knowledge about politics. 

As a result of that piece not appearing on the APSA NSF page alongside other opinion pieces about the NSF controversy, including another piece critical of NSF funding, I was in correspondence over the summer with Mr. Brintnall and Professor Powell about how how they had ascertained that the position statements coming out of the APSA actually were representing the interests of its membership.

The response was that they had no specific authorization from either the Council nor the membership for these statements and were issuing them on the basis of previous commitments that also had no specific authorization from the APSA membership or Council.  Professor Powell indicated that there would be a discussion of the APSA relation to the NSF, including input on funding criteria, at the Council meeting in New Orleans.

That meeting was cancelled and I am wondering if the Council has actually discussed the statements issued in our name.  I am especially concerned about the language in your March 15, 2013 letter echoing previous statements offering our colleagues' services to so-called national security and defense interests.  Senator Coburn seems to have taken you up on this.  I am wondering on what basis you decided to emphasize our colleagues' availability for this research, and not, say, research on how vague nativist national security anxieties such as those invoked by your letter undermine the rule of law, not to mention rational research priorities.

Senator Coburn affirmed one part of my argument but then contradicted himself by creating an exception to the ban on NSF funding for political science if it is used to advance the national security or economic interests of the United States.  If political scientists are bad at producing useful knowledge, the part of my argument Coburn affirms, then it seems illogical to rely on these dart-throwing monkey equivalents in areas about which Coburn prioritizes. However, alas, this is exactly the exception emphasized in your open letter.

Your open letter to senators also states that our "discipline [is] devoted to learning how to make democracies work better" and you mention your concern that the passage of this measure would be an "embarrassment for the world's exemplary democracy."  In light of the fact that you are advancing positions without following a single recognized procedure of representative democracy these lofty sentiments seem hypocritical and absurd.  The Senate openly debated and voted on a measure and amendment ascertaining the relationship between the NSF and our discipline.  I am aware of no deliberative or decision-making procedures that have been followed pursuant to establishing a position on NSF funding for our own organization.  Instead, the President and Executive Director in 2012 and 2013 appear to have been simply issuing these statements by fiat.

We do not need NSF funding to bring democracy to our own organization. Why not a moderated digital conversation under the aegis of the APSA about the priorities we would seek of the NSF funding of political science?  What about actually being the democratic change and using tools for digital democracy among our own membership?

In short, the APSA is a membership organization but follows no procedures for ascertaining its best interests much less for representing these to the public.  Without this, the claims you make on behalf of political scientists as saviors of democratic values lack any integrity.  Instead of presenting your membership as eager to lick up the scraps alongside the trough of the country's militarist, homeland security funding, why not treat us as serious intellectuals who may be driven by intellectual curiosity and ideals of creativity, justice, freedom, peace, and, yes, democracy?

I am copying this to the Council Secretary John Green and am requesting that he distribute this to the current Council members (not all of them have their email addresses available online).  I understand it is possible that there has been some conversation among them and look forward to having these views more openly distributed and a range of positions on important questions such as the government funding for our discipline more systematically deliberated.

Yours,

Jackie

-- Jacqueline Stevens
Professor
Political Science and Legal Studies Board
Northwestern University

Director
Deportation Research Clinic
Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies
http://www.cics.northwestern.edu/programs/deportationresearch/

phone 847-467-2093
fax  847-491-8985

Mail
601 University Place
Department of Political Science
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL  60208

http://www.jacquelinestevens.org
http://stateswithoutnations.blogspot.com

Some Thoughts on the American Political Science Association

On June 24, 2012 the New York Times Sunday Review ran my essay Political Scientists Are Lousy Forecasters explaining the problems with the National Science Foundation's current political science grants. Not surprisingly, it drew strong responses. I intended to reply to these earlier but some unanticipated time-sensitive work intervened.

The question of how best to study politics is an immense one that I will take up in more detail elsewhere. For now I want to review a few specific responses to the essay, and raise some big picture questions, the first one being about the word "science" in the name of our professional association.  I also want to address in an abbreviated fashion some of criticisms of what I wrote. I'll do this in a few posts, of which this is the first.

Here are a couple criticisms: 1)  political scientists do not claim to predict anything; and 2)  Karl Popper's work has been relegated to intellectual history.  Quick responses: first, many political scientists and New York Times blogger and statistical enthusiast Nate Silver disagree with both of these positions.  I mention Silver and will go through the work of others later because the guys writing for the political science blogs offered no conclusive evidence for their claims that political scientists do not or should not attempt to make predictions nor that Karl Popper is wrong, but rather make these ad populi assertions in the bombastic fashion that is typical of their bluster and a major reason for, and symptom of, our discipline's intellectual impoverishment.   

Substantively, here are five quick thoughts I'd like to share.

 First, the assertion in my New York Times piece was that political scientists who were modeling nuclear war and deterrence scenarios, and experienced Sovietologists and even Kremlinologists, just blew it.  And they knew it at the time--no idea why folks now are trying to muddy the waters on this point now.  I was a grad student at Berkeley in 1991 and had taken classes with Ken Jowett, who repeatedly claimed that the Communist Party in the USSR was like the Catholic Church and would never willingly give up power.  His was not just a majority position but encompassed the views of every expert in the field.  Even those who didn't specify this position as a specific prediction were implicitly predicting it in every sentence they wrote.  Likewise, Middle East experts also didn't see the Arab Spring coming.  Period.  To the extent they discussed the upending of regimes in places such as Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria, it was to explain why this was not happening nor going to happen. 

Second, the most interesting response to my analysis was the claim that some to many political scientists are not even trying to orient us to the future but merely using statistical analysis to retrospectively understand causal mechanisms associated with changes in cases in their databases.  

Assuming that some political scientists really are only quantitative historians (and perhaps should be applying for history grants, anyway) these folks, too, are making predictions.  I was very surprised to read this criticism because it was coming from the folks who are supposedly in the more subtle and sophisticated wing of the quantitative field.  Regardless, they know, or should know, that their claims about "expected values," either as a universal snapshot to be generalized or just retrospectively, are by definition predictions about the likelihood of a particular case having characteristics consistent with the categorical characteristics imputed to the mean: "expected value: The mean value of the theoretical sampling distribution of any statistic.  Statistical reasoning is centrally concerned with the expected value, as opposed to any particular observed value.  In statistical procedures that seek to predict the values of the dependent variable using one or more independent variables, the predictions are typically estimated expected values, conditional on the independent variables included in the analysis."  Jason Seawright and David Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards. p. 326.  

This is important because many cases in these sorts of studies have outcomes that are diametrically the opposite of that predicted by the so-called scientists' expected values; if you think Popper is right, and many of us do, including those who do work emphasizing necessary but not sufficient conditions, then these cases have falsified the predictions of the expected value.

Third, some claimed that when political scientists get it wrong, and are corrected later, say in the example of the civil war studies I referenced, then a) I am a hypocrit for quoting quantitative work; and b) the system works.  Steven Saideman, in his post referring to me as a "Self-hating Political Scientist," made this point.  (Professor Saideman: Really?  You want to associate yourself with Zionist ideologues who attempt to avoid accountability for racist policies by name-calling tactics?  And me with leftist Jewish critics of racist policies?  I'm perfectly fine with this but thought it might merit further reflection.)

I have a few thoughts on the boosterism for quantitative work's putatively cumulative approach to knowledge. The first is that my juxtaposition of positions on the relevance of ethnic grievances to civil wars -- comparing the analyses of James Fearon and David Laitin with that of Lars-Erik Cederman, Nils Weidmann, and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch -- was to emphasize that the work of the former had been falsified and to perform how quantitative analysts are re-representing journalistic observations through equations and not producing new knowledge. 

If you read the latter article's commendable qualifications and especially the last line, this becomes especially obvious: "It is very unlikely that such conflicts can ever be understood, let alone durably solved, without taking seriously the claims of marginalized populations."  "Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnonationalist Civil War: A Global Comparison," American Political Science Review, p. 492.  These guys, who, for what it's worth, did not receive any attributed funding from the U.S. NSF -- Saideman's claim to the contrary notwithstanding -- but did receive funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research,  are saying, hey, we are going to tell you through our databases we spent tens of thousands of dollars putting together the same thing we hear from the people enduring violence from civil conflicts.

I understand that the authors and Saideman likely will claim that political scientists with lots of gigabytes still need to sweep in and use their magical variables and formulas to render the "claims of marginalized populations" as knowledge, but then we're just back in the old debate about what counts as knowledge.  In other words, the article Saideman claims is evidence of the effectiveness of quantitative work also is evidence that this work at its best is merely an echo chamber for the claims of marginalized populations that are noted by journalists in newspapers such as the New York Times.

As far as the assertion that science-in-progress means lots of mistakes and corrections.  Come on, guys!  Sounds to me as though the great thing about this "probabilistic nonsense," as Popper called it, is that it helps you put together a protection racket for the guys who crunch.  As long as you keep doing it, it doesn't matter if you are right or wrong.  In other words, you can have a long and lucrative, government-funded career if you just keep reviewing each other's work, as Saideman himself claims occurred in the case above, and you never have to worry about getting it wrong.  Also, as Nate Silver points out, echoing Popper, if your field is prone to mistakes and the work is probabilistic, then it's impossible to know when someone really has made a correction or when the supposed correction is just noise.  For instance, Fearon and Laitin were supposedly correcting previous quantitative analyses of civil war studies.  (Professor James Fearon did write a thoughtful response and I will be engaging this in more detail in another post.)

As I mentioned at the beginning, I think this discussion is part of a larger debate and to that end want to end this post by asking why we bother inserting the word "science" in the name of our professional association, which, by the way, is excluding only my opinion piece from its web page advocating the position of the association.

(Charles Lane's column in the Washington Post, also critical of NSF funding, by the way, was included, and also an opinion piece by a psychologist on his inferiority complex among natural scientists.  I asked APSA President Bingham Powell, Jr. about this and he refused to share with me the names of individuals making decisions about the contents of the APSA web pages on the NSF funding and he gave me an explanation for the exclusion of my piece that would have required as well the exclusion of the opinion pieces by Lane and the psychologist Timothy Wilson.) 

-----
UPDATE (7/31/2012):  Since this was posted, Professor Powell and I have shared additional e-mails that have been mutually collegial, and for which I am very grateful.  He has clarified that Michael Britnall, the APSA Executive Director, is supervising the staff making decisions on the APSA NSF funding web pages and that the decision to present information for the purposes of advocacy on this issue reflected a longstanding commitment to this objective, though Professor Powell did not specify any particular APSA directive or decision initiating this commitment. Especially heartening was Professor Powell's assurance that he would raise at the next Council meeting the question of whether the APSA should provide guidance to the NSF on the nature of what the APSA considers its "pure research" priorities, and he was receptive to my question about the relevance and accuracy of the current name for our professional association.
-----

I have a few other thoughts on the positive and negative responses I will make in another post.  

but to conclude for now...

Why are we still calling our professional organization the American Political Science Association? 

 Leaving aside, for now, the word “American,” why is “science” in the title, a word that does not appear in the professional association names for any other discipline engaged in empirical and theoretical research on our macro- or micro-level institutions, communities, practices, and ideas, to wit: the American Anthropological Association, the American Economic Association, the American Historical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Sociological Association

Why not change our association's name to the American Politics Association, or the American Political Association, or even the American Politicological Association, which is the least preferable among the three but still more accurate than our current name?

(That “politicological” does not roll easily off one's tongue is not because the syllables are inherently more jargony or difficult to pronounce than, say, “sociological” or “anthropological,” but because of habits associated with our ordinary use today of “political science,” or “politics,” and because “politicological” is not a word. )

Instead of debating whether we members of the American Political Science Association and the authors of the articles appearing in the American Political Science Review are really scientists, thus forcing us to engage the question of what counts as a science and whether we support or oppose working under this rubric, why not eliminate this question altogether, and work under a disciplinary heading that embraces scholarship about politics?

Why are we not those who for the domain of politics “craft knowledge,” a somewhat literal translation of “Wissenschaft,” as opposed to aspiring to be politics' scientists? Why not discuss a more interesting, fundamental, and difficult question, of which the debate about science is one tangent: what counts as knowledge about politics and how do we know this?

(“Wissen” is the perfectly colloquial verb “to know” and does not have the white lab coat connotations of the English “science.” It is possible to use a broader understanding of knowledge than that pursued by some of my colleagues through considering the etymology of the English “science” as well, but the more general connotations of knowledge are less idiomatic than for the German “wissen.”)

The word “science” in our professional association title is an empty abstraction and distraction. If my colleagues want to be scientists, let them defend their definition of science and their fitness for this vocation through their research, publications, and logical arguments, and let them not occupy the throne of scholarly authority by bullying and vague nomenclature.

Especially in light of the fact that some, though not all, of my colleagues are claiming that the “scientific method” they advocate has nothing to do with the scientific method from the time of the APSA's founding, or what science looked like in the 1930s, the word “science”-s significance and meaning in the name of our professional association today seems especially unclear and hence indefensible and ripe for elimination.

Please note that I am not claiming here that “scientific” research is this or that, or good or bad—this discussion comes later. I am simply pointing out that in light of the intellectual diversity of our actual membership and the metaphysical uncertainty about methods most conducive to knowledge, not to mention the contradictory defenses of the “science” in political science—some today think political scientists should be good at prediction, and are or are not, others that this is not required of political science—there are no consistent and widely accepted reasons to claim that we all are or should be working as scientists; and hence the word “science” has no good grounds for remaining in the name of our professional association.

More on the Sunday Review Essay

 Ten Commandments Posted in Griffin Courthouse, Spaulding County, Georgia

shadows from right to left--Mark Lyttle, his wife, and me

An opinion piece is a great way to stir up a conversation and a lousy way to present arguments in scholarly detail or provide sources.  Here are a few other thoughts related to "Political Scientists are Lousy Forecasters," published in hard copy of the New York Times Sunday Review on June 24, 2012.  (I am not under the impression that a whole lot of people are interested, but for folks with questions, it seemed more efficient to do this here than on email.)

Auto- Q and A

Q.  Why did you write this?
A.  Because  a couple weeks ago I returned from a day in Judge Fletcher Sam's court in Griffin, Georgia and listened to an impassioned speech just outside his court room by Sernita Trice, a one-time political science major at Penn State, that began, "There is no justice here.  No one cares about us."   The details are not relevant here, but she was right and I was embarrassed for my discipline for ignoring a myriad of politically and intellectually gripping questions that are in cities like Griffin and counties like Spaulding and states like Georgia throughout our country.

I returned to my room at the Griffin Inn and that's when I saw e-mails from my chair and APSA urging me to defend political science against being cut from the National Science Foundation budget.  Of course, I've had my frustrations about political science research agendas long, long before this but it was the specific conjuncture of frustration and the timing of the appeals for NSF support that moved me to write this.

Q.  Geez!  I thought we'd gone beyond that old Wolin v. the behavioralist debate.  Why are you stirring up that old can of worms?
A.  I'm not.  I disagree quite strongly with both the claim of quantitative political scientists to be emulating the method of Karl Popper and also Sheldon Wolin's attack on them for doing so.  As I point out in the piece, Popper rejected behavioralism; he also rejects probabilistic research's claim to being scientific knowledge.  I've published chunks of this in the Methods Appendix to States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals (Columbia University Press, 2009).

Also, I've criticized political theorists for making non-falsifiable claims about the alleged decline of the nation-state, including Wendy Brown's Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Verso, 2010).

Q.  Does this mean that there's a rift between the theorists and everyone else in your department?
A.  NO!  My colleagues are intellectually curious, well-read, and great interlocutors, as well as supportive of my less traditional research agendas.  It's true that I've been trying to encourage more reflection on the implications of Tetlock's research as well as more general questions about our scholarly objectives and I see this piece as part of our ongoing conversation.    

Q.  You really go after James Fearon and David Laitin.  What's that about?
A.  The quantitative civil wars studies industry reveals various troubling and even horrifying commitments, especially to reductionism, inductivism, and the axiomatic status of the nation and ethnic groups. These studies radically impair our society's ability to grapple with pressing problems generated by kinship groups in this country and elsewhere.

Unfortunately there wasn't room to go into the many problems with Fearon's and Laitin's work.  Here's a link to a work in progress:"A Popperian Reading of Civil War Studies," is what I think I'll call it.  It received comments from a peer reviewed journal with a recommendation that I revise and resubmit but this all happened during the time-frame when I was moving and starting new projects so I haven't yet followed up. 

Q.  Also, that whole Tetlock metaphor with the chimps throwing darts: isn't that a bit unfair?  It's such a provocative image. 
A.  Yes, it is a provocative image.  Thanks, Professor Tetlock, for providing this!  All representations of ideas from math and indeed all observations use metaphors. Words, ideas, and symbols that are vivid, accessible, and clarifying are better than others.  

Q.  What are the sources you're using for the claims in "Political Scientists Are Lousy Forecasters"?
A.  Here you go: a list based on the materials I put together for the intrepid New York Times fact-checker. 

Q.  Any reading recommendations?
A.  Yes.  There are lots of greats methods work.  Alas, I don't have the time for putting together a full list but I do want to plug this one:  Kristin Monroe put together an amazing collection of essays that should be required reading for every political scientist, and is available on Amazon for $12!:  Contemporary Empirical Political Theory (University of California Press, 1997).

Q.  Did you have to make any cuts?
A.  Alas, several.  The ones I feel the worst about are the places describing examples of terrific work my colleagues are doing. Here they are:

Intriguingly, another article cautions against taking at face value what people tell survey researchers, and not just on hot button issues such as racial attitudes.  In an ingenious study, funded by the NSF Digital Government Research Program, not part of the Political Science division, political scientist Michael Neblo and his colleagues found that people in their sample who were angry about politics were substantially more likely to express a disinterest in meeting their members of Congress when asked about this  as a survey question than when researchers arranged actual online meetings with their representatives.

.... Government can and should assist political scientists, especially those who use history and theory to yield insights beyond the daily headlines. [THE LAY READER DOESN’T NEED THIS such as Jeffrey Winters’ analysis of oligarchy in the United States, Charli Carpenter’s reflections on the "everyday politics," shaping political science research, Dorian Warren’s work on the intersection of race and labor politics, and other articles appearing in the APSA’s Perspectives on Politics, a journal offering readable, relevant expert analyses that orients us to shifting political contexts and challenges our intuitions.CUT]

Q.  I was reading other stuff on your blog.  Why do you have all these posts on U.S. citizens being detained and deported?
A.  This is a little experiment in be-the-change, politically and intellectually.  I'm drawing on these very specific people and their stories to engage theories of citizenship and membership and also to throw a few monkey wrenches into the system producing these outcomes.  (Hmmm, wonder how political scientists compare with monkeys throwing their wrenches.)  I focus on the plight of U.S. citizens being unlawfully detained and deported because they're the 900 pound gorilla in the mine: if even the rights of U.S. citizens are not being protected then that tells us a lot about the treatment of everyone else.

Also, anything the government does to protect due process rights for U.S. citizens will improve the rights of everyone else -- because the only way to establish citizenship is to provide people with assigned attorneys.  (People may not realize they are U.S. citizens or be in a position to file the right motions to stop the deportation machine, especially if they are 19 year-old guys just being released from jail for stealing a car and they are whisked straight from the jail lobby to an ICE detention center without anyone telling their families.)  If you're interested in more about this, please see "U.S. Government Unlawfully Detaining and Deporting U.S. Citizens as Aliens," Virginia Journal of Social Policy and Law, 18:3 (2011), 115 p.

In addition, I'm supervising a Deportation Research Clinic.  The major project is to conduct a survey of misconduct in deportation proceedings.   If any of this is of interest and you want to collaborate, please be in touch.

Q.  Anything else you are working on?
A.  My major work-in-progress is a long-term project, "200 Per Cent American."  This is the response Mark Lyttle gave to a deportation officer who asked if he was a U.S. citizen after he was detained in the Atlanta airport on his return from Guatemala City.  Mark, who is cognitively disabled and bipolar, had been deported to Mexico and then from there deported to Honduras.  It took him more than four months before a consular officer figured out his story and issued him a U.S. passport--and it was this passport that the government said was fraudulently obtained when he returned and had the interview.   (Mark's attorney was unable to obtain his release from ICE custody and emailed me.  I was at a spring workshop in Dartmouth and called an ICE agent in Washington D.C. with whom I was working on another story, and she called the Atlanta ICE office and procured Mark's release.)

The book I'm writing is a story about his experiences told through the historical and narrative lens of Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote, a novel making fun of the Spanish conquistadors for acting on the basis of the crazy myths that led them to the Americas. 

Q.  Where are you?
A.  I'm dividing my time between Chicago and New York City this summer.

UPDATE (June 26, 2012)
Q.  What has been the response to your piece?
A.   A deluge of grateful emails, including from political science NSF panel advisers -- the plurality of which literally say, "the emperor has no clothes"; and ferocious, incoherent, illogical, and often ad hominem blogosphere attacks from the naked emperor's fashion consultants desperately trying to convince the elite guard that the finery really is there.

(Clearly an email that says "the emperor has no clothes" won't work; these statements only work when the spectators/chorus do this together and thus embarrass the emperor's henchmen into abandoning their latest round of propaganda and group-think activities.)

I will let the dust settle a bit and then respond sometime next week in a separate post. 

Citizenship To Go

Today's opinion piece in the New York Times provoked e-mail to me I wanted to share:

Dear Professor Stevens,

I completely agree with your article "Citizenship to go".

I've lived most of my adult life in the US, having moved here as a
graduate student in 2001. I bought a house, had a child born here, pay
my taxes, have a retirement plan, etc. All 100% legal. Yet I'm not
even a "permanent resident" yet. I can apply next year, and become a
citizen several years after that. It is quite possible that someone
born in the US or to American parents in 2001 will be able to vote
before I do. Where's the logic in that?

I even get jury duty notices, and each time I have to go to extra
trouble to prove that I'm not eligible to serve. This is always a
painful reminder of my second-class status.

I understand you may get hundreds of letters about your op-ed, so I
don't expect a reply. I just I wanted to get this off my chest. I hope
you don't get a lot of hate mail.

Best,
Ivan  "Temporary visitor" to the US

 Of course Ivan most likely would be a fine juror in his community.  In light of the problems enlisting participation on juries or even voting, this is perhaps more reason to put Ivan's time to good use on a a jury and not fighting government bureaucracy.

From my colleague Jeff Rice in the History Department:

[Y]our column today... reminded me of an interesting anecdote about Thomas Mann.  After becoming an enemy of the Nazi regime he took off to Czechoslavakia and then to England acquiring citizenship along the way.  After that he came to L.A. and took US citizenship and then, when called before HUAC he took off for Switzerland for the remainder of his life (suggesting that he left Germany in the name of freedom and he would leave the US in the name of freedom).  One of his detractors denounced him for  changing citizenship as often as he changed his clothes.  Personally, I always admired Mann for his cosmopolitanism.  

 Here's a link to the book behind the opinion piece.

"Citizenship-In-Question: Evidentiary Challenges"

Below is a link to the conference report for

"Citizenship-In-Question: Evidentiary Challenges for Jus Soli  and Autochthony, from Authenticité to ‘Birtherism’"

Scholars convening at the Boston College Law School April 19 - 21, 2012 presented rich, fascinating papers focused on struggles over ascertaining citizenship claims across regions. Through the above report, the conference organizers, Dan Kanstroom, Benjamin Lawrance, Rachel Rosenbloom, Rogers Smith and I wanted to alert our colleagues to this important work in progress.

States Without Nations: Citizenship For Mortals, Available on Kindle

(You can go here to order.)

$10 less than the $25 paperback and you can read it on the subway.

DHS at Princeton Rejects USCIS Efforts to Table Same-Sex Green Card Applications Pending DOMA Challenge, Obama Ignoring Civil Rights Violations

Yesterday's March 28 round table on "Deportations and National Security" organized by Patricia Fernandez-Kelly with the support of several Princeton University co-sponsors, moderated by the Pulitzer-prize winning Julia Preston who has been covering immigration law and politics for the New York Times, staged a conversation among high-level officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Princeton's pro civil rights congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ), several directors and leaders of national and local immigration and civil rights groups, as well as academic experts on deportation and immigration policy.

At one point, Princeton University graduate Josh Vandiver popped out of the audience, identifying himself as the "American half of a same-sex couple" involved in a high-profile fight for his spouse's green card. He was following up on Rep. Holt's questioning of John Sandweg, DHS Counselor to the Secretary, about whether, in light of Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement that his office's finding that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional the DHS would continue to deny U.S. citizens with same-sex spouses the same benefits of marriage green cards for their loved ones available to different-sex spouses, "what policy is being formulated that would respond to the activism we've done?"

Mr. Sandweg replied, "The president's directive is to enforce the law as currently written until a court decision. There are a couple of cases we are holding in abeyance, but we are going to enforce the law until DOMA is declared unconstitutional." His colleague Seth Grossman, Chief of Staff for the DHS Office of the General Counsel backed this up, "What the attorney general says is that as a litigation position he will not defend [DOMA] in court," but his decision "makes it crystal clear that the executive agency must enforce the law as it did before."

In saying this, DHS stepped on hopes raised by a story broken in the Daily Beast indicating that two regional offices of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services were no longer rejecting marriage green card applications from same-sex couples, and would approve these pending authorization from the DHS:

Sarah Taylor, who heads the Washington district for USCIS, gave a presentation on Wednesday night to more than 100 members of the local AILA chapter. During a Q&A session afterward, she was asked whether her office had put cases involving same-sex marriages on hold. Taylor said that it had, according to Brenda Oliver, the AILA chapter’s chair. The lawyers in the room, Oliver added, responded with claps, smiles, and cheers.

Her colleague Greg Collett who runs the Baltimore regional office said the same, the story reported.

The fact that government attorneys running these agencies contemplated the approval of same-sex green card applications suggests that the directive is not "crystal clear" in requiring DHS to violate the civil rights of same sex couples, but that the agency is making a political decision, one that would only be made at the behest of the White House.

[UPDATE confirming DHS plan to overturn USCIS abeyances: see Tuesday article in Metroweekly, "DHS Official: Bi-National Immigration Case Abeyances Could End Within a Week."]

This was just one very obvious example of the Obama White House failing to take advantage of its discretion to decrease deportations and increase the protection of U.S. residents' civil rights that drew concern, eloquently articulated by Lucas Guttentag, founding national director for 25 years of the ACLU's Immigrant Rights Project, and now a Robina Foundation Distinguished Senior Fellow in Residence at Yale Law School.

In response to frequent statements by the DHS officials that they were bound to "enforce the law" Guttentag pointed out that in light of DHS discretion and the absence of any immigration legislative reform in the near future that might incentivize bumping up numbers in order to attract Republican support, the harsh policies were pointless: "If one thought comprehensive immigration reform were around the corner," massive arrests and deportation might make sense, "but given there is not going to be significant legislative reform what's the role of presidential leadership on this issue?"

Guttentag added later:

It is a mistake for the administration to view this solely as a matter of legislation. [The DHS] could adopt regulations on the adjudication of waivers so people could safely apply for the immigration status for which they are eligible. They could adopt court interpretations to get individual hearings at which their danger and flight risks are adjudicated.

Of course even these high-ranking DHS officials were not the right audience for his astute insights and suggestions. They were not making these decisions. The White House is. If Obama wanted the DHS to use its discretion, Sandweg and Grossman would be in Princeton making the sort of announcement their counterparts at the USCIS were making. (The USCIS has to defer to the DHS Office of General Counsel instruction and they were the ones in Princeton saying, forget it.)

The fact that people such as Guttentag and Rep. Holt were having this conversation at a Princeton roundtable and not in the White House was perhaps the most discouraging takeaway from the event. An activist who attended and has been to these White House meetings said the relevant staff in the White House listen but no one is supporting their proposals. The individual lacks "confidence that meetings at the White House are useful to move proposals forward."

That the Obama administration is not taking advantage of its ability to protect civil rights by virtue of running the government, and is indeed going in the opposite direction by using its discretion to implement nationwide the InSecure Communities program by 2013, means that Obama is focused on a craven calculus of his re-election, and not the civil rights of millions of people whose lives are being crushed by his policies.