DPRK talks

“I think he will do these things. I may be wrong. I may stand before you in six months and say, hey, I was wrong. I don’t know I’ll ever admit that. I’ll find some excuse.” If Narang and Panda are right, and Kim Jong-un proves as unwilling to follow through on his vague promises as his predecessors given the credibility and legitimacy they now provide him, the president finding some excuse to cover up what will then be a failed summit will likely be the best case scenario.

I've been trying to figure out what to make of all of this for a few weeks now.

I find the idea that no talks should occur, ever, a bit strange. It's very clear there are reasons to engage with DPRK along with South Korea and probably China to resolve the issues involved non-militarily if possible. The danger to US allies is substantial, as is the probability of the regime collapsing and a massive humanitarian and economic crisis emerging in a very rich corner of the world, a corner which would be largely demolished. The bar should be set pretty low that anything could happen for such talks. But talking is preferable to threatening words being exchanged or destructive warfare.

I do think the idea that any talks involving Trump would be productive, particularly for the US and our allies, is correct to bring up as a serious problem. This was never very likely. Trump is a terrible negotiator as but one obvious problem. And there did not even appear to be agreement over what the terms of the deal could even be. Spiking the football when you're at the two yard line is an interesting game plan for conducting diplomacy. I would not call it a winning one.

It's really strange to think talks will be productive after nuclear deals to prevent proliferation with Iran are being scrapped. This should put a very low ceiling on the prospect of what "denuclearization" actually means to the North's regime. Many Trump decisions on foreign policy have this quality of own-goals being scored rather than forward progress being made toward these goals. (This is before considering if those goals are worthwhile, which they are often not).

The most self-aware admission is the quote above. This is correct he will find someone else to blame rather than admit fault if these talks go nowhere or produce no tangible result. As we should expect for the time being.

The amount of praise heaped upon Kim is disgusting and unnecessary. This is not the only authoritarian regime Trump has obsequiously complimented and admired for little or no diplomatic benefit, effectively unprompted gushing and fawning swoons over some of the most terrible people on the planet. This is probably the most disturbing trend that continued.

The most optimistic reading is that talks and relations between North and South Korea improve or are able to have productive outcomes without the added attention of the US nuclear demands for a time. Presumably those US centered talks will continue, but without Trump's attention, they are less likely to be important to anyone in the region, allowing for attention to be spent on more productive things. This would be a net boon. The nuclear deal itself is unlikely to materialize in any practical sense, but relative peace in Korea and the possibility of trade or economic freedoms offered through reform of the North's authoritarian system of repression and starvation would be welcome (basically a smaller version of what happened in China in the 1980s and 90s).

This is to keep in mind, again, that Trump's Iran policy purportedly offered as a framework here is not helpful. That policy will ultimately destabilize the region and made it more likely Iran, and Saudi Arabia if not others, would become a nuclear power, all while achieving no humanitarian aims or diplomatic advantages and weakening relations with the US's European allies necessary to achieve any harsher goals on nuclear powers (including North Korea).

Not so Open Borders

Observing immigration debates, particularly with the border issues over asylees currently. Something that occurs to me is there's a very poor public understanding of what "open borders" actually means and the propensity of any Americans to think it to be a good idea or ideal (there are few who do).

This is a typical canard faced by people who oppose nativist restrictionist policies intended to reduce legal immigration from current low levels, not just illegal immigration is this claim they favor an open borders policy. Sanders complained about this too, so it's not just Trump types that do it. The actual debate is something more like the following: We don't have open borders, or very open borders, and what we are mostly arguing about as a country is the level of how closed we wish them to be, whether it is closed or open enough and how or whether to adjust that. Not whether it should be thrown open entirely to allow for the most possible free movement of people.

The US has fairly restrictive immigration policies by comparison to the rest of the globe and has had them in place for a long time, going back at least a century, which make it difficult to move here and become a legal citizen or worker/resident, particularly from non-favored places on the globe. This restrictive approach didn't start with Trump or Obama, and wasn't undone by Reagan (or Obama). It started during the Arthur administration (if we don't want to go back further to restrictions on the Transatlantic slave trade as a means of reducing "immigrants" from certain places on the globe). Anti-immigrant fervor was for a time a major political movement of its own during the antebellum period, and existed throughout the early days of the American republic, but did not succeed in surging into broad and major legislative restrictions until the early 20th century.

We were explicit back in the Wilson administration when some of the first major and broad immigration restrictions were instituted that a significant goal was to severely reduce and strictly control immigration from, say, Poland or Russia or Japan, just as it is now sought to reduce and control it from Honduras or Nigeria or Syria. There is and was little reason to do any of this for the benefit of our residents and citizens, to keep people out from any particular nations or regions. It solely benefits nativist demands to reduce the need for their own assimilation to a more dynamic culture. Immigrants themselves tend to assimilate fine to the American system and ways of life; it's the nativists who don't keep up. This is evident by examining places with more dynamic economic growth (mostly places with more immigrants living there), or places that more strongly oppose immigration (mostly places with very few immigrants).

There are advantages to the overall US system, such as jus soli, that make it easier in certain ways for immigrants to get and stay here legally. But we actually receive fewer families as immigrants than even the supposed high-skilled worker-based immigration systems of Canada and Australia that (some) Trump type conservatives seem to want to emulate (other than Trump himself or Stephen Miller types). Those supposed advantages are being washed out by all the difficulties and impediments we throw up instead.

What seems needed to reform the situation in a more constructive manner, as a non-expert observing the issue.

- Understanding that the "illegal" immigration issue, such as this even matters, largely is one of people overstaying legally issued visas or coming in from Asia or Africa or Eastern Europe, and not anymore from Central America. Many people coming in from Central America at present getting much of the news attention are attempting to apply for asylum status. Almost none of this is anything like someone storming across the border with malevolent intent that it should require a harsh legal or military response as is being demanded.

- Walls are pointless to deal with those problems even if they are considered as seriously as issues related to these problems. Walls are a poor symbolism for a free democratic nation to use to boot as an additional reason to avoid them.

- Policies adopted by less democratic or less free nations with the intention of reducing the cultural, intellectual, ideological, and ethnic diversity of that nation are not to be emulated or considered a valid comparison as something we should wish to do. The very idea any number of Americans think it is a good idea to see what North Korea or Afghanistan or China does with people trying to cross their borders illegally and copy any elements of that, or to take a more representative example of actual policy, to look at what we did with Japanese Americans during WW2 and see that as an instructive and successful policy, is horrifying from a civic perspective.

- There should be a massive expansion of work visas in amounts and availability. These visas should be controlled by the workers themselves as much as possible so that companies can decide whether or not to employ someone without worrying about national origins or needing to apply and somehow justify that they need to hire someone from another country, and so workers can go from job to job relatively easily or start a company of their own if they wish/are able. Companies could sponsor specially talented workers as a means of generating loyalty among highly skilled employees, but otherwise should have to pay normal wages to everyone.

- Significant expansion of refugee/asylum programs should be undertaken. The global refugee population is at an all time high in the last decade. This is in part because of American policies; such as in Yemen or parts of Central America. Regardless of the blame we may ascribe to our policies abroad or domestically as they negatively impact other nations and people, we have a moral obligation as a rich country and people to help those in dire need. And we tend as a nation to benefit considerably by taking in refugees historically as a selfish reason to do this. There are no significant downsides to doing this. Other than that it annoys nativists who may elect more immigrant-restrictive public officials.

- Significantly easier citizenship applications and processes should be created. The cost and time involved is a significant impediment to making it easier for people to immigrate legally and become a permanent resident, if they wish. If it is easier to immigrate legally via citizenship or work status, it would be much easier to concentrate enforcement resources on those who continue to come with more dangerous and thereby illegal purposes than finding work or being with family and friends.

- As such, we should see reduced deportations of non-criminal immigrants, whether or "illegal" or not. If someone is not a terrorist, spy, or murderer/rapist, I'm not sure why it would be a useful exercise of the federal government's priorities or resources to deport them. Concurrent with that, abolishing checkpoints for immigration within a border zone, not at the border would be useful for US residents. Immigrants are not required to live in and are not necessarily concentrated in these zones anyway that monitoring visa status would be useful to do in this way. Such checkpoints appear to be mostly used for other dubiously legal purposes, such as checks on narcotics smuggling rather than arresting or detaining immigrants with dubious residential status