Would-be Bomber’s Profile More than “Noise”

The Obama administration’s response to the attempted bombing of the Christmas Day flight into the Detroit has been both weak and wrongheaded.

On the matter of first principles, I agree with my colleagues Chris Edwards and Roger Pilon that among its limited and enumerated powers, the federal government has a duty to protect its citizens from people such as Umar Farouk Abdulmatullab. He’s the 23-year-old Nigerian Muslim who tried unsuccessfully to detonate a bomb sewn into his underwear with the help of al Qaeda operatives in Yemen. Thwarting attacks such as this is what should keep officials and lawmakers awake at night, not forcibly redesigning the private-sector health care system.

The government’s response has been weak in failing to acknowledge the real breakdown in the system: Abdulmatullab should never have been on that plane. His own father, one of the heroes in this story, reported his son’s radical beliefs and connections to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria. The report landed the son on a terrorist watch list but not on the no-fly list.

One news report characterized the information on Abdulmatullab as “noise” in the system. If this is noise, what does the government consider a signal? He posted his radical beliefs on his blog. He traveled twice to the terrorist hotbed of Yemen. His own family took the initiative and the risk to report him to U.S. authorities. Eight years after 9/11, what do the guardians of public safety require as a signal—arriving at the airport wearing an “I ♥ Osama Bin Laden” t-shirt?

This is no place for political correctness. The risk of denying entry to a twenty-something Muslim who is acting suspiciously but means us no harm is small compared to the human tragedy and economic cost of a plane loaded with innocent people being blown out of the sky.

The administration has, at the same time, overreacted by imposing new burdens on the traveling public. According to the New York Times, in the wake of the attempted bombing, “passengers at airports in the United States and around the world encountered stiff layers of extra security, with international travelers undergoing newly required bag inspections, body searches and questioning at security checkpoints and before they boarded planes.” Passenger visits to airplane restrooms will also be more closely monitored.

All this will needlessly inconvenience the flying the public, discourage tourists from visiting the United States, and create a false sense of security. The right response is not to give grandma an extra pat-down, but to lower the threshold for denying visas to the small but identifiable minority abroad who arouse any reasonable suspicions.

Disappointing start for immigration reform

The good news is that a bill has been introduced in the House this week under the broad heading of immigration reform. Even during a recession, Congress should be working to change our immigration system to reflect the longer-term needs of our economy for foreign-born workers.

The bad news is that the actual bill put in the hopper by Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-IL, on Tuesday would do nothing to solve the related problems of illegal immigration and the long-term needs of our economy.

As I argued in a recent blog post and a Washington Times op-ed, immigration reform must include expanded opportunities for legal immigration in the future through a temporary worker visa.

Any so-called reform that is missing this third leg will be doomed to fail. We will simply be repeating the mistakes of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to 2.7 million illegal workers and ramped up enforcement, but made no provision for future workers. Rep. Jeff Flake, R-AZ, agrees.

Chile sets a good example on trade

The longest and least uplifting chapter in my new Cato book Mad about Trade is Chapter 9, where I describe all the remaining duties and restrictions our government imposes on our freedom to trade with people in other countries. We are certainly not “the most open market in the world,” as a member of President Obama’s Cabinet asserted in China a few days ago. In fact, by one measure we rank a lowly 28th.

After mentioning this fact in speeches lately, I’ve been asked more than once to name the markets that ARE the most open in the world. Here, according to the latest 2009 Economic Freedom of the World Report, are the top ten most open economies:

1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. Chile
4. Ireland
5. Panama
6. Netherlands
7. United Arab Emirates
8. Slovak Republic
9. Hungary
10. Luxembourg

(The list is a bit different from the one I cite in the book, which was based on the 2008 EFoW report.)

One of the most remarkable members on the list is Chile. Decades ago, it was one of the most closed, protectionist economies in Latin America. Today it is the most open. In fact, when you consider that Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China, and Singapore is a tiny city state, Chile is the most open full-sized country in the world. (I hope our free-trade friends in Singapore won’t take offense at that!)

It is no coincidence that Chile has become the economic star of Latin America.

Will our own president and Congress learn from Chile’s example?

 

Higher Immigration, Lower Crime

Yes, you read that right. The story is more complicated than a short headline can covey, but that is the gist of an article of mine in the just-out December issue of Commentary magazine. [Subscription needed.]

The past 15 years have witnessed two undeniable trends: dramatically rising levels of immigration, both low-skilled and high-skilled, and an equally dramatic plunge in crime rates nationally. I don’t argue that increased immigration in the past 15 years is the primary cause of falling crime rates, but I do argue that the evidence punches a gaping hole in the Lou-Dobbs contention that immigrants have clogged our prisons and unleashed a new wave of crime.

In the Commentary article, and in an earlier Cato Free Trade Bulletin, I cite Census data that show that incarceration rates for immigrants are significantly lower than for native-born Americans. The contrast is especially sharp between immigrants without a high-school diploma and their native-born counterparts. Along with their lower propensity to commit crimes, immigrants are also more likely to be employed than similarly educated Americans.

Or as the subhead of the magazine article nicely puts it, “Today’s ‘underclass’ of newcomers seeks a day’s work, not a drug deal.”

U.S. government stiffs our Colombian allies

Sunday marked the third anniversary of the signing of a free trade agreement between the United States and Colombia. It is an embarrassment to our great nation that this agreement with an important Latin American ally still sits on the shelf three years later, a victim of congressional trade politics.

As my Cato colleague Juan Carlos Hidalgo and I argued in a 2008 Free Trade Bulletin, and as I wrote in a more recent op-ed, the FTA with Colombia is a win-win for Americans. It fully opens the Colombian market and its 44 million pro-American consumers to our exports, while deepening our ties with one of our most dependable allies in the Western Hemisphere.

The AFL-CIO and other opponents of the agreement demand that Colombia further reduce violence against trade unionist before approval can be considered, and the president and Democratic congressional leaders have dutifully agreed. Never mind that the number of trade union members murdered in traditionally violent Colombia has declined dramatically under President Alvaro Uribe. Congress and the administration keep moving the goal posts, much to the frustration of the Colombian government.

Meanwhile, since the agreement was signed, U.S. companies have paid $2.3 billion in unnecessary duties, according to the “Colombia Tariff Ticker” sponsored by the Latin America Trade Coalition. On the foreign policy front, Colombia faces continued threats from the Marxist FARC guerrilla movement and its anti-American neighbor, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Refusing to enact the trade agreement with Colombia only reinforces suspicions in Latin America that the U.S. government is unreliable.

Tear down this wall … between the U.S. and Cuba

The House Foreign Affairs Committee is holding a hearing today on the almost-50-year-old ban on travel to Cuba. The ban is part of a broader economic embargo in place since the early 1960s that was supposed to bring about change in the island’s oppressive, communist regime.

Instead, the embargo and travel been have needlessly infringed on the freedom of Americans, weakened our influence in Cuba, and handed the Castro government a handy excuse for the failures of its Caribbean socialist experiment.

Is the U.S. “the most open market in the world”? Not even close

Accompanying the president on his trip to China this week, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk couldn’t resist repeating the old line that the United States is “the most open market in the world.” The chief U.S. trade negotiator was trying to rebut criticism from Chinese officials that the Obama administration, with its 35 percent tariff on Chinese tire imports and all that, has retreated from a commitment to free trade.

The administration’s “more open than thou” rebuttal is a weak one. As I write in Chapter 9 of my new Cato book, Mad about Trade:

Immigration reform’s “missing leg”

In a speech this morning in Washington, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the administration remains committed to enacting real immigration reform. In a key passage in her remarks, she said reform must contain three essential components:

Good Night, Lou Dobbs!

In his CNN swan song last night, Lou Dobbs told his loyal if shrinking audience that important national issues

are now defined in the public arena by partisanship and ideology rather than by rigorous empirical thought and forthright analysis and discussion. I will be working diligently to change that as best I can.

His very act of resigning from his prime-time perch is probably the best contribution he’s made yet to advancing “rigorous empirical thought.”

Trade Wrongly Blamed for Unemployment

Import competition can throw Americans out of work. Even advocates of free trade like me will readily acknowledge that fact. And nobody needs to remind the people of Hickory, North Carolina.

On the front page of the Washington Post this morning, under the headline, “In N.C., damage not easily mended: Globalization drives unemployment to 15% in one corner of state,” the paper reports in detail how the people of that community are struggling to adjust to a more open U.S. economy: