Friday, May 21, 2010

Music To Rant By

If there has been any constant in my work life, it has been music.  I bought my first boom box (with a 3 CD carousel) when I worked at the print shop right out of high school.  I've gone to data entry temp jobs with a Walkman and a mix tape (when I was younger) or a few choice CDs (when I was older).  I ended up snapping off the locking tab for the battery cover of my Zen Nano MP3 player because it ate up so many batteries.  Bottom line, I loves me some music when I work.

Normally, I'll throw up my entire MP3 collection on Winamp and just let it play on shuffle.  But once in a while, I need to build a custom playlist.  I'll still let it play on shuffle, but there's a much smaller sample and it's mood music.  Right now, I'm working on a big rant for The Armchair Empire, and I figured I needed something to help keep my mind focused lest the searing rage get out of hand.  Music soothes the savage blogger.  For those who follow this blog, this is my unofficial soundtrack, eighteen songs of anger, defiance, and bullheaded hope of triumph over experience.  Go get them, put'em on shuffle, and enjoy.

  1. Anberlin - The Resistence
  2. Dethklok - Fansong
  3. Disturbed - Ten Thousand Fists
  4. Dropkick Murphys - The Gauntlet
  5. Everclear - Like A California King
  6. From First To Last - The Latest Plague
  7. Fuel - Won't Back Down
  8. Godsmack - I Stand Alone
  9. Incubus - Megalomaniac
  10. INXS - Don't Lose Your Head
  11. Judas Priest - You've Got Another Thing Coming
  12. Linkin Park - Hands Held High
  13. Lo Fidelity All Stars - Battle Flag
  14. Monster Magnet - Temple Of Your Dreams
  15. Pillar - Frontline
  16. Sevendust - Face To Face
  17. The Jam - Town Called Malice
  18. Thrice - Image Of The Invisible
Happy listening, folks.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Border Brouhaha

Sometimes, the writers of The Armchair Empire get bored.  There's only so much one can talk about in the games industry before you need to take a break from it.  Politics is one of those areas that doesn't get a lot of talk in the site's forums, but when one of the writers asked me for my thoughts on the recently passed SB1070 bill here in Arizona, I obliged him the only way I really knew how.  Below is the text of my main response.  The link to the full forum thread can be found here.


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The whole business with SB1070 and the issues it is supposed to be alleviating depends a lot upon how one parses language and how one reacts to words.

The bare bones of the case: Mexico is still an unstable broke-as-hell country. There's very few opportunities south of the border that don't involve smuggling drugs, guns, or people, so everybody and his brother seems to be trying to go north of the border. The last several years, it's gotten a lot more unstable, particularly since Felipe Calderon took office and deployed Army troops to fight the drug cartels. At the same time, almost 9 years after 9/11, the federal government STILL hasn't managed to get their shit together and make serious and substantive efforts at securing the US/Mexican border.

Despite the euphemistic phrase "undocumented workers" being bandied about, the plain fact is that crossing the border without going through the admittedly byzantine process of getting work visas or green cards does, in fact, make one an illegal alien under federal law. While Mexicans who have work in and around the Nogales area right on the border might be able to bounce back and forth (legal or not), once you get north of there, it becomes a practical impossibility to work in the state and not live here. It's not like there's giant caravans of Mexicans running around the state, moving from job to job like an echo of the Okies back during the Great Depression. Mexicans are coming up, grabbing shit jobs, crashing at slum apartments, and generally not making any effort to actually become citizens, get resident alien status, or even just try to get a work visa. And that's the best case scenario.

What's been happening more and more frequently is Mexicans getting stuffed into trucks and vans by smugglers ("coyotes" in the local vernacular), then carted off to drop houses in residential neighborhoods where they either become hostages (so the coyotes can extort more money from the families back in Mexico) or virtual slaves. For those who don't get a ride up Interstate 10 to Phoenix, they march straight through both public and private lands, usually littering and destroying the environment in the process. With the increasing violence from the drug cartels, there are folks north of the border that are ending up getting injured and or killed, usually by smugglers or their immediate associates. It's not a situation designed to help people sleep soundly at night.

Looking at the text of the bill, there are two sub-sections which I can imagine create a great deal of consternation. Subsection B reads "FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE, WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON. THE PERSON'S IMMIGRATION STATUS SHALL BE VERIFIED WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PURSUANT TO 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1373(c)." Subsection E reads "A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER, WITHOUT A WARRANT, MAY ARREST A PERSON IF THE OFFICER HAS PROBABLE CAUSE TO BELIEVE THAT THE PERSON HAS COMMITTED ANY PUBLIC OFFENSE THAT MAKES THE PERSON REMOVABLE FROM THE UNITED STATES." You can read the full text of the bill here.

The reasons why the consternation might be coming about are manifold. First, there's a pretty large Hispanic population in Arizona, as you might well imagine. "Reasonable suspicion" is a lower standard of proof than "probable cause," which means that as a practical matter, there's a whole lot of people that could potentially get stopped just to make sure they're not illegals. Secondly, the fact that being an illegal alien is a "public offense" creates conditions where if you get stopped by a cop under Subsection B, you can get busted under Subsection E. The text of the bill does lay out provisions for people to contest their arrest if they believe they've been wrongfully arrested, and it does lay out provisions that indicate cops who just go around busting people because they've got brown skin and a Spanish surname won't have any sort of support or protection from the state or municipality if they get hauled into court. A couple days ago, an amendment to the bill specifically prohibiting racial profiling was passed and signed. The problem with all of this, however, is that the issues aren't nearly so cut and dried.

The common assumption and attitude among those who are in an uproar over the bill is that America is being anti-immigrant. And to be sure, the process for becoming a resident alien or a full US citizen has never been a cakewalk. But once you've got it, you're golden. And if you think the process for America is bad, try looking at the process for Japan sometime and then come back to me to bitch about how "unfair" America's naturalization process is to people. I know folks who immigrated legally to the US, went through the process, took all the stupid classes, took their tests, and took their oath. The ones who went through all that trouble are generally pretty pissed, and rightly so, at the illegals coming up from Mexico precisely because the Mexicans aren't bothering to make the effort. It becomes a giant merry-go-round where Mexicans cross the border, get work, get caught, get shipped back to Mexico, and then cross the border to start it all over again. Compounding the problem is the perception by some illegals that they're performing a "reconquista," that they're not entering the US but rather Mexican territory illegally occupied by the US. After the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, which Mexico lost badly, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded Texas and California, as well as what would later become Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, along with chunks of Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Subsequently, the Gadsden Purchase in 1853 bought the remaining southern portions of Arizona and New Mexico from the Mexican government. To some Mexicans, the entire affair is a national insult, and you sometimes hear Mexicans blathering on about how they're taking back what was stolen from them.

Further complicating the problem is the abuse of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. What was intended to ensure that former black slaves and their children would be legally treated as American citizens has boomeranged into a situation whereby foreign citizens, legal and otherwise, are entering the US to give birth because the current reading of the law grants their newborn children automatic American citizenship. When these children grow up, they can legally enter the country without any problem and be able to bring their parents and siblings over because they're family members. It's a loophole that needs to be rectified.

As if all this wasn't enough, there's the financial angle to look at. It's not just the illegals that are making money on the situation, it's businesses that hire illegals that are making money off it, if only indirectly. The simplest measure for paying illegals would be through cash. Since it's cash, there's a lot less of a paper trail to follow, which means the business saves money because they're not paying into Social Security or Medicare. By using fake Social Security numbers or fake taxpayer ID numbers, businesses can potentially get more money back from the government when the tax refunds are disbursed, though there's also the potential for the feds to come by and do some digging through the records. Should that occur, the employer can disavow any discrepancies as the action of the illegal alien. It should be mentioned that there are notionally checks in place to discourage using fake or stolen information, and there are legitimate businesses that do everything right but still end up unwittingly hiring an illegal alien because they happened to have a good set of faked credentials.

To top it off, there is an element of political armtwisting involved with the passage of the bill. As weird as it may sound, Arizona wants the federal government to step in and do something about the border situation. However, the usual legislative process has consistently put immigration and border security issues to the back burner in favor of financial issues (which were pretty critical at the time), health care (which nobody seems to be super happy about outside of D.C.), and other issues which never seem quite as important. Since Congress can't or won't take action on the issue, Arizona is attempting to force them to do something about it. By passing the bill, they're applying pressure to the feds to get serious about border issues. In the long run, Arizona knows that it can't choke off the flow of illegal aliens completely, but in the short term, the bill potentially will shift the avenues of illegal border crossing into New Mexico, Texas, and California. Theoretically, if New Mexico and Texas pass similar bills, California will be the only state which will be considered "safe" to cross into, which will doubtlessly put a strain on the resources in a state which is already uncomfortably close to insolvency. By making California cry "uncle!", the federal government really will have to get serious about the border. The best case scenario is that the feds realize exactly what Arizona is doing and start making substantive changes to border and immigration policy before it ever reaches the point where Texas and New Mexico follow suit. However, I don't imagine that anybody in the current administration has that level of foresight.

It is a great stinking mess and it remains to be seen if anybody has the requisite intestinal fortitude to shove a hand into this sack full of snakes and pull out a good workable solution.