The Rev. Jay Voorhees, a Methodist minister of my own Conference, has a thoughtful essay about one of the conundrums of his stance on illegal immigration so far (”My stance in the past has been to be supportive of those who have crossed into this country illegally.”) He writes,

But then I heard about Jose Sosa.

Jose Sosa is a 16 year old immigrant from Mexico who has been living in our community here in Nashville. Several months ago Sosa was picked up in an INS raid and deported back to Mexico. He stayed about two weeks, and then came back across the border, taking up residence with a brother here in South Nashville. Sosa probably would have gone through our community without notice, if it weren’t for the fact that he has now been charged with the brutal murder of a mother and daughter in the house next door to his brother. The facts aren’t completely in, but the early stories suggest that he may have been trying to sexually assault the daughter when the mother came in. In the fight that followed Sosa came up with a knife and stabbed the two women repeatedly. Of course, he still is innocent until proven guilty, but the bloody fingerprints on the door match his and it looks from the outside like this kid is a murderer.

Now one bad apple doesn’t mean that the whole barrel is rotten. And frankly I hate to hear that it is an undocumented alien charged in the crime for that simply feeds the fear and concerns of those in my community who are hostile to our new neighbors from Mexico.

But I wonder . . . Could it be possible that the current approach to immigration which leads to illegal activity is feeding into a group of people who think that law is optional? Might Sosa, a 16 year old kid, represent a group of young persons who start life engaged in illegal activities and thereby are more likely to continue in other activities? Does the breaking of one set of laws with impunity lead to a disregard of the entire body of law?

Jay isn’t convinced it is so, but there is enough about the possibility that he finds it compelling enough to explore. However, it has been explored at some length. City Journal reported in its Winter 2004 edition,

Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. …

• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.

• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.

Between 1991 - 1995,

The number of illegal aliens sentenced in federal courts increased by 167 percent , compared with 13 percent for citizens. The number of legal aliens declined by 18 percent over this period.

The share of defendants in federal courts who were illegal aliens rose from 4 percent to 11 percent while the share who were legal aliens declined from 12 percent to 9 percent.

The number of illegal aliens sentenced increased for 89 of the 94 federal district courts, for all major offense categories, and for all major country of citizenship groups.

I’d say, based on these cites and many others I’m not listing here, that the question is answered.

Update: I cross-posted this at Winds of Change, where commenter Jim Rockford provides Census Bureau and DOJ crime statistics, with links, that firmly shore up the contention that illegal immigrants are greatly over-represented in criminality.

Frederic D. Schwarz explains at American Heritage that there are perverse factors at work in the way that American colleges and universities are willing to be beaten to a pulp by Title IX.

[W]hite guilt … is like original sin: You’re born with it, everyone has it, and you can only get rid of it through an elaborate series of rituals. Like self-flagellating medieval monks, even enlightened souls who have impeccable nonsexist credentials (and will tell you about them) bemoan their inherently evil nature and cry out for correction. This explains many of the follies of current academia, both large (the diversity obsession) and small (linguistic tics like opposing the use of “American” to refer to the United States). A previous scholarly generation may have expiated its own racist-sexist-classist-colonialist-orientalist original sin, but any expiation quickly becomes standard practice, and each new generation must search ever harder to find new isms that can be added to the list of evils and ever more minute sins that can be magnified, bewailed, and subjected to ceremonial death by committee.

In the end, that may be the greatest perversion caused by white guilt. The fearless intellectuals of our college faculties, impenetrably protected by tenure from retaliation or discipline, have always boldly explored the frontiers of society, science, thought, and life itself, free from constraints and roving wherever their restless minds take them in search of truth. Bravely and tirelessly they fight off all attempts at restriction or punishment—yet when it comes to affirmative action, their response is: “Tie me up! Beat me! Tighter! Harder!” Regardless of how you feel about academics, it’s sad to see these doughty battlers and rugged individualists timidly submitting to the iron hand of oppression—or it would be, that is, if you didn’t get the sneaking feeling that they’re actually enjoying it.

Read the whole thing.

Christopher Hitchens has written one of the most penetrating Memorial Day essays I’ve ever read. The closer:

This Memorial Day, one might think particularly of those of our fallen who also guarded polling-places, opened schools and clinics, and excavated mass graves. They represent the highest form of the citizen, and every man and woman among them was a volunteer. This plain statement requires no further rhetoric.

Read the whole thing.

As Thomas Scheckter crashed at the entrance to pit row at the Indianapolis 500 this afternoon, a following car hit some debris from the wreck. A big piece of carbon panel from Scheckter’s car was thrown high above the fence alongside the track and well into the bleachers. No word yet on whether spectators were injured.

Update: News reports:

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Five fans were injured at the Indianapolis 500, none seriously, when debris from a crashed car flew into the stands Sunday.

The most severe injury was when an unidentified man was struck in the head by a flying rear wing, but he walked away with only a knot on his head. One other fan also was struck by debris, but walked away.
Speedway spokesman Ron Green said three other fans were injured as they tried to avoid the car part that sailed into the stands after Jaques Lazier ran over it following a crash. Green said all five were checked and released from the speedway’s hospital, describing the injuries as minor cuts or abrasions.

Which is good news. In past races some fans have been killed from flying debris and flaming fuel from wrecks on the track. Including non-Indy 500 races held at the track in its early years, there have been 66 fatalities there of drivers and spectators. Wikipedia has a list of names.

Update: Here’s an account by a man who was missed by only six rows, the debris landing directly behind him.

Having children: costs and ideology

The demographic “death spiral” of most European countries has been analyzed and written about for a few years now. In first-world countries it takes an average of 2.1 births per woman to maintain a stable population. More births than that and the population grows, less and it declines. Thirteen European countries are solidly below 2.1 and several are way below.

America’s overall average is 2.08, but some demographic sectors of our society are carrying the freight for the rest - Hispanic women, for example, have a much higher average birth rate than white women.

Why has the birth rate declined so much? Glenn Reynolds has an incisive piece is TCS in which he explores the shrinking American family of a cost-benefit perspective.

Children used to provide cheap labor, and retirement security, all in one. Now they’re pretty much all cost and no return, from a financial perspective. …

There’s also the decline in parental prestige over generations. My mother reports that when she was a newlywed (she was married in 1959) you weren’t seen as fully a member of the adult world until you had kids. Nowadays to have kids means something closer to an expulsion from the adult world.

It’s true that raising children is expensive - heck, just getting newborns home from the hospital is pretty expensive! But of the two sides of this coin, the social costs that Glenn talks about are far more important.

[P]arenting has become more expensive in non-financial as well as financial terms. It takes up more time and emotional energy than it used to, and there’s less reward in terms of social approbation. This is like a big social tax on parenting and, as we all know, when things are taxed we get less of them. Yes, people still have children, and some people even have big families. But at the margin, which is where change occurs, people are less likely to do things as they grow more expensive and less rewarded.

There is enormous social pressure on parents to have two kids and stop, especially since most adults have been brainwashed over the last forty years or so to think that the world is badly overpopulated and human beings are a blight upon the planet. As my high-school son told me this school year, the not-very-subtle message of his required block of ecological studies was that there is nothing wrong with earth’s environment that the disappearance of humanity couldn’t solve. As Ronald Bailey wrote in Reason Online,

“Coercive population control has long been an established and widely accepted precept of ideological environmentalism.”

But the anti-human bias of the environmental movement is only one part of the picture. Since 1970 or so the feminist movement has continuously and often rabidly devalued mothering as something successful women do. Motherhood has been propagandized (even demonized) as what losers do when they can’t hold down a real job, or better yet, a profession. The social pressure on young women to “succeed” at something before having children - even before getting married at all - is huge. More and more women who have babies are having them at later ages, and this fact tends to push down the total number of babies a woman will have. A woman whose firstborn comes along when she’s 30 is a lot less likely to have three more kids than a woman who first gives birth at 23.

Some data - births by age, 1970 v. 2003:

1970:

Age 20-24 — 1,418,874
Age 25-29 — 994,904
Age 30-34 — 427,806
Age 35-39 — 180,244

2003:

Age 20-24 — 1,032,337
Age 25-29 — 1,086,898
Age 30-34 — 975,964
Age 35-39 — 467,520

It’s true that advances in prenatal medicine have made it safer for women to give birth at older ages than they could before, but the figures still show that overall, first babies are being born to older women than ever before.

A corresponding social fact of life is that women are getting married much later than before, too, if they get married at all (nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43 percent since 1960). Obviously, a lot of women have children without ever being married, but marriage followed by children is still the norm. In place of marriage is cohabitation, which has increased tenfold since 1960. This development was impelled by the Pill, which has served to separate having sex from its reproductive consequences for married and unmarried women alike. In pre-Pill days a married couple might want two children and settle for four, but no longer.

As well, men are affected by the separation sex from fatherhood. I explored this issue from a related angle back in 2002.

Over the last four decades, men have discovered that marriage is no longer the sure way to sex. Women have discovered that men’s sexual and emotional commitment to them isn’t usually gained by giving men sex before marriage. As the old saying goes, “Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?” If most women offer men sex apart from marriage, then the need for men to commit to sexual loyalty to a particular woman is greatly lessened, even eliminated. Then women look around and wonder why so many men they know all seem to be rotters who aren’t interested in marriage.

The decline of marriage has undoubtedly had a significant effect on the birth rate, although the rate of children born to unmarried parents is rising. But the costs such as Glenn discusses are so high for single parenting that while more unmarried women are giving birth than before, they are having no more children apiece than married women (lots of birth-related stats here).

Update: ShrinkWrapped blog says that widespread “narcissistic pathology” is one reason for the shrinking family. See also Dean Esmay’s observations, echoed by several commenters, that anti-male bias in divorce law and society in general inhibits men from marrying more than before.

Update: Joshua Zeitz, writing in American Heritage magazine, says that the birth rate per woman had fallen to three by 1920, and that the sexual revolution began decades before the Pill, with World War II being a major contributor. “The pill didn’t create America’s sexual revolution, but it may have accelerated it—and that revolution had been a long time in the making.” Link.

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. has proposed the creation of and “Army genocide prevention unit.” Relating to the mass killings in Darfur, and potential other such killings in the future, “it is time to stop the genocide.”

To make this possible, the United States needs a radical innovation in recruiting policy. We should create a genocide prevention division in the U.S. Army — a Peace Corps with guns — with individuals enlisting specifically for this purpose. There would be risks in such a venture, to be sure. But they are manageable and tolerable risks. By contrast, the Darfur genocide is unacceptable, intolerable, and a blight on our collective consciences.

Even if somehow this force proves unnecessary in Sudan — an unlikely proposition — there will be other conflicts for which such a force could prove very useful in the future.

The notion is this: of all those well-intentioned and admirable Americans rallying to call attention to Darfur and demand action, ask for volunteers to join a genocide prevention division for two years. They would begin their service with roughly 12 weeks of boot camp and 12 weeks of specialized training — and then go to Darfur next winter. They would receive the same compensation and health benefits as regular troops, given their age and experience; other incentives such as educational assistance would be made roughly proportionate to their length of service.

This is not a new idea. Retired Col. Austin Bay notes,

What he’s doing is recasting the “peacekeeping brigades” concept from the early 1990s as “genocide prevention.” I wrote a War College sub-course paper in 1997 advocting the creation of two peacekeeping brigades. … Thepeacekeeping units were MP and engineer-heavy, but had a strike capability. (Again, this is not a new idea.)

The first time I heard of this idea was the early 1980s, and it was not new then, either. But there are some conceptual problems with the idea of a genocide-prevention force such as Hanlon proposes.

James Joyner observes,

As a practical matter, however, despite our professed revulsion at genocide and the “never again” pledge taken so solemnly after the Holocaust, the international community has more-or-less ignored genocide or near-genocide at will. Granted, most of them have been in the context of at least a nominal civil war and none have been quite so systematic as Adolf Hitler’s.

Further, I would dispute the notion that we have a “duty” with regard to mass slaughter elsewhere, regardless of whether it rises to the level of genocide. Humanitarian intervention in the case of famine, drought, and natural disasters is arguably a “duty” and regardless something I tend to support. Stopping other cultures from butchering one another in civil wars, however, falls outside the realm of reasonableness. Stopping the slaughter in Burundi, Zaire/Congo, or Rwanda in the 1990s would have been great but were not vital national interests worth the sacrifice of substantial American blood and treasure. Ditto Sudan now.

Coupling humanitarian motives with national security objectives also makes sense. Would it be worth the commitment of tens of thousands of American troops to establish democracy in a random country in the world that is currently led by a bad guy? Nope. If the bad guy has been a repeated nuisance, is funding international terrorists, and threatening to destabilize a key strategic region? Yep.

Which leads directly to the question I commented on James’s post, quite simply, “And just where would we stop?”

Attention is rightly being focused on Darfur and the slaughter there, but let’s not kid ourselves that mass killings are not taking place elsewhere. The North Korean regime continues to kill its own subjects with vigor, killings that have been taking place for more than 50 years. If we truly do have a duty to intervene in Darfur, do we not also have a duty to liberate North Koreans from their own murderous oppression?

The answer is, of course, that intervening in Darfur would be “easy” compared to North Korea. At least, that seems to be a subtext in O’Hanlon’s proposal, which is why he thinks Darfur could be secured with mere semi-soldiers. But liberating North Korea would mean real war.

Not long before the invasion of Iraq someone asked me whether we should also topple the regimes of all the other dictators in the world - remember that red herring? “If we’re going to invade Iraq shouldn’t we also invade Iran and North Korea and this place and that place?”

To which I replied, “Yes, we should. But there is a great gap between what we ought to do and what we are able to do or what would be wise to do. The moral considerations are not the only ones.”

Yet it is also true, I continued, that simply because we cannot act everywhere that deserves it, we are not therefore paralyzed from acting where we can. So what are the criteria for acting? What makes Darfur deserving of the expenditure of American blood and treasure and not elsewhere?

(Matthew Yglesias and Jane Galt debate the imperative of a Darfur intervention, worth reading, but that specific question is not what I’m writing about.)

If the United States were to form such a force as O’Hanlon proposes, I hope we form it without taking his advice on what it would be like. A “Peace Corps with guns,” as he puts it, is a recipe for many American body bags. As others have noted (sorry, can’t remember who), the use of military force is normally a matter of last resort but in halting genocide it is necessarily a matter of first resort. After all, when a building is burning, you call the fire department, not debate what less energetic means can be used to halt the inferno.

This means that genocide prevention will almost always require what military planners call “forced entry” into the operational area. For the plain spoken among us, it means breaking in and fighting our way in. In other words, invasion. If the perpetrators of genocide could be merely persuaded to stop, there would be no need for a Peace Corps with guns.

This initial phase, plus the stabilization phases to follow, requires real soldiers, not semi-soldiers who “would begin their service with roughly 12 weeks of boot camp and 12 weeks of specialized training,” then go to an operational area. As any soldier or Marine can tell you, boot camp/basic training does not make you combat ready.

O’Hanlon says that limited support from regular military units would be needed, but he’s referring to combat power. He’s wrong because if you’re going to fight your way in - and you are - why would you send in a third-string outfit rather than the first team? Right away it’s obvious that the initial-entry force will always be Army or Marine regulars.

But let that pass for now because what O’Hanlon never mentions is logistics capability of his proposed genocide-prevention units. Will they have their own helicopters? Personnel carriers? Trucks? Landing craft? Will they have their own maintenance and supply units? Command, control and communications specialists?

These are crucial questions; as military officers like to say, “Amateurs talk about tactics. Professionals talk about logistics.” Any intervention such as O’Hanlon envisions will require long-term logistic support. Where will it come from? Who will command it (which is another way of saying who will “own” it)?

If the Defense Department is not to be logistics provider, then we would wind up duplicating DOD’s massive log capability, at least in part, with a parallel structure. That would mean another fleet of aircraft when Congress isn’t funding the Air Force’s needs now, and perhaps cargo sea vessels. Maybe we’re rich enough to do that, but it won’t help the budget deficit. It would be more cost efficient and more effective simply to add on to the services’ existing logistics capabilities, proportionally to the anticipated need to the size of intervention units.

But that begs the question: Why not authorize greater strengths for the Army and Marines to take into account this kind of mission? There is no “specialized training” O’Hanlon envisions than that already done by the services, with such units and espertise already in place. As a commenter on Austins Bay’s site observes, “I think this is called Civil Affairs, and clearly we don’t have enough.”

It might be objected that wresting these units away from DOD to use for humanitarian missions rather than “real military” missions would be a bureaucratic nightmare. I say not. First, the units would be inherently under DOD control to begin with. Second, a directive signed by the president of the United States solves the problem. After all, there was no bureaucratic infighting when President Bush ordered the Navy, Air Force and Marines to conduct very large-scale humanitarian assistance in the days following the genocide-scale tsunami disaster of December 2004 in the Indian Ocean.

In sum, if the United States is to establish a permanent capability for the kinds of interventions O’Hanlon describes, it should be placed within the Defense Department, fully funded, trained, equipped and staffed, including additional logistics units and personnel. Additional combat units should be authorized for the initial phases and security troops (Austin bay says military police units) for stablization operations.

Halfway measures with halfway troops won’t cut it.

It’s Saturday night and still a little early to start writing a sermon (heh) so I’m jotting some thoughts about Mission Impossible III, which opened yesterday and which Other Hand Clapping and I went to see at the fabled Franklin Cinema. This is a theater where the back half has conventional theater seats, but each row also has a coffee table to set your popcorn and drinks upon. Or your feet. Or your supper. Yes, you can watch the show and eat your dinner at the same time, with wine if you wish. In fact, the front half of the theater is actually filled with tables and chairs.

But back to MI3. Deadline Hollywood says that it’s opening day gross was slidesvile, a mere $17M.

[A]ccording to rival studio estimates, Paramount’s MI3 will gross in the mid-$40 millions — $45 mil-to-$46 mil — for this opening weekend, much lower than the pre-Friday estimates of $63 mil from 4,054 theaters. That’s also disappointing compared with MI2’s 2000 gross of $57 mil for the Friday-Saturday-Sunday period and $71 mil over the 4-day Memorial Weekend. Friday night’s MI3 box office figure was only in the vicinity of $17 mil domestically. There are some early reports that Cruise’s film experienced dropped overseas, too. Is all this Cruise’s fault? Or the movie’s fault? After all, reviews have been mixed. The big question I posed previously: Will MI3 Withstand Tom Cruise Cooling?

The writer postulates that “that young males can be fickle about action stars, and the tracking showed young females already had signs of Cruise fatigue.” Which may be true, as TC is getting a little long in the tooth to be the guy young men wish they were or a heartthrobber for the younger gals. Think about it - Top Gun was made 20 years ago, released when TC was only 23. MI3 debuts with TC’s 44th birthday looming large.

But that may not matter, I dunno. Whatever the reason peiople are staying away in droves, it’s a pity because MI3 is a lot better than you’d have reason to believe, based on its predecessors. I was skeptical of reviewers who said it is the best of the series, but they are right (not that being better than the previous two is a very high hurdle).

Right when TC’s off-screen personal and antics have become really weird, MI3 is a movie in which Tom Cruise actually avoids playing Tom Cruise. And this movie actually has a story. In fact, it is a really well-done MacGuffin movie.

… bad guys, good guys, both want the same thing badly, yielding dramatic conflict.

Alfred Hitchcock the “MacGuffin” plot effectively in his movies. In a book-length interview by the late French director Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock explained the MacGuffin thus (paraphrased):

The MacGuffin is the source of the conflict; it is what everyone wants. What it is does not matter. It serves only to bring about the dramatic conflict. Once the conflict is resolved, what happens to the MacGuffin is unimportant.

Q: Why do you call it a MacGuffin?

Well, there were two Scotsmen sharing a compartment on a train. One had a large, wrapped box, tied up with twine, on his lap. The other Scotsman became curious and asked, “Hoot mon, MacGregor, what ha’ ye in yon bonnie box?”

“Why, MacTavish, within this box be a MacGuffin.”

“Wha’ be a MacGuffin, Macregor?”

“A MacGuffin is a device for capturing the lions roaming the Scottish highlands.”

“Aye, MacGregor, there nae be any lions roaming the Scottish highlands.”

MacGregor is silent for a moment, then says, “Aye. Well, then this canna’ be a MacGuffin.”

In MI3, the Macguffin is called the rabbit’s foot. The villain wants it, IMF wants it. It’s no spoiler to say that IMF gets it in the end; that’s a forgone conclusion. But how they get it and the obstacles and fights Ethan Hunt and crew have to work through are engaging throughout, even though there are no few plot holes if you think about the sequences now and then.

But the movie hardly gives you time to think about it. The pacing is frenetic. It’s hard to see how more action could be packed into an action movie than MI3 has. And most of it is pretty good action, too - a fight on a bridge, for example. Who is good, who is bad? I admit I miscalled it and that made me enjoy the flick all the more. Definitely a see-again on DVD.

I give MI3 seven out of 10 cable swings from a skyscraper in Shanghai.