The slow progress of bad decisions or 'Who risks their half-a-million-dollar-a-year job for $70,000?'

The guy on the left probably isn't evil, but this is not a good look

Despite what movies and cop procedural TV shows would have us think, I don't believe most people who do terrible things are intrinsically evil. Sure, the Stephen Millers of the world exist, but he's an exception. (Even real jerks don't usually make speeches to their high schools arguing kids should be slobs because the school's janitors can clean up after them.)  A good chunk of people in positions of power believe on, some level, they're doing good, or at least, they're not actively evil. 

That's why I was fascinated a by Planet Money episode that profiled a white-collar convicted felon. The cumulative effect of the episode is more like a dark comedy than a business podcast. Then again, this isn't a new feeling since most serious news these days plays like Dr. Strangelove.

LONDON: The people back in the studio on TV after this - they were talking about it. Like, who risks their half-a-million-dollar-a-year job for $70,000 

KESTENBAUM: Scott says his friends asked him that, too. And he does not have a great answer. He can't say exactly why he did it. I asked, was it exciting? Was the thrill part of it? 

LONDON: No - wasn't exciting at all. 

GOLDSTEIN: Was he trying to get his friend to like him more? Is that what was going on? 

LONDON: No. That didn't ever pass through my mind. 

KESTENBAUM: Scott says he was kind of overworked and unhappy with his job, so everything felt a little less important. Maybe that had something to do with it. But he says crossing over that line was somehow just not as hard as it should've been. 

GOLDSTEIN: Scott says what he did was just dumb. He says that. But he says, you know, as best as he can figure out, as best as he can reconstruct, he did it to help out his friend. And he says he didn't think they were going to get caught.

What struck me about Scott London's story was the ease of making increasingly bad choices. Of course, people make ruinous choices all the time and often for reasons as banal as what London describes in the interview with journalists David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein. In this case, London's choices led to criminal behavior, a guilty plea, and jail time. 

***

Some backstory: London was a CPA and partner at the giant firm, KPMG. He led teams that conducted massive audits of Fortune 500 companies. As he said, he made more than $500,000 a year. But he had a friend in the wholesale jewelry business who was struggling. It was during the 2008 recession and his friend asked him for a favor - can you tip some stock info to me? He proposed trades in the five figures, a small amount considering the tidal wave of money moving through stock markets.

LONDON: You know, it's a battle. The simple version of the one side is that I knew it was wrong. It was stupid. And then the other side is, all right, well, he's a good friend. I trust him. You know, if you are trading, and, you know, you're only going to make 10 or $15,000, who's going to know?

The answer to that last question? The feds. (The picture above was taken by FBI agents.) He was arrested in one of those 6 a.m. knocks federal agents pull. London didn't fight the charges, but he also didn't fully understand the ramifications of his actions. 

KESTENBAUM: It got worse. Scott got a lawyer. And one day, they were on their way to court in the lawyer's car. Scott's reading the news on his phone, and he sees this story about his case that has something he says he didn't know. His friend Bryan hadn't been just making small trades for a few thousand dollars. The story says Bryan had been placing much bigger trades, says he made $1.27 million. 

LONDON: And I almost threw up right there in the car. And I actually told my attorney, you got to pull over. He was driving. But I just - you know, I was just fearful that I was just going to lose it right there. So I just couldn't believe it. And once I saw that, I said, holy hell. This is - you know, this is obviously going to be a lot worse.

One would think a top-tier CPA, an expert in fiscal compliance, wouldn't need a reminder that a stock tip can used as easily for million-dollar trades as $10,000 ones. Greed is a funny thing, though. What we assume about others' decisions involving the seven deadly sins is usually wrong. 


***

I'm fascinated in a "can't look away from a car wreck" sort of way by the ostensibly well-off, competent people who've humiliated themselves working for this White House. Sean Spicer, for example, had a decent career as a press flack for Congress, then the RNC before becoming a punchline. Rex Tillerson ran the 10th-largest company in the world and then was fired while taking a call on the toilet. (Side note: Who answers the phone on the toilet?)

It's not hard to see similarities between London and the retinue of folks who've sold their soul for a nominally prestigious position. Take John Bolton, the national security advisor. This is a guy who's made his name pushing U.S military intervention is most every world conflict since Reagan was in office. (A short list of countries he's wanted to bomb: North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia, Iraq two different times.) 

Reminder: last year John Bolton called the Russian election interference "an act of war."

Now as national security adviser he puts out an official statement calling investigation of said act of war "witch hunt."

— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) July 25, 2018

Note how quickly Bolton reversed himself on a fundamental view. I wonder if he even acknowledges the switch to himself. In a way, I thought of Scott London when I read that tweet. Both guys made decisions that seem counter to everything they've done up to that point. 

I'm not sure Bolton (or Spicer or Tillerson) could articulate the rationale for the series of choices they led them to hypocrisy and humiliation. But they -- educated and ambitious men, all -- did what they did. 

It's a bleak comedy, sure, but since we have the live their consequences, there's not much for the rest of us to laugh at.

Except for Paul Manafort -- I will be laughing all week at that crook getting methodically destroyed in a federal courthouse.

***

Update on John Bolton's continuing humiliation:

Lol John Bolton just tore out his own mustache https://t.co/FOxH13GhI3

— David Klion 🔥 (@DavidKlion) July 30, 2018

Cake and genius

The next time I go to NYC, I'm eating this. All of it. 

Notwithstanding all the terrible stuff in the news, let's celebrate the greatness of a nation where people can demonstrate their brilliance (and make tons of money) through creating baked goods.

We live in remarkable times. For better and for worse.

***

With the whole newborn thing happening, I've searched for mindless TV to watch. One of my favorites is Netflix's Chef's Table. It's beautifully shot and features talented people doing their best work. It's not normally a show where words amount to much. That's why Christina Tosi's rant on cake is so startling.

It's superficially about cake, but there's so much more here. You can hear her frustration about toiling decades in the high-end NYC restaurant scene. You notice the barely-veiled astonishment at how off most judgments are regarding the way a given dish should be. 

You can't help but apply the spirit of what she's talking about to topics far away from baking.

Sometimes the genius is in recognizing obvious things everyone else misses.

***

The scene opens with Tosi seated alone in an industrial kitchen. We've just seen nostalgic scenes from her midwestern hometown in her mom's kitchen. She starts talking about food's role in celebrations and it's mostly forgettable until her monologue takes an unexpected turn:

...I never really thought much of cake. Cake is the thing that you're raised as a child in America to be like the most exciting most celebratory dessert you can have. And it was just okay. It’s spongy. Usually there’s not much flavor. It’s usually a little dry. There's a not lot of texture. It’s just like a world of missed opportunities. I knew I needed to define my own relationship with cake and that cake could be a lot better than what it was.

One of the underrated, yet defining features of expertise is that subtle, gnawing sense that something isn't quite what it could be. 

Also from being in culinary school, around all these insane masters of beauty and perfection when it comes to finishing a cake. They had, like, tired me completely. To the point of like, ‘I don’t think cake should be frosted.’ I’ve seen how obsessed you can get with frosting a cake and that time should be spent elsewhere. That time should be spent in the actual layers of cake, in the frostings or fillings or whatever it is, but it shouldn’t be spent on a turntable trying to make the perfect, perfect, perfect frosted cake. For what? We’re not in pottery class.

“I don’t think cake should be frosted” is an astonishing statement from a woman who spent the previous decades of her life, among other things, training to master cake decoration. Not content to stop there, she -- against her high-priced culinary education -- reimagined cake as whole. 

Also worth noting is that she did this when shows like Cake Boss established the trend of elaborate frosting designs and customers expected to see something Renaissance-level in their colored sugar. Through this cake, Tosi essentially said to her customers, "What you think you want isn't actually what you want." That's a hard argument to make to spouses or children. Telling it to NYC diners requires a level World Series of Poker-level of "put your money where your mouth is."

There’s a world of flavors. There’s a world of texture. Cake should be delivering more than that. And when I start to think about all these different moments and decisions and time and work put into making the most delicious cake and cake soap and frosting and crumbs and filling...why would I cover it up? It is that dollhouse moment of looking in and being like, ‘I want to see the world of amazing things that’s happening on the inside. The little intricacies of how I’m thinking about your perfect bite of layer cake.’ So we don’t frost the sides of the cake. That’s my diatribe on cake.

Here she takes something thought to be sacred about her profession and strips it back to reveal its original purpose - creating the perfect bite. The elaborate (and often unappetizing) designs that command high prices -- and therefore the attention of most pastry chefs -- are a distraction. A dessert should first be fantastic to eat.

Because she sees what a cake should be, she is also clear on what it shouldn’t be. Because she knows what she wants in her cake, she doesn’t spend any time paying heed to someone else’s idea of cake. She reallocates the time spent doing stuff that doesn't further the goal of making delicious cake. 

The substance is cake, but the principles and creativity could be applied to anything.

A newborn and a threenager

So we brought home a newborn the other day.

This is our second child, so the lifestyle switch isn't quite as brutal. (We already weren't going out much.)

Our first child is a three-year-old boy. So, between the two kids, we can never fully focus on any one task at a time. Please take that into consideration as you read my posts going forward.

***

So, some just-brought-her-home reflections:

• A major parenting shift with the second child is that N and I are surprised by less. This doesn't make stuff like "baby wakes up six times at night" physically easier (especially not on mothers), but we can mentally take more stuff in stride. We know that day/night reversal eventually ends, no child cries forever, and that she will someday take a bottle from me.

• Our three-year-old has been all over the place. He wants to be helpful and also senses that he's getting less attention. We've had to be creative in finding ways for him to help -- fetching the nursing pillow and throwing away dirty diapers have been our go-to moves. Even so, he's had some epic meltdowns. A common precursor is delaying behaviors -- for example, he'll go back and forth f-o-r-e-v-e-r when choosing his PJs. The root cause seems to be wanting sustained attention from N and me. We've had to balance a careful line of giving him attention versus not reinforcing undesirable behaviors. Like a lot of parenting moves, the outcomes are delayed, inconsistent, and hazy.  

• N and I are incredibly fortunate to be able to take lengthy breaks from our jobs. Many people don't have that luxury. Family leave policies in this country are awful for babies and parents. We reap the costs of inadequate childcare in this country in all sorts of ways -- a national birthrate that is lower than replacement level, all sorts of negative health outcomes resulting from inadequate early childhood care, to name a few. I can't help but see this as a part of a general political trend of sacrificing the future to cut costs for the present. (Also known as "cutting off one's nose to spite the face.") This is why it is maddening for politicians to treat family leave policy as a "women's issue." If we want men to better partners and fathers, give them time to do so. 

'Look for the helpers'

Name a hospital after this woman already 

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” 

- Fred Rogers

While an awful American betrays his country and as other Americans supinely support this ongoing assault on our values, read about the best person you've never heard of (hat tip to Forrest Dillard for passing on the link to this):

It started in 1984, in a hospital hallway. Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother when she went to University Hospital in Little Rock, Ark., to help care for a friend who had cancer. Her friend eventually went through five surgeries, Burks said, so she spent a lot of time that year parked in hospitals. That’s where she was the day she noticed the door, one with “a big, red bag” over it. It was a patient’s room 

...Whether because of curiosity or — as she believes today — some higher power moving her, Burks eventually disregarded the warnings on the red door and snuck into the room. In the bed was a skeletal young man, wasted away to less than 100 pounds. He told her he wanted to see his mother before he died.

...Burks wrangled a number for the young man’s mother out of one of the nurses, then called. She was able to speak for only a moment before the woman on the line hung up on her. 

“I called her back,” Burks said. “I said, ‘If you hang up on me again, I will put your son’s obituary in your hometown newspaper and I will list his cause of death.’ Then I had her attention.” 

Her son was a sinner, the woman told Burks. She didn’t know what was wrong with him and didn’t care. She wouldn’t come, as he was already dead to her as far as she was concerned. She said she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died. It was a curse Burks would hear again and again over the next decade: sure judgment and yawning hellfire, abandonment on a platter of scripture. Burks estimates she worked with more than 1,000 people dying of AIDS over the years. Of those, she said, only a handful of families didn’t turn their backs on their loved ones.

(Emphasis mine)

Some things worth pondering:

Burks was doing this in the 1980s when most doctors, let alone the general public, had little knowledge about HIV/AIDS outside of rumors of the "gay plague." We know now that she didn't have a significant risk of being infected herself. At the time, she didn't know that. She went through the red door anyway. 

She did this for years, in anonymity. See more below:

After she cared for the dying man at University Hospital, people started calling Burks, asking for her help. “They just started coming,” she said. “Word got out that there was this kind of wacko woman in Hot Springs who wasn’t afraid. They would tell them, ‘Just go to her. Don’t come to me. Here’s the name and number. Go.’...I was their hospice. Their gay friends were their hospice. Their companions were their hospice.” 

Before long, she was getting referrals from rural hospitals all over the state. Financing her work through donations and sometimes out of her own pocket, she’d take patients to their appointments, help them get assistance when they could no longer work, help them get their medicines, and try to cheer them up when the depression was dark as a pit. She said many pharmacies wouldn’t handle prescriptions for AIDS drugs like AZT, and there was fear among even those who would.

She soon stockpiled what she called an “underground pharmacy” in her house. “I didn’t have any narcotics, but I had AZT, I had antibiotics,” she said. “People would die and leave me all of their medicines. I kept it because somebody else might not have any.”

I remember the political climate regarding AIDS in the 1990s. I'm reasonably sure that if word had gotten out too widely in Hot Springs that Burks was illegally redistributing prescription drugs to HIV-positive gay men, she would've ended up doing hard time. 

To recap, Burks did the following:

• Risked her life
• Risked her savings
• Risked her freedom
• Gave selflessly of her love and time for years in what seemed like a hopeless cause

She did this for a sexual minority facing rampant discrimination from everyone from politicians to health care providers to their own families. She did this for men dying slowly and horribly.

I like to remember that so many of our neighbors are much better than we deserve.

The U.S. men's team can win a World Cup if we commit to being unfair

I will be rooting for this guy.

Unless you've been purposefully ignoring it, you know France will play Croatia in Sunday's World Cup Final. Both teams are loaded with players who play for the top European clubs. While you could reasonably assume a historic power like France fields a roster that looks like Champions League team, it's worth checking out the number of Croatian players who ply their trades for top teams like AC Milan, Liverpool, Inter Milan, Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Juventus. 

Croatia's roster. These guys are good.

Because everything should always and everywhere be about what this means for American, consider that the success of the Croatian team gives hope for the U.S. men's team (USMNT). (The U.S. women's team, you should remember, are already world-beaters.) The reason for optimism is this: Croatia is nation of 4.2 million people. The United States has 14 metropolitan areas with more people.

14 places in the U.S. with more people than Croatia

Even though the USMNT failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF) has improved in producing world-class players. (If you aren't yet familiar with Christian Pulisic, you soon will be.) While soccer-playing culture in the U.S. is unlikely to become as big a deal as it is in most European, African, and South American countries, it doesn't have to be. The United States is big and diverse enough that we can produce plenty of world-class players in multiple sports. Think of the Olympics -- Americans dominate in a bunch of sports that the general public cares about only every four years. 

American follow sports like this only every four years,
yet we produce plenty of dominant athletes.

USSF needs to improve, though. For years, the U.S. has had the largest number of youth soccer registrants (about 4 million) in the world, yet places with far less money and training resources (like Croatia, Rio de Janiero, or the Paris suburbs) produce better players. This happens for several reasons, but the chief one is obvious and overlooked: The American attitude towards youth sports, soccer in particular, is messed up. 

Here's why:

• Teams in the U.S. prioritized playing a bunch of games instead of practicing. 
• American coaches were woefully under-trained in technical soccer skills. 
• A result of the first two means that most American players spend far less time with on-ball training and don't develop the otherworldly dribbling and passing skills that top European leagues require.
• Playing on traveling teams is expensive. Many talented players are excluded because their families can't afford the five-figure expenses and/or the amount of time required from parents.

Creating more Christian Pulisics will involve a lot of this

To its credit, the USSF has taken steps towards a better system:

When U.S. Soccer first reached out to Lemov, in 2010, the organization was already in the midst of a wholesale reformation. Four years earlier, soccer executives had toured the world, studying what other countries did differently. They had learned, among other things, that kids in other nations spent less time playing soccer games than did their American counterparts, and more time practicing. In response, the federation created its own youth league, called the U.S. Soccer Development Academy, modeled after international best practices. Top youth-soccer clubs could apply to join, if their coaches agreed to get licensed and follow a new model for training. The academy now comprises 152 soccer clubs across the U.S., which have produced more than 180 professional players.

They are also taking concrete steps in ensuring better coaching, hiring pedagogical expert (and folk hero in the part of teaching world I live in) Doug Lemov to instruct the instructors.

“For 20 years, we had focused almost exclusively on closing our global gap in the technical and tactical components of the game,” says Dave Chesler, U.S. Soccer’s director of coaching development. “In doing this, perhaps we had lost perspective on the quality of our delivery—a k a the essential mechanics of teaching. ” Chesler, who had himself spent 15 years as a high-school chemistry and physics teacher before becoming a full-time soccer coach, realized after reading about Lemov in The Times Magazine that he had never transferred some of his own best teaching techniques to the field. He made immediate modifications to his coaching—for example, slowing down practices and focusing more on watching the players, making sure each one demonstrated every step in a drill before moving on—and he sent copies of Lemov’s book to his national staff. And then he asked Lemov for help.

The USSF is rich enough that this will gradually produce more elite players. However, the men's World Cup will be in North America in eight years. Accompanying the prep for the tournament will be both avalanche of money and also pressure to field a top American team. 

Like this, but for soccer players

So I have a radical idea: start an Apollo-like project to concentrate coaching resources in two metro areas that are already teeming with talent -- say, Los Angeles and Houston. Both are substantially larger than Croatia. Both are already soccer-crazy, have a ton of local money, and field multiple professional teams. Build something similar to La Masia, FC Barcelona's famous training academy in each metro area. (Barca is already beating us to this punch - it has its own residential academy in Arizona.) Roger Bennett of Men in Blazers recently made the case that Mexican pro teams have a better understanding of talent in those heavily Latino cities than the American teams.

Elite teams win in part because their entire system has consistent training methods and style. American teams have historically relied on grit and athleticism. That doesn't get it done at the highest levels.

It shouldn't be a matter of cash. The USSF had $152 million in revenues for 2017. Fox Sports is paying between $400 to 600 million per World Cup for U.S. broadcast rights through 2026. God only knows how much companies like Nike, Adidas, and New Balance would make if there were several more American stars. It wouldn't even need to be Messi or Ronaldo-level superstar; an American Kylian Mbappe or Luka Modric would be a worth small country's GDP on its own. For a relatively small sum and considering what's at stake, a lot of groups could reap massive rewards if a world-class USMNT is driving audience attention.

Sure, some will complain about the unfair distribution of resources. But a moonshot project that develops a top-tier USMNT would lift the American soccer structure as whole. Think of what the 1999 women's World Cup championship team inspired. Some of those later played for 2015 champions. 

With all of the challenges facing our nation, this is one we could actually come together and solve.

What should we do about the Supreme Court itself?

A wide lens changes perspective

Framing

I'm returning to Amanda Ripley's fantastic article "Complicating the Narrative" about applying professional mediation techniques to writing about conflict in our society. Her first recommendation was to listen to a person, then amplify the contradictions in an answer as a way to tease out nuance. Then, as a person explains more, there's a greater opportunity for common ground.

The second recommendation -- adopt a wider lens -- is useful when you've hit a roadblock in a conflict. The purpose is to "start a bigger conversation," as Ripley writes:

Decades of research have shown that when journalists widen the lens [...] the public reacts differently. Starting in the 1990s, Stanford political science professor Shanto Iyengar exposed people to two kinds of TV news stories: wider-lens stories (which he called “thematic” and which focused on broader trends or systemic issues — like, say, the causes of poverty) and narrow-lens stories (which he labeled “episodic” and which focused on one individual or event — say, for example, one welfare mother or homeless man).

Again and again, people who watched the narrow-lens stories on the welfare mother were more likely to blame individuals for poverty afterwards — even if the story of the welfare mother was compassionately rendered. By contrast, people who saw the wider-lens stories were more likely to blame government and society for the problems of poverty. The wider the lens, the wider the blame, in other words.

Which brings us to the recent nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Mimicking how Mitch McConnell and company treated Obama nominee Merrick Garland, several senators announced their opposition before Trump announced the the pick, citing a corrupt process. It's fait accompli that nearly all Democratic senators will vote against the nomination. 

In short, conflict over Kavanaugh's nomination isn't going to lead us anywhere productive. It's now an exercise in raw power politics. 

We can and should debate the specifics of the nomination. We'll likely have more interesting information in a couple of weeks. For now, let's consider what the Supreme Court could be. 

***
Context

From The Week

First, some factors that got us here:

• Increasing gridlock in Congress made it more difficult to address policy problems through legislation. Major points along this route include instituting the Hastert Rule, banning earmarks, the increasingly regular use of the filibuster (especially during the Obama years), the gutting of campaign finance laws thanks to Citizens United, and the rise of partisan news outlets. 

• This caused presidents of both parties to use executive orders and executive branch rule-making process to enact more policy. 

• This means courts are playing an ever-more important role in deciding how far the president and regulatory agencies can go in enacting policy. This has massive implications for both conservatives and liberals.

• The Supreme Court is one of the few places in the American system where issues can be decided with a sense of finality. This increases the stakes even more.

• The Supreme Court is, by design, not a very democratic (note the small-d) institution. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The purpose of lifetime appointments was to insulate its members from the pressures of elections and politicians. 

• Medical advances like vaccines, antibiotics, and various cancer treatments (among hundreds of others) have made the average lifespan of a highly educated American to be much longer than Founders could've imagined. (Life was a little more capricious in the late 1700s.)

• As Republicans have lost the popular vote more often**, they've depended on anti-democratic (again, note the small-d) measures to maintain power. This includes maximizing the number of conservatives in the judiciary, while curtailing the number of judges nominated by Obama. In addition, conservatives built a massive legal infrastructure since the founding of the Federalist Society in 1982 to ensure the farm system always has enough depth.

** George W. Bush's 2004 campaign is the only time the GOP won the popular presidential vote in 30 years. Separately, Democrats in the Senate have consistently gotten more overall votes, but because of the structure of the Senate, control has shifted back and forth between the parties. Republicans and Democrats in the House have alternated winning the overall vote total the past few elections.

***

Widening the Lens

We are at an unhealthy point for our democracy (for this and a lot of other reasons).  The pressures on the high court increases the likelihood it could lose the trust of the public. Too much is riding on 1) the power held by a small number of lifetime appointees, 2) the physical and mental health of nine people, and 3) the arbitrariness by which presidents get to make appointments. It's possible Trump could make two or three more appointments and the 46th president may not have the chance to make any. Finally, the political norms that governed appointments for most of the 20th century are no longer operable. 

Here's an idea: a Constitutional amendment making the following modifications to the judicial branch:

• All federal judges -- district, appeals, and Supreme Court -- serve 15-year appointments. This would end the morbid watch for septuagenarian or octogenarian judges to retire or die. This would also encourage appointing judges in the prime of their careers rather than handing a Supreme Court seat to the youngest plausible jurist. This could also lessen the stakes of potential battles if a justice became senile, but refused to step down.

• Judicial appointments should be on a cycle so that equal numbers of seats are up per year. Each president would get to appoint two Supreme Court justices per four-year presidential term. Voters get a realistic expectation of how much to weigh judicial nominations when deciding on a presidential candidate.

• Each presidential judicial nominee is guaranteed an up-or-down vote in the Senate within six months of her or his nomination or the nominee is automatically appointed to the seat. No filibusters. 

***

Top of the U.S. Supreme Court

This is less about advocating for a specific set of solutions and more about people thinking what our Supreme Court should be. That's a discussion that could ultimately defuse some of the tensions around both the appointment process as well as the high court's decisions themselves. It's always going to matter, but it shouldn't feel like political Armageddon every time a justice retires or dies.

What say you? Leave a comment here or on Twitter or Facebook. 

Amplifying contradictions - So what does a humane immigration policy look like?

Per what I wrote earlier, I wanted try an exercise of "amplifying contradictions" to tease out nuance on the immigration issue. I hope you’ll excuse the convoluted nature of questioning myself. My goal is honestly address the questions of an interlocutor who is tough and well-intentioned. 

I have no interest in addressing the segment of society that approaches the immigration issue in bad faith and barely-disguised racism. I don't see where common ground is possible. For that part of electorate, I agree with Jon Lovett's dictum to get two votes for every one of theirs.

See these kids? Don't separate them from their parents.

1. You’ve critiqued the family separation policy. What should border patrol agents do instead to people claiming asylum at the border?

A few things: First, families should be kept together. Otherwise, this traumatizes children and empowers human traffickers and other who would take advantage of minors without their parents present to protect them. 

Second, go back to the previous policy of assigning parents a court date for an immigration judge to decide the case. To rectify the system’s huge backlog, the government should hire many, many more immigration judges and caseworkers. While the attendance rate was about 90 percent for previous families assigned a court date, increased efficiency would likely drive increase attendance. 

Finally, running a system well takes people. This is where I part ways with "Abolish ICE" folks. There's a need for competent, well-funded law enforcement agencies* focused on border patrol and another focused on trans-national trafficking issues. Good policing matters. Everyone is safer. However, I wouldn't be surprised if a future administration decides to rebrand and reconstitute** the agencies because trust between the brand has been so badly damaged.

* An oft-overlooked fact is that two separate federal agencies are in play here. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) manages the border. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) handles deportation and trafficking crimes. 

** Both agencies are housed in the Department of Homeland Security, which was created post-9/11. Therefore, the sort of mass reorganization this would take isn't unheard of. It wouldn't be like reconstituting a more established agency like, say, the FBI or DEA.

2. Won’t this empower human traffickers and bad actors to fake their way through the process?

Not necessarily. A major reason law enforcement struggles in separating the bad actors from those with legitimate needs is because immigrants can best tell officers the difference between the two. Unfortunately, immigrants, documented and undocumented, don’t trust law enforcement because they believe they’ll be harassed or deported if they have any interactions with officers. (This is a major reason why serious crimes like rape go unreported at higher rates in immigrant communities and many local police forces stress that they won’t turn anyone over to ICE.)

Effective law enforcement requires trust and cooperation from the communities officers are trying to police. That trust must be earned. Taking kids away from their parents does precisely the opposite.

Victims of human trafficking are taken into custody in Guatemala

3. If the federal government is too permissive, could it create a structure that encourages immigration from central American countries, thereby further destabilizing them (because of mass migration) and empower human traffickers (who prey on people’s dreams of making it to the U.S.)?

This is a real concern that I don’t hear discussed enough. Everyone will be better off if countries like El Salvador and Guatemala become much more stable. I’m not an expert on Central American geopolitics, so I won't go much beyond generalities. But here goes:

Creating a functioning states means more than sending a bunch of DEA agents there. It means investing in basic infrastructure, health care, and education. This will be expensive, though less expensive than our military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan (with an arguably better benefit for Americans).

To deter human traffickers, it would make a lot more sense if lawmakers and law enforcement first acknowledged in policy what American businesses have been doing for a long time: employing a ton of undocumented immigrants, especially seasonal workers.  Once everyone becomes more upfront about what is happening and way, the next step it to implement an effective work visa program so people have a way to travel legally and safely to and from the United States for work without relying on traffickers. 

This could be financed by a reasonable tax on workers. Employers get the benefit of not exposing themselves to legal trouble and also predictability as far as when workers will be available and for how long.

4. Isn’t that just turbocharging immigrants taking jobs away from Americans?

On a practical level, not really. For a lot of these seasonal agriculture jobs, not enough American workers lack the skill set or just don't want to do the work. Many more Central Americans grew up on farms than U.S. citizens. If we want to have a functional food supply in this country, we need to import workers.

Apropos of nothing, plenty of Americans could do the food service jobs at Mar-a-Lago.

When future generations ask what the Trump administration was like, this is the story I'm going to show them: https://t.co/qb0EORtTql

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) July 9, 2018

5. The upshot of what you’re arguing is that a lot more immigrants will be entering the U.S. from country that are basically failed states. Will those immigrants bring those issues with them?

The long history of American immigration says no. For example, Irish immigrants, many fleeing from a world-historical famine, have done just fine. In the short-term, first generation immigrants are likely to struggle. This has a lot to do with them lacking much beyond a grade-school education and not speaking English (a notoriously difficult language to learn as an adult). 

Also, violence from drug cartels are a major cause of Central American countries' struggles. As the U.S. figures out how to tackle the opioid crisis, it’s possible that we could adopt a more public health-focused approach (similar to countries like Portugal) and decriminalize many possession-related offenses. 

While this wouldn’t get rid of the cartels -- Prohibition birthed American organized crime and it obviously didn’t go away after Repeal -- it would weaken their financial might and also free law enforcement to focus on the cartels’ other illegal activities like extortion and human trafficking. 

Homicide rates in Central America, per The Economist

A lot my arguments boil down to these themes:

- Loosen laws to reflect realities on the ground. By narrowing the focus, it should be easier to enforce those laws. 

- To make enforcement more efficient, increase the capacity of the system by hiring more judges, caseworkers, and law enforcement officers.

- Prioritize easier, legal entry for most immigrants who want to work here so as to 1) build trust between law enforcement agencies and undocumented immigrants and 2) law enforcement can devote resources to targeting the bad actors. 

The idea is not to weaken law enforcement. Instead, refocus resources on the cartels and associated criminals. Weakening the cartels' grip on money and power will go a long way towards stabilizing the countries by giving their citizens less of an incentive to want to leave in the first place.

***

It’s worth remembering that moving away from everything and everyone a person has ever known is mind-bogglingly difficult. Most people wouldn’t want to do it unless they believed they had no real choice. Therefore, the people who do take this on are likely to exceptionally entrepreneurial and hardworking. These are folks we should want in our community! 

Finally, even now, undocumented immigrants pay taxes. As the native-born U.S. birthrate hovers below replacement level, we will need more young taxpayers to pay for Social Security and Medicare costs of the two biggest generations of Americans -- the Baby Boomers and their children. Immigrants can help mitigate the need to pay higher taxes.

The last point is especially important because some folks will be unresponsive to appeals on ethical or humanitarian grounds. Successful political activism usually means marshaling an unwieldy coalition on narrow grounds. What I hope is that by putting better immigration policy in the economic interests of the "lower taxes!" crowd, plus giving employers some legal certainty, we can create political will that will ultimately result in a lot less needless suffering of some of the world's most vulnerable people. 

Right now, the people who are satisfied with the status quo on the border are the drug traffickers (who appreciate the re-allocation of law enforcement resources) and white nationalists. Those are groups I'd rather see made miserable. 

If this guy is smiling, we're doing it wrong.

'When people show you who they are, believe them.'

The reason it is taking a long time to reunite these kids with their parents is that it was never the plan. https://t.co/Ld4KnPgfxo

— Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) July 6, 2018

Maya Angelou famously said, "When people show you who are they are, believe them." We need to keep that in mind because the news of child separation at the border is a few weeks old. There's a tendency to forget the mendacity and cruelty.

A timeline:

* The Trump administration, spearheaded by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and senior White House aide Stephen Miller (a former Sessions aide), implemented a policy of forced separation for all immigrants showing up at the southern border, including those seeking asylum, an internationally protected right.

* After being picked up by border patrol, children were forcibly separated from their parents because their parents were accused of, at worst, a misdemeanor crime. (Note: seeking asylum is not a crime. It is protected by treaty, ratified into the U.S. law by the Senate.) Children and parents were incarcerated in separate locations. In no other context does this happen in America. 

* A federal judge ordered the government to reunite the families within a given time period. Note how the judge lays waste the Trump administration's actions:

The government readily keeps track of personal property of detainees in criminal and immigration proceedings. Money, important documents, and automobiles, to name a few, are routinely catalogued, stored, tracked and produced upon a detainees' release, at all levels—state and federal, citizen and alien. Yet, the government has no system in place to keep track of, provide effective communication with, and promptly produce alien children. The unfortunate reality is that under the present system migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property. Certainly, that cannot satisfy the requirements of due process.

The facts set forth before the Court portray reactive governance -- responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the Government's own making. They belie measured and ordered governance, which is central to the concept of due process enshrined in our Constitution.

* After mass outcry, President Trump signed an executive order to reunite the families and jail the entire family together. By ordering to detain the families indefinitely, the government is violating a different court order. 

* For the overwhelming amount of cases, reuniting families hasn't happened. The federal government hasn't tracked which children and parents are connected. From the NYT:

...In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process.

As a result, the parents and children appeared in federal computers to have no connection to one another.

“That was the big problem. We weren’t able to see that information,” said one of the officials, who is directly involved in the reunification process.

Yet, I've run across a couple of folks (in conversations or on Twitter/Facebook) claiming that the executive order solved the family separation issue. Two things to remember:

1. It did not. See above.
2. Assume for the sake of an argument that it did. Administration officials showed what they are willing to do. Namely, take children away from their parents. 

I don't care what sort of policy end one wants to achieve. If part of the solution involves forcibly taking children away from their parents and not tracking where they go, then the people doing this are committing an evil act. The policy goal is irrelevant. 

Think of this a different way: If I robbed a bank, but gave the money back, the FBI would not forgive and forget. 

One other thing: there's a temptation to put the blame entirely on Trump. That's not quite right. It lets too many people abdicate responsibility. To implement a policy like this takes cooperation from people up and down the federal government hierarchy. Remember the actions Sessions, Miller, and the officers who did things like not even bathe toddlers: 

14. Months. Old. https://t.co/Z3srt7KVco pic.twitter.com/uUgcxgbR0L

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 6, 2018

The people separating children from families have shown us who they are. We should never forget.

***
Update (7/6/18, 4:35 p.m.)

Priorities https://t.co/POUiQFa9Vm

— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) July 6, 2018

***

Yesterday I wrote about how we have multiple views on pretty much every issue. That's true here, too. Even though, I've written quite a bit about immigration and my positions are clear, I can think of some criticisms and conflicting views. 

The nature of these posts is they tend to be strident in one direction. It's worth noting that I believe proper enforcement is necessary. Having a humane and useful immigration system and also improving public safety shouldn't be competing interests. 

In the spirit of bringing out nuance, I'll address some common criticisms of views like mine in the near future. 

Asking the right questions is often about noticing a person's conflicting answers

My brief experience as a professional journalist in 2004-2005 frustrated me in a couple of ways. One is that I rarely felt like I was getting to the real story. I'd go to a board of education meeting or the county supervisors meeting, both full of folks disagreeing about everything short of which day of the week it was. I'd listen to it, interview the people, hear about this view or that one, but never feel like I got to the root of the issue. 

And nothing really changed.

I didn't have a clear picture of why I struggled so much until I read a recent article by Amanda Ripley explaining that I wasn't the only one with this problem. There's an epidemic of not asking the right questions and it's killing the ability of people in our country to talk to each other.

As politicians have become more polarized, [journalists] have increasingly allowed ourselves to be used by demagogues on both sides of the aisle, amplifying their insults instead of exposing their motivations. Again and again, we have escalated the conflict and snuffed the complexity out of the conversation

Conflict is a fact of life and is a healthy part of a pluralistic society. However, I don't think anyone would argue that our voting public is in a good place. In Ripley's article, she interviews researchers who classify what is going in our country as "intractable conflict."

In this hypervigilant state, we feel an involuntary need to defend our side and attack the other. That anxiety renders us immune to new information. In other words: no amount of investigative reporting or leaked documents will change our mind, no matter what.

(Emphasis mine)

It gets worse.

Intractable conflicts feed upon themselves. The more we try to stop the conflict, the worse it gets. These feuds “seem to have a power of their own that is inexplicable and total, driving people and groups to act in ways that go against their best interests and sow the seeds of their ruin,” Coleman writes. 

The result of all of this is a situation where everyone is worse off. Something like the equivalent of burning down the house to prevent your ex from getting it. The experience is so scarring, too, that people often overcorrect and refuse to engage in any sort of conflict with anyone. Then, of course, nothing gets solved and problems fester.

So what to do? Ripley interviewed academics psychologists and professional mediators and came away with both a different goal for journalists and some ways to get there. 

The key is solving intractable conflicts is to introduce complexity. It muddles the internal narrative that each of carry about the person opposing us. It also is just a more accurate way of thinking about an issue. Ripley references Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's famous TED talk "A Single Story:" 

The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete.

***

Ripley goes on to describe several different techniques for making our stale narratives more complex. It's too much to put into a single post, so I'll focus on one today -- amplifying contradictions. 

Ripley frames this while watching a group interview Oprah conducted with several people, some of whom support Trump and others who oppose him. Two professional mediators joined Ripley to review Oprah's performance. She first interviews a Trump supporter named Tom:

“Every day I love him more and more. Every single day. I still don’t like his attacks, his Twitter attacks, if you will, on other politicians. I don’t think that’s appropriate. But, at the same time, his actions speak louder than words. And I love what he’s doing to this country. Love it.”   

Hearing this, Winfrey turned, without comment, to the woman next to Tom to solicit her (polar opposite) opinion. 

Both mediators jumped all over Winfrey for failing to respond to Tom. It was a perfect opportunity, said Cobb. “I would have said, ‘Gosh Tom, I didn’t know from out of the gate that we were going to have this kind of complexity in the room, and I compliment you because it’s so easy to say Yes or No, but you’ve actually said two things at the same time.”

(Emphasis mine)

Amplifying contradictions is about catching those time we hear a person in conversation say two things at the same time, then asking to explain the contradictions. Not as a "gotcha" moment but rather a way to draw out nuance. 

Listen for the next time someone is talking about their opinion about...well, anything. The thing is, we have multiple views about pretty much any subject. Heck, I've got conflicting views about frying bacon. (I like it prepared medium rare except when in a breakfast burrito. Then I want crispy so it contrasts with the eggs and cheese. See? Nuance!) 

It's weird, but as much as we humans like to talk, we often don't explain enough. Instead, we fall in to the trap of telling a single story. We stereotype ourselves.