« March 2006 | Main | May 2006 »
April 28, 2006
Beneficial inaction
As events this year have already demonstrated, Congress has a great capacity to shape U.S. foreign and national security policy. Certain institutional realities, however, limit its abilities in these policy realms. Perhaps foremost among these limitations is Congress' deliberative nature. Whereas the president can make a decision and thereby define the institutional voice of the executive branch, Congress must deal with the views, agendas, and personalities of 535 co-equal members before it can even consider speaking with a single institutional voice. Such difficulties were amply highlighted during the recent debate over immigration policy. Sometimes, however, the difficulties wrought by deliberation are actually by design, and accordingly represent a blessing in disguise.
There is no question that immigration is an urgent issue in the United States. Drawn by family ties, political idealism, and the promise of employment, as many as 12 million unauthorized or “illegal” immigrants currently reside in the United States. The scope of the immigration debate encompasses many fields of public policy, from national security (border control) to economic policy (enforcement of regulations prohibiting the hiring of illegal immigrants) to cultural affairs (assimilation of immigrants into U.S. society). In terms of sheer economic and societal impact, immigration may be the foreign policy issue felt most directly by many Americans. Yet the current U.S. immigration policy is woefully inadequate. For this reason, immigration reform has been a priority for President Bush since he took office. In the midst of the recent debate, he reminded Congress that it “needs to pass a comprehensive bill that secures the border, improves interior enforcement, and creates a temporary-worker program to strengthen our security and our economy.”
Any immigration reform, however, would have to originate in Congress. Immigration has long been a uniquely divisive issue for politicians, and the proposals considered by legislators in recent weeks spanned the political spectrum and forged unlikely alliances across party lines. In the Senate, a number of proposals were considered that would have offered work visas or guest worker status to illegal immigrants for varying periods of time and that would have made it more difficult for employers to hire illegal immigrants. One such proposal, primarily sponsored by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA), passed the Judiciary Committee by a surprisingly bipartisan 12-6 vote.
In the House, however, a much different proposal had won approval. Sponsored by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the House bill would have built a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border, made it a felony to be an undocumented worker, and criminalized the act of giving assistance to illegal immigrants. Sensenbrenner noted, “Illegal aliens should not be granted amnesty and a path to citizenship. This would be a slap in the face to all those who have followed the law and have come to America legally.”
The unpredictable politics of immigration policy, plus the widely divergent bills emerging from the House and the Senate, made any deal seem impossible. But just before Congress recessed in the middle of the April, a hopeful glimpse of compromise emerged in the Senate. Under a complex deal reached by Republican and Democratic leadership, the proposal would have required illegal immigrants who had been in the country between two and five years to return to their home country briefly, re-enter the United States as temporary workers, and ultimately become eligible to seek citizenship. Illegal immigrants who had been in the United States for longer than five years would not have needed to return to their home countries, while those who had been in the United States for less than two years would have been required to leave without any assurances of returning. The Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid (D-NV), praised the deal: “Even though we all feel good about [the deal], it pales in comparison to the millions and millions of people out there who today feel that they have a chance to participate in the American dream.”
Alas, the earlier predictions of legislative collapse were borne out. At almost literally the last minute, the compromise reached by Republicans and Democrats in the Senate fell apart. Republicans attributed the failure to the Democratic refusal to allow votes on amendments to the immigration bill. Democrats claimed that Republicans would have drastically altered the proposal during the conference process with the House, resulting in a final bill that would have borne little resemblance to the original Senate compromise. Many pundits suggested that an immigration deal had always been a long shot, for neither party would have been willing to grant the other a political victory during an election year. And because the deal collapsed right before a congressional recess, its failure was widely interpreted as more than just a temporary setback. Once halted, the momentum for reform would be hard to restart.
Almost universally, this legislative collapse was greeted with frustration. Indeed, that this session of Congress will likely produce no new immigration legislation represents a disappointment for Bush, for advocates on all sides of the immigration debate, and for immigrants themselves. There is, however, another way to interpret this legislative collapse. In a perfect world, Congress should accurately represent popular will. In the case of immigration, there was plenty of will to go around, on all sides of the debate. Vocal and well-organized demonstrations by immigrants and their supporters across the country took many by surprise, while the immigration debate made minor celebrities of newscasters like CNN's Lou Dobbs who railed against the United States' “broken borders.”
How, then, can this abundance of popular will be reconciled with an apparent collapse of the legislative process? It is important to remember that the U.S. system of government was created by people inherently distrustful of authority—the founders specifically wanted the policymaking process to be difficult, time-consuming, and deliberative. The process was to simultaneously convey popular will and limit its excesses. While many lamented the collapse of the Senate compromise, that deal vastly differed from the Sensenbrenner bill that had cleared the House. Even if the Senate compromise had survived, the likelihood of any legislation passing both chambers of Congress was slim. In other words, the process was difficult, time-consuming, and deliberative—just as it was supposed to be. In this particular case, however, the result was not new legislation but stalemate. After exhausting the policymaking options available at the time, could such legislative inaction actually be a desirable outcome?
Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, suggested something along these lines in the midst of the immigration debate in Congress. Although he acknowledged that much is wrong with U.S. immigration policy—border security could be tightened, and those immigrants in the United States illegally need to somehow be better integrated into U.S. society—Zakaria also noted that things could be much worse: “Compared with every other country in the world, America does immigration superbly. Do we really want to junk that for the French approach?”
This is an important perspective that risks being overlooked amidst the fallout of the legislative collapse. Although immigration remains an urgent public policy problem, perhaps inaction represents the most sensible course available at this time. If the political stars are not properly aligned, inaction is certainly preferable to bad policy, and it can pave the way for better policy in the future. And in this election year, Senators and Congressmen are acutely aware that their political stars are ripe for realignment.
Foreign Policy Association, 27 April 2006
Posted by Daniel Widome at 10:05 AM to Trans-geographical, U. S. Politics
April 04, 2006
Dubious dialogue
On March 18, the foreign ministers of Australia, Japan, and the United States met in Sydney for a "Trilateral Strategic Dialogue." As usual, the United States was the primary driver of the agenda, and, invariably, the focus was on China. But instead of promoting regional unity, the "strategic dialogue" was an example of how the United States is driving the region apart. In the process, it is doing China a great favor.
To understand why, it helps to look at the relationships between each of the trilateral partners and China. Japan came into the meeting with the most strained relationship. Japan and China have long been the most important powers in East Asia, and tensions between them have only grown in recent years. On Monday, the Japanese foreign minister (and trilateral participant), Taro Aso, sharply lamented the growth in China's military spending: "It's not clear what China is using the money for [and it] creates a sense of threat for surrounding countries."
Australia, on the other hand, came into the dialogue with a decidedly different view of China. Australian Prime Minister John Howard has attempted to find a balance between aligning with Asia, on the one hand, and with the United States, on the other. He supported the U.S. invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, but he also recently signed the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Treaty of Amity and Co-operation -- a move he had long resisted but ultimately approved for the sake of better relations with Australia's Asian neighbors. Perhaps more important, Australia's export market is becoming increasingly reliant on China's voracious economy.
The United States, for its part, viewed the dialogue as a way to augment its array of bilateral alliances in the region. But China could easily have viewed the dialogue as just the latest U.S. attempt to contain it. In Congress, vilifying China -- large, menacing, and conveniently Red -- has become a bipartisan pastime. Last year, politicians united in exploiting public fear to scuttle the purchase of U.S.-based Unocal by CNOOC, a state-owned Chinese oil firm. And in advance of the trilateral meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned that China could become a "negative force" in the region. In the trilateral partnership, the U.S. position is clearly more in line with Japan's than Australia's.
This alignment of interests was clear to all, and Australia sought to disavow any notion that the trilateral dialogue was designed to counter China. Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer noted that "a policy of containment of China would be a very big mistake." But regardless of its true purpose, the dialogue was shrouded in speculation and opacity. The media consequently portrayed it as a nascent anti-China alliance -- so for all intents and purposes, that is what it was. The only mention of China in the joint statement emanating from the dialogue was an anodyne reference to its "constructive engagement in the region": a sure sign that the trilateral members had difficulty finding common ground.
China, for its part, has not been standing still while the United States attempts to bolster its regional alliances. In December, the inaugural East Asian Summit was held, in Kuala Lumpur. An outgrowth of ASEAN, the summit was inevitably dominated by China, through its sheer size; should this summit evolve into an organization, China's influence within it will only grow. The price for Australian participation in the summit, however, was its signature on the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Co-operation. For Howard, this was not an insignificant price to pay, for the treaty severely limits Australia's ability to assist in the Bush administration's "war on terror." Despite his conservative credentials, it is difficult to imagine Howard paying a similar price for the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue.
Indeed, Australia is keen to exploit and expand its relationship with China. On Monday, during a visit to Australia by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Downer signed an agreement to sell uranium to China. An official in the Australian foreign ministry noted that the United States was "hardly in a position" to criticize the agreement, given the Bush administration's recent deal to sell nuclear fuel to India. Wen, for his part, diplomatically made note of Australia's precarious positioning between the United States and China: "We believe that countries which are allied with the United States can also be China's friends, and Australia is one of them."
None of this should suggest that the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue is a wasted effort. Surely the United States, Japan and Australia have many common interests, and it is in each country's best interest to pursue continued cooperation with one another. Likewise, the sheer opacity of many aspects of China's growth is reason enough for caution.
But the United States must avoid sending mixed signals -- to allies, foes and everyone in between. Under the Bush administration, the U.S. position toward China is closer to Japan's than to Australia's. Because the United States and Japan are longstanding allies, this is understandable. But Australia is also an ally, and not the first -- or the only -- one to find itself needlessly torn between the United States and China.
There once was a time when a country, faced with such a choice, would clearly pick the United States. That time may be over.
Providence Journal, 5 April 2005
Posted by Daniel Widome at 10:51 PM to Asia, Australia/NZ, U. S. Politics
