The sudden influx of unaccompanied minors into the United States from south of the border is complicating the president’s plans to reform immigration by any means necessary:

Absent the current crisis at the border with Mexico, Obama might have made his next step a big one. Activists have been pressuring him to extend protection from deportation to a larger class of undocumented immigrants, building on his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, which made it possible for undocumented immigrants who arrived as children to gain a legal foothold in the U.S.

But since October, more than 52,000 unaccompanied children, most of them from Central America, have wound up in the care of the U.S. government. An additional 39,000 mothers with children have crossed the border into U.S. custody over the same period.

The influx has changed the political calculations. The White House is still off balance, but even more awkwardly than before. Unlike the presence of 11 million or so undocumented immigrants in the U.S., most of whom have been here for many years, the children’s crisis both began, and escalated, entirely under Obama’s administration.

Republicans, suddenly blessed with a fact that fits their pre-packaged narrative of a lawless president overseeing a besieged border, have what they’ve long lacked: ammunition. Like his colleagues, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte has achieved nothing on immigration. Now, however, he has 52,000 reasons why nothing can be done. He’ll be traveling to the Rio Grande Valley next week to lambaste the administration for allowing the children’s crusade to overrun Texas.

Presumably, we need these youthful migrants to start new businesses here in the United States. The news reports on this development have conjured up images of rosy-cheeked urchins but the reality appears to be a bit more complicated. A sizeable percentage of the unaccompanied minors are teenage males and there have been reports some of them are gang members.

I repeat the point I’ve made about this in the past. The missing link in this discussion is the government of Mexico. According to the reports the preponderance of these young people aren’t Mexicans but from farther south, i.e. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, maybe even Colombia. They’re crossing more than a thousand miles of Mexico to arrive at our border. I find it incredible that could take place in the numbers being reported without the Mexican government being aware of it and maybe even complicit in it. This report from The Economist, for example, suggests that Mexico is deporting these kids into the United States rather than repatriating them.

The Chicago Board of Education is laying off more than 1,000 teachers and school staff:

Chicago Public Schools officials told 550 teachers and 600 more school staff Thursday that they’re out of a job.

The number of dreaded phone calls being made by principals is based on how many kids CPS officials project will show up on the first day next fall.

“The staffing changes are driven most directly by declining student enrollment,” CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said in a conference call with reporters.

This follows on the heels of thousands being fired last year with thousands more the year before. To some extent this is an annual ritual—they lay off 1,000, 600 are hired back.

But it’s part of a pattern that’s been going on for a decade. As I’ve documented before, education spending in Chicago continues to increase even as the number of students being educated shrinks. If the extra money were being spent on more teachers and schools, it would be one thing but it’s not. It’s being spent on former teachers and more staff being paid higher wages.

I think it was George Santayana who defined fanatacism as redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. Using that gauge I think it’s fair to say that here in Chicago we support the schools fanatically.

On a related topic, Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union is being reported to be seriously considering running for mayor:

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said Thursday she is “seriously thinking” about mounting a formal challenge to Rahm Emanuel.

“I’m a little sick of the mayor and I don’t see anyone stepping up,” Lewis told the Chicago Sun-Times by telephone Thursday evening. “I am seriously thinking about it.”

She denied a WMAQ-Channel 5 report that she has met with election lawyers about her own campaign possibilities, saying she has spoken with attorneys about CTU members who are running for office.

Lewis has made no bones about wanting to oust Emanuel, with whom she’s sparred since he took office in 2011 and who supposedly shouted, “F – – – you, Lewis” in an early meeting with her.

The mayor doesn’t really need to worry about losing the campaign contributions the CTU represents—much of his election funding comes from outside Chicago. However, opposition from a serious opponent might well present a problem. It might cut into the time he’d otherwise be devoting to getting whatever Democratic candidate is running in 2016 elected.

I think that this “Moderate Syrian Rebel Application Form” from The Borowitz Report says pretty much everything there is to say about the president’s plan to give a half billion dollars worth of weapons and training to “the moderate Syrian armed opposition”. Here’s a sample question:

If I were given a highly lethal automatic weapon by the United States, I would:
A) Only kill exactly the people that the United States wanted me to kill
B) Try to kill the right people, with the caveat that I have never used an automatic weapon before
C) Kill people only after submitting them to a rigorous vetting process
D) Immediately let the weapon fall into the wrong hands

Here’s Pat Lang’s take on the plan:

Why? Why? The Free Syrian Army (FSA) is one of the smaller and weaker elements in the galaxy of anti Syrian government forces. They have had their asses kicked by the SAG, al-Nusra and ISIS. They will continue to have their asses kicked. The SAG’ armed forces have become a much stronger force and the notion that the FSA will somehow be transformed into the winners of the Syrian jug f–k is amusing.

Bashar Assad wants to be taken in from the cold, just as Qathafi wanted the same thing.

From the time we relented about Qathafi until we chose to get rid of him, Qathafi was not a problem for the US. Why will we not listen to the Syrian government? pl

As I’ve asked in the past, what’s the American interest at stake here? Not the French interest or the Italian interest or what’s against the Russian interest but what supports whatever interests we have in Syria?

If ending the carnage is Syria is one of those interests, can anyone seriously contend the move will hasten that?

While I’m on the subject of the economy, you might want to take a look at this post from Doug Short. In a whole raft of charts and graphs with not a lot of excess verbiage he says much the same thing I did yesterday, i.e. we’re probably not diving into another recession just yet.

It’s nice to see somebody trotting out data that supports conclusions I’ve basically come to by having my ear to the ground.

Economist Heidi Shierholz dispels several myths about our present employment situation:

The long-term unemployed are not fundamentally different than other unemployed workers, and there is no evidence that the mere fact of being unemployed long-term fundamentally damages workers’ productivity. Moreover, there is no evidence that long-term unemployment cannot be solved through macroeconomic policy to boost the aggregate demand shortfall. In fact, today’s high long-term unemployment rate is exactly what you’d expect given the overall weak labor market, how long it has been so weak, and pre-recession trends in long-term unemployment. In other words, what is going on now with long-term unemployment is right in line with the historical relationship between long-term unemployment and the overall unemployment rate. Today’s long-term unemployment crisis is part and parcel of the weak labor market more broadly and there is no evidence that the long-term unemployed have somehow hardened into structurally unemployed workers with the wrong or depreciated skills.

One way to see this is to note that today’s long-term unemployment crisis is not confined to workers who don’t have the right education or happen to be looking for work in specific occupations or industries where jobs aren’t available. Long-term unemployment is elevated in every age, gender, and racial and ethnic group, and it’s elevated in every major occupation, in every major industry, and at all levels of educational attainment. Some groups definitely have lower long-term unemployment rates than others, but that is always true, in good times and bad. The key point is that for all groups, the long-term unemployment rate is substantially higher now than it was before the recession started.

Elevated long-term unemployment for all groups, like we see today, and the fact that long-term unemployment has improved right in line with other measures of labor market improvement means that today’s long-term unemployment crisis is not due to something wrong with these particular workers. It is overwhelmingly due to more than six years of weak business hiring across the board.

Her explanation for the sluggish hiring is a shortfall in aggregate demand and her prescriptions for mending the situation are:

• Passing extended benefits again to help the long-term unemployed, who are the ones who have been the hardest hit by the lasting effects of the Great Recession,
• Undertaking other measures that also stimulate aggregate demand, and
• Enacting policies that spread total hours worked across more workers.

I wish that Dr. Shierholz would explain the differences between the United States and France when it attempted that third solution some time ago. Why would that work here now when it wouldn’t work there then?

It’s interesting to consider her observations in this context:

Government data show that since 2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal). This is remarkable given that native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population. Though there has been some recovery from the Great Recession, there were still fewer working-age natives holding a job in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job was 5.7 million above the 2000 level.

All of the net increase in employment went to immigrants in the last 14 years partly because, even before the Great Recession, immigrants were gaining a disproportionate share of jobs relative to their share of population growth. In addition, natives’ losses were somewhat greater during the recession and immigrants have recovered more quickly from it. With 58 million working-age natives not working, the Schumer-Rubio bill (S.744) and similar House measures that would substantially increase the number of foreign workers allowed in the country seem out of touch with the realities of the U.S. labor market.

That would suggest that immigration reform as it’s now being defined would actually aggravate the situation.

I don’t think that the report from the Center for Immigration Studies linked above should be considered dispositive but I think it should at least be considered.

Perhaps we should add this to the mix. In response to Lawrence Summers’s repeated prescription for infrastructure spending to make up for the shortfall in aggregate demand John Cochrane retorts:

It’s a quantitative problem. The natural rate is per Laubach and Williams, about -0.5%. But we still have 2% inflation, so the actual real interest rate is -1.5%, well below -0.5%. With 2% inflation, we need something like a 4-5% negative “natural rate” to cause a serious zero bound problem. While Summers’ discussion points to low interest rates, it is awfully hard to get any sensible economic model that has a sharply negative long run real rate

Moreover, to Summers, the one and only problem worth mentioning in the US economy is that the “natural rate” is negative while nominal rates cannot fall below zero. Can’t we think of one single solitary additional distortion in the American economy?

What to do? Summers sees the problem as eternal lack of “demand” and recommends more of it. I think this more of a microeconomic/lack of growth theory problem needing the removal of distortions.

We still agree a bit — Summers starts with “There is surely scope in today’s United States for regulatory and tax reforms that would promote private investment.” That’s distortion removal.

A major problem with the infrastructure prescription is that everyone I’ve seen including Dr. Summers assumes an impossibly high Keynesian multiplier—4 or 5. I think that the actual empirical evidence of anything larger than a fractional multiplier is unconvincing. I’m skeptical we could actually launch infrastructure spending amounting to 5% of GDP all at once. Dribbling it out over five or ten years wouldn’t do it.

To actually do anything serious about unemployment I think that both of our major political parties would need to discard some closely held beliefs. Republicans would need to recognize that government spending is actually needed to get us out of the hole we’re in. While it might be true that over time the workings of the market would optimize economic growth neoclassical (or Austrian) theory doesn’t promise economic growth here. Under globalization the growth that results from the workings of the market here could occur in China, India, or Vietnam.

And Democrats would need to realize that government spending as such isn’t enough. We’d need a whole raft of other reforms some of which they would find utterly unacceptable.

Since I strongly suspect that both parties will hang on to their closely held beliefs regardless of the consequences for the foreseeable future, I don’t think we’ll be putting the people who lost their jobs during the Great Recession back to work any time soon.

Every few years the story about Jack Kennedy calling himself a jelly doughnut in his 1963 speech in Berlin makes the rounds. Here’s a first hand report of what actually happened, originally published in 1997:

From 1957 to 1980 I taught German at the Foreign Service Institute School of Language Studies, run by the Department of State in Washington, D.C. Classes were small, seldom more than four students, and I spent six hours every day with them, five days a week for five months. Following the school’s unconventional method, I started by giving my students a short sentence, which they had to repeat again and again until their pronunciation was correct. Longer sentences followed, and as their speaking ability progressed, I gave them dialogues to memorize to help promote conversation within the group. Mark Twain once said that it takes thirty years for intelligent people to master the German language. It’s too bad the Foreign Service Institute’s method hadn’t yet been tried; he would have admired its success.

One evening I received a phone call at my home in Maryland. “This is the White House calling,” said the voice on the line. “I’d like to speak with Mrs. Plischke from the Foreign Service Institute.” I laughed and said, “I’ll see you in the morning,” and hung up. I was absolutely sure one of my students had tried to play a joke on me.

An amusing expansion on the historical background.

When I read this headline, “4,500-year-old food items found in cupboard in Bristol”, with the remark “And you think I’m bad!” to my wife she quipped “It sounds like your mom’s cupboard.”

The actual cupboard in question is a university cupboard and the article is minorly interesting:

Researchers from the University of Bristol pulled a wooden box down from the top of a cupboard in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology and found it was filled with ancient pottery, seeds and animals bones.

The goods were marked with words such as ‘predynastic’, ‘sargonid’ and ‘Royal Tombs’ written on index cards.

The team’s investigation revealed that these were the remains of food offerings from a royal tomb at least 4,500 years old.

It is believed the remains were collected during famous excavations by Sir Leonard Wolley in the site of Ur in southern Iraq during the 1920s and 1930s, but staff had no idea the rare items were being stored at the university.

No mention of what was on the menu. I would think that would be worth researching.

Writing at the Wall Street Journal Edward C. Prescott And Lee E. Ohanian revisit a problem I’ve remarked on here from time to time—the decline in the rate of new company formation in the United States:

Virtually every state has suffered a drop in startups, which suggests that this is a national, and not a regional or state, problem. It may not be surprising that states hit hard by the recession, such as Arizona, California and Nevada, have a 25% to 35% lower rate of startups. But the startup rate in such business-friendly states as Tennessee, Texas and Utah is also down substantially, and in some cases exceeds the declines in the states that suffered most during the recession. Even North Dakota, which has benefited enormously from oil and gas fracking, has a startup rate lower than in the 1980s.

These numbers are likely to underestimate the decline in new business formation, because they do not count changes in the pace of new ideas and new business activity in existing establishments. The fact that the economy has been weak since 2007 suggests that new business activity has also declined in existing companies.

New businesses are critical for the U.S. economy to grow because a small fraction of today’s startups will become tomorrow’s economic heavyweights. Most of today’s workers are employed at older, established businesses, but the country cannot rely on existing companies to boost the economy. Businesses have a life cycle, in which even the largest and most successful reach a stage at which they stop expanding.

Here’s their analysis:

There are clear solutions to these problems. Immigration reform that increases the pool of skilled workers and potential new entrepreneurs. Tax reform that reduces and equalizes marginal tax rates on capital income, including reducing the corporate income tax, which currently exceeds 40% in some states. Reforming Dodd-Frank to make it easier and cheaper for small business to obtain loans. Reducing the regulatory burden on all businesses.

Something we should keep in mind is that there was, paradoxically, an enormous amount of new business formation during the Great Depression of the 1930s. I think we should entertain the possibility that measures we’re taking to prevent existing business from failing are also preventing new businesses from starting. That’s something too infrequently considered: established businesses that are able to mobilize government intervention will inevitably do so to beat down upstarts. There was an example in the news just this week. The Supreme Court has ruled against Aereo on intellectual property grounds. Whatever you think of the television network, Aereo, or intellectual property that’s a clear example of harnessing the power of government to prevent competition. Do enough of that and you’ll reduce the appetite for risk that is the definition of entrepeneurial activity and you’ll have a lot fewer business start-ups.

I also think that globalization is putting a damper on new business formation here. New businesses don’t grow out of nothing. The more manufacturing we send offshore, the more production engineering we send offshore. The more production engineering we send offshore, the more design engineering we send offshore. Historically, production engineering and design engineering are the soil from which a lot of start-up companies have grown.

Yesterday’s big political news is certainly the decision by House Speaker John Boehner to sue President Obama, charging that he is not “faithfully executing” the law. Dana Milbank scoffs:

To sue the president, Republicans are tying themselves in ideological knots. After howling about excessive lawsuits, they are embracing long-shot litigation. After lamenting activist judges, they are now insisting that judges be more activist and shed their long-standing reluctance to adjudicate disputes between the elected branches.

Even some conservative scholars argue that lawmakers probably don’t have a legal standing for such a suit. If Republicans persuade the courts to grant them standing, the case could take years to work its way through the system, at which point Obama will be gone. Adding to the charade, the taxpayer-funded legal fight would be waged under the authority of the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, which is known by the acronym “BLAG” and is bipartisan only in name because it is controlled by the House majority.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are cheering:

All due credit to John Boehner, who told his House colleagues on Wednesday that the institution will sue the executive branch to defend the Constitution’s separation of powers. The Speaker is showing more care that the laws be faithfully executed than is President Obama.

In a memo to the House, Mr. Boehner detailed the institutional injury Congress is suffering amid Mr. Obama’s “aggressive unilateralism,” which is as good a description as any of his governing philosophy. When the executive suspends or rewrites laws across health care, drugs, immigration and so much else, elected legislators are stripped of their constitutional role.

The Beltway press is portraying Mr. Boehner as merely serving carrion to the tea party vultures, and no doubt he hopes in part to sate the political appetites of the backbench. But we doubt he’d wager the House’s reputation, and his own, on a novelty lawsuit that the courts wouldn’t hesitate to toss as frivolous. From what we know of the Speaker’s deliberations, he’s been persuaded on the merits.

In my view the case is benign, a test of a theory of Florida law prof Elizabeth Price Foley’s (among others) that the standing lacked in cases of this sort by individual Congressmen resides in the Congress as an institution. I think they’d have a better case if both houses of Congress backed the suit.

As it is not only is the House asking the Court to take sides with it against the president, it’s asking that it take sides against the president and the Senate and, frankly, I doubt it will prevail.

I think that those who claim that the House can act on its own to limit the power of the presidency by using the power of the purse and, in particular, the constitutional provision that all spending bills must initiate in the House are missing something basic. Congressional appropriations aren’t just slush funds to be used ad libitum by the executive. They’re limited in their use to statutory purposes. In his going well beyond what is necessary and proper, President Obama has already signalled his willingness to vitiate the power of the purse.

The question at hand is should the Congress have recourses other than impeachment and possible removal from office to punish a president refusing to enforce the law? I don’t rejoice in a return of our “national nightmare” but there are those who do.

I think that the Congress should have a recourse short of impeachment and the Court should aid in that effort. The Republicans may well have their chance at testing the theory again, this time with a suit brought by the entire Congress, next session.