I did not think that at this late date we would be relitigating Emancipation, the aftermath of the Civil War, and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s. But we appear to be. What’s next? The reincarnation of the American Colonization Society?

I think one of the problems is the very light exposure so many present Americans have to the history, culture, and people of the United States other than the neighborhood in which they grew up and what they’ve seen on TV. We’ve made tremendous progress in social development over the last 70 years. You don’t have to take the word of an old white man for it. Ask an old black woman. She will tell you the same thing.

In Syria the battle for Idlib, the last “opposition” stronghold in Syria continues. Few doubt that it would have been over long ago but for the intervention and support of Turkey. At Al-Monitor Fehim Tastekin writes:

The Syrian regime wants Turkish troops to pull back. But the situation in the field is liable to get out of control. Russia’s role as a “guaranteeing power” to prevent clashes between Syria and Turkey is becoming more important. Although Russia continues its backing of Turkey — at least in part because of the sensitive S-400 arms deal between the two countries — it still doesn’t fully use its influence to rein in the Syrian regime.

So why are Syria and Turkey fighting, and why is the situation escalating? After clashes on April 29, the Syrian army imposed control over 20 locations including the Madik fortress in rural Hama, but Turkish-backed groups retook three areas: Tell Meleh, Jubbeyn and Zahra. In response, the Syrian army launched five offensives in June, trying to restore its control over those three locations. It failed.

The Assad government is fighting for its survival and for the survival of Syria’s Alawites. They are well aware what the Sunni opposition has in mind for them.

Iran is fighting to shore up its credentials as guarantor of the security of Shi’ite people. Nearly all of the countries of the Gulf and Mediterranean Middle East have Shi’ite populations including not just Iran and Syria but Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and others as well.

Ergogan’s neo-Ottoman Turkish government is irredentist. It is fighting to recover lands it belongs are Turkey’s. That extends not just to Syria but, as we have seen more recently, to Libya. The civil war in Libya, as I have noted before, is actually a war between two different Ottoman provinces. Coincidentally, seizing bases in Syria helps the Turks keep the Kurds down and fragmented.

The Free Syrian Army, a masterpiece of agitprop since it is not free, Syrian, or an army, is fighting for survival. They have nowhere else to go. No one wants them. Not the Syrians, the Iranians, the Saudis (their main supporters), or anyone else.

Russia fighting to preserve the Assad government and to preserve access to the warm water port the Assad government has given it. And to keep the Americans out.

So far we have managed to stay out of the battle for Idlib although some are encouraging a more active involvement. It remains unclear to me what our interest in the conflict in Syria is. I would think that preserving the Assad government was more in our interest than in having it replaced by a Sunni government with terrorist components. Their first official act would likely be to exterminate the Alawite population.

Chemical weapons? We have never reacted that way to chemical weapons use in the past. Not in the Iran-Iraq War, not when used by Saddam Hussein against his own people, and not in Angola. The case that the Assad government used chemical weapons is about equivalent to the case that various opposition factions have used them against the SAA.

In the Financial Times the last British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, writes:

The violent scenes at the Legislative Council building earlier this week played into the hands of Chinese propagandists and hardliners. But they should not distract attention from the peaceful marches by up to 2m Hong Kong citizens. Anyway, one way of dealing with minority violence and with concerns about how the demonstrations have been handled would be to establish an independent and open inquiry into what has happened in recent weeks.

The British government should press for this and argue for a complete withdrawal of the previous extradition proposals. It should also make clear, as UK foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt did in his remarks this week, that there would be serious consequences if the international and binding legal agreement with China were not to be honoured. We must hope that Britain has rediscovered its sense of obligation to the citizens whose bravery and seriousness of purpose put to shame our current insular and often delusional political debate.

Britain may have lost some of its soft power recently. It would be nice to think, however, that it still understands how to behave with integrity. Our own “golden age” with China should put more emphasis on honour and less on “fear and greed”. That is where our national interest really lies.

Reading between the lines, I think that Mr. Patten see the situation much as I do. Commercial and financial interests are likely to prevail and the United Kingdom, Germany, and France are predisposed to ignore China’s elimination of Hong Kong’s autonomy as long the supply chains remain open.

This should be a reminder to us that the only thing the Chinese authorities can be depended on to follow through with are their own interests narrowly understood.

I wanted to bring three articles to your attention. In the first the editors of the Wall Street Journal take Democratic politicians to task for refusing to ameliorate the conditions they have created, preferring to blame it all on Trump:

The “breaking point has arrived this week at our border,” then commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Kevin McAleenan warned way back on March 27. “CBP is facing an unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis all along our Southwest border.”

He was ignored. But suddenly Democrats and their media friends are flogging a pair of new inspector general reports, including one on May 30 that documents the “dangerous overcrowding” at a border control station in El Paso. It describes how one “cell with a maximum capacity of 35 held 155 detainees,” and how migrants were “standing on toilets in the cells to make room and gain breathing space.”

At a CBP facility in the Rio Grande Valley, says a July 2 IG report, “some single adults were held in standing room only conditions for a week.” Some migrants were desperate enough to clog the “toilets with Mylar blankets and socks in order to be released from their cells during maintenance.”

This is appalling, and Democrats want to blame it all on heartless Donald Trump. The Administration is an easy target, given its obsession with border enforcement and previous tone-deaf policies like family separation.

But Democrats should also look in the mirror. The perverse incentives of U.S. asylum policy have lured hundreds of thousands who are overwhelming border resources. Yet Democrats refuse to change the incentives that are the root of the crisis.

Migrants who cross the border, legally or not, can claim asylum. They are taught what to say to pass the low bar of “credible fear” in an initial asylum interview, and then most are released into the U.S. pending their final hearing. In the second quarter of 2019, more than 876,500 cases were pending in the immigration courts and they can take years.

In fiscal 2019, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had funding for an average daily detention population of 45,274. But as of June 29 more than 53,000 were in its custody. With its beds full, ICE now releases some of those migrants who aren’t subject to mandatory detention orders, but it has also slowed the numbers it takes from CBP. The border patrol can’t by law stop apprehending illegal crossers, though it can’t pass all of them out if its facilities. Thus, the overcrowding.

Under a legal settlement known as Flores, CBP gives priority to children and families before single adults. Minors can’t be detained for more than 20 days, so parents are released with their children. Migrants now know that if they bring children on the dangerous journey north, they’ll move through the system faster and be freed sooner. Meanwhile, single adult migrants languish in increasingly deplorable conditions, as the IG reports show.

Health and Human Services, which cares for unaccompanied minors, has also been overwhelmed. The Trump Administration’s fixation on enforcement has worsened the problem. Ideally, the children are released to parents or other sponsors who take financial and legal responsibility.

But until recently HHS required fingerprints from everyone in the sponsor’s household that were shared with ICE and could be used for enforcement. The predictable result was that potential sponsors were reluctant to take the risk of picking up children lest they be deported. Recent limits on this finger-printing have helped move children out of government custody faster, but HHS continues to deal with near-record numbers. As of July 1 some 13,000 children were in its care, and as of June 10 it had taken in more than 52,000 this fiscal year—60% more than in 2018.

Late last month Democrats reluctantly voted to pass legislation to provide $4.6 billion in emergency funding, mostly for urgent humanitarian needs. But if last week’s Democratic debates are an indication, the party’s only immigration policy is to offer an open border and free welfare and health care to anyone in the world who wants to come to America.

That isn’t politically sustainable even if it were financially affordable. The answer is a political compromise that narrows the asylum loophole and trades border security for more legal paths to work in the U.S. Any politician who won’t work toward that end is merely grandstanding for the cameras.

In the second, from the Washington Post the head of the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama Administration, Jeh Johnson, laments the present partisan food fight:

It’s time for some straight talk on immigration. There is almost none left in the highly emotional and politicized environment of the Trump era.

To govern in the immigration space and accomplish meaningful change requires compromise across Democratic and Republican lines. Very few solutions are black or white. Polls reflect that most Americans want to see two basic things when it comes to immigration: that we are fair and compassionate to those immigrants who have become honest and integrated members of our society (most notably the “dreamers”) and that we secure our borders. This broad consensus is drowned out in the current political debate, but it is actually the place from which the Obama administration tried to govern. We fought for comprehensive immigration reform in Congress, created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in 2012, tried to expand upon it in 2014, focused our resources on deporting major felons and saw some of the lowest numbers of apprehensions on our Southern border in decades.

As someone who for three years owned the difficult issue of immigration generally and enforcing border security specifically, I know these hard lessons:

First, high volumes of illegal immigration on our Southern border (and the tragic overcrowding at holding centers that follows) cannot be truly solved unless we make the long-term investment to reduce poverty and violence in Central America. Congress and the Obama administration began with an investment of $750 million in 2016, but the yearly investment has decreased since, and Trump has now suspended it altogether. This is the exact wrong thing to do. State and Homeland Security officials have told me the modest assistance so far was starting to make a difference.

Second, we cannot, as some Democratic candidates for president now propose, publicly embrace a policy to not deport those who enter or remain in this country illegally unless they commit a crime. This is tantamount to a public declaration (repeated and amplified by smugglers in Central America) that our borders are effectively open to all; this will increase the recent levels of monthly apprehensions at our Southern border — about or more than 100,000 — by multiples. For the same reason, we cannot formally decriminalize unauthorized entry into this country, though first-time illegal border crossers are in fact rarely prosecuted for that misdemeanor (except for last year’s disastrous “zero-tolerance” policy).

The Obama administration’s immigration priorities for deportation included both those who committed major crimes and those who were apprehended at the Southern border. Those apprehended at the border were allowed to remain this country while their deportation and asylum cases proceeded to conclusion.

Third, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has attracted criticism from the left for accepting last week a more moderate version of legislation to provide humanitarian aid to migrants at the border. The media sensationalized the speaker’s agreement as a “striking defeat” and a “capitulation.” Give her a break. Those who govern in a democracy know that progress requires compromise, and the speaker made the obvious calculation that it was more important to deliver prompt help to those facing inhumane conditions on the border than it was to delay and hold out for everything House Democrats wanted.

All this comes amid a larger alarming trend in today’s politics, on both sides of the aisle. To win support from a vocal and committed segment of a major party’s base — and simply for the sake of a good applause line — candidates for office now espouse extreme policy proposals that are unworkable and have no hope of winning the broad support of Congress and the people they represent.

while in the New York Times Ross Douthat remarks:

So it’s a good time to step back and assess the disastrous cycle in which our immigration policy has been caught.

The cycle started with a gap between the elite consensus on immigration — unabashedly in favor — and the public’s more conflicted attitudes, which differ depending on the day’s headlines and the wording of the polling questions. Across the first 15 years of the 21st century, too many Beltway attempts to simply impose the elite consensus set the stage for backlash, populism, Trump.

Unfortunately that backlash did not just give us a more restrictionist president. It gave us a restrictionist president who mixes ineffectiveness in legislating, incompetence in administration, and an impulse toward “toughness” as the response to every challenge — one that easily becomes a license for cruelty when a crisis hits. As it has, in the form of the wave of family migration — to which the Trumpian response has been, first, the formal inhumanity of the child separation policy, and since then, the informal inhumanity of an overwhelmed detainment system.

This inhumanity, in turn, has driven many liberals — led by the Democratic Party’s would-be nominees for president — to repudiate not only the specific evils of Trump’s approach, but the entire architecture of immigration enforcement as implemented by, well, the last Democratic president. The camps for asylum seekers must not just be made more humane; they must be closed. Deportations of non-criminal aliens must not only be limited; they must be ended. As migration rates increase exponentially, the government must respond by … decriminalizing illegal entry and extending public benefits to undocumented immigrants.

These policies are far more reckless than the old path-to-citizenship, more-guest-workers elite consensus, because they learn exactly the wrong lessons from the last five years of turbulence. We now have multiple case studies, European and American, of how in a globalized and internet-connected world migration can suddenly cascade, how easily a perceived open door can lead to a dramatic rush to enter — and then how quickly the most generous societies can find themselves retreating to enforcement and lurching toward populism.

For this cycle to break, for immigration policy to stabilize instead of whipsawing between folly and cruelty, you would need fraternal correction to happen within both the right-wing and left-wing coalitions.

That can’t happen when it’s as or more important to you for your political opponents to lose as it is to win.

There are some facts of which more people should be aware:

• The detention facilities on the border were built by the Obama Administration.
• The fatality rate among migrants detained at the border is roughly the same under the Trump Administration as it was under the Obama Administration. It’s just more highly publicized.
• In other words on the border the Trump Administration has largely continued the policies of the Obama Administration. It is the rhetoric, the optics, and the way it is covered in the media that are different.
• The number of migrants who originated in the “Northern Triangle” (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) has increased greatly over the last year and a half.
• That is true despite declines in the violence rate in those countries over the period in question. Indeed, the homicide rates in Guatemala and Honduras have actually been declining since 2011.

The number of migrants who cross our borders is more closely related to economic conditions in the U. S. and in the sending countries than it is to violence in those countries.

Here’s an opinion I’ll express. “Hispanic” means a language community, not a community bound by ties of blood or culture or even interest. The overwhelming preponderance of Hispanics in the United States are Mexican-Americans. Do not expect Mexican-Americans to greet the new Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans coming into the country with open arms.

I sometimes do not understand what impels people to say the things they do. The editors of the Washington Post decry the situation in Hong Kong:

THE LESSONS of recent events in Hong Kong start with the fact that an enormous number of people took to the streets in peaceful demonstrations against a rollback in the territory’s guarantees of freedom and autonomy from China. The very size of the protests that filled Hong Kong’s downtown, the largest in a generation, is a powerful reminder this is not a splinter movement but the mainstream speaking loud and clear.

Another lesson is that Hong Kong’s protesters are growing angrier and more distraught than they were before. In past years, it often appeared the opposition in Hong Kong was unfailingly orderly, simply asking China to fulfill its original promise to protect Hongkongers’ freedoms. There was little public support for outright independence from China. But the latest demonstrations reflect a new edge of distrust and wariness that should worry the rulers in Beijing.

The militancy is a direct result of China’s gradual but inexorable tightening of the screws on Hong Kong, most recently through a proposed extradition law that would have undermined the territory’s justice system. China’s leaders, who supervise the Hong Kong executive, have no one but themselves to blame for the opposition’s hardened attitude.

closing by proclaiming

The young people must be careful not to give the Chinese Communist Party leaders in Beijing, or their underlings in Hong Kong, an excuse for more repression. Violence and vandalism invariably play into the hands of the Chinese leaders, who take fright at all signs of protest and democracy. In today’s world, the students can be just as powerful hurling words as smashing windows.

The larger conclusion to be drawn is that China’s leaders should abandon their old thinking. Repression will ultimately fail and generate more resistance. China can’t grind down Hong Kong for another generation, and it would be terribly counterproductive to try.

I can’t tell whether that’s wishful thinking or a free flight of fancy. 23 years ago the Chinese needed Hong Kong and they needed the good will of Europe and the United States. Trade with the United States was still severely constrained by China’s trading status. It was not a member of the World Trade Organization. Its factories were still being built largely by the Germans and many of its people were desperately poor. It did not have a modern military.

None of those is the case now. China can stand on its own and is quite eager to do so. It recognizes that the Europeans and many in the United States. don’t really care what they do so long as the supply chains remain open. The Chinese authorities should be concerned all right. They should be concerned that they no longer have the control over the flow of information from Hong Kong to the balance of China as they a generation ago and China’s newly-prosperous middle class may be infected by Hong Kong’s comparatively democratic and liberal system.

The Chinese authorities need one system to prevail across China, Hong Kong included, much more than they need Hong Kong or foreign good will and there’s nothing the people of Hong Kong can to to prevent it.

Expect a crackdown.

I wish the editors of the Wall Street Journal would devote less energy to figuring out whether Trup or Obama has helped more ordinary working people:

Judging from last week’s debate, Democrats running for President see America as a Dickensian nightmare of inequality. It’s the best of times for millionaires and billionaires, and the worst of times for everybody else. Time to wake up from the Barack Obama economy, folks, and admit how many more Americans are prospering from the faster economic growth and tighter labor market after the policy changes of 2017.

Judging from last week’s debate, Democrats running for President see America as a Dickensian nightmare of inequality. It’s the best of times for millionaires and billionaires, and the worst of times for everybody else. Time to wake up from the Barack Obama economy, folks, and admit how many more Americans are prospering from the faster economic growth and tighter labor market after the policy changes of 2017.

[…]

Nearly one million more blacks and two million more Hispanics are employed than when Barack Obama left office, and minorities account for more than half of all new jobs created during the Trump Presidency. Unemployment among black women has hovered near 5% for the last six months, the lowest since 1972, and a mere 3.5% of high school graduates are unemployed.

But what about Senator Harris’s assertion that folks are stringing together jobs to make ends meet? About 5% of Americans hold more than one job, and this rate has held relatively constant since 2010. Yet there are now 1.3 million fewer Americans working part-time for economic reasons than at the end of the Obama Presidency.

and lot more energy to answering two questions:

1. Do working people need help?
2. If so, what’s the best way to help them?

I think it’s pretty obvious that ordinary working people do need help and what they need most are relief from regressive state and local taxes and less competition for jobs from workers from other countries, whether they remain in those countries or are brought into this one.

But I’m open to other solutions than those I’ve been prescribing. What are your answers to the questions above?

I haven’t had the energy to post my pictures of the annual Fourth of July Sauganash parade but I wanted to share this one with you. We had a prominent guest this year. The woman in the red shirt and straw hat is our recently-elected mayor, Lori Lightfoot. Next to her in the burgundy pants suit is our newly-elected alderman, Samantha Nugent.

I’m guessing that Mayor Lightfoot read the election returns. In the primaries the voters that turned out most solidly for her were on the Northwest Side. However, I did find it notable that she walked the parade. We frequently have politicians show up for the Sauganash parade but this is the first time I can recall that politicians have walked it. And they most frequently show up before an election rather than after one. That’s change of a sort.

This year the Fourth of July found me sad. The bonds of belief, commitment, and national pride that have connected the people of the United States, never the strongest, are fraying. It is being demanded that symbols of the country, like the flag of the American Revolution, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson be removed or destroyed because they were not conceived without sin. It is not the demands that bother me but that they are being taken seriously enough to terminate products, destroy murals, and abolish holidays in their honor. I don’t think anything can survive that scrutiny. I wonder if we’re becoming little more than a currency exchange.

When I was a kid in St. Louis from about June 15 to about September 15 the temperature went up to about 100°F every day with humidity about 100 as well. Night was little relief. The temperature rarely went below 80°F at night.

We did not have air conditioning. My dad considered it an unnecessary luxury. When the sun came up we sealed the house as well as we could, closing the curtains and windows, opening the door for as short a time as possible. When the sun went down we pulled the cooler outdoor air in with fans. It was hot and close but tolerable.

The only people with tans were field hands, laborers, and the rich.

In the winter, say, from December through January, at night the temperature generally dipped below 32°F but during the day it almost invariably rose above freezing. Drivers in St. Louis know how to drive on ice! Temperature very rarely went below 10°F and much warmer temperatures during the day were a commonplace. I knew people who made a tradition of playing golf in their shirtsleeves on Christmas Day.

Where I live now in Chicago in the summer we always have a few days where the temperature rises above 100°F and we always have a few days in the winter when the temperature dips below 0°F. Summer nights are generally very pleasant.

St. Louis is at roughly the same latitude as Algiers. Chicago is at roughly the same latitude as Rome. Algiers and Rome are more temperate than St. Louis or Chicago because of the moderating effect of the sea. For comparison Paris and Frankfurt are at about the same latitude as Vancouver.

Until the invention of the steel plough much of the Midwest could not be cultivated. The turf was too tough, the soil too rocky or, as in Missouri, too clay-ey. You had to be tough and tenacious to wrest a living from the soil.

The people of the United States mirror their land. There is a toughness, a roughness to the people of the Midwest, just as there is to their land. By comparison the Eastern seaboard and the West Coast are much more temperate, much more like Europe.

The most miserable weather I have ever experienced in the United States was in Texas. It’s beastly hot in the summer and either dry as dust or dank and humid, depending on where you are. There is nothing quite as frightening as watching a thunderstorm move towards you across the hundreds of miles of Texas prairie.

I have nothing but respect for the people of Texas. Not only do they tolerate it, they love their native state. That takes a special kind of person.

For practical purposes Florida was unlivable until the invention of the electrical air conditioner in the late 1920s. Swamp coolers (evaporative air conditioning) helped a little but not a lot.

The people of Europe are presently going through a heatwave, temperatures rising above 100°F. They are not accustomed to it. They have my sympathy.

Where I lived in Germany winter temperatures rarely dropped below 20°F or rose above 80°F in the summer. If my experience is any gauge, the climate in Europe is incredibly mild, the land rich and gentle. Europeans cannot understand how rough and hard a place the United States is.