An immigration puzzle

I think I must be missing something obvious, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why so many people sneak across the border– especially those who pay coyotes to smuggle them across. Wouldn’t a much safer (and cheaper) method simply be (a) getting a passport, (b) coming across the border at a manned crossing point, and (c) simply disappearing once you’re in? I know some people must do this already, but why isn’t it the predominant method?

Snap!

An administrative note: At some point (I don’t know when), WordPress decided it would be fun to implement Snap Preview Anywhere on its blogs. I’ve taken the liberty of disabling this “feature” for this site. If you disagree, please give me five minutes to explain why Snap Preview Anywhere is a blight upon the face of the Internet. Thanks!

Undoing the Reformation in England?

Churches back plan to unite under Pope:

Radical proposals to reunite Anglicans with the Roman Catholic Church under the leadership of the Pope are to be published this year, The Times has learnt.

The proposals have been agreed by senior bishops of both churches.

In a 42-page statement prepared by an international commission of both churches, Anglicans and Roman Catholics are urged to explore how they might reunite under the Pope.

If this happens, I don’t know how much of an impact it will actually have… but as a matter of historical significance, it’s huge. Queen Mary and the Spanish Armada– now just temporary setbacks?

Cross-cultural marriage rates falling

According to USA Today:

The USA’s growing diversity is cooling the melting pot in at least one way: marriage across racial and ethnic lines.

The share of Hispanics and Asians married to whites dropped between 1990 and 2000 after two decades of steady growth, new research shows.

The sheer number of immigrants who arrived last decade has made it more likely for them to marry among themselves, according to findings published this month in American Sociological Review.

The article does note that this trend is likely to reverse itself once the more recent immigrants have kids, as those kids will be more likely to marry across group lines.  The sooner, the better– as always, I’m troubled by non-permeable community boundaries within the U.S.

Depressing stories

There are days when every story suggests that the world is going to hell. Here are just two.

Hussein has become a martyr due to his stately presence during his humiliating execution. Wasn’t this man supposed to be a non-factor? According to the article, he was — but not anymore.

The first U.S. citizen born in 2007 has been denied a $25,000 scholarship because her mother is not a legal resident. Whatever you think about illegal immigration, and whatever the legality of this decision, you cannot be happy at the ugly tone of this story, which pits a Chinese family against a black family (whose baby won the prize instead). “She’s an American all the way,” says the grandmother of the winning baby. Then, referring to the losing baby’s mother: “If she’s an illegal alien, that makes the baby illegal.” (The baby is, of course, an American citizen.) Racial minority against racial minority, and a vicious note of xenophobia: what an unhappy new year.

UPDATE: Maybe there’s hope after all: the baby is getting her scholarship.

Something’s Terribly Wrong with David Bernstein

David Bernstein at the Volokh Venture complains about a story about college applicant who isn’t a shoo-in at MIT because she isn’t necessarily “giving back to the community.” Leaving aside the race classification part of the story, he’s upset that it isn’t enough that the applicant is a “math genius, and has a perfect score on her SATs.”

Gosh, gee, maybe the student with more community service is likely to be a nicer person who will make MIT (or another high-pressure technical school) into a better place for her classmates, and improve the educational experience for all.

“Are more thumpings needed?”

From PJB:

What conservatives should do now is what they should have been doing for six years. Stand behind the president when he fights for low taxes and conservative judges. But when he joins with Pelosi, Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderon and McCain-Kennedy for open borders, or with Dick Durbin for “moderate justices,” give him another “thumping” – like he got from conservatives when he sought to elevate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court and just as he got from the nation on Nov. 7.

Absolutely correct. The Republican party never would have gotten into this mess if they had stuck to their principles all along. As the “head” of the party, Bush should have been responsible for ensuring this, but since he hasn’t been, others need to step up and reinstitute conservatism. The election was lost because the party leaders got too comfortable with power, not because conservative ideas were rejected (hence all the Democrats running toward the center).

Loyal, Disloyal, Whatever

WaPo:

“I don’t see the votes there,” said one Washington Republican who has been advising Allen and spoke on condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to undermine the senator’s message.

Or maybe he wanted to undermine it just a little.

Interpretive Unity

What would follow if we insisted that our various species of interpretation should be approached in identical fashion? That is, if we consistently used the same rules in interpreting constitutions, statutes, regulations, judicial decisions, wills, and contracts?

One possibility is that we might take powerful arguments from one of these domains and apply it in another. The Constitution, we might say, is a will. It is the embodied intent of those who are now gone. We cannot ask them what they meant by it; if we guess wrong, the mistake cannot easily be corrected. We might take the canons of statutory instruction and apply them to contracts. Or we might say that inferior courts are charged with interpreting precedent in the same manner that administrative agencies are charged with interpreting statutes.

Some of these ideas are intriguing. Let us explore one at greater length.

Consider a standard economic argument against turning to extrinsic evidence in contractual interpretation. This turn increases the cost of adjudication. If the parties meant their course of dealing, or trade usage, or some other extrinsic evidence to be relevant, they could have written it into the contract. Going purely on the contract leads to predictable and inexpensive enforcement, and makes it easier for those dealing with a contract to know what it means. These arguments are not necessarily correct; there are strong counters. But let us take them as given for the moment.

If imported into constitutional interpretation, they can wreak some significant havoc. They are a strong argument for a particularly rigorous textualism, one that regards as irrelevant a great deal of matter that courts engaged in constitutional interpretation sometimes discuss. The records of the constitutional debates are irrelevant prior negotiations now integrated in the final document. The ratification debates are irrelevant, self-serving statements made by the parties. Common practice in the early Republic is irrelevant evidence of the initial performances and course of dealing. What we have is the raw text of the Constitution, and nothing else.

It is true, says this economic argument, that we might now in hindsight better match the intent of the framers by appealing to extrinsic evidence. But that process requires expensive historical inquiry and difficult adjudication. Those writing constitutions prospectively will find it cheaper and more efficient to embody their complete intentions in the document. (If they disagree, then let the constitution specify its own interpretive methodology. Ours, conspicuously, does not.) We encourage healthier constitutional debate and better constitutional drafting if we ignore all but the document itself.

This argument can easily pass into a parody of itself. But there is something to it, nonetheless. Textualist approaches to statutory interpretation often make similar arguments against the use of legislative history, arguing that it is unreliable. Applying these arguments to constitutional interpretation is an act of slightly greater courage, but shouldn’t the burden of proof fall on those who claim that different forms of documents require different methodologies? The contractual analogy adds an efficiency argument to the call for restrained textualism. Certainly, when one looks at the microscopic study of the Federalist, the debates of the Convention, and other contemporary arguments that some historicist and originalist theories of interpretation demand, the virtues of an intrinsic approach are easy to apprehend. It stands as a bulwark against an otherwise endless inquiry.

When Judges Attack

Has anyone else noticed that John M. Walker (2d Cir.) ran over and killed a police officer?