Global Portable Identities

I just finished a lovely book of essays edited by Susan Ossman called The Places We Share:  Migration, Subjectivity, and Global Mobility. Nicely written and redacted and I recommend it to you.

There was one essay in particular that I noted and went back to.  It's called "A New Take on the Wandering Jew" and it's about Jewish identity as it is experienced in different countries by people who are globally mobile.  As the author of the essay, Shana Cohen, put it, "Acting on my Jewish identity has seemed to provide continuity as I have migrated from place to place."  Wherever she has lived (US, Morocco, England, Egypt and Israel) that identity has served to ground her.  It isn't about integration so much as it is having a kind of worldwide plug adaptor so that wherever a migrant lands there is something that he or she can connect to that is not tied to one country, culture, nationality or citizenship.  It exists separate from all those things.  There are local variations, certainly, but there is something under it all that connects where you came from, where you've lived, where you are right now and where you might go.

Furthermore, it's a something that you feel that you have a right to be a part of based on criteria that is not determined by border guards or states or even to a certain extent, the local culture and community.  You belong.  Period.  And all you have to do is show up and in most cases, they have to honor your claim to belong.  Or at least if they don't they forfeit some important principles in their own rulebook such as their claims to universality.

In my own life the Catholic church functions in exactly this manner.  It is a constant wherever I go.  By virtue of this identity, this membership, I can simply find the local church or cathedral wherever I happen to be and plug in.  Christianity is a universal creed, a world religion that was already global before anyone ever noticed there was this thing called "globalization."  As the essay so ably points out, so is Judaism.  Islam too, for that matter. You can be affiliated to any one of these world religions and find an instantiation of it in just about any country you wish to visit or live in.  If you like (and I do) that provides a thread of cohesion that can mute some of the psychic distress of culture shock and adaptation to new places.

This function of world religions may be completely lost on adherents who do not travel widely or migrate.  In France, for example, I see this very strong identification of Catholicism and French culture and sometimes even claims to a kind of special culturally-based version of Catholicism that is unlike any other in the world.  I was asked once by a family member here if American Catholics baptized their children, too - a question that I found highly amusing.  Yes, there are culturally specific traditions around Catholic rites here but the creed, sacraments and rites are the same and don't fundamentally change between the US and Canada or France and England.  For all that the French have misgivings about mondialisation, a fair number of them are (and have been for generations) members of these global organizations/communities whether we are talking about Christianity, Judaism or any other religion with a global presence.

So far I've talked only about world religions and the question that followed my reading of the essay was:  Are there secular equivalents out there?  Identities, organizations or movements that have the same characteristics:  a universal creed, shared rites and rituals, open membership and a global presence.

And the answer is Yes.  Alcoholics Anonymous.  Believe it or not, AA is worldwide and a recovering alcoholic can find a meeting just about anywhere he or she goes in the world.  I know personally any number of serial migrants and travellers who use AA as their base in every country, region, city, town or village.  I have seen people walking into a meeting with their luggage having just come from the airport.  They find and go to a meeting before they check into the hotel.  It's that important to them.  There are local traditions and different languages depending on the country/culture but the basic principles are always the same and they are universal.  

Now I have heard the argument that AA is a religion.  My experience in France, the US and Canada is that, if there is a religious component to it, it varies according to the place with atheists and agnostics very prevalent in French meetings. A bit different in North America but it depends on the particular meeting.

So I do argue for AA as a secular transnational organization with a global membership and a  portable identity that gives a migrant or a traveller  a place to "plug in" anywhere he or she goes in the world.

Are there others?

You tell me.

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Global Labor Mobility and Taxation

"Globalization has forgotten the worker.  Scholarship on the tax consequences of globalization emphasizes the movement of capital and corporations, neglecting labor."

Ruth Mason
Tax Expenditures and Global Labor Mobility

Alas, this is all too true.  In the debate about catching rich tax cheats and going after tax-evading corporations, the worker is hardly ever mentioned and the impact on him or her isn't even considered in the fights against tax evasion and the implementation of different and creative taxation regimes.

People migrate for many reasons but one of the most common is moving to another country because there are good employment opportunities there as opposed to where they are.  It's not just a question of different unemployment rates, it's also because a skill or a degree can be worth more in another market.   Speaking English in the U.S. or the U.K. is no big deal in the home country but a lot of English speakers can earn a living in other countries teaching that language or filling a job abroad where the foreign company has decided they want someone with native English.  The first is not well-paid but the latter can be if it's combined with other skills and talents including integration into the host country language and culture.  Other examples abound like plumbers, electricians, IT workers, secretaries, engineers, musicians, technical writers, construction workers and mid-level managers.  The terms "highly-qualified migrant" and "low-skilled labor" do not even begin to do justice to the diversity of the migrants seeking economic opportunity outside of their home countries.  Even workers from developed countries can better their situation by moving abroad if they find the right match and the right job.

For globalization to work for people, and not just to the benefit of corporations and elites, it is essential that natural persons (aka "human beings") be able to seek out opportunities all over the world and not just be "captive citizens" of their homelands while capital and jet-setters flow freely from one country to another.

The biggest impediments to global labor mobility are local laws and immigration policies.  The question today is:   Given the efforts of many states to combat cross-border tax evasion, talk of exit and diaspora taxes, and the attempt to create a worldwide system of financial information exchange are we putting a mighty tool in the hand of governments to extract revenue from their diasporas and to prevent emigration?

I think that is a real possibility.  We are already seeing how Americans abroad are disadvantaged compared to the migrants from other countries because of U.S. citizenship-based taxation.  Americans who seek work abroad can be double-taxed (owe taxes in both the host country and the U.S.)  This is a fact and you have only to check the IRS website to see that, while there are methods to alleviate that burden, they do not eliminate it.  Other possible impacts are having to pay for expert advice in order to fill out tax returns and to comply with reporting requirements (all required even if no tax is due).

How many Americans, if they knew the full extent of their own country's worldwide taxation regime and its consequences, would still contemplate taking a job in Canada, South America, Asia or Europe?  How many American companies, faced with the added cost and complexity of sending their U.S. personnel overseas, will simply fill the position with a local?  High-level managers (executives) will still be able to go but lower-level skilled people like an IT worker or a finance person will be shut out from all the benefits they might have expected to enjoy when they sought employment with a home country multi-national.

From that experience we can extrapolate and imagine what would happen if other countries developed their own "tax the diaspora" schemes.  Would a French person bother to go to California to start a small company if he knew he was going to have to report his financial activity and pay taxes to the French government?  Ditto for the young person from the U.K. seeking a job in Singapore or a Chinese national offered a job in Canada.  Much of it depends entirely on the ability to pay and this is where it could be become flagrantly discriminatory.  A potential migrant who is highly-skilled (an executive) or has a particular talent (a movie star) will probably command a high salary in the host country and will be able to pay experts to navigate the home country tax system as it applies to expats.  They will be able to take full advantage of globalization and international mobility because they can pay the direct or indirect tax on it.  The young who are just starting their careers, and those with skills that command only modest salaries, probably can't.

Many countries have floated the idea of taxing their emigrants.  You could almost say that the bigger the budget deficit, the more attractive it looks.  Very politically popular.  Plus, it would have the added benefit of discouraging emigration in a way that is just devious enough not to fall foul of international law.   So why haven't more countries gone ahead and done it?

One reason is because it was almost impossible to enforce.  A country can try to say to its diaspora, "OK, ladies and gentlemen, you owe us 1% of your earnings in the host country," but how in the heck to make that stick?    A Frenchwoman in Boston has a W-2 so the US knows what she makes and can tax her but that information isn't automatically passed along to the French government.   As for the contents of her bank account, American banks  are known for their fierce resistance to sharing that information with other countries even when it concerns a national of another country.  Other countries have similar policies and privacy laws to prevent it.

This is where automatic worldwide sharing of financial information comes in.  The scope of what is being proposed goes way beyond the idle rich and corporations (though this is given as the driver behind it).  It is no less than the exchange of huge databases containing private financial information on literally millions upon millions of people.  In these databases there will be retirees, plumbers, foreign language instructors, fast-food industry workers, stay at home mothers, and many many others who don't fall into the category of "rich".  FATCA contains provisions so that only accounts over a certain amount have to be reported but that is no guarantee that the databases won't still be filled with the lower or middle-income who have retirement savings, for example.  There is also no guarantee that other proposals like the French or UK FATCA won't apply different rules and seek a much lower threshold for their citizens living abroad.

The danger is not so much the automatic information exchange itself as it is the potential for governments to use that information in ways that have only a tenuous connection to the goal of unearthing those "rich tax cheats not paying their fair share," and everything to do with their own domestic agendas:  extracting tax revenue from all their diaspora members living abroad to balance their homeland budgets and, of course, slowing down emigration of the young, the skilled and semi-skilled, and the adventurous by making it onerous and financially disadvantageous to leave the home country.

The threat to global mobility as I see it is in the combination of a worldwide information exchange of financial information coupled with countries passing their own laws inspired by the American model of citizenship-based taxation.  With the first they would actually have means to enforce the second.

I personally do not believe for one moment that these countries would restrict the scope of these new tax laws to the entrepreneurs, idle rich and the investor class.  Why?  Do the math.  In 2010 there were around 40 million immigrants in the U.S.  Most are probably not rich or even upper-income.  If their home countries could get as little as 100 USD out of them, that would be a chunk of change, wouldn't it?  Same holds true for all other governments - even small amounts would make a difference where the diasporas number in the hundreds of thousands or millions of members.  And where these people do not have much political power in the home country and only modest salaries in the host country, they have few defenses against this.  As far as I've been able to determine there is nothing in international law that would prevent countries from doing this to their emigrants once their governments have the information in hand.  And you just have to ask to what extent global mobility would be slowed down by the implementation of enforceable diaspora tax regimes.

Maybe it won't ever happen.   Still, I would argue that someone should be watching this closely so that this sort of thing does not evolve into yet another impediment to global mobility and another nightmare for global migrants.  What is really distressing right now is that with all these potential impacts on the working international migrant is that international labor organizations and migrants advocacy groups are not more implicated in the discussions around information-sharing initiatives and cross-border tax issues at the international level.   There is a real potential here for abuse and the danger is that the burden will fall hardest on those who are least able to bear it.

Not the rich who have access to expensive international legal counsel and who will undoubtedly move their money around to whatever country decides not to share information with the others.  But on those who dream of distant shores and on those who are already there and terribly vulnerable twice over:  as immigrants in the host country and as emigrants from predatory states.

U.S. Tries to Build Its Own Berlin Wall

I mentioned a few days that Eduardo Saverin's renunciation of U.S. citizenship has ruffled a few feathers back in the homeland.  Didn't take long for the politicians to take up the cause in the name of "justice" for the American people.

Two Senators,  Charles Schumer (Democrat-NY) and Bob Casey (Democrat-Pennsylvania), have proposed a nifty new law called the Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy Act (aka the Ex-PATRIOT Act).  Catchy title - must have taken them hours of meetings to come up with that one.  I would have preferred that they had spent that time thinking a little harder about the impact and the potential consequences of such a law.

What does their bill propose?  It would "amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide that persons renouncing citizenship for a substantial tax avoidance purpose shall be subject to tax and withholding on capital gains, to provide that such persons shall not be admissible to the United States, and for other purposes."  It would assume that anyone renouncing citizenship who had over 2 million USD in assets or a tax liability of 148,000 USD is guilty of tax evasion until he or she proves his or her innocence.  So much for "Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat."  And who gets to decide the merits of their case?  The Internal Revenue Service.  Brings to mind the old saying about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.  But that's not all, once these "covered expatriates" have been scolded and found guilty, they will be forever barred from traveling to or living in the U.S.  This proposed law is retroactive which means that they could unleash the IRS to go after anyone who renounced U.S. citizenship in the past decade. You read that correctly - they are proposing to go after people who legally renounced in the past but who could now be judged guilty based on a law to be passed in 2012.

Just a quick glance at the particulars reveals all sorts of things that are just plain wrong about the Ex-PATRIOT Act:  presumption of guilt, lack of due process (shouldn't the courts be deciding guilt, not a government bureaucracy?) and the idea that you can turn perfectly legal past behaviour into a crime that can be punished today.   For the edification of homelanders, the U.S. already has an Exit Tax passed by Congress in 2008 which Eduardo Saverin paid for the privilege of renouncing his U.S. citizenship.  Rest assured, folks, the U.S. government got its cut of his wealth as he walked out the door.  The only new thing about Schumer and Casey's law is that it would punish Saverin for his cheek by keeping him out of the U.S. and ensuring that they get even more money out of him after Facebook goes public.  This isn't about Saverin evading taxes so much as it's about punishing people who dare to do something that Americans don't like and don't want others to do.  That may make some Americans feel better about being divorced but it has some real consequences they need to think about before cheering Schumer and Casey on:

Barrier to Naturalization:  Look at this from the perspective of a potential citizen who is being invited to the "land of opportunity" to inject his human capital (forged in another land) into something that may or may not pay off.  This is a huge risk - not every immigrant is successful and failure is a real possibility.  If this immigrant has the good sense to look before he leaps, he will see that becoming a U.S. citizen is fraught with peril.  As a citizen or Green Card holder not only will he be taxed on what he earns in the U.S., he will have to pay (or at least report) on everything he owns and earns outside the U.S. even if none of those assets or income came from the U.S.  Does that sound like a good deal to you?  No other country does this which makes the U.S. very uncompetitive in the global citizenship market.  On top of that, if said immigrant does actually make some money and wants to return home (reverse migration) or move on and tries to renounce, he is going to have to pay out a considerable amount of what he earned in the U.S. just to exercise his right to expatriate.  You know, the right that was confirmed by the U.S. Congress in 1868 when they said, "the right of expatriation is a natural and inherent right of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"?  

Anyone with a lick of common sense can see the solution to this little dilemma;  just don't become a U.S. citizen.  Ever.  Nothing prevents anyone from coming to the U.S., living there for years, enjoying almost all the benefits of citizenship (except for voting) but never pledging allegiance.  This will increase the number of resident aliens in the U.S., people who may be very fond of America but who are not willing to see their ability to work where they like, live where they please, and to participate in business ventures and to build enterprises outside the U.S. (all the goodies of globalization) compromised.

Increases renunciations:  Look at this from the perspective of an overseas American who is debating whether or not to renounce.  This proposed law sends an important signal to them:  get out while you can. Today the threshold is 2 million USD.  What will it be tomorrow?  200,000 USD?  A Congress that is capable of making a law like the ex-Patriot Act retroactive sounds perfectly capable of deciding one day in the future that every expatriate will have to pay an onerous exit tax no matter what level of income or assets.  This is what many of us suspect is going to happen if those renunciation figures get so high that the U.S. starts to get queasy and finds itself embarrassed in the national and international media.  Jumping now is starting to look like a very good idea.  Could Congress lower the threshold and make that retroactive?  Sure they could but renunciants could fight back in the courts and just might have a better case that says, "Look, what we did was perfectly legal at the time.  Not cool to play "gotcha" now."

Punishes Homeland Americans:  The inability of renunciants to return to the U.S. to visit may turn out to be a heavier burden on the people they left behind in the homeland.:  their families.  One reason many overseas Americans have for not renouncing has nothing to do with the U.S. and everything to do with aging parents and other family members still living there.  People who would otherwise have no reason or desire to be American citizens are nevertheless concerned that their families will bear the brunt of their defection.  This is a bit of collateral damage that Schumer and Casey probably didn't consider.  The reality is that potential renunciants may also have family outside the U.S. that they need to protect from U.S. citizenship-based taxation and the new FATCA laws.  What a terrible choice:  aging parents in the U.S. versus spouses and children outside the U.S.  Where parents and grandparents are in ill-health and unable to travel, this will prevent them from ever seeing their children again and potentially their grandchildren.  All potential renunciants are aware of this.  Given the current situation, I think many will renounce anyway because they feel they must act now to protect immediate family.  If this law passes, expect some interesting headlines like "U.S. government prevents daughter from visiting dying mother in Houston because of U.S. exit tax laws."

Aside from this short list of potential consequences, have homelanders thought for two seconds what this law says about the United States of America in 2012?  Is the U.S. so desperate for citizens, so eager to prevent people from leaving, that it must do everything in its power to discourage it?  Since when did Americans have so little confidence in themselves and their country that they have to build a wall to keep people in?  I understand that Americans feel angry and out of sorts when people renounce, but, you know, that's what countries who invest in their citizens and watch them pack up and leave for the U.S. often feel.  Most have the good sense to be gracious about it and some even welcome back the descendants of their emigrants with open arms.  Now that the shoe is on the other foot, Americans find that they don't much care for the rules that have benefitted them for over 200 years.  

Here are a couple of radical ideas:  if Americans think an Exit Tax is such a great concept, then why don't they ask every immigrant at every U.S. citizenship ceremony to cut a check for 30% of their assets earned in the States to be sent back to their countries of origin with a note of thanks signed by the head of the USCIS?  Or if they are so convinced that Saverin owes something to the countries that "made" him, perhaps they would share what they have already collected from him in taxes with Brazil, his other country of citizenship?

I don't care much for that idea and I think most Americans wouldn't like it much either (the Brazilian government, on the other hand, would probably be tickled pink to get a check from the U.S. Treasury).  So let's stop with the petty small-minded rubbish coming out of Washington .  To do otherwise would clearly give credence to what a lot of Americans inside and outside the U.S. have been wondering about:  that the "land of the free' has become something else altogether.

Globalization and International Law

From the time I was very young, I wanted to be a lawyer.  The story of how I became an IT worker instead, I'll save for another day, but I've always had a fascination for the law and, because of my interest in global migration, international law.

So I dove into Taming Globalization: International Law, the U.S. Constitution and the New World Order by Julian Ku and John Yoo with high hopes for a good read and a real interest in the topic.  I was not disappointed.

It all starts with the notion of sovereignty which is being strained by globalization.  The old Westphalian conception of this idea where states have complete authority over national territory has never been a perfect description of reality but it is even less so in our era.   As Arjun Appadurai points out so eloquently in Fear of Small Numbers, "the certainty that distinctive and singular peoples grow out of and control well-defined territories has been decisively unsettled by the global fluidity of wealth, arms, people and images..."  To this Ku and Yoo add, "the increase in the number and influence of international organizations" and a "fundamental shift in the nature and scope of international law."

International Organizations:  According to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), entities like the United Nations are "international persons" and have a "legal personality."  This means that they possess the right to have rights.  In the case of the United Nations the ICJ determined that "it is a subject of international law and capable of possessing international rights and duties, and that it has capacity to maintain its rights by bringing international claims."  Or in other terms it has the, "right of creating international norms, mostly through the treatymaking power or adoption of binding resolutions, but also through their contributions to the creation of customary rules of international law, the active and passive ius legationis, i.e. the right to send and receive representatives of other subjects of international law, as well as to apply sanctions if the rules of the Organization so provide."  Among other things this means that the UN can demand reparations from a nation-state on behalf of one of its employees.  Prior to this ruling only a state could do this on behalf of its nationals.

Ku and Yoo also make the excellent point that some international organizations today enjoy unprecedented levels of autonomy from the nation-states that created them in the first place. They argue, quite convincingly, that both the European Court of Justice and the North American Free Trade agreements possess great independence and real sovereignty.  Both have real power.

International Law:  The first change here (the "new international law") is a change of focus.  Prior international law dealt almost exclusively with relations between states.  This has been broadened to include "the relationship between a nation and its own citizens or between citizens of different nations."  This means that a state that deprives its own citizens of  "universal human rights" such as: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile" or the right to free expression can be taken to an international court and held accountable.

The second change, according to Ku and Yoo, is how international law is created and enforced.  It used to come from nation-states and their "practice and opinion."  This is still true to a certain extent but their consent is much less important these days.  New laws and norms are coming out of those international organizations which change Customary International Law (CIL) by looking to treaties between states and using them to create "universal international norms that theoretically bind even those nations that refused to join the treaty in the first place."

Does this mean that state sovereignty is dead?  Of course not.  States can and do ignore international law.  Even in EU-land where nations have explicitly agreed to give up some sovereignty and who are bound to obey EU charters and directives, drag their feet or dodge implementation. The Blue card is one example, France's reluctance to respect the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages is another. But what is clear is that no nation-state can completely ignore globalization and the existence of international laws and norms in both its behavior in the international realm or within its own domestic legal framework.  Nation-states are no longer completely free to do as they wish even within their own territories and the well-being of their citizens is now of direct interest to the international community whether those citizens are living in China, the U.S. or Germany.

Where is all this going?  One possibility is that we are ushering in an era of what Ku and Yoo call "a full-blown, European-style system of global governance." We are surely not there yet.  But even without such a system, international laws and norms are becoming a part of domestic law.  In recent years some high profile cases in the U.S. have, "sought to directly incorporate international legal norms into the domestic order without approval by democratic means."  Here are just a few of the over 30 decisions made by the Supreme Court in the last decade where international or even foreign law were cited in the decisions:   Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon,  Sosa v. Alvarez Machain, Medellin v. Texas, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd....

You can read about some of these cases and much more in this very excellent read.  For this brief review I've only gone over a few of the many ideas and concepts that they explain in a manner that makes them accessible to a general audience (self-executing versus non self-executing treaties, for example).  And underlying it all is a well-reasoned argument in favor of a sovereignty that (with only minor tweaking) would square the democratic nation-state, respectful of the "will of the people," with all the good that comes from being a responsible international actor in an increasingly globalized world.

Foreign Policy and U.S. Immigration Law

There are two very good posts here and here by Peter Spiro and Julien Ku and over at the Opinio Juris blog concerning U.S. immigration law.

This week the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for and against the Arizona Immigration Law SB 1070 which was passed back in 2010 in order to "discourage and deter the unlawful entry and presence of aliens and economic activity by persons unlawfully present in the United States."  The law has been highly controversial for many reasons.  It is seen as being overly severe and potentially a source of discrimination against Mexican-Americans because "it makes the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally."  It also raises the question of who exactly gets to make immigration law in the U.S. - the Federal government exclusively or the States as well?  To understand why this might be a real problem, imagine, if you will, what would happen if every département in France decided to pass its own local rules to refine and enhance the national integration and immigration laws.  Whether it's 50 states or 100 départements, one grasps immediately that this has the potential for becoming an unholy mess (not that U.S. immigration law isn't already there, mind you).  That is why the Department of Justice of the United States has taken the recalcitrant state to court.  United States v. Arizona is being closely watched inside the U.S. but it is also a source of interest outside the United States.

It may be of only passing concern to the state of Arizona but it's important to mention that the people they propose to round up and incarcerate without due process are citizens of another country.  Under international law their home countries do indeed have an interest and a say in what happens to them.  That means that this is not just a domestic issue, it's a foreign policy problem.  As such, it is of more than passing interest to the 6-7 million American citizens living abroad as well as those Americans who travel outside the U.S.

Why?  Because it is crucially important that the United States of America treats foreigners (documented or undocumented) well because it just might have some important implications for how well we will be treated by our host countries.  Did you know that that there are around 1 million Americans in Mexico?  Yes, that's right - 1 million.  In addition the Mexican government estimates that there are at least 200,000 "illegal" Americans.  According to this website, most of these "illegals" are retirees living in Baja though there are also reports of more young people moving south to teach English since the souring of the U.S. economy.  I would add that there are probably a fair number of veterans as well, living there and in other parts of Latin America on military pensions.

Now just imagine a scenario where the Mexican government decides to crack down on these people and harass the legal residents and incarcerate the illegals (all those retirees, English teachers and military veterans.)  Not a very pretty picture is it?

Arizona may not be too concerned by any of this but the U.S government certainly is.  After all, they are the ones who will have to manage the international incidents that may come to pass as a result of Arizona's and other U.S. states' laws.  According to Julien Ku, the Solicitor General did indeed make that argument saying that the Arizona law might have this unhappy result:

"And so — so, you’re going to have a situation of mass incarceration of people who are unlawfully present. That is going to raise — poses a very serious risk of raising significant foreign relations problems.
And these problems are real. It is the problem of reciprocal treatment of the United States citizens in other countries."

To those who argue that the United States is not in the business of allowing its domestic laws to be influenced by foreign governments and to hell with the whole business, I do see some merit to that argument.  After all, I know a lot of people who are not at all amused when the United States tries to influence, let's say, France in the implementation of her local laws and the making of her policies.  But the world has gone global, international migration is a fact, and Americans have a natural desire to be a part of the globalization game.  That means growing numbers of Americans outside the U.S. (just think of them as America's very own "hostages to fortune"):  daughters, sons, retired parents, veterans, childhood friends.  To treat these people as irrelevant or beyond consideration in this debate sends a very interesting message to those of us who live abroad - one that I can only hope can be properly interpreted as a misunderstanding based on simple ignorance and not a disavowal.

Immigration Policy - An International Affair

I came across some very interesting articles about U.S. immigration law recently and I thought I'd share them with you.  It seems that the U.S. Congress is not necessarily the highest authority in this matter and some very creative people have had the intelligence to take this out of the national realm and make it an international fight.

Civil Rights Groups Take Alabama Immigration Law to the UN:  Union and civil rights leaders have filed a complaint against Alabama and the U.S. government with the United Nation International Labor Organization.  They allege that Alabama's immigration laws are a "flagrant violation of international norms" and that the United States' inability to come up with coherent immigration policy hurts domestic and migrant workers alike.  The Service Employees International Union filed the complaint with the UN earlier this week:

The complaint, submitted to the ILO Committee on Freedom of Association alleges the U.S. government’s “inability to act promptly and decisively to put in place a national policy related to immigration - attentive to international guarantees related to individual workers’ rights as well as to the rights of trade unions with immigrant members - has given the space to individual states to enact laws that are in flagrant violation of international norms.”

They are holding the US government responsible for the recently enacted Alabama immigration laws and they are not only willing to take it to the UN, they are bringing the fight directly to the foreign companies that have invested in that state.

In a statement to Daimler AG, which produces Mercedes-Benz vehicles in Alabama, the SEIU and its affiliate, the Southern Regional Joint Board of Workers United wrote, “Until now, Daimler and Mercedes-Benz have been silent on this law which violates human rights, even though one of its German executives was arrested under the Alabama law.”

Labor Leaders Take Alabama Immigration Law Repeal Bid to Berlin:  Labor leaders are backing up their words with action by going directly to the source in Berlin, Seoul and Tokyo and calling these companies on their tacit collaboration with what they feel is legislation that violates human rights:

At the Daimler AG annual shareholders meeting in Berlin April 4, U.S. labor and civil rights leaders said that unless the German company takes a stand on Alabama’s infamous anti-immigrant law, it is tacitly supporting a racist and unjust regime in a state where its Mercedes Benz factory is considered responsible for 10,000 jobs and $1.5 billion in economic impact.
In March, civil rights activists and labor leaders attended Hyundai’s annual shareholder meeting in Seoul to make a similar point, as Colorlines reported, since Hyundai’s Alabama operations account for 2 percent of the state’s GDP. Depending whether the state legislature acts to repeal before then, they may also visit Honda’s shareholder meeting in Tokyo in June.

That is not only very gutsy, it's a very smart strategy.  This is not exactly the kind of publicity these companies need.  As for the U.S. government, if the ILO rules against them, it makes their criticism of other governments' policies (like China) look terribly hypocritical.  Alabama certainly doesn't come off well either.  If the unions and civil rights leaders can successfully equate investment in that state with support for violating international standards for human rights, companies might be less willing to do business there and that ought to make local lawmakers sit up and take notice.  This is one to watch closely.  If anyone in Germany, Korea or Japan finds links to this story in the local media, I'd really appreciate your adding them in the comments section.  It would be interesting to see how this story is presented in these companies' home country media.

India challenges U.S. immigration rules at WTO:  India has filed a complaint against the U.S. government with the World Trade Organization (WTO).  In 2010 the U.S. raised visa fees for skilled workers to a whopping 4,500 USD per visa.  Indian IT firms say that this discriminatory (and it does seem to have been directed against them) and a barrier to free trade.  This may be a bit of a "tit for tat" situation since the complaint was filed after India put a ban on poultry imports from abroad - something that hurts the U.S. poultry industry.  Nonetheless, the high fees and the high rejection rates of Indian applicants for U.S. work visas (H1B and L-1) really hurts the Indian IT industry.

The law under which those business visa fees were raised is known as the James Zadroga Act. Under the law, fees are substantially increased for H1B and L1 immigrant business visas. The rule also makes it harder for Indian multinationals in the U.S. like Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro to bring in top executives or senior computer engineers from abroad.
“It is the sovereign right of any country to hike visa fee, but the U.S. move is mainly against Indian IT companies. The law discriminates between an American and Indian companies. This is a breach of national treatment and most favored nation status,” an unnamed Commerce Ministry official told the ET.

Tech CEOs visit Washington to lobby for H1B visa, tax reforms:  Last month 60 CEOs of high-tech companies in the U.S. descended on Washington to fight for immigration reform.  What do they want?  More H1-B visas, faster processing of visa applications and a better retention policy for foreign graduates from U.S. universities with high-tech degrees.  Technet is a lobbying organization that represents high-tech industries in the U.S.  However, if you take a look at the executives they sent to Washington, you'll see that its members are not really U.S. companies, they are international companies like Cisco, HP,  Intel, Google, Microsoft and EMC.

These articles really highlight the complex nature of immigration policy and how it can't ever be made in a vacuum that takes into account only local concerns.  Look at the stakeholders above:  United Nations, WTO, trade unions, civil rights leaders, workers, lobbyists, local and international industry, local and national governments.  And then take a look at the people who are responsible for sorting through all this and actually passing laws that make sense in this complex environment.  How many U.S. congressman, for example, have ever lived or worked overseas as a civilian?  How many of them have been immigrants?  How many of them speak a foreign language or have extensive experience with another culture?  I couldn't find any statistics on the Web but just looking at my Congresswomen, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, the answer is they have zero international experience. That's a bit worrisome when you consider that they represent a state that hosts the offices of international companies like Boeing and Microsoft.  And lest you think that I am picking on the U.S. check out the biography of Claude Guéant, the French Minister of the Interior.  His world is the Hexagone and reading his profile you start to understand why he was so surprised when his infamous circulaire received international attention.  

I am not saying that these people are not intelligent - on the contrary they are smart, dedicated public servants who I am sure are doing the very best they can for their constituents.  What I am saying is that when it comes to immigration policy they may be at the lowest level of ignorance which is "not even knowing what you don't know." They just don't have sufficient international experience that would give them the context they need for the decisions that they are responsible for making.

I think this is something to take into account in this election year even at the local level. Globalization is a fact of life and your local representative might just find him or herself thrust into an international spotlight thanks to some local policy or law that has international stakeholders.  The question to ask is:  can this person play at that level?   Is he/she experienced and knowledgeable enough to understand the international implications of the votes he casts or the policies he has a hand in making?  If the answer is "no" or "I'm not sure," you might want to think again.  For your own protection and so that globalization may be rightly guided to the benefit of us all.

The End of Plural Nationality?

After I wrote yesterday's post about taxes, I revisited the the issue of modern citizenship, plural nationality and globalization.  Here are a few of my thoughts:

Citizenship is an odd beast because it is an individual status that represents a kind of contract between a person and a state.  It can be conferred without the consent of the individual either by jus sanguinis (blood) or by jus soli (place of birth).  Think about that:  a child is never asked if he want to be French or Egyptian or American just because his parents were or he was born in a particular place. True, once he becomes an adult he can renounce his citizenship but that is contingent in most places on having acquired another one.  So renouncing is not something that a person can simply decide on his or her own - you cannot wake up one morning and simply say, "I'm not German. "  You must petition the German state and formally sever your ties after having formally created another tie to another country.   Most countries (not all) recognize that their citizens have the right to do this but they also retain the right to put conditions on this renunciation.  Americans, for example, might be very surprised to learn that they are not allowed to renounce their citizenship within the borders of the U.S.  They must physically leave the country and apply at a consulate on foreign soil.

Most people never bother to learn these things because they either never leave their home countries or because, in a world where plural citizenship is becoming very common, it can be a real advantage to have several passports even if one is not actually residing on one of the passport countries.  It appears to be all gain and no pain so why bother renouncing?  A citizen retains the right of return at any time, the right to vote in many cases from abroad and even, in some countries, actual representation in the national parliaments.  On the other, he or she feels free to travel about, build a life abroad, pass citizenship on to his or her children and ask for assistance (limited in reality) at the home country consulate.  That is the perspective of many of us who have chosen to live outside our original countries of citizenship.  We rarely consider how our home countries and its citizens feel about this.  The world is flat and it is our playground.

I think we ignore their opinions at our peril.  All states have the right to determine who is and who is not a citizen and what obligations citizens have toward the country of nationality.  Some of these obligations are legal and some, I contend, are moral.  The legal ones are explicit and yet not well known by most people who move abroad.  In the moral realm they are implicit and are about how homelanders feel their citizens abroad should behave and what their proper relationship to the home country ought to be in an ideal world.   People who live outside their home countries also have legal and moral obligations to the host country and this intersection of duties and responsibilities can be quite complex and, in some cases, contradictory.  Americans who live abroad, for example, are required to obey U.S. law even outside of U.S. territory.  No consideration is given to the unpleasant reality that national laws can and do conflict.  Hard to enforce and yet, as the world gets ever flatter, what you do in Vegas (or Thailand) could conceivably come back to haunt you in Berlin.

It is worth taking a few moments to consider the situation from the perspective of the states and the homeland citizens.  Citizens represent an investment by the nation, states expect some return on that investment and consider their claim on their productive power and the right to control their behavior to be just and right wherever those citizens happen to live. The frontier days of globalization are slipping away.  It will be harder and harder to "escape" as states make agreements between themselves to regulate the flow of capital and people.  National parliaments can and will make laws to police the activities of their citizens abroad and will back them up either through enforcement agreements with other states, by controlling the issuance of necessary documents (passports, birth certificates and the like) and by catching people at the border when they come "home."

How those laws will be made and applied will depend greatly, I think, on the opinions and feelings of people in the homeland.  As a practical matter their numbers are greater and their feelings carry much more weight then those of expatriates.  They can more easily make phone calls, send letters and organize demonstrations or visit lawmakers in their offices.  Diasporas can organize and make their side of the story known but that implies a great deal of organization and fertile ground for those opinions to have any legitimacy and stick.  Where expatriates are perceived as rich, tax-dodging quasi-traitors to the nation it is so much easier for politicians to pass laws to their detriment with nary a word from the homelander population.  Sarkozy, for example, is proposing a tax on French expatriates that would oblige them to pay the difference between the taxes they pay in their host countries and what they would pay in France.  I have spoken to people here in France about this and the consensus seem to be that this is a fine idea.  I have not found one person who thinks it is a bad idea and would raise a finger on behalf of French citizens abroad.

When we move outside of our home countries we tend to fall off the radar of people in the homeland.  Because they do not know who are or what we are doing, the information void can be filled with anything:  pictures of rich expatriates sipping wine on the Riviera or rich retirees sunning themselves on the beaches of a South American country or living a hedonistic life in Amsterdam or just having landed a decent job in a modern country. That the reality is so much more mundane (and much harder then one might think) is not a message homelanders want to hear because alongside their envy of those who have "escaped" to live fabulous lives in exotic locales are their own fantasies of one day doing exactly the same thing.

There is no easy solution to this.  The key, I suspect, is finding a way to demonstrate that the diaspora is, in fact, an important resource for the nation and merits support and not condemnation.  This is easiest when there is something concrete to show like remittances that add to the wealth of the home country.  It is much harder when the benefits are not quantifiable:  goodwill, connections between nations, small businesses and skills like language ability and cross-cultural competence.   From there we have a basis for negotiation and I think it is becoming urgent that all diasporans do this (some already have).  We need to make the implicit explicit.  On what terms is the "domestic abroad" part of the nation?  What are the legal rights and moral responsibilities of those who leave?  To what extent does one country of citizenship retain control over the productive power and behaviour of its citizens on foreign soil?  How is this reconciled with the needs and requirements of the host nations or the other countries of citizenship?  These are terribly complex issues and international law does not, as far as I can determine, give sufficient guidance.  States can and do make their own rules but as plural nationality becomes more and more common this is becoming an incoherent intersection of competing laws and the power to enforce them across borders, with a growing population of diasporans caught in the crossfire.

Those of us who live outside our host countries have, I think, three options:  we can wait until states settle things amongst themselves (as they seem to be doing with FATCA which is rapidly becoming a global template for the control of the productive power of all diasporans), we can shed our second or third passports and citizenships or we can make some effort to organize across nations and host countries and try to influence how this all shakes out.  I am hoping that the third will become a reality one day but I very much fear that option one and two are the most likely scenarios.  This would mean that states, long hostile to the very concept of dual nationality and emigration, will finally get what they have always wanted:  captive citizens.

Breeder Documents

I first came across this term when I was exploring the different methods at our disposal to prove citizenship.  At first glance, I thought it meant "license to reproduce." Believe me, it's nothing like that. But what they really are is pretty interesting and of concern to all of us.

A very loose definition of Breeder Document would simply be:  a document that allows you to obtain other documents.  A birth certificate is probably the most common one because it establishes all sorts of things:  that you were born (good to know), where and when, and who your parents were.  That document can be matched against existing law in the country where you live to allow you to obtain other documents like a driver's license, an identity card, a voting card, a national health card and even a certificate of nationality.    In a lot of countries, if a person never goes beyond the national borders, it's possible that he or she may never have to have one.  In the first 20 years of my existence living in the U.S., it was completely superfluous (even for travel to Canada).  It only became necessary when I applied for a passport.  For those who do travel and, most importantly, for international migrants, this is often an indispensable document.  Applying for a visa may just require a passport but most countries want a little more information (the documents behind that passport) before granting you residency or citizenship.

Now this seems like an entirely reasonable request on the part of the receiving state but it assumes that the receiving country trusts your home country to have accurately recorded the birth and is now willing to certify that you are that person by issuing the document and putting an official seal on it.  Think about that for a moment - your ability to establish your identity is only as good as the trust that your host country places in your sending country and its documentation.

So do states really trust each other when it comes to breeder documents?  It depends.  There is a cost to not trusting.  Just imagine if every birth certificate presented by a potential migrant from Canada to France was considered suspect and other documents or even an investigation were required before any of these documents were accepted as legitimate.  Think of how much trouble the French authorities would have to go to (not to mention the time and money involved) to be 100% sure.  Think of how annoyed the sending state would be if they were asked to justify every document.  Not a very diplomatic move either since it does kind of imply that the host country thinks the sending country is inefficient or corrupt.   And what would be the benefit?  That the receiving state might catch a very small percentage of identity thieves?  I imagine most states have done a rough cost/benefit analysis and adjust their trust level according to what they know (or assume) about the other state.

That they probably do this does not mean that they aren't thinking about more cost effective ways to tackle the problem.  The EU issued this statement in 2009 concerning the reliability of breeder documents within the EU.   They implied that they were not even sure that member states should be trusting each other.  If that's indeed true then what about countries outside the EU?

And that brings us straight to a country with serious issues in this area:  the United States.  While Americans are very concerned (for security and immigration reasons) about false documents used to enter or stay on American soil, other countries have reasons to be a bit nervous about  breeder documents coming from entities within the United States.  According to the 2011 MPI report, A New Architecture for Border Management:

In the United States, breeder documents are issued at the state or local level:  there are 16,000 different offices that can issue birth certificates, and over 14,000 different kinds of birth certificates.
There are no common requirements and little consistency among them, and thus such documents are highly susceptible to forgery.  

Please note how carefully worded those two sentences are.  The first is a statement of fact and the second is a statement of fact with mitigating language tacked onto the end.  If we translate, basically what they are saying is the entire U.S. mechanism for producing breeder documents is decentralized to the point of absurdity and these documents cannot necessarily be trusted. They are implying both inefficiency and a strong possibility of outright fraud.  If any of you have another interpretation, I'd be happy to hear it.

This is a situation worth watching.  In all my time abroad I have never had anyone in France, Japan or any other country question my documentation from the U.S.  Up until now American citizens who travelled or lived abroad seem to have been given the benefit of the doubt;  beneficiaries of a "halo effect" conferred because the U.S. was perceived as an efficient, developed country with a certain amount of prestige and status in the world.  To the extent that people become aware of certain idiosyncrasies in the way the U.S. manages its internal affairs, we could see a bit more suspicion of Americans abroad and their documentation.  It could lessen the value of a U.S. passport and diminish the protection U.S. citizens receive when they travel.  It could also make it more difficult for U.S. citizens to get work or residency status in other countries.

Clearly we are not there yet and I should clarify here that there are many countries with worse processes than the U.S.  Nevertheless, the next time you hear Americans complaining about document fraud,  "illegals" and the like in the United States,  just remember that the U.S. is, in fact, the "tallest midget in the room."

DEBTOCRACY // ΧΡΕΟΚΡΑΤΙΑ

I stayed up late last night watching Debtocracy, a documentary produced by Greeks about the Greek debt crisis.  It was released in mid-2011 and has been so well received that the producers are preparing another called Catastroika to be released some time this year.

We live in an age where information is abundant but knowledge and reflection is in short supply.  It's easier to swim in the swallows of a few well-known Internet sites because the blue water just seems too dark and too deep.  Based on that information, gained cheaply and with little effort, we judge and we have the arrogance to think that we judge rightly because we read a few one-page analysis on Der Spiegel, Le Monde or The New York Times.

Some of what I have read on such sites about the Eurozone crisis troubles me because, while the root causes of the situation are complex, they are all too often reduced to a simple morality tale:  the "disciplined" versus the "undisciplined," the "hard-working" versus the "lazy," and "honest taxpayers" versus "tax evaders" with the Greeks cast as the villains (les coupables) of the piece.

If we were a bit more honest and had a better grasp of history we might recall that Greece is hardly the first country on this planet (and certainly not the first in Europe) to have had this problem.  Some of the countries that seem very happy to pass moral judgement on them today (and seem mighty reluctant to help them now) once had their own debt problems.  Correct if I'm wrong but weren't France, Germany and others also members of this club?  Some were even "serial defaulters" who walked away when the situation was simply impossible and there was no other way out.

We are living in difficult times.  No country is immune.  We are all fearful for ourselves and for our families.  It is human to assign blame.  If nothing else it salves our own uneasy consciences because, quite frankly, we and our governments bear a great deal of responsibility for what is.  Greece did not create the present situation all on her own;  she had a great deal of "help" from other European member-states and the U.S.

I don't know of any cure for being human but there is one way we can mitigate some of our least attractive traits:  we can suspend judgement and listen to the other side of the story.    This is what Debtocracy aims to do - present another view- and I think it does it very well, very pursuasively.  I learned a great deal (Iraq and its "odious debt," for example) and I think the only certitude that I had before I watched it that has stayed with me is this:  peace of mind and prosperity cannot be purchased through the punishment and impoverishment of others.  Europe made this mess and either we are "solidaire" in solving it or we are nothing.


Debtocracy International Version par The_Press_Project

(The film is in several languages, mostly Greek but also English, French and Spanish.  If you are fortunate enough to understand all of them you can muddle through without the subtitles.  If not, pass your cursor to the right-hand portion of the screen to find the subtitles in the language of your choice.)

H1-B Visas and the Neufeld Memorandum

I don't generally spend much time delving into the intricacies of U.S. immigration law but I thought this issue was interesting because it touches directly on my field, IT.

The H1-B visa is a work permit program that targets that highly sought after group of skilled migrants (called "travailleurs hautement qualifiés" in French) who work in professions like healthcare, IT, engineering and many others (list here).  It is similar to the EU Blue card in the sense that a migrant must first find a position and then it is the future employer who requests the visa from the U.S. government.  Though it is good for 6 years (and allows for Green Card status later on), it does not allow family members to come and work as well (unless of course they qualify for their own H1-B visas).

Nevertheless this visa was both sought after and fought over for many years.  In times past the quota for each year was reached very quickly.  In 2007, for example, the cap of 85,000 for 2008 was reached by April 3, 2007 - a mere 3 days after the program was opened on April 1.  What kind of companies were requesting H1-B visas?  To no one's surprise, a lot of IT companies were taking advantage of this program:  Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro and Microsoft.

Then came the crisis and demand dropped precipitously.  How bad was it?   It took months for the quotas to be filled instead of weeks or days.  As MPI reports in Migration and the Great Recession, legal immigration to the U.S. slowed considerably in those years. (Note to Tea Party and all other anti-immigrant groups in the U.S. - if you want to stop immigration in its tracks, just tank your economy.) 2010 was a bit better but the bloom is off the rose.  This article from Forbes India, "The H1B Visa's Fall From Grace,"  says that there were two other factors that are leading to decreased demand:  a steep rise in application fees - it now costs between 3000 to 5000 USD to apply - and increased scrutiny of applications - the Obama administration has, contrary to what the Right in the U.S. is saying, stepped up enforcement of immigration law to a nearly unprecedented degree.

Into this already troubled picture, has marched the U.S. government, specifically the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, with the the Neufeld Memorandum (something similar to a "circulaire" here in France) which aimed to step up enforcement of H1-B immigration and employment law.  The issue was the mobility of H1B workers and how IT companies can assign them to different client sites.  Something, by the way, that is pretty standard if you are working in an IT service company.

According to this article, in the past it was understood that when an IT worker changed work locations, all the company had to do was file a little form called a Labor Condition Application with the Department of Labor.  The Department of Immigration was not informed and had no way of knowing where the worker was actually working based on his or her original H1-B application.

With the Neufeld Memorandum that sets higher standards for investigation of employer/employee relationships combined with greater enforcement, immigration agents are checking out these workers by going to the original site/employer to investigate.  If they find that the worker is no longer physically present in that location, they report back that the worker and his/her employer are, shall we say, in an "irregular situation."  The seems to be causing everyone to waste a great deal of time and energy.  One article I read even said that "the USCIS’s fraud detection national security division may also pay a “friendly” surprise visit to the client company to ensure that the work location and other terms of employment are consistent with the H-1B petition."  Oh my.  I'm sure that those clients were just THRILLED to get a visit from U.S. immigration.

So what is the impact of all of this?  Forbes reports that companies are using different strategies to get around this.  Some are simply hiring more U.S. citizens and legal residents or trying for L-1 visas instead since "Visas issued in the L-1 category involve transfers within the same company, and employees do not need to be paid the minimum wage levels of the US, which are much higher than what an employee on an L-1 would be paid."  Other IT companies are simply tweaking their off-shoring models and keeping more of their staff at home and doing the work from Bangalore, for example.

Now I am pretty sure that U.S. government did not intend to make the United States less competitive in the global market for worldwide talent.  I'm even more sure that they are or will be mightily annoyed by efforts of foreign migrants and multi-national IT companies to work around their rules.  But the fact remains that both migrants and companies are rational actors and all of their solutions are quite logical and well within the law.  To make matters even worse, I fail to see how anyone is going to benefit from this:  certainly not U.S. IT workers who may see a few more jobs available but who will face increased competition from migrants in the U.S. on L-1 visas who are apparently not subject to minimum wage laws, and IT workers in lower-cost locations outside the U.S.  It will also hurt migrants who come in with good skills needed by U.S. industry and who, frankly, have other options and other countries that are much more inviting.  These people are legal, for heaven's sake, and making them jump through multiple bureaucratic hoops and harassing them in front of their clients is just unbelievably counter-productive and punitive.

In the 2011 MPI report, Shared Challenges and Opportunities for US and EU Immigration Policymakers, they issued this mild warning:

The U.S. has a strong competitive advantage in attracting and integrating the highly skilled... However, analysts argue that the United States is resting on its laurels and that without more active strategies to provide an attractive immigration "package" to the highly skilled, it may lose some of its traditional advantage.

"May lose"? 

Sorry, mes amis, it is time to take that sentence out of the possible future and move it firmly into the present tense.

Cracking the DaVino Code and Winning the Wine Wars

Wine Wars: the Curse of the Blue Nun, the Miracle of Two Buck Chuck and the Revenge of the Terroirists by Mark Veseth is, hands down, one of the best books I've read recently.  The author is a "wine economist" but don't let that put you off.  This book manages to be both entertaining and informative with a style that is more like an enthusiastic and spontaneous conversation and nothing at all  like a dry lecture on supply and demand.   I can't attest to the validity of his arguments - I outsourced everything to do with wine to my French family over 20 years ago - but I am impressed by his facts and his ability to tie wine to so many different subjects, many of which I enjoy discussing here on this blog.  Here are a few examples:.

Migration:   The wine world we have today is a direct result of international migration:  Phoenicians and Greeks to Italy and Spain, and Romans to France and Germany.  From there it has spread all over the world where the climate was suitable - called the "30-50 wine belt" which includes North Africa, North America, Australia, New Zealand, China and Japan among many others. Interesting enough, up until the 1960's in France half the French wine actually came from North Africa (Algeria to be precise). Today, the wine shelf of your local supermarket looks like a model United Nations.  Wherever modern migrant populations gather, they demand the tastes of home and wine is no exception to that.  Veseth, who lives in North America, says that wine from Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Georgia (a "cradle of wine") and many other countries, are all available in his local supermarket.

Language: The wine world is bi-lingual with the Old and New World speaking different languages with the former using geography (Veseth calls this the "DaVino Code") and the latter using a simpler (and more accessible to the amateur) system of brand/grape/region.


The Global Economy:  Wine is also about business and it is a tough one to succeed in.   I learned this first hand via a family member in France who ran a small traditional family (four+ generations) winery in the Loire Valley. He loved his "metier" but he still had to break even and turn a profit because, like most people, he had house payments to make and children to feed and to send to university.

France (Languedoc) is the center of production, the "world's largest vineyard,"  but the UK is the economic center of wine - the British not only consume one in six bottles of wine on the international market, but London is center of the auction market for really good, very expensive wine. This may change because Hong Kong is starting to give the British competition for this market.


New Technology:  Are you someone who would never drink "wine in a box?"  Surprise, you probably already have -that bottle of wine you bought in the supermarket might just have started life as "wine in a container."  Lots of technological change in the wine world designed to make it more "green".  One of those changes is the (now fairly common) practice of shipping wine in huge wine bladders and then bottling it locally.

Global warming :  This was a real shock to me since I never connected the dots that go from climate change to my glass of Sancerre.  All the places in the world that make wine today (both the traditional wine countries and the newcomers) are going to be severely and negatively impacted by global warming.  Veseth says that "Wine is the canary in the coal mine in terms of global climate change."  The grape varieties that to into wine are exquisitely sensitive to temperature.  By around 2050 experts are predicting that today's "terroir" will be pushed between 280 and 500 km toward the poles.  Great for Norway.  Bad for California, France and North Africa.

I'll stop there because I wouldn't want to deprive you of the pleasure of discovering this book for yourself. I recommend that you savour it slowly, like a really good Bordeaux...

Cheers!

Fear of Small Numbers: Majorities and Minorities

Yesterday, we looked at Arjun Appadurai's description of a potent cocktail that blends ethno-nationalism and social uncertainty and is shaken (not stirred) by globalization.

"Globalization," he says, "exacerbates these uncertainties and produces new incentives for cultural purification as more nations lose the illusion of economjc sovereignty or well-being."

While this "orgy of exclusion" does lead to a number of disagreeable and unseemly rhetorics and acts against non-citizens and citizens alike, it does not necessarily lead to an "orgy of violence."

Appadurai argues that the path to large-scale violence has to do with the creation of majorities and minorities (be they cultural, linguistic, religious and so on), a very modern phenomenen that relies on those "tools of legibility" that are the glory of the modern nation-state. The ability to count and categorize people reveals (creates?) differences that can be used to assign people to one group or another. There is nothing particularly natural or self-evident about this - minorities and majorities are made, not born.

Having assigned people to a category, the majority will sometimes turn on their minorities and not only deprive them of their dignity, liberty and property, but their lives as well. When you think about it, this is unbelievably strange and illogical. What is so threatening about a group that is numerically inferior and is, by definition, weak? This is the "fear of small numbers" Appadurai uses for the title of his essay. But there is a certain logic behind it if one's dream is a vision of the nation as a pure whole - ethno-nationalism taken to its bitter, and extreme, end. In this context, an identified minority is a provocation that "reminds the majority of the small gap between their condition as majorities and the horizon of an unsullied national whole, a pure and untainted national ethos." This creates what Appafurai calls, "the anxiety of incompleteness." When this is tied to a "predatory identity" that goes so far as to claim that the very existence of the majority is threatened by, and incompatible with, a minority, you have all the elements necessary for large-scale violence. The debate is framed as a fight for survival.

This is, in my view, exactly what the Far Right parties are trying to create. Here are a few examples of minorities under attack: dual nationals in France, Spanish speakers in America, Moslems in India and migrants just about everywhere. Right-wing parties and movements are claiming that these people, however small their numbers, are a real threat to their respective nations. Though the criteria for minority status differs by national context, the answer to difference is the same - elimination by various means with harsh measures and methods being proposed when the right-wing parties achieve some power through the electoral process or they see that polls and public sentiment demonstrate that the majority is amenable to moving in that direction.

The most extreme method of elimination, of course, is genocide.  Can you drew a straight line from social uncertainty exacerbated by globalization, ethno-nationalism, the "anxiety of incompleteness" and "predatory identities?"  I am convinced that, yes, you can. Here are the elements Appadurai cites as ingredients for genocide;

1. "The capture of the state by parties or groups that have placed their political bets on some sort of racialized nationalist ideology
2. The availability of census tools and techniques that encourage enumerated communities to become norms for the idea of community itself
3. A felt lack of fit between political borders and community migrations and populations, yielding a new alertness to politically abandoned kin or ethnic strangers claiming to be one's kinsmen
4. A successful campaign of fear, directed at numerical majorities, which convinces them that they are at risk of destruction by minorities who know how to use the law (and the entire apparatus of liberal-democratic politics) to advance their special ends."

A rather sobering list, elements of which can be read in every newspaper on and off-line, heard on every radio and viewed on every television in nations all around the world.  Fear of Small Numbers is a fascinating and frightening read.  I've gained two things from this book:   a language and framework that I can use to describe some of what I see and experience as a migrant among many other migrants in this increasingly global and interconnected world.

Fear of Small Numbers: Globalization and Autochthony

Before leaving Seattle I selected several books with intriguing titles that sparked my interest. In the stolen time I managed to carve out in our busy schedule, I've been reading here in our hotel room in Montreal.


Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger by Arjun Appadurai is a brilliant book.  It is the second book in an ongoing project that examines globalization and seeks ways to make it work for those who "need it most and enjoy it least."  Comparing it to his first book, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, I found Fear of Small Numbers to be the better book. Both have excellent ideas but Fear of Small Numbers is more accessible to someone like me who has never had much patience with the language of "Theory."


Remember the heady post-Cold War days when we believed that globalization (exemplified by democratic movements, Free Trade, and the Internet) was ushering in an era of peace and prosperity for all?  Over the years much of our optimism has faded away to be replaced by a growing horror at some of the darker aspects of a world gone global:  terrorism, crashing financial markets and failed states.  We are forced to admit that a world that has become more connected is not necessarily a world with less conflict.  In Fear of Small Numbers Appadurai asks, "why in the 1990's, the period of what we may now call the period of 'high globalization', should also be the period of large-scale violence in a wide range of societies and political regimes?"

His argument begins with the nation-state itself.  He contends that, "No modern nation, however benign its political system and however eloquent its public voices may be about the virtues of tolerance, multiculturalism, and inclusion, is free of the idea that its national sovereignty is built on some sort of ethnic genius."   Even countries that have gone to extraordinary lengths to create Frenchman or Americans or Indonesians are not immune.    

Is ethno-nationalism sufficient to explain why this language of ethnic or cultural purity tips over into discrimination and violence?  No, other conditions are required.  One condition is "social uncertainty" which Appadurai traces directly to globalization.   Above all", says Appadurai, "the certainty that distinctive and singular peoples grow out of and control well-defined territories has been decisively unsettled by the global fluidity of wealth, arms, people and images..." What, specifically, are the "sins" of globalization that provoke our anxiety?

Loss of a sovereign and stable territory with a containable and countable population:  How many of 'us' and how many of 'them' are there in our territory or abroad?  I think he is absolutely right about this.  Our census, one of the "tools of legibility" so ably described by J.C. Scott, are unreliable. We know there are "illegals' but we can't know for sure how many.  Our fellow citizens living abroad?  These are people we cannot accurately count. The US government seems to have given up. France and other countries' statistics are unreliable. How can a nation-states fulfill their duties to citizens or demand that citizens fulfill their obligations if they have no idea who or where their citizens are?

Loss of reliable, stable categories for placing people: How do we determine that someone is one of 'us' and not one of 'them'?  Again, I agree 100% with Appadurai.  As much as I personally dislike categorization, I have to acknowledge that many people find it very disturbing when they encounter someone in their country they cannot place or who they suspect is not what he or she claims to be. An official asks me for my identification and is very surprised when I hand him my residency card.  In almost all nation-states it has become impossible to sort out the citizens/nationals and the "sons of the soil" from the dual-nationals, multi-linguals, legal  residents and undocumented aliens.

Let's take this one step further.  Having lost the old (and, let's face it, rather dubious) categories we are desperately in search of new ones. This is a perilous undertaking because, as Peter Geschiere points out in Perils of Belonging, "in practice any attempt to define the autochthonous community in concrete terms will give rise to fierce disagreements and nagging suspicions of faking."  That has not stopped some people from trying.  Le Pen of the Front National suggested that only French people with four French grandparents could be considered "truly French." If taken seriously, this would transform over 25% of the population of France into foreigners overnight.  The "National Operation of Identification" launched by the president of the Ivory Coast required that all persons go back to their "village of origin." to be "identified."  Only those who had as village to go back to (cities didn't count) were citizens with the right to vote and to own land.  Bobby Jindal, a rising star of the American Right, had his qualifications for high office questioned because he is the son of Indian immigrant who were not citizens at the time of his birth which, to some people on the Far Right, means that he can never be president of the United States even though he was born on US soil.

Potential loss of state-provided goods and services:  This loss of nation-state sovereignty and of stable, consistent, reliable categories, according to Appadurai, "creates intolerable anxiety about the relationship to state-provided goods - ranging from housing and health to safety and sanitation-since these entitlements are frequently tied to who 'you' are and thus to who 'they' are."  I would add that, in an era of huge budget deficits and economic turmoil, even citizens are unsure if they will ever receive a government pension or have access to the same level of healthcare as they had in the past.  Desperate to hold onto what is left, they try to create categories with themselves as the deserving, first-class citizens, and the others as second-class citizens (not "true citizens") or undeserving non-citizens (migrants). Geschiere's book describes a similar struggle over resources that are handed over to local community control.  Suddenly the definition of "community" is of primary importance and people find themselves sorted into "natives" with rights to control these resources and "foreigners" who do not.

I find Appadurai's argument, from nation-state ethos to the local struggle for goods and resources, to be very compelling.  Within it, I find plausible reasons for the rise of Far Right parties (Front National, Tea Party and others) and for recent efforts at cultural purification in many nation-states all around the world.  What is interesting to me is how these movements or parties do not just target migrants, they also go after their fellow citizens in an orgy of exclusion. The paradox is, as Peter Geschiere points out, that the same parties that are interested in reducing the power and role of the state are calling on their governments to take drastic (and costly) measures against the second-class or non-citizens on their soil.

Do these attempts at exclusion (state-supported or not) always turn violent? Not necessarily.  While the language and legislation are often disagreeable, and isolated acts of violence and discrimination do occur, outright violence on a large-scale is rare in most democratic nation-states. Ethno-nationalism and social uncertainty are necessary conditions for, but not a complete explanation of, wide-spread, large-scale violence. Tomorrow we'll continue our discussion by looking at what Appadurai calls "the anxiety of incompleteness."