Bernd Debusmann

After breaking a promise to tackle immigration reform in his first year in office, President Barack Obama now thinks the time has come to deal with the thorny issue “once and for all.” It’s a safe bet that he will fail to repair America’s broken immigration system. Why? George W. Bush helps explain.

The immigration reform Bush championed would have provided tighter control over the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, a new visa system for temporary workers, and a path to legal status for millions of illegal immigrants already in the country. The bill failed in 2007 after running into stiff opposition from congressional leaders of his own Republican party.

In his memoir, Decision Points, he says the debate over the reform had been affected by “a blend of isolationism, protectionism and nativism,” apocalyptic warnings of a “third world invasion and conquest of America” by TV radio hosts and commentators and last but not least the influence of ideological extremes in Congress.

“The failure of immigration reform points out larger concerns about the direction of our politics,” Bush writes in a perceptive passage. Since members of Congress in safe districts do not have to worry about challenges from the opposition party, their greatest vulnerability is getting outflanked in their own party. The result is a drift towards the extreme, he writes, and “this is especially true in the era of bloggers, who make national targets out of politicians they deem ideologically impure.”

That trend was obvious in the 2010 mid-term elections that gave Republicans a 49-seat majority in the House of Representatives and brought in many extremely vocal guardians of ideological purity, adherents to the populist tea party movement.

It is not a congress with an appetite for fixing what Obama, like his predecessor, has described as a broken immigration system. And the obstacles for him are even bigger than they were for Bush. Isolationism, protectionism and nativism are still running strong in the debate. The talk radio hosts and TV commentators Bush complains about in his book treated him, a fellow Republican, much more gently than they do Obama, whom they tend to portray as the devil incarnate.

So Obama’s remark, in his State of the Union address on January 25, that the debate “will be difficult and take time” sounds like the understatement of the year. Particularly because it came just a few weeks after anti-immigration hard-liners added a new element to the long-running political battle.

ANCHOR BABIES” AND THE CONSTITUTION
That involves a constitutional amendment, dating back to 1868, providing U.S. citizenship to almost all babies born in the United States. (The children of foreign diplomats are excluded). In the terminology of proponents of tighter immigration rules, children born to illegal immigrants are “anchor babies,” meant to ensure legal status for their parents and prevent their deportation.

The phrase adds a toxic element to the immigration debate but it is misleading. Until such children reach the age of 21, they cannot sponsor their parents for legal immigration status. That has not stopped an anti-anchor baby movement from gathering momentum.

Two days after Obama’s “once and for all” remark, two Republican senators, Rand Paul and David Vitter, introduced legislation that would end the right to citizenship for children of illegal immigrants born in the U.S.

A day earlier, Arizona Republicans filed similar legislation, part of a coordinated drive in several U.S. states to highlight claims that the federal government is not doing enough to curb illegal immigration.

The aim is to fuel debate over the 14th amendment of the U.S. constitution which guarantees citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Interpreting the second half of that sentence will boost the income of lawyers but do little to repair the immigration system.

The key to doing that is what Bush pursued and Obama echoed in his State of the Union speech: a way to “protect our borders, enforce our laws and address the millions of undocumented workers who are now living in the shadows.”

There are at least 11 million of them and to the ideological purists, any proposal to give them a path to legal status is tantamount to “amnesty,” like “anchor babies” one of the terms that touch emotional buttons and tend to drown practical considerations. Common sense would dictate that border security, an out-of-date visa system and the status of millions of people already in the country must be dealt with simultaneously and in one package.

But for long, leading Republicans have insisted on a sequence – first, there must be full “operational control” over the border, defined by law as “the prevention of all unlawful U.S. entries, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics and other contraband.”

The ambitious, or elusive, nature of that requirement was best described by Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano when she was governor of Arizona: “Show me a 50-foot wall and I will show you a 51-foot ladder.”
And the solution?  None in sight. If Obama has a plan on how to solve the problem, he has yet to spell it out clearly.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

On April 24, 1984, the respected London-based Jane’s Defence Weekly reported that Iran was in the final stages of producing a nuclear bomb that could be ready in two years. Sound familiar?

In the past quarter century, forecasts of when Iran might have a nuclear bomb have been issued, and proven wrong, so frequently that nuclear experts have coined the phrase “rolling estimate.” Forecasts have come from a wide variety of sources, including Iraq (during its disastrous war with Iran), the U.S. Congress, the Central Intelligence Agency, Israel’s Mossad, prominent Israeli politicians, and think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic.

Iranian bomb estimates have been making headlines again this month after Meir Dagan, on the day he handed over leadership of the Mossad to his successor, said he did not believe Iran could have a nuclear capability before 2015. Last year, he forecast Iran could reach that stage within a year.

Dagan ascribed the revised time frame to a series of malfunctions in the Iranian nuclear programme. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking two days after the Israeli spy chief’s new forecast, said Iran’s nuclear program, “from our best estimate, has slowed down.” The main reason, according to Clinton: U.N.-blessed economic sanctions against Iran have been effective.

There is cause for skepticism about bomb prognostications. Iran has consistently denied that it wants to build nuclear weapons and doing so would depend on a political decision by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Western Iran experts and intelligence officials tend to agree that no such decision has yet been taken.

Whether it is drawing closer or becoming more distant will remain shrouded in Iran’s opaque and multi-layered government system even after talks in Istanbul this weekend between Iranian negotiators and representatives of the five members of the United Nations Security Council (the U.S., China, Russia, France and Britain) plus Germany.

In advance of the talks, a diverse group of U.S. experts and organizations, from human rights and pro-democracy to arms control groups, urged the administration of President Barack Obama to “reinvigorate” its diplomacy because “diplomacy is the only sustainable means of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.”

Ironically, it was not diplomacy but a campaign of sabotage and murder that gave American and Israeli officials reason to believe Iran was farther from the bomb than previously estimated, thus providing more time for talk rather than the military strikes American neo-conservatives and many Israeli politicians last year saw as increasingly inevitable.

STUXNET AND ASSASSINATIONS
By many accounts, the principal reason the Iranian nuclear programme slowed down is a sophisticated computer worm which took out almost 1,000 of the centrifuges at the Natanz uranium-enrichment facility. After many months of speculation on the creators of the worm, Stuxnet, the New York Times reported this week that it was a joint U.S.-Israeli effort. Neither the U.S. nor Israel denied the story.

There has been official silence on the near-simultaneous attacks in Tehran last November on two Iranian nuclear scientists. The hits, in different parts of the capital, were carried out by motorcycle-riding assassins who magnetically attached bombs to the cars of their targets. One, Majid Shariari, was killed in the blast. The other stopped his vehicle and jumped out before the bomb went off.

The attacks highlighted the view of many that the end justifies the means when it comes to stopping Iran from pursuing the bomb. “I don’t know who’s behind it but whoever did it should be blessed,” Ilan Mizrahi, a former deputy chief of the Mossad, Israeli’s principal intelligence agency, said in an interview during a recent visit to Washington.

Stuxnet has given rise to warnings that this kind of sabotage could backfire with dire consequences for the saboteurs. At the end of an extraordinarily detailed technical report last December on how the malware took over control of Iranian centrifuges, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington think tank, sounded a sober note of concern.

“It is important for governments to approach the question of whether using a tool like Stuxnet could open the door to future national security risks or adversely and unintentionally affect U.S. allies,” ISIS said. “Countries hostile to the United States may feel justified in launching their own attacks against U.S. facilities…(and) shut down large portions of national power grids or other critical infrastructure.” That could cause a national emergency.

Gary Sick, an Iran scholar at Columbia University, echoed such concerns. While the military and technical capabilities of the U.S. and Israel dwarf those of Iran, he says, “cyber warfare may be an attractive way to level the playing field – the ultimate in asymmetric warfare.”

Whether and when that might happen depends as much on Iran’s complex internal politics as the decision to go ahead and get the bomb.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

Another American mass shooting. Another rush to buy more guns.

On the Monday after the latest of the bloody rampages that are part of American life, gun sales in Arizona shot up by more than 60 percent and rose by an average of five percent across the entire country. The figures come from the FBI and speak volumes about a gun culture that has long baffled much of the world.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation compared January 10, 2011, with the corresponding Monday a year ago.

So what would prompt Americans to stock up their arsenals in the wake of the shooting in Tucson that killed six people and wounded 14, including Gabrielle Giffords, the congresswoman who was the target of an unhinged 22-year-old who has since been charged with attempted assassination?

To hear gun dealers tell it, demand went up because of fears that the Tucson shooting might lead to tighter gun laws. There was a similar spike in sales after the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech, where a deranged student killed 32 people and himself in the worst such massacre in American history.

Fear of regulation also drove up gun sales after President Barack Obama won the presidency in November 2008. In the first two months of 2009, about 2.5 million Americans bought guns, a 26 percent increase over the same period in 2008.

According to a CBS poll taken two days after Jared Loughner shot congresswoman Giffords in the head, Americans are almost evenly divided on the issue of gun control – 48 percent said gun laws should remain as they are or be made less strict, 47 in favor of more regulation. That is down from 56 percent in 2002 and confirms a Gallup analysis this week that found public support for stricter gun laws has declined over the past two decades.

That prompts one to wonder how many Americans see gun violence as the inevitable by-product of a free society – and whether the gun lobby has been right all along in saying that gun control advocates are out of touch with much of the country.

As one of the staunchest opponents of more gun regulation, John Lott, puts it in a book entitled More Guns, Less Crime: “American culture is a gun culture – not merely in the sense that in 2009 about 124 million people lived in households that owned a total of about 270 million guns but in a broader sense that guns pervade our debates on crime and are constantly present in movies and the news. So, we are obsessed with guns…”

WORLD LEADER IN PRIVATE GUNS
That obsession has long secured the United States the number one position on the list of gun-owning nations. There are more guns in private hands than anywhere else on earth. On a guns-per-capita basis (90 guns per 100 residents) it is comfortably ahead of second-ranked Yemen (61 per 100), according to the authoritative Small Arms Survey issued by the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

That obsession, in the eyes of gun control advocates, borders on insanity and some of the wrinkles of America’s permissive gun laws are so bizarre they beggar belief. To wit: “Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law.” Neither does inclusion on the government’s ever-growing terrorist watch list.

So found the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the research arm of Congress, after looking into the background checks of prospective buyers gun dealers are required to file to the FBI. According to a GAO report read at a congressional hearing last May, sales of guns and explosives to people on terrorist watch lists totaled 1,119 in a period of six years.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, came out in opposition to proposed legislation that would have barred people on the list from buying guns. Why? They are placed there on “reasonable suspicion” of terrorist links and the NRA argues that suspicion is not enough for Congress to take away the constitutional right, enshrined in the second amendment to the U.S. constitution, to own and bear arms.

After the Tucson attack hurt one of their own, members of Congress are worried about their safety but whether that will translate into greater willingness to tighten gun regulations remains to be seen. The test will come when a New York Democrat, Carolyn McCarthy, introduces a bill to ban extended magazines, such as the 33-round clip used by Loughner.

Such magazines were illegal from 1994 to 2004 as part of a ban on assault weapons the Bush administration let lapse, a move that prompted gun control advocates to predict a sharp increase in the number of gun deaths. That did not happen. The rate of gun deaths – by murder, suicide or accidents – has held steady at around 31,000 a year and the murder rate has actually dropped.

Which is an argument gun enthusiasts and their lobby are certain to field when McCarthy’s bill is debated. After that, the topic will fade – until the next mass shooting.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)