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Let's start this post by acknowledging the life and service of recently deceased Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry,  his recent death in the line of duty is a tragedy.

However having read some of the early reporting done on this has proven to be frustrating as some commentators have tried to conflate agent Terry's death with the current debate on the DREAM Act in congress. 

It is necessary to highlight this particular disconnect because opponents of immigration reform have become so skilled at putting border security and pretty much any other legislation that tries to address immigration reform at odds.

It can not be said enough, border security is a component, an important one for reform, there are others, including figuring out what to do with the current 11 million people currently here. It is not impossible to do more then one at a time.

Michele Malkin, has released a blog hit entitled A dream denied: Border Patrol agent Brian Terry killed in Arizona.  There is nothing wrong with the first part of this post, it is a simple explanation of what has occurred with a link to a USA Today story on what occurred  in Rio Rico, Arizona:

A Border Patrol agent was shot and killed Tuesday night near Rio Rico after encountering several suspects, federal authorities said Wednesday. Agent Brian Terry was killed just 10 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, north of Nogales. Four suspects are in custody and one is being pursued, according to a press release from Customs and Border Protection. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office are investigating.

The above quote accurately presents all of the current information provided by Department of Homeland Security regarding the circumstances of Agent Terry's death. It is her next sentence that is egregious:

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats continue to push the pro-amnesty DREAM Act and security-undermining environmental land grabs. Priorities…

As someone who follows Immigration issues, and the DREAM Act in particular on a daily basis, the connection between the current legislation before the Senate and the death of a border patrol agent is baffling. These two issues have nothing to do with each other. For one thing the citizenship of the four suspects is not currently known. A fact corroborated by Fox News article on the shooting:

Agent Brian A. Terry, 40, was killed late Tuesday near Rio Rico, Ariz., according to a statement released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials. At least four suspects are in custody and another is still being pursued.

The leader of a union representing Border Patrol agents said Terry was trying to catch bandits who target illegal immigrants for robbery.

In the Fox News reporting of the events that led to Agent Terry's death, it would seem that what most likely happened was that he was killed trying to protect immigrants from "bandits" who target undocumented immigrants crossing the desert.

In case Malkin neglected to read anything written about the DREAM Act, it only affects children born to undocumented immigrants  in the United States who want to serve in the military or go to college. In no place within this legislation is there a provision to award "bandits" citizenship....

It is unfortunate what happened in Arizona, but it is irresponsible for anyone to conflate this act of violence with the current debate over the DREAM Act. It is entirely possible to secure the border and pass the DREAM Act. As they are both components of broad reform of our immigration system. Border security is a part of that and so is dealing with the current 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in America.

The United States faces economic problems as daunting as any seen since the 1930s. GDP growth and job creation remain slow in the early stages of the current recovery, when both should be strong.  Moreover, the pressures of globalization, along with technological advances, have reduced the capacity of American businesses to create new jobs even when demand is strong.  These changes have boosted productivity, but most people’s wages and incomes remain stalled.  And in the most dynamic sectors of our economy, those technological advances increasingly demand skills beyond those of most working Americans.  These developments also have produced rapidly widening gaps in incomes and wealth, so that 20 percent of Americans now own 93 percent of the nation’s financial assets.  And the one asset that most families can claim, their homes, has lost an average of 30 percent of its value in the last three years.

Yet, Washington continues to respond to these challenges through an economics of nostalgia.  The economic agenda of most conservatives today consists mainly of tax cuts for those at the top who earn, save and invest the most, resting on an unflagging faith that markets are self-correcting and invariably produce the best possible outcome.   After all, this approach seemed to work in the 1980s -- even if its reprise under George W. Bush led to nearly a decade of historically anemic job creation and stagnating incomes, and culminated in a disastrous financial meltdown and long deep recession of 2007-2009.   The progressive response amounts mainly to a series of stimulative spending and tax measures bolstered by virtually unlimited and free loans for large financial institutions to stimulate their own lending.   And while similar approaches worked in the 1960s and 1990s, the current iteration has produced the weakest recovery in decades. 

The progressives are closer to the mark than the conservatives, because when the private sector underperforms as badly as ours has over the last 18 months, it needs stimulus of the sort currently promoted by the President and likely to pass the Senate this week.   But in an economy hampered by serious structural problems, stimulus alone cannot ignite strong and self-sustaining gains in growth, jobs and incomes.  To accomplish that, both sides need to put aside their traditional responses and consider new approaches that can directly address the structural problems holding back real prosperity.  Ironically, the most significant initiative to do so is the one program that the Administration gets the least credit for – the health care reforms or at last those parts which over time should slow the rate of increase in medical and insurance costs, and thereby help provide a foundation for faster job creation and wage gains.

These nostalgic economic nostrums seem to blind most of Washington to the necessity for a new economic strategy.  For example, it should be evident to all but the most ideologically-blinkered free marketers that the housing market has been dysfunctional for nearly a decade.  Moreover, the sustained decline in housing values has produced a “negative wealth effect” which continue to dampen consumer demand when the various stimulus measures run out.  Conservatives argue for letting those markets work their will, which would amount to another two years of slow demand and declining assets for most Americans.  A better strategy begins by acknowledging that declining housing values are a real problem, now driven by high levels of home foreclosures.  We can try to fix that with a new loan program to help families facing foreclosure keep their homes.  And if that strengthens consumer demand, it should also trigger significant increases in business investment – and together, both should generate real job gains.

The problem of slow job creation isn’t limited to our current circumstances – in the expansion of 2002-2007, American businesses created jobs at less than half the rate, relative to GDP growth, seen in the expansions of the 1980s and 1990s.  Much of this problem comes from the intense competitive pressures unleashed by globalization, which limit the ability of businesses to pass along higher costs by raising their prices, and therefore forces them to cut costs when, for example, their energy, health care or pension bills go up.  A reasonable response to this problem would be measures to lower the cost to businesses of creating new jobs.  For the short term, for example, we can give U.S. multinationals 18 months to bring back their foreign profits at a lower tax rate, but only if they already expand their U.S. workforces by 5 percent to 10 percent.  That would produce an estimated 750,000 to 1.3 million additional jobs.  For the longer term, we should consider cutting the payroll tax for employers on a permanent basis and using a carbon fee to restore the revenues for Social Security.  

Similarly, neither stimulus nor the market alone can affect the growing mismatch between the IT skills required to excel at most well-paying jobs today and the training of most American workers over age 30 or 35 years.  For $300 million to $400 million a year – a fraction of the smallest bank bailout of 2008 or 2009 – Washington could provide grants to community colleges to keep their computer labs open and staffed in the evenings and on weekends so any adult could walk in and receive free computer training.  It’s also time to join the rest of the advanced world in recognizing that higher education has become as much a public good as elementary and secondary education.  Our idea-based economy now requires that government also ensure genuine low-cost access for both undergraduate and graduate training for anyone attending public colleges and universities, tied perhaps to a requirement for a year or two of public service.

This leaves us a major structural problem that at least Washington acknowledges – the prospect of damaging long-term deficits once the economy recovers, tied to fast-rising entitlement spending for retiring boomers.  The economics of nostalgia will be of little use here as well, but a view of a more effective strategy will require a separate discussion. 

Linda Chavez, a long time conservative commentator has released a great editorial on the DREAM Act today.  Her piece The DREAM and The Nightmare is critical of Democrats for bringing up what she calls a purely political vote but she saves her most withering tongue lashing for the GOP:

Republicans may, nonetheless, be walking right into their trap. For all the loose talk of "amnesty" in the immigration debate, proposals to grant a path to legalization for adult immigrants who entered or remained in the United State illegally were never true amnesty. The Bush plan included hefty fines for all transgressors -- which, by definition, is not amnesty -- as well as requiring them to pay back taxes, undergo criminal checks, learn English, and go to the back of the citizenship line. As conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin notes, the definition of amnesty is to "exempt from punishment."

Chavez is especially critical of GOP Senators who would deny undocumented students the ability to contribute to society, tying the success of these young DREAMers to the future of Republican party:

Do Republicans really want to tell young people who've lived here most of their lives, who may speak no other language but English, and who are even willing to sacrifice themselves on the battlefield for the protection of all Americans: "We don't want you"? What are the alternatives -- let them continue to live in the shadows or deport them? Not even the most aggressively anti-immigration groups are calling for the latter. A number of Republicans who previously supported the legislation -- including one of its chief authors, Sen. Orrin Hatch -- have decided it is too risky to vote for it now. But the real risk is to the future of the Republican Party.

She also ties the rise of hard line anti-immigration stances of the GOP to their electoral losses in Senate races in 2010, as well as how it may affect them in 2012:

The refusal of all but a tiny handful of Republicans to vote for the Dream Act will become a future nightmare. Hard-line anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric has already cost Republicans at least two U.S. Senate seats, Nevada and Colorado, even in a GOP landslide election. It could well cost Republicans the White House in 2012 -- the Democrats are betting on it.

From The Hill's blog:

"The debt ceiling, obviously, is going to have to be increased if we're not going to default, so the question is, what do we get in exchange for that, and what kind of fiscal controls?" said Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the incoming chairman of the House budget panel, last week on Bloomberg Television.

Ryan's question - what do I get in exchange for not letting the United States of America default? - has only one answer: a $174,000 paycheck for being a member of the United States Congress. This is going to be an interesting battle over the next few months, but Ryan's current position of demanding something that fits his ideology in exchange for not ruining America's credit could easily be considered unpatriotic.

With a DREAM Act vote expected at the end of the week in the Senate, negotiations continue to rage with hope that after some procedural maneuvering there could be a vote this Friday on final passage.

In the mean time  John Creighton of the Washington Times has written an article on the DREAM Act for his column "Dispatches From The Homeland", this article is worth reading because it highlights who is eligible for the DREAM Act and what the process is for recieving benefits from this legislation. The article also clears up a large misconception about the DREAM Act: the actual level of eligibility for social services for current undocumented immigrants, and those who actually become legal permanent residents:

“We can’t get Medicaid,” asserted a young man.  “That’s impossible without a Social Security number.  We pay taxes but we’re not eligible for benefits.”  Even if the DREAM Act passes, these students would not be eligible for many, perhaps most, government services. “We’ve contributed all our lives,” added another student.  “We volunteer.  We collect food for the food drive and clothes for the clothes drive [at school].  We always try to help.

This is an important distinction as much of the current complaints from conservatives as to why they cannot support the DREAM Act is because it gives undocumented immigrants access to too many social services. This is flat out not true. The Senate Leadership released a list of changes made to House Legislation which actually makes it much harder for recipients of the DREAM Act to receive any social services.

House Addition: Does not grant lawful permanent resident (LPR) status to anyone for at least 10 years; instead, an individual who meets the bill’s requirements becomes a “conditional nonimmigrant.”

What This Means:  First things, this portion of the bill requires TEN Years of background checks and good behavior as a conditional non-immigrant, before the status of LPR is applied. Only after 10 years as a conditional nonimmigrant may a DREAM Act beneficiary apply for LPR status. Earlier versions of the DREAM Act provided “conditional permanent resident status” for 6 years, at which time those eligible could apply for LPR status.

Conditional non-immigrant status provides a Social Security number, however as beneficiaries of the DREAM Act, they are required to pay taxes but receive no other federal benefits except the ability to get students loans and work study.

Getting back to the conservative argument that DREAM allows immigrants to receive social services, this is tangentially true, only it is after 10 years of good service and after paying into the system. Not a sinister grafting of the system as many conservative pundits have tried to characterize the DREAM Act.

Lets also be clear here, under the current legislation before the Senate, people can apply and be rejected. This is not an easy process, especially since if someone applies for the DREAM Act and is rejected their undocumentted status is now public knowledge and they can deported.

Anyone who is willing to take that chance, and pay into the system for essentially 10 years, without receiving any benefits, should after meeting all of the background checks and requirements be allowed to fully recieve benifits. 

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Violence is down on the American side of the Border. To say that violence on the border has dropped under the Obama Administration is empirically true, there is certainly statistical evidence to indicate that there has actually been a drop in violence on the American side of the border.

This is not an unrealistic outlook, it is the result of unprecedented amounts of funding that has been thrown at securing the American side of the border. What the Media in the United States particularly Fox fail to acknowledge is that much of the violence that occurs on the border occurs mostly on the Mexico side of the border.

Perhaps an even more nuanced view of what is happening on the border is that violence is down on the American side while also being up on the Mexican side, but that violence committed on the Mexican side has been done with American guns.

James V. Grimaldi and Sari Horwitz of The Washington Post have a great story up, which really dives into the connection between the increase in violence in Mexico and the increase in American guns moving south of the border.

No other state has produced more guns seized by police in the brutal Mexican drug wars than Texas. In the Lone Star State, no other city has more guns linked to Mexican crime scenes than Houston. And in the Texas oil town, no single independent dealer stands out more for selling guns traced from south of the border than Bill Carter.

The report goes even further by compiling the 12 largest retailers of weapons to Mexico, not surprisingly all of them are from border states, additionally 8 of these 12 come from Texas:

A year-long investigation by The Washington Post has cracked that secrecy and uncovered the names of the top 12 U.S. dealers of guns traced to Mexico in the past two years. Eight of the top 12 dealers are in Texas, three are in Arizona, and one is in California. In Texas, two of the four Houston area Carter's Country stores are on the list, along with four gun retailers in the Rio Grande Valley at the southern tip of the state. There are 3,800 gun retailers in Texas, 300 in Houston alone.

The fact that so much of the guns being used in the drug war being waged IN MEXICO come from Texas is significant because Governor Rick Perry has made much about the escalating violence on the Mexican side of the border:

Perry said drug-related crime and violence all along that country-sized border have "gotten considerably worse, despite all of our efforts." The governor told the Tribune-Review that he is concerned not only by the increasing violence and its spiraling brutality, but by the growing sophistication of the drug cartels' operations and the willingness of gang members to confront U.S. law enforcement officers.

If Governor Perry was serious about doing something about violence on the southern part of the border, given the evidence presented in the Washington Post report, perhaps he should make it harder to buy weapons in his state. The report notes that what makes Texas so popular is not only the sheer numbers of gun shops but also the types of guns you can buy with relative ease in Texas:

Drug cartels have aggressively turned to the United States because Mexico severely restricts gun ownership. Following gunrunning paths that have been in place for 50 years, firearms cross the border and end up in the hands of criminals as well as ordinary citizens seeking protection. "This is not a new phenomenon," Webb said. What is different now, authorities say, is the number of high-powered rifles heading south - AR-15s, AK-47s, armor-piercing .50-caliber weapons - and the savagery of the violence.

This has led to a huge number of guns moving from the United States to Mexico:

Federal authorities say more than 60,000 U.S. guns of all types have been recovered in Mexico in the past four years, helping fuel the violence that has contributed to 30,000 deaths. Mexican President Felipe Calderon came to Washington in May and urged Congress and President Obama to stop the flow of guns south.

The Washington Post article is comprehensive, it is well worth wading into as it gives an excellent snapshot of exactly what is occurring on the southern border.

The current (summer-fall) issue of the SAIS Review focuses on the impact of technological innovation on international affairs, with a number of great authors and thinkers looking at the issue from a variety of angles. From the issue's forward:

This issue was first conceived as an examination of the impact of technological innovation on international affairs. In the wake of the Iranian "Twitter Revolution" and the creation of a U.S. Cyber Command, it became clear that innovations in network technology were significant enough to be our sole focus. The substance of international relations-the manifold daily interactions, some cooperative, some conflictive among societies and states-are increasingly played out in a connected cyberspace. This development increasingly holds the potential to alter the dynamic of power within and among states.

It also presents policymakers with a host of new and complex challenges. On one level, individual societies are still grappling with the question of how to accommodate networks in their national lives. At the same time, how any individual society approaches the Internet has immediate foreign policy implications given the interconnectedness of today's world. In short, the rapid advance of technological innovation in the cyber realm has created a demand for equal innovation in the policy realm. This issue explores the policy implications of this remarkable technological milieu, shedding light on both the threats and opportunities of international relations in cyberspace.

Now, there is a certain irony in such content being placed behind a paywall, but such is the state of academic publishing. Perhaps you can get the student in your life to lend you their university login information.  

It's worth it, with articles from Alec Ross on State's approach to internet freedom, Min Jiang on China's "internet sovereignty," Bruce Etling, Rob Faris, and John Palfrey on the "promise and fragility of online organizing," Patrick Meier and Rob Munro on the "potential of the Internet to facilitate political resistance and disaster response," Maja Andjelkovic on the potential for innovation-- particularly on mobile devices-- to drive growth in the developing world, and my friend Neil Shenai writing with Teryn Norris on the "long-term innovation potential of the Chinese and U.S. economies." Among others.

Lots of interesting stuff.  Looking forward to diving into it all myself, and perhaps commenting here on Global Mobile. 

The BBC had a good article this week about mobile-based learning tools. The piece doubled as a bit of self-promotion, as it discussed the BBC World Service Trust's own project, Janala, which uses brief audio lessons to teach English to poor Bangladeshis. The other story is about Nokia's Ovi Life tools, which has 6.3 million users in China, India and Indonesia, and just introduced in Nigeria. Nokia's service uses SMS messages to teach English, instead of voice.

Much of the article focuses on the challenge of delivering content that is locally relevant and appropriate. Nokia's service in Nigeria will use Hausa and pidgin English as available languages of instruction, just as they've used 11 regional Indian languages to make their service useful to Indians who don't speak Hindi. Janala teaches English with a Bangladeshi accent, rather than the Queen's, and replaced references to "tennis and hamburgers" with references to "cricket and rice."  All good stuff.

But the question I want to zero-in on here has to do with the different models of instruction: voice vs. SMS.  I don't want to take anything away from Nokia's service-- if they're reaching over six million people, with over one million repeat users, they're creating a valuable service. But around the world today there are more and more people who own mobile phones, and yet cannot read: people for whom SMS is useless.

In most countries, the literacy rate still exceeds the mobile penetration rate, but this won't be true for long. Take a look at the graph below, which charts the growth rates in mobile penetration in a sampling of developing countries over the past 15 years. South Africa is in there as a fully-saturated market, to give you a sense of what the mature S-curve looks like:

Extrapolate those trends forward to today, and it's a safe bet that 40-50% of Indians and Bangladeshis have a mobile phone, while the rate in Nigeria is creeping toward 60%. Literacy rates are still higher-- India's is around 66%, Nigeria's is about 72%, Bangladesh's is about 53%-- but those numbers grow more slowly, at only about 1 or 2 percentage points each year over the past fifteen years. Probably sometime in the next two to three years, more Bangladeshis will own mobile phones than are able to read. The same will likely be true in India and Nigeria within four-five years, if not sooner. 

This should perhaps change the way we think about tools-- not just learning tools, all tools-- on mobile. If, very soon, there's going to be a massive market of phone-owners without the ability to read, then how much can we make available by voice, as opposed to SMS? Earlier this year, I wrote about CGnet Swara, a citizen journalism service in Chhattisgarh, India, that's entirely-voice based. What about banking services? Healthcare services? Even better, how might voice and SMS hybrid services be used to improve literacy? 

(Mike Trucano wrote about one project working on that problem here, and MobileActive.org covered another project here.)

With the Senate set to vote on The DREAM Act next week, those on the fence just got a nice bit of polling data to help push them over the top. According to a Gallup Poll released today, a slim majority of American's at 54% of the electorate support moving forward with legislation like the DREAM Act.  The full poll can be seen here.

The interesting thing about this particular piece of polling data, is that the description of the DREAM act above is actually much laxer then what the Senate will be voting on next week. The description above does not mention any of the various background checks, or time necessary to be eligible for the DREAM Act. While this is positive, it would be interesting to see if these numbers would go up if they polled what was actually going to be voted on.

When they broke the numbers out by party, the majorities actually went up for Democrats, and dropped for republicans but what is most interesting is that independents also overwhelmingly support the DREAM Act.

Support among independents is important as this voting block will be crucial for both Democrats and Republicans running in 2012.  Hopefully those still on the fence take the time to look at all of the polling data here as overall it shows broad national support for the DREAM Act.