After 9/11 we created a Department of Homeland Security as a “Something Must Be Done” response, but DOJ didn’t want to give up the FBI, the actual lead counterterrorism agency, so DHS got immigration agencies instead — in retrospect a fateful development.
DHS was supposed to have some kind of counterterrorism mandate, but the actual agencies under its auspices was a weird grab-bag of things that mostly weren’t about terrorism.

Immigration and border enforcement were close enough that they could be reconceptualized that way.
At the same time, the IIRIA law passed five years earlier had created a weird situation.

It was still relatively easy to sneak across the US-Mexico border but now basically impossible to “get legal” and regularize your status no matter how integrated into the US you became.
At the intersection of these two developments, what was essentially a lacuna in US labor market policy became bureacratically reconceived as a national security vulnerability and we live with that legacy today in so many ways.

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More from @mattyglesias

7 Sep
A lot of things have happened that have surprised me on one level or another but the big one is that a year ago I’d have said a Trump-led United States was at risk of a panicky overreaction to something like this not a response that just amounts to the power of positive thinking.
Like okay Trump “didn’t listen to the experts” and lies constantly and other Trumpy things.

But in the early days he also didn’t actually ban travel from China. He did nothing when Northern Italy was clearly full of virus. No centralized quarantine. Just let everyone leave NYC.
He embraced anti-maskism rather than dunking on the experts for getting this wrong and becoming the most zealously pro-mask person in the world. He let revenue-hungry universities he hates reopen. He didn’t try to use the pandemic as a pretext to ban protests.
Read 4 tweets
31 Aug
This is a common view of the history of the conservative movement, but I think it obscures more than it reveals and there’s always been a symbiotic relationship between the elite right and the fever swamps.
My friends @daschloz and @sam_rosenfeld have PhDs and everything and made this case last year and I find their view persuasive.

nytimes.com/2019/01/15/opi…
One factor worth considering is that the conservative legal movement — which is the most highbrow and respectable form of conservative politics — is one of the most pro-Trump wings of the right, precisely because of their shared hostility to electoral democracy.
Read 4 tweets
29 Aug
I think the CHAZ situation usefully helped illustrate the extent to which the crime-deterring function of police is largely separate from their investigatory function.

That said we should try to solve more crimes!
There was a good study last year showing that police departments dedicate fewer detective-hours to trying to solve non-fatal shootings than fatal ones, and consequently solve them at lower rates.

We could (and imo should) try to solve more crimes.

eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2…
I think the literature pretty convincingly supports a vision of law enforcement that features more diverse departments doing fewer stops & using less force and spending more time walking around & more time investigating crimes.
Read 4 tweets
27 Aug
One simple clause from the Fed today but it’s a big deal: “following periods when inflation has been running persistently below 2 percent, appropriate monetary policy will likely aim to achieve inflation moderately above 2 percent for some time.”
Why does that matter? Well, the Fed directly influences short term interest rates.

But big investment decisions are more about long-term rates. But you can think of long-term rates as a series of predictions about what short-term rates will look like over the long term.
So in the current setup, you could have low rates now but also the expectation that as soon as the economy reaches a non-crisis point the Fed will raise rates.

The new framework says no, we’ll keep them lower for longer.
Read 6 tweets
25 Aug
Okay, yes, this seems bad but on the other hand Trump supports Israel [in an effort to hasten the apocalypse] so it all balances out.
If you’ve spent your whole life living in cosmopolitan cities you may not realize how deeply quotes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion resonate with regular people in the red oblasts outside the Pale of Settlement.

Sneering at this stuff is why Trump won.
In all seriousness, Trump’s “genius” — such as it is — is through repeated outrages and stubbornness he’s created a situation in which “will the president distance himself from the RNC speaker who earlier today endorsed a notorious anti-Semitic con job” is somehow uninteresting.
Read 4 tweets
23 Aug
The non-Trump version of the story seems to be a disagreement inside the public health bureaucracy about the merits of approving a safe treatment whose effectiveness is unclear, part of a bigger debate about FDA procedures.

nytimes.com/2020/08/19/us/…
The FDA normally requires companies to demonstrate that medicines and medical devices are safe AND EFFECTIVE.

Other stuff is regulated more lightly; a dietary supplement that purports to boost the immune system needs to be safe but you don’t need to prove it actually works.
Since demonstrating efficacy is time-consuming and expensive, one view — a general view not unique to Covid — is we should shift to a pure safety standard that makes it easier to bring things to market.

If it’s safe what’s the harm?
Read 6 tweets

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