Category: reason

Immigration Politics Are Killing the Debate Over Immigration Policy


idphoto027036

When it comes to immigration (legal or illegal), I still take cues from that radical social-justice warrior Ronald Reagan. “(I)t makes one wonder about the illegal alien fuss,” the Gipper said in a 1977 radio address after a New England town restricted apple pickers to U.S. citizens and then couldn’t find enough people to do the work.

“One thing is certain in this hungry world; no regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the field for lack of harvesters,” he added. Reagan didn’t even shy away from the A-word. “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally,” Reagan said in his 1984 presidential debate.

That adds a little context, now that the Republican Party has become the party of Donald Trump. Our recently departed president was devoted not just to building a border wall and clamping down on illegal immigration—but to dramatically reducing the number of immigrants and refugees who can come to the United States in a legal manner.

Trump’s rhetoric, of course, was a far cry from Reagan’s. It’s perfectly legitimate to debate immigration policy, but when Republicans describe immigrants as killers and invaders, that’s not a policy debate. It’s the use of immigration as a dividing line in an obvious attempt to rally conservative base voters. The issue hasn’t subsided with the new administration.

Joe Biden had promised a more humane policy, but so far the results aren’t good. “Officials barred nonprofit lawyers who conduct oversight from entering a Border Patrol tent where thousands of children and teenagers are detained,” AP reported. The new administration has “refused or ignored dozens of requests from the media for access to detention sites”— something even Trump didn’t do.

The latest fracas at the border, with a recent surge of asylum seekers from Central America, has turned expectedly into yet another partisan grudge match. Conservatives claim that the new Democratic administration essentially is inviting refugees to the country because it has dropped plans for the wall and loosened up restrictions.

Yet the latest influx isn’t the result of short-term change—but long-term bureaucratic failures. “The immigration system at the border, which was built up in the 1990s, with single, job-seeking adults from Mexico in mind, was not designed to handle a population seeking asylum on this scale,” argued The New Yorker‘s Jonathan Blitzer. “(I)t takes almost two and a half years to resolve an asylum claim, and there’s now a backlog of 1.3 million pending cases.”

As I’ve argued repeatedly, most government policy has little to do with the nominal head of state—and more to do with the permanent bureaucracy. Conservatives rightly complain about the failure of every imaginable state and federal bureau, from California’s Employment Development Department to the federal Department of Education. They refuse to acknowledge that our immigration and security bureaus aren’t any better than those others.

Stopping illegal immigration is the equivalent of trying to stop water from flowing down a hill. Labor is like any other market, including illegal drugs or anything else for that matter. As long as there’s plenty of supply and demand, there will always be a way around whatever regulatory barriers the government puts in the way. On an ethical note, it’s hard to be too angry at people who are doing what we would do if we faced similar impoverished circumstances.

There’s no solving the immigration mess in one short column, but it would be nice if politicians from both parties stopped using the issue to clobber one another and tried to work out reform proposals in a reasonable way. The bipartisan Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was signed into law—but it obviously didn’t solve the ongoing problem.

No single piece of legislation—especially one filled with contradictions and compromises—will fix any long-running problem. That law created a path for citizenship for many illegal immigrants, but also ramped up enforcement against companies that hired people without legal status.

Still, there’s got to be a better way than the GOP’s enforcement-only approach—or California’s progressive zeal to discard the meaning of citizenship. We could start by calming down debate and trying to pass reasonable measures rather than fight the same futile war on illegal immigration that we fight on illegal drugs, with similar inhumane and useless results.

We could create a process for people who want to come here to do so in a timely manner rather than force them to spend years mired in bureaucracy. We could legalize the dreamers. We could even develop a guest-worker program that lets people work the farms and go home, as Reagan had supported. Then again, the late president must have been a crazy radical who didn’t understand a good wedge issue when he saw one.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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Immigration Politics Are Killing the Debate Over Immigration Policy


idphoto027036

When it comes to immigration (legal or illegal), I still take cues from that radical social-justice warrior Ronald Reagan. “(I)t makes one wonder about the illegal alien fuss,” the Gipper said in a 1977 radio address after a New England town restricted apple pickers to U.S. citizens and then couldn’t find enough people to do the work.

“One thing is certain in this hungry world; no regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the field for lack of harvesters,” he added. Reagan didn’t even shy away from the A-word. “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally,” Reagan said in his 1984 presidential debate.

That adds a little context, now that the Republican Party has become the party of Donald Trump. Our recently departed president was devoted not just to building a border wall and clamping down on illegal immigration—but to dramatically reducing the number of immigrants and refugees who can come to the United States in a legal manner.

Trump’s rhetoric, of course, was a far cry from Reagan’s. It’s perfectly legitimate to debate immigration policy, but when Republicans describe immigrants as killers and invaders, that’s not a policy debate. It’s the use of immigration as a dividing line in an obvious attempt to rally conservative base voters. The issue hasn’t subsided with the new administration.

Joe Biden had promised a more humane policy, but so far the results aren’t good. “Officials barred nonprofit lawyers who conduct oversight from entering a Border Patrol tent where thousands of children and teenagers are detained,” AP reported. The new administration has “refused or ignored dozens of requests from the media for access to detention sites”— something even Trump didn’t do.

The latest fracas at the border, with a recent surge of asylum seekers from Central America, has turned expectedly into yet another partisan grudge match. Conservatives claim that the new Democratic administration essentially is inviting refugees to the country because it has dropped plans for the wall and loosened up restrictions.

Yet the latest influx isn’t the result of short-term change—but long-term bureaucratic failures. “The immigration system at the border, which was built up in the 1990s, with single, job-seeking adults from Mexico in mind, was not designed to handle a population seeking asylum on this scale,” argued The New Yorker‘s Jonathan Blitzer. “(I)t takes almost two and a half years to resolve an asylum claim, and there’s now a backlog of 1.3 million pending cases.”

As I’ve argued repeatedly, most government policy has little to do with the nominal head of state—and more to do with the permanent bureaucracy. Conservatives rightly complain about the failure of every imaginable state and federal bureau, from California’s Employment Development Department to the federal Department of Education. They refuse to acknowledge that our immigration and security bureaus aren’t any better than those others.

Stopping illegal immigration is the equivalent of trying to stop water from flowing down a hill. Labor is like any other market, including illegal drugs or anything else for that matter. As long as there’s plenty of supply and demand, there will always be a way around whatever regulatory barriers the government puts in the way. On an ethical note, it’s hard to be too angry at people who are doing what we would do if we faced similar impoverished circumstances.

There’s no solving the immigration mess in one short column, but it would be nice if politicians from both parties stopped using the issue to clobber one another and tried to work out reform proposals in a reasonable way. The bipartisan Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was signed into law—but it obviously didn’t solve the ongoing problem.

No single piece of legislation—especially one filled with contradictions and compromises—will fix any long-running problem. That law created a path for citizenship for many illegal immigrants, but also ramped up enforcement against companies that hired people without legal status.

Still, there’s got to be a better way than the GOP’s enforcement-only approach—or California’s progressive zeal to discard the meaning of citizenship. We could start by calming down debate and trying to pass reasonable measures rather than fight the same futile war on illegal immigration that we fight on illegal drugs, with similar inhumane and useless results.

We could create a process for people who want to come here to do so in a timely manner rather than force them to spend years mired in bureaucracy. We could legalize the dreamers. We could even develop a guest-worker program that lets people work the farms and go home, as Reagan had supported. Then again, the late president must have been a crazy radical who didn’t understand a good wedge issue when he saw one.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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Review: Voyagers


VOYAGER 1

Writer-director Neil Burger has salted his new sci-fi movie, Voyagers, with provocative social issues, but they’re hardly new. “Who are we?” “Where are we going?” “Who cares?”

Colin Farrell plays Jim, a science guy involved in a project creating government-engineered embryos. The resulting babies are raised in isolation—they never see outsiders or sunlight or hateful Chick-fil-As blighting the landscape. These kids have been created to scout out a new home for the people of Earth, whose own planet—as they were warned!—is being roasted by global warming. Scientists already have their telescopes trained on a substitute orb for Earth’s sweltering masses, but it’s 86 years away. So the original crew will never arrive there, only their no-doubt-cranky grandchildren.

By the time we arrive on the spaceship Humanitas, we see that the kids, now young adults (but still chaperoned by Farrell), are spending their days in a state of robotic indifference, exhibiting no signs of emotion. This is because they’re secretly being dosed with a drug that renders them dull and docile, as if they were citizens of Cold War Bucharest. More alarming, the drug also eliminates sexual desire. “So they can control us,” says one young crew member, a born troublemaker named Zac (Fionn Whitehead of Dunkirk). “They don’t want us to reproduce naturally,” says his nice guy buddy Christopher (Tye Sheridan of Ready Player One). Now pissed off, these two stop knocking back the little blue drug cocktails that accompany their meals, and immediately develop an interest in a cute shipmate named Sela (Lily-Rose Depp).

Soon Zac and Christopher are squabbling over Sela and striking philosophical poses for us. Christopher is the voice of reason and probity. Zac is the voice of “Fuck that!” Told that he must try to be a good person, Zac says, “Why? We’re just gonna die in the end, so why can’t we do what we want? Who cares about ‘the rules’?” Soon, the rest of the crewmembers are taking sides and lining up behind either Zac or Christopher. Punches are thrown, weapons are sought.

“Why have they all gone crazy?” Sela asks.

“Maybe they haven’t,” says Christopher thoughtfully. “Maybe this is what they’re really like. Maybe this is our true nature.” Yeah, maybe.

Burger is pretty out-front about his story’s resemblance to Lord of the Flies. And he borrows from familiar sci-fi sources. There’s a loud-gasping spacewalk of the sort we’ve seen before in movies like Sunshine, Gravity, and of course 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s a frantic tussle at the ship’s airlock. And there’s an alien, too—well, there’s quite a bit of talk about an alien (it’s said to be stowed away onboard the ship, like some sort of intergalactic Mexican), but it turns out to be a big red space herring.

Sheridan and Whitehead are solid and snarling embodiments of the counterpoised talking points they represent. Depp is…cute. (She’s not been given much of a character to work with.) The rest of the rocket crew are suitably gutless sheep. (“Maybe we should just give up,” says one of Christopher’s increasingly imperiled followers.)

In a movie built around antiseptic tones of blue and gray and white, and long empty corridors in which knots of people occasionally run around, there’s not a lot to get excited about. There are a few mildly amusing moments (when carnal consciousness arises in one scene, we’re given a quick montage of spurting water and sprouting greenery), but we’re probably past the point where anyone ever quivered in anticipation of mild amusement in a sci-fi movie.

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Review: Voyagers


VOYAGER 1

Writer-director Neil Burger has salted his new sci-fi movie, Voyagers, with provocative social issues, but they’re hardly new. “Who are we?” “Where are we going?” “Who cares?”

Colin Farrell plays Jim, a science guy involved in a project creating government-engineered embryos. The resulting babies are raised in isolation—they never see outsiders or sunlight or hateful Chick-fil-As blighting the landscape. These kids have been created to scout out a new home for the people of Earth, whose own planet—as they were warned!—is being roasted by global warming. Scientists already have their telescopes trained on a substitute orb for Earth’s sweltering masses, but it’s 86 years away. So the original crew will never arrive there, only their no-doubt-cranky grandchildren.

By the time we arrive on the spaceship Humanitas, we see that the kids, now young adults (but still chaperoned by Farrell), are spending their days in a state of robotic indifference, exhibiting no signs of emotion. This is because they’re secretly being dosed with a drug that renders them dull and docile, as if they were citizens of Cold War Bucharest. More alarming, the drug also eliminates sexual desire. “So they can control us,” says one young crew member, a born troublemaker named Zac (Fionn Whitehead of Dunkirk). “They don’t want us to reproduce naturally,” says his nice guy buddy Christopher (Tye Sheridan of Ready Player One). Now pissed off, these two stop knocking back the little blue drug cocktails that accompany their meals, and immediately develop an interest in a cute shipmate named Sela (Lily-Rose Depp).

Soon Zac and Christopher are squabbling over Sela and striking philosophical poses for us. Christopher is the voice of reason and probity. Zac is the voice of “Fuck that!” Told that he must try to be a good person, Zac says, “Why? We’re just gonna die in the end, so why can’t we do what we want? Who cares about ‘the rules’?” Soon, the rest of the crewmembers are taking sides and lining up behind either Zac or Christopher. Punches are thrown, weapons are sought.

“Why have they all gone crazy?” Sela asks.

“Maybe they haven’t,” says Christopher thoughtfully. “Maybe this is what they’re really like. Maybe this is our true nature.” Yeah, maybe.

Burger is pretty out-front about his story’s resemblance to Lord of the Flies. And he borrows from familiar sci-fi sources. There’s a loud-gasping spacewalk of the sort we’ve seen before in movies like Sunshine, Gravity, and of course 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s a frantic tussle at the ship’s airlock. And there’s an alien, too—well, there’s quite a bit of talk about an alien (it’s said to be stowed away onboard the ship, like some sort of intergalactic Mexican), but it turns out to be a big red space herring.

Sheridan and Whitehead are solid and snarling embodiments of the counterpoised talking points they represent. Depp is…cute. (She’s not been given much of a character to work with.) The rest of the rocket crew are suitably gutless sheep. (“Maybe we should just give up,” says one of Christopher’s increasingly imperiled followers.)

In a movie built around antiseptic tones of blue and gray and white, and long empty corridors in which knots of people occasionally run around, there’s not a lot to get excited about. There are a few mildly amusing moments (when carnal consciousness arises in one scene, we’re given a quick montage of spurting water and sprouting greenery), but we’re probably past the point where anyone ever quivered in anticipation of mild amusement in a sci-fi movie.

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Cops Are Using Facial Recognition Technology More Than Previously Revealed


splrfphotos147677

Clearview AI carved out a market niche for itself as a provider of facial recognition tools for law enforcement agencies that find the technology challenging to implement on their own. The company’s plug-and-play surveillance capability entices government users with free trial periods and a database of billions of faces scraped without permission from social media. According to a new report, the technology has been used by more agencies than previously disclosed, sometimes without authorization. The report may not be complete, since many police departments belong to networks for sharing resources.

“BuzzFeed News has developed a searchable table of 1,803 publicly funded agencies whose employees are listed in the data as having used or tested the controversial policing tool before February 2020. These include local and state police, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Air Force, state healthcare organizations, offices of state attorneys general, and even public schools,” the publication noted this week. The data was leaked to Buzzfeed by a source whose identity is being kept secret.

Uses to which the tool was put included searches for protesters, criminals—and friends and family members. Inappropriate searches on acquaintances could have been predicted by anybody aware of the abuse of official databases for curiosity and personal gain. “Police officers across the country misuse confidential law enforcement databases to get information on romantic partners, business associates, neighbors, journalists and others for reasons that have nothing to do with daily police work,” the AP reported in 2016. A massive facial recognition database is an enormous temptation for unscrupulous government employees already accustomed to misusing such tools.

Aware of such problems, Clearview AI rolled out features last fall designed to make searches more easily auditable to cut down on misuse. But implementation of the controls requires internal monitoring by law enforcement heads. That’s dependent on policy and on leaders actually knowing that officers are using the technology.

“In many cases, leaders at these agencies were unaware that employees were using the tool; five said they would pause or ban its use in response to questions about it,” Buzzfeed’s reporters added. But some organizations—such as the New York City Police Department—appear to be hiding deeper relationships with Clearview AI behind claims of ignorance.

Unofficial and even unauthorized use of a facial recognition tool is possible partially because the company offers free 30-day trials to anybody “employed by a federal, state or local law enforcement organization” who says that they “have received authorization from your supervisor at that law enforcement organization to request trial access to Clearview AI.” The requirement for supervisor approval was added last year.

The list may not even capture the full range of use of Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology since many smaller departments tap into larger agencies and resource-sharing networks.

“My agency does not have any type of facial recognition software,” Charles Wynn, police chief for Chino Valley, Arizona, told Buzzfeed when asked about his small department’s place on the list of Clearview AI users. “If we have a need for it we send the cases to either the Arizona Department of Public Safety or Rocky Mountain Information Network. I have double checked with all my investigators, including the ones assigned to off-site task forces and no one is using any software programs outside of the two intelligence agencies I mentioned before.”

The Arizona Department of Public Safety admitted to trying Clearview AI’s facial recognition tool, but claims it is no longer in use. Rocky Mountain Information Network, also listed as a user and one of six federally funded regional centers in the Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) Program, didn’t respond to queries. Serving well over 9,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, RISS is intended to make tools such as facial recognition available to agencies that might find implementing them on their own to lie beyond their needs and resources. Departments tapping into services offered through RISS wouldn’t necessarily appear on Buzzfeed’s list.

Clearview AI isn’t the only vendor of facial recognition software out there (Motorola-owned Vigilant is also a major player, though it’s better-known for license-plate recognition) but the more than 3 billion faces in its database give it an important edge over competing services. Even the FBI boasts “only” 640 million or so faces (as of 2019) against which to match images.

But the FBI built its database from public records, such as driver’s license repositories, and was called out for doing so. “[T]he FBI’s face recognition apparatus continues to balloon, threatening our fundamental liberties,” the ACLU warned after House Oversight Committee Hearings two years ago. Clearview AI, on the other hand, populated its vast database by scraping images from social media services without the permission of either the posters or the hosting companies. The company’s activities drew protests from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as a lawsuit over privacy violations in California following on earlier legal action in Illinois.  

“Technology company Clearview AI’s scraping of billions of images of people from across the Internet represented mass surveillance and was a clear violation of the privacy rights of Canadians,” according to Daniel Therrien, Privacy Commissioner of Canada. The company subsequently withdrew from the Canadian market.

Facial recognition, like any automated means of identifying and tracking people, is something of a holy grail for cops and intelligence community types. The technology’s accuracy has improved, too, especially during the pandemic as algorithms have been refined to focus on eyes and noses unconcealed by facial coverings.

“Without masks, median system performance demonstrated a ~93% identification rate, with the best-performing system correctly identifying individuals ~100% of the time,” the Department of Homeland Security boasted in January. “With masks, median system performance demonstrated a ~77% identification rate, with the best-performing system correctly identifying individuals ~96% of the time.”

Clearview AI isn’t alone as a provider of surveillance technology to law enforcement. Agencies have purchased cell phone location data from marketing firms and telecommunications companies to track people’s movements. The surveillance state isn’t yet ubiquitous, but it’s increasingly available as a plug-and-play solution for any cop interested in a free trial period.

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Soul


minissoul

Dozens upon dozens of animated features have encouraged viewers to chase their dreams, but few have focused on setting realistic expectations. Pixar’s Soul breaks the mold by showing that happiness is more complicated than just pursuing the one thing you love the most.

Aspiring jazz musician Joe (Jamie Foxx) finally catches his break as he approaches midlife, only to fall through a manhole and die. Rather than accepting his death, he flees into a quirky cosmic bureaucracy, inadvertently being paired with a stubborn soul (Tina Fey) who refuses to be born into a body in the first place, having been overly pressured to decide in advance what her interests should be.

Their entertaining misadventures have a familiar carpe diem veneer, but the movie also shows that the bliss of success is often transitory, that it requires a lot of hard work, and that obsessing over your pursuits can be self-destructive rather than fulfilling. A spark can ignite a lifelong passion, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of enjoying the totality of experience.

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Cops Are Using Facial Recognition Technology More Than Previously Revealed


splrfphotos147677

Clearview AI carved out a market niche for itself as a provider of facial recognition tools for law enforcement agencies that find the technology challenging to implement on their own. The company’s plug-and-play surveillance capability entices government users with free trial periods and a database of billions of faces scraped without permission from social media. According to a new report, the technology has been used by more agencies than previously disclosed, sometimes without authorization. The report may not be complete, since many police departments belong to networks for sharing resources.

“BuzzFeed News has developed a searchable table of 1,803 publicly funded agencies whose employees are listed in the data as having used or tested the controversial policing tool before February 2020. These include local and state police, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Air Force, state healthcare organizations, offices of state attorneys general, and even public schools,” the publication noted this week. The data was leaked to Buzzfeed by a source whose identity is being kept secret.

Uses to which the tool was put included searches for protesters, criminals—and friends and family members. Inappropriate searches on acquaintances could have been predicted by anybody aware of the abuse of official databases for curiosity and personal gain. “Police officers across the country misuse confidential law enforcement databases to get information on romantic partners, business associates, neighbors, journalists and others for reasons that have nothing to do with daily police work,” the AP reported in 2016. A massive facial recognition database is an enormous temptation for unscrupulous government employees already accustomed to misusing such tools.

Aware of such problems, Clearview AI rolled out features last fall designed to make searches more easily auditable to cut down on misuse. But implementation of the controls requires internal monitoring by law enforcement heads. That’s dependent on policy and on leaders actually knowing that officers are using the technology.

“In many cases, leaders at these agencies were unaware that employees were using the tool; five said they would pause or ban its use in response to questions about it,” Buzzfeed’s reporters added. But some organizations—such as the New York City Police Department—appear to be hiding deeper relationships with Clearview AI behind claims of ignorance.

Unofficial and even unauthorized use of a facial recognition tool is possible partially because the company offers free 30-day trials to anybody “employed by a federal, state or local law enforcement organization” who says that they “have received authorization from your supervisor at that law enforcement organization to request trial access to Clearview AI.” The requirement for supervisor approval was added last year.

The list may not even capture the full range of use of Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology since many smaller departments tap into larger agencies and resource-sharing networks.

“My agency does not have any type of facial recognition software,” Charles Wynn, police chief for Chino Valley, Arizona, told Buzzfeed when asked about his small department’s place on the list of Clearview AI users. “If we have a need for it we send the cases to either the Arizona Department of Public Safety or Rocky Mountain Information Network. I have double checked with all my investigators, including the ones assigned to off-site task forces and no one is using any software programs outside of the two intelligence agencies I mentioned before.”

The Arizona Department of Public Safety admitted to trying Clearview AI’s facial recognition tool, but claims it is no longer in use. Rocky Mountain Information Network, also listed as a user and one of six federally funded regional centers in the Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) Program, didn’t respond to queries. Serving well over 9,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, RISS is intended to make tools such as facial recognition available to agencies that might find implementing them on their own to lie beyond their needs and resources. Departments tapping into services offered through RISS wouldn’t necessarily appear on Buzzfeed’s list.

Clearview AI isn’t the only vendor of facial recognition software out there (Motorola-owned Vigilant is also a major player, though it’s better-known for license-plate recognition) but the more than 3 billion faces in its database give it an important edge over competing services. Even the FBI boasts “only” 640 million or so faces (as of 2019) against which to match images.

But the FBI built its database from public records, such as driver’s license repositories, and was called out for doing so. “[T]he FBI’s face recognition apparatus continues to balloon, threatening our fundamental liberties,” the ACLU warned after House Oversight Committee Hearings two years ago. Clearview AI, on the other hand, populated its vast database by scraping images from social media services without the permission of either the posters or the hosting companies. The company’s activities drew protests from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as a lawsuit over privacy violations in California following on earlier legal action in Illinois.  

“Technology company Clearview AI’s scraping of billions of images of people from across the Internet represented mass surveillance and was a clear violation of the privacy rights of Canadians,” according to Daniel Therrien, Privacy Commissioner of Canada. The company subsequently withdrew from the Canadian market.

Facial recognition, like any automated means of identifying and tracking people, is something of a holy grail for cops and intelligence community types. The technology’s accuracy has improved, too, especially during the pandemic as algorithms have been refined to focus on eyes and noses unconcealed by facial coverings.

“Without masks, median system performance demonstrated a ~93% identification rate, with the best-performing system correctly identifying individuals ~100% of the time,” the Department of Homeland Security boasted in January. “With masks, median system performance demonstrated a ~77% identification rate, with the best-performing system correctly identifying individuals ~96% of the time.”

Clearview AI isn’t alone as a provider of surveillance technology to law enforcement. Agencies have purchased cell phone location data from marketing firms and telecommunications companies to track people’s movements. The surveillance state isn’t yet ubiquitous, but it’s increasingly available as a plug-and-play solution for any cop interested in a free trial period.

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The Expanse


ministheexpanse

An old saying holds that all politics is local. In The Expanse, all politics is interstellar. Somehow, they’re kind of the same thing.

The series, which completed its fifth season on Amazon Prime Video in February, is set hundreds of years in the future. Human beings have colonized the solar system and divided into three broad political sects. There’s Earth, an economically stagnated political mess and also the species’ breadbasket; Mars, the elite technological center; and the Asteroid Belt, the working-class locus of resource extraction.

From the beginning, these three groups are in rotating conflict with each other. That conflict intensifies with the discovery of the protomolecule, an alien organism that is both immediately deadly and a warning sign of greater dangers beyond the solar system’s limits.

Eventually, the protomolecule leads to the discovery of a portal to the rest of the galaxy and a slew of inhabitable worlds. There’s a land rush, but the conflict doesn’t disappear; it shifts venues and even increases. All this unfolds with smart plotting, intricate world building, and consistent characterization.

Refreshingly, this intensely political show doesn’t feel like it’s simply rehashing today’s real-life arguments as a thinly veiled sci-fi metaphor. Instead, it reminds us that human society will always be an unpredictable product of economic interests, obscure individual motivations, cultural rivalries, bureaucratic infighting, ideological disagreements, sociological shifts, pride of place, and personal profit motive. People are people and politics is politics, no matter how far you get from planet Earth.

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