Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War and Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue—two new exhibits at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.—are more different than they are alike. Their only common thread is the war they profile.
The former emphasizes conflict here at home, as Americans clashed over the morality of U.S. intervention. It’s brash, imbued with flashy colors and gruesome sights that implore the viewer to look at things he or she might prefer not to. The confrontational nature of the show is epitomized by Chris Burden’s disturbing piece of performance art, documented in a series of still photographs. In 1971, he stood against a wall and had a marksman shoot him in the arm.
Artist Tiffany Chung takes the opposite approach. With images of deserted battlefields, meticulously drawn maps, and refugee video diaries, she offers a straightforward account of the lives of Vietnamese Americans whose stories were never heard at the time. After the war, with millions of casualties and a country in shambles, hundreds of thousands from South Vietnam fled to the States. Many suffered intense emotional trauma as they desperately clung onto their vanishing culture, their community, and their home.
Chung calls the absence of these Vietnamese stories “politically driven amnesia.” Considering our current interventionist approach, it’s an ailment we can’t seem to kick.
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A small cadre of former Obama administration officials have been counselingIranian Government officials since 2016 on how to deal with the Trump administration, according to the Daily Beast, which notes that Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zerif has been involved in the ongoing discussions.
The message? “Don’t take Trump’s bait. Stay calm.”
Conversations between former Obama officials and Iranian government officials have been ongoing since November 2016. Zarif, who visits the U.S. every year for the U.N. General Assembly in New York, usually meets with lawmakers, think tanks, journalists, and former officials when he is in town.
But the recent round of conversations, which took place over the phone and in person over the last two months, came as lines of communication between the U.S. and Iran, through intermediaries in Europe and elsewhere, deteriorated. –Daily Beast
“It’s not just about what they were saying to the Iranians,” an aide told the Beast. “It’s about what they were saying to their political allies back here in the U.S. Their strategy was to divide and isolate the Trump administration just as the Trump administration was trying to re-establish deterrence with Iran. In the current highly partisan political environment, the only safe course is to signal national unity—and they contributed to eroding that at home and abroad.”
In September, former Secretary of State John Kerry admitted to meeting with Zarif “three or four times” since Donald Trump took office, a move which drew condemnation from conservatives who said Kerry was “coaching” the Iranian FM on how to deal with the White House.
John Kerry had illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian Regime, which can only serve to undercut our great work to the detriment of the American people. He told them to wait out the Trump Administration! Was he registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act? BAD!
In response, some Republican lawmakers levied charges that Kerry is engaged in rogue diplomacy and is undermining the active, elected administration.
Kerry defended the meetings, saying: “What I have done is tried to elicit from him what Iran might be willing to do in order to change the dynamic in the Middle East for the better.”
Tensions between the US and Iran have increased recently, after Iran warned that it would increase its stockpile of nuclear-related materials – though the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a quarterly report seen on Friday by the Wall Street Journal that Tehran remains in compliance with its main commitments under the 2015 nuclear agreement. On May 8, the one-year anniversary of President Trump pulling out of the nuclear deal, Iran said that it would begin to scale up its nuclear program, and would disregard limits on its stockpiles of enriched uranium and heavy water.
Iran has rebuffed Trump’s calls to come back to the negotiating table for a new, stricter nuclear accord – and has slammed US sanctions which have sent the Iranian economy into a deep recession.
And now we learn that former Obama administration officials have been advising Iran this whole time.
Three Obama officials who worked closely on the Iran nuclear deal, one of whom is still in touch with Iranian government officials, traveled to Capitol Hill to brief congressional Democrats about the situation. Those former officials said would not say if they passed information from Iranian government officials to members of Congress. Rather, they said they focused on educating members about their experience working with Iranian leaders and how Tehran reacts to economic pressure.
Several former officials who spoke to The Daily Beast stressed that their discussions with their Iranian contacts were “normal.” But in other corners, these kind of talks cause alarm. A Republican congressional aide who works on Iran policy told The Daily Beast the conversations may run counter to the Trump administration’s messaging to the Iranian government. –Daily Beast
“Former Obama administration officials gave wrong-headed advice to the regime in Iran that U.S. sanctions couldn’t work without European support and that the regime should just wait out the Trump administration,” according to Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the DC-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has advised the Trump administration on Iran policy. “Now with U.S. sanctions biting and the Islamic Republic facing an economic crisis, they’d be wise to tell their Iranian counterparts to return to negotiations. Bipartisan support for efforts to block the Islamic Republic’s malign activities strengthens American security.”
Others have defended, or at least downplayed the discussions.
“The communications are not surprising because of the lack of direct contact between the U.S. and Iran. The urgency is greater now. There is a sense of, let’s make sure that there is some channel open,” said Dalia Dassa Kaye, director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the Rand Corporation. “But it’s not clear that they are talking to Iranians that are making the ultimate decisions in the country. It’s not clear that those talking to each other, those in the room, are representing the realities on the ground in their respective countries.”
One former official who worked on the Obama administration’s Iran policy told The Daily Beast he spoke with Iranian government officials as recently as a few weeks ago, as tensions were cresting. His message, he said, was simple: The Trump administration can escalate things plenty all by itself; the Iranians shouldn’t take the bait, fuel the fire, and move things from bad to worse by, for example, pulling completely out of the nuclear deal.
Another former senior Obama administration official, who said he was not himself aware of the conversations, called the talks “neither unusual nor particularly consequential.”
“Exaggerating their significance lends undue credence to those cynically blaming others for their own failing approach,” the ex-official said.
Separately, some former Obama officials are trying to keep the roots of the Iran nuclear deal alive by taking the pulse of lawmakers on Capitol Hill to gauge whether they are in favor of restarting talks in the future. They are also speaking to officials in Europe who are concerned about their long-term ability to trade with Iran and stick to the terms of the Iran nuclear deal, all while attempting to avoid U.S. sanctions. Meanwhile, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)—formerly the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee—had dinner with Zarif “a few weeks ago,” according to a Politico report published May 23. –Daily Beast
Will the 1799 Logan Act be invoked, which made unauthorized diplomacy with foreign powers by a private citizen illegal?
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2I8gL8k Tyler Durden
Police in Indonesia held a suspected cellphone thief down, draped a live snake around his shoulders, and rubbed the man’s face with snake’s head in an attempt to coerce a confession from him. Video of the interrogation shows the man screaming in fear. “The investigator was not professional in doing his job,” Police Chief Tonny Ananda Swadaya said in a statement apologizing for the incident.
New Jersey’s Lakeland Regional High School has banned students from taking limousines or private party buses to the prom. Students can only use transportation provided by the school. Officials say the move is about both safety and equity—limos can be expensive to rent.
Want to volunteer in your child’s school? A proposed Arizona law would require you to provide a DNA sample and pay $250 in order to perform any activity that currently requires fingerprinting, including school volunteering. The state would keep the sample and link it to your Social Security number, last known address, and other personal information. The bill allows the state to share the sample with other government agencies and with anyone doing “legitimate research.”
A Los Angeles county sheriff’s deputy has pleaded guilty to his role in a theft from a legal marijuana business that netted more than half a ton of weed and $600,000 in cash. Marc Antrim was off duty but wearing a sheriff’s office jacket and driving a sheriff’s office SUV at the time. He and his partners pulled up to the firm’s security gate, showed a fake warrant, locked up the guards, and robbed the place.
A Saskatchewan man wants a personalized license plate with his last name on it. But officials have told Dave Assman his request is “unacceptable.”
The Boston Police Department has opened an investigation of a cop who had his service weapon stolen by two strippers while off duty in Rhode Island.
Utah’s Davis School District says it is investigating a fourth-grade teacher who forced a student to wipe an Ash Wednesday cross from his forehead, telling him it was inappropriate in the school. The boy’s grandmother said she spoke to the teacher after the incident. “I asked her if she read the Constitution with the First Amendment, and she said no,” the grandmother told KSTU-TV. The teacher and the school district have apologized to the boy.
In New York, Elizabeth Catlin faces felony charges including working as a midwife without a license. Catlin is a certified professional midwife and has successfully delivered hundreds of babies over the past three decades, primarily serving the state’s Mennonite community. But the state has some of the most severe restrictions on midwives in the nation, requiring extensive training, including a graduate degree.
The Ann Arbor, Michigan, City Council is considering creating permanent “solar easements” to protect the investments of those who install solar panels on their homes. The proposal would prevent people from constructing tall buildings or planting trees that might block sunlight from reaching someone’s panels.
The day after Jane Silakowski gave birth, a doctor came into her room and told her she’d failed a drug test. She insisted she had taken no drugs and asked if the poppy seed bread she’d eaten recently could have caused the result. The doctor responded that was merely a plot from an episode of Seinfeld, not something that could actually happen. In fact, the bread had caused a false positive. But the hospital still contacted Erie County Child Protective Services, which launched an investigation and required the new mother to undergo drug testing and counseling at her own expense.
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The Knowles children were selling lemonade across the street from their house in 2018 when Denver police informed them they needed three different licenses to operate. The closure of their stand, which was raising money for needy kids overseas, led to an outcry. On April 1, newly elected Democratic Gov. Jared Polis signed the Legalizing Minors’ Businesses Act, which exempts temporary, minor-owned businesses from local licensing regulations.
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“So, how’s it going in Iraq? No, really. As we learn to measure the U.S. engagement there in years and (let’s face reality) decades, only this much seems absolutely beyond question: On a very basic level, it’s virtually impossible to know whether the occupation is going well or horribly wrong. This is above and beyond the question of whether we should be there in the first place.”
Nick Gillespie “The Age of Uncertainty”
“Flexibility and freedom are vastly better than the alternatives. By and large, for the new generation of parents, rigid division of gender roles is obsolete—and so is the stark dichotomy of Superwoman vs. Supermom. That’s a good start.”
Cathy Young “Opting Out”
“Burke, the patron saint of social conservatism and the scourge of the French Revolution, supported the American Revolution. He distinguished between a revolt that aimed to overthrow established rights and principles and a revolt that aimed to restore them. Many of the American founders, incidentally, made exactly the same distinction. Whatever else they may have been, they were not utopian social engineers. Whether a modern-day Burke or Jefferson would support gay marriage, I cannot begin to say; but I am confident they would, at least, have understood and carefully weighed the possibility that to preserve the liberal foundation of civil marriage, we may find it necessary to adjust its boundaries.”
Jonathan Rauch “Objections to These Unions”
20 Years Ago
June 1999
“American radio is very capitalist, in the crude sense of the word: The industry is a busy bazaar, rife with deal making, speculation, and scrappy hustlers trying to get rich quick. It is also very socialist, in the crude sense of the word: It has long relied on the government to protect its biggest players, shore up their profits, and ensure that the competition doesn’t get too unruly.”
Jesse Walker “Radio Waves”
“To date, the property rights movement has not been doing very well. It is the ragged relation of conservatism, invited to dinner on major holidays but relegated to the children’s table, where its advocates can be patted on the head occasionally while not interfering with the serious conversation.”
James V. DeLong “Taking Back the Fifth”
“When government tries to rig the game in advance, Mr. Clinton, it interferes with this process of trial and error. Statism is the enemy of progress. It is the adversary of all growth except its own. Government programs are poured cement; once they flow into an economy and set, the man-made stone hardens forever.”
Alejandro Castellanos “Facts of Life”
30 Years Ago
June 1989
“Despite the widespread belief that state licensing somehow ensures quality care, an estimated 80 percent of family day-care providers—those who operate out of their homes—go unlicensed. This figure is a major factor behind statistical ‘proofs’ of a tremendous shortage of child care. Unwilling to recognize that unapproved day care may meet parents’ needs, day-care advocates conveniently leave it out when demonstrating that the supply of child care falls short of demand.”
Virginia Postrel “Who’s Behind the Child Care Crisis?”
“Bernard Sanders will try to persuade a national audience that leftists can make American cities livable. To prove that ‘progressives’ or ‘rainbows’—he is phasing out his use of the ‘S-word’—can run a government, he will invite people to examine his record in Burlington [Vermont]. He risks the chance that they will examine it more closely than Bernie himself has yet been willing to.”
Jim McIntosh “Backpack Socialism”
40 Years Ago
June 1979
“Libertarians are, of course, determined opponents of the Leviathan State. They are also ‘idealists,’ believing in the power of ideas to move mountains, to make history, to transform society. Even to overthrow an entrenched coercive despotism. And yet, libertarians have displayed curiously little interest in the process by which such social transformations can and do take place. How do ideas force a change in social institutions, even those that seem to be deeply entrenched?”
Murray Rothbard “The Death of a State”
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Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War and Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue—two new exhibits at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.—are more different than they are alike. Their only common thread is the war they profile.
The former emphasizes conflict here at home, as Americans clashed over the morality of U.S. intervention. It’s brash, imbued with flashy colors and gruesome sights that implore the viewer to look at things he or she might prefer not to. The confrontational nature of the show is epitomized by Chris Burden’s disturbing piece of performance art, documented in a series of still photographs. In 1971, he stood against a wall and had a marksman shoot him in the arm.
Artist Tiffany Chung takes the opposite approach. With images of deserted battlefields, meticulously drawn maps, and refugee video diaries, she offers a straightforward account of the lives of Vietnamese Americans whose stories were never heard at the time. After the war, with millions of casualties and a country in shambles, hundreds of thousands from South Vietnam fled to the States. Many suffered intense emotional trauma as they desperately clung onto their vanishing culture, their community, and their home.
Chung calls the absence of these Vietnamese stories “politically driven amnesia.” Considering our current interventionist approach, it’s an ailment we can’t seem to kick.
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Police in Virginia Beach have delivered a more complete picture of Friday afternoon’s tragic shooting at a municipal building that has left 13 people dead, including the shooter, and four people injured, including a police officer who was reportedly saved by his bullet-proof vest.
During a Saturday morning news conference, Va. Beach Police Chief James Cervera identified the gunman as DeWayne Craddock, a civil engineer who was a 15-year employee of the city’s public utilities department. Craddock was armed with a .45 caliber handgun, and died after a long gun fight with police. Craddock died after a lengthy shootout with police. The weapon he used had been purchased legally, as Craddock had no criminal record to speak of.
Cervera also refused to speculate about a motive.
DeWayne Craddock
Craddock joined the army national guard after graduating from Denbigh High School in nearby Newport News, Virginia, in 1996. During his time in the national guard, he received basic military training and advanced individual training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma.
He eventually graduated with a degree in civil engineering from Old Dominion University, and worked a private firm for a few years before joining the town.
City Manager Dave Hansen said he had worked with Craddock for years. Others pointed out that his name frequently appeared on city notices.
“I have worked with most of them for many years,” said Dave Hansen, Virginia Beach City Manager. “We want you to know who they were so in the weeks to come you will learn what they meant to all of us, to their friends, to their families, and to their co-workers. They leave a void that we will never be able to fill.”
Craddock’s neighbors in the modest Va. Beach neighborhood where he had lived for at least 10 years told NBC News that he was quiet, mostly kept to himself, and that he was “jacked” from spending lots of time at the gym.
People who live near Craddock said police swarmed the small neighborhood of modest townhomes in Virginia Beach on Friday where some said he had lived for at least 10 years.
Several neighbors said Craddock was clean cut, a member of the neighborhood association board and spent time lots of time at the gym. But they also said he mostly kept to himself, especially after his wife left him some number of years ago.
Angela Scarborough, who lives in the neighborhood, said “he was very quiet. He would just wave.”
At one time, Craddock was married. But his wife apparently left him abruptly a few years back.
She said she knew his wife, but she left some time ago. “She just left,” Scarborough said. “Didn’t let us know or anything.”
“I’m very saddened because this is a great neighborhood,” Scarborough said. “It’s very sad to know that that’s the way he decided to resolve the situation. It’s just something I can’t believe.”
She added: “I would speak to him and he would speak back, but conversation-wise, I never had a conversation with him.”
Another neighbor said Craddock appeared to be awake at all hours of the night, occasionally dropping heavy objects and making other noises that sometimes disturbed his neighbors.
Finally, police have released the names of Craddock’s victims. 11 were city employees who worked with Craddock. The 12th was a contractor who was in the office applying for a permit. The full list can be found below:
The 11 city employees who died were identified as Laquita C. Brown of Chesapeake, Tara Welch Gallagher of Virginia Beach, Mary Louise Gayle of Virginia Beach, Alexander Mikhail Gusev of Virginia Beach, Katherine A. Nixon of Virginia Beach, Richard H. Nettleton of Norfolk, Christopher Kelly Rapp of Powhatan, Ryan Keith Cox of Virginia Beach, Joshua A. Hardy of Virginia Beach, Michelle “Missy” Langer of Virginia Beach and Robert “Bobby” Williams of Chesapeake. The 12th victim, Herbert “Bert” Snelling of Virginia Beach, was a contractor filling a permit.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2KjIkyf Tyler Durden
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said Thursday that people in systems of power have exploited the human desire to connect in order to create systems of mass surveillance.
Snowden appeared at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia via livestream from Moscow to give a keynote address for the Canadian university’s Open Dialogue Series.
Right now, he said, humanity is in a sort of“atomic moment” in the field of computer science. “We’re in the midst of the greatest redistribution of power since the Industrial Revolution, and this is happening because technology has provided a new capability,” Snowden said.
Image source: Laura Poitras
“It’s related to influence that reaches everyone in every place,” he said. “It has no regard for borders. Its reach is unlimited, if you will, but its safeguards are not.” Without such defenses, technology is able to affect human behavior.
Institutions can “monitor and record private activities of people on a scale that’s broad enough that we can say it’s close to all-powerful,” said Snowden. They do this through “new platforms and algorithms,” through which “they’re able to shift our behavior. In some cases they’re able to predict our decisions—and also nudge them—to different outcomes. And they do this by exploiting the human need for belonging.”
“We don’t sign up for this,” he added, dismissing the notion that people know exactly what they are getting into with social media platforms like Facebook.
“How many of you who have a Facebook account actually read the terms of service?” Snowden asked. “Everything has hundreds and hundreds of pages of legal jargon that we’re not qualified to read and assess—and yet they’re considered to be binding upon us.”
“It is through this sort of unholy connection of technology and sort of an unusual interpretation of contract law,” he continued, “that these institutions have been able to transform this greatest virtue of humanity—which is this desire to interact and to connect and to cooperate and to share—to transform all of that into a weakness.”
“And now,” he added, “these institutions, which are both commercial and governmental, have built upon that and… have structuralized that and entrenched it to where it has become now the most effective means of social control in the history of our species.“
“Maybe you’ve heard about it,” Snowden said. “This is mass surveillance.”
* * *
Listen to Snowden’s full remarks below. (He begins speaking around the 25-minute mark.)
Proceeds from the event went to the Montreal-based organization For the Refugees, which is working to obtain refugee status in Canada for the three families who sheltered Snowden in Hong Kong when he fled the U.S. to avoid being charged with violations under the Espionage Act.
Two of Snowden’s “guardian angels” arrived in Canada in March. The other five are still stuck in Hong Kong, the organization says, where they face the threat of deportation to their home countries of Sri Lanka and the Philippines, where they could face continued threats of persecution, torture, and possible death.
Every month it costs over $7,500 to support the seven Snowden refugees in Hong Kong and Canada. All of those funds come from small-dollar online donations. Want to help? https://t.co/bnkgzEnI6X
A few short weeks ago, the economy seemed to be growing, the trade war looked winnable and the Mueller Report appeared to take presidential impeachment off the table. And then…
The economy hit a rough patch. Auto sales are down and home sales are way down. This morning:
(MarketWatch) – Pending home sales fell a seasonally adjusted 1.5% in April and were 2% lower than a year ago, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday. The consensus Econoday forecast was for a 0.5% increase.
NAR’s index, which tracks home-contract signings, has been volatile, but the trend is solidly downward. April marked the 16th-straight month of annual declines.
Contract signings precede closings by about 45-60 days, so the pending home-sales index is a leading indicator for upcoming existing-home sales reports.
Only the Midwest saw an increase in April, with a 1.3% uptick. Pending sales were down 1.8% in the Northeast, 2.5% in the South, and 1.8% in the West.
On Tuesday, the widely-followed Case-Shiller index showed home prices had risen at the slowest pace since mid-2012 in March.
Interest rates cratered, inverting the yield curve. Check out the US 10-year Treasury yield in May:
From 2.5% to 2.15% in a single month implies massive changes within the credit markets that signal an economic slowdown and/or a flight to safety because of external risks.
The trade war went parabolic. China refused to budge and Trump upped the ante with more tariffs, to which China responded by threatening to end rare earth exports, a terrifying prospect for US tech companies that rely on those elements. Then last night Trump shocked pretty much everyone by slapping tariffs on Mexico in retaliation for the recent surge of illegal immigration. Meanwhile, global trade flows are collapsing.
Mueller put impeachment back on the table. On Wednesday, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller appeared to invite Congress to go after the President over Russiagate. The Democrats gleefully complied, virtually guaranteeing political chaos right through the 2020 election.
Growth projections evaporated. Economists have been revising year-ahead GDP estimates downward for the past few weeks and are no doubt cutting them again as this is written. The already-anemic numbers on the following chart from the Atlanta Fed are due to be updated on June 3. Look for a sharp drop.
How do modern central bankers respond when faced with this kind of perfect negative storm? They look to the stock market for guidance, of course. If share prices are rising they assume that funky growth numbers and political turmoil are minor inconveniences. If stocks are falling they interpret the above as an existential threat and immediately start cutting interest rates and raising asset purchases.
So we really just have to watch the stock market. Which, as this is written, is tanking yet again. The past month has been relentlessly bad – not quite as brutal as the yearend 2018 flash crash that stopped the Feds tightening, but still pretty ominous.
One more month – or even a couple more weeks – like this, and the US, along with the rest of the world, will be back in full-on easy money mode.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2KdTq7U Tyler Durden
When critics of President Trump’s plan to build a wall on the Mexican border analogize it to the Berlin Wall, immigration restrictionists indignantly respond that there is a crucial difference between keeping migrants out and locking people in. The former is the supposed sovereign right of any nation, while the latter is a human rights violation only oppressive totalitarian regimes would resort to. Anyone who defends Trump’s new plan to use tariffs to force Mexico to restrict the emigration of its citizens to the United States can no longer rely on that distinction.
The whole point of the plan is precisely to force Mexico to lock in its own people. Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro, for example, emphasizes that the goal is to force Mexico to “help us” stop the “the export, one of their high exports, of illegal aliens.” At least in the short run, the only way Mexico can give us the needed “help” is by restricting the movement of its people.
Defenders of Trump’s action could argue that there is a distinction between locking people in completely and “merely” preventing them from leaving for a specific destination (such as the US). But surely we would still condemn the Berlin Wall if the East German government had said its purpose was to block its citizens from moving to the West, but they were still free to leave for other communist nations. As a practical matter, moreover, the US border is Mexico’s longest and most significant land boundary, by far, and blocking exit rights through that border is a major restriction on Mexicans’ ability to go anywhere by land.
Another possible distinction between the two cases is that East Germans were locked into a far more oppressive regime than Mexicans would be. But Mexico’s corrupt and often deeply unjust government is far from wonderful, and being confined there would force many potential migrants to endure what may well be a lifetime of poverty and exposure to violence. Moreover, the right to exit is not limited only to citizens of the most oppressive regimes. If Canada or the United States were to block their citizens from leaving, that would surely be a gross violation of human rights, even though Canada and the US are substantially freer and wealthier societies than Mexico.
Some of the people Trump wants to force Mexico to lock in are not Mexican citizens, but Central American refugees. But, if anything, Mexico has even less right to prevent other nations’ citizens from leaving than its own.
Blocking the right to emigrate is a violation of international law. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (to which both Mexico and the US are signatories), mandates that “[e]veryone has the right to leave any country.” Much more importantly, locking people in is a violation of fundamental human rights, even aside from any treaty. We readily recognize that in the case of the Berlin Wall. The same goes for Trump’s attempt to force Mexico to block the emigration of its own people.
The distinction between locking in and keeping migrants out is not nearly as robust as many like to think. Economist Bryan Caplan effectively explains why most of the arguments against the former also apply to the latter. The distinction also often relies on the flawed analogy between governments’ power to exclude migrants and the rights of private homeowners to keep trespassers off their land (I criticized that analogy here).
But those who believe that the difference between “keeping out” and “locking in” is an important moral distinction that differentiates US immigration restrictions from the Berlin Wall should oppose Trump’s plan to coerce Mexico. There are, of course, many other goo reasons to oppose it. But the ways in which it makes our policy analogous to the Berlin Wall should be high on the list.
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