The affair with Agnieszka bothered him not because he felt guilty about Basia, his wife—though he did feel guilty—but because Agnieszka’s poetry was notorious for its candor and explicitness…

Piotr was forty-two, married to Basia, the father of three sons, a professor of English at the Instytut Anglistyki at the University of Krakow. Three things worried him.

First, he was having an affair with Agnieszka, the poetess, who wore spectacles and looked like Nana Mouskouri.

Second, he had recently undergone a series of tests to establish whether he had inherited the family’s predisposition to die of cancer in the late forties, as his mother had done.

And, third, his blond eyebrows, always strongly marked, had gone Nietzschean almost overnight. They were the family eyebrows, his father’s eyebrows—two intense pelts, half an inch high, that made him look middle-aged. His older brother, Czeslaw, the architect, had an identical pair, but he was fifty.

There was to be a fourth thing, but as yet he knew nothing of it.

The affair with Agnieszka bothered him not because he felt guilty about Basia, his wife—though he did feel guilty—but because Agnieszka’s poetry was notorious for its candor and explicitness. Every year produced a new slim volume in which the slimness was inversely proportionate to the indiscretion. Piotr wrote poetry himself, less prolifically and more guardedly. He had written poems about his affair with Agnieszka, but his way with pathetic fallacy meant that even Basia could read them without guessing their true provenance. The nearest he had come to confessional poetry was a dramatic monologue titled “Peter the Great to His Courtesan”—in which the Tsar forbade his mistress to “rust his sword” and issued other majestically obscure imperatives.

Agnieszka’s poetry, though, had her taking off her horn-rims to kiss her lover in the Kool Kats Jazz Club or giving a blow job on the back seat of the bus to Nowa Huta. And her titles were nearly always dates and places.

One day he expected to read a poem about his eyebrows. Or a poem with his phone number or his address in the title: “Ul. Sienkiewicza 35 m.5.” Especially since his apartment was often the easiest place for the lovers to meet—as they were going to meet on this rainy day in June. He wasn’t teaching that afternoon, because his students had exams. Agnieszka walked from the nearby Film School, where she worked in the cataloguing department. His sons would be in school till four, and Basia, who worked for a foreign press agency, was never home before six o’clock, because of the time difference.

As soon as Agnieszka arrived, Piotr put the chain on the door, and the pair undressed quickly and silently on opposite sides of the sofa bed. Like a married couple in a cold room. But the thick curve of his erection was ready before they even touched. He could smell her genitals across the tartan blanket—the blanket with tell-tail tassels which she always brought in her tote bag.

She took off her spectacles.

On the sofa bed, she seldom repeated herself. This particular afternoon, as her features warped with pleasure, Piotr heard her agonized whisper, “I want to, aah, push your stiff red, aah, into another woman’s . . .” And he came, too.

Afterward, they talked, always about the same thing—Piotr’s postcoital desire to end the affair and Agnieszka’s passionate opposition. “We are like mayflies. We live only for an afternoon, and we must take whatever joy is given us.” This was the argument she always urged.

Piotr thought of the tests he had undergone—the barium meals, the endoscopies, the soreness of his throat after tubes had been pushed down it, the yellow bruise in the crook of his arm where blood had been taken. But there was also something comic in her chosen image for man’s transience—the indestructible trope of the doomed mayfly. And he thought of the character in Chekhov’s “Ivanov” who says that mankind is like a flower in a field. Along comes a goat—no more flower. The earpieces of Agnieszka’s spectacles, he noticed, were arranged around a bottle of Basia’s perfume, brought back from England by her sister. Je Reviens.

And then he heard the shtpp of Basia’s key in the lock. The chain was in place, and the snib of the lock was also depressed, so that the apartment door couldn’t be opened from the outside. Shtpp. There was a faint jingle of keys as Basia checked she was using the right one. Shtpp. Shtpp.

Piotr laid his finger against his lips—and smelled the rankness of Agnieszka’s genitals. He leaned toward her, shaking his head vigorously when she tried to kiss him. “No,” he whispered in her ear. “She’ll go away in a minute. Just wait quietly. Then you can leave.” They listened to the sibilance, not even daring to dress. A minute passed. Neither of them heard Basia’s steps descending the concrete stairs. Piotr found himself listening for the terse resonance of the steel bannister when it was slapped.

Shtpp. “Shit.” Then, raising her voice, “Piotr, are you in there?”

Basia began to thump on the door. After only a minute, the hammering stopped, and they heard the voice of the old woman in the apartment below. “He’s there with that woman he brings. It’s disgusting. You should get a divorce.”

“You should mind your own fucking business,” Basia yelled. “Piotr, open the bloody door, you shit.”

They began to get dressed. The shoulders of Agnieszka’s raincoat were still dark from the rain. She tightened the belt and looked at Piotr. He was folding away the sofa bed.

“Deny it,” he whispered. “Say we weren’t doing anything, but it looked bad, so we kept quiet. In case she came to the wrong conclusion.”

Agnieszka shook her head. “No. It’s fate, Piotr. Tell her that you love me. That you’re leaving her.” But she was pale.

“I can’t.”

Agnieszka wound up her lipstick, applied its apricot shimmer with a surprisingly steady hand, turned up the collar of her raincoat, and went to open the door. “I am not going to discuss our love with her. My conscience is clear. And yours should be, too. I’m going home. How could something so beautiful between us, something so noble, be touched by something so grubby? So undignified?”

The door opened, but there was no sign of Basia, only the head of the old woman, at floor level, staring up through the bars like a criminal.

Agnieszka stepped out and received an almighty crack to the side of her head from the handle of Basia’s red umbrella. The old woman applauded. Agnieszka did not collapse. She held on to the ochre bannister with both hands, leaning forward, as if she were keeping it at arm’s length. Her mouth opened and shut, opened and shut. Tears brimmed in her eyes.

Piotr was amazed to find himself noticing the sleeve belts on her raincoat—how they gathered the cuffs, like Christmas crackers.

Without saying a word, or even acknowledging Basia’s existence, Agnieszka walked slowly down the stairs.

o Piotr’s gradual surprise, Agnieszka made no attempt to contact him after she was hit on the side of the head with the rosewood handle of Basia’s umbrella.

What did he expect? Obviously, she couldn’t phone him at home. He thought that she would phone him at work. Even if there was no one else in the common room—marking papers or drying shoes at the wall heater—he would adopt his customary neutral tone. His responses would be inconsequential. To her question “Why can’t you meet me on Friday night?,” he would answer, “No, I don’t think it’s arrived yet.” Or she would ask, “Do you want to fuck me?” And he’d reply, “Not all the work has been completed yet, but yes, as far as I know, that’s the case.” He thought this strategy might help to contain her outrage.

But Agnieszka didn’t phone. He could, of course, phone her. In some ways, that would be better, because she shared an office at the Film School with only one other colleague, an older, divorced woman whom she’d taken into her confidence. The truth was that Piotr was afraid of her anger at his timidity, at the way he had stood to one side—silent in the curious silence after the blow. That curt, wordless, forceful dak.

Perhaps, he reasoned, she didn’t wish to add to the pressure he was under? It was unlikely: Agnieszka had no way of knowing that Basia had summoned the entire family to a discussion of his infidelity.

And, in any case, Agnieszka’s consideration for others wasn’t often evident. It wasn’t selfishness but, rather, a principled egoism. She believed in the truth of her emotions. The important thing was not to live a lie. Other people, consideration for other people, putting their feelings first, inevitably meant putting your own feelings second. Hell is other people, Sartre said. But Agnieszka’s conviction was unrelated to existentialist ideas of inauthenticity and mauvaise foi. She could imagine telling a lie in order to live in the truth.

The concept of “poetic truth” appealed to her—the idea of something not literally true but nevertheless ideally true. The slow thistledown of stars, for example, their drift and cling, was something that struck her with renewed force whenever she removed her spectacles—and was looking over a lover’s shoulder at the Milky Way. Her favorite poet was Marina Tsvetayeva.

A week passed before she finally telephoned—to tell Piotr that the blow delivered by the umbrella handle had produced first a lump, expected by Agnieszka and therefore unsurprising, and then a tumor. Which was aggressive, according to the doctor. She had wanted to be quite certain before she telephoned. That was why she’d waited. Her voice was steady and her tone factual.

Piotr stared up at the institute ceiling, with its elaborate nineteenth-century moldings and the Greek islands of damp. He could see nothing for the pulsing blackness that shrouded his vision. He was finding it difficult to breathe. There was no saliva in his mouth.

“Piotr?”

When he tried to speak, he could manage only a whisper. “Agnieszka.” Her name in his mouth sounded like the scratch of a fountain pen.

“I can’t hear you.”

“I was saying your name.” He began to breathe at last, but his voice was unsteady. “Tell me what happened.”

“You know what happened.”

“At the doctor’s.”

“He says I should expect secondaries. It will metastasize.”

“So is there going to be surgical intervention? Radium? Or chemo? What tests did he run?”

There was a long pause. “No. It’s hopeless, he says. A death sentence.”

“See another doctor. Agnieszka, you’ve got to see another doctor.”

“I want to die. There’s nothing to live for now.”

Piotr was shocked to find himself more worried about his wife than about Agnieszka. Somewhere in his mind, he already thought of it as a vindictive tumor. And he wanted to know if Agnieszka had been to the police, whether his wife might be facing some kind of criminal charge, and how exactly it would be framed. But he did not dare ask directly, in case he put the idea in her head.

“I have to see you,” he said in a low voice, without thinking, as if there were someone else in the empty common room.

“Only if you spend the rest of my life with me.”

“The arrangements for that shipment will require detailed advance planning,” he said.

“Is there someone there?” she asked.

“That is the correct state of affairs. The arrangements for that shipment—”

Agnieszka hung up with a clatter. And she didn’t telephone again.

asia was frying chicken livers and onions in the tiny kitchen when he told her about Agnieszka’s tumor. She kept her back to him as he stood in the doorway. These days she seldom glanced in his direction, much less looked him in the eye. She took a pinch of salt with her right hand, rubbed a trickle into the pan, and beat her hands clean like a pair of cymbals.

“I’d take it with a pinch of salt, that tumor of hers.”

“Basia, I have to see her.”

“See her.”

On the wet chopping board, a few bloody shreds, seasoned flour with a red sticky edge.

“She might go to the police,” he said.

“Or a lawyer, more likely. See her. Find out.”

“You don’t believe her, do you?”

“Doesn’t matter either way. Whether she’s lying. Which she is. Or if it’s the truth, in which case she’ll die before the case is settled.”

“What if it’s a criminal case? What if it isn’t a civil action?”

“Lay the table.”

Basia was tempted to tell Piotr about her own lover.

Just to balance the hurt. But she ate without lifting her eyes from the plate.

he reason Basia never told Piotr about her lover was that by then they were no longer lovers. Witold had found someone else—a man. Also Basia was deeply persuaded by her own inherent disposition toward fidelity. Fidelity, as she perceived it, wasn’t something literal and pedantic. It was a fundamental mental posture, the essential truth. More, her righteous indignation with Piotr would be compromised if she indulged her instinct for revenge and sexual counterstrike. As it was, she could count on everyone’s sympathy. The family conference about Piotr’s infidelity took place one Sunday afternoon in his brother Czeslaw’s new apartment on the outskirts of Warsaw. It was also the architect’s fifty-first birthday. The seal on the frosted bottle of Zubrowka was broken with a click—of plectrum on fingernail. Piotr thought of Agnieszka performing her poems, with her head bent over her guitar like a nursing mother. He listened, reproved, to the rustle, the sigh of the foil cap and the single tut-tut it took to pour a glass. Soon the white carved wooden tray would hold eight squat glasses—their clarity iced to ground glass—which would leave broken links of damp on the wood.

Fuck all this pathetic fucking pathetic fallacy, Piotr thought.

Czeslaw hadn’t yet put up curtains. On the twentieth floor they hardly seemed essential. Piotr looked down at the builders’ rubble and the canopy of cow parsley flourishing between the blocks of new flats. He turned back to the room for the birthday toast.

The vodka made for frankness. Basia’s parents sat in their coats. Her father looked down and turned his flat cap to the right like a steering wheel. They were both hurt and surprised by his behavior. They would find it hard to forgive him.

“I find it hard to forgive myself,” Piotr said.

“You’ve behaved like a complete shit,” his mother-in-law said.

“You can’t be harder on me than I am on myself.”

“Anyone can be sorry,” his mother-in-law said. “But the damage is done now. Saying sorry won’t mend anything. What’s that supposed to mean? Sorry.”

“His eczema’s back on his legs. That’s what it means.” It was Basia, defending him against her parents. He looked up gratefully, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She was stern, yet in a strange way looked more vulnerable than usual. Younger. Touching.

Piotr realized that she wasn’t wearing eye makeup.

He felt outmaneuvered. Clean shaven. Normal. Criminal. Why had he agreed to this ludicrous show trial?

“What we want to know, isn’t it, is what he intends to do about it.” It was his mother-in-law again.

Piotr wondered why Basia’s mother never mentioned the time—almost twenty years ago now, at a New Year’s party—when she had kissed her future son-in-law and put her tongue in his mouth. He had been standing with his arms folded outside the bathroom when she came out, saw him, kissed him expertly, then rejoined the party. Piotr hadn’t been in the least surprised, actually. They were drunk, but it wasn’t a drunken kiss. It had seemed perfectly natural—proper, even—an acknowledgment of an ordinary fact. It was never repeated, never alluded to, written off by both as an alcoholic indiscretion. But the eidetic spark of mutual attraction had been there for the first five years of his marriage and had only gradually faded. They used to get on well, Piotr and his mother-in-law.

Edward, Piotr’s younger, unmarried brother, said nothing. His sister, Nadia, also said nothing. She had parted from her husband over a similar affair and sat there like a reproach and a warning.

Piotr’s father and Czeslaw spoke of the temptation, the vanity of the male. Piotr knew that they were defending him, but their generic argument offended his sense of individuality. He wasn’t flattered by the gift of Agnieszka’s youth and beauty. It wasn’t his vanity that drove him—it was his mortality. He didn’t want to remain young. He wanted to be alive before he died. That was all.

“The kid’s told me how sorry he is,” Czeslaw concluded. “And I think that’s pretty obvious. He doesn’t want to risk losing Basia and the kids. They’re the most important thing in his life. He knows that.”

And Czeslaw put his arm around Piotr’s shoulders. “A toast. A toast to Piotr and Basia.”

ut later, walking in the wasteland between the new apartment blocks, Czeslaw was less friendly. “You stupid cunt. What the fuck did you think you were doing, you prick?” The elder brother dressing down the younger. They faced each other. Czeslaw tore the cigarette out of Piotr’s mouth. “Smoking. Why are you fucking smoking? You are so stupid. You don’t fucking smoke.”

“You made my lip bleed.” Piotr touched his lower lip and looked at his finger.

“I don’t give a fuck about your fucking lip.” Czeslaw threw the cigarette on the grass and ground it to pieces.

Both men were slightly breathless, as if they had been running up stairs. Piotr wondered why Czeslaw was so angry.

“For fuck’s sake! Putting everything at risk. Your whole fucking life for a fucking fuck. I can’t fucking believe it. In your own fucking house. Jesus.”

Piotr could smell cheese on Czeslaw’s breath. He wanted to cry. He wasn’t sure he could trust himself to speak.

“O.K.,” he said. “I’ll try to explain.” But his voice kept vanishing. “The tests I had. Because of Ma.” He shook his head. His eyes looked up to the right. His mouth stretched.

“Take it easy, Piotr. Easy now.” There were tears in Czeslaw’s voice, too.

“The point is. The point is. Shit. With her. I just think about her. Her cunt.” He was staring at Czeslaw’s lavish tie knot. “I want to live, you know. Before I die. And she understands that.” Piotr looked up and met his brother’s gray eyes under the tangle of eyebrows. “Agnieszka says we’re like mayflies. We only live for an afternoon.”

Something changed in Czeslaw’s eyes. A point of light.

“I don’t know whether I should tell you this, our kid.” Czeslaw pushed his lips forward, ruefully. “Anyway. But that’s exactly what she said to me when I was fucking her.”

The two brothers shook their heads and smiled at each other.

“Incredible.”

“It is. Fucking incredible.”

And they starting comparing notes about Agnieszka in bed.

Three weeks later, the affair began again. In spite of everything. And in spite of everything Piotr still believed that we are mayflies who only live for an afternoon.

Nothing more was heard about Agnieszka’s tumor. ♦

N'Dimagou -- "Dignity"

Interview with Abderrahmane Sissako on "Dignity"

First of all, we would like to ask you where the story that you tell in your movie comes from.

The idea was born from the complexity of the theme proposed: dignity. I think it's very difficult to deal with such sweeping concepts as justice and dignity in the allotted two or three minutes, so I looked for an idea that actually asked the question 'What is dignity' rather than answering it.

With regard to the topic that was given to you, which aspect struck you the most? Are there ways in which you were already addressing it in your work?

I think the most stimulating aspect of the theme is that dignity should be a worldwide question. Anyone can speak about it, no matter where they come from. I'm an artist and part of my identity includes being universal. As a film-maker I've always wanted to tell the story of people who have really difficult lives and deep down resent injustice, but still manage to keep going, to keep living, perhaps that's dignity.

Human rights are real, something you can feel on your skin, and not something abstract. In a film, the artist and director -- just like the poet -- creates a personal universe that is drawn from his or her own life in one way or another. Can you help us understand the link between your short film and the experiences that led you to make it?

My origins and my life give me strong links to Africa. Injustice and suffering under many guises are endemic in Africa today and this drives me. I've always wanted there to be monuments to 'worthy anonymous people' in the world, along the same lines as the tombs to the unknown soldier, because I find them more interesting than the people whose names we know.

This is why I film people passing by, people I may never see again . . . but who leave their mark on me and on others, immortalized on film.

We think that culture in general and cinema in particular can help people to better understand the importance of human rights in their own lives. What do you want to provoke in the wider public with your film?

"Like water that nourishes the land to feed men", someone said, "culture nourishes their souls to reconcile them".

With this film I wanted to make the statement that there can only be peace in the world, that words like 'rights' and 'hope' can only have meaning, if the world's wealth is more evenly distributed.

In most of the films created for this project, we see signs of clashes deriving from cultural diversity or caused by limitations imposed on individuals that curtail their freedom in different ways. What do you think is the reason for that?

This is certainly due to the failure to solve the important issues we face every day around the world. Our role as spokespeople obliges us to take a stand.

Now let's talk a bit about you. Who is Abderrahmane Sissako?

I was born in Kiffa, in Mauritania. I studied film-making in the Soviet Union and now I live in France. I've lived in Africa and I think I'm a citizen of the world.

Review of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation

Joe Costelo:

Karl Polanyi’s, The Great Transformation is a truly original and important work published in 1944. Polanyi doesn’t fit well in our standard left/right economic dichotomy and for the refined economic tastes of the past several decades, he includes far too much history and politics. Most contemporary economists would no doubt shake their heads and say, “How can a book about economics be taken seriously, when it doesn’t have one equation?” That would be a great mistake. Mr. Polanyi’s insights deserve great attention.

Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation during World War II. With depression and war, the previous two decades had been a cataclysmic time for the planet. His central thesis was, “The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.” The book decisively pooh-poohs many of the myths of our ruling economic doctrine. Most importantly, he eviscerates the idea of laissez-faire and uniquely documents Europe’s century and half revolution to a market society. Time after time, Polanyi shows the very visible hand of the government interfering in all aspects of society in order to insure market dominance.

Now this point is especially relevant to us today. For the last several decades, we have witnessed a resurgence of economic liberalism — neo-liberalism. We were told once again that markets could self-regulate, and once again it has come crashing down. Most importantly, over the last year, we’ve watched government step in to save some of our largest market institutions, including the locus of laissez-faire, Wall Street itself.

Polanyi is not anti-market. He believes they are indeed beneficial, but they are not self-regulating, and more importantly the ethos of the market should not be the ruling or even dominant ethic of society. The idea of self-regulating markets is utopian, and like all utopias extremely brutal if tried to be realized.

It would take a long piece to give Mr. Polanyi an overview his thinking deserve. However, there’s a couple points in Mr. Polanyi’s book that I’d like to emphasize on their relevance for today’s financial crisis. First, regarding the financial collapse of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Polanyi writes:

“In the 1920s, the gold standard was still regarded as the precondition of a return to stability and prosperity, and consequently no demand raised by its professional guardians, the bankers, was deemed too burdensome, if only it promised to secure stable exchange rates; when, after 1929, this proved impossible, the imperative need was for a stable internal currency and nobody was as little qualified to provide it as the banker.”

This is terribly important today. If you simply replace the gold standard with our last few decades “financial innovations,” we have a very similar situation. In the last year and half, every action taken by the Federal Reserve and Treasury has been an attempt to return to the “stability” of the last decades’ casino banking of derivatives and securitization. This isn’t going to work. Just like then, the bankers who provided us with securtization and deviravtives are the least qualified to bring about the changes we are of in such desperate need.

Secondly, Polanyi astutely points out the necessity of locality. This insight deserves a great deal of thought. It is an important component of our current banking problems. It provides an important principle for the necessary political reform that must accompany any real reform of our banking sector. Polanyi writes:

“In contrast to the nomadic peoples, the cultivator commits himself to improvements fixed in a particular place. Without such improvements human life must remain elementary, and little removed from that of animals. And how large a role have these fixtures played in human history! It is they, the cleared and cultivated lands, the other buildings, the means of communication, the multifarious plant necessary for production, including industry and mining, all permanent and immovable improvements that tie a human community to the locality where it is. They cannot be improvised, but must be built up gradually by generations of patient effort,and the community cannot afford to sacrifice them and start afresh elsewhere. Hence that territorial character of sovereignty, which permeates our political conceptions – for a century these obvious truths were ridiculed.”

Once again, over the last several decades, these obvious truths were ridiculed. In short, power must in some ways remain tied to locality. It cannot all be centralized and globalized. Centralization is both the enemy of locality and democracy. Yet, over the last several decades, the centralizing of the American economy under the utopianism of free-market fundamentalism has been staggering. The Financial Times writes,“The four biggest US commercial banks - JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo - possess 64 per cent of the assets of US commercial banks.”

When power becomes so concentrated it devolves certain traits. One of the most important of these traits in recent years has been the growing use of mathematical models, no more so rampant than in the banking sector. Yves Smith has touched on the issue as it relates to the mortgage fiasco stating quite accurately,

“The problem is that there isn’t a good substitute for knowledge of the borrower and his community. Does he understand what he is getting into? How stable is his employer? What are the prospects for the local economy? Those are important considerations, and they require judgment. That may still in the end be used as an input to a more structured decision process. but overly automating borrower assessment has resulted in information loss. It’s hardly a surprise that the quality of decisions deteriorated.”

Of course, modeling is not exclusive to the banking sectors. It has become essential in many of our large corporations and just as importantly in our centralized government bureaucracies. We need to step back from this head-long rush, this modern Pythagorean  movement of enshrining mathematics. We must rethink our institutions of political economy away from centralization and the seductive but wrong-headed notion of ever more efficient control from the top, both practices are antithetical to democracy.

Instead, we need to reform our institutions of political economy, not based on mathematical models, don’t misunderstand, they still can be useful tools, but instead founded on the principles that people with all their human complexities and the localities in which they live and work must always be preeminent. We must understand that in order to create truly adaptive systems of political economy, which grow ever more necessary with the evolution of technology, we must allow our political economy to evolve and adapt. Centralization is not only the least conducive and the least democratic to these means, it eventually becomes truly reactionary.

In 1944, Polanyi had lived through the great cataclysms brought about by self-regulating market utopia. With the rise of the New Deal and the defeat of fascism, Polanyi thought he was witnessing, “a development which the economic system ceases to lay down the law to society and primacy of society over that system is secured.” Yet four decades later, the myth of the market once again rules and has led once again led to crisis.

We need to learn from this. Over the longer term the New Deal failed to keep markets restrained. While providing short-term relief, over time, the centralization of political power in DC proved as problematic as centralization of economic power in our mega-corporations. The corporations were easily able to take over the government. Those today who wish to once again confront the myths of self-regulating markets also need to confront the challenge of reforming our politics and government. Mr. Polanyi offers some valuable thinking.

Manipulation: How Markets Really Work

Stephen Lendman

Wall Street’s mantra is that markets move randomly and reflect the collective wisdom of investors. The truth is quite opposite. The government’s visible hand and insiders control markets and manipulate them up or down for profit — all of them, including stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies.

It’s financial fraud or what former high-level Wall Street insider and former Assistant HUD Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts calls “pump and dump,” defined as “artificially inflating the price of a stock or other security through promotion, in order to sell at the inflated price,” then profit more on the downside by short-selling. “This practice is illegal under securities law, yet it is particularly common,” and in today’s volatile markets likely ongoing daily.

Why? Because the profits are enormous, in good and bad times, and when carried to extremes like now, Fitts calls it “pump(ing) and dump(ing) of the entire American economy,” duping the public, fleecing trillions from them, and it’s more than just “a process designed to wipe out the middle class. This is genocide (by other means) — a much more subtle and lethal version than ever before perpetrated by the scoundrels of our history texts.”

Fitts explains that much more than market manipulation goes on. She describes a “financial coup d’etat, including fraudulent housing (and other bubbles), pump and dump schemes, naked short selling, precious metals price suppression, and active intervention in the markets by the government and central bank” along with insiders. It’s a government-business partnership for enormous profits through “legislation, contracts, regulation (or lack of it), financing, (and) subsidies.” More still overall by rigging the game for the powerful, while at the same time harming the public so cleverly that few understand what’s happening.

Market Rigging Mechanisms — The Plunge Protection Team

On March 18, 1989, Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12631 created the Working Group on Financial Markets (WGFM) commonly known as the Plunge Protection Team (PPT). It consisted of the following officials or their designees:

• the President;
• the Treasury Secretary as chairman;
• the Fed chairman;
• the SEC chairman; and
• the Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman.

Under Sec. 2, its “Purposes and Functions” were stated as follows:

(2) “Recognizing the goals of enhancing the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of our Nation’s financial markets and maintaining investor confidence, the Working Group shall identify and consider:

(1) the major issues raised by the numerous studies on the events (pertaining to the) October 19, 1987 (market crash and consider) recommendations that have the potential to achieve the goals noted above; and

(2)…governmental (and other) actions under existing laws and regulations…that are appropriate to carry out these recommendations.”

In August 2005, Canada-based Sprott Asset Management (SAM) principals John Embry and Andrew Hepburn headlined their report on the US government’s “surreptitious” market interventions: “Move Over, Adam Smith - The Visible Hand of Uncle Sam” to prevent “destabilizing stock market declines. Comprising key government agencies, stock exchanges and large Wall Street firms,” this group “is significant because the government has never admitted to private-sector membership in the Working Group,” nor is it hinting that manipulation works both ways - to stop or create panic.

“Current mythology holds that (equity) prices rise and fall on the basis of market forces alone. Such sentiments appear to be seriously mistaken….And as official rhetoric continues to toe the free market line, manipulation has become increasingly apparent…with the active participation of selected investment banks and brokerage houses”: the Wall Street giants.

In 2004, Texas Hedge Report principals Steven McIntyre and Todd Stein said “Almost every floor trader on the NYSE, NYMEX, CBOT and CME will admit to having seen the PPT in action in one form or another over the years” — violating the traditional notion that markets move randomly and reflect popular sentiment.

Worse still, according to SAM principals Embry and Hepburn, “the government’s unwillingness to disclose its activities has rendered it very difficult to have a debate on the merits of such a policy,” if there are any.

Further, “virtually no one ever mentions government intervention publicly….Our primary concern is that what apparently started as a stopgap measure may have morphed into a serious moral hazard situation.”

Worst of all, if government and Wall Street collude to pump and dump markets, individuals and small investment firms can get trampled, and that’s exactly what happened in late 2008 and early 2009, with much more to come as the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression plays out over many more months.

That said, the PPT might more aptly be called the PPDT — The Plunge Protection/Destruction Team, depending on which way it moves markets at any time. Investors beware.

Manipulating markets is commonplace and as old as investing. Only the tools are more sophisticated and amounts involved greater. In her book, Morgan: American Financier, Jean Strouse explained his role in the Panic of 1907, the result of stock market and real estate speculation that caused a market crash, bank runs, and hysteria. To restore confidence, JP Morgan and the Treasury Secretary organized a group of financiers to transfer funds to troubled banks and buy stocks. At the time, rumors were rampant that they orchestrated the panic for speculative profits and their main goals:

– the 1908 National Monetary Commission to stabilize financial markets as a precursor to the Federal Reserve; and

– the 1910 Jekyll Island meeting where powerful financial figures met in secret for nine days and created the private banking cartel Federal Reserve System, later congressionally established on December 23, 1913 and signed into law by Woodrow Wilson.

Morgan died early that year but profited hugely from the 1907 Panic. It let him expand his steel empire by buying the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company for about $45 million, an asset thought to be worth around $700 million. Today, similar schemes are more than ever common in the wake of the global economic crisis creating opportunities to buy assets cheap by bankers flush with bailout cash. Aided by PPT market rigging, it’s simpler than ever.

Wharton Professor Itay Goldstein and Said Business School and Lincoln College, Oxford University Professor Alexander Guembel discussed price manipulation in their paper titled “Manipulation and the Allocational Role of Prices.” They showed how traders effect prices on the downside through “bear raids,” and concluded:

“We basically describe a theory of how bear raid manipulation works….What we show here is that by selling (a stock or more effectively short-selling it), you have a real effect on the firm. The connection with real value is the new thing….This is the crucial element,” but they claim the process only works on the downside, not driving shares up.

In fact, high-volume program trading, analyst recommendations, positive or negative media reports, and other devices do it both ways.

Also key is that a company’s stock price and true worth can be highly divergent. In other words, healthy or sick firms may be way-over or under-valued depending on market and economic conditions and how manipulative traders wish to price them, short or longer term.

The idea that equity prices reflect true value or that markets move randomly (up or down) is rubbish. They never have and more than ever don’t now.

The Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF)

The 1934 Gold Reserve Act created the US Treasury’s ESF. Section 7 of the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreements made its operations permanent. As originally established, the Treasury ran the Fund outside of congressional oversight “to keep sharp swings in the dollar’s exchange rate from (disrupting) financial markets” through manipulation. Its operations now include stabilizing foreign currencies, extending credit lines to foreign governments, and last September to guaranteeing money market funds against losses for up to $50 billion.

In 1995, the Clinton administration used the fund to provide Mexico a $20 billion credit line to stabilize the peso at a time of economic crisis, and earlier administrations extended loans or credit lines to China, Brazil, Ecuador, Iceland and Liberia. The Treasury’s web site also states that:

“By law, the Secretary has considerable discretion in the use of ESF resources. The legal basis of the ESF is the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. As amended in the late 1970s…the Secretary (per) approval of the President, may deal in gold, foreign exchange, and other instruments of credit and securities.”

In other words, ESF is a slush fund for whatever purposes the Treasury wishes, including ones it may not wish to disclose, such as manipulating markets, directing funds to the IMF and providing them with strings to borrowers as the Treasury’s site explains:

“…Treasury has often linked the availability of ESF financing to a borrower’s use of the credit facilities of the IMF, both to support the IMF’s role and to strengthen assurances that there will be timely repayment of ESF financing.”

The Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group (CRMPG)

Established in 1999 in the wake of the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) crisis, it manipulates markets to benefit giant Wall Street firms and high-level insiders. According to one account, it was to curb future crises by:

• letting giant financial institutions collude through large-scale program trading to move markets up or down as they wish;
• bailing out its members in financial trouble; and
• manipulating markets short or longer-term with government approval at the expense of small investors none the wiser and often getting trampled.

In August 2008, CRMPG III issued a report titled “Containing Systemic Risk: The Road to Reform.” It was deceptive on its face in stating that CRMPG “was designed to focus its primary attention on the steps that must be taken by the private sector to reduce the frequency and/or severity of future financial shocks while recognizing that such future shocks are inevitable, in part because it is literally impossible to anticipate the specific timing and triggers of such events.”

In fact, the “private sector” creates “financial shocks” to open markets, remove competition, and consolidate for greater power by buying damaged assets cheap. Financial history has numerous examples of preying on the weak, crushing competition, socializing risks, privatizing profits, redistributing wealth upward to a financial oligarchy, creating “tollbooth economies” in debt bondage according to Michael Hudson, and overall getting a “free lunch” at the public’s expense.

CRMPG explains financial excesses and crises this way:

“At the end of the day, (their) root cause…on both the upside and the downside of the cycle is collective human behavior: unbridled optimism on the upside and fear on the downside, all in a setting in which it is literally impossible to anticipate when optimism gives rise to fear or fear gives rise to optimism…”

“What is needed, therefore, is a form of private initiative that will complement official oversight in encouraging industry-wide practices that will help mitigate systemic risk. The recommendations of the Report have been framed with that objective in mind.”

In other words, let foxes guard the henhouse to keep inventing new ways to extract gains (a “free lunch”) in increasingly larger amounts — “in the interest of helping to contain systemic risk factors and promote greater stability.”

Or as Orwell might have said: instability is stability, creating systemic risk is containing it, sloping playing fields are level ones, extracting the greatest profit is sharing it, and what benefits the few helps everyone.

Michel Chossudovsky explains that: “triggering market collapse(s) can be a very profitable undertaking. (Evidence suggests) that the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulators have created an environment which supports speculative transactions (through) futures, options, index funds, derivative securities (and short-selling), etc. (that) make money when the stock market crumbles…foreknowledge and inside information (create golden profit opportunities for) powerful speculators” able to move markets up or down with the public none the wiser.

As a result, concentrated wealth and “financial power resulting from market manipulation is unprecedented” with small investors’ savings, IRAs, pensions, 401ks, and futures being decimated from it.

Deconstructing So-Called “Green Shoots”

Daily the corporate media trumpet them to lull the unwary into believing the global economic crisis is ebbing and recovery is on the way. Not according to longtime market analyst Bob Chapman who calls green shoots “Poison Ivy” and economist Nouriel Roubini saying they’re “yellow weeds” at a time there’s lots more pain ahead.

For many months and in a recent commentary he refers to “the worst financial crisis, economic crisis and recession since the Great Depression…the consensus is now becoming optimistic again and says that we are going to go from minus 6 percent growth to positive growth in the second half of the year…my views are much more bearish….The problems of the financial system are severe. Many banks are still insolvent.”

We’re “piling public debt on top of private debt to socialize the losses; and at some point the back of (the) government(’s) balance sheet is going to break, and if that happens, it’s going to be a disaster.” Short of that, he, Chapman, and others see the risks going forward as daunting. As for the recent stock market rise, they both call it a “sucker’s rally” that will reverse as the US economy keeps contracting and the financial system suffers unexpected or manipulated shocks.

Highly respected market analyst Louise Yamada agrees. As Randall Forsyth reported in the May 25 issue of Barron’s Up and Down Wall Street column:

“It is almost uncanny the degree to which 2002-08 has tracked 1932-38, ‘Yamada writes in her latest note to clients.’ ” Her “Alternate Hypothesis” compares this structural bear market to 1929-42:

• “the dot-com collapse parallels the Great Crash and its aftermath,” followed by the 2003-07 recovery, similar to 1933-37;
• then the late 2008-early March 2009 collapse tracks a similar 1937-38 trajectory, after which a strong rally followed much like today;
• then in November 1938, the market dropped 22% followed by a 26% rise and a series of further ups and downs — down 28%, up 23%, down 16%, up 13%, and a final 29% decline ending in 1942;
• from the 1938 high (”analogous to where we are now,” she says), stock prices fell 41% to a final bottom.

Are we at one today as market touts claim? No according to Yamada — top-ranked among her peers in 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004 when she worked at Citigroup’s Smith Barney division. Since 2005, she’s headed her own independent research company.

She says structural bear markets typically last 13-16 years so this one has a long way to go before “complet(ing) the repair process.” She calls the current rebound “a bungee jump,” very typical of bear markets. Numerous ones occurred during the Great Depression, 8 alone from 1929-1932, some deceptively strong.

Expect market manipulators today to produce similar price action going forward — to enrich themselves while trampling on the unwary, well-advised to protect their dollars from becoming quarters or dimes.

The Case for Amnesty

A forum on immigration

Harvey Finkle / harveyfinkle.com

Joseph H. Carens

“Even if we accept the state’s right to control immigration, that right is not absolute and unqualified. The state’s right to deport irregular migrants weakens as the migrants become members of society. ”
Time erodes the state’s right to deportMiguel Sanchez can’t earn enough to pay the bills in his hometown. He tries for several years to obtain a visa to come to the United States and is rejected every time. In 2000 he enters on foot with the help of a smuggler. He makes his way to Chicago where he has relatives and friends and starts working in construction, sending money to his father. Miguel works weekends at Dunkin’ Donuts and goes to school in the evening to learn English. In 2002 he meets an American-born U.S. citizen who lives in his neighborhood. They marry in 2003 and now have a four-year-old son.

Miguel, his wife, and son live under constant fear of his deportation. Driving to the funeral of a relative in another city causes high stress: a traffic stop or an accident can lead to Miguel’s removal from the country. Nor can the family travel by plane. Their son has never met his grandparents in Mexico. Meanwhile, they have an ordinary life in the neighborhood: they own a home and pay taxes, their child attends preschool, and they have become friends with other parents. Current U.S. law provides Miguel and his family no feasible path to regularize his status.

Miguel Sanchez’s story is true, but for a few identifying details. And there are millions of similar stories in North America and Europe. Some eleven million irregular migrants— noncitizens residing without official authorization—now live in the United States. The European numbers are smaller, but the reality is similar. People make their way across the southern Mediterranean or through Eastern Europe, or they arrive through authorized channels and overstay visas. Like Miguel, they find work, have families, and live ordinary lives—ordinary, but for one dramatic difference: their vulnerability to deportation.

How should a liberal democracy respond to the vulnerability of irregular migrants? Should it expel irregular migrants whenever it finds them? Should it accept them as members of the community, at least after they have been present for an extended period, and grant them legal authorization to stay? Should it pursue some third alternative, with a path to permanent residence mixed with penalties and restrictions?

The right answer, I think, is a (qualified) version of the second alternative. Irregular migrants should be granted amnesty—allowed to remain with legal status as residents—if they have been settled for a long time. Some circumstances—arriving as children or marrying citizens or permanent residents—may accelerate or strengthen their moral claims to stay, but the most important consideration is the passage of time.

Although most readers of Boston Review are Americans (as I am, in addition to being Canadian), I pose a general question about liberal democracies because they share some important principles and values. While particular features of American (or British or French or Canadian) legal traditions, history, and circumstances may affect our stance toward irregular migration, there are common moral commitments that limit the range of acceptable policies. It can be helpful to remind ourselves sometimes of the wider moral communities we belong to, and, as we will see, Americans have something to learn from Europeans in this area.

Most people think that the state has the right to determine whom it will admit and to apprehend and deport migrants who settle without official authorization. Let us accept that conventional view about states and borders as a premise and explore the question of whether a state nonetheless may sometimes be morally obliged to grant legal-resident status to irregular migrants. The claims of irregular migrants are strong, even on this conventional assumption.

                                                                            • • •

Miguel Sanchez has been in the United States for almost nine years. Does that length of time affect his moral claim to remain? Some might argue that the passage of time is irrelevant. Some might even say that the longer the stay, the greater the blame and the more the irregular migrant deserves to be deported. In my view, the opposite is true: the longer the stay, the stronger the moral claim to remain.

Consider the case of Marguerite Grimmond. Grimmond was born in the United States but moved to Scotland with her mother as a young child. At the age of 80, she left the United Kingdom for a family vacation to Australia. It was her first time away from Britain, and she used a newly acquired American passport. When she returned to the United Kingdom, immigration officials told Grimmond that she was not legally entitled to stay and had four weeks to leave the country. She was, in effect, identified as someone who had been an irregular migrant all those years, since she had never established a legal right to reside in Britain. And she clearly knew that she was not a British citizen because she obtained an American passport for her trip.

Despite all this, once the story appeared in the newspapers, Grimmond was not deported. The moral absurdity of forcing her to leave a place where she had lived so long was evident, whatever the legal technicalities. She had been an irregular migrant for all those years, but that clearly no longer mattered.

Grimmond had a moral right to stay for two reasons: she arrived at such a young age, and she stayed so long. Because Grimmond arrived as a child, she was not responsible for the decision to settle in the United Kingdom. Being raised there made her a member of U.K. society, regardless of her legal status. The importance of such social membership was implicitly recognized even in the British Nationality Act of 1981. This law restricted citizenship in a number of ways and abolished the traditional rule (still followed in the United States and Canada) that anyone born on the territory is a citizen (the jus soli or “right of the soil” rule). It limited automatic acquisition of citizenship to the children of citizens and permanent residents. Nevertheless, the law made an exception for anyone who was born in Britain and raised there during her first ten years of life. It appears that the United Kingdom did not want to deport people with such strong ties to the country.

Human beings who have been raised in a society become members of that society: not recognizing their social membership is cruel and unjust.

The rationale behind the British Nationality Act’s ten-year rule is compelling, but neither it nor the laws of most other states recognize that the same rationale applies even more forcefully to children who are not born in a country but who spend ten years of their childhood there. After all, the ten years from six to sixteen (or from eight to eighteen) are even more important in creating a substantial connection to the country where one lives than the first ten years of life. The later years of childhood are the most important ones from society’s perspective—the formative years of education and wider socialization. Human beings who have been raised in a society become members of that society: not recognizing their social membership is cruel and unjust. It is morally wrong to force someone to leave the place where she was raised, where she received her social formation, and where she has her most important human connections, just because her parents brought her there without official authorization. Yet current legal rules in North America and Europe threaten many young people in just this way.

The principle that irregular status becomes irrelevant over time is clearest for those who arrive as young children. But the second element in Grimmond’s case—the sheer length of time she had lived in the United Kingdom—is also powerful. What if Grimmond had arrived in the United Kingdom at twenty rather than two? Would anyone really think that this difference would make it acceptable to deport her, 60 years later? Grimmond’s case clearly illustrates that there is some period of time beyond which it is wrong to deport people who have settled illegally.

How long is too long? What if Grimmond had been 60, not 80? Would that have diminished her claim to stay? I assume not. What if she had been 40? The poignancy of the case certainly diminishes, but the underlying principle remains: there is something deeply wrong in forcing people to leave a place where they have lived for a long time. Most people form their deepest human connections where they live. It becomes home. Even if someone has arrived only as an adult, it seems cruel and inhumane to uproot a person who has spent fifteen or twenty years as a contributing member of society in the name of enforcing immigration restrictions. The harm is entirely out of proportion to the wrong of illegal entry.

When her ordeal was over, Grimmond expressed relief: she had “worried,” she said, “about moving to America because I don’t have any friends or family there.” Normally we do not think of moving to the United States as a terrible prospect. But think about the fear and anxiety Grimmond must have felt, and then about the reality of irregular migrants, who can be and are deported even after very long periods of residence. Grimmond was lucky because her case attracted such public attention. Had it not, the immigration bureaucracy might well have sent her “home.”

Grimmond poses a particularly difficult challenge for those who would uphold at all costs the state’s right to deport irregular migrants, but her claims are not unique. Hiu Lui Ng arrived in New York at the age of seventeen with his parents on a tourist visa. After that expired he applied for asylum and obtained a work permit while his application was reviewed. Although his application for asylum was denied, he managed over the years to attend a local high school and then a community college, acquiring technical skills as a computer engineer. He married an American citizen, had two children, a house in Queens, and a job at the Empire State Building. In 2007 he came to the attention of immigration officials because, following bad legal advice, he applied for a green card. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him and set out to deport him. Ng died before he could be deported. His story appeared in The New York Times primarily because of the ways in which he had been mistreated and neglected by those supervising his detention—he suffered from a broken spine and liver cancer that was diagnosed only five days before it killed him. But why was the United States trying to deport Hiu Lui Ng in the first place? He was an American in every respect that mattered, except legal status.

Ng’s claim not to be deported, like Grimmond’s, has two elements, though the details are different. Ng did not arrive here as a young child (although he was brought by his parents), so his early social formation did not take place in the United States. On the other hand, Ng, like Miguel Sanchez, was married to an American citizen. Marriage creates deep ties, not only with the person one marries but also with the communities to which that person belongs.

Living with one’s family is a fundamental human interest. The right to family life is recognized as a basic human right in European human rights legislation, and concern for family values has played a central role in American political rhetoric in recent decades. All liberal democratic states recognize the principle of family reunification, i.e., that citizens and legal residents should generally be able to have their foreign spouses and minor children join them and that this takes priority over the normal discretionary power that the state exercises over immigration. (In fact, Ng was applying for residency on this basis.) Once Ng was married to an American citizen, his ties to the United States, his interest in living there, and his spouse’s interest in living there all assumed a new importance and greatly outweighed any interest the state had in deporting him in order to enforce its immigration laws. Even if the state is entitled to enforce its immigration laws (as I assume here), it is not right to do so without regard for the harm done in such a case. If an irregular migrant marries a citizen or a legal permanent resident, he or she should no longer be subject to deportation.

In addition to the claim that he had to remain in the United States because of his marriage to an American citizen, Ng had a powerful claim to stay simply because he had already been in the United States so long and thus had become a member of society. Unlike Grimmond, he had not been present for over seven decades, but he had lived peacefully in the United States for fifteen years, getting an education, working, building social connections, creating a life.

People who live and work and raise their families in a society become members, whatever their legal status: that is why we find it hard to expel them when they are discovered.

Fifteen years is a long time in a human life. In fifteen years connections grow: to spouses and partners, sons and daughters, friends and neighbors and fellow-workers, people we love and people we hate. Experiences accumulate: birthdays and braces, tones of voice and senses of humor, public parks and corner stores, the shape of the streets and the way the sun shines through the leaves, the smell of flowers and the sounds of local accents, the look of the stars and the taste of the air—all that gives life its purpose and texture. We sink deep roots over fifteen years, and these roots matter even if we were not authorized to plant ourselves in the first place. The moral importance of Ng’s social membership ought to have outweighed the importance of enforcing immigration restrictions.

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The moral right of states to apprehend and deport irregular migrants erodes with the passage of time. As irregular migrants become more and more settled, their membership in society grows in moral importance, and the fact that they settled without authorization becomes correspondingly less relevant. At some point a threshold is crossed, and irregular migrants acquire a moral claim to have their actual social membership legally recognized. They should acquire a legal right of permanent residence and all the rights that go with that, including eventual access to citizenship.

How can migrants become members of society without legal authorization? Because social membership does not depend upon official permission: this is the crux of my argument. People who live and work and raise their families in a society become members, whatever their legal status: that is why we find it hard to expel them when they are discovered. Their presence may be against the law, but they are not criminals like thieves and murderers. It would be wrong to force them to leave once they have become members, even when we have good reasons for wanting them to go and for preventing others like them from coming.

Over time the circumstances of entry grow less important. Eventually, they become altogether irrelevant. That is what happened in Europe in the 1970s when people who had originally been admitted as guest workers, with explicit expectations that they would leave after a limited period, nevertheless were granted resident status. Of course, the guest workers’ claims to stay were somewhat stronger than those of irregular migrants because the guest workers were invited. But this difference is not decisive: after all, the guest workers’ permanent settlement contradicted the terms of their initial admission. What was morally important was that they had established themselves firmly as members of society.

My argument that time matters cuts in both directions. If there is a threshold of time after which it is wrong to expel settled irregular migrants, then there is also some period of time before this threshold is crossed. How much time must pass before irregular migrants acquire a strong moral claim to stay? Or from the opposite perspective, how much time does the state have in which to apprehend and expel irregular migrants?

There is no clear answer to that question. The growth of the moral claim is continuous, although at some point it becomes strong enough that further time is unnecessary. The examples I have cited suggest that fifteen or twenty years are much more than enough. Ten years seems to me like a maximum, and I would think that five years of settled residence without any criminal convictions should normally be sufficient to establish anyone as a responsible member of society. On the other hand, it seems plausible to me that a year or two is not long enough.

The policy implication of this analysis is that states should move away from the practice of granting occasional large-scale amnesties or providing a right to stay on a case-by-case basis through appeal to humanitarian considerations. Instead states should establish an individual right for migrants to transform their status from irregular to legal after a fixed period of time of residence, such as five to seven years.

Proving length of residence can be a problem, but past practice shows that this difficulty is not insuperable. For example, France had for many years a policy that granted an entitlement to legal-resident status to anyone who could show that he or she had lived there for at least ten years. When a right-wing government came to power in 2003, the policy was made much more discretionary and restrictive, but the change was spurred by ideological hostility to immigration, not by evidence that the previous policy increased the level of irregular migration or created other problems.

Similarly, for a long time, the United States permitted the Attorney General to grant permanent-resident status to migrants (including irregular migrants) who could establish that they had lived in the country continuously for ten years and met certain other requirements regarding employment, the lack of a criminal record, and so on. The same rule gave positive weight to family ties to American citizens and residents. Unlike the French policy, the American one was always a discretionary authority, and it did not give migrants a legal entitlement to the regularization of their status. Nevertheless, it was used fairly often. Like the French policy, it recognized the moral logic I defend here: people become members of our community over time, even if they settle without authorization, and this membership should be recognized by law. In recent years, opponents of immigration have placed legislative restrictions on the exercise of the Attorney General’s discretionary authority, and political dynamics have further limited its use. Today it is much more difficult for irregular migrants to gain legal status under this provision than it was once. Nevertheless, the principle is still on the books: the passage of time creates a moral claim to stay.

Identifying a specific moment after which irregular migrants have a legal right to remain inevitably involves an element of arbitrariness. No one can pretend that choosing five years rather than four or six involves any question of fundamental principle. It is more a matter of the social psychology of coordination, given the need to settle on one point within a range. But if one asks why five years rather than one or fifteen, it is easier to make the case that one is too short and fifteen too long, given common understandings of the ways in which people settle into the societies where they live.

Some people are puzzled by the weight I give to the passage of time, rather than to the actual range and intensity of the migrant’s social ties in the new society. Is it really right to pay attention only to the passage of time?

There is merit in this concern. Individuals form attachments and become members of communities at different rates. And the harm done to someone in forcing him or her to leave will vary, too. It is not the passage of time per se that matters but what that normally signifies about the development of a human life. It is appropriate, for example, to give special weight to the fact that an irregular migrant has received her social formation in the country, to the fact that an irregular migrant has married a citizen or legal resident, to a clean record and a history of employment. But it would be a mistake to try to establish a much wider range of criteria of belonging and an especially big mistake to grant more discretion to officials in judging whether individual migrants have passed the threshold of belonging that should entitle them to stay.

In most states, violations of immigration law are treated as an administrative matter, not as a criminal offense.

This approach is justifiable partly as a matter of efficiency. When it comes to assigning legal rights and responsibilities, like the right to vote or marry, a state does not normally inquire into the capacities of each person. Rather it establishes rules that tie the possession of rights and responsibilities to an objective measure of the passage of time. The gain from a more detailed inquiry into individual capacities is much too small to warrant the expenditure of social resources that it would require. The same would be true of any effort to make individual determinations about depth of membership for irregular migrants.

More importantly, the very effort to determine these questions would run afoul of the normative commitment of liberal democratic states to respect individuals. We have every reason to worry that discretionary criteria would be interpreted and applied (whether consciously or not) in a discriminatory manner. In addition, there is something presumptuous in imagining that one person can make nuanced judgments about how deeply another belongs to the society in which she lives.

                                                                            • • •

Many people find my argument about the importance of social membership unpersuasive. In their view, the conclusions are unfair to people who would like to enter but have respected existing restrictions (and perhaps waited in line); they reward lawbreaking; and they encourage others to enter and remain without legal authorization.

These criticisms have force, but they are also overstated. I explore them here because understanding their limits lends further support to the idea of an amnesty based on membership.

Consider first the argument that an amnesty is unfair to those waiting patiently in line for admission. In many democratic states, there is no effective admissions line for those without family ties or special credentials. Even in countries such as the United States and Canada that encourage legal immigration, there are almost no immigration lines for unskilled workers without close family ties to current citizens or residents. Most of those who settle as irregular migrants would have no possibility of obtaining authorized entry.

Second, consider the charge of lawbreaking. It is true that the rules governing immigration are laws, but so are the rules governing automobile traffic. We do not describe drivers who exceed the speed limit as illegal drivers or criminals. In most states, violations of immigration law are treated as an administrative matter, not as a criminal offense. But if immigration violations are not criminal offenses, those who violate immigration laws cannot reasonably be described as criminals.

In any event, we all recognize that laws vary enormously in the harms they seek to prevent and the order they seek to maintain. Laws against murder are more important than laws against theft, laws against theft more important than laws regulating automobile traffic. The laws restricting immigration are far more like traffic regulations than like laws prohibiting murder and theft. The laws serve a useful social function, but that function can be served reasonably well even if there is a fair amount of deviance and most of those violating the rules never get caught. For enforcement purposes, it makes sense to focus on the really dangerous violators—those driving drunk or so recklessly as to endanger lives in the case of traffic laws, those who engage in terrorism or crime in the case of immigration laws. For run-of-the-mill violations (ordinary speeding, irregular migration for work), just having the rules in place and occasionally enforcing them will maintain order at a sufficient level.

Settling without authorization violates immigration laws, but that does not mean that we should punish people many years after the fact. As the historian Mae Ngai has argued, there is a parallel between statutes of limitations for criminal offenses and a policy of not deporting long-settled irregular migrants. Most states recognize that the passage of time matters morally, at least for less-serious criminal violations. If a person has not been arrested and charged within a specified period (often three to five years), legal authorities may no longer pursue her for that offense.

Why do states establish statutes of limitations? Because it is not right to make people live indefinitely with a threat of serious legal consequences hanging over their heads for some long-past action, except for the most serious sorts of offenses. Keeping the threat in place for a long period serves no useful deterrent function and causes great harm to the individual—more than is warranted by the original offense. If we are prepared to let time erode the state’s power to pursue actual crimes, it makes even more sense to let time erode the power of the state to pursue immigration violations, which are not normally treated as crimes and should not be viewed as crimes.

In a related vein, we should be wary of efforts to criminalize actions that irregular migrants take simply to live ordinary lives. Most jurisdictions have criminal laws prohibiting identity theft and the use of false documentation. These are usually sensible laws intended to prevent fraud. Of course, irregular migrants often provide false information to satisfy administrative or legal requirements. For example, they may provide a social security number that is not their own to an employer who uses this to deduct taxes from their pay. In most such cases, the irregular migrants are only trying to conceal their presence, and are not engaged in deception designed to harm others. They pay their taxes, even when they are not entitled to the benefits that taxpayers normally receive (such as Social Security or unemployment compensation). Their actions may be technical violations of laws against identity theft and the use of false documents, but they are not normally the kinds of actions those laws were intended to prevent. Treating irregular migrants as criminals under these laws, as some authorities in the United States have been doing, is an abuse of the legal process.

The state does have the power to make irregular migrants the targets of those laws, just as it has the power to make violations of immigration laws a criminal offense. But if we weigh the harm criminalization aims to prevent against the social costs it incurs, criminalization makes no sense.

The third objection probably worries people the most: the concern that an amnesty for long-term residents would encourage many others to come without authorization. Would the likelihood of regularization in the long term affect decisions to migrate (or to stay after arrival)?

The argument that I have been developing is a constraint on the state’s right to control immigration, not a repudiation of it.

If irregular migrants think about their own long-term prospects, then they surely understand that immigration policies shift over time in response to changes in the political climate. Opportunities to move to regular status may disappear when political opposition to immigration increases. Alternatively, new opportunities for regularization may appear if the political dynamics shift again. All this is beyond their control. What they can control is more immediate. Most irregular migrants compare their situation at home with what they think they will face in the near term. Most irregular migrants come because they think they can find work that is considerably more financially rewarding and because they think they will be able to evade the immigration authorities, at least long enough to make it worthwhile. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is plausible to suppose that such a long-term consideration as possible regularization years down the road would have little impact.

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The argument that I have been developing is a constraint on the state’s right to control immigration, not a repudiation of it. Nothing in my argument denies a government’s moral and legal right to prevent entry in the first place and to deport those who settle without authorization, so long as these expulsions take place at a relatively early stage of residence.

At the same time, it is only a minimalist argument (though doubtless it will not appear so to many). I identify only general moral constraints upon acceptable policies for the deportation and exclusion of irregular migrants in all liberal democratic states, not all of the moral considerations that might generate responsibilities to irregular migrants.

One such consideration is the claim that states are complicit in irregular migration. Many argue that rich, liberal democratic states do not actually want to exclude irregular migrants, despite loud public pronouncements to that effect. From the state’s perspective it is precisely their irregular status that makes them desirable as workers because their vulnerability makes them tractable and easy to exploit. If this is true, then it undermines the argument that irregular migrants are present without the consent of the political community and so not entitled to the same rights as legally authorized migrants. If a state covertly encourages migrants to enter, it owes them the same status and legal rights to which they would be entitled if they were recruited openly. Even if the question is not one of the state explicitly recruiting irregular migrants, but only of failing to enforce immigration laws and controls when it could do so, the state bears considerable responsibility for results of its inaction.

So state complicity in irregular migration reinforces the moral case for amnesty. And this is not just a point of principle. Recognition of the state’s complicity in irregular migration movements has played a role in Spain, Italy, and even the United States in the past in generating public support for legalization policies for irregular migrants.

But we should be careful not to overuse the complicity argument. First, the argument that the state is complicit in irregular migration only makes sense when there is scope for state action (or inaction) to make some difference in the number of irregular migrants. To the extent that irregular migration flows are determined—as many analysts argue—by structural factors beyond the state’s control, the state cannot be held responsible for failing to prevent the entry and settlement of the irregular migrants. We can criticize state policies for being ineffective or counterproductive but not for complicity.

Second, we cannot simply infer the state’s complicity from the fact that some employers within the receiving society want to hire irregular migrants. No state can be held responsible for the desires or actions of every citizen or corporation within its jurisdiction. To establish complicity, it is necessary to show that the state is facilitating or permitting irregular migration despite its formal policies by, for example, relaxing enforcement efforts against migrant workers during the hiring season. This is sometimes the case, but not always.

Third, one cannot charge a state with complicity simply because of its failure to deter unauthorized immigration. Every enforcement effort has some failure rate. In some cases a state’s effort to prevent unauthorized immigration and to expel those who are discovered may legitimately be hampered by other considerations. For example, some argue that efforts in the United States and Southern Europe to keep people out already go too far because they cost too many lives. If border officials were to cut back on some of these measures in order to save lives, we should not turn around and accuse them of complicity in letting the migrants in.

Similarly, the mere presence of visa overstayers does not by itself show that states are encouraging unauthorized immigration. Visitors from poor states to rich ones already face severe and discriminatory restrictions on admission. Tightening those restrictions further because a few of the visitors do not leave when they are supposed to would impose too high a cost to be a defensible way of restricting irregular migration.

Various moral considerations will always limit the ways in which states may try to control irregular migration, even if one fully accepts the legitimacy of the goal itself. But these limits and the surplus of irregular migrants generated by them do not represent evidence of a state’s complicity in irregular migration or undercut its right to try to restrict it.

Even if we accept the state’s right to control immigration as a basic premise, that right is not absolute and unqualified. The state’s right to deport irregular migrants weakens as the migrants become members of society. Over time an irregular migration status becomes morally irrelevant while the harm it inflicts grows. Liberal democratic states should recognize that fact by institutionalizing an automatic transition to legal status for irregular migrants who have settled in a state for an extended period.

This is the lead article of a New Democracy Forum on immigration. Read responses toThe Case for Amnesty here .