Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 544

The Lessons of U.S. Refugee Failures Past

The U.S. turned away Jewish refugees in the 1930s—have we learned nothing since? So goes a popular meme circulating among the left and center left in the wake of the Syrian refugee brouhaha. You may have seen it in Vox, the Washington Post, or the Huffington Post (where the article in question was contributed by the CEO of the ADL). If you use Facebook, you’ve almost certainly seen a post about it on your friend’s wall. Usually, it’s accompanied by one or both of these infographics:

US Jul ’38: What’s your attitude towards allowing German, Austrian & other political refugees to come into the US? pic.twitter.com/7hMfLbXWFE

— Historical Opinion (@HistOpinion) November 16, 2015

US Jan 20 ’39: Should the US government permit 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children to come in from Germany? pic.twitter.com/5cFs5RabQn

— Historical Opinion (@HistOpinion) November 17, 2015

As Dara Lind at Vox  notes, “polling wasn’t yet a science, and it’s possible the public was less anti-refugee than Gallup’s methods indicated.” But the lesson seems clear: by turning away Syrian refugees, we risk repeating one of the most shameful episodes of our history.

The plight of Jews who were turned away on the eve of or even during the Holocaust (Lind points to the M.S. St. Louis) really is one of the ugliest, most heartbreaking stories that anyone who studies U.S. immigration history comes across. But the picture is more complicated than this narrative suggests, and the conclusions we should draw from it are perhaps different than those being advanced memetically across the internet right now. While there is a good moral case—a case we have made here ourselves—to bring in Syrian refugees, the left’s big push to do so in the wake of Paris was both ill-timed and in bad faith. A sober look at both U.S. history and our current politics suggests that, instead of damning the benighted attitudes of our supposedly backward fellow-citizens, our immigration advocates need to take a good hard look in the mirror. Nobody is listening to the pro-immigration side now for similar reasons that nobody listened to them then.

In the Thirties, as Ishan Tharoor notes in the above-mentioned Washington Post article, the mood was more anti-immigrant than anti-Semitic:

[R]espondents may not necessarily have had a particular bias against Jewish refugees. A separate portion of Gallup respondents were asked a nearly identical question which did not describe refugees as Jewish. Support for accepting refugees was slightly lower than when they were described as mostly Jewish.

Although this somewhat absolves the U.S. of the sin of anti-Semitism, it actually made the human tragedy even greater: Europe’s Jews were locked out, and so were the Poles, Czechs, etc. whose nations were about to be invaded by Hitler, caught in a war that killed 40 million, and enslaved for the next half century by the tyrannical Communist regime. The U.S. answer to almost all comers from Eastern Europe—Jewish or otherwise—was the same preceding this bloodbath: no.

As I pointed out in an essay in these pages in August, this was the result of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act that shut down the “Great Wave”—the 1880-1924 period when immigration rates to the U.S. last stood as high as they do now:

[W]hile the Wave had been cresting, other intellectual and social undercurrents had begun circulating in America: a populist nativism, national security concerns (about Eastern European radicals, and after 1917, Communists in particular), and a growing, international movement toward restrictionism. Do any of these conditions sound familiar?

Meanwhile, America’s pro-immigration forces failed to make the case persuasively to preserve the status quo. They were unable to tailor the traditional defenses of liberal American immigration to new political realities, or to develop new narratives defending it instead. The ardent restrictionists built their case, over years of small measures (such as banning convicts) or failed bills (such as a vetoed 1913 bill imposing a literacy test on would-be immigrants). Moderate America began to pay attention. Some were swayed by this, some by that. The 1911 report of the Senate’s Dillingham Commission gave an official stamp of approval to “scientific”, Progressive racist theories (that were in fact no more than gussied-up a priori assumptions). World War I sealed for many the idea of the foreigner as menace. And afterward the United States, struggling economically, was anticipating another wave of immigration from Europe that it wanted no part of. Slowly, a restrictionist coalition assembled that would prove unstoppable.

In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act. It set national-origin quotas for immigrants from each country at 2 percent of the number of foreign-born persons from that country recorded in the U.S. during the 1890 census—effectively barring mass immigration from South, Central, and Eastern Europe—and outright barred immigration from Asia. Not at all coincidentally, those were the areas which had fed the Great Wave, but whose populations were considered too poor and too culturally foreign to be assimilable en masse. Furthermore, an overall cap was set on immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere at 150,000 per year. Immigration halved within one year after implementation, and declined more than 90 percent over a decade, from 700,000-plus immigrants in 1924 to 29,400 in 1934.

And at the time, I took note of the fact that seems so salient right now: this held even through the horrors of Hitler. In fact, the history is even worse than Vox has it. Lind tries to paint the revelations of the Holocaust as America’s “lesson learned” moment on refugees: “After the Holocaust, the U.S. decided helping refugees was a moral imperative.” But the only concrete initiatives she points to are international (“[t]he UN set up its office of the High Commissioner for Refugees in 1950, and the Refugee Convention”)—because the U.S. by and large didn’t change it’s policies. The “golden door” was definitively slammed shut, and remained so even after the Holocaust. After the war, the U.S. let in a few thousand refugees, but nothing like the hundreds of thousands to millions that it had before 1924—and that surely would have come then had they been welcomed. Instead, our policy was to assist abroad in lieu of allowing large-scale refugee intakes at home. (Incidentally, this had a major effect on the creation of Israel: many of the surviving Jews of Europe would have opted to join cousins in New York and Philadelphia had they been welcomed.)

It wasn’t until another generation had passed that we revamped our immigration system with the 1965 Immigration & Nationality Act law, and in fits and starts the U.S. really did wind up being exceptionally accepting of refugees in the decades since. But we never returned to pre-1924 levels of immigration from Eastern Europe, and certainly not for the generation affected by the Holocaust.

The pre-war policies were a moral catastrophe, but the blame for it clearly lies with both sides. The pro-immigration caucus totally failed to trim and tailor pre-1924 policies to a point where most Americans found them acceptable; as a result, the door was slammed shut so hard that nothing could pry it back open when it was needed most.

Despite the plaintive wails on the left, the U.S. is not where it was in the thirties—either with regard to refugees (we take in more than anyone in the world) or immigrants (ditto). But there can be no doubt, from looking at this primary season, that sentiment to restrict this is a growing political force. And just when they asked the U.S. public to trust them on an urgent humanitarian request, immigration advocates found they had no trust to bank on—and with good reason. The left has made it abundantly clear for decades it has no plans to seriously police the border, and in fact it regards requests to do so as quasi-racist. That same hostile dismissiveness is in full display in President Obama’s remarks on the Syrian refugee debate, and is similarly hardening stances on the other side.

The lessons of history cut both ways. The left needs to take the thirties—and the present Syrian controversy—as a warning. It must consider how to trim its immigration policies to popular will—or it risks having America’s still rather open door to newcomers slammed shut anew.

Plus Ça Change, ACA Edition

Despite a temporary bump, overall satisfaction with the quality of American health care is virtually the same now as it was in 2005-2007, and attitudes towards health care coverage and cost remain unfavorable, according to a new survey. Gallup breaks down the numbers:

From 2005 to 2007, a slim majority of Americans rated the quality of healthcare in the U.S. as excellent or good. But this percentage increased slightly in 2008 after President Barack Obama was elected, reaching a high of 62% in November 2010 and again in 2012 just after he was elected to his second term. Those higher ratings could reflect optimism about Obama’s promises to reform healthcare and the passage of the Affordable Care Act. However, since November 2013, shortly after the ACA insurance exchanges first opened, no more than 54% of Americans have rated the quality of healthcare in the U.S. as excellent or good.

Americans rate U.S. healthcare coverage far less positively than they do healthcare quality. The percentage of Americans rating U.S. healthcare coverage as excellent or good increased from 26% in 2008 to 38% in 2009. Since then, the percentage who view healthcare coverage in the U.S. positively has varied slightly from year to year, but remains higher than before Obama took officeAmericans’ satisfaction with the total cost of healthcare in the U.S. remains low, with 21% saying they are satisfied. Twenty-eight percent were satisfied in 2001, but satisfaction fell after that, rising again only in 2009, to 26%. This increase too may reflect optimism about the possibilities of Obama’s healthcare reform. However, satisfaction has since slipped.

This is yet another piece of evidence that the Affordable Care Act hasn’t really done much to improve many Americans’ experience with the U.S. health care system. Whatever one can say about the ACA, it’s increasingly clear that it left intact many of the root dysfunctions driving our health care problems, and, as a result, Americans are still unhappy with both cost and coverage, and almost evenly split on quality.

Soccer is Politics

Ahmed (not his real name) is an Egyptian soccer fan—and a fugitive. He has been expelled from university, convicted twice in absentia, and sentenced to two long terms in prison. He moves around Cairo in a protective crouch, speaks in a low voice to avoid being overheard, and looks furtively over his shoulder as he organizes flash protests against the government of General-turned-President Abdel Fattah al Sisi.

Ahmed is a leader of a militant soccer fan group called Ultras Nahdawy (“ultra” is a term for a hardcore soccer fan first used in Italy). Like other such groups, it is constantly in danger of being banned by the Sisi government under new, sweeping anti-terror legislation that targets dissent as much as political violence. Ahmed sees Nahdawy, founded by soccer fans as a Muslim Brotherhood support group in 2012, together with the main anti-Sisi student organization, Students Against the Coup, as a healthy outlet for disaffected youth at risk of radicalization. “We don’t like violence but we are not weak”, Ahmad insists, sipping coffee in a hip café in a middle-class Cairo neighborhood. “Hope keeps us going. We believe that there still are options. We created options on Tahrir Square. This regime is more brutal [than the Mubarak regime] but there still are options.”Yusuf Salheen echoes Ahmed’s words. A 22-year-old leader of Students Against the Coup, created in 2013 after security forces killed more than 600 people at a Brotherhood sit-in, he studies Islam at Cairo’s prestigious Al Azhar University. Salheen was luckier than Ahmed and more than 1,500 other students who have been detained by security forces, not to mention 2,000 others merely ejected from their institutions of higher learning: He defended himself successfully in a university hearing called to debar him. “We are absolutely concerned that if we fail things will turn violent. Going violent would give the regime the perfect excuse. We would lose all public empathy. We hope that Egyptians realize that there are still voices out there that are not giving up and are keeping protests peaceful despite all that has happened”, he said.The concerns of Ahmed and Salheen are real. Sisi has brutally repressed all opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood, which was banned as a terrorist organization immediately after the military coup in 2013 that deposed Mohammed Morsi, a Brother and Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president. The crackdown has left disaffected youth with a stark choice: Either apathetically accept a status quo in which the government fails to offer them any prospect of a socially and economically viable future, or engage in violent resistance. The student groups and soccer clubs try to offer a third choice: nonviolent resistance.With stadiums closed to the public for much of the past four years to prevent them from becoming anti-government rallying points, militant soccer fans have had fewer opportunities to live out either their passion for their team or their frustration with Egypt’s politics. Nonetheless, there are multiple potential flashpoints to watch in the coming months.One is the final outcome of the retrial of 73 people accused of causing the deaths of 74 members of Ultras Ahlawy (fans of storied Cairo club Al Ahli SC) in a politically motivated brawl in the Suez Canal city in 2012. The details of what happened in Port Said remain murky, but what is clear is that the national security forces manipulated the traditional rivalry between the Ahlawy and Masri fans and allowed the deadly brawl to proceed while ensuring that the Ahli supporters could not escape.The accused include supporters of Port Said’s Al Masri SC as well as nine security officials and executives of the club. Many people believe that security forces began the brawl to punish Ahlawy for its role in toppling President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and opposing the military government that succeeded him. A court sentenced 21 of the Al Masri fans to death in 2013, sparking a popular revolt in cities along the Suez Canal that forced then-President Morsi to declare an emergency and deploy troops to the region.A June retrial reduced the number of death sentences to 11, but appeals are still pending. They could well spark the next confrontation. Whatever the court finally decides, one set of ultras—whether Al Masri’s Green Eagles or Al Ahli’s Ultras Ahlawy—is likely to express their anger at the verdict. Al Masri fans have already protested against the June development in the streets of Port Said.A second court case and potential flashpoint involves 16 members of the Ultras White Knights (UWK), supporters of Al Ahli arch-rival Al Zamalek SC, who are charged with causing the deaths of 20 fans at Cairo stadium in February. Prosecutor Hesham Barakat and Zamalek President Mortada Mansour have accused the UWK of having accepted funds from the Brotherhood in return for provoking the stadium incident. Barakat asserted that some of the alleged Brothers had confessed to planning and funding the incident in an attempt to dissuade foreign investors.To many people, the charges seem trumped up. Cairoscene, an Egyptian news website, opined that the assertion of a conspiracy between the UWK and the Brotherhood “seems ridiculous, considering there was clear evidence that security was mismanaged. Fans were forced to enter through one singular metal cage, which ultimately collapsed. At the same time police fired tear gas at the crowds arguably fuelling the stampede that resulted in many of the deaths.” The charges against the UWK reinforced the conviction of the group, shared by other ultras, that the regime is targeting them. ”We have no confidence in the justice system or the government’s willingness to ensure that justice is served”, said one UWK member.Meanwhile, the ban on spectators in Egyptian stadiums, which was at the root of the Cairo stadium incident, continues to keep unrest high among fans. Repeated attempts to reopen stadiums have stalled, with the government, the clubs, and stadium owners failing to agree on what kind of security would be needed to prevent a resurgence of anti-government protests within the stadiums. Testing the water before a relaxation of the ban, Egypt’s interior ministry agreed to allow 25,000 fans to attend a November 17 qualifier between Egyptian teams for the 2018 World Cup qualifier against Mali. The game took place without incident in a stadium secured by the Falcon Group, a private security firm closely tied to Sisi. (It provided security for his 2013 election campaign and began securing universities with rebellious student bodies in the same year, causing many deaths and even more injuries.) This success may lead to a re-opening of stadiums under tight security. However, alarmed by the attacks in Paris that included a stadium, Egypt’s authorities will probably follow Turkey’s failed attempt to depoliticize stadiums by introducing electronic ticket systems that register personal details of spectators.The fans got a chilling reminder of how the regime views them from a leak to Al Jazeera earlier this year. On an audio recording, Interior Minister Muhammad Ibrahim, a member of the Morsi government instrumental in overthrowing it and facilitating the military takeover, is heard discussing with senior officers of Egypt’s notorious Central Security Force (CSF) how the government can crack down on protesters. He suggests that the CSF should shoot protesters using anything “permitted by law without hesitation, from water to machine guns.” The meeting on the tape is thought to have occurred not long before a major anti-government protest in November 2014, at which police killed at least four people.Ibrahim goes on to say that no attempt at political change in Egypt would succeed without the support of the military and the police—in his words, “the strongest institutions in the state.”Egypt’s first groups of ultras emerged in 2007, inspired by similar groups in Serbia and Italy formed by militant fans who found each other online. The European ultras expressed their aggressive support for their clubs and artistic appreciation of the game through intimidating chants, poetry, banners, fireworks, flares, smoke guns, and continuous jumping up and down during matches. The Egyptian fans took up these passionate (and dangerous) displays with enthusiasm. They also adopted the ultras’ analysis of the power system governing the sport’s professional teams. It defines the fans as a club’s only true supporters, the club management as corrupt pawns of a repressive government, and players as mercenaries who offered themselves to the highest bidder. The Egyptian fans embraced the ultras’ principle, “All Cops are Pigs”, as their own—a no-brainer in a country whose security forces, to many the face of a repressive regime, are its most hated institution.The ultras’ power analysis emboldened them to claim ownership of stadiums in a country that tolerated no independent or uncontrolled public space, and put them in direct confrontation with security forces determined to uphold the established order. But the ultras had an advantage: they aimed at the Achilles’ heel of the Mubarak regime. Aside from the mosques, the stadiums were the only public spaces that the government could not simply shut down entirely, because nothing evokes the kind of deep-seated passion in Egyptians that soccer and religion do. Eager to crush the threat but recognizing the political benefits of influencing one of the most important activities in the lives of Egyptian men, the regime had little alternative but to fight for control.The ultras’ regular clashes with security forces in the stadiums made the games a magnet for thousands of frustrated and angry youth, turning the sum total of rival fan groups into one of Egypt’s foremost social movements alongside the Brotherhood and labor. By the time mass protests against Mubarak erupted in early 2011, the ultras had become highly organized, politicized, street fight-hardened shock troops who formed the demonstrators’ first line of defense against security forces, persuading the protesters to stand their ground in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.Ahmed and Salheen hope to repeat that performance in an environment that is far more repressive and brutal than the Mubarak era. In a replay of the ultras’ role in the toppling of Mubarak and the protests against subsequent military governments, Ahmed and his fellow ultras form the front-line defence against security forces in demonstrations on campuses and in popular neighborhoods. They use the same tactics of chanting, jumping up and down, and using flares and firework they employed in support of their clubs. Security forces have killed some 17 members of Nahdawy, which has branches in most Egyptian universities, in the past two years.Between protesting and avoiding capture (or worse), Ahmed and Salheen have their plates full. Scores of ultras and students are on trial for protesting on campuses and in neighborhoods during the past two years, as well as for soccer-related actions like the storming of Zamalek’s headquarters and Cairo airport’s arrival hall.The regime targets ultras not only on the streets and in the courts but also in the military, which asks conscripts whether they belong to a militant soccer fan group. Those that respond affirmatively are singled out. “They were immediately ordered to do 100 push-ups during which an officer shouted at them: ‘You are the lowest creatures. You sacrifice yourselves for your club, not for your religion or country’”, a conscript who hid his affiliation recounted. At the same time, fringes of Nahdawy and Students Against the Coup’s audience of ultras and students have grown increasingly radical.“This is a new generation. It’s a generation that can’t be controlled. They don’t read. They believe in action and experience. They have balls. When the opportunity arises they will do something bigger than we ever did”, said one of UWK’s original founders, who has since distanced himself from the group. He said that Sisi would be unwise to repeat Mubarak’s mistake of underestimating the groundswell of anger and frustration among Egypt’s youth at the closing of the stadiums to the public and at the security forces’ strict control over university campuses.A charismatic radical can rise fast in the loose organization of the ultras. Said Moshagheb, a mesmerizing, under‐educated soccer fan, was representative of the thousands of angry young men joining protests in Egypt—except he managed to oust the UWK leaders and founders in a dramatic coup in 2012 involving a melee on the pitch of an Egypt-Tunisia game. Arrested in April 2015, he was acquitted in May of charges that he had been involved in a plot to kill Al Zamalek SC President Mortada Mansour, but he remains imprisoned. Sources close to the ultras as well as Moshagheb’s family said the UWK leader had been under police surveillance for some time for smuggling arms from the Sinai, the home base for jihadi groups linked to ISIS.Other soccer fans have travelled to join the terror group itself. A former leader of Ultras Ahlawi in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, Rami Iskanderiya, joined the Islamic State, the jihadist group that controls a swath of Syria and Iraq, and married a Syrian woman in the group’s Syrian stronghold of Raqqa. A third ultra, Hassan Kazarlan, was in Turkey en route to Syria when he was persuaded to return to Egypt after security forces detained his father as a hostage.Moshagheb, Iskanderiya, and Kazarlan exemplify one response to the repression of the Sisi regime and the violence that followed the general’s overthrow of Morsi in 2013. Groups like Ultras Nahdawy and Students against the Coup hope to stymie this response. But it is difficult, and growing more so.“Take Alf Maskan [an Islamist stronghold in Cairo]”, said an ultra and student activist. “Alf Maskan is a traditionally conservative, Islamist neighbourhood. Youth have nothing to look forward to. They are hopeless and desperate. They join our protests but their conversation often focuses on admiration for the Islamic State. They are teetering on the edge. We are their only hope, but it’s like grasping for a straw that ultimately is likely to break.”“Success for us is our survival and ability to keep trying. The government wants to provoke us into becoming violent. Two years later, we are still active. . . . We can promise only one thing: we will stay on the street. To us football is politics; politics is in everything. That’s why we tackle politics”, Ahmed explained.Though they oppose the regime, the soccer fans are not partisans of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Many of us are Islamists. I am a member of the Brotherhood, but that is not why we supported the Brotherhood. We don’t want to be inside the Brotherhood or the system. We supported Morsi not because he was a brother but because we wanted a revolutionary force to be in government. The Brotherhood was the only revolutionary force that had a candidate and popular support and was part of the [2011] revolution”, Ahmed said. Since there is now no alternative in sight to the military dictatorship, Ahmed and his fellow fans will go their own way.Back in the early 20th century, celebrations of Al Ahli’s victories by anti-colonial and anti-monarchical soccer fans often exploded into anti-British protests. Twelve years after the club’s establishment, university student fans led anti-British demonstrations during the 1919 revolution. That uprising, fuelled by deep-seated resentment of British manipulation of the economy, the heavily British-staffed bureaucracy, and the war-time requisitioning of Egyptian assets, led to Egypt’s independence three years later.The chants of protesting student soccer fans a century ago reverberate today in updated form in universities that have become security force-controlled fortresses and in flash protests in popular neighbourhoods. Almost a hundred years ago, students adapted a song written by Sayed Darwish, an Egyptian singer and composer widely viewed as the father of Egyptian popular music:“We are the studentsWe don’t care if we go to prison, nor do we care about the governorateWe’re used to living on bread, and sleeping with no blanketsAl Ahli against the British Rule.”Today they proclaim that “the students are back,” a slogan inspired by a song by Imam Mohammed Ahmed Eissa, a composer and singer known for his political songs that focus on the plight of the poor.Students shaped Egypt’s history again later in the 20th century, by rejuvenating the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s. The Brotherhood had been withering under a brutal crackdown by Gamal Abdel Nasser that had forced many of its leaders to go underground or leave the country, but after Nasser died in 1970, it slowly began to revive. “Even as they rebelled against the tenets of Nasserism, the youth of this period were the products of its socioeconomic policies, from increased urbanization to greater access to education. . . . The real story of this era revolves around a vibrant youth movement based in Egypt’s colleges and universities,” said historian Abdullah Al-Arian, author of Answering the Call, Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt, in an interview with the online publication Jadaliyya.For men like Ahmed and Salheen, however, the modern youth movement is less about the Brotherhood and more about aligning Islamists and revolutionary forces that run the gamut from liberal to conservative, from left to right, and from secular to religious in a united front against autocracy. “It’s not about Morsi; we have bigger fish to fry than Morsi. Most of us no longer believe in the slogan in returning Morsi to office. Thousands are suffering. I don’t give a damn about Morsi. Anything is better than this regime. There are two approaches, the reformist and the revolutionary one. We have seen dramatic shifts since 2011. Both Tahrir Square and Sisi’s junta were dramatic twists. I and many like me believe that another twist is possible even if that will take time,” Salheen said.The uphill battle of soccer fans and students for political change is not only hampered by the government’s relentless repression. It also is stymied by the widespread apathy of an Egyptian public disillusioned by the failure of the 2011 revolt to bring reform, tired of political volatility, and desperate to see their country return to stability and trickle-down economic growth. These Egyptians may not be starry-eyed about Sisi’s ability to deliver, but they see no viable alternative.As a shopkeeper in one of Cairo’s upmarket neighborhoods put it, “The protesters have nothing to offer. The government will crush them. Sisi is not perfect, but he’s all we have. What we need is stability to turn the economy around. If that means putting people in jail, so be it.”

Price Plunge Stunts African Oil Output

Cheap crude is great if you’re a buyer, but if you’re an oil company or petrostate it’s a nightmare. With oil trading below $50 per barrel, down from $110+ a year and a half ago, oil companies are busy cutting capital expenditures and shelving higher-cost, higher-risk projects to stop the bleeding. That’s hitting Africa especially hard. Until prices took a nose dive, the continent appeared to be heading towards a mini hydrocarbon boom. Bloomberg reports:

“Capital markets are effectively closed to the oil and gas industry” in Africa, Tony Hayward, former head of BP Plc and now chairman of Genel Energy Plc, said at a conference in Cape Town last month. “A decade of exploration, with billions of dollars invested and only limited commercial success.”

When six of the 10 biggest global oil discoveries in 2013 were made in Africa, it underlined the potential of the energy riches that had lured companies from Royal Dutch Shell Plc to Exxon Mobil Corp. Governments have been slow to react as the slump in crude makes the royalties charged from Libya to Angola look punitive. African production, already 19 percent below its 2008 peak of 10.2 million barrels a day, is set to drop for a third year.

There’s a temptation to call this a bust, just as there was a temptation to overhype Africa’s oil fortunes before the price plunge. Our own Walter Russell Mead has discussed the tendency to view the continent in one of two ways: either as one of the 21st century’s emerging giants poised for a development breakthrough, or as a part of the world plagued by poverty and bad governance. It would be a mistake to embrace one of these perspectives exclusively, as both ultimately contain truth.

Dimming oil prospects in today’s bearish market aren’t welcome news for Africa, but neither do they doom it. Again, we’re reminded of the far-reaching effects of an oversupplied oil market.

Millennials Far More Open to Censorship than Previous Generations

Jonathan Chait—one of the most prominent left-of-center critics of the campus PC movement—points out on Twitter that, in the wake of the latest free speech meltdowns on college campuses, people who previously denied the existence of PC are now resorting to “whataboutism”—that is, arguing that even if left-wing intolerance of opposing viewpoints does exist here and there, other parties are guilty of free speech violations, or other rights violations, of their own.

Obviously, all threats to our open and democratic society need to be taken seriously, racism and intolerance very much included. But a new Pew survey underscores the reason why it is not unreasonable to be particularly concerned about college students’ apparent hostility to America’s traditional understanding of free expression:

American Millennials are far more likely than older generations to say the government should be able to prevent people from saying offensive statements about minority groups, according to a new analysis of Pew Research Center survey data on free speech and media across the globe. […]

Even though a larger share of Millennials favor allowing offensive speech against minorities, the 40% who oppose it is striking given that only around a quarter of Gen Xers (27%) and Boomers (24%) and roughly one-in-ten Silents (12%) say the government should be able to prevent such speech.

Meanwhile, Pew’s massive 2010 report on Millennials found that America’s young people are likely more tolerant of racial and sexual minorities than any generation in American history. Millennials were substantially more supportive of interracial marriages, immigration, gay rights, and feminist causes than any of the other age cohorts surveyed.

So when conservatives (and moderates, and, occasionally, liberals, like Chait) denounce the attacks on freedom of speech taking place on campus, it is not necessarily because they think that persistent problems of racism, sexism, and intolerance are unimportant, or even that they are being overstated. Rather, it is that while America’s next generation of leaders is making clear (if uneven) progress in fighting identity-based intolerance, it is turning its back on other, equally important, liberal values. If current opinion trends continue, American free speech norms will look much different—much more like what we are seeing on college campuses—a generation from now. The fight against racism is being won in the realm of popular opinion, while the fight for free speech is being lost.

Sweden Democrats’ Moment in the Sun?

The migrant crisis, which is now seeing some 1,500 asylum seekers arrive in Sweden each week, has not just shaken the country’s infrastructure. The country’s party system is in havoc, with the xenophobic Sweden Democrats setting the political tone and occupying an ever-stronger position with each passing week. The government itself may be in danger if the Greens, the ruling coalition’s junior partner, decide they can no longer stand by as policies they oppose get implemented.

“Right now there’s a whole lot of ad hoc and rapid changes in Swedish politics,” said Tommy Möller, a professor of political science at the University of Stockholm and an expert on the country’s political party system. “Even just during the past several days the language used by the political parties has changed. Things that used to be unthinkable are now thinkable. And there’s a race between the Christian Democrats and the Moderates to adapt themselves as much as possible to the Sweden Democrats’ policies while at the same time distancing themselves from the party.” The November 14 Paris attacks provided the party with new ammunition for its calls to limit immigration, and representatives including Ted Ekeroth—the party’s leader in the southern city of Lund—took to Twitter to essentially say “I told you so”.The Christian Democrats and the Moderates belong to Sweden’s reliably centrist right wing, which formed the government until the most recent elections, in 2014. But as far as large chunks of the public are concerned, traditional parties such as the Christian Democrats and the Moderates, and indeed the Social Democrats—for decades Sweden’s predominant party—are no longer an attractive choice. Instead record numbers of voters support the far-right Sweden Democrats, who more than doubled their support in last year’s elections, becoming parliament’s third largest party, and have since gained even more support. A poll last week placed the Sweden Democrats as Sweden’s most popular party, with 26.8 percent of voter support.  (Another new poll gives the party 18.3 percent voter support, which is still a leap from the 12.9 percent of votes it received in the 2014 elections.) And in a recent ranking of Sweden’s most powerful personalities, the Sweden Democrats’ leader, 36-year-old Jimmie Åkesson, came third, after Prime Minister Stefan Löfven and Central Bank head Stefan Ingves.But the traditional parties refuse to work with the Sweden Democrats, and Löfven has called the party neo-fascist. The presence of the ever-more popular pariah, combined with the dramatic influx of asylum seekers—the Migration Agency projects 190,000 asylum seekers will arrive this year, up from 82,000 last year—is causing turmoil in traditionally consensus-oriented Swedish politics. “The Sweden Democrats have long argued that immigration is taboo, but now that everybody else is talking about it, they have to resort to even stronger actions,” explained Andreas Johansson Heinö, a researcher at the Stockholm think tank Timbro. “That’s why they’re proposing a referendum on immigration.” In addition, most of the traditional parties are now trying to slash the flow of asylum seekers—a move also long demanded by the Sweden Democrats.Despite their small ideological variations, traditional Swedish parties have kept being elected thanks to their positions on three issues that are hugely important to voters: education, healthcare, and social welfare. “In general, all the parties except the Left Party [which won nearly six percent of the votes in the 2014 election] and the Sweden Democrats pretty much agree,” noted Joakim Ruist, an economist at Gothenburg University who studies public attitudes to immigration. And that’s exactly the problem: by representing a narrow scope of opinions they have created a vacuum for the Sweden Democrats, who may represent popular opinions but often take elected office lightly and have office-holders with plainly bizarre views. Recently a local SD politician warned that children born to a Swedish and an immigrant parent will have lower IQs than other Swedish children.Now the Sweden Democrats are upping the ante. In addition to proposing the referendum, the party has announced it will be taking politics to the streets, prioritizing public acts over parliamentary maneuvers. “It’s not as if they’re going to boycott the parliament,” said Möller. “But nobody knows what the result will be.” The party, represented by at least one of its MPs, has already begun distributing flyers to refugees on Lesbos, warning them against coming to Sweden, where there is “no money, no jobs, no homes”. The flyers are signed “the people of Sweden”.To those accustomed to the bellicosity of U.S. politics, the Swedish turmoil may seem mild indeed. But the Sweden Democrats’ success is destabilizing Swedish politics at the very moment when the migrant crisis is creating political instability of its own. The Green Party, the junior partner in the Social Democrat-led coalition, has long opposed the very policies—including attempts to restrict asylum seeker numbers—the coalition has now introduced. “It’s very possible that the Greens will leave the coalition,” explained Möller. “They started out as a party based on the peace and environment movement, and in recent years they’ve fought very hard to be seen as a responsible party, but they have already made very painful concessions. The question now is where they’ll draw the line.”If the Greens were to leave the government, Löfven would face tricky choices. Among them: forming another minority government, this time with a couple of center-right parties as his coalition partners. If he pulls this off, and is able to push through more initiatives that move closer to long-held Sweden Democrat positions, the levee will probably hold a while longer. If not, Sweden could be sailing into choppy waters.

Turkey Talk Turns Sour

Discussions of an EU-Turkey deal on handling migrant flows hit a stumbling block earlier this week as both sides dug their heels in on which side would move first on implementing aspects of the agreement, according to the FT.

EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and EU Council President Donald Tusk, visiting Ankara, pushed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to implement tighter border controls and to award worker visas to two million Syrian refugees already in Turkey. Erdogan bristled at the demands, and said the EU must first unlock the €3 billion in aid and start making progress on re-opening EU accession negotiations with Turkey. The talks turned contentious when Erdogan reportedly dismissed Juncker as the former premier of a country, Luxembourg, that’s “the size of a Turkish city.” The ever-cheerful Juncker later described the meeting as “sportive and exhausting.”Turkey is the EU’s great hope as Brussels scrambles frantically for a solution to the migrant crisis. The deal is supposed to be finalized and signed ahead of a November 29 Turkey-EU summit. If that doesn’t happen, everyone goes back to the drawing board.

The Terms of the Immigration Debate Are Outdated

Walter Russell Mead once described “the conventional picture” of U.S. immigration as “an unstoppable wave of unskilled, mostly Spanish-speaking workers—many illegal—coming across the Mexican border.” Adherents to this view (such as Donald Trump and his supporters) tend to fear that, “instead of assimilating the immigrants, the immigrants will assimilate us.” But more and more evidence is surfacing to show that this understanding of U.S immigration is out of date. USA Today reports on striking new data from the Pew Research Center:

For the first time in more than four decades, more Mexican immigrants are returning to their home country than coming to the United States, according to a report released Thursday.

From 2009 to 2014, an estimated 870,000 Mexicans came to the United States while 1 million returned home, a net loss for the United States of 130,000, according to the report from the Pew Research Center. That historic shift comes at a time when immigration has become a contentious focal point in the 2016 presidential race, as Republicans and Democrats argue over how best to modernize the nation’s immigration system.

There are some qualifications: Mexican in-migration still exceeded out-migration (by a hair) if you exclude deportations of illegal immigrants. Also, migration from across the Mexican border remains high, even if Mexican immigration is trending downward; as the now-forgotten crisis from the summer shows, thousands of Central American migrants, many of whom had to enter Mexico illegally to begin with, try to cross America’s Southwestern border every year. Finally, Pew studied the five-year period immediately following the worst recession America experienced in 80 years. Immigration numbers will likely tick upward as the economy recovers.

Still, the number of Mexican immigrants living in the United States peaked in 2007, before the U.S. economy soured. It seems likely that the “Great Wave” of Mexican immigration to the United States, which has carried more than 16 million Mexican immigrants across the border since 1965, is coming to a close. This is typical in U.S. immigration experience. The country has historically experienced temporary waves of immigration from one region of the world or another that reshape America’s demographic landscape but then gradually run their course.Next up, if current projections are to be trusted, is a wave of Asian immigration. Within 50 years, according to Pew, immigrants from Asian countries will solidly outnumber those from Latin America.

A Sated China is Bad News for US LNG

We’re just two months away from the first liquified natural gas (LNG) cargoes leaving the U.S. for foreign buyers, but the market isn’t exactly chomping at the bit to get at the new supplies. Thanks to flagging demand in China, U.S. exporters are not only losing out on a major potential customer, but they also seem to be gaining a competitor as Beijing looks to offload cargoes that it’s already purchased. Bloomberg reports:

The Asian nation will accept only 77 percent of contracted cargoes in 2015 as the slowest economic growth since 1990 cuts demand, according to industry consultant IHS Inc. The rest of the supply will be put up for sale amid a worldwide glut that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. says is likely to force U.S. export projects to operate at half capacity.

The U.S. and China are seeking to sell cargoes just as new output equivalent to more than a third of global demand is set to flood the market over the next three years.

The LNG market has seen its fair share of swings in recent years. Just a decade ago the U.S. was looking to become a major LNG importer, and companies were investing tens of billions of dollars in import terminals to help bring in those supplies. Now, thanks to the shale boom, a number of export terminals are being constructed, with the goal of unleashing the domestic glut of natural gas here on the global market.

But while Asian markets were snatching up LNG at $15 per million BTU as recently as the beginning of this year, today that price is hovering between $7 and $8, pinching and in some cases completely erasing the price incentive to liquify, ship, and regassify U.S. shale gas. And with China’s thirst for the energy source apparently slaked, there’s little reason to expect demand to drive prices back up anytime soon (sound familiar?).For buyers, however, these are heady days. Japan, which shut down its reactors in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and has had to rely heavily on LNG imports to make up that loss, is relishing half-price imports. Europe, too, will be pleased at the state of the global market, as it looks to snatch up LNG to help it diversify away from Russian gas.Whether it’s oil or gas, it’s a buyer’s market today—and a decidedly bad time to be in the business of selling hydrocarbons.

Japanese Investors to India’s Rescue?

Are Modi’s reforms paying off in India? The country has become hot investment for Japanese households, according to Reuters, and the policies of the Modi government are credited with helping to make the influx of capital possible:

Fund managers say the increased interest from Japanese investors is also a vote of confidence in the fiscal and market reforms of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, voted into office in May 2014.

Just the year before that, worries about India’s record current account deficit sent the rupee to a record low.The reforms that have opened up India’s markets to foreigners were game changers for the so-called “Mrs. Watanabe” – Japanese retail investors driven by their country’s policy of zero interest rates to seek yield offshore.Japanese retail investment into India through investment trusts in October was 462 billion yen ($3.76 billion), its highest level in 7 1/2 years and more than doubling the amount invested at the time Modi came to power. That’s in stark contrast to markets such as Brazil that have experienced heavy outflows from Japanese investors.

This certainly sounds like a not-insignificant boost for the Indian economy, but we aren’t sure the interest in India will last much longer. Modi’s policies may have helped encourage investment at first, but the pace of those reforms has now slowed, and Modi’s party has faced significant election setbacks. Japanese housewives probably don’t follow every twist and turn of the Indian economy or Indian politics, but at some point they might notice the same signs that institutional investors have already observed about where India is headed. If so, that would be bad news for one of the handful of emerging markets that has been prospering lately.