UPDATE: This is going on in one hour, so if you’re in downtown Washington, you can still do it.[Map]

If you’re going to be in Washington tomorrow at noon, look in at the National Press Club, in the Zenger Room, where Ed Rubenstein

will release his new 70-page report detailing the cost of immigration to 15 federal departments and agencies. This first of its kind assessment of the fiscal impact of mass immigration looks at the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Interior, Justice, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, transportation, Treasury, and State, in addition to Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration.

Copies of the new study will be available.

A light lunch will be available for journalists at 12:15.[More, scroll down to 1:00]

Also, check out the coverage at Investor’s Business Daily, whose motto might easily be “We’re not the Wall Street Journal.“ Nothing could make that clearer than this editorial.

The Real Cost Of Immigration

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, April 04, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Immigration: As some experts tell Congress to fight a possible recession with more immigrants, a respected economist warns that immigration’s costs are grossly underestimated — because the government won’t study them.

Set for release Tuesday is a report published by Social Contract magazine, “The Fiscal Impact of Immigration: An Analysis of the Costs to 15 Federal Departments and Agencies.” [More]

Peter Brimelow will be there, and will be introducing Ed Rubenstein.

Here’s some encouraging news from Major League Baseball.

One of the Detroit Tigers’ relief pitchers is stuck in the Dominican Republican on “immigration problems,” said Dave Dombrosky , the team’s president and general manager, last night during an ESPN broadcast of the Tigers humiliating 13-2 loss to the Chicago White Sox.

Last month, the Detroit News confirmed that Francisco Cruceta, one of the Tiger players acquired during the off-season, “ran into not only a visa holdup in trying to leave the Dominican Republic, he ran into visa captivity for reasons the State Department has not divulged. He never made it to spring training.” [The Foils To the Tigers’ Toils, Detroit News, March 29, 20008]

Why the Tigers would be in a hurry to get Crucetta, with his 10.05 MLB career ERA , is a mystery. But one hopes that this may mark the beginning of closer State Department scrutiny of visa applications from foreign-born players.

Evidence indicates that, like many other visa holders, baseball players don’t always return home when their time is up.

In my 2005 column about baseball and visa over-stayers, I quoted former Cincinnati Reds manager Ron Plaza:

“Out of 10 (Dominican players) who are released, I’d say nine stay here illegally. They would rather live in the worst areas of New York than go back home. You can’t handcuff them to the plane, so there is very little we can do.”

Anthropologist Stanley Kurtz has a long, useful article in The Weekly Standard about Middle Eastern tribalism, “I and My Brother against My Cousin.” He argues that we’ve overstated the importance of Islam in our recent troubles and understated the importance of tribal behaviors, rooted in nomadism, that are older than the Koran. (Indeed, Islam can be seen as both assuming but also criticizing the low-level feuding that was endemic to that difficult-to-police part of the world.) Fans of “The Man Who Would Be King” and “Lawrence of Arabia” won’t be terribly surprised, but will still find the essay provides a solid framework for understanding.

I agree with Kurtz’s article on just about everything other than the scale of the threat posed to the U.S. by Middle Eastern tribal tendencies. My view is that the danger, while not negligible (obviously), tends to be self-limiting due to the fractiousness exemplified in the title of the article. These guys aren’t the Russians with 10,000 nuclear warheads mounted on ICBMs. It’s not like Al-Qaeda is going to build its own fleet of jetliners to fly into our skyscrapers. They’re only a danger to us to the extent that we let them be a danger to us. To stop the Russians, we had to build a fleet of Poseidon subs. What we needed to stop Mohamed Atta and Co., in contrast, was a memo to Customs agents telling them to not let terroristy-looking guys through the gates at JFK.

Late last summer, with no decent new movies out, I wrote a retrospective review for The American Conservative of “Lawrence of Arabia” that discussed how we get a glimpse in the second half of the movie of the end of the ancient struggle between the regular armies of settled nations and the irregular warriors of tribal nations:

Among its numerous virtues, “Lawrence” provides insight into America’s quandary in Iraq by offering a vivid primer on what William S. Lind calls “asymmetrical” war.

In “Lawrence,” regular warfare, with its drilling and decisive battles, is exemplified by the stolid Turkish infantry, while irregular warfare, with its interminable raids and retreats, is embodied in the mercurial Arab camel cavalry.

In the famous screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, the British high command wants Lawrence to trick the Bedouin Arabs into enlisting as cannon fodder in the grinding British attack on the Ottomans at Gaza. Lawrence insubordinately devises a more culturally appropriate strategy for the nomads: “‘The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped’ and on this ocean the Bedu go where they please and strike where they please.” They will harass the Turkish railway to Medina with hit-and-run attacks, avoiding the pitched battles, for which the tribesmen, no fools, wouldn’t even show up.

In 1917, in the first two-thirds of the movie, Lawrence’s insight works wonderfully. In the 1918 conclusion, however, although the British and Arabs win, the failures of irregularity become clearer. The victorious but still fractious clans can’t competently manage the hospitals and waterworks of Damascus. Even before then, there are hints that irregular desert warfare is doomed by the new age of mechanized mobility. When the Turks can get their hands on enough German armored cars and airplanes, they negate the traditional Bedouin advantage in mobility and elusiveness.

Subsequently, it turned out that cultures that were good at regular warfare, like the Israelis and Americans, were also better at building and maintaining the tanks and planes that gave regular militaries the mobility of irregular warriors.

But history never ends; losers adapt. As Lawrence tells Omar Sharif’s Sherif Ali, “Nothing is written.” Now, after two easy victories in open country over Iraq’s derisible regular army, America has bogged down in Iraq’s urban jungles fighting countless irregular units that disappear into the alleys as Lawrence’s mounted warriors vanished into the dunes.

In other words, while irregular warriors from the Middle East long harassed Christendom due to their often superior mobility (such as that provided by the camel), the mechanization of military mobility in the 20th Century meant that the cultures that fostered cooperation and discipline were much better at building and maintaining the tanks and planes that have determined victory since WWI. Now, though, tactics have evolved, and we’re bogged down in places like Basra … but only because we’re in places like Basra.

William Kristol writes in the NY Times in his column “The Shape of the Race to Come:”

More fundamental will be the question of the discrepancy between the image of Obama the uniter and the reality of Obama the liberal. That hasn’t been much of a problem for Obama in the Democratic contest, since Clinton hasn’t attacked from the right or even the center.

But Republicans will. Last week, over drinks, one Republican strategist not affiliated with the McCain campaign mused about how an independent advertising effort against Obama might work. “Barack Obama: He’s not who you think he is” would be the theme. The supporting evidence would come from his left-wing voting record in Illinois and Washington, spiced up with fun video clips of Reverend Wright.

The essential misjudgment that countless people have made about Obama is assuming that being half-white makes him more ideologically moderate. It’s an easy assumption to make: if 88% of blacks voted Democratic in 2004 vs. only 41% of whites, then somebody who is half-black and half-white should fall in-between, right? It’s simple arithmetic!

In reality, the opposite is true. Somebody who is as white as Obama in upbringing and personality, but as black by avocation and profession, has to constantly prove he’s “black enough.” Since Obama’s a Primarily Political Person, as Michael Blowhard might say, he has to repeatedly prove he’s black enough politically.

Obama’s basic political psychology isn’t at all complicated — it doesn’t take a high degree of empathy or psychological acuity to figure out the basic theme of Obama’s life–but it’s remarkable how he got to the point of almost having the Democratic nomination for the White House wrapped up before the press starts to figure it out.

From the NYT:

That’s What I Like About Me

By ANDREW KOHUT

A recent poll [of white Democrats] suggests that Barack Obama’s biggest draw is his ability to make voters feel good about themselves

The U.S. economy shed 80,000 jobs in March – the biggest drop in five years, as weakness in construction and finance spread to a wider swath of occupations. (See the BLS report. [PDF] .) The March drop, along with revised figures showing sharper than previously reported declines in January and February, offer the most persuasive evidence yet that we’re in a recession.

We say: Not so fast!

The “other” employment survey – of households rather than businesses – shows a curiously mixed job picture for March.

• Total employment fell 24,000 (-0.02 percent) from April
• Hispanic employment fell 132,000 (-0.65 percent)
• Non-Hispanic employment: rose 108,000 (+0.09 percent)

In fact, March is the latest of a string of months in which Hispanic workers lost ground relative to non-Hispanics. (So many Hispanics are foreign-born that we can use them as a proxy for immigrants, since the federal government chooses not to break out immigrant employment). The trend –call it reverse American worker displacement–started in late summer 2007 when housing construction started to tank.
But this also was a period when federal authorities ramped up enforcement of the immigration laws. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made 4,940 workplace arrests last year, a 13 percent increase from 2006. In 2002 only 510 such arrests were made. [Worksite Enforcement fact sheet, ICE]
We opined that many illegals– especially those with criminal records – would self deport rather than risk being caught in an ICE bust. Their former employers are equally wary, having read media accounts of companies losing their entire workforce and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

It’s too early to pronounce the reversal in Hispanic job growth as anything other than an economic phenomenon. That said, why haven’t non-Hispanics lost jobs at similar rates? Hispanic employment peaked at 20.6 million in September 2007. From that month through March 2008:

• Total employment fell 291,000 (-0.20 percent)
• Hispanic employment fell 350,000 (-1.70 percent)
• non-Hispanic employment rose 59,000 (+0.05 percent)

The past six months marked the longest stretch of declining native displacement in seven years—as seen in our VDAWDI graphic:

Could enforcement be the explanation? Stay tuned.