Technology, Immigration, and are we a serious nation? And send me examples of what a paladin could do.

There are two important topics to be covered, both generated by Newt Gingrich’s remarks at last night’s Republican candidates debate.

• A Strategy of Technology

• A Strategy of Immigration Control

Can water prevent dehydration?

I will not be able to get to either of them in detail today, but I will have essays on both; indeed, it is pretty clear that there is a real need for a revised version of The Strategy of Technology, by Stefan T. Possony, Jerry Pournelle, and Francis X. Kane. Dr. Possony was a former Intelligence Officer for Austria under Schuschnigg, for France after the anschluss, and then for the United States during World War II. When I met him he was a Senior Fellow for the Hoover Institution. Jerry Pournelle is me. Francis X. Kane is a retired Air Force Colonel, Ph.D. , and Director of Plans for General Schriever. When we wrote the book he was still a serving officer so his name does not appear on the published edition. The book was used as a text in all three US service academies and at two of the service War Colleges, and is said to have been influential in cold war planning policy. Mr. Gingrich has read it and has discussed it with me more than once. It is very much oriented to the Cold War threat, and most of the examples are from that era. The principles remain true and applicable, but both the original edition and the revisions were intended to be applicable to the Cold War. It needs a new edition applicable to the present era. I am reminded of this because in the Republican Candidate debate Mr. Gingrich, asked about defense policy and budget cuts, made it clear that his policy would be a strategy of technology to make the military more cost/effective.

For a fuller disquisition on The Strategy of Technology, see my essay with that title. When I was part of the team that advised Newt from 1981 until he left the office of Speaker I knew him to be a hands-on Congressman (like Bob Walker who was one of Newt’s team) who understood the matters he was dealing with. I met Newt originally when he telephoned me (having got my phone number form my publisher) to discuss A Step Farther Out . He had just been elected to the 6th District of Georgia and he wanted to discuss the book. We became friends, and I found he was quite serious about technology and space development. Clearly he still is.

If I were to wait until I could do a full revision of Strategy of Technology we might be a very long time; so next week I will try to do a brief essay on the application of a strategy of technology to our current strategic situation, and what might be some of the outcomes of that. Actually that is pretty well what the new book Niven and I are doing is all about, so it is not a shift of mental gears, and in the process of explaining it I will probably be able to generate scenes for the book, thus growing two crops on one field. A good use of my time.

The Immigration Issue

The second essay I need to write is a rational inquiry into immigration policy. One of Newt’s problems is that he assumes his listeners have thought about problems and have seen the obvious. That is why he often says things that seem inexplicable to new analysts who do not think through problems nor even attempt to.

In the Republican debates Newt said something obvious without doing much preparation for the announcement, and without making clear the prior conditions. To Newt it is obvious that one controls the borders; if you don’t you are not a sovereign nation. He also knows that we will have some kind of “guest worker” program whether it is legal or not: the nation has changed since the days of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best, and whereas for a hundred years women’s liberation meant that women were free to stay home and not have to work outside the home, that all changed starting with World War II, and liberation came to mean equality very much including women working outside the home and having careers in academia and business. The result is a need for nannies and housekeepers. There is a need for agricultural workers, particularly seasonal. These two factors alone constitute a magnet for migrant workers. Closing the borders with barbed wire, electrified fences, drones, armored cars, watchtowers, troops with orders to shoot to kill – remember the Mexican goat herding boy shot by a Marine team at the border, and the flap THAT caused> — and other such measures is possible, but it is expensive, particularly so long as those and other magnets are in place.

But presume that all that works. The borders are controlled, probably by a combination of security measures using all appropriate technologies (sometimes the most appropriate technology is quite low tech, sometimes it is high tech, most often it’s a combination of both, perhaps combined with firepower). Once you have the borders secured what do you do with the 11 million illegal immigrants already here?

Now for gangsters of any age the answer is simple: get them out of here. They’re illegal, deport them. If their country of origin will not take them, bribe some foreign country to give them a visa. Get them out of here. Then there is a great number of more ambiguous cases. And on the other end of the spectrum comes Newt’s sudden speculation (he’s prone to examining the limits, something that all systems analysts are taught to do routinely). Take the case of a hard working family that has been here 25 years, never in trouble with the law, parents of citizens, grandparents of citizens: in the real world no one in their right mind want to deport Grandpa and Grandma whether they be from Latin America or Eastern Europe or West Africa. We aren’t going to do it, and it’s madness to assume we will. Since we are not going to deport them, what do we do? Well that implies that we think of some means to make them legal residents but not give them citizenship. And in the real world that’s about all we can do, and we all know it.

But most illegal immigrants are neither gangsters nor Grandpa Lorca. How do we decide who goes and who stays, once we have the borders secure and a reasonable guest worker program?

What everyone seems to have missed is that Newt speculated that perhaps we need thousands of local commissions, very like the Selective Service Commissions we formed back in the days of conscription. Greetings, a commission of your friends and neighbors has selected you — etc. He didn’t get very far with that speculation, but it preceded his remarks about what to do with Granma Lorca. It’s clear he was speculating and hadn’t thought this through very far, but since then I’ve given it some thought, and it’s a good starting place. We really do have to deal with the problem. There will be illegal immigrants who are neither gangsters nor pillars of the community. More on this another time.

But no one up on that stage would put Granma Lorca in handcuffs and shove her across the border into Tia Juana, and everyone knows that.

Incidentally, one of Newt’s observations is obvious: any immigrant graduate in any of the hard sciences should automatically be offered permanent residency. As Governor Perry put it, there ought to be a visa stapled to the degree certificate. I can’t think anyone would object to that. If we are going to implement a strategy of technology to get ourselves out of this mess – and we could do that – we will need smart people to implement that strategy. It is madness to send an MIT computer science graduate go back home to a foreign competitor if there is any chance of getting that graduate to stay and work here. Same goes for medical and most health care graduates.

One other obvious observation: if this were a serious country, we would not be wondering about Iranian and Iraqi oil. We would rely on our own resources and in a year we could have supplies and refineries. The difficulties in doing that are not technological. We can do it.

During World War II we built a liberty ship a day. Advanced fighter aircraft went from design board to operations in combat in under 150 days.(For those who doubt it, look up the history of the P-51.)  During the Depression we built Hoover Dam in about five years. We built the Empire State Building in not much more than a year. We supplied oil for England as well as America and carried it through submarine infested waters to get it there. We organized D-Day, the most complex operation in the history of the world, and carried it off despite facing Rommel and his beach defenses. Have we so degenerated that we can no longer do those things?

Energy and freedom could make this country great again. But we have to treat those matters seriously.

This week remains frantic. Roberta has a cold, and I have been advised to stay off my knee for a few days (twisted a ligament somehow) which means that neither of us have been getting out for a walk, which means that Sable has decided that she has been remiss in doing her job which is to be sure these humans she lives with get out for their exercise and also do the daily hunting for the pack, so she has decided to remind us, at fairly frequent intervals.

Meanwhile they are coming to remove the whacking big desiccation machine from my bathroom, and they’ll be back next week to put in new floor covering. It’s Chaotic at Chaos Manor.

You can view Strategy of Technology on line free, but if you want a pdf copy it is available. I also send a copy to new Platinum and Patron subscribers to this web site, so if you were thinking of becoming a patron of this site, that may be relevant information.

For a copy of Strategy of Technology in pdf format, go to http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/2011/Q2/mail669.html and scroll down to the end, where you will find a button. I have tried to transfer this but I don’t know how, and I haven’t time to learn it. I am presuming that the old web site buttons still work. If not I’ll find another way, but the simplest way is to become a Patron subscriber. That works because I do it myself.  And now I have work.

Can Water Prevent Dehydration?

Not according to the European Union and its panel of 21 scientists. Of course there is some controversy.

Of course this is one more development of the rule of the Nomenklatura in Europe and the United States. It’s not enough for the regulators simply to take the money and do their jobs keeping the system running. The modern bureaucrat is educated, a college graduate (who has probably learned little of any use, but it’s the credential that counts) and feels compelled to contribute something. What better way than to be certain that his – or her – benighted subjects benefit from the wisdom of the Nomenklatura? Hence bunny inspectors, water doesn’t dehydrate, the streets fill with pothole – there’s nothing creative about filling a pothole, let’s look for something to do that reflects our superiority – and civilization spirals down in a morass of permits and regulations.

Query: if you were a paladin given the Low and Middle Justice and sent out to make the world better, what might you do? I can use some incidents of bureaucratic madness that could be corrected by someone with power and common sense. Send me your examples.  And now I really do have to work, but first I have some errands.