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Russia’s Brain Drain, Putin’s Brainwashing & the Lame-Brained U.S. Immigration Apparatus

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Putin’s approval rating has jumped from a not-so-bad 77% to a much better 83% according to a recent “state-backed” opinion poll. So says the Wall Street Journal, while noting that “experts have cautioned against taking current Russian polls on face value, given that Russian authorities have pursued a crackdown against dissent, including a media blackout of any reports contrary to the Kremlin’s narrative about Russia’s actions in Ukraine.” Anyone calling the war a war or impugning the military is liable to receive harsh punishment. The muzzling has been so effective that Russians are refusing to believe first hand accounts of death and devastation from their own relatives and friends in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post has reported the results of a recent Gallup poll: 20% of the Russian population are eager to leave the country. This tranche of unhappy Russians skews young, male, educated and urban, which suggests an ingenious way for the West to undermine the Putin regime. Lure the dissatisfied element to the U.S. and the E.U. by making immigrant visas easy to obtain. Think of it! Russia could lose a generation of its best and brightest!

Unfortunately for that bright idea, multitudes of desperate people are waiting for the U.S. to get its immigration act together, some with deservedly high priority, particularly the thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. throughout America’s military adventure in Afghanistan.   Also already in line for adjudication are the long-suffering refugees from violence, corruption and climate change  in Central America.  Although Ukrainian refugees belong on the list of worthy immigrants, most of them seem to prefer accommodation in Europe, to make it easier to return home as soon as they can.  [Update:  Still thousands are at the border.  Even as we do our best to help them regain all of their country, we need to give them temporary shelter.]

Deceptively promising for would-be immigrants to the U.S. is the nationwide labor shortage that has been pushing wages and salaries to higher levels.  Employers are desperate for employees in nearly all categories.  Without workers, the economy is in danger of tanking.  Yet the immigration pipeline is clogged with able and willing foreign workers who can’t get a hearing.   Such being the sad case, what's the possibility in the near future of anything like a comprehensive immigration reform bill being drafted, let alone passed, by stalemated U.S. legislators?  Zilch.

All of which raises another question: given the sorry state of U.S governance and the frightening odds of a much worse future, why should anyone want to emigrate to the U.S. anymore?

 

 

Iris Scamming: The American Visa Process

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

They’re everywhere among us, doing essential work, sending their kids to school, dreaming of something better, but statistics on undocumented immigrants are pretty fuzzy, which shouldn’t be surprising. Anyone who has entered the U.S. without papers is obviously not going to be jumping up and down and shouting, “Here I am. Come and count me! Come and get me!”

For the most part, in fact, the only undocumented entrants who are likely to come to notice are the small percentage who are stupid enough to run afoul of the law (or of their neighbors) once they’re safely far from the border. As a result, vote-seeking Republican xenophobes can turn the few into a norm and seek electoral support based on fear-mongering.

Conversely, in regard to foreigners who’ve entered the U.S. via a notoriously rigorous U.S. visa system, the statistics must surely be pretty complete, a well-maintained compendium of relevant information. Seems logical in a well-organized government, doesn’t it?
So I assumed, anyway, until a few days ago. That’s when Homeland Security Department officials confessed to Congress that they “don’t know” how many foreign visitors overstay their visas every year.

I had to read that twice. It seemed impossible. It seemed absurd. Getting a U.S. visa often involves the submission of countless documents in preparation for a torturous inquisition conducted by an eagle-eyed, hard-hearted, deeply skeptical official, to say nothing of a long wait, oftentimes under unpleasant conditions. Why would our immigration apparatus put so much effort into screening people wishing to study, travel or work in the U.S., in each case issuing a visa with an explicit expiry date, then turn the lucky entrants loose, to comply or not, according to whim—or artfully concealed original intent? Re the latter, surely by now the whole universe of prospective immigrants must know that once you enter the U.S. on any type of visa the odds are good that you can stay forever, undetected.

Here’s one possible explanation for the sloppy statistics: officialdom has so much faith in the thoroughness of its laborious screening process that what recipients do after they enter hardly matters. Back home? Still here? Who cares? The birth rate being what it is, good people are always welcome. Very touching.

Another explanation has to do with money. Serious exit processing would cost money, and no non-military agency in the U.S. is adequately funded. So, the great disappearing visa-holder scandal may be a consequence of short-sighted cost-cutting by a U.S. government that’s afraid to tax its citizens to pay for essential services responsibly rendered by well-trained professionals. Evidence of this: amongst other blatherings those red-faced officials undergoing a Congressional grilling very strenuously passed the buck. Airlines, they whined, are reluctant to accept the cost of screening departing visitors with any degree of seriousness—as if the job of handling departures belongs with the private sector in the first place. In fact, I’ve always been astonished that airline personnel are the only ones to examine (well, glance at) the travel documents of passengers departing the U.S. on international flights.

Above all, the excuse for losing track of non-immigrant visa holders leaned heavily on the great promise (and the current lack) of a screening system backed up by a storehouse of biometric data. Think cheat-proof—at least, for now—iris scans.

Iris scans. That’s the goal, and it will transform immigration statistics, according to hopeful immigration officials. Everyone will be accounted for.

Maybe so, but requiring iris-scans might not be so hot for tourism. Imagine how privacy-minded European tourists will react when they learn they’ll have to provide unique biodata info in order to visit New York or gaze into the depths of the Grand Canyon. The Taj Mahal or the Forbidden City anyone? For that matter, why should anyone of us trust the insidiously over-reaching U.S. government with such vital personal data? Not in this post Snowden age, anyway. Think of the many purposes to which unprincipled U.S. security officials might, in secrecy, put a collection of iris-scans? I, for one, am not in the least tempted to enable an iris-scan in order to to circumvent the time-consuming, TSA inspection line at the airport—and I stash my passport in a RFID-defeating envelope when I travel.

But wait. Maybe the paranoia is misplaced. Maybe we’re looking at another example of technological overreach, the romantic quest for an application-loaded, state-of-the-art, absolutely “perfect” system of the sort routinely proposed by private sector contractors enjoying cost plus deals fostered by Congressional enablers beholden to said contractors? The more complex the system the bigger the profit.

So let’s step back a bit. Was there really no way to keep track of visa holders before the iris-scanning became the solution du jour? Was it technologically impossible—or just not sexy enough, like maintenance? There’s never enough money, it seems, to maintain roads or bridges or schools in this country. Why? Because maintenance, like housekeeping, is boring. More accurately, it isn’t very lucrative when it comes to attracting big donors for the re-election campaign.

But a solution loaded with bells and whistles and requiring years to develop and install—wow! Get the bidding under way! Never mind that overly complex systems do indeed take forever to develop, are very tricky to operate and have a crash-score well above boring workhorse solutions.

In fact, such a practical, bare bones system could probably (technologically speaking) have been put into place many many years ago. Picture it: Every visa has a number and an expiration date, and each visa (with vital associated data) is entered into a master log when issued. Thereafter, the visa number is noted when its possessor enters the U.S. And when he or she leaves. If the expiry date occurs with no record of extension or departure, a search is initiated. To make this system work, some additional office workers would be required and departures would have to be handled as seriously as entries, but the investment would surely be worthwhile. What we’ve got now is clearly a charade. Hypocrisy does not a healthy government make.

Would this simple system guarantee that no person of ill intent would ever manage to enter the country legally? No. Neither will iris scans, unless every person in the world is scanned and every police record is fed into the system and everyone managing the system is pure-as-the-driven-snow honest. You get the picture. A police state—and police states tend to be run by sadists, not saints.

Iris scan or iris scam, not the kind of country I want to live in.

 

Narendra Modi: That Shocking Costume in New York

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appearance at Madison Garden before thousands of Indian-Americans during UN Week was dubbed a “love fest.”  It was certainly a tamasha, which is Hindi for big blast: music, dancing, balloons— plus the true sign of great importance today: protesters on the street outside.  Why the anti-Modi demonstration?  Many Indians still fear that Modi will allow Hindu extremism to tear India apart.  The colors the controversial PM chose to wear while addressing the Indian-American crowd must have intensified the protestors' anxiety.

During the latest round of parliamentary elections, many Indians laid aside their well-justified concerns about divisive religious issues and registered their hopes for change by deserting the Congress Party and voting for Modi’s BJP.  Campaigning vigorously in person and via his mastery of modern media, Modi had promised to get the economy roaring.  Perhaps more importantly, he had pledged to preside over a little less corruption.  Still, in a bewilderingly diverse country where the greatest threat to law and order is communal violence, anxieties remained.  The Bharatya Janata Party is not only well to the right of Congress on economic issues, it is anything but a rigorously secular party.  

The BJP shelters a strident  Hindu nationalist wing that not only condones but encourages violence to hound those who do not conform to an exceedingly narrow view of Hinduism.  (Think of Salafism in Islam or Christian fundamentalism in the US.)   Thanks to aggressive Hindu nationalists, erudite Sanskritists have had their books removed from book stores, and India’s foremost modern painter, a Muslim but secular to the core, was forced into exile.  (Fairness note: India’s Muslims succeeded in getting Salmon Rushdi’s The Satanic Verses banned.) More boldly, a long march was staged to tear down a historically important mosque supposedly built over an ancient temple devoted to the man-god Ram, of which to date no archaeologically convincing evidence has surfaced.   Infamous Hindu nationalist groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS (an ex-member, outraged by Gandhi’s sympathetic attitude toward Muslims, assassinated the Mahatma in 1947) find a welcome at the leadership level in the BJP, and Modi himself was accused of culpable passivity during a bloody Hindu-Muslim riot in his home state of Gujerat while he was Governor.  India’s judicial system never sanctioned him, but his apparent favoring of Hindus over Muslims during that slaughter led the U.S. to deny him a visa for years.    

The Modi government has not yet moved to execute a Hindu nationalist agenda, but many non-fans are waiting for the shoe to drop and Hindutva proponents are chaffing at the bit.  So far, the worst the ideologues have done is to revive demands for eliminating the use of English as an alternative national language, even though such action would so alarm the non-Hindi speakers of South India that a long dormant movement for Tamil independence could be revived.  If anything, Modi has reined in his overly enthusiastic nationalists, but not strongly enough to be convincing. What’s more, some analysts believe that the reason he has not moved aggressively on any BJP agenda item, be it economic or communal, is that he is waiting for state elections to give the BJP broader control at the state as well as the national level.  We’ll have to wait more than few months to see if this hypothesis is correct.

Whatever Modi’s thought processes these days, one thing was clear to US officials last month. When Modi became India’s prime minister, visa denial had to be reversed.  As a result, when he came to the US during UN Week, his schedule reflected his importance in the international scheme of things—and his importance to Indian-Americans who want India to get its act together and become a credible superpower rival to China.  Hence the tamasha.  So what did Modi choose to wear when he wanted to rev up the desi crowd?  Look at the photo above.  See the pale yellow shirt or kurta?  See the orange vest?  These are the classic colors of Hindu holy men, the symbolic colors of Hindu nationalists in India. In short, at Madison Garden the prime minister of a constitutionally secular state chose to flaunt a politically-charged Hinduism.  To hammer in the visual message, a half dozen aides draped in orange scarves followed him as he strode to the microphone.  This was a pretty shocking sight.

Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices: A Must Read

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Take the time to read Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices.  Read it carefully and take it seriously, as many critics have not.  Instead, having salivated in anticipation of  its publication date, they swooped in, intending to gorge on juicy (but highly unlikely) revelations, then panned the actual book.  It isn’t the tell-all exposé they’d prayed for.  

Gossip’s Not the Point

For one thing—and wisely, not coyly, as some critics believe—Clinton, in these pages, limits herself to confessing she’s still weighing the pros and cons of making another run for the presidency.  Whether she’s even leaning this way or that, she doesn't tell.  And thank goodness for that!  Spring 2014 is way too early for presidential hat-tossing. Her reticence is a grace note for ordinary Americans who feel that presidential campaigns are much too long.  

Meanwhile, others sneer that Hard Choices is “merely” a campaign tool allowing Clinton to test the waters while ostensibly just signing books.  But there’s nothing wrong with that.  Nor with the fact that little or nothing on any page can hurt her much.  What kind of an idiot commits political suicide?  Should she decide to run, however, there’s much worth gleaning here.  Above all, voters would know beyond a doubt that  we’d have with her, for the first time since George H.W. Bush was on the scene, a president who understood from the get-go how the world works and how to work with it.
    
So Hard Choices is not gossipy. It's certainly not a long delayed sob story, even as Monica Lewinsky attempts to rake up the sordid sex life of the 42nd  president.   Never ever expect Hillary Clinton to spill her guts about her partnership with Bill, although she does expose her deep love for her daughter Chelsea.  Unlike the recent memoirs of Robert Gates, it’s not sprinkled with snarky put downs of erstwhile colleagues either.  Yet, for all that she avoids gratuitous personal pot shots at political opponents, Clinton does, as relevant,  acknowledge differences of opinion on policy-making.  

 What’s Wrong with Solid and Reliable?

Some would say that Clinton is simply playing it safe in Hard Choices.  I don’t think so.  The Hillary we get here is the real thing.  Intelligent.  Conscientious.  Earnest.  Hard-working.  Intense.  Straightforward.  Principled and pragmatic.  Not flamboyant.  Not bombastic.  Not vicious.  And so, maybe, a trifle boring, as serious people are often held to be.  

No, Clinton’s not a drama queen, and thank god for that.  There’s already enough drama in today’s world.    To those who think they’d prefer a more exuberant political performer at center stage, I suggest a hard look at a powerful  politician who dominates Europe without pizzaz or a wasp waist: Angela Merkel.  She doesn’t seem to have a unified grand theory of diplomacy either, but wow!  Whether or not you agree with her all the time, Merkel, these days, puts every other European politician in the shade.

What!  No Grand theory?

Hillary Clinton set out to write a book about her role in the formation (maybe not so much) and carrying out (tirelessly) of U.S. foreign policy as Secretary state in the first Obama administration, a task at which some say she failed.  The dreadful deficiency?  She never evolved a grand theory to guide the Obama administration’s encounters with the rest of the world.  The touchstone for this criteron?  Something on the order of George Kennan’s policy of containment, which worked so well during the Cold War.   

These critics don’t seem to have noticed how much simpler the world was back then.  Bipolar is the modern word for it.  Facing a credible threat of nuclear war, it fell to the U.S. to blunt the U.S.S.R.’s geographic and ideological ambitions until that sudden implosion in 1989.  To a very large extent the richer state won, although it feels much better to say that the better system won, which I can’t help thinking was no less true.  Unfortunately, today’s world is anything but  the harmonious unipolar system imagined by American triumphalists contemplating the rubble of the Berlin Wall.  For one thing, they overlooked the possibility that countries getting richer—China, Brazil, et. al.—would seek the equivalent in power and influence as well.  Worse, who dreamed that the U.S. would also have to deal with a proliferation of non-state actors whose tactics, weapons and dedication make for a serious threat? 

Maura Harty’s Latest State Department Reincarnation

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Also see Peter Van Buren "An Example of Petty Corruption and Cronyism at State", January 23, 2013.   Van Buren worked on Congressional Relations for State's Bureau of Consular Affairs at the time of the passport fiasco.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Maura Harty, State Department darling – and Congressional bête noir – somehow received a Presidential rank (the US government’s most prestigious civilian) award. This happened in 2010.  But for what?  Staying home after being fired for causing such a mess with the normally routine issuance of passports to American citizens for the first six months of 2007 that members of Congress finally summoned her to the Hill to testify - to her and the Department’s chagrin?

 We remember it all too well since WhirledView became the “go-to” website for advice on how to circumnavigate the interminably long delays caused by incompetent bureaucratic decisions because, well the mainstream media and most everyone else had largely been ignoring this very human story. Perhaps as importantly we made it possible for applicants to share experiences and for those successful in navigating the Passport Agency’s rocky shoals to offer practical advice.   

Presidential awards are rare and special. 

These awards are normally reserved for a very few US government officials successfully employed and in responsible positions who had performed their duties in exemplary fashion for the previous three years.   This, we pointed out in 2010, Harty had not been or done because she had been let go – not just moved to another position in the Department - in early 2008 for incompetence in the passport affair. She submitted her resignation on November 21, 2007 effective February 29, 2008.

How is it that no one in authority in the Department noticed Harty’s Presidential award nomination and questioned its propriety - before it was announced?  Shouldn’t this have come from Nancy Powell then Director General of the Foreign Service?

Or what about – let’s fast forward to the present – Harty’s far more recent reemployment by the Department – this time in the Office of the Inspector General?  Didn’t Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the current Director General think more than once about rehiring someone who had been let go for cause just a few years earlier?  Guess not.    

While Harty herself is now back at State in the Office of the Inspector General, we understand that her husband (different last name) is employed in State’s Consular Affairs Bureau front office.  Guess they can carpool together.  Wonderful.

There’s one thing about bringing someone back on contract or into the Foreign Service who performed well, left of his or her own volition or was forced out because of the Foreign Service’s antediluvian up-or-out promotion system despite the individual’s sustained superior performance.  But face it Harty does not meet those criteria.  And employing her non-State Department husband in the front office of the bureau she formerly headed (before she became a public embarrassment) simply smacks of a weird form of questionable cronyism.

But why the Office of the Inspector General (OIG)?  How can the Department hire someone for a position in the Inspector’s Office with this track-record?  Should she really be allowed to make judgment calls as to how others perform their jobs?

When a Good Thing Goes Bad: The J-1 Visa

By Patricia L. Sharpe

For years and years, in America, chocolate meant Hershey. Today, evidently, Hershey means sweets kept affordable by exploiting U.S. J-1 visa laws.  Who knew that Hershey kisses come to us wrapped in sweat and tears? 

But now we do.  Some of Hershey’s overworked and underpaid workers have turned out to be eager young foreign students fed unsuspectingly into the American underworld of semi-enslaved, sub-contracted workers who keep the cost of living for cheapskate Americans unrealistically low.  Unlike the tens of thousands of workers who find themselves trapped in an all too common bait and switch situation, however, these students weren’t afraid to go public. They got in touch with unions and non-profits.  They took to the streets in protest.  And their families back home, not abject have-nots, but people with accomplishments and aspirations in countries where America wants to look good,  joined the protest. 

The All-American Summer Job

What an embarrassment!  The students were supposed to experience the joys of American culture and perfect their English  while they, like so many young Americans, held a summer job that would help defray their college expenses.  How American can you get?   So they’d been issued a variant of the classic  J-1 educational visa. 

In fact,  working a speed-up job on the night shift for peanuts (not even the joys of almonds) they did experience American culture, but not the kind that features summer music festivals and tete-â-tetes at Starbucks.  And they reacted in a way that drew on (once) standard operational procedure among mistreated American workers.  They rose up.  They protested.  And they did find some admirable segments of American society ready to show them how the system could work for them.  So call it a mini American Spring.  What a pity if overworked, underpaid native-born American workers don’t follow the visitors’ self-respecting example and demand a government that represents Main Street, not Wall Street.

The Hershey story is fascinating and instructive for three reasons.  It reveals, once again, how  the J-1 visa, for all its idealistic origins and fine accomplishments, has always been susceptible to manipulation.  It also shows how the U.S. government’s ever-multiplying levels and varieties of sub-contracting have made supervision so difficult that mission goals often become distorted and financial malfeasance becomes commonplace.  Finally, the Hershey debacle is just one more chapter in the exploitation of labor that has blighted American history from day one and, now, under global cost pressures, seems to be providing material for a new ignoble chapter.    

The Happy Student Story

So what’s a J-1 visa anyway?  To keep it simple, let’s say it’s the visa foreigners must seek if they want to study in the U.S.  With the right papers from the accepting university, college or other bona fide educational institution and strong evidence of plans to return home after the graduation ceremonies are over, the visa is granted expeditiously.

What’s the point of making it (relatively) easy for these students to enter the U.S?  It’s good for America if people wish to study here. U.S. universities and colleges can use the tuition money, especially to support programs in the science and math departments spurned by too many Americans.  Better yet, historically, some of the top foreign students have remained (legally) in the U.S. and thank goodness for that.  Since so few native-born Americans wish to study math, engineering or the sciences, these  J-1 alumni immigrants have been disproportionately responsible for the American lead in computer and computer-based technology, to name just one area of excellence which helped to prolong the American century.

As for those foreign students who chose, degrees-in-hand, to return home, that was good for the U.S., too.  Having been in contact with the best of America and often being grateful for a first rate education, the returnees became de facto American ambassadors in their own country.  They have been knowledgeable.  They have been sympathetic.  Soft power at its best. A terrific return on America’s  investment in the bureaucratic capacity to issue visas to those properly qualified to receive them.

The Perversions

Well, that’s how the J-1 visa is process is supposed to work.  Mostly it does, but it’s never been easy to separate the honest students from the opportunists, some heart-wrenchingly in need of a path—any path—to a better future. So, on any one day, American visa officers have to deal with sad cases who plead for exceptions as well as shady operators who play games with the truth and submit documents of dubious validity.  As for those documents, fraudulent or not, they bring further complexities.  Some of the more naive candidates may not know that their admission papers come from notorious—or newly established—diploma mills, which serve two ignoble purposes.  They allow American fraudsters to collect tuition money from clueless foreigners who will end up with worthless educational credentials.  They also allow knowing foreigners to masquerade as students in order to evade America’s otherwise forbiddingly strict immigration laws. 

In February I wrote about the diplomatic fallout from a raid on a relatively unknown diploma mill in California.  At the time, it was not known if all or indeed any of the students who were uncivilly apprehended and clamped into ankle bracelets had been aware of the true caliber of the “university” they planned to attend when they applied for admission, but all of them were treated like criminals by U.S. immigration authorities.  The reaction in India was shock and anger, and the clumsy handling of the incident by a public affairs officer at an American consulate in India added fuel to the fire.  The State Department’s immediate response to the Hershey affair was equally clumsy.

The Monstruous Pyramid of Contractors

Unfortunately, any attempt to understand and assign responsibility for the perversion of the J-1 visa process at the Hershey packing plant has been complicated by the multi-leveled sub-contracting network that blights too many U.S. government operations today. “Among the four companies with a role in the huge plant where the foreign students were employed, each one pointed to another as being the primary manager in charge of monitoring the students’ work....The Hershey Company said it had contracted day-to-day operations at the packing plant to Exel, a logistics company. Exel contracted with a local labor supplier, SHS Staffing Solutions, to provide temporary workers, including the J-1 students, for the summer months when work is at a peak....” 

The chocolate-maker, worried about its image, came up with a boilerplate PR response.  “The Hershey Company expects all its vendors, including Exel, to treat employees fairly and equitably,” said Kirk Saville, a spokesman, when the J-1 story broke.  And the State Department, no doubt, could express equally sanguine expectations re the performance of its J-1 contractors and sub-contractors. But, as a certain president is supposed to have said, trust isn’t enough.  You have to verify. When you give money away, you must ensure that the contractor has used the funding according to contract—and, my goodness, effectively. That means hiring auditors, lots of auditors, auditors with guts and no complicating connections.  It ain’t cheap.

All in all, when oversight and goodly profit margins are built in, not all that much is saved by contracting out—especially when a more or less normal amount of corruption is added in—and a predictably  minimal commitment to the mission itself is allowed for.  Let’s put the commitment part this way.  A State Department employee’s mission is to produce a good policy result for the U.S.  He or she gains no institutional reward  by doing a shoddy job.  However, since a contractor’s mission is only to make a profit, the quality of the job isn’t as important as his bottom line.

Cynical?  No, realistic.  Again and again in recent years we’ve witnessed the tragicomedy of foreign policy—developmental, diplomatic, military—contracted out.  The reports from U.S. missions in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq show how billions of U.S. dollars have been funneled through private sector organizations to very poor effect.  Sometimes, it seems, sub-contractors have found it profitable to funnel U.S. dollars to Taliban agents!  And so on.  The Hershey debacle is the tiniest peephole into this vast scandal made possibly by the ideological romance with privatization. Needless to say the ideologues in Washington do not want a proper auditing of this waste of tax payer dollars.

Cheap Labor Redux

Unfortunately, the Hershey incident also reminds us of the ruthless exploitation that has been a constant of American economic history.  The norm was established early on, with black slave labor and indentured white labor. By the nineteenth century the cheap labor that was needed had other origins: the Chinese who built our continent-spanning railroads; the Eastern and Southern Europeans who did the grunt work in factories and mines that made for the industrial revolution.  Toward the end of the twentieth century the people who were worked as hard as possible for as little as possible tended increasingly to be Latinos.  In America, anyone will do, so long as the price is right. 

And so, in the Hershey case, the J-1 visa process was co-opted for private profit, but the State Department was largely oblivious. Or was it?  I don’t know.  I only know that the Hershey situation, once it developed, was managed badly.  Surely, it could have been handled managed more adroitly—but only if there had been the kind of oversight that would have provided the data to respond convincingly.  In that case, State could have cited the huge numbers of happy participants involved in this wonderful program, then told a few well-chosen emotionally-satisfying success stories and finally promised, with convincing earnestness, to get to the bottom of this truly unfortunate aberration. The press reaction, I promise you, would have been far less scornful.   

 

The Unsettling Case of Sergei Magnitsky, Hermitage Capital and the Russian Mafia

By Patricia H. Kushlis

The last time I visited Moscow was three years after the Soviet Union collapsed.  It was an unsettling experience and one reason why I have yet to return.

Crime was rampant and one of our exchange professors – a young Russian speaking teacher – had just been assaulted on the Stari Arbat, one of Moscow’s most prestigious central shopping streets, by men in Russian army uniforms.  She had been physically attacked, robbed and her teeth smashed.  This had happened one early Friday evening in October during the height of an after work shopping excursion. 

This young woman and her friend and colleague - another American teacher who also spoke fluent Russian – blended in with the crowd in appearance and language.  Other Russians were horrified at what had happened and tried to help her. An Embassy officer and I interviewed her in her dormitory soon after.  The physical violence was painfully obvious.

A culture of seemingly senseless crime

This was not the first time I had experienced similar senseless street crime in that city.  When I was exchanges officer at the US Embassy nearly a decade earlier, three foreign women – two American exchangees and a Finnish nanny - had been physically accosted at different times and places during my two year tenure there by drunken Russians and a male student had reported seeing fresh blood smeared on the walls of his apartment building’s stairwell one weekend. 

Since the Soviets then tried to shield foreigners from the effects of the country’s rampant criminality and physical violence (bad press for a society that claimed to be the crimeless Communist Nirvana), I still wonder what occurred in less well guarded buildings – away from the possibility of prying foreign eyes.

In 1978, the caviar-packed-in-tuna-fish-cans-for-export scam broke.  This almost laughable crime against state property involved the highest levels of the Soviet government.  Essentially, profits from the sales of the expensive contents of the cans made their way into secret foreign bank accounts of high level Soviet officials.

That was then, this is now

Has anything changed subsequently since the Communist regime collapsed?

Certainly. Both for good and for bad.

Many more Russians are allowed to own private property.  Moscow is jammed with cars. Russians travel and live abroad.  They work for private companies formed after 1991.  They dress well and fashionably. And, more importantly they write about events such as the Magnitsky affair in print and post them on the Internet even though the country's major mass media messenger - television is thoroughly controlled by the Putin regime.

Beneath the surface, however, corruption and the violence that accompanies it thrive big time. Perhaps even bigger time than when the stakes were far smaller.  Now not just state property is the object of personal avarice – individual and corporate holdings have become subject to the dictum that operated during the Soviet Union - “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine too – that is if I can get my hands on it – never mind how.”

The Law of the Jungle Still Applies

That’s what seems to have happened in terms of Sergei Magnitsky and the head of Tax Office Number 28, a woman named Olga Stepanova.  This former mid-level tax official who now works as an adviser to the head of Russia's new and powerful arms procurement agency clearly did not operate alone.  Investigative reporters have shown that she and her accomplices stole at least half a billion dollars, including or perhaps, in addition to, private property owned by individuals acquired by Stepanova by forging and issuing fraudulent deeds. 

Candidates for an Underground Railroad: Afghan Women

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Little by little U.S. policy makers are beginning to realize that a war with the Taliban can’t be won.  Why not?  Because it’s almost impossible to extricate or isolate “the Taliban” from the rest of Afghan society. 

Here, for instance, is a less than exhaustive list of how and why Afghan menfolk get involved with the Taliban:  Theology.  Ethnic loyalty.  Yearning for justice and order.  Traditional mores.  Excitement and adventure.  Disgust with corruption in Kabul.  Money. Self-protection.  Anti-American, anti-foreigner sentiments.  Fear, threats or duress. 

Unfortunately for American (or NATO) aspirations, no one incentive can counter or neutralize  each and all of these motivations.  As far as theology is concerned, there is a civil war going on within Sunni Islam.  Since this is not our battle, we can’t win it.  What's more, our influence is negligible—or worse: by confronting the Taliban, we create sympathy for beleaguered fellow Muslims even among those who actually loathe the Taliban.  The U.S. has also been unable to mitigate corruption within a central government functioning under a Constitution imposed by foreigners, whose fingerprints taint it beyond redemption, corrupt incumbents or not.  Traditional Afghans ask:  wouldn’t Sharia or simple Paktunwali be preferable?  Fear is more elemental.  Fear goes away when the Americans patrol, though relief is usually tinged with the shame of depending on non-Afghans for security. When the Americans move on to the next village, district or province, however, the guys with the guns are Taliban again.  Time to grow the beard back.

So it’s not surprising that a new Washington consensus is emerging: bring the Taliban in from the cold.  Get them to buy into the system.  More wishful thinking! If the Taliban leadership (or even lower level types) were sincerely amenable to joining in a government according to the present rules, why have they been fighting all these years?  Who honestly believes the Taliban, even in partial power, will respect women’s rights (defined according to Western standards) even if they promise to do so? Isn’t this the likely scenario: they’ll persuade their non-Taliban male colleagues to limit women’s opportunities, little by little, until it’s back into the box, ladies. 

The Taliban may take a while to regain the unchallenged upper hand in much of Afghanistan, and that’s the bright side for American forces.  With a little luck, the Yanks will be gone, the war lords will regroup and the re-Talibanization can be blamed on U.S.-favored Afghans who refused to use a proven model effectively. Whew!

The Airport Scene - Time to Change Those American Welcome Mats

In Tyler Brûlé’s September 18, 2010 Financial Times column entitled “Let’s play ‘Guess where I am?” the columnist wrote: “I’ve just come off an airliner (after an eight hour, 45 minute flight from Frankfurt) and it’s absolute pandemonium. There are gate agents screaming for transfer passengers, there are sniffer dogs, there are loads of immigration officers and there’s a general sense of disorganization.” His experience descended quickly downhill from there.

The answer to his “guess where I am” question - which he reveals later in his column - is Washington, DC’s Dulles Airport on a Sunday afternoon.

Akin to a “dumpy” airport in a “shambolic banana republic” or “police state”

Brûlé’s description of the immigration hall at Dulles was that of a “corral for citizens of the country” he’d “just arrived in and a much larger maze for everyone else.” “The citizen’s line (had) about 200 people waiting to be processed, while the other pen (had) more than 1,000 passengers waiting to be interrogated. . . He said that he studied “the scene . . .and reckoned” that he “was in for an hour’s wait. When passengers from a Jeddah flight” were “ushered to the front of the line,” he quickly revised his “timetable to 90 minutes.”

As he finally approached the inspector’s booth, a bevy of immigration officers closed up shop and waddled off duty in response to an all-points bulletin announced over the public address system that advised all officials who had not signed up for overtime to “leave their post.”

Dallas-Ft. Worth: Immigration the Weak Link

My experience at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport on a Wednesday afternoon coming from an equally long, or longer flight that originated in London was nowhere as horrific as Brûlé’s. I didn’t have to deal with antiquated airline-to-terminal shuttles that were state of the art decades ago but have long past their prime; the American Airlines flight I was on landed on time and the airline’s baggage transfer system functioned far better than a near Brûlé-type disaster I remember in Denver four years ago when the pandemonium there – at every step of the way from airline ground crew incompetence to long backlog at immigration - resulted in my missing my, albeit short, connecting flight to Albuquerque.

Nevertheless, the immigration hall at Dallas-Ft Worth was the weak link in the chain on September 8. The line was far longer for non-Americans – at least double. Even those of us with the appropriate passports had to wait in a queue for twenty or more minutes before approaching the official’s booth although handicapped were exempted and wheeled to the front of the line. An INS employee was assigned to direct the able-bodied to booths to keep us, I guess, from rushing the special booth reserved for airline crew, diplomats and APEC where, guess what, no one was waiting.