— In a sentence, Monti reminds us that the debate on privatisation needs to get more complex.
—
Alan Greenspan in the FT. The man who lowered interest rates to zero and then left.
BUT he deserves major kudos for banging the drum on immigration in consistent, thoughtful, and surprising ways.
Chanel Paris Bombay
I took Pier’s advice and watched Vincere, an operatic film about Mussolini’s first wife. It is quite brilliant, has beautiful and disturbing set pieces, and is very Italian. This is one of them, and uses an aria from an American opera—Philip Glass’ Akhnaten—to effect.
Happy Christmas.
Wassail Song, from Clare College Holly and the Ivy, 1979.
Jakarta—Despite the boom of recent years, Indonesia is still the sort of place from which young people seek to escape. Nearly all Indonesians who can afford it send their children to study in universities abroad, and my parents were no different. But where many of my former classmates have since become Canadians and Australians, I am again in Jakarta. Like most of the Indonesians I know who studied in the United States, I had trouble staying there after graduating. Many of these would-be Americans are now doing exceptional things elsewhere. One person who was denied a visa to the United States is now back in Indonesia, founding his own tech company. Another went to the Netherlands and is working on a software platform to sell to Indonesian companies. They would have preferred to be making contributions to the United States, but the American immigration system wouldn’t permit it.
No one can deny that immigration is a major political issue in the U.S.—it has, in some respects, dominated this year’s Republican presidential primary—but it’s lamentable how narrowly the issue is usually defined. Much of the American public is obsessed with the specter of poor, illegal immigrants, but there is little attention paid to the byzantine system for skilled migrants. There is a bipartisan skilled immigration plan sponsored by Charles Schumer and Mike Lee currently meandering through the Senate, but its prospects, like all recent immigration reform efforts, are dim.
In the absence of reform, the American immigration system will remain what it is—the product of a series of accidents and miscalculations by policymakers. From the preferences for family unification that have come to dominate America’s immigration system to the absurd lotteries that determine green cards, the overall picture is unflattering: of a country on autopilot, with a civil service incapable of formulating a long-term strategic plan in the national interest, and with rabid interest groups jockeying for narrow victories. There’s no perfect way to determine how many family members, skilled migrants, refugees, or other groups America should admit—broader questions of economic vitality, social justice, belonging, and obligation all need to play a part—but as it stands, there’s simply no coherence at all.
THE UNITED STATES’ modern immigration system was born in the postwar era with the abolition of the ethnic quota system that favored Europeans. Conservatives and patriotic groups were initially opposed to the 1965 reform to abolish quotas, but they eventually relented, in part because they imagined the concept of family reunification would help to freeze the ethnic landscape in the 1960s. “Do you not agree with me that it would be vastly easier for us to assimilate into American life an Englishman than it would be to assimilate a person from Indonesia?” asked Senator Sam Ervin, a notable conservative in the hearings, about people like myself. “I think immigration should be restricted to those who have relatives already in this country. I think that we should have our immigration drawn in such a way as to reunite families.” There was a general understanding that family reunification would prevent an excess of many non-white migrants entering the country. As Representative Emmanuel Celler, author of the 1965 Hart-Celler immigration act said, “since the people of Africa and Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate from those countries because they had no family ties to the United States.”
The congressmen’s assumptions turned out to be completely, even spectacularly wrong. Immigration from Asia totaled about 15,000 a year in the 1950s but surged to 43,000 a year in the ’60s, then to six times that amount by the ’80s. Policymakers had no understanding of the concept of “chain migration,” which renders the composition of the native cohort not nearly as meaningful as the future supply of the incoming cohort. To put it simply, while there were many Americans of French descent already in the United States, they had comparatively few relatives available and willing to migrate, whereas the small number of Thai in America were linked to millions of other Thai seeking to emigrate. The reason this miscalculation was important is not because we ought to prefer European immigrants to Asian ones. Rather, if policymakers had understood the concept of “chain migration,” they might have ditched the family reunification system entirely in favor of a more meritocratic or humanitarian one. Instead, the country was saddled with an immigration policy that neither sought out the most skilled applicants nor recognized its historic obligation to the needy of the world (“give us your tired, your poor”), opting instead to cater to the special interests of some of its citizens.
The second accident that defines our current dysfunctional system comes on the heels of the first: By the 1980s, congressional panels began to think up ways to redress what they saw as the immigration system’s bias against Europeans. It had become clear that family reunification hurt would-be European migrants because they had no immediate relatives in America—most of their ancestors had migrated decades ago, whereas Asians and Latin Americans had “fresher” ties to the United States and could keep coming. At the same time, the number of illegal Irish and Italian immigrants in the country had grown, and powerful lobbies began to call for a solution.
The NP-5 visa lottery was subsequently created to aid nationalities “adversely affected” by the 1965 law. Because Irish groups had strong political ties to the immigration subcommittees, which among others, included Senator Ted Kennedy, initially 40 percent of the lottery visas were allotted only for Irish nationals, an extraordinary handout. Later, the program was expanded into what is now known as the green card lottery. Today’s lottery is not particularly discriminating—applicants need a high school diploma and two years of work experience—and in 2011, 12.1 million people applied for 50,000 visas. The national quotas have since been randomized, deprioritizing the Irish, but it now contains a more basic, troubling feature: America is the only country to use lotteries to determine questions of citizenship, which, incidentally, is something it appears to have made a habit out of—lotteries also decide the recipients of the H-1B skilled worker visa when the 65,000 person cap is reached. Both lotteries are partly to correct mistakes made in 1965. A non-lottery H1-B system is not possible until Congress votes to increase the number of skilled workers allowed to migrate or narrow the definition of skill to reduce applications. The political paralysis of the past decade, however, has left even a basic reforms like this impossible.
The third accident also involves the 1965 law and demonstrates the power of special interest groups in crafting our current system. As it turns out the White House never intended for the family reunification category to represent the largest category of visas in the first place. The initial plan President Kennedy and his advisor Abba Schwartz sent to Congress in July 1963 envisioned a 50 percent quota for skilled migration, with the remaining places for close relatives and refugees—similar to Canada today. But the House committee chairman deliberating the bill, Michael Feighan, was successfully lobbied by ethnic and labor groups in his district to bring their own family members to America. Unions don’t tend to favor a large influx of immigration, but the AFL-CIO and other groups in the 1950s and 1960s were comprised mostly of recent migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, which were particularly active in Feighan’s district. The congressman, who nearly lost his seat in 1964 and was fighting a tough reelection battle in 1966, caved easily to the pressure. As Feighan told a congressional reporter on September 30, a few days before the Hart-Cellar bill that revamped American immigration was passed, “1,000 families in my district would benefit from the family reunification provisions of the final bill.”
As a result, the preferences that were unveiled in 1965 were diametrically opposed to what the Kennedy administration had imagined, with family reunification at 74 percent, professionals and skilled workers at 20 percent, and refugees at 6 percent. Today, these basic proportions hold, with two-thirds of immigrants arriving because they are related to American citizens, 13 percent from employment (of which a maximum of 10 percent are skilled), 5 percent via the Green Card lottery, and the remainder as refugees.
THE HISTORY OF AMERICA’S ACCIDENTAL immigration system points to the absence of any kind of long-term strategic planning on the issue. This is not to suggest that America should design its system to only accept skilled migrants. There is a historical obligation to the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses that makes America different from more practical settler countries like Australia or Canada, in which immigration is used foremost as a tool of economic policy and where, at least in Canada, nearly 66 percent of all immigrants are skilled.
But the United States does need to decide what it wants its immigration system to accomplish. As long as it proves incapable of considering its long-term goals, Washington will blunder from one policy event to another in a process of bureaucratic improvisation that fails to serve the country’s interests. Meanwhile, groups of citizens more concerned about their family members than the fate of the country will continue to wield enormous influence: They have already proven that their opposition can help defeat any half-sensible attempts at reform (Abba Schwartz’s 1963 reform or George W. Bush’s 2007 proposed changes come to mind). The issue, in other words, can’t be solved through a technical fix: It concerns civic virtue, and whether Americans can be convinced to change their priorities, to admit fewer relations in favor of talented outsiders and poor people. The first is an economic imperative, the second a historical obligation. The current arrangements have neither morality nor efficiency in their favor.
If the system doesn’t change, where does this leave the United States? Canada and Australia have always been open, and one can get citizenship predictably in 3 to 6 years, unlike the 10 to 20 years common in the United States. In Singapore, graduates of a “top 100 university” are given priority, and the bureaucracy delivers what it promises. In Britain, there is a new consensus that immigration levels throughout the Blair and Brown years were unacceptably high and let in too many of the wrong sort. New visa programs are emerging, including one that rewards people with “exceptional talent.” The French, of course, have always fast-tracked immigration for graduates of its elite Grandes Ecoles. Young people with the talent and means are everywhere thinking, watching, observing. Ultimately they will go where they are wanted.
Sahil Mahtani lives (temporarily) in Jakarta, Indonesia.
“It is difficult to remain an emperor in the presence of a physician,” the emperor Hadrian tells us in Memoirs of Hadrian, a fictionalised retelling by Marguerite Yourcenar. It is a book famed for its imaginative recreation of Roman antiquity, not just through a correct inventory of objects but by conveying the mental landscape of the period. For her learning, Yourcenar was the first woman elected to the Académie Francaise. Scholars though can be worthy and mind-numbing. What it incredible here is the book’s adherence to Kafka’s exhortation it must “be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us,” must move us to pity, love or admiration.
The emperor Hadrian is dying, and has decided to instruct young Marcus Aurelius, who will be king, of his life. From the premise comes the essential arc of the story: an ambitious and insatiable youth, a lover of beauty trying to earn the favour of the emperor, a content young king, hunting, governing, and sleeping under the stars in various faraway Roman colonies, to the aged emperor, “a mass of humours, a sorry mixture of blood and lymph,” unable to think of himself as a king in the presence of his physician.
Yourcenar tells us she was fascinated by Hadrian’s period, which came after the time when Roman gods were no longer believed in, but before the establishment of Christianity, which is here dismissed as a troublesome Jewish cult. Without the prospect of myth or redemption, Hadrian’s mature outlook is essentially melancholy, the presence of life tempered by the awareness of death, after which there is nothing. Japanese literature identifies this cultural trope as “mono no aware,” a gentle awareness of the passing of things, especially youth and beauty, a sadness which heightens our appreciation of them. In this world-view, religion is a denial of nature, a promissory note of a place beyond death that cannot be redeemed.
This naturalism permeates Memoirs of Hadrian throughout and is its most moving aspect. The chapter on Hadrian’s grief at the death of his young companion Antinous at 20 is the emotional centerpiece of the book and deeply affecting. Mémoires d’Hadrien was published in 1951 in France, and translated a few years later by Yourcenar’s collaborator and partner Grace Frick. It still works.
Some passages convey the flavour of the book.
Attianus had been right in his conjectures: the virgin gold of respect would be too soft without some alloy of fear. The murder of four men of consular rank was received as was the story of the forged will: the honest and pure of heart refused to believe that I was implicated; the cynics supposed the worst, but admired me only the more. As soon as it was known that my resentment had suddenly come to an end Rome grew calm; each person’s joy in his own security caused the dead to be promptly forgotten. My clemency was matter for astonishment because it was deemed deliberate and voluntary, chosen each morning in preference to a violence which would have been equally natural to me; my simplicity was praised because it was thought that calculation figured therein. Trajan had had most of the virtues of the average man, but my qualities were more unexpected; one step further and they would have been regarded as a refinement of vice itself. I was the same man as before, but what had previously been despised now passed for sublime: my extreme courtesy, considered by the unsubtle a form of weakness, or even of cowardice, seemed now the smooth and polished sheath of force. They extolled my patience with petitioners, my frequent visits to the sick in the military hospitals, and my friendly familiarity with the discharged veterans. Nothing in all that differed from the manner in which I had treated my servants and tenant farmers my whole life long. Each of us has more virtues than he is credited with, but success alone brings them to view, perhaps because then we may be expected to cease practicing them. Human beings betray their worst failings when they marvel to find that a world ruler is neither foolishly indolent, presumptuous, nor cruel.
and this:
Arrian wrote me thus:
“I have completed the circumnavigation of the Black Sea, in conformity with the orders received…On the northern shore of that inhospitable sea we touched upon a small island of great import in legend, the isle of Achilles. As you know, Thetis is supposed to have brought her son to be reared on this islet shrouded in mist; each evening she would rise from the depths of the sea and would come to talk with her child on the strand. Nowadays the place is uninhabited; only a few goats graze there. It has a temple to Achilles. Terns, gulls, and petrels, all kinds of sea birds frequent this sanctuary, and its porch is cooled by the continual fanning of their wings still moist from the sea. But this isle of Achilles is also, as it should be, the isle of Patroclus, and the innumerable votive offerings which decorate the temple walls are dedicated sometimes to Achilles and sometimes to his friend, for of course whoever loves Achilles cherishes and venerates Patroclus’ memory. Achilles himself appears in dream to the navigators who visit these parts: he protects them and warns them of the sea’s dangers, as Castor and Pollux do elsewhere. And the shade of Patroclus appears at Achilles’ side.
I report these things to you because I think them worthy to be known, and because those who told them to me have experienced them themselves, or have learned them from credible witnesses… . Achilles sometimes seems to me the greatest of men in his courage, his fortitude, his learning and intelligence coupled with bodily skill, and his ardent love for his young companion. And nothing in him seems to me nobler than the despair which made him despise life and long for death when he had lost his beloved.”
I laid down the voluminous report of the governor of Armenia Minor, admiral of the expeditionary fleet. As always Arrian has worked well. But this time he is doing more than that: he offers me a gift which I need if I am to die in peace; he sends me a picture of my life as I should have wished it to be. Arrian knows that what counts is something which will not figure in official biographies and which is not written on tombs; he knows also that the passing of time only adds one more bewilderment to grief. As seen by him the adventure of my existence takes on meaning and achieves a form, as in a poem; that unique affection frees itself from remorse, impatience, and vain obsessions as from so much smoke, or so much dust; sorrow is decanted and despair runs pure. Arrian opens to me the vast empyrean of heroes and friends, judging me not too unworthy of it.
Anonymous asked: Dear Mahil, thank you for understanding & reviewing my book in this way, w. regards, Lizzy van Leeuwen
Dear Lizzy, incredibly nice of you. As you can see, I enjoyed the book very much. Do let me know if you are ever in Indonesia. Would be very happy to chat.—Sahil
Lost in Mall by Lizzie van Leeuwen
reviewed by Sahil Mahtani
30 October 2011 — Early in Lost in Mall, an anthropological account of middle-class Jakartans in the 1990s, a elderly lady enquires, weeping, whether “demokratisasi means she has to allow her servants to sit on the chairs from now on.” Lizzy van Leeuwen, a Dutch anthropologist with Indonesian relatives who spent much of the 1990s there, tells us that the lady almost had a stroke that morning after catching a servant sitting in an armchair while watching television—previously a floor-bound activity. For anybody who lived through the May 1998 riots in Jakarta, history felt like it was on fast-forward, and Lost in Mall is full of vignettes that show the magnitude of social change.
Van Leeuwen is curious about the DNA of the new middle classes of Indonesia. What are their socio-cultural origins, if any? What is their outlook on life, and specifically, how do they understand themselves in relation to the state and the outside world? Is it inevitable they will push for democracy, as “modernization theory”, an academic school of thought, holds or are they eternal Suharto-style “guided democracy” sympathisers? Befitting an ex-journalist, van Leeuwen decides “long-term participation” is the best way to gain insight into these chosen themes, and she moves in with the Wiyantos, a family in Bintaro, a nondescript but prosperous suburb of Jakarta. In the great tradition of Indonesianists who began as anthropologists—Clifford Geertz, James Siegel and Robert Hefner come to mind—van Leeuwen’s method is “thick description” followed by social and historical synthesis. Academic purists who prefer their scholarship liberated from relevance may balk, but the rest of us will appreciate her sharp insights into a substantial and growing group that is emblematic of larger trends across Asia—and of which little is known.
Bintaro, van Leeuwen writes, is a “fantasy island of modernity” with the kampung areas— urbanized villages common in Southeast Asia—hidden behind fences and high walls, surrounded by golf courses and hopeless villas. Crucially it is a place “where nothing major is supposed to happen.” In their air-conditioned lives, with frequent trips to nearby malls, residents could imagine themselves to have escaped Suharto’s Indonesia, “its backwardness, inefficiency, provincialism, control, corruption, officialdom, abuse of power, its ‘bad quality’ and all things archaic in general,” even while being an integral part of the regime’s base of support.
These descriptions offer a faithful, if searing, mirror of the city in the 1990s. Her description of the “apparent need to talk continuously about money” in Jakarta is spot on. Knowing the price of something here is still a mark of solidity and good sense, and great acclaim has been known to greet Indonesians who recite entire ledgers of prices. There are also some extraordinary character portraits of the Wiyantos. Ugo, a tall, fat thirteen-year old who has just been circumcised, spends all his time reading Japanese comics in his air-conditioned “relax room” and sometimes demands male servants to play football with him. When the ball falls in the sewer, he makes an authoritative hand-gesture for it to be washed before he will resume playing with it. This sort of behavior might be common in any sort of society where labour is cheap, but crucially, Ugo’s parents applaud his behavior—it is his first step towards becoming a “pater familias… a serious bapak,” a word meaning ‘father’ in Indonesian, and encompasses “all the father figures in the socio-political system, who all demanded respect, deference, and obedience.” Another Wiyanto sustains enough pathologies for several people: Sonya is obsessed with her skin color, attracted primarily to bules (Indonesian colloquial for white people), and is constantly threatening to leave Jakarta for Wichita, where she once studied and which she associates with freedom.
Lost in Mall is best on the massive depoliticization of Indonesian society, which has only recently begun to change. There is an extraordinary chapter detailing reactions to the 1998 May riots that will ring true to anyone who experienced them. In the face of conflagrations outside, Van Leeuwen’s Jakarta acquaintances resort to denial, playing down or fixating on objects without clear importance. Luxury possessions are a common crutch—people refer to their cars and houses totemically; an elderly lady repeatedly asks van Leeuwen to bring boldoot—a Dutch eau-de-cologne used in colonial times—instead of discussing the looting and burning of Slipi Plaza unfolding a block away from her.
Part of the problem with political expression in Indonesia may be that Bahasa, the national language, is too polite to express demands or complain about injustice or power. In Bahasa, one is never poor, just belum, or “not yet” rich. In fact, University of Tokyo scholar Saya Shiraishi has argued that learning Indonesian is not just about grammar and syntax but especially about “what must be kept unsaid and how important it is to know what lies behind the silence.” No wonder that Jakarta residents resorted to the language of consumption to convey 1998’s trauma. It was a reminder of more comforting suburban days, when nothing was supposed to happen.
When did the Indonesian middle classes depoliticize? The Soekarno years saw a jangle of activism from an intellectual vanguard, but for the most part people cannot be said to have been politically active. Van Leeuwen cites the work of Benedict Anderson and James Siegel to argue that the rejection of politics takes a more extreme cast after the trauma of 1965-1966, when a contested “communist” coup led to the immediate seizure of power by Suharto, culminating in the massacre of more than half a million Indonesians. Even today, key parts of the story have not been clarified, and public discussion is not as extensive as it should be. Adam Schwarz and Michael Vatikiotis, among others, have noted the awkward responses of Indonesians to mention of the events—people pretend not to have heard certain remarks or abruptly finish phone conversations. In the aftermath of the coup, van Leeuwen tells us, depoliticization, which became entrenched, turned “communist” terms like “social inequality” (let alone “class struggle”) into taboo expressions. Even “politics” became a bad word, with modernization the imperative of the hour. Jakartans became obsessed with crime, revolt and insecurity, even though the city is not particularly unsafe. Van Leeuwen rightly points out that late colonial literature too was obsessed with “rust en orde” (peace and order), which suggests that repression with modernization has deeper roots than the Suharto era, and might in some sense be the natural frame of reference for most Indonesians.
Today, of course, Indonesia has a lively public sphere and the freest press in Southeast Asia, at least according to the 2010 Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. But Suharto nostalgia is also all-pervasive, and if anything, more powerful than any liberal sentiments to which Indonesians are frequently exhorted to subscribe to by civil society types. Van Leeuwen prefaces her book with a strikingly contemporary caution against Aburizal Bakrie, the notorious Indonesian tycoon who is front-runner in the 2014 presidential contest, writing, “Suharto was inspired and instructed by colonial rule, and just as in the Netherlands, it takes a few generations to overcome this experience.” A Bakrie victory would show that the political pathologies predating Suharto have survived his demise.
Sahil Mahtani is writer currently based in Jakarta. He has previously written for The Economist, The New Republic, and the Far Eastern Economic Review.
Lost in Mall: An Ethnography of Middle Class Jakarta in the 1990’s, Lizzie van Leeuwen (University of Hawaii Press, July 2011; KITLV Press, July 2011)
© 2011 The Asian Review of Books.
Moderator: “Switzerland’s very high there.” [Pointing to a chart showing financial leverage in the developed world]
Kyle Bass: “Well Switzerland’s an anomaly, because two banks have all their assets. I don’t know if you know in Switzerland, if you’re a director of the bank you have personal liability of the assets if the bank goes down. So guess what? Very few Swiss banks go down. [Laughter] Their give-a-shit factor is pretty high on the loans they make.”
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Sahil Mahtani is a journalist based in Southeast Asia. He contributes to The Economist and a variety of regional publications.
