Other countries eagerly await U.S. immigration reform

They design our electronics, harvest our food, staff our research labs and care for our children. Immigrants -- legal and illegal, skilled and unskilled -- by all accounts are vital cogs in the wheel of the U.S. economy, and the money they send back to their families improves the quality of life throughout their homelands.

So why, when both sending and receiving countries benefit, is the quest for comprehensive immigration reform in the United States so politically divisive and often pushed to the legislative back burner?

Immigration policy experts say the caustic partisan debate over who can stay and who must go has been ratcheted up by the lingering joblessness inflicted by the Great Recession and the searing spotlight of Campaign 2012 that illuminated only candidates' points of contention rather than those of convergence.

Now that the election is over and President Obama purportedly is beholden to the 71% of Latino voters who helped propel him to a second term, the more sober analysts of immigration dynamics are predicting that lawmakers of all political stripes will make a priority of devising more fair, efficient and mutually advantageous practices for integrating foreign labor.

"Immigrants operate on supply and demand, like everyone else. If there is a huge supply of jobs, they will come to the United States and look for them. If, as the case has been recently, there is not a huge supply of jobs or work opportunities are declining, then they either don’t come here or they go back," said S. Lynne Walker, vice president of the Institute of the Americas and an immigration policy analyst for more than 20 years. She pointed to a Pew Hispanic Center report in April that tracked the steady decline of undocumented workers, who have been kept at bay by the recession.

Australians torn over promises, risks of coal-seam 'fracking'

Lock the Gate appears to be a fitting name for Australia’s protest movement against hydraulic fracturing. It took activists years to identify threats to public health from "fracking," a classic case of getting mobilized only after the proverbial horse has escaped.

Australians in the rural reaches of Queensland greeted fracking with gusto when the northeastern state’s political leaders began about seven years ago to tout the profit potential of the unconventional extraction method that blasts sand, water and chemicals into coal and shale seams. Ambitious projects were drafted. More than 4,500 wells were drilled in barely two years, and work has begun on a 250-mile pipeline from the gas fields to Gladstone Harbor and a massive liquefaction facility there. Once construction of the port complex on Curtis Island is completed in 2014, gas will be converted to liquefied natural gas and shipped north to energy-hungry Asian neighbors.

It wasn’t until the buildup got into full swing about three years ago that locals began complaining of distressing side effects of fracking. Activists claim drinking-water aquifers have been contaminated, groundwater depleted and greenhouse gases released along a three-mile stretch of the Condamine River, which at times appears to be boiling.

Dredging in Gladstone Harbor has been blamed for disease outbreaks among fish and mud crabs. Marine scientists attribute the sickness to toxic metals being stirred up from the seabed. Port developers say the defects and deaths were caused by an excess of fresh water from seasonal flooding.

“What was a wonderful fish nursery has turned into an industrial harbor, with ships that will be driving straight through the Great Barrier Reef,” said Matt Landos, a University of Sydney researcher and private consultant in aquatic animal health.

A greater irritant for Australians, Landos said, is the lack of information being provided on the environmental and health costs entailed in the race to make Australia the No. 1 LNG exporter in the world by 2020.

Gas output in historically coal-dependent Australia took off in the last decade, beginning with undersea extraction off the northwestern coast. It quickly swept to the more populous east coast with the discovery of major coal-seam deposits in the Bowen and Surat basins that extend from Queensland into New South Wales.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration in its 2011 world energy outlook reports that Australia, already the fourth-biggest exporter of LNG, has the largest proven natural gas reserves in the Asia-Pacific region, with 110 trillion cubic feet. It has nearly four times that volume in technically recoverable shale gas, the agency estimates, leaving it well positioned to fill the booming energy needs of the region.

Queensland’s new premier, Campbell Newman, campaigned on a platform of support for the LNG buildup but insisted before his election in March that it wouldn’t be “at any cost,” that the agricultural state's farmland had to be protected.

But activists charge that pursuit of the gas bonanza has been unbridled. And the acrimony has only intensified since the appointment of rancher John Cotter as “gas sheriff,” charged with resolving disputes between landowners and gas industry interests. Cotter’s son, John Jr., is founder of a private company that does consulting and project management in mining operations, including contracts with the multibillion-dollar Queensland Curtis Project expanding coal seam fracking and helping build an underground pipeline.

Lock the Gate Chairman Drew Hutton accuses the Cotters of having an “intolerable” conflict of interest and calls the appointment “a most appalling, short-sighted decision,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported last month.

Landos accuses the Queensland government of being blinded to the environmental threats of expanded fracking by “starry-eyed economic forecasts” of Australia emerging as the new LNG global powerhouse.

“It’s a false accounting that doesn’t take into consideration the costs of environmental cleanup,” the veterinary scientist complained in a telephone interview from Sydney. Expectations of jobs and export income, he added, “are leading to tremendous enthusiasm among our politicians to push the industry forward with minimal impediment.”

He worries that the all-out drive for LNG dominance will destroy coastal fisheries and damage sites of natural beauty in exchange for an economy dependent on gas that could be exhausted in 25 years.

The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization warned the Australian government in June that its rapid LNG development plan was posing “a significant risk” to the Great Barrier Reef, which has been under World Heritage protection since 1981. It extends from Gladstone Harbor northward along the Queensland coast and would be traversed by gas exporting ships headed for China, Japan and Taiwan.

UNESCO asked the Queensland government to provide assurances by February 2013 that port development will be brought under control and the reef protected, warning that otherwise the site may be designated as "in danger," a shaming censure for any First World national steward.

Campbell, the state premier, responded to the world body report with assurances that the environment would be protected, "but we are not going to see the economic future of Queensland shut down."

Lock the Gate and other anti-fracking groups have exploded over the last year as farmers have seen their water tables drop and their land littered with mine tailings, said Mariann Lloyd-Smith, a lawyer and senior advisor to the International POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants) Elimination Network. The groups seek clarity on what is being injected into the coal seams. Companies often refuse to disclose such information, saying the formulas are industrial secrets.

Groups such as Australia’s National Toxins Network have been collecting data on pollution and waste to use in legal challenges that have become so prevalent that some fracking companies are giving up and handing in their exploration permits, Lloyd-Smith said.

Unlike in the United States, where property owners hold the rights to resources beneath their land, the Australian government owns everything below the topsoil. The Gasfields Commission has the authority to compel landowners to accommodate energy exploration, typically resulting in compensation of about $1,500 per well, Lloyd-Smith said. That's turning out to be too little to clean up the mess once drilling is over, driving up opposition across Australia.

Temporary bans on fracking in the two states south of Queensland -– New South Wales and Victoria –- have been enacted in response to public demands for investigation of environmental damage claims.

“When one farmer locks his gate, the companies have the right to take the case to arbitration or to the courts, and they often do. But when 100 farmers lock their gates, it’s a case of diminishing returns for the companies,” Lloyd-Smith said. “It’s that sort of consolidation of the community opposition that to a degree is winning the battle.”

"To a degree" may be the operative assessment, as energy industry leaders are fighting back. In a speech in Melbourne this month, ExxonMobil Australia President John Dashwood blamed the fracking bans on “those who run agendas on emotional messages.” He pointed to reduced greenhouse gas emissions as a tangible benefit from replacing coal-generated power with natural gas from shale and coal seams.

With more than $500 billion in LNG-purchase commitments from Asian neighbors already on the books, even the more vociferous cries of fracking opponents are being drowned out by the drilling and blasting from new wells cropping up by the dozens each week.

As Hutton of Lock the Gate recently warned, "The Queensland environment is going to die a death of 1,000 cuts with this industry that it cannot control.”

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Photo: Protests against the proliferation of coal-seam gas fracking have swelled in size and number in recent months as farmers, ranchers and rural residents confront industry and government leaders over the alleged polluting side effects of the unconventional gas extraction process. This protest last spring targeted plans to frack in New South Wales. Credit: Courtesy of Andrya Hart

 

North Korea farmers to test regime appetite for reform

Bountiful cucumbers, tomatoes and oranges grown in tiny backyard gardens kept private farmers' markets in business in the Soviet Union and served as a constant reminder that, by contrast, massive state-run farming collectives were pitifully inefficient.

In China, agricultural reforms were the crucial kick-start to the communist giant's three-decade transition from a centrally planned economy to one driven by market forces. And unlike their cohorts in Moscow, the Chinese leadership managed the rural revolution without losing its grip on political power.

North Korea's communist leadership is now reported by recent visitors to be experimenting with smaller-sized farming cooperatives and incentives for expanding food production by letting farmers keep and sell more of what they grow.

The dilemma faced by the Pyongyang regime, say academics who scrutinize the hermetic state, is whether opening the agricultural sector will rescue the economy, as it did in China, or whet North Koreans' appetite for more opportunity and political choice, thereby bringing down one-party rule, as it did in the Soviet Union.

No proclamations of radical change to combat persistent food shortages came out of Tuesday's session of the Supreme People's Assembly, a rubber-stamp parliament of 687 deputies all aligned with new leader Kim Jong Un. But veteran Korea watchers say they wouldn't expect a dramatic gesture.

"They can do that without trumpeting it," Stephan Haggard, director of the Korea-Pacific Institute at UC San Diego, said of the market reforms quietly introduced this summer at local and regional cooperative meetings. "That comports with the style I would expect to see, that the leadership is not going to stand up and make bold pronouncements that they're moving in a new direction."

Significant among the changes that will apply to next month's harvest,  Haggard said, is the government's revised formula for splitting crops between growers and the state. Farmers previously kept a small share of their output for their own consumption and delivered the rest to the government for distribution to the cities, but they now will be able to keep -- and presumably sell at market prices -- all produce in excess of an upfront quota for the state.

"The idea is that farmers are then incentivized to put in additional work to produce more, if they believe the quota will hold," Haggard said. "One thing we worry about is if they have shortages, the regime might be tempted to walk in and say that they can't have hunger in the military and will seize what they need."

There is also uncertainty over how willing the regime is to let the market determine food prices, as the government also talks of imposing price controls to rein in inflation, said Charles Armstrong, director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University.

Armstrong has been tracking what he calls a "bottom-up market reform" since the 1990s and sees significant parts of the economy now operating outside state control. Black markets flourish for scarce consumer goods smuggled in from China. Barter is a common means of commerce, independent of the won's fluctuating value. Underpaid professionals and craftsmen surreptitiously peddle their talents to monied elites in the capital and other major cities, Armstrong said.

Although Kim's leadership would want to prevent the rise of an entrepreneurial class that could challenge its monopoly on political power, Armstrong said, he still sees the most promising signs in more than a decade that the regime is eager to redirect investment from military to civilian pursuits.

Since he assumed power nine months ago, Kim has altered the image of the leadership with more speeches and public appearances  than his father, Kim Jong Il, made in 18 years as leader. He has weeded out some of the stodgier generals in the military hierarchy and promoted younger officers to positions of power, analysts note. And he is the first in the Kim dynasty, installed by his grandfather Kim Il Sung at the nation's founding, to introduce Western entertainment and attend performances with his fashionably dressed wife.

Victor Cha, head of Korean scholarship at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, heralds the signals of change as "encouraging" but adds that reform has been attempted in the past only to be rescinded later.

"The dilemma for them is that real reform means loosening political controls and allowing opening, which a young, leadership-in-transition, is afraid to do," Cha said of Kim Jong Un.

The young leader's father introduced modest agricultural reforms in 2002 but revoked them three years later, reverting to an isolationist posture amid condemnation of North Korea's nuclear aspirations. He again embraced a quixotic policy of food self-sufficiency, refusing foreign humanitarian aid despite persistent malnutrition, the country's dearth of arable land and vulnerability to floods and mudslides.

Cha applauds the latest reform measures, not because he thinks they herald the kind of charismatic top-down transformation executed by China's Deng Xiaoping, "but because each time they allow for some economic incentivization in the market, they pull it back again at their own peril."

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Photo: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on a recent visit to the Pyongyang Vegetable Science Institute. Since Kim assumed the leadership nine months ago, he has quietly introduced some market-oriented agricultural reforms in hope of boosting crop outputs and easing chronic food shortages. Credit: Korea Central News Agency