My comparative silence on “…my Heart’s in Accra” has been counterbalanced by a couple of long posts on the Global Voices website. Rebecca and I presented our current thinking about GV to our Berkman colleages and friends on Tuesday, and we wanted a couple of great stories to show off as we “soft-launched” the project. In the past couple of days, I’ve posted an online conversation with Sokari Ekine, the creator of the fantastic Black Looks blog, an essay by Elina Karakulova on her reactions to the “revolution” in Kyrgyzstan, and a quick look at the weblog put together by rights organization Sokwanele in Zimbabwe. I’ll throw something up later today talking about what we accomplished in Tuesday’s brainstorm…

A bit of followup here, talking a bit more about aspects of the Kyrgyz and Zimbabwe stories.

I’m suspicious of folks on both the left and the right who are talking up the Kyrgyz “revolution” as part of the spread of democracy through the world. One of the reasons I think Karakulova’s piece is so important is her observation that the events that just transpired were not a revolution, but a rebellion:

“I personally do not think that Kyrgyzstan witnessed a revolution, but a rebellion with change of political elites. Revolution implies ideological change. I do not see any ideological difference between the current interim government and the former one.”

The Akaev government was so rotten with corruption that no one was willing to stand in the way of the protesters when they seized the “White House”. But it’s a mistake to conclude that this shows support for a revolutionary “movement”, rather than just massive dissatisfaction with the status quo. (Indeed, Kurmanbek Bakiyev has said little that sounds like a recipe for a new direction for the Kyrgyz government.)

It would also be a mistake to assume that the Kyrgyz “revolution” will create some sort of domino-effect in the former Soviet republics. A rally of 1,000 people last week against Lukashenko was quickly dispersed, with the ringleaders being thrown into prison. As Fred Weir observes in the Christian Science Monitor:

the post-Soviet countries that have so far been rocked by revolution have been among the most liberal and relatively democratic in an admittedly tough region. “Akayev, to his credit, allowed a fairly permissive environment for NGO’s to work,” says Stuart Kahn, Kyrgyzstan project director for Freedom House, which is partly financed by the US government. The danger, he says, is that other Central Asian leaders may see Akayev’s concessions to democracy as the Achilles’ heel of his regime. “The lesson they may draw is that the permissive, or semi-repressive environment Akayev created is antithetical to maintaining the status quo.”

In other words, one very real possible outcome of the Kyrgyz revolution is an increasing crackdown on the limited freedoms still available in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Belarus.

On the Zimbabwe side of things, I wanted to look more closely at an article by my main man, Abraham McLaughlin. McLaughlin observes that China is a major player in the Zimbabwean election, an observation consonant with the trend that China is becoming a huge, if not dominant, political force on the continent. It’s widely understood that China’s efforts to prevent UN sanctions against Sudan have had less to do with solidary between oppresive nations, and more to do with ensuring access to a regular oil supply.

McLaughlin reports that the Chinese governments, or Chinese companies, have provided pro-Zanu-PF t-shirts and radio jamming devices to the ruling party, helped build Mugabe’s presidential palace, and sold the government jet fighters and trucks in violation of a Western arms embargo. It’s hard to know whether this is “just business” for the Chinese government, or whether they actively support Mugabe’s repressive regime. But, one way or another, it helps relieve pressure on dictatorial rulers by enabling them to point to the support they see in the east even as they lose support in the west.

Working closely with the WorldChanging team is having an effect on my blogging style: I’m finding it harder to post stories that seem purely like bad news. WorldChanging has a hard and fast rule – no doom, just solutions. Unfortunately, on the issues I focus on, that eliminates many of the stories I most want to talk about. But I’m still resistant to publishing stories that are pure, unmitigated bad news.

Which kept me from posting this story for a few days: a group calling itself the “Minutemen Project” is organizing in southern Arizona, planning on running private border patrols to deter illegal immigration from Mexico. Jim Gilchrist, who is helping organize the vigilantes, claims his patrols are designed to “assist” law enforcement – the US border patrol, on the other hand, has asked Gilchrist and his volunteers not to come to the Arizona border, and now plans on monitoring “Minuteman” activities at the same time as they watch the border. Human rights groups, including the ACLU, are also planning on watching the volunteers – who are expected to be armed – and Salvadorean criminal gang MS-13 has threatened to confront the “Minuteman” volunteers. Should make for an interesting month of April in and around Tombstone, Arizona, at the very least.

Yes, I’m worried that porous land borders are a potential terrorist risk (though, I would argue, much less so that our container ports, for instance.) And I agree that legal immigration is preferable to illegal immigration, at minimum because immigrants take tremendous personal risks crossing the US-Mexico border. But a response to complex immigration issues by massing armed civilians on the Arizona border looks like extremely thinly veiled racism to me, as well as a recipe for violent confrontation. (It’s unsurprising that the “Minuteman Project” has been generating extensive interest on racist sites like Stormfront in the past few weeks. As Stormfront poster “311inAZ” puts it: “This will not be a White racialist project, per se, and all that are concerned with our wide open borders are encouraged to apply.”)

There are two reasons that the Bush administration hasn’t extensively cracked down on illegal overland immigration. One is that it’s really hard – the Mexican border is enormous, largely unfenced and runs through some of the most isolated, barren and hostile environments of the US. But the major reason is that a strong crackdown against illegal immigration would be economically disastrous to the US. Millions of low-paying jobs in the United States are filled by illegal immigrants. Because of this uncomfortable truth, pro-business groups often find themselves supporting immigration reform which lowers immigration barriers… and tend to oppose strict enforcement and border control measures.

Which brings us to the subject of robots. (I love a good segue.)

Joshua Davis has a beautiful story in Wired, “La Vida Robot”, which looks at a team of high school students from Carl Hayden Community High School in West Phoenix who build an underwater robot that takes first prize in a national robotics championship, beating a well-funded team from MIT.

All four students on the team are undocumented immigrants from Mexico. This means that Oscar Vasquez, team capitan and ROTC student, discovered that he’s ineligible for military service and the academic scholarships that come with it. He wants to study engineering at Arizona State University, but because he’s undocumented, he’s ineligible for federal loans, and ASU considers him an “out of state” student, more than doubling the in-state tuition to over $10,000 a year. As a result, he’s installing sheetrock in Phoenix.

If this pisses you off as much as it does me, I encourage you to do two things. One, support the “DREAM Act” – S. 1545 – which would enable states to decide to extend scholarship aid to undocumented students who’ve lived in the US for multiple years. And visit the page Wired has set up for the La Vida Robot Scholarship Fund, designed to support the efforts of these amazing young men to go to college. I just wrote them a check and I’m now marginally less angry.

My comparative silence on “…my Heart’s in Accra” has been counterbalanced by a couple of long posts on the Global Voices website. Rebecca and I presented our current thinking about GV to our Berkman colleages and friends on Tuesday, and we wanted a couple of great stories to show off as we “soft-launched” the project. In the past couple of days, I’ve posted an online conversation with Sokari Ekine, the creator of the fantastic Black Looks blog, an essay by Elina Karakulova on her reactions to the “revolution” in Kyrgyzstan, and a quick look at the weblog put together by rights organization Sokwanele in Zimbabwe. I’ll throw something up later today talking about what we accomplished in Tuesday’s brainstorm…

A bit of followup here, talking a bit more about aspects of the Kyrgyz and Zimbabwe stories.

I’m suspicious of folks on both the left and the right who are talking up the Kyrgyz “revolution” as part of the spread of democracy through the world. One of the reasons I think Karakulova’s piece is so important is her observation that the events that just transpired were not a revolution, but a rebellion:

“I personally do not think that Kyrgyzstan witnessed a revolution, but a rebellion with change of political elites. Revolution implies ideological change. I do not see any ideological difference between the current interim government and the former one.”

The Akaev government was so rotten with corruption that no one was willing to stand in the way of the protesters when they seized the “White House”. But it’s a mistake to conclude that this shows support for a revolutionary “movement”, rather than just massive dissatisfaction with the status quo. (Indeed, Kurmanbek Bakiyev has said little that sounds like a recipe for a new direction for the Kyrgyz government.)

It would also be a mistake to assume that the Kyrgyz “revolution” will create some sort of domino-effect in the former Soviet republics. A rally of 1,000 people last week against Lukashenko was quickly dispersed, with the ringleaders being thrown into prison. As Fred Weir observes in the Christian Science Monitor:

the post-Soviet countries that have so far been rocked by revolution have been among the most liberal and relatively democratic in an admittedly tough region. “Akayev, to his credit, allowed a fairly permissive environment for NGO’s to work,” says Stuart Kahn, Kyrgyzstan project director for Freedom House, which is partly financed by the US government. The danger, he says, is that other Central Asian leaders may see Akayev’s concessions to democracy as the Achilles’ heel of his regime. “The lesson they may draw is that the permissive, or semi-repressive environment Akayev created is antithetical to maintaining the status quo.”

In other words, one very real possible outcome of the Kyrgyz revolution is an increasing crackdown on the limited freedoms still available in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Belarus.

On the Zimbabwe side of things, I wanted to look more closely at an article by my main man, Abraham McLaughlin. McLaughlin observes that China is a major player in the Zimbabwean election, an observation consonant with the trend that China is becoming a huge, if not dominant, political force on the continent. It’s widely understood that China’s efforts to prevent UN sanctions against Sudan have had less to do with solidary between oppresive nations, and more to do with ensuring access to a regular oil supply.

McLaughlin reports that the Chinese governments, or Chinese companies, have provided pro-Zanu-PF t-shirts and radio jamming devices to the ruling party, helped build Mugabe’s presidential palace, and sold the government jet fighters and trucks in violation of a Western arms embargo. It’s hard to know whether this is “just business” for the Chinese government, or whether they actively support Mugabe’s repressive regime. But, one way or another, it helps relieve pressure on dictatorial rulers by enabling them to point to the support they see in the east even as they lose support in the west.

Working closely with the WorldChanging team is having an effect on my blogging style: I’m finding it harder to post stories that seem purely like bad news. WorldChanging has a hard and fast rule – no doom, just solutions. Unfortunately, on the issues I focus on, that eliminates many of the stories I most want to talk about. But I’m still resistant to publishing stories that are pure, unmitigated bad news.

Which kept me from posting this story for a few days: a group calling itself the “Minutemen Project” is organizing in southern Arizona, planning on running private border patrols to deter illegal immigration from Mexico. Jim Gilchrist, who is helping organize the vigilantes, claims his patrols are designed to “assist” law enforcement – the US border patrol, on the other hand, has asked Gilchrist and his volunteers not to come to the Arizona border, and now plans on monitoring “Minuteman” activities at the same time as they watch the border. Human rights groups, including the ACLU, are also planning on watching the volunteers – who are expected to be armed – and Salvadorean criminal gang MS-13 has threatened to confront the “Minuteman” volunteers. Should make for an interesting month of April in and around Tombstone, Arizona, at the very least.

Yes, I’m worried that porous land borders are a potential terrorist risk (though, I would argue, much less so that our container ports, for instance.) And I agree that legal immigration is preferable to illegal immigration, at minimum because immigrants take tremendous personal risks crossing the US-Mexico border. But a response to complex immigration issues by massing armed civilians on the Arizona border looks like extremely thinly veiled racism to me, as well as a recipe for violent confrontation. (It’s unsurprising that the “Minuteman Project” has been generating extensive interest on racist sites like Stormfront in the past few weeks. As Stormfront poster “311inAZ” puts it: “This will not be a White racialist project, per se, and all that are concerned with our wide open borders are encouraged to apply.”)

There are two reasons that the Bush administration hasn’t extensively cracked down on illegal overland immigration. One is that it’s really hard – the Mexican border is enormous, largely unfenced and runs through some of the most isolated, barren and hostile environments of the US. But the major reason is that a strong crackdown against illegal immigration would be economically disastrous to the US. Millions of low-paying jobs in the United States are filled by illegal immigrants. Because of this uncomfortable truth, pro-business groups often find themselves supporting immigration reform which lowers immigration barriers… and tend to oppose strict enforcement and border control measures.

Which brings us to the subject of robots. (I love a good segue.)

Joshua Davis has a beautiful story in Wired, “La Vida Robot”, which looks at a team of high school students from Carl Hayden Community High School in West Phoenix who build an underwater robot that takes first prize in a national robotics championship, beating a well-funded team from MIT.

All four students on the team are undocumented immigrants from Mexico. This means that Oscar Vasquez, team capitan and ROTC student, discovered that he’s ineligible for military service and the academic scholarships that come with it. He wants to study engineering at Arizona State University, but because he’s undocumented, he’s ineligible for federal loans, and ASU considers him an “out of state” student, more than doubling the in-state tuition to over $10,000 a year. As a result, he’s installing sheetrock in Phoenix.

If this pisses you off as much as it does me, I encourage you to do two things. One, support the “DREAM Act” – S. 1545 – which would enable states to decide to extend scholarship aid to undocumented students who’ve lived in the US for multiple years. And visit the page Wired has set up for the La Vida Robot Scholarship Fund, designed to support the efforts of these amazing young men to go to college. I just wrote them a check and I’m now marginally less angry.