Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

My Facebook feed is alight with hysterical headlines regarding the Federal government’s treatment of undocumented immigrants who are younger than age 18. The worst horror described in the headlines is separation from parents, but also there are some articles about abuses suffered in what are essentially government-run short-term orphanages.

My stupid question for today is How does our government deport any person young enough to credibly claim to be under age 18?

Suppose that a young-looking person shows up in the U.S. and says the following:

• “I am 14 years old”
• “I grew up in a small village, but I don’t know what country we were part of.”
• “My name is Santiago, but I never was told about a last name.”
• “Adults brought me here against my will.”

How would our government go about deporting such a person? By definition this undocumented immigrant has no documents. It wouldn’t make sense to deport him to a specific country and there would be no reason for any specific country to take him.

Minor children are entitled to food, shelter, health care, and education, right? So Santiago would have to be provided with all of that for $50,000(?) per year in a government-run facility or maybe put into foster care (table of rates by state). He would have to be given education through age 18, perhaps at about $25,000 per year including the capital cost of building a school.

He can’t be imprisoned for the crime of breaking U.S. immigration laws, can he? He says that it was an adult who brought him here.

What actually happens in the above case?

[Separately, what is happening with the separation of children from parents that the headlines are screaming about? One article that I saw was about a father who came here from Central America as an asylum-seeker. He brought one child with him and left the wife and two or three additional kids back home to face whatever violence and oppression qualified him and the apparently favored child for asylum. He and the child (10 years old?) were separated for four days and then reunited to spend a few years in the U.S. waiting for the asylum request to be resolved.

My Facebook feed is on fire regarding this, but nobody mentions that separating children from parents is a common commercial activity in the U.S. We have boarding schools. We have summer camps. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a family law system whose primary function is separating children from one parent (see the “Children, Mothers, and Fathers” chapter for statistics on how 2/3rds of children report not having seen the loser parent within the preceding year). Obviously the govenrment-run orphanage is not an elite boarding school or a lakeside summer camp, but of all of the bad things that the Federal government does, why are people obsessed with this one?]

Related from Facebook:

• From our Native American senator, Elizabeth Warren: “Cardinal O’Malley is right. Tearing children away from their families is cruel and unconscionable — and goes against everything our country stands for.” and “At our town hall in Newburyport yesterday, people wanted to know: how can we stop the horror of the Trump administration ripping children from their parents? #KeepFamiliesTogether” (Warren sued her own husband and successfully separated two children from the person who had been their father; she also advises other women to keep a divorce litigation fund at the ready)
• “By now you’ve likely seen all the headlines about the children being separated from their parents at the border. It makes me sick, and sad, and I don’t know what to do. I’ll admit to writing this post in anger, but I know I’m not the only one with these emotions. When we hear that 2,000 children are being taken from their parents, what can we do?” from Mayim Bialik, an actress who sued her husband for divorce in 2012, thus separating her own children (age 4 and 7) from their two-parent family.
• “There is no excuse for inflicting these abuses and trauma on children. The Administration must immediately reverse course. #KeepFamiliesTogether” and “I’m standing in solidarity with the activists and families standing up to our government’s human rights abuses along the southern border. Government should be in the business of keeping families together, not breaking them apart.” from California Senator Kamala Harris. Wikipedia says “The family lived in Berkeley, California, where both of Harris’ parents attended graduate school. Harris’ parents divorced when she was only 7 and her mother was granted custody of the children by court-ordered settlement. After the divorce, her mother moved with the children to Montreal, Québec, Canada…” (i.e., the government of California was in the business of separating what had been Kamala’s own family; see Promise of divorce ruined by children (Australia parental relocation study) for how this kind of complete separation of children from the loser parent is getting tougher)
• “As a father, as a parent, I can not in good conscience abide this removal of children from their families. It is a cruel and inhumane action.” over “Here’s How You Can Help Fight Family Separation at the Border” (Slate). (Other than posting on Facebook, he is not personally doing anything to help. He lives in New York so if his wife decides that she wants to spend more time having sex with new friends, he will be separated from his own children except for every other weekend.)
• The above Slate article was also linked-to by a divorce, custody, and child support litigator here in Massachusetts. As we are a winner-take-all state when it comes to family law, she will spend nearly every working day separating children from a loser parent.
• direct post from Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse: “Catch-and-release – combined with inefficient deportation and other ineffective policies – created a magnet whereby lots of people came to the border who were not actually asylum-seekers. … Human trafficking organizations are not just evil; they’re also often smart. Many quickly learned the “magic words” they needed to say under catch-and-release to guarantee admission into the U.S. Because of this, some of the folks showing up at the border claiming to be families are not actually families. Some are a trafficker with one or more trafficked children. ” (posted by a passionate Hillary supporter with “One of the only actually informative statements I’ve seen on the family separation debacle.”)
• “13 Facts the Media ‘Pros’ Don’t Want You to Know About ‘Family Border Separation’” (from a Deplorable via private message; he noted “And if you intended to seek refugee status, why break in, why not just go to the border guard and say you want to be a refugee? If you do that, there is no arrest and no child separation. That means that the people who are arrested only lie about being refugee after they are caught.” He added “at least the anti-gun kids are out of the news”)

I haven’t heard anything about Boston kicking in for the portion of the school that is used by their residents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METCO says that the busing program was set up in 1966. At the time the suburbs were rich and the cities were poor. So it would have made sense for Lincoln taxpayers to subsidize the comparatively poor taxpayers of Boston by paying capital costs.

Today the situation is reversed. A high-end parking space in Boston is worth more than a low-end residence in Lincoln (see https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenparis/2017/11/29/garage-condominium-sales-remain-strong-on-bostons-beacon-hill/#302ad30f1532 ). That’s a big switch compared to 1966 when METCO was established (the Forbes article says that parking spaces that sold for $7,500 in 1979 were up to $400,000 by 2017).

https://boston.curbed.com/maps/boston-most-expensive-homes-for-sale-winter-2018 shows condos and townhouses in Boston from $6.3 million (2,517 square feet) to $16 million (5,703 square feet). So Boston has a lot more rich people than Lincoln and the rich taxpayers of Boston are much richer than anyone in Lincoln. But maybe the METCO funding concept hasn’t kept up with this change since 1966? Or middle-class people in Lincoln enjoy paying higher taxes so that people who own $16 million condos can pay lower taxes?

[How do the $16 million condo owners run their own schools’ physical plant? Boston Latin School, the #1 high school in the state (see US News), operates within a structure built in 1922. It was renovated in 2001 and, apparently, a lot of the funds were raised through private donations.]

METCO students come from families with higher income levels than the Boston
population at large

… to Florida and Texas. “How Much Can Democrats Count on Suburban Liberals?” (nytimes) reports on an interesting study done in the wealthy and virtuous suburbs of Boston.

(Why is “Trump” relevant to this story? The NYT URL starts with “trump-racism”. The study was actually done in 2012 and published in 2014, but anti-immigrant sentiment apparently wasn’t newsworthy at the time.)

Putting two Mexicans speaking Spanish on a commuter train was sufficient to get virtuous supporters of Obama and Hillary to advocate for a reduction in immigration.

(I’ve done my own anecdotal experiments in this area. Whenever I have child passengers in the minivan and know that we’re heading into a traffic jam I ask for their feelings on immigration and policies, such as paid parental leave and tax subsidies, to encourage population growth. The kids always start out virtuous and welcoming to documented and undocumented immigrants. After 45 minutes of being parked on an Interstate highway, the same children will generally be turned into Zero Population Growth zealots and express hostility to sharing their infrastructure with tens of millions of new arrivals.)

“Boston City Council approves rules limiting short-term rentals like Airbnb” (WCVB) describes a new regulatory regime that adds jobs for bureaucrats (to register AirBnB hosts and monitor them) and, mostly, shuts down competition for hotels. It seems that stays of more than 10 days are exempt so in some ways it is less restrictive than in the adjacent paradise for hotel owners of Cambridge, where rentals for less than 30 days are more or less shut down.

Losing the Nobel Prize by Brian Keating, a cosmology professor at UCSD, contains a tell-it-like-it-is description of the life of a scientist (see the previous posting regarding this book). Examples:

Battle is an apt metaphor for what we scientists do. There is a fierce competition that begins the day you declare yourself a physics major. First, among your fellow undergraduates, you spar for top ranking in your class. This leads to the next battle: becoming a graduate student at a top school. Then, you toil for six to eight years to earn a postdoc job at another top school. And finally, you hope, comes a coveted faculty job, which can become permanent if you are privileged enough to get tenure. Along the way, the number of peers in your group diminishes by a factor of ten at each stage, from hundreds of undergraduates to just one faculty job becoming available every few years in your field. Then the competition really begins, for you compete against fellow gladiators honed in battle just as you are. You compete for the scarcest resource in science: money. Surprisingly, not by brains alone does science progress; funding is its true lifeblood. Cosmology’s primary funding agency is the National Science Foundation. But the NSF proposal success rate is currently only about 20%, across all fields of physics and math: the lowest it has been in over a decade.

If you pick science as a career at age 18, how long before you can know whether or not you’ll be successful?

A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences written by Ronald Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, found that the average age of a first-time recipient of a nationally funded grant has increased from under thirty-eight in 1980 to over forty-five as of 2013.20 More disturbingly, the fraction of first-time recipients aged thirty-six or younger has plummeted from 18% in 1983 to 3% in 2010. The awful conclusion of the study is this: “Without their own funding, young researchers are prevented from starting their own laboratories, pursuing their own research, and advancing their own careers in academic science.” With the success rate so low, the study continues, “it is not surprising that many of our youngest minds are choosing to leave their positions in academic research for careers in industry, other countries, or outside of science altogether.”

So you just have to give it at least 27 years! (from 18-45, assuming that the trend hasn’t continued since 2013) Make sure that your ideas aren’t too novel. Professor Keating cites a study that “once projects go beyond a modest level of novelty, the probability they’ll be funded decreases as their perceived novelty increases.”

The Nobel Prize makes a competitive situation more ruthless:

Yet Mother Nature herself, so red in tooth and claw, couldn’t have devised a more efficient means of incentivizing bitter competition than the Nobel Prize. Indeed, the competition in science is at least as ferocious as in any corporate boardroom; there are many billion-dollar corporations, but the Nobel Prize is science’s most closely held monopoly. Most nonscientists think science is conducted by altruistic boffins, happy to find gainful employment doing work that they uniquely are capable of. Yet competition and science go hand in hand, and have done so since the invention of the scientific method itself.

But there is an important distinction between artistic innovation and scientific discovery. As historian of science Derek de Solla Price opined, “If Michelangelo or Beethoven had not existed, their works would have been replaced by quite different contributions. If Copernicus or Fermi had never existed, essentially the same contributions would have had to come from other people. There is, in fact, only one world to discover, and as each morsel of perception is achieved, the discoverer must be honored or forgotten.” Honor comes to those who do not wait.

In keeping with the zeitgest, the book contains a section titled “Women and the Nobel Prize in Physics”. According to the book, only 2 out of 207 laureates in physics have been “women.” Does this analysis make sense given what we now know about the fluidity of gender ID? How do we know that Marie Curie actually identified as a woman? Could it be that Werner Heisenberg identified as a woman, but was afraid that his Nazi Party colleagues would have been hostile to a gender reassignment?

Suppose that we were willing to make cisgender-normative assumptions and deny the fluidity of gender.

Currently, women make up an unfortunately small fraction, approximately 20%, of the physics faculties at major U.S. research institutions. But that fraction dwarfs the percentage of female physics laureates by a factor of twenty. All other fields—including economics, the newest comer on the Nobel circuit, with one female laureate compared to seventy-five male winners—have a higher percentage of female laureates. Physicists are now asking themselves how the lack of gender diversity is affecting the career choices of young women. And even Nobel Prize winners like Brian Schmidt are speaking up against the prize’s lack of gender diversity.

The lack of diversity in prizewinners gives the message to a young woman deciding on her choice of profession that in physics women are not equally valued. A vicious cycle results in which women fail to enter the field, denying younger women role models; it is the anti-Matthew effect. Women disproportionately miss out on the Nobelist’s noblesse-oblige phenomenon where “Scientists who as young men worked with a laureate received the award at an average age of forty-four, nine years earlier than men who had not.”

Professor Keating proposes awarding the prize to dead women and also patching up some previous prizes retroactively:

future committees can correct past instances of the “Matilda effect,” Margaret Rossiter’s term for the phenomenon wherein men get credit for discoveries that were made by women. The history of the Nobel Prize is replete with examples of this, from Rosalind Franklin’s lost credit for co-discovering DNA to Lise Meitner’s snubbing after she discovered the foundations of nuclear fission.

Awarding Vera Rubin the first posthumous prize would be immensely inspiring to young physicists, and specifically to women. But even if the committee is unwilling to restore posthumous eligibility, it should ensure justice for 1974 Nobel Prize Matilda effect victim Jocelyn Bell Burnell; the prize was awarded to her thesis advisor for the serendipitous discovery of pulsars which she made. Thankfully, Bell Burnell is still very much alive.

Assuming that women behave rationally, most of the book is consistent with “The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM” (Atlantic). In a society where nearly every job is available to women, why would a woman take a 27-year chance on becoming successful as a physicist, with the risk that, if unsuccessful, she would be out on the street at age 45, her fertility exhausted? (see my “Women in Science” article on why the more interesting question is “Why are there men in science?”)

The author himself suffers a setback that would be almost inconceivable for a physician, for example (since doctors are scarce in the U.S. whereas there is a huge glut of physics PhDs compared to tenure-track jobs):

Then, one day, a mere six months after I defended my PhD, as I was lost in thought again, Sarah Church walked into the lab and told me she was unhappy with my performance, my attitude, and my work ethic. For the first time in my life, I was fired—my career ended before it even started. I couldn’t help but think this was yet another ironic parallel with my hero, Galileo: both of us had been on the wrong side of the Church. I couldn’t argue with Sarah. I had it coming. The months I’d spent fantasizing about new telescopes were months I should have been working on her projects.

He recovers from this, of course, and his ability and drive were eventually sufficient to earn tenure at the University of California. So the author himself could arguably inspire young people in the same way that Shah Rukh Khan or Michael Jordan might inspire young people to go into acting or professional sports. However, the survivorship bias here should be obvious. The physics postdocs who were fired and went into selling mortgages or teaching high school (starting at age 40 a career that others start at 22) do not write books.

My take-away from the careers aspect of the book is that if you (1) love competition, (2) have a huge appetite for risk, (3) don’t mind working long hours for a minimum of 27 years until getting that first grant, and (4) are mostly indifferent to money, pursuing a physics PhD and an academic job might be a reasonable plan. You’ll get to work with a lot of smart people, for sure, but, as the book notes, quite of few of them may be planning to stab you in the back when it comes time to assign credit for a Nobel-worthy discovery. It is not like most other fields of human endeavor where there is room for everyone to excel in his or her own way.

More: read Losing the Nobel Prize.

Related:

• Book review: The search for E.T.

“Human Husbandry” by Elaine Ou is fun:

Domestication is a rather unnatural form of selection. As a population’s per-capita GDP increases, average fertility decreases. This phenomenon has been termed the demographic-economic paradox, but it’s really not paradoxical at all. Raising children carries a huge opportunity cost – remove this cost and the population has way more productive capacity. It’s no coincidence that San Francisco, home of the most advanced civilization in the world, also has the lowest share of children out of any major city in the country.

Just as a broody hen negatively impacts a farmer’s productivity, a gravid human poses a significant inconvenience to her employer. That’s why companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple pay for female employees to extract and freeze their eggs. It’s great to see tech companies empowering women the same way that factory farms empower their battery hens!

Marc Andreessen and his wife hired a surrogate to carry their biological child. While not scalable, it’s always heartwarming to see billionaires take time out of their busy lives to reproduce like the rest of us mere mortals. Even if it does involve some outsourcing.

She also writes about Bitcoin:

Paul Krugman doesn’t know anything about anything, but I’ll grant him this one: There’s nothing to backstop a cryptocurrency’s value! If people come to believe that Bitcoin is worthless, it’s worthless. There’s no tether to reality.

One of the greatest tragedies of modern money is the decoupling between a store and display of wealth. Or, more accurately, the societal decoupling between wealth and status. For most of human history, the functions of display and storage were condensed. Even before people wore clothing, they wore piercings and tattoos. A full-body ink job isn’t transferable, but it’s a sort of proof of work.

here’s a better way to flaunt crypto wealth. … Secure multi-party computations were first introduced in 1982 as a solution to the Millionaires’ Problem: Multiple millionaires want to know their relative wealth standing, but no one wants to reveal their actual net worth.

One solution is to distribute shares of a secret to each participant. Each person combines the secret with the value of their net worth, broadcasts the result, and a blinded function processes the values to arrive at the final rankings. This function evaluation forms the basis for a zero-knowledge proof.

This can be done with any cryptocurrency. Instead of self-reporting a net worth, each participant signs a message to prove ownership of an account. The message is combined with a secret share, resulting in an output that indicates the user’s balance relative to everyone else. Turn the output into crypto-bling by mapping it to a unique identicon. Bitcoin can now be used as a visual display of wealth.

(This would work against “Secret bitcoin billionaires will renounce their U.S. citizenship before cashing in?“)

“After 10 Years, Nathan Myhrvold’s $3 Billion Of Private Equity Funds Show Big Losses” (Forbes) is interesting for a tidbit on the second page:

In total Myhrvold’s firm has acquired 95,000 patents…

Just imagine the number of hours that has gone into writing these patents, examining them, deciding whether or not any of them are relevant, etc.!

Back in 2016 I wrote “Are markets so inefficient that global warming isn’t being priced properly?”

If sea level rise is imminent, why were people willing to pay $8 million for a Ft. Lauderdale house that was “approximately the same height above sea level as a crushproof cigarette pack”?

Three Harvard eggheads have looked at this more carefully in “Climate gentrification: from theory to empiricism in Miami-Dade County, Florida” (Environmental Research Letters, April 23, 2018)

They have to work pretty hard, but they do find a correlation between height above sea level and price appreciation.

Related:

• “Sea level rise is pushing coastal property owners to move to higher ground” (CNN), which also looks at research comparing rental rates to selling prices and finds that people are happy to rent at sea level and pack up the minivan after a big flood, but they’re cautious about buying

“Number One in Poverty, California Isn’t Our Most Progressive State — It’s Our Most Racist One” (Forbes) is kind of fun in the same way as me offering my neighbors with the Black Lives Matter posters a minivan ride down to the Fresh Pond McDonald’s for a viewing of some people of color.

For me the most powerful part of the argument concerns real estate regulation and taxation. By making it tough to build anything new, California enriches owners of existing property. Most of these folks are white or Chinese investor visa immigrants. Prop 13 taxes long-time homeowners at much lower rates than recent home buyers. Guess what color the average person who has been in the same house since 1978 is?

California also has sales taxes, which are regressive, much higher than what other states charge.

The author attacks Califronia for running public schools for the benefit of unionized school employees and the politicians who receive their reliable votes. Nobody in California cares what the students learn. But how is that different from other states?

Some music-oriented friends and I were trying to come up with titles for modern operas that would be sequels to The Marriage of Figaro.

We quickly came up with

• The Divorce of Figaro
• The New Gender Identity of Figaro

But then we stalled out.

Readers: What would be a good update to this 18th century story? It has to be something that is reasonably likely to happen in the 21st century, but not in the 18th century.