The Cato Institute

The ACA’s Pre-existing Condition Regulations May Be Less Popular Than They Seem

The ACA’s pre-existing condition regulations lose support when the public learns the cost…

Democrats pinned much of their hopes this election season on protecting Americans from pre-existing conditions from losing certain coverage mandates. In fact, about half of Democratic ads featured health care issues compared to less than a third of Republican ads. 

Much of the public debate centered on pre-existing condition protections assume that these regulations enjoy widespread public support.

Days before the 2018 midterms, 68% of voters said that health care is very or extremely important to how they plan to vote in this year’s elections, according to a new Cato 2018 Health Care Survey of 2,498 Americans.

However, the survey also finds that public support for pre-existing condition regulation plummets to less than half in favor when Americans are faced with the likely trade-offs and costs of these regulations, which goes against the widespread perception among the political punditry that pre-existing condition regulations are necessarily and universally supported by voters across the political spectrum.

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Midterms Result in the Most Pro-Immigration House of Representatives in Over a Century

Could the midterm elections spell good news for much-needed immigration reform?

In this election, journalists following the immigration beat will focus on the outcomes of individual races. Dave Brat, the Virginia nativist whose defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014 doomed hopes of immigration reform, lost in a previously safe GOP seat. Democrats blew out Corey Stewart in Virginia and Lou Barletta in Pennsylvania, the most anti-immigrant Senate candidates. Kris Kobach, the author of state anti-immigrant laws across the country, cost Republicans the governorship in Kansas.

But, when it comes to immigration, the two most important outcomes of this election are in the big picture. 

First, nativists have officially squandered their last, best chance to restrict legal immigration. There may never be another moment like the one in 2017 and 2018, where the House, Senate, and White House were all controlled by Republicans with nativist agendas. They held multiple votes in the House and Senate on various measures to make legal immigration cuts, and all their efforts went down in flames.

The second outcome is even more important: the House of Representatives is now the most pro-immigrant that it has been since the 19th century. Current House Democrats would not only pass the broadest legalization in the history of the United States — they also would greatly expand legal immigration. No elected House Democrat is opposed to legalization, even if they would want it paired with some enforcement measures.

Better yet, this House will have the backing of the most pro-immigration general public in recorded history. More Americans oppose cuts to immigration and favor expanded immigration than at any point since at least 1965. 

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Birthright Citizenship Is An All-American Idea — And It Works

The 14th Amendment enshrines our traditional common law practice of granting citizenship to those born in the United States who are subject to its laws — otherwise known as birthright citizenship…

President Trump has announced that he plans an executive order that would remove the right to citizenship for babies of noncitizens and unauthorized immigrants born on U.S. soil. 

The 14th Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution 150 years ago in July of 1868. Among other things, it enshrined our traditional common law practice of granting citizenship to those born in the United States who are subject to its laws-specifically it guaranteed that the recently freed slaves and their descendants would be citizens. The 14th Amendment also applied to the children of immigrants, as its authors and opponents understood at the time.

Released earlier this year, President Trump’s immigration position paper, however, famously endorsed an end to birthright citizenship. Michael Anton, a former national security official in the Trump administration as well as a lecturer and researcher at Hillsdale College, has argued that President Trump should use his pen and his phone to exclude the children born here to noncitizens, with little thought of what would happen were such a policy enacted.

Taking Anton’s advice would do grievous harm to our country, destroy one of the finest legacies of the Republican Party, and overturn centuries of Anglo-American common law in exchange for a citizenship system that would slow assimilation.

In addition to being constitutionally questionable, such an order would harm all Americans, not just the children or grandchildren of noncitizens. 

Birthright citizenship is good for the United States. It guarantees that everyone who is born in America believes that they are Americans, which is the single best policy for promoting assimilation.

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Walling Off Liberty

President Trump’s immigration policies violate the Constitution and stand in opposition to both federalism and individual liberty…

During his campaign, Donald Trump vowed to aggressively ramp up immigration enforcement by implementing “extreme vetting,” building a wall along the southern border, cracking down on so-called “sanctuary cities,” and creating a “deportation force.” President Trump and his allies took steps to implement some of these proposals shortly after his inauguration. There are ample reasons for concern over how such efforts will impact America’s law enforcement agencies and Americans’ civil liberties.

In order to be effective, the president’s proposals require the federal government to gather more information about American citizens. Border Patrol will increase its presence both at the border and at interior checkpoints, inconveniencing Americans and foreigners alike. Immigration law enforcement officials will exploit the lack of privacy protections at the border, leading to citizens being pressured into providing authorities with access to their electronic devices. The federal government will increase surveillance and explore new tools, such as facial-recognition drones. Federal immigration officials will expand databases and include biometric information on both visitors and American citizens.

Trump’s pledge to crack down on sanctuary cities runs afoul of the Tenth Amendment, while proposals to expand the class of removable aliens and deputize state and local law police officers threaten to undermine effective policing.

Although the president could take steps to reverse many of the damaging features of his immigration policy, such a reversal is unlikely. However, policymakers can mitigate the risks of the immigration agenda by strengthening legal protections on the border and limiting federal involvement in state and local policing.

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Permission to Work

In the 1950s, 1 in 20 U.S. workers needed government permission to work. Today licensing has ballooned to 1 in 4 workers…

The story of state occupational licensing is the same across most occupations. Insiders want to block outsiders — people they deem less professional — from practicing their occupation. Thus, they lobby state legislators or licensing boards to restrict entry into the occupation.

Licensing advocates will typically argue that requiring a state license is necessary to guarantee quality or to protect public health and safety from unprofessional or dangerous workers. However, advocates lobby vigorously to protect their turf by creating barriers to entry with scant evidence that those barriers will improve quality, public health, or public safety. Once an occupation is licensed, workers are motivated to increase the costs to outsiders by changing requirements to include more hours of education, higher grades to pass exams, or increased fees. 

Unlicensed workers operating in the shadow (or informal) economy have a harder time standing up to such threats. Those workers will earn less than they could out in the open. Hiring employees and paying taxes might expose them as unlicensed operators. 

Licensing harms consumers by increasing the price of services and decreasing innovation — without ensuring quality. Consumers may purchase fewer services. Consumers who choose to save money by hiring unlicensed practitioners may face fewer legal protections. And people who chose to save money by performing potentially dangerous work themselves, like electrical work, place themselves at a greater risk of harm.

On top of those tradeoffs, consumers still face the costs of finding reputable service providers, despite claims that occupational licensing establishes professionalism and quality. Remember experiences you may have had with a bad haircut, a slow home contractor, an angry nurse, or a painful dental procedure.

Licensing is not a substitute for reputation. Word of mouth is a typical method for finding quality service providers, even in licensed occupations. Today it is easier than ever to find a provider who will best fit your needs. Technology reduces search costs through website reviews from Yelp, Angie’s List, and TripAdvisor, for example, and through crowdsourcing on sites like Facebook and Reddit.

In addition to failing to ensure quality, there is little to no evidence that occupational licensing improves health and safety outcomes for consumers. And consumers do not require occupational licenses to feel safe.

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Jamal Khashoggi’s Death Is the Latest Chapter in A 300-Year War

Prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s suspected murder, and its aftermath, is the latest battle of a 300-year war over Sunni Islam…

The apparent abduction, and probable murder, of the prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 unmasked the ugly despotism behind the reformist image of the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. 

The U.S./Saudi relationship should be under the microscope like never before following Khashoggi’s probable death. 

Less noticed, however, is the way this scandal revealed a long-running rivalry between the two countries that directly butted heads at the outset: Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

This is a story that goes back to the 18th century. Then, much of what we call “the Middle East” today, including the more habitable part of the Arabian Peninsula, was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled from Istanbul, then called Constantinople, by a cosmopolitan elite of mainly Turks and Balkan Muslims, including Bosnians and Albanians. The Hejaz, the western region of the Arabian Peninsula that included the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, was revered for religious reasons, but it was a backwater with no political or cultural significance.

In the 1740s, in the most isolated central area of the Arabian Peninsula, called Najd, a scholar named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab emerged with a fiery call for the restoration of “true Islam.” Wahhab soon allied with a chieftain called Ibn Saud—the founder of the Saudi dynasty.

The First Saudi State they established together grew in size and ambition, leading to a big massacre of Shiites in Karbala in 1801 and the occupation of Mecca in 1803. The Ottomans crushed the Wahhabi revolt in 1812 via their protectorate in Egypt, and Wahhabism retreated to the desert.

Another tumult in Hejaz occurred in 1856 when the Ottomans, thanks to the influence of their British allies, introduced another heretical “innovation”: the banning of slave trade, which was then a lucrative business between the Africa coast and the Arabian city of Jeddah. At the behest of angry slave traders, Grand Sharif Abd al-Muttalib of Mecca declared that Turks had become infidels and their blood was licit. As we learn from the chronicles of Ottoman statesman Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, Turks’ sins included “allowing women to uncover their bodies, to stay separate from their fathers or husbands, and to have the right to divorce.”

These were the changes introduced during the Tanzimat, the great Ottoman reform movement in the mid-19th century by which the empire imported many Western institutions and norms. The Tanzimat allowed the Ottoman Empire to ultimately become a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament—something still unimaginable in the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia. It also allowed the rise of the modern Turkish Republic, where secular law became the norm, women gained equal rights, and democracy began to grow.

Today, admittedly, Turkey became the home of jailed journalists, crushed opponents, hate, paranoia, and a new cult of personality that has been called “Erdoganism.” Yet Erdogan and his fellow Islamists are still Turkey’s Islamists—that is, compared with Saudi Arabia’s elites, they are still operating within a more modern framework that reflects a milder interpretation of Sunni Islam.

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India’s Modi is No Great Champion of Economic Freedom

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has been hailed as an economic liberalizer, but new import duties on more than 40 items threaten to reverse the major gains India has made since economic reforms began in 1991…

When Indian prime minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, he was seen as a liberalizer, bearing the slogan, “Minimum government, maximum governance.” He has since sharply criticized rising U.S. protectionism under the Trump administration. 

In reality, Modi has expanded the role of government in welfare even while liberalizing the economy incrementally. Most recently, just like President Trump has done in the United States, Modi has promoted measures to protect and support manufacturing jobs in India.

The latest Indian budget — from February 2018 — raised import duties on more than 40 items, ranging from auto parts and toys to candles and furniture, in order to protect uncompetitive small businesses and create jobs in labor-intensive industries. Even before that, India raised import duties on several electronic items, from phone components to TVs and microwave ovens — all done in pursuance of a Phased Manufacturing Program aiming to check massive imports from China and ensure that cellphone assembly and the manufacture of components are done mostly in India. An official task force has also been appointed to look into ways of reducing import dependence.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is not a conventional right-wing party. It rejects both socialism and Western capitalism and seeks a homegrown solution called Integral Humanism. It supports private enterprise but also runs India’s biggest trade union and believes in a wide-ranging welfare state. It has highly protectionist affiliates that have always been wary of multinational corporations and international institutions. It believes in government intervention to create national champions, increase employment, and protect small businesses. The party also contains many liberalizers who succeeded in opening up the economy when the party ruled from 1998 to 2004, overcoming objections from BJP affiliates.

Modi now faces the same global headwinds that Trump does: fear of China, automation, and lack of good jobs. These pressures are driving India’s new protectionism, just as they have done in the United States. Optimists hope the new import tariffs are only temporary. The risk is that the new protectionism will get entrenched and reverse the major gains India has made since economic reforms began in 1991.

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