TEORIA COMUNICARII 2 ITT

Coordonator seminar: Petruta Naidut

SEMINAR 2
(1) Identificati cuvintele cheie din fiecare paragraf si faceti un rezumat al paragrafului pe baza acestora.
(2) Identificati ideile principale din textele de mai jos. Faceti un rezumat al textelor pe baza ideilor
principale.
[1] Lexington. The loneliness of Barack Obama. His domestic team is dispersing. But national security is
the area where the president could use closer friends. Sep 30th 2010
BOB WOODWARDS latest fly-on-the-wall White House potboiler, Obamas Wars, is among other things an
essay in the loneliness of command. Having inherited a failing war, a fresh young president is bombarded on all
sides by conflicting advice and has in the end to set the strategy himself, pleasing nobody. It would be a
fascinating tale at any time, but it is especially poignant in present circumstances. For one reason or another,
many of the advisers who have surrounded Mr Obama since he took office at the beginning of 2009 are deserting
the listing ship. If he were not from the planet Vulcan (birthers take note) and therefore incapable of feeling
emotion, he would have every reason to feel lonely right now.
Two members of his economic teamChristina Romer and Peter Orszaghave already left the White House
and Larry Summers, his chief economic co-ordinator, will return to Harvard University after Novembers midterm elections. Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, is expected to announce his departure at any
moment so that he can pursue his longtime ambition to become mayor of Chicago in place of Richard Daley.
David Axelrod, the presidents political adviser, he of the sad eyebrows, is meanwhile reported to dislike his
bachelor existence in the nations capital and to be keen to return to his life, his family and Mannys deli in the
Windy City. The need to prepare Mr Obamas 2012 election campaign gives him the perfect excuse.
The president has so far taken these impending departures in his stride. He will be working closely with Mr
Axelrod in the presidential election, and Mr Emanuel was never a close friend anyway. Valerie Jarrett, a senior
adviser who is indeed close, appears to be staying, as does his press secretary Robert Gibbs, one of the original
Obama team. There is, however, one departure in the works that may cause even a Vulcan some worry. The
thought provoked by Mr Woodwards book is that the loss of Robert Gates, the defence secretary, may damage
Mr Obama most of all.
Mr Gates served as George Bushs defence secretary but agreed to stay on to provide continuity in the Iraqi and
Afghan wars and the war on terrorism. Keeping a Republican CIA veteran at the Pentagon was an inspired
decision by a president acutely conscious of his own lack of security experience. But politics can be cruel. The
presence of Mr Gates has not prevented ownership of the failing Afghan war from shifting rapidly to Mr
Obama. All presidents eventually own the wars America fights on their watch, whether they started them or not.
What is special about Afghanistan is that Mr Obama rejected both of the big ideas his subordinates promoted in
the great hand-wringing review the White House conducted in the autumn of 2009. Instead, he constructed a
compromise, in which, if Mr Woodward is to be believed, only he has confidence.
The big idea that bubbled up through the chain of command was a long-haul counter-insurgency campaign. The
opposing idea from Joe Biden, the vice-president, was counterterrorism-plus: keep only enough force in, near
and above Afghanistan as needed to prevent al-Qaeda returning from Pakistan, which should in fact be the focus
of American policy. In the end, eager as he was to find an exit from a war his own party hated, Mr Obama
rejected the Biden plan. But nor, quite, did he accept the generals. He sent 30,000 new troops, not the 40,000
General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan wanted, and according to Mr Woodward insisted to his commanders
that this is not a nationwide counter-insurgency strategy, because the public would not accept a plan that could
cost up to $1 trillion and break the budget. He also wanted the troops to start leaving by July 2011.
Was this a brilliant compromise or a refusal to take a hard decision? The answer may not come until the
withdrawal is due to begin next summer. By then, however, Mr Gates could well have quit. He says that he might
depart in 2011, but has not said whether he will stay until the fateful deadline. He may not relish being stuck in a
new fight between the president and his generals.
The thinning ranks
If Mr Gates does go, Mr Obama will miss him. Nobody else can provide the same support and cover. Hillary
Clinton is still a potential rival. Jim Jones has outlasted serial rumours of impending defenestration, but Mr
Woodwards book suggests that the national security advisers relations with Mr Obama are at best proper,
verging on awkward: the towering former marine is no consigliere. Nor will Mr Obama have a trusted ally on the
ground: General McChrystal has been replaced by General David Petraeus, a registered Republican who remains
a stubborn believer in the counter-insurgency strategy he invented for Iraq and which Mr Obama says America

cannot afford in Afghanistan. The president is intimate with no foreign ally in the way that Mr Bush was with
Tony Blair. Even if he sought such a friendship, it might not be forthcoming: British prime ministers have now
learnt the perils of poodledom, whether real or perceived.
Inside the White House, of course, there is still the loyal Mr Biden. The vice-president is one of the surprises of
Mr Woodwards narrative. His prolixity is a legend, yet he emerges as an original thinker and iconoclast, more
familiar than his master with Afghanistan and Pakistan and more willing to challenge the militarys most basic
assumptions, such as the one that maintains that Americas vital interests are still at stake in a country from
which Osama bin Laden has long since fled. Had the vice-president been able to exercise the same influence
over Mr Obama as Dick Cheney did over Mr Bush, America might already be winding down its war. But this is a
president who does his deciding alone, no matter how widely he consults. Just as well, perhaps. Mr Obama faces
the prospect of a lonely summer in 2011.
[2] Lexington. The best Congress money can buy? For all the money sloshing around in American politics,
you still cannot buy the results of elections. Oct 7th 2010
IT IS fair to say that the Supreme Court of Chief Justice John Roberts is not extravagantly admired by
Democrats. Of all its conservative rulings, the one they find most enraging as Novembers mid-term elections
approach is undoubtedly its 5-4 decision in January in the case of Citizens United. This held that since the first
amendment tells Congress to make no law abridging the freedom of speech, previous legislation that barred
companies, unions and other groups from paying directly for political advertisements during election campaigns
was unconstitutional.
Barack Obama was furious. This was a green light to a stampede of special-interest money that would enable
Big Oil, Wall Street banks, health-insurance companies and other powerful interests to drown out the voices
of everyday Americans. As the mid-terms have neared, the cries of foul have multiplied. David Axelrod, one
of Mr Obamas advisers, complained in September about an audacious stealth campaign by powerful
corporate special interests using front groups to pour millions into misleading, negative campaign ads that could
tip the scales in the coming election. The New York Timesbemoaned the most secretive election cycle since
the Watergate years.
Vast right-wing conspiracy, revisited
How valid are these complaints? This cycle has indeed seen the emergence of an exotic bestiary of organisations
bearing innocuous labels such as Crossroads GPS, Americans for Job Security and Americans for Prosperity.
These are raising lavish sums for pro-Republican political advertising, but the ads do not disclose the source of
their funding. Voters would plainly see such advertising differently if they knew, say, that Crossroads GPS and
its partner, American Crossroads, were connected to Karl Rove (George Bushs former strategy guru), or that
Americans for Job Security was formed by the insurance industry, or that Americans for Prosperity is funded by
the billionaire Koch brothers in order (says Mr Axelrod) to support their right-wing agenda and corporate
interests. An investigation by the Washington Post concludes that special interests have increased their spending
fivefold compared with the 2006 mid-terms, and that the disclosed proportion has declined from more than 90%
to less than half.
That said, the impact of Citizens United is in danger of being vastly exaggerated. The bipartisan Centre for
Public Integrity reports that in recent weeks organisations with Republican affiliations have spent five times
more than their Democratic counterparts. Add to this the message from the White House that vengeful, deeppocketed businesses and shadowy special interests are poised to buy the November elections, and you might well
conclude that money is destroying American democracy.
This is just not true. Consider, for a start, these two words: Meg Whitman. The former chief executive of eBay
has by now spent about $120m of her own money on her campaign to become governor of California, and yet
the latest polls have her trailing her Democratic rival, Jerry Brown, who says he has spent $11m.
This is not to say that possession of a personal fortune is a fatal handicap in politics. Michael Bloombergs three
terms as mayor of New York and Jon Corzines victory in the New Jersey governors race of 2005 suggest the
opposite. But Mr Corzine failed to buy his way to re-election last year. The moral of such stories, and the
conclusion of a mountain of research, is that although money can sway the odd race here and there, it is
generally subject to the law of diminishing returns. Once a candidate has spent enough to become known, the
value of each extra dollar falls. A study by Americans for Campaign Reform in 2008 put that minimum at
$700,000 for a crack at a seat in the House of Representatives.
This leads some to argue that instead of seeking to cap campaign contributions and spending, reformers should
aim to help candidates across the magic threshold. A bill languishing in Congress, the Fair Elections Now Act,
would offer public matching funds. Yet even that may be unnecessary. Gary Jacobson of the University of
California in San Diego says the wielders of campaign funds have become expert at spotting competitive
candidates and giving them the money they need to make a fight of it.

Besides, the Democrats are hardly penniless. The Democratic National Committee raised more than $16m in
September, mainly from small donors, and has tended to do better at this than the Republican National
Committee, whose mismanagement under the lackadaisical Michael Steele is one reason why Republicans are
turning to outside organisations. And though outspent so far in the advertising war, trade unions (no less liberated
than companies by the Citizens United ruling) have been working hard on the get-out-the-vote ground war at
which they excel. Mr Jacobson expects the mid-terms to see many races between well-financed Democrats and
Republican candidates with less money of their own but more help from outside organisations.
In other words: a pretty fair fight. Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution says that the Citizens United
decision will no more determine the mid-terms than Mr Obamas outspending of John McCain in 2008 swung
the presidential race. That contest was determined by the fundamental politics (rejection of the Bush legacy, the
charm of Mr Obama), as Novembers will be (the jobless recovery, disappointment with Mr Obama). Bill
Galston, also at Brookings, goes so far as to wonder whether the fuss about it might be a pre-emptive attempt to
explain away a defeat.
Politics in the United States is contaminated by money in many ways. But if the Democrats are hammered in
November, it will not be because of the judicial activism of a conservative Supreme Court. It will be because
they have done too few things that voters admire, and too many they do not like. To that extent at least, American
democracy remains in rude health.
[3] Lexington. The perils of constitution-worship. One of the guiding principles of the tea-party movement
is based on a myth. Sep 23rd 2010

WOULDNT it be splendid if the solutions to Americas problems could be written down in a slim book no
bigger than a passport that you could slip into your breast pocket? That, more or less, is the big idea of the teaparty movement, the grassroots mutiny against big government that has mounted an internal takeover of the
Republican Party and changed the face of American politics. Listen to Michele Bachmann, a congresswoman
from Minnesota and tea-party heroine, as she addressed the conservative Value Voters Summit in Washington,
DC, last week:
To those who would spread lies, and to those who would spread falsehoods and rumours about the tea-party
movement, let me be very clear to them. If you are scared of the tea-party movement, you are afraid of Thomas
Jefferson who penned our mission statement, and, by the way, you may have heard of it, its called the
Declaration of Independence. [Cheers, applause.] So what are these revolutionary ideas that make up and
undergird the tea-party movement? Well, its this: All men and all women are created equal. We are endowed by
our creatorthats God, not government [applause]with certain inalienable rights
The Declaration of Independence and the constitution have been venerated for two centuries. But thanks to the
tea-party movement they are enjoying a dramatic revival. The day after this Septembers constitution-day
anniversary, people all over the country congregated to read every word together aloud, a profoundly moving
exercise that will take less than one hour, according to the gatherings organisers. At almost any tea-party
meeting you can expect to see some patriot brandishing a copy of the hallowed texts and calling, with trembling
voice, for a prodigal America to redeem itself by returning to its founding principles. The Washington
Post reports that Colonial Williamsburg has been crowded with tea-partiers, asking the actors who play George
Washington and his fellow founders for advice on how to cast off a tyrannical government.
Conservative think-tanks have the same dream of return to a prelapsarian innocence. The Heritage Foundation is
running a first principles project to save America by reclaiming its truths and its promises and conserving its
liberating principles for ourselves and our posterity. A Heritage book and video (We Still Hold These Truths)
promotes the old verities as a panacea for present ills. America, such conservatives say, took a wrong turn when
Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt fell under the spell of progressive ideas and expanded the scope of
government beyond both the founders imaginings and the competence of any state. Under the cover of war and
recession (never let a crisis go to waste, said Barack Obamas chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel), Franklin
Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and now Mr Obama continued the bad work. Thus has mankinds greatest
experiment in self-government been crushed by a monstrous Leviathan.
Accept for arguments sake that those who argue this way have identified the right problem. The constitution, on
its own, does not provide the solution. Indeed, there is something infantile in the belief of the constitutionworshippers that the complex political arguments of today can be settled by simple fidelity to a document written
in the 18th century. Michael Klarman of the Harvard Law School has a label for this urge to seek revealed truth
in the sacred texts. He calls it constitutional idolatry.
The constitution is a thing of wonder, all the more miraculous for having been written when the rest of the
worlds peoples were still under the boot of kings and emperors (with the magnificent exception of Britains
constitutional monarchy, of course). But many of the tea-partiers have invented a strangely ahistorical version of
it. For example, they say that the framers aim was to check the central government and protect the rights of the
states. In fact the constitution of 1787 set out to do the opposite: to bolster the centre and weaken the power the
states had briefly enjoyed under the new republics Articles of Confederation of 1777.
The words of men, not of gods
When history is turned into scripture and men into deities, truth is the victim. The framers were giants,
visionaries and polymaths. But they were also aristocrats, creatures of their time fearful of what they considered
the excessive democracy taking hold in the states in the 1780s. They did not believe that poor men, or any
women, let alone slaves, should have the vote. Many of their decisions, such as giving every state two senators
regardless of population, were the product not of Olympian sagacity but of grubby power-struggles and
compromisesexactly the sort of backroom dealmaking, in fact, in which todays Congress excels and which is
now so much out of favour with the tea-partiers.
More to the point is that the constitution provides few answers to the hard questions thrown up by modern
politics. Should gays marry? No answer there. Mr Klarman argues that the framers would not even recognise
Americas modern government, with its mighty administrative branch and imperial executive. As to what they
would have made of the modern welfare state, who can tell? To ask that question after the passage of two
centuries, says Pietro Nivola of the Brookings Institution, is to pose an impossible thought experiment.
None of this is to say that the modern state is not bloated or over-mighty. There is assuredly a case to be made
for reducing its size and ambitions and giving greater responsibilities to individuals. But this is a case that needs
to be made and remade from first principles in every political generation, not just by consulting a text put on
paper in a bygone age. Pace Ms Bachmann, the constitution is for all Americans and does not belong to her party
alone. Nor did Jefferson write a mission statement for the tea- partiers. They are going to have to write one for
themselves.

[4] Lexington. 9/11 plus nine. Barack Obamas expected advantages are turning into handicaps in the war
on terrorism. Sep 9th 2010
EVERY September 11th America mourns the people al-Qaeda murdered in the atrocities of 2001. And every year
the anniversary compels an assessment of how the war on terror is faring. After a year that saw a successful
terrorist attack and two near-misses on American soil, it is hard to be upbeat. In November Major Nidal Malik
Hasan, an American, killed 13 comrades in Fort Hood, Texas. On Christmas Day Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a
Nigerian, failed to set off his bomb properly on a Detroit-bound passenger jet. And in May Faisal Shahzad, a
naturalised American, left a car bomb in Times Square in New York.
If the emergence of home-grown Muslim terrorism has been bad enough, the failure of Barack Obama to
engineer the transformation some expected from him in the wider world has been no less dispiriting. After the
toxic impact of George Bush on Muslim opinion, many hoped that the advent of a kinder, gentler president
whose middle name was Hussein would help America to draw the poison. Mr Obama himself seemed to think
that this might be possible. Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, told the New York Times earlier this year that Mr
Obama counted his Cairo speech to the Muslim world of June 2009 as one of the three most important things he
had done to combat terrorism.
And yet Mr Obamas programme of Muslim outreach is already faltering. The Pew Research Centre reported in
June that the percentage of Muslims expressing confidence in him had declined in a year from 42% to 33% in
Egypt and from 13% to 8% in Pakistan. The reason is not hard to fathom. Whatever expectations the Cairo
speech aroused in the Muslim world have yet to be fulfilled. Like Americans waiting for economic recovery,
Muslim countries have been waiting for Mr Obama to match his words with deeds, and have so far been
disappointed.
Under Mr Obama America no longer waterboards detainees, but that stopped on Mr Bushs watch. Mr Obama
promised to close Guantnamo, but so did Mr Bushand it is still in operation. Mr Obama has withdrawn
combat troops from Iraq, but sent more to Afghanistan and used drones to kill far more suspected terrorists in
Pakistan. He said in Cairo that the plight of the Palestinians was intolerable, but the Palestinians are still
stateless. To Muslim eyes, the formerly exotic Mr Obama has metamorphosed in office into just another
American president, doing the things American presidents do to defend Americas interests.
In the meantime, however, a funny thing is happening on the home front. Where the Muslim world sees just
another president, Mr Obama is somehow becoming more exotic to Americans. In August a Pew survey found
that nearly one in five, and a third of conservative Republicans, think that he is a Muslim himself. Only about a
third of all Americans say he is a Christian and 43% say they do not know what religion he practises. Moreover,
both the number who think he is a Muslim and the number who do not think he is a Christian have risen sharply
since March 2009.
Mr Obama is in fact a Christian, and the reasons for the public doubt are perplexing. But it is not hard to guess
what the consequences might be. At his inauguration, Mr Obama said the choice between safety and ideals was
false. That is not the case, as evidenced by his own decision to keep some especially dangerous suspected
terrorists imprisoned indefinitely without trial. What may instead be true is that, to the dismay of liberals, the
growing belief that Mr Obama is a Muslim will compel him to be ever more risk-averse when choosing between
safety and civil liberty.
As the trauma of 9/11 recedes, so have the inhibitions that politicians once showed about exploiting the war
against al-Qaeda for partisan advantage. When Mr Abdulmutallab failed to detonate his bomb last Christmas, for
example, Mr Obamas Republican foes were quick to accuse the vacationing president of flaccidity in face of
danger. Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, said that Mr Obama was too busy trying to transform America
to admit that it was at war. Republicans were especially furious that the bomber was read his rights and not
simply incarcerated as an enemy combatant. The administrations stymied plans to try Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, the supposed mastermind of 9/11, in a federal court instead of a military tribunal have likewise
been greeted as evidence that the president is soft on terrorism.
Fascinatingly, Mr Bush faced no such criticism when doing exactly the same thing. In 2003 Richard Reid, the
would-be shoe-bomber, was brought before a federal court. That may be because nobody could accuse Mr
Bush of being a less than diligent warrior, or suspect him of praying to other than the Christian God. Mr Obama
cannot fail to see that he of all presidents would face severe punishment at the slightest sign of weakness.
Ever-lonelier in the middle
Lately, a new front has opened in the war on terrorismnot Yemen or Somalia but back in lower Manhattan,
where plans for the misnamed ground-zero mosque are being portrayed as a deliberate attempt by radical
Muslims to demonstrate triumphalism at the site of the atrocity. As a previous column argued, this is a
ludicrous misreading of a well-intentioned initiative, but the outcry against it has fed a stream of anti-Muslim

sentiment, including plans by the pastor of a small church in Florida to mark the anniversary of 9/11 by burning
copies of the Koran.
To his credit, Mr Obama affirmed last month that in America Muslims had the same right to practise their
religion as anyone else. But it was a muted statement, tempered a day later by an insistence that he was taking no
position on the wisdom of the Manhattan mosque. In the war on terror, as in much else, this presidents
pragmatic search for the middle way is in danger of satisfying nobody. It is turning into the recurring pattern, and
may become the ultimate tragedy, of his presidency.
[5] Lexington. Build that mosque. The campaign against the proposed Cordoba centre in New York is
unjust and dangerous. Aug 5th 2010
WHAT makes a Muslim in Britain or America wake up and decide that he is no longer a Briton or American but
an Islamic soldier fighting a holy war against the infidel? Part of it must be pull: the lure of jihadism. Part is
presumably push: a feeling that he no longer belongs to the place where he lives. Either way, the results can be
lethal. A chilling feature of the suicide video left by Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the band that killed
more than 50 people in London in July, 2005, was the homely Yorkshire accent in which he told his countrymen
that your government is at war with my people.
For a while America seemed less vulnerable than Europe to home-grown jihadism. The Pew Research Centre
reported three years ago that most Muslim Americans were largely assimilated, happy with their lives and
decidedly American in their outlook, values and attitudes. Since then it has become clear that American
Muslims can be converted to terrorism too. Nidal Malik Hassan, born in America and an army major, killed 13 of
his comrades in a shooting spree at Fort Hood. Faisal Shahzad, a legal immigrant, tried to set off a car bomb in
Times Square. But something about Americathe fact that it is a nation of immigrants, perhaps, or its greater
religiosity, or the separation of church and state, or the opportunities to risestill seems to make it an easier
place than Europe for Muslims to feel accepted and at home.
It was in part to preserve this feeling that George Bush repeated like a scratched gramophone record that
Americans were at war with the terrorists who had attacked them on 9/11, not at war with Islam. Barack Obama
has followed suit: the White House national security strategy published in May says that one way to guard
against radicalisation at home is to stress that diversity is part of our strengthnot a source of division or
insecurity. This is hardly rocket science. America is plainly safer if its Muslims feel part of us and not, like
Mohammad Sidique Khan, part of them. And that means reminding Americans of the differencea real one,
by the way, not one fabricated for the purposes of political correctnessbetween Islam, a religion with a billion
adherents, and al-Qaeda, a terrorist outfit that claims to speak in Islams name but has absolutely no right or
mandate to do so.
Why would any responsible American politician want to erase that vital distinction? Good question. Ask Sarah
Palin, or Newt Gingrich, or the many others who have lately clambered aboard the offensive campaign to stop
Cordoba House, a proposed community centre and mosque, from being built in New York two blocks from the
site of the twin towers. Every single argument put forward for blocking this project leans in some way on the
misconceived notion that all Muslims, and Islam itself, share the responsibility for, or are tainted by, the
atrocities of 9/11.
In a tweet last month from Alaska, Ms Palin called on peaceful Muslims to refudiate the ground-zero
mosque because it would stab American hearts. But why should it? Cordoba House is not being built by alQaeda. To the contrary, it is the brainchild of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a well-meaning American cleric who has
spent years trying to promote interfaith understanding, not an apostle of religious war like Osama bin Laden. He
is modelling his project on New Yorks 92nd Street Y, a Jewish community centre that reaches out to other
religions. The site was selected in part precisely so that it might heal some of the wounds opened by the felling
of the twin towers and all that followed. True, some relatives of 9/11 victims are hurt by the idea of a mosque
going up near the site. But that feeling of hurt makes sense only if they too buy the false idea that Muslims in
general were perpetrators of the crime. Besides, what about the feelings, and for that matter the rights, of
Americas Muslimssome of whom also perished in the atrocity?
Ms Palins argument does at least have one mitigating virtue: it concentrates on the impact the centre might have,
without impugning the motives of those who want to build it. The same half-defence can be made of the AntiDefamation League, a venerable Jewish organisation created to fight anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry.
To the dismay of many liberal Jews, the ADL has also urged the centres backers to seek another site in order to
spare the feelings of families of the 9/11 victims. But at least it concedes that they have every right to build at
this siteand that they might (only might, since the ADL hints at vague concerns about their ideology and
finances) genuinely have chosen it in order to send a positive message about Islam.
The Saudi non-sequitur

No such plea of mitigation can be entered on behalf of Mr Gingrich. The former Republican speaker of the
House of Representatives may or may not have presidential pretensions, but he certainly has intellectual ones.
That makes it impossible to excuse the mean spirit and scrambled logic of his assertion that there should be no
mosque near ground zero so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. Come again? Why
hold the rights of Americans who happen to be Muslim hostage to the policy of a foreign country that happens
also to be Muslim? To Mr Gingrich, it seems, an American Muslim is a Muslim first and an American second.
Al-Qaeda would doubtless concur.
Mr Gingrich also objects to the centres name. Imam Feisal says he chose Cordoba in recollection of a time
when the rest of Europe had sunk into the Dark Ages but Muslims, Jews and Christians created an oasis of art,
culture and science. Mr Gingrich sees only a deliberate insult, a reminder of a period when Muslim conquerors
ruled Spain. Like Mr bin Laden, Mr Gingrich is apparently still relitigating the victories and defeats of religious
wars fought in Europe and the Middle East centuries ago. He should rejoin the modern world, before he does real
harm.
[6] Lexington. The hub nation. Immigration places America at the centre of a web of global networks. So
why not make it easier? Apr 22nd 2010 | From The Economist print edition
IMMIGRANTS benefit America because they study and work hard. That is the standard argument in favour of
immigration, and it is correct. Leaving your homeland is a big deal. By definition, it takes get-up-and-go to get
up and go, which is why immigrants are abnormally entrepreneurial. But there is another, less obvious benefit of
immigration. Because they maintain links with the places they came from, immigrants help America plug into a
vast web of global networks.
Many people have observed how the networks of overseas Chinese and Indians benefit their respective
motherlands. Diasporas speed the flow of information: an ethnic Chinese trader in Indonesia who spots a
commercial opportunity will quickly alert his cousin who runs a factory in Guangdong. And ties of kin, clan or
dialect ensure a high level of trust. This allows decisions to be made swiftly: multimillion-dollar deals can
sometimes be sealed with a single phone call. America is linked to the world in a different way. It does not have
much of a diaspora, since native-born Americans seldom emigrate permanently. But it has by far the worlds
largest stock of immigrants, including significant numbers from just about every country on earth. Most
assimilate quickly, but few sever all ties with their former homelands.
Consider Andres Ruzo, an entrepreneur who describes himself as Peruvian by birth; Texan by choice. He
moved to America when he was 19. After studying engineering, he founded a telecoms firm near Dallas. It
prospered, and before long he was looking to expand into Latin America. He needed a partner. He stumbled on
one through a priest, who introduced him to another devout IT entrepreneur, Vladimir Vargas Esquivel, who was
based in Costa Rica and looking to expand northward. It was a perfect fit. And because of the way they were
introducedby a priest they both respectedthey felt they could trust each other. Their firm now operates in ten
countries and generates tens of millions of dollars in annual sales. Mr Ruzo wants the firm, which is called ITS
Infocom, to go global. So although he and Mr Vargas Esquivel natter to each other in Spanish, they insist that the
firms official language must be English.
Trust matters. Modern technology allows instant, cheap communication. Yet although anyone can place a longdistance call, not everyone knows whom to call, or whom to trust. Ethnic networks can address this problem. For
example, Sanjaya Kumar, an Indian doctor, arrived in America in 1992. He developed an interest in software that
helps to prevent medical errors. This is not a small problem. Perhaps 100,000 Americans die each year because
of preventable medical mistakes, according to the Institute of Medicine. Dr Kumar needed cash and business
advice to commercialise his ideas, so he turned to a network of ethnic Indian entrepreneurs called Tie. He met,
and was backed by, an Indian-American venture capitalist, Vish Mishra. His firm, Quantros, now sells its
services to 2,300 American hospitals. And it is starting to expand into India, having linked up with a software
firm there which is run by an old school chum of one of Dr Kumars Indian-American executives.
Ethnic networks have drawbacks. If they are a means of excluding outsiders, they can be stultifying. But they
accelerate the flow of information. Nicaraguan-Americans put buyers in Miami in touch with sellers in Managua.
Indian-American employees help American consulting firms scout for talent in Bangalore. The benefits are hard
to measure, but William Kerr of the Harvard Business School has found some suggestive evidence. He looked at
the names on patent records, reasoning that an inventor called Wang was probably of Chinese origin, while some
called Martinez was probably Hispanic. He found that foreign researchers cite American-based researchers of
their own ethnicity 30-50% more often than you would expect if ethnic ties made no difference. It is not just that
a Chinese boffin in Beijing reads papers written by Chinese boffins in America. A Chinese boffin in America
may alert his old classmate in Beijing to cool research being done at the lab across the road.
Network effects
In Silicon Valley more than half of Chinese and Indian immigrant scientists and engineers report sharing
information about technology or business opportunities with people in their home countries, according to

AnnaLee Saxenian of the University of California, Berkeley. Some Americans fret that China and India are using
American know-how to out-compete America. But knowledge flows both ways. As people in emerging markets
innovatewhich they are already doing at a prodigious clipAmerica will find it ever more useful to have so
many citizens who can tap into the latest brainwaves from Mumbai and Shanghai. Immigrants can also help their
American employers do business in their homelands. Firms that employ many ethnic Chinese scientists, for
example, are more likely to invest in China and more likely to do so through a wholly owned subsidiary, rather
than seeking the crutch of a joint venture, finds Mr Kerr. In other words, local knowledge reduces the cost of
doing business.
Immigration provides America with legions of unofficial ambassadors, deal-brokers, recruiters and boosters.
Immigrants not only bring the best ideas from around the world to American shores; they are also a conduit for
spreading American ideas and ideals back to their homelands, thus increasing their adoptive countrys soft
power.
All of which makes the task of fixing Americas cumbersome immigration rules rather urgent. Alas, Barack
Obama has done little to fulfil his campaign pledge to do so. With unemployment still at nearly 10%, few
politicians are brave enough to be seen encouraging foreigners to compete for American jobs.