Palpatine: Failed Founder of the Galactic Nation
How the Presence or Absence of a Real Polity Impacts Governance
Those who know me are aware that I’m something of a Star Wars superfan. Aside from the multiple boxes of action figures in stores at my childhood home, there’s the books, the video games, the endless debates with fellow fans, the card games, etc. When Disney announced the summary dismissal of the Expanded Universe, I was one of those distraught nerds frantic that decades of a favorite hobby and emotionally significant alternate reality had been chucked out the window.
Of course, as most are aware, I’m also somewhat into politics. In the leadup to The Force Awakens, I’ve taken part in the raging online debate about whether or not the Imperials are actually the good guys in Star Wars. Spoiler alert: no, the Imperials are not the good guys. I’ve laid out my case for why the Rebel Alliance is at least as good an analog for political conservatism as is the Empire many times in many places, so I’ll avoid that for now.
Instead, I want to take a look at a key facet of the Star Wars universe, and then relate it to, wait for it… immigrant integration.
What Is A State?
Territory, Population, and Sovereignty
Virtually all modern politics relates to the political factions within states that debate how to exercise the sovereignty of the state in relation to that state’s people and territory, and in relation to other states’ peoples and territories. But what is the state really? The classic definition is that, to be a “state,” an entity must have:
Territory. States are geographically bounded entities, not nebulous groups or identities. Today we contrast territorial states with non-territorial groups like al Qaeda. But in the 1500s when the first proto-states were forming, the contrast was with (1) “Empires” like the Holy Roman, Byzantine, or Ottoman Empires, which derived legitimacy from traditional or religious claims to widely recognized legal authority or (2) Ethnic kingships, like “the King of the English” or “the King of the Germans” or “the King of the French.” So the original territoriality of states at once occurs as a rejection of higher levels of traditional or religious political authority over their lands, and also rejects the idea that political sovereignty is, in a sense, genetic.
Population. As I noted above, states have a fixed territory with recognized borders, and within that territory must be a population. Whoever resides within a state’s territory is by definition subject to that state, with very limited exceptions. So none of this, “But I’m a subject of the King of France!” nonsense: if you’re in England, you’re under English authority. Oh and clergy? You too. This is what that “population” means: nobody here can have legitimacy in claiming they are primarily subjects to some other law.
Sovereignty. Sovereignty means, essentially, a monopoly on the use of force, especially for coercion. A state is only really a state in the way we mean when we talk about “states” (or especially nation-states) if they can claim to be the only power that is (1) generally recognized as being permitted to and (2) in fact readily able to coerce obedience to its policies within its territory for its population. There are, of course, client states and hegemonically dominated states, who in a sense give away some use of force rights to an outside state. But the more such authority a state gives away, the less we really think of it as a “state,” and the more we think of it as a component of a larger state. So sovereignty means you’re the only one with an independent army and/or police force in a given area.
Okay. So let’s look at the Star Wars universe.
Assessing Galactic Republican Statehood
Sovereignty
The best place to start with the Galactic Republic will be sovereignty. We know from the movies that the Republic had no standing army. It had a very small sort of “emergency expeditionary force,” but that was really just a minimal professional core, to be supplemented at need by planetary or sectoral forces.
Wait, planetary or sectoral forces? Yes, that’s right, because individual star systems in fact did have fully independent militaries. Witness Episode I, where even peace-loving Naboo has on hand squadrons of highly capable military fighters, and a major corporation has on hand dozens or hundreds of battleships. The Old Republic is full of militaries, but none of them owe allegiance to the Republic itself.
Now the Old Republic does seem to have rules about the use of force (think of the “But Darth Sidious, is that leeegal?” question). But so did the Medieval Church. Those rules were often broken. We have a small sample size for the Republic, but it seems plausible that the Republic’s rules were often broken as well.
So the Republic has no demonstrated ability to exercise the use of force, while sub-entities within it do. More importantly, there is a wide-ranging group that exercises force within the Republic: the Jedi. Now crucially, there are places where the Jedi appear hesitant to use force, such as in Hutt Space (for those familiar with the Expanded Universe, we might include the Chiss Ascendancy, the Ssi-Ruuk, and the Hapes Consortium as other key examples of places where the Jedi semi-monopoly on legitimate force appears inoperative). All this adds up to one obvious truth: the Old Republic is not a sovereign entity. It’s not clear it ever was, or that its laws ever intended for it to become such an entity. Rather, the Old Republic’s laws are clearly predicated on the existence of local and regional militaries and polities.
Territory
So the Old Republic misses the key qualification to be a state, but maybe it’s just some other kind of territorial, population-possessing body, just with distributed sovereignty. Maybe it’s like a confederation or something (wait, that’s what the Separatists were called? hmmm…). But let’s consider this territorial component.
Qui-God Jinn in episode one refers to being outside of Old Republic space, which implies territoriality; yet he tries to pay in Republic credits and refers to Republican legal norms, implying he still expects Republican legal claims to be the legitimate standard. He doesn’t hesitate to borderline kidnap a kid to draft into the Jedi Order, which seems odd if he’s really beyond the boundaries of Jedi/Republican pseudo-sovereignty.
Furthermore, the rebels in Episodes II and III are called “Separatists.” They want to separate, to make their own territory, right? So that implies that the Republic holds territory, right?
Not so fast! The fact that the goal of separation from the Republic is so clearly key, and that many Senatorial delegations of clearly “Separatist” groups and systems remain in the Senate, suggests there’s more going on here. I would suggest the Separatist movement isn’t about breaking off a discrete territorial unit primarily, but is about gaining legal and political recognition for the idea that they are no longer subject to Republican traditional and quasi-religious jurisdiction. Do they want to fully leave the Senate and the Republic? Maybe, that seems entirely plausible. But the main goal is probably more about destroying the idea that the Senate has the moral or legal authority to interfere in their business. The Separatists showed many times before the Clone Wars they were capable of using force to achieve their ends; maybe they’re just tired of getting rapped across the knuckles for it.
Population
So we have a semi-territorial entity with pseudo-sovereignty. Does it have a population? Well, clearly the territory has population in it. But think about your average Republic citizen; say, a Corellian. Is her first loyalty to the Republic, or is it to Corellia? What’s the real state to which this person owes allegiance? The answer, to me, is obvious: in all but the most altruistic systems, pre-Clone Wars Republican citizens are loyal to their local polity above all else. And well they should be! These polities are the ones that administer justice, organize the vast majority of taxation and spending, and possess militaries. As far as populations directly loyal to the Republic, it’s probably just Coruscant, the capital world. Even if the Republic had wanted to recruit an army, their only real base of hard-core loyalists would have been in Coruscant, one world among billions of worlds. There’s no plausible base of power for forging a state.
The Republic Was Not a State
Okay, so, the Old Republic was not a state. Nor did it presume to be. It wasn’t even a weak state like the US under the Articles of Confederation. The best analog that I can think of is the Holy Roman Empire. There’s a suprastate entity that, under certain leaders at certain times can rally together a seriously powerful army (such as to fight off various Sith uprisings, or to fight the Mandalorian Wars), but the “normal state of affairs” is basically every man for himself and a loose body of rules managed by a convoluted, semi-democratic system.
When you look at the Republican Senate, you’re not looking at a single nation’s Senate, nor at the United Nations. You’re looking at a pre-state form of governance. Every Senator is representing a people group that sees itself as having perhaps sovereignty but no territory, like the various corporate entities, or perhaps population and territory but no sovereignty, like some weak system. And over them all hangs a religio-military order that has a kind of pseudo-sovereignty, but no population or territory, the Jedi.
But before we rush to judgment, we need to weigh the pros and cons here.
The Republic Should Not Have Been a State
The galaxy is big. Expanded Universe estimates suggest quadrillions of sentient beings, millions of species. Think of all the different cultural and religious traditions involved. Think of the insane logistics involved in waging interstellar war against dedicated insurgencies. Think of all the places where terrorists could hide in the galaxy. Governing the whole galaxy as one polity does not make any sense at all. Undoubtedly the dream of a galactic polity is appealing, but it’s not reality.
However, a completely ungoverned galaxy is a dangerous place: think of the insane violence that could arise if one group got it into their head to try and create a galactic polity? Star Wars EU material is full of such instances of attempts at galactic hegemony. And every time the Republic pulled through. But the Republic doesn’t survive because it is strong: it survives because it is weak. This is strange if you believe the Republic is a state engaged in interstate warfare. But it’s not. The Republic is essentially a legal, religious, and political framework for coordinating galactic resources. The Galactic constituents, as it happens dislike contributing to galactic causes.
Think of the coordination problem here. Oh yeah, that farmer on Tatooine? He needs to pay higher taxes to fight smugglers literally on the other side of the galaxy. Try justifying higher galactic taxes, especially to restive, independent-minded planetary elites who not only have a different linguistic and cultural background, but are actually a different species. The Republic is probably dependent on trade taxes to finance itself, since that’s the only constituency that has a real interest in specifically galactic concerns.
But we still need someone to keep order, to keep peace, to diffuse conflicts, to promote resolution, and, when necessary, to exercise discrete force. If it’s “the Army of the Republic” then it creates worries of galactic tyranny. But what if we created an ascetic, celibate, religious order steeped in (1) the virtues of Republican governance, (2) noninterventionist, tolerant, moderationist ethics, (3) aristocratic elitism, and (4) superdominant martial prowess. If a galactic state is not tenable, then a galactic peacekeeping religious order may be the best option. The religious beliefs of the Jedi serve as a kind of “commitment mechanism.” The Galaxy can mostly trust the Jedi not to be tyrants because, look, these people are raised their whole lives steeped in religious fanaticism directed at preserving basically the current political order, and killing anyone who tries to “violate the peace.” But the Jedi also don’t do petty crime: just peacebreaking of interstellar scale. So basically, the job of the Jedi is to balance against the ambitions of would-be galactic state-formers. The Jedi don’t rule the galaxy, they work hard to make sure nobody rules the galaxy.
With that in mind, let’s look at the Empire.
Palpatine’s Efforts at State Formation
The Clone Wars
The Empire’s roots are in the Clone Wars. The Republic had fought wars against would-be state-formers and galactic hegemons many times before. But this time was different: the Separatists weren’t aiming for hegemony, but for complete independence from Republican governance. Such independence had occurred in the past (much of the Republic’s existence was alongside other polities and pseudo-polities, usually Sith polities seeking galactic hegemony), but was almost always accompanied by attempts at hegemony by the Sith.
Let’s talk about the Sith. The Sith are the Jedi, except they have a different ethic. Oh, and they have a home-base with population and territory. So the Sith are “Jedi state” that really is a state, and makes a real stab at galactic hegemony several times. Throughout the history of the Republic in fact, Sith-led efforts will form the majority of the major attempts at creating a centralized Galactic polity. The Sith seek a centralized galaxy under one political leadership, the Jedi seek to preserve a political order that maintains highly distributed sovereignty under a very loose and dynamic Republican leadership.
Palpatine knew that a war between the Republic and a Sith resurgency would end the same as always: the Republic would unite around the foe in defense of their liberties, crush the Sith polity, then go back to diffuse sovereignty. But Palpatine was more clever than previous Sith leaders (also, the Expanded Universe hints he was more aware of rival galactic powers like the Ssi-Ruuk and the Chiss, so engaged in trying to create a polity to pre-empt their aggression; there’s also some belief he was seeking to militarize the galaxy in advance of the Yuuzhon-Vong invasion which he, allegedly, saw coming via the Force).
So Palpatine orchestrated the creation of an “Army of the Republic,” to pre-empt a “Republican coalition army.” This would give the Republic a military platform from which to centralize itself. This is sort of like Cromwell’s New Model Army in a sense; a source of truly nationalized military force that creates the nation and reshapes the political scene. Meanwhile, the Separatists would be just enough of a bogeyman to provoke the Republic to circle the wagons and gear up the centralization machine, but would never actually achieve (or even seriously pursue) total hegemony. By simultaneously creating an optimal foe whose animating ideology was about uber-decentralization and supplying the Republic with an unprecedentedly centralized military force, Palpatine created the ideal conditions for getting the Republic to turn itself into the centralized state, instead of leading a Sith resurgency to conquer it.
You can see this all over the movie. Why does Palpatine want to undermine the Jedi? It’s not because he’s Evil Sith and they’re Good Jedi: that’s too facile. It’s because the Jedi are ideologically committed to decentralized sovereignty, while Palpatine is trying to create a centralized state. This is also why Palpatine’s Empire (in the Expanded Universe) discriminates against non-humans, despite their forming a majority of the population: Palpatine needs to create a constituency for his newly centralized state. Speciesism is a as solid a post-war constituency as any, especially given the disproportionately non-human leadership of the Separatists, and the disproportionately human leadership of the Republic.
The Rebellion In Favor of Decentralized Sovereignty
As long as the war continues, Palpatine’s efforts at centralization go well. And putting the Jedi at the head of the army made them great fall guys. Palpatine could claim that the Jedi were abandoning their traditional role (half-true, in Factcheck language), which essentially means that the anti-tyranny commitment mechanism could be construed as a failure. Once you no longer trust the Jedi to be fanatically devoted to their traditional ideology, do you really trust them as peacekeepers? Heck no! So Order 66 sails through, the Jedi attack Palpatine (I never claimed the Jedi were shrewd politicians) in a last ditch effort to thwart centralization, and the Empire is born.
But as soon as the Clone Wars are over, the rebellion begins. Palpatine’s efforts at centralization increasingly rely on military force. By Episode IV, we see that provincials are actively chaffing under military rule. Tatooine was previously beyond the grip of the Republic, firmly under Hutt influence, but by Episode IV, we have imperial troops and officials present. This doesn’t make life better for your average Tatooinian, of course, indeed Luke appears positively enthusiastic about the rebellion even before his radicalization under Obi-Wan. But the Empire has definitely been engaged in military actions to create hard borders, clamp down on interstellar crime, and enforce its rule.
The Importance of Institutions
Unfortunately, Palpatine forgot that successful states are not made by mere power, but by institutions. The Jedi Order was an institution that could credibly induce compromise in interstellar conflicts. The Empire only has force. So we see a galaxy where a growing coalition bands together into the Rebel Alliance, despite in many cases disparate complaints. Do they want the Senate restored? Sure they do! But we should see in the Rebel Alliance at least as much a coalition of systems opposed to any central government as systems opposed to this central government.
Hence why Alderaan is not the real face of the rebellion. Most rebel systems are “outlying” as Tarkin says; the fringes that never accepted Republican rule and sure as shootin’ won’t accept more heavy-handed Imperial rule. Alderaan, however, is a core planet; ideologically committed to the Republic, but actually quite atypical of the average rebellious planet. Kashyyk or Tatooine is far more typical of the rebellion than Alderaan. While the political leaders of the rebellion come from core planets, reflecting the resilience of old Republican elitism (Mon Mothma is from Chandrila, for example), the economic and military core is obviously in the Outer Rim and in the rogues and vagabonds who lost the most under Imperial rule.
The Emperor eventually has to accept limits to centralization, of course. The abolition of the Senate is swiftly followed by devolution of military command to regional governors. Meanwhile, Tarkin attempts to replace the old peacekeeping institutions with raw, unmitigated fear of total annihilation.
This is all just garden-variety state formation strategies. ISIS is doing the same thing. They don’t have much in the way of established institutions, so they appeal to two key mechanisms for creating legitimacy: religious claims (like the Jedi or Sith; let’s say Sith pretty ovbiously), and the threat of extraordinary violence (Tarkin and the Death Star). Unfortunately, raw fear is not very good at building functional states. The early Westphalian states were founded on existing proto-states based on religious uniformity and continuing Feudal claims. But the Empire seeks religious reform and the creation of an entirely new legal framework.
To put it more plainly, we should not see Palpatine as a coup leader or dictator, but as a nationalist figurehead along the lines of Wilhelm I or Victor Emmanuel II. And Darth Vader is his Bismarck, his Garibaldi, his Cromwell.
The Future of Galactic Statehood
Civil Wars Are Common First Steps to Statehood
The Empire’s state-building project encounters serious headwinds. In the Expanded Universe, the Empire is pushed back by a New Republic. But the New Republic is not at all like the Old Republic. It has a standing army, centralized control, and a galactic constituency. The New Republic shares a common story of revolution and restorationism, and renewed commitment of revivalist Jedi-ism. These are solid foundations for shared statehood. So the New Republic in fact creates a galactic polity, even as they never fully crush the Empire before the Yuuzhon Vong sweep in and crack everything to pieces.
In the new Star Wars, we’ll see what happens. Best guesses right now are that there’s some kind of decentralized chaos after the Battle of Endor. If so, that’s exactly what my theory predicts. Rather than accept a “New Republic” which can enforce a kind of republican sovereignty, the galaxy would be likely to splinter again into chaotic factions. And without institutional credibility the Jedi Order and Old Republican Senate to mediate conflicts, this post-Imperial galaxy is likely to be chaotic.
Of course, chaos is how states are born. Consider the English Civil War, which transformed a feudal personalist monarchy into a real honest-to-goodness premodern nation-state. The English Civil War(s) was, above all else, chaos. It was a chaos that enabled the nation to violently sort out and publicly prove which models of governance could actually command real public support. The Thirty Years War did the same: it showed that Catholic imperial governance of Protestant principalities was just not viable in the real world. The brokered Westphalian compromise was a necessary result for the end of the chaos.
We don’t yet know how the Star Wars galaxy’s chaos will resolve. We don’t know what the underlying equilibrium form of governance is. Maybe the fires of the Clone Wars, Imperial centralization and expansion, and the Galactic Civil War will convince the galaxy of the need for a strong central state. Or maybe it will convince regional players of the hopelessness of seeking galactic hegemony, focusing on regional states. I, for one, am excited to see how the project of galactic state-formation progresses in the new trilogy.
This much is clear so far: the Star Wars galaxy is not a rational polity. Forcing it to become a state may, in the process, create a national identity, but is almost certainly immoral given the costs involved. Are the billions and billions of lives lost in the Clone Wars and Galactic Civil War worth the benefits of centralized rule from Coruscant? Almost certainly not. This is why the Rebel Alliance are the good guys: not only because the franchise designers say so, but because the Rebels and the Jedi have an accurate and morally good perception of the imperative to align the coercive force of government with the real polities and interests that exist. Forcing the centralization of coercive force in Coruscant is essentially a kind of “internal war of conquest.”
But I promised you commentary on immigration. So here we go.
Rational Polities and Statehood
Why Non-Racist Republicans Get Worried About Immigration
I’m on record many times as being politically conservative, but also on record as being pretty explicitly in favor of higher levels of immigration. But unlike many of my more libertarian-minded colleagues, I’m not even remotely in favor of open borders. The reason is, of course, Star Wars.
The United States is essentially a rational polity right now. We possess enough shared history, language, culture, and identification as patriots to a nation, the United States, that governing the U.S. as one polity makes a lot of sense. When the south seceded (and if you want my views on southern heritage, see here and here), they did so because they saw themselves as a different nation, and governing multiple nations (or nationalities) under one state is really, really hard. Like, crushing-the-Rebel-Alliance-hard. Now, as was shown in the American Civil War, the national identity of a given people in a given territory can change. The threat of southern secession is no longer serious. So there’s no immutable fact to a given set of facts on the ground and the rationality of a given polity. A country with a given ethnic mix may be a rational polity, or may not be, depending on its norms, institutions, culture, legal arrangements, and the strength of the state apparatus.
But if somehow a country develops within itself different nations, then it can become ungovernable and rebellious. The threat of domestic rebellion in general is a rising one in the 21st century, as deaths from civil war have risen even as other forms of war death have fallen. In the United States, such rebellion is incredibly distant and preposterous, except, you know, when it isn’t.
Short of armed rebellion, the presence of different de facto nations within a state can simply lead to radical and volatile politics, extreme rhetoric, and generally dysfunctional politics. When a given political settlement faces shifting underlying political preferences, it creates tension. This is an obvious fact. But when there are multiple shifts in underlying preferences going opposite ways, the tension is particularly severe.
Enter the question of immigration. After my last post where I claimed that, yes, those concerned about immigration do have some valid concerns, several readers asked for clarification. Aside from mere racism or xenophobia, and aside from fears specific to value judgments about Arab or Chinese culture, what’s the core worry about immigration?
The core worry is that immigration will lead to competing polities within the United States at a time when centralization remains high. The share of national income going to the Federal government remains much higher than in the 19th century during the last immigrant boom, and as does the share of government revenue. In other words, a larger immigrant population runs the risk of creating rival polities within the United States at a time when it is uniquely risky to do so due to currently high levels of centralization.
This has some practical corollaries. Conservatives tend to favor, in principle and usually though not always in practice, greater devolution of policymaking power to the states. The argument runs that each state is different, with different preferences, and the solution that works for California may not for Georgia. So we should devolve. But that argument is even stronger when the voters in New Mexico, for example, view themselves as Mexican-Americans, while the voters in West Virginia view themselves as, well, American-Americans. Yes, we’re all something else originally, but rational polities are formed by communities of imagined political and cultural identity. The nation is a creation of the mind. So with people who view themselves as American-Americans seeing what they perceive as a growing number of Foreign-Americans who may have different interests and preferences, there will naturally be a push for retrenchment of American-American interests.
That’s true even if, as in the 19th century, immigration comes from diverse groups and filters out into both major parties more-or-less evenly, or at least not consistently. Now keep in mind that immigrants are overwhelmingly Democrats. Now it’s true that their actual policy preferences differ somewhat less, but seriously, since when have actual policy preferences ever mattered? What matters is public affiliation and loyalty. Whose candidates get the votes?
Thus, you’ve got a situation where the American-American population views itself as being overwhelmed by the Foreign-American population, who themselves are overwhelmingly of a single party. To put it bluntly, if immigrants were 80% Republican and voting for candidates who restrict abortion, oppose same-sex marriage, and cut taxes and spending, do you really think no Democrats would change their tune? I suspect it’d be about 10 minutes until we heard a chorus of stories about the need to exercise prudence and caution and be “smart” about who we let in.
And, by the way, that kind of strategic partisanship is a good and beneficial thing. Because it correctly recognizes the risk of creating rival polities within a single state. Especially if immigrants are not encouraged to integrate rapidly (which, in general, the U.S. does encourage rapid integration), the risk of one party becoming a vehicle for a rival polity (perhaps affiliated with a foreign state, perhaps simply a brand new polity within the domestic state) is real.
At current levels of immigration, this kind of rival-polity-formation is not a serious threat. I want to emphasize that: our current inflows do not lend credibility to the idea that we face any imminent threat of the U.S. being meaningfully destabilized by immigrant groups fueling the division of the U.S. into rival polities. However, immigration certainly does exacerbate existing sectional tensions. And while I favor higher immigration, I don’t favor open borders or too much higher immigration because, as I mentioned in my previous post, immigration at the open borders levels of the 19th century actually would swamp natives pretty fast. Moderately higher flows? That’s fine and dandy. Dramatically higher flows? There’s risks to that; serious risks of the “This Could Destroy the Foundations of Liberal Democracy in a Large Republic” kind.
The Optimal State
Governing the Galaxy; or the 50 States
There’s a logical conclusion to all this. High immigration flows are particularly likely to create nativist extremism during periods of high government centralization, such as at present. By locating many decisions in the most divided polity, you get more and more bitter fights over those decisions. It is fortuitous, then, that the state and local share of U.S. governance has edged upwards over the last few decades. However, the share of national income going to the Federal government has also edged upwards. Uh-oh.
Overall, if we want to sustain current or higher levels of immigration, there will have to be compromises with regards to how many decisions are made at the Federal level. The large immigrant share and its concentrated positioning in certain states alongside heavy dominance by one party will lead to a growing political and cultural divergence. While it’s unlikely to ever become so severe as to cause actual constitutional problems, it’s entirely plausible that the current political settlement could become (or perhaps is becoming) unworkable.
The solution, of course, is the one most conservatives say they want anyways: devolve policymaking and revenue-raising authority to the states. Maybe instead of having the split be 60/40 Federal/State & Local, sustained high inflows will make 40/60 a more viable political settlement.
The point is not that Star Wars is a super realistic universe. The point is that the fairly deliberately silly reading of Star Wars that I’ve offered serves to give us a metaphor for what happens when you try to run a centralized state when the underlying polity is, in fact, several underlying polities. I hope I’ve succeeded in convincing you that (1) the Rebels really are the good guys, (2) they are the good guys because they support a functional form of galactic governance which devolves sovereignty to local officials in most cases, (3) Palpatine is the bad guy because he tries to force central authority on a divided polity, (4) high, sustained immigration flows increase the risk that the U.S. faces from divided polities, and (5) as this risk grows, the prudent path forward is to, on the margin, shift the balance of revenue-raising and policy-making to the states, away from the Federal government.
And with that, I promise my next post will be entirely free of Star Wars references.
See my previous two posts, offering a detailed, interactive history of immigration, and discussing the domestic geography of immigration.
See that time I had a beef with Pew’s immigration forecasts.
See my previous work on the linkages between domestic and international migration.
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I’m a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliott School with an MA in International Trade and Investment Policy, and an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. I like to learn about migration, the cotton industry, airplanes, trade policy, space, Africa, and faith. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research. More’s the pity.
