There’s nothing more self-congratulatory than a government announcing it’s DOING SOMETHING ABOUT SOMETHING. That’s the New York City government at the moment, lauding its efforts to reduce crime in the city’s subways by installing tech even the tech manufacturer has stated isn’t capable of doing what’s being asked of it.

In mid-May, Mayor Eric Adams and the city government told New Yorkers something was being done. And that “something” was the installation of gun detection tech. Eric Adams (and I’m sure some city residents) appears to believe the city’s subways are awash in a flood of criminal activity, apparently forgetting the city actually has seen much, much worse over the years.

In addition to scrambling National Guardsmen to subway stations to police (state) passengers, the city has done a whole lot of handwringing over a perceived uptick in subway-related crime. It has also claimed the spike in fare jumpers presents an existential threat to city funding, which is a weird thing for an entity that has always paid for stuff with other people’s money to be saying.

The latest proposal is gun detection tech produced by Evolv. The problem with this supposed solution is that even Evolv says deploying its tech in subways is going to be of extremely limited utility. Georgia Gee’s scathing report for Wired on the tech and the company’s ties to Mayor Adams and several current and former NYPD law enforcement officials made several things clear.

First, this seems to have less to do with keeping subway passengers safe and more to do with pleasing people with high-level connections in the New York government, including the nation’s largest police force.

Second, this tech isn’t going to do what Mayor Adams and other city officials claim it will:

In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the [Evolv’s] CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.

Not great! And it’s not entirely clear any future failures should be blamed on the rails. As Gee’s reporting for Wired notes, a previous test run at a Bronx hospital resulted in an 85 percent false positive rate.

But this is what New York’s getting, whether it wants it or not. And whether it works or not. More details here, via reporting by Ana Ley and Hurubie Meko for the New York Times.

New York City officials will begin testing gun-detecting scanners inside subway stations in the coming days in what they say is an effort to address riders’ concerns about crime.

The weapon-detection devices, produced by Evolv Technology, a Massachusetts-based start-up, roughly resemble the metal detectors often found at the entrances of courthouses and concerts. Representatives for Mayor Eric Adams, who announced the pilot, said that a single set of roving scanners would be used to search for weapons at various stations throughout the subway system for one month beginning Thursday or Friday. City Hall officials later corrected Mr. Adams and said that the pilot would begin on an unspecified date.

Speaking of not great, it’s kind of a problem when the mayor himself doesn’t seem to know when these devices will be rolled out. What’s worse is they’re being rolled out without guardrails. The city apparently has nothing in place to track the hit rate of these scanners. Nor does it seem immediately interested in engaging in any form of oversight that might let city residents know whether or not their money is being wasted.

It was not immediately clear how the city would gauge the pilot’s efficacy and whether there were plans to deploy the gadgets more widely. A representative for the mayor said that the city had not entered into a contract with Evolv and that it was not spending any money on the gadgets for the pilot. Officials have said that they are only experimenting with Evolv and that they are still seeking proposals from other companies with similar products.

While this may be a trial run of a proposed “solution” to what is only a perception of an increase in violent crime, there’s nothing in this statement that indicates the city won’t move forward with Evolv even if it does nothing to lower crime rates or even the perception itself.

Trials of products by government agencies generally involve some form of tracking to ensure the product delivers what’s been promised. In New York City, these baselines have been replaced by shrugs and vague assertions about “experiments.” But the word “experiment” means something. (Or, at least it used to.) It’s a scientific term that means current results will not only be tracked, but retained and compared to similar offerings from other companies.

But what’s being said here appears to be nothing more than vague assurances meant to stop journalists from asking further questions, rather than solid assurances that this is the beginning of a thorough process that will ultimately result in the best solution for the subway safety problem, even if that means walking away from gun detection tech entirely.

The most likely outcome is that Evolv will become a permanent part of the subway ecosystem. The company’s incestuous relationship with NYPD officials and the mayor himself strongly suggests the “experiment” will be deemed a success and the company granted a long, lucrative contract. And with nothing having been tracked during the supposed trial run, it will be impossible for anyone to claim Evolv’s system adds nothing to the security of the city’s subways. And that part is definitely by design.

"In 2016," Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe writes, quoting Democracy Docket's Marc Elias, "Donald Trump seemed to pull an inside straight by narrowly winning" Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin "while losing the popular vote by 3 million. We now know Trump committed 34 felonies to win that election. Without these crimes, he seems almost certain to have lost to Hillary Clinton. She would have been sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. She would have filled two Supreme Court vacancies and enacted her legislative agenda."*

Since those 34 felonies involved falsified business records that were produced in 2017, that claim is logically impossible. Yet this gloss on the former president's New York conviction echoes similarly puzzling claims by many smart and ostensibly well-informed observers. In their eagerness to embrace the prosecution's dubious "election fraud" narrative, they nonsensically assert that Trump retroactively ensured his 2016 victory by disguising a 2017 hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services.

Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Michael Cohen, then Trump's lawyer, paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her from telling her story about sex with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel during a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006. When Trump paid Cohen back in 2017, prosecutors said, he caused the falsification of business records to cover up the arrangement with Daniels by misrepresenting the reimbursement as compensation for legal work. However you view that misrepresentation, it obviously had no impact on the outcome of the election. Yet Tribe, Elias, and other people bizarrely insist that it did.

"Two years shy of this country's 250th birthday," Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said on CBS last Sunday, "12 New York jurors have convicted former president Donald Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election." The dates of those records—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries—ranged from February 14, 2017, to December 5, 2017. All of them were created after Trump was elected. You might expect that a historian would pay attention to chronological consistency.

You might expect the same from editorialists at major newspapers. Yet according to a May 30 Washington Post editorial, the jury found Trump "guilty of felony falsification of business records in order to influence the 2016 election." A New York Times editorial published the same day likewise claimed the jury found Trump "guilty of falsifying business records to prevent voters from learning about a sexual encounter that he believed would have been politically damaging." Barring time travel, of course, nothing Trump did in 2017 could have "influence[d] the 2016 election" or "prevent[ed] voters from learning about" that "sexual encounter" before they cast their ballots.

The same temporal difficulty is apparent in news coverage of Trump's trial. "Prosecutors will attempt to make the case that Trump falsified business records to tip the 2016 race," Al Jazeera said in April. "Trump faces 34 felony counts alleging that he falsified New York business records in order to conceal damaging information to influence the 2016 presidential election," NPR reported a week later.

Judging from some accounts of the trial's outcome, prosecutors succeeded in proving that the 2017 records reached back in time to influence the 2016 election. "Former President Donald Trump has been found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election," NPR reported. The subhead of a Times story published the day after the verdict said, "The former president was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 campaign." The Associated Press reported that the jury found Trump "guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex."

These confounding characterizations reflect the bait and switch at the heart of the case against Trump. "We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate," Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in January. "It's an election interference case." In his opening statement, lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo claimed the case was about "election fraud, pure and simple."

There was nothing "pure and simple" about the case, which did not involve "election fraud" at all. Although the prosecutors repeatedly insinuated that there was something inherently criminal about trying to hide potentially damaging information from voters, that is not true. And although they averred that Cohen's payment to Daniels amounted to an illegal campaign contribution under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), that interpretation of the statute is controversial. In any case, fronting the hush money did not constitute "election fraud," which is usually understood to mean interfering with the casting, counting, or reporting of votes.

Trump was not charged with violating FECA by soliciting Cohen's "contribution." The Justice Department declined to bring that case, probably because it would have been hard to prove that Trump "knowingly and willfully" violated the statute, given the fuzziness of the distinction between personal and campaign expenditures. Even if the deadline for prosecuting Trump under FECA had not passed, Bragg would have no authority to enforce that statute. So instead he resorted to an elaborate workaround that relied on various possible combinations of interacting statutes and questionable assumptions about Trump's knowledge and intent.

The FECA claim was just one of three dueling theories for treating Trump's alleged falsification of business records as a felony rather than a misdemeanor. The other two theories did not hinge on the assumption that the Daniels payment was illegal. And since the jurors were told they did not have to settle on any particular theory, it is not clear which one they found most compelling. Even if they split three ways on that crucial point, they were still allowed to reach a guilty verdict.

All of this is pretty confusing, so it is not surprising that many people have inaccurately described the meaning of the verdict, especially since Bragg and his underlings repeatedly misrepresented the nature of the case. But it is surprising that so many people who should know better have described the verdict in a way that could not possibly be true.

*CORRECTION: This post has been revised to clarify that Tribe was quoting Elias.

The post Laurence Tribe Bizarrely Claims Trump Won the 2016 Election by Falsifying Business Records in 2017 appeared first on Reason.com.

Last January, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg summed up his case against Donald Trump this way: "We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate. It's an election interference case."

That gloss made no sense, because the records at the center of the case—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries that allegedly were aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services—were produced after the 2016 presidential election. At that point, Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, had already paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her from talking about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, and Trump had already been elected. The prosecution's case against Trump, which a jury found persuasive enough to convict him on all 34 counts yesterday, was peppered with temporal puzzles like this one.

A New York Times editorial concedes that "many experts" have "expressed skepticism about the significance of this case and its legal underpinnings, which employed an unusual legal theory to seek a felony charge for what is more commonly a misdemeanor." Yet the Times also claims the jury found Trump "guilty of falsifying business records to prevent voters from learning about a sexual encounter that he believed would have been politically damaging." How did records created in 2017 "prevent voters from learning" about the Daniels tryst before they cast their ballots the previous year?

The editorial's characterization of Cohen's payment to Daniels is confounding for a similar reason. "A payoff like this is not illegal by itself," the Times concedes. "What makes it illegal is doctoring business records to mask its true purpose, which prosecutors said was to hide the story from the American people to help Mr. Trump get elected." Again, the "doctoring" of business records happened in 2017. Contrary to what the Times claims, it did not retroactively make the Daniels payment "illegal."

The Times also says the verdict "establishes that Mr. Trump committed crimes in hiding pertinent information about himself from the American people for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election." The verdict does not establish that. Trump was not charged with breaking the law by instructing Cohen to pay off Daniels. And while the contentious characterization of that payment as an illegal campaign contribution figured in one theory for treating the falsification charges as felonies rather than misdemeanors, the other two theories did not hinge on the assumption that the payoff was illegal.

Since the jurors were instructed that they did not need to settle on any particular theory, it is not clear that they unanimously accepted the idea that Trump "committed crimes in hiding pertinent information about himself from the American people for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election." That description, however, is consistent with the prosecution's dubious "election fraud" narrative, which falsely implied that "hiding pertinent information about himself" was inherently criminal.

Although it seems clear that the jury accepted that narrative, even the prosecutors sometimes forgot what they claimed the case was about. They argued that Trump violated an obscure, rarely invoked state law by conspiring with Cohen to influence the presidential election "by unlawful means." They further argued that Trump caused the falsification of business records with the intent of aiding or concealing that crime, which is the element that transformed the charges into felonies. But some versions of that theory were logically impossible.

According to one theory of "unlawful means," Trump facilitated a violation of New York tax law by allowing Cohen to falsely report his reimbursement as income. But since Cohen filed those allegedly fraudulent tax returns in 2018, after Trump had been president for more than a year, his misrepresentation could not possibly have helped Trump win the election.

Under another theory, Trump falsified business records to conceal the falsification of other business records, including the 1099-MISC forms in which the Trump Organization inaccurately described Cohen's reimbursement as income. Since the 1099 forms were issued after the election, it is hard to see how they could have been aimed at ensuring Trump's victory.

These logical difficulties were just one of several reasons to question the prosecution's case, which relied on convoluted theories involving interacting statutes and questionable assumptions about Trump's knowledge and intent. But instead of zeroing in on those weaknesses, Trump's lawyers, presumably at his behest, were determined to deny everything, starting with Daniels' story about sex with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel during a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006.

That strategy invited embarrassingly detailed testimony by Daniels, who described a presumptuous Trump abruptly disrobing while she was in the bathroom before engaging in a "brief," condomless sexual encounter "in the missionary position." Contrary to her previous accounts, Daniels implied that the sex was less than fully consensual, citing "an imbalance of power," noting the presence of a bodyguard at the door to Trump's hotel suite, saying Trump's failure to use a condom worried her, and describing her own mental state as hazy, although she added that she was not drunk and had not been drugged.

None of this was legally relevant. When it came to the questions of whether Trump had caused the falsification of business records and his intent in doing so, it did not matter exactly what happened in that hotel suite. Even if Daniels had made the whole thing up, Trump still would have been keen to keep her quiet, whether for personal reasons, business reasons, political reasons, or some combination of the three.

The defense team also insisted that Trump really thought he was paying Cohen for legal work, even though Trump had publicly admitted that he reimbursed Cohen for the Daniels payment. And Trump's lawyers disputed that he "knew about this payment" at the time, even though it defies belief to suppose that Cohen, who was eager to please Trump and conferred with him frequently, would have hatched this scheme on his own, or that he would have fronted $130,000 of his own money without the promise of reimbursement.

Whether Trump approved the misleading records related to Cohen's reimbursement, as Cohen claimed, is less clear. Trump's lawyers hammered at Cohen's credibility on that point, saying jurors should not trust a convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, and admitted liar with a powerful grudge against his former boss. But because they were also implausibly claiming that Cohen lied when he said Trump approved the Daniels payoff, the jurors may have discounted any doubts about the veracity of Cohen's account.

If Trump had been willing to concede some of the prosecution's allegations, his lawyers could have focused on the shaky legal argument for charging him with felonies. They not only failed to do that in a cogent way; they insisted on jury instructions that ruled out convicting Trump of misdemeanors rather than felonies.

"Instead of telling a simple story, Mr. Trump's defense was a haphazard cacophony of denials and personal attacks," defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti observes. "That may work for a Trump rally or a segment on Fox News, but it doesn't work in a courtroom. Perhaps Mr. Trump's team was also pursuing a political or press strategy, but it certainly wasn't a good legal strategy. The powerful defense available to Mr. Trump's attorneys was lost amid all the clutter."

The post The Prosecution's Story About Trump Featured Several Logically Impossible Claims appeared first on Reason.com.

Guilty on all counts: Last night, a jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on all 34 counts. He was convicted of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, with whom he had a tryst, in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

Sentencing, which may include prison time but does not necessarily, has been set for July 11. Trump still has appeals to exhaust, and Judge Juan M. Merchan could also choose to seek probation instead of throwing the presidential candidate in the slammer. In other words: There are a lot of different ways this could play out which would still allow Trump to campaign for president (and be elected).

Since this happened last night, we do not yet have polling data on how this verdict will affect the presidential race. But a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 6 percent of Trump voters would be less likely to vote for their favored candidate if convicted, while "24 percent say they would be more likely to vote for him" and an impressive "68 percent say it would not make a difference." That 6 percent could be consequential in a tight race.

Critics on the left, many of whom are hungry for Trump to receive jail time, and those on the right who are willing to excuse his criminal and norms-shattering behavior time and time again are both frequently wrong, but in this particular case, the legal argument was mighty dubious, writes Reason's Jacob Sullum, and the verdict was perhaps reached too swiftly, providing fodder for the argument that this was politically motivated.

"In legal terms, the quick verdict is hard to fathom," writes Sullum. "That's not because there were so many counts to consider, each related to a specific invoice, check, or ledger entry allegedly aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services. Once jurors accepted the prosecution's theory of the case, it was pretty much inevitable that they would find Trump guilty on all 34 counts. But that theory was complicated, confusing, and in some versions highly implausible, if not nonsensical."

The basics: One of the prosecution's basic arguments was that Trump falsified business records with "an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof." That other crime would be a violation of Section 17-152, a New York state election law that considers it a misdemeanor for "two or more persons" to "conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means."

But Judge Merchan told jurors they did not have to agree on what "unlawful means" were used, or what that even means, to reach a unanimous verdict. And prosecutors needed to convince jurors that Trump "knowingly and willfully" engaged in such criminal conspiracy with his fixer, Michael Cohen, which strains credulity: One argument, put forth by prosecutors, was that Cohen "made an excessive campaign contribution, thereby violating the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), when he fronted the money to pay Daniels" (per Sullum)—an offense Cohen pleaded guilty to several years ago and a piece of evidence jurors heard but were instructed to use "to assess Cohen's credibility" but not his guilt—but it is in fact quite plausible that Trump did not know that instructing Cohen to pay Daniels was illegal.

"The prosecutors zapped a dead misdemeanor back into life by claiming a violation under New York's election law 17-152," writes Jonathan Turley at The Hill. "The argument is that the crime was committed to further another crime as an unlawful means to influence the election. However, that other crime can be the falsification of business records. So the jury (or some jurors, at least) could find that some documents were falsified as an unlawful means of falsifying other documents."

HOODWINKED: It's all legally shaky, but that didn't stop prosecutors from making wild arguments (as they do), like one that the hush-money payment (also called "[an] effort to hoodwink the American voter") "could very well be what got President Trump elected" in 2016, and that the cover-up of the Daniels affair amounted to "a subversion of democracy" meant to "manipulate and defraud the voters."

The payment to Daniels "turned out to be one of the most valuable contributions anyone ever made to Trump," Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass argued at one point. But, ultimately, jurors were convinced by these arguments—even if much of the conservative legal movement and punditry (even those who aren't Trump fans) were not.

As far as appeals, Trump has plenty of "material to work with" writes Ankush Khardori at Politico. "What he's got has almost nothing to do with the salacious and supposedly extraneous details offered by Daniels about her sexual encounter with Trump—after all, Trump and his legal team foolishly invited that testimony themselves by denying its existence—but with the underlying legal architecture of the case, which imported complex principles of federal election law into a state law case about false business records."

Scenes from New York: That's enough New York for today.

QUICK HITS

• It's pretty fun to play with this tool—called "Build a Trump Voter"/"Build a Biden Voter"—from The Economist.
• Bill Ackman preps for Pershing Square IPO.
• I'm here for all shots fired at baby boomers but am not sure whether stinginess—also termed frugality or fiscal prudence—is the concern. Why are we trying to audit an entire generation's consumer spending habits? Who cares?
• Inside the world of TikTok influencers who instruct their lady followers on how to snag a rich guy.
• Ukraine is now allowed to hit targets within Russia using American-made weapons in order to defend itself from its aggressors.
• Not sold on the term "climate refugees" (or apocalypticism about what the future will hold) but Brazilian flooding is displacing hundreds of thousands of people, leaving the government scrambling.
• Are you a libertarian left wondering who Chase Oliver is? Ask no more. Watch Just Asking Questions (and send us hate mail/love letters, vows of loyalty, notes of criticism, anything you desire). Some have said my views, espoused within, are "based" but I still do not know what this word means nor will I investigate.

The post First Felon appeared first on Reason.com.

Give people ways to share images and videos with each other, and people will quickly push the limits. It’s what people do.

There’s been a slightly amusing story making the rounds these past few days: a digital “video portal” was set up to allow people in New York and Dublin to communicate with each other. And people… did exactly what you’d expect some people to do when given a spot to, um, express themselves:

However, it has also attracted a lot of unwanted attention. Some people on the Dublin side have been putting up pornographic images to the camera while one person posted video footage of the Twin Towers on fire during 9/11.

The problems have not been confined to the Dublin side. An OnlyFans model showed her breasts to onlookers in Dublin and then posted it on TikTok and Instagram. The New York portal was closed down for a time as a result.

The portal has now been closed so officials can “figure out” what to do about the fact that, sometimes, people will do wacky, crazy, or awful things if given a platform to do them.

I tend to side with Katie Notopoulos, whose take is to suck it up and open the portal back up and just revel in human absurdities.

This is terrible. The portal should reopen! In fact, we should have portals all over the country, all over the world — connecting two random places. We should have a portal between Miami and Tokyo, Florence and Dubai, Delhi and Stockholm. Currently, there’s a portal between cities in Lithuania and Poland, but let’s dream even bigger.

As she notes, at a time when people think tech is just awful, this was just fun, even if some people were perhaps less than elegant in how they used the portal.

But the portal is a case of technology that’s just pure joy.

It’s simple, there’s nothing too deep to think about. It’s not even “new” tech — video streaming between two locations is not exactly novel, although I suppose “it’s really big” differentiates it from, say, FaceTime. The situation is what makes it different — video chatting technology is usually personal, used at home or in your office conference room. Putting it in a public space, with other strangers — that makes it fun and special.

It is pure and human to be curious about strangers in another country, to be excited about the idea of seeing someone else across the screen, knowing they can see you, too. It’s fun. It’s delightful.

I mean, the story does remind me of the simple fact that if you allow people to communicate, you have to consider that some of them are going to do disturbing and awful things. And anyone managing a system that lets people communicate needs to at least consider what to do about that.

The weirdest part of this story is that it appears the people who set up the portal didn’t consider this or think about how they were going to handle these kinds of scenarios. It’s amazing that they seem to have been taken by surprise by all of this.

But sometimes (perhaps even most of the time), the answer on how you deal with the messiness of humanity communicating can simply be: nothing. Do nothing. Recognize that sometimes people are going to be people, and get on with your life.

Sure, there may be the occasional offensive image or inappropriate behavior. But that’s life. People can be weird, wild, and sometimes downright unpleasant. However, the vast majority of interactions are likely to be positive, fun, and enriching. Connecting with strangers across the globe, even briefly, can expand our horizons and remind us of our shared humanity. So let’s embrace the chaos, the silliness, and the serendipity. Open the portals and let people be people.

Dennis Powanda and Vincent Yakaitis are bound together by a common experience: They were both criminally charged in connection with an attempted burglary. Powanda was the burglar, and Yakaitis was the property owner.

Ah, justice.

Indeed, that's not a misprint, parody, or a bad joke (although I wish it were the latter). Powanda was arrested and charged with criminal trespass and burglary, along with other related offenses, for executing the botched raid a little before 2:00 a.m. in February 2023 at Yakaitis' property in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania. The government charged Yakaitis, who is in his mid-70s, with using a firearm without a license after he shot Powanda, despite that it appears prosecutors agree Yakaitis justifiably used that same firearm in self-defense.

Whatever your vantage point—whether you care about criminal justice reform and a fair legal system, or gun rights, or all of the above—it is difficult to make sense of arresting and potentially imprisoning someone over what essentially amounts to a paperwork violation. That injustice is even more glaring when considering that Powanda, 40, allegedly charged at Yakaitis, who happens to be about three and a half decades older than Powanda.

Pennsylvania's permitting regime does carve out a couple of exceptions, one of which would seem to highly favor Yakaitis. Someone does not need a license to carry, according to the law, "in his place of abode or fixed place of business." Yakaitis owned the home Powanda attempted to burglarize. The catch: He didn't live there—it reportedly had no tenants at the time of the crime—opening a window for law enforcement to charge him essentially on a technicality.

If convicted, Yakaitis faces up to five years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Quite the price to pay for protecting your life on your own property. The misdemeanor charge also implies that Yakaitis has no history of using his weapon inappropriately, or any criminal record at all, as Pennsylvania law classifies his particular crime—carrying a firearm without a license—as a felony if the defendant has prior criminal convictions and would be disqualified from obtaining such a license. In other words, we can deduce that Yakaitis was a law-abiding citizen and eligible for a permit, which means he is staring down five years in a cell for not turning in a form and paying a fee to local law enforcement. OK.

Yakaitis is not the first such case. In June, law enforcement in New York charged Charles Foehner with so many gun possession crimes that if convicted on all of them he would face life in prison. Police came to be aware of his unlicensed firearms when Foehner defended himself against an attempted mugger—the surveillance footage is here—after which they searched Foehner's home and found that only some of his weapons were licensed with the state.

Prosecutors classified it as a justified shooting. And then they hit Foehner with an avalanche of criminal charges that would have resulted in a longer prison sentence than his assailant would have received, had he survived.

There's also LaShawn Craig, another New York City man whose case I covered in December. He, too, shot someone in self-defense and he, too, was arrested for doing so without a license. Like Foehner, he was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, a violent felony in New York. For a paperwork violation.

New York is a particularly relevant case study on the subject, as its highly restrictive concealed carry framework was the subject of a landmark Supreme Court case—New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen—which the majority disemboweled. It wasn't just conservative gun rights advocates who wanted that ruling, although you'd be forgiven for thinking so based on how polarized this debate tends to be. That Supreme Court decision also attracted support from progressive public defenders with The Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, The Bronx Defenders, and Brooklyn Defender Services. As I wrote in June about the amicus brief they submitted to the Court:

[The public defenders] offered several case studies centered around people whose lives were similarly upended. Among them were Benjamin Prosser and Sam Little, who had both been victims of violent crimes and who are now considered "violent felons" in the eyes of the state simply for carrying a firearm without the mandated government approval. Little, a single father who had previously been slashed in the face, was separated from his family while he served his sentence at the Vernon C. Bain Center, a notorious jail that floats on the East River. The conviction destroyed his nascent career, with the Department of Education rescinding its offer of employment.

In many jurisdictions, including New York, it can be expensive and time-consuming to get the required license, which in turn makes the Second Amendment available only to people of a certain class.

So where do we go from here? Those skeptical of rolling back concealed carry restrictions may take comfort in the fact that this doesn't have to be black and white. Governments, for example, can "give eligible persons a 30-day grace period to seek and obtain a permit after being charged, then automatically drop charges and expunge record once obtained," offers Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, or "remove the criminal penalty entirely" and perhaps "make it a fineable infraction," like driving without a license.

Whatever the case, it should be—it is—possible to balance public safety with the right to bear arms, and, as an extension, the right to self-defense. To argue otherwise is to embolden a legal system that incentivizes elderly men like Yakaitis to sit down and take it when someone threatens their life.

The post This Elderly Man Was Arrested After Shooting a Burglar in Self-Defense—for Carrying the Gun Without a License appeared first on Reason.com.

In an innovative move, a chain of New York City restaurants introduced virtual cashiers, who are taking customers' orders over Zoom from their homes in the Philippines. The approach has sparked heated debates, with some claiming it is a step toward a dystopian, impersonal future. But the technology might not be as bad as critics think. 

Customers at Sansan Ramen and Sansan Chicken in the Long Island City neighborhood in Queens are no longer greeted by a cashier face-to-face but instead interact with one displayed on a flat-screen monitor. Although physically half a world away, the virtual cashiers handle menu inquiries and take customers' orders just like in any other restaurant.

this is insane

cashier is literally zooming into nyc from the philippines pic.twitter.com/opAyS8AYUs

— brett goldstein (@thatguybg) April 6, 2024

The initiative, launched by New York–based Happy Cashier, has been under testing since October. It currently operates in several stores in Queens, Manhattan, and Jersey City, including the dumpling joint Yaso Kitchen. 

Yet since the virtual cashiers started trending on social media, the system has faced criticism. A New York Times reporter who visited a Sansan Chicken said the cashier had a spotty connection, making it hard to hear. Another reporter tried to order something off the menu at Yaso Kitchen, but the virtual cashier didn't seem to know what they were ordering. And a New York Post article seemed to care more about the system's tipping standards than the benefits of the technology.

Beyond technical glitches, the model has sparked broader economic and social concerns. Critics argue that virtual cashiers are taking away job opportunities from New Yorkers, especially amid the shrinking local fast-food work force. Meanwhile, others have come to the defense of foreign workers who are being "exploited" with a meager salary of $3 an hour—way under New York City's $16.

Despite these concerns, employing virtual cashiers could have several advantages. For struggling businesses, it offers a way to reduce operational costs and maintain lower consumer prices. 

Chi Zhang, the founder of Happy Cashier and a former restaurant owner himself, sees the model as a necessary adaptation. Facing high rents and operational costs, having "a virtual-assistant model, somewhat akin to that employed by overseas call centers, could help maximize small retail spaces and improve store efficiency," he told The New York Times.

"I simply cannot avoid discussing this topic," he told Fortune, referring to using outsourced labor to cut down costs. "The cost is admittedly cheaper than the U.S."

While the operational costs of virtual cashiers are lower for restaurant owners, the wages are also competitive by Philippine standards. According to Zhang, his virtual cashiers are earning over 150 percent more than the average cashier earns back home. It's a win-win situation.

The concept of virtual cashiers is not entirely new. Back in 2022, the Canadian food chain Freshii hired almost 100 workers from places like Nicaragua to take orders and payments through a video calling device after the company was left grappling with staffing shortages caused by the pandemic. 

With the technology still in its pilot stage, improvements are expected. Zhang hopes to quickly scale up the number of virtual assistants by the end of the year, positioning his venture as the leader of a transformative trend in the restaurant industry. 

The post Could Virtual Cashiers Be the Future of the Restaurant Industry? appeared first on Reason.com.

Feisty Joe: I am glad Joe Biden seemingly took a lot of Adderall before delivering his State of the Union address, since it made him look alive. The only downside was that the actual policies he talked up were all terrible.

Overall, the speech seemed like a campaign event in more ways than one. Biden repeatedly called out "my predecessor" without criticizing Trump by name, and brought up issues like January 6, as well as Republicans' inability to pass legislation. Biden said Trump's "bowing down" to Vladimir Putin is "outrageous," as well as "dangerous" and "unacceptable" (paired with a call for more Ukraine funding, natch). There was a fair amount of heckling in the chamber throughout, and Biden himself was feisty and confrontational. The decorum of previous addresses was conspicuously absent last night. (And Biden's opponent resorted to, uh, predictably juvenile artistic rebuttals.)

As for actual substance, Biden spent a fair chunk of time "proposing temporary tax credits of $400 a month to compensate for high mortgage rates and the end of title insurance fees for federally backed mortgages," per Reason's Christian Britschgi. The White House circulated more info about this plan, which would "increas[e] the number of tax credits available for low-income housing developers" and create "a $20 billion competitive grant program that would directly fund affordable apartments." All of these are odd, expensive fixes for the actual problem, which is low housing supply that could be fixed by zoning reform and reducing the political power of NIMBY activists.

Biden also devoted a few lines to making the wealthy pay their "fair share," specifically claiming that "working people who built this country pay more into Social Security than millionaires and billionaires do."

"Under current law, the payroll tax that funds Social Security is capped so that, for this year, only the first $168,600 in earnings are subject to it," writes Reason's Eric Boehm. "Raising that cap—or eliminating it—is frequently discussed as one possible solution to Social Security's approaching insolvency. That seems to be the idea that Biden was gesturing towards in his speech." But this solution, clothed in eat-the-rich rhetoric, would not come anywhere close to fixing the actual Social Security funding issues and would involve a massive tax increase on the many people who make more than $168,600 in earnings.

"Too many corporations raise prices to pad their profits charging more for less," said Biden at one point, referring to what he calls "shrinkflation" and calling out candy bars and bags of chips as an example of this. "The snack companies think you won't notice if … same size bag, put fewer chips in it," he added. Not only is this comically unserious, but it's also insulting to Americans struggling with inflation and high grocery costs—no amount of blameshifting should distract from the fact that COVID-era stimulus spending (from both presidents) led to inflation, which has led to interest rate hikes to tame that inflation, which has thankfully not created a severe recession but has certainly led to a lot of budgetary pain for normal Americans. 

Proportionate response: "If you ban TikTok, I will kill myself," one constituent caller told a House GOP office, according to Politico. Right now, members of the House are weighing moving forward on legislation that could possibly result in a TikTok ban for U.S. users within the next six months.

TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The legislation, which advanced out of committee with an impressively unanimous vote, "creates a narrow process to let the executive branch prohibit access to an app owned by a foreign adversary if it poses a threat to national security," per the Associated Press, in addition to forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok so it can continue to be accessible to American users.

"If you actually read the bill, it's not a ban. It's a divestiture," Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wis.), cosponsor of the TikTok bill, told Politico. In fact, the decision is "squarely in the hands of TikTok to sever their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party." If the U.S. version is sold to a non-Chinese company, "TikTok will continue to survive."

Scenes from New York: "They're gonna hang out in Whole Foods," complains one New Yorker about a migrant shelter proposal that would place recent border-crossers in Gowanus, Brooklyn. (From now on, I will point to this stupid quote when people ask why I abandoned Brooklyn in favor of Queens.)

QUICK HITS

• All about Opill, the first over-the-counter birth control pill that the Food and Drug Administration has approved.
• "A congressional probe of Chinese-built cargo cranes deployed at ports throughout the U.S. has found communications equipment that doesn't appear to support normal operations, fueling concerns that the foreign machines may pose a covert national-security risk," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The installed components in some cases include cellular modems, according to congressional aides and documents, that could be remotely accessed."
• Preliminary data out of Los Angeles suggests that AI is 3.5 times better than social workers at predicting who will become homeless.
• God bless Hawaii: land of poke bowls, hula girls, and the appropriate amount of political disillusionment.

Wow. 29% for uncommitted in the final Hawai'i tally. pic.twitter.com/VMMsu1hX3S

— Read Let This Radicalize You (@JoshuaPHilll) March 7, 2024

• British author J.K. Rowling has been reported to the police for misgendering a trans person. Her thread about free speech is incredible, and ends with this delightful nugget:

Aware as I am that it's an offence to lie to law enforcement, I'll simply have to explain to the police that, in my view, India is a classic example of the male narcissist who lives in a state of perpetual rage that he can't compel women to take him at his own valuation. 5/5

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) March 6, 2024

The post State of the Union (on Stimulants) appeared first on Reason.com.

There's a well-known saying about finding connection in the nation's capital city: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

Robot Dreams, a new animated film that is up for this year's Academy Award for best animated feature, proposes a sort of twist on that idea. What if you are a dog? And you live in New York City? But you still want a friend.

Well then. Maybe the answer is to get a robot.

Robot Dreams is a whimsical, wordless story set in a fantasy version of early 1980s New York in which every person is an animal. It follows Dog, a lonely apartment dweller in the East Village who spends his days playing Pong and watching television, as he purchases a mail-order robot who quickly becomes his best and closest friend. But after a swim on a day trip to the beach, Robot becomes inoperable. Dog is forced to leave Robot on the beach for the long winter, when the beach is closed. What will he do without his best friend?

The answer, it turns out, is that he'll have to find a new friend—perhaps in the form of Duck, a pretty, sporty pal he meets flying kites in Central Park, or perhaps in the form of a new Palbot, one who isn't the same as his old Robot, but who offers a different form of companionship. Robot, meanwhile, spends the winter on the beach, dreaming of Dog, and hoping for a way to escape his strange entrapment.

Robot Dreams is a tale of love and friendship, and it is decidedly sweet-natured without being sentimental. The story's indie comic roots—it was adapted from a 2007 comic of the same name—are obvious: More than most animated films, it captures the distinctive, quirky sensibility of hand-drawn, indie comic line work.

That gives the central story an affable, fablelike quality. It also allows for a level of environmental and period specificity that is rare in any sort of film, animated or otherwise. The movie's early 1980s NYC setting is rendered in pointillistic detail, with intricate sign work and gritty city blocks populated by animal versions of New York street characters.

That includes the city's difficult, impersonal bureaucracy: One reason Dog can't rescue Robot from the beach is that there's a grumpy NYPD officer who refuses to let him through the locked gate onto the sand. Dog visits the city courthouse to plead his case, but his application for a special winter visit to the beach is quickly denied. There's a layered, lived-in quality that even the busiest Pixar movies and the most precisely recreated historical live-action films lack.

The contrast between the ordinariness of the scenario, the unconventional intricacy of the animation, and the fantastical animal characters gives the movie a peculiarity and a particularity that keeps the low-key sweetness afloat. There's magic in the mundanity of it all, which, come to think of it, is how love and friendship work too.

The post Oscar-Nominated <i>Robot Dreams</i> Is a Gentle Animated Love Story About Dogs, Robots, and 1980s New York appeared first on Reason.com.

Welcome to the police state: Yesterday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that 750 National Guardsmen and 250 state police officers will be deployed to patrol the New York City subway system, Hochul's attempt at combating recent high-profile crimes, like the incident in which an A train conductor's neck was slashed last week.

Law enforcement will also start doing bag checks for straphangers, and will bar people who have been convicted of violent crimes against subway passengers from using public transit for three years. It's clear how the bag checks will be enforced (in a way that costs the city money and commuters time) but it's not clear how the ban on past offenders will be enforced.

This all comes in addition to the roughly 1,000 New York City Police Department officers who were deployed throughout the subway system last month, and the cameras that have been installed in roughly one-sixth of the subway cars. That was in response to a January spike in major crime—driven mostly by grand larcenies, which are thefts without force—compared with January 2023. But crime stats are notoriously hard to untangle, and just because police are deployed doesn't mean they're effective: Subway crime, which is tracked as its own category, was up 30 percent year over year in 2022 when compared with 2021, despite Adams choosing to deploy police patrols throughout the system.

Hochul's new initiative appears to have already started; when I was going through the Broadway Junction stop last night, which connects the A train to the L, I counted a greater density of law enforcement than I'd seen before.

Bag checks are already happening at Grand Central: 

If you're going to introduce a bunch of new police officers and National Guard soldiers into the subway system, what is the point of having them all stand in the same place instead of riding trains and walking laps of stations? pic.twitter.com/dhpdgB3b2X

— Anthony LaMesa (@ajlamesa) March 7, 2024

But political stunts are different than good policing, and this looks more like the first.

Patrol politics: Interpreted as part of the power struggle between Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, this looks like an attempt by the governor's office to either undermine Adams or set the stage to be able to take credit for a decline in crime—if that is in fact what results, which is a big if.

Interpreted as a tactic by major Democrats in major cities to be responsive to people's crime fears, it looks a lot like pandering. Neither Adams nor Hochul is up for reelection this year, but the political tides feel like they're turning in a direction of even soft-on-crime liberals being dissatisfied with the status quo.

There is a vast middle ground between the two loudest types of New Yorkers: the "I ride the subway all the time and it's totally safe, what are you talking about?" and the "this city is a hellscape, I fear for my life every time I leave my house." The truth is somewhere in between: It is common to get on a subway car and have a crazy person yelling. Sometimes they're threatening, but infrequently. I see smoking inside the subway car or urinating inside the station every month or so. I've seen bum fights. I've noticed people passed out in front of the turnstile, blocking access, a few times before; it's hard to know if the person is dead or passed out, and what to do. (Nor is it lost on me that the above sentence is a crazy thing to have to write.)

These situations force hard questions: What do we owe to our fellow New Yorkers, especially those in severe need, who sometimes refuse to help themselves? Should we expect public spaces to be free of threat and despair and, if so, what policing or surveillance should be used to get there? Are these tradeoffs worth it?

But Hochul's plan probably doesn't address the actual issue, which has less to do with a criminal free-for-all and more to do with erratic mentally ill people who essentially use the subway system as free shelter, and sometimes act out with violence. "The [subway disorder] problem got worse in 2017, when Transit Police stopped enforcing loitering and related subway rules to keep homeless and mentally ill people and drug addicts from living and sleeping in the subway system. This was a simply a political choice," wrote Peter Moskos on X. "Before then, people using the system for shelter and not transit would be told to leave. Not arrested. But you can't stay here. After, they were told of shelter options. If they chose not to [accept], they were left alone. 95% chose to remain."

"The right to prohibit behavior on the subway that is permitted on the street (EG begging) was affirmed by Young v. New York City Transit Authority (1990). This was a hard fought battle by the MTA back in the days. It made a huge difference in crime & riders' Quality of Life," added Moskos (in a useful thread), who argued that "turning the subway into a defacto shelter isn't good for homeless people. Nor is it not fair to the rest of us who need to ride the subway."

Exiling mentally ill people from select public spaces doesn't sound like a solution that solves underlying needs. But it is a solution that possibly returns subways to the people who pay for them, and to their original use. Perhaps New Yorkers would instead prefer to have cops going through their handbags during rush hour so they can feel like the city has finally started to do something. The problem is that the something actually matters, and that random searches, which violate people's privacy, should not be taken lightly or instituted for political gain.

Scenes from New York: That's enough New York up above, I think. But here's a subway ad I saw yesterday. End microaggression discourse and return to real issues!

QUICK HITS

• "Corporations will have to share key details about their role in driving climate change and the threat that warming poses to their operations under a contentious proposal the Securities and Exchange Commission approved 3-2 on Wednesday over intense business opposition," reported The Washington Post. 
• The U.S. is negotiating a six-week ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas that Hamas is allegedly refusing to sign onto. Both Qatar and Egypt are also helping to broker it, and all parties view the holy month, Ramadan, as an urgent and looming deadline.
• Armed gangs in Haiti are putting pressure on the country's prime minister, Ariel Henry, to resign, and it looks like the country may be heading toward a civil war. So far, gangs have set a bunch of prisoners free, seized the airport, and attacked a police academy.
• "Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey swiftly signed legislation on Wednesday passed by the state's GOP-controlled legislature giving physicians who provide in vitro fertilization civil and criminal immunity for any death or damage to embryos," reported Politico.
• Inside the Satoshi Nakamoto trial in the U.K., which aims to figure out who actually created bitcoin.
• Linwei Ding, a Google employee in the U.S. who is originally from China, was just charged with stealing AI trade secrets that he was allegedly feeding to two Chinese companies.
• In the Elizabeth Warren formulation of the world, high prices are attributable to greed. So maybe landlords actually just magically became less greedy?

Austin built a shit ton of new housing and now rent is falling 7% year-over-year pic.twitter.com/BI0tWoSkU8

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) March 6, 2024

The post Empire State Police State appeared first on Reason.com.

The New York City government is refusing to reimburse Adam and Elizabeth Rizer for the loss of their car, which was totaled during a police chase. An officer was pursuing a suspected stolen vehicle when the officer's vehicle, with its lights flashing, T-boned a Hertz rental car in an intersection. That car then collided with the Rizers' Jeep, which was parked outside their apartment. The entire incident, including the collision, was caught on video. Police reports note that the police vehicle struck the Rizers' vehicle, but the city comptroller's office insists the vehicle that was T-boned actually struck their car and referred the couple to Hertz for possible compensation.

The post Brickbat: Passing the Buck appeared first on Reason.com.

In recent months, many politicians and media outlets have focused on the "migrant crisis" in various cities, supposedly caused by the arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers. Many of these migrants cannot support themselves, and end up taking up shelter space or living on the streets. In a recent Atlantic article (unfortunately, paywalled), Jerusalem Demsas explains why the supposed crisis is in reality a product of flawed government policies, rather than migration, as such:

When the mayor of New York, of all places, warned that a recent influx of asylum seekers would destroy his city, something didn't add up.

"I said it last year when we had 15,000, and I'm telling you now at 110,000. The city we knew, we're about to lose," Eric Adams urged in September. By the end of the year, more than 150,000 migrants had arrived. Still, the mayor's apocalyptic prediction didn't square with New York's past experience. How could a city with more than 8 million residents, more than 3 million of whom are foreign-born, find itself overwhelmed by a much smaller number of newcomers?

In another legendary haven for immigrants, similar dynamics were playing out. Chicago has more than 500,000 foreign-born residents, about 20 percent of its population, but it has been straining to handle the arrival of just 35,000 asylum seekers in the past year and a half. Some people have even ended up on the floors of police stations or in public parks. Mayor Brandon Johnson joined Adams and a handful of other big-city mayors in signing a letter seeking help with the "large numbers of additional asylum seekers being brought to our cities."

Sometimes the best way to understand why something is going wrong is to look at what's going right. The asylum seekers from the border aren't the only outsiders in town. Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought a separate influx of displaced people into U.S. cities that quietly assimilated most of them. "We have at least 30,000 Ukrainian refugees in the city of Chicago, and no one has even noticed," Johnson told me in a recent interview.

According to New York officials, of about 30,000 Ukrainians who resettled there, very few ended up in shelters. By contrast, the city has scrambled to open nearly 200 emergency shelters to house asylees from the Southwest border.

What ensured the quiet assimilation of displaced Ukrainians? Why has the arrival of asylum seekers from Latin America been so different? And why have some cities managed to weather the so-called crisis without any outcry or political backlash? In interviews with mayors, other municipal officials, nonprofit leaders, and immigration lawyers in several states, I pieced together an answer stemming from two major differences in federal policy. First, the Biden administration admitted the Ukrainians under terms that allowed them to work right away. Second, the feds had a plan for where to place these newcomers. It included coordination with local governments, individual sponsors, and civil-society groups. The Biden administration did not leave Ukrainian newcomers vulnerable to the whims of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who since April 2022 has transported 37,800 migrants to New York City, 31,400 to Chicago, and thousands more to other blue cities—in a successful bid to push the immigration debate rightward and advance the idea that immigrants are a burden on native-born people.

Demsas is largely right here. Ukrainians admitted under the Uniting for Ukraine (U4U)  program have not caused any controversy in cities largely because they are allowed to immediately start working, and thereby can support themselves and contribute to our economy. By contrast, asylum seekers aren't eligible to apply for work permits for six months, and even then it often takes the federal immigration bureaucracy a long time to actually issue them.

What is true for Ukrainians is also true of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and Haitians admitted under the "CNVH" program—an extension of the U4U model to a combine total 30,000 migrants per month fleeing oppression and violence in those four countries. Several hundred thousand people have entered the US under the CNVH program. But, like the Ukrainians, they have immediate work authorization, and therefore turn out to be a asset to cities, not a burden.

As Demsas explains, the federal government should abolish the six-month rule and let asylum-seekers work legally from day one. The Biden Administration has taken this step for many Venezuelans already in the US. But it needs to expand work authorization to other asylum seekers.

I do think Demsas gets one point wrong here. For the most part, it is not true that "the feds had a plan for where to place" U4U participants.  The program requires each migrant to have a US sponsor. But, beyond that, the federal government makes little or no effort to control where and how they live.

I myself am a sponsor in the U4U program, and have advised other sponsors and migrants.  Generally speaking, the migrants decide for themselves where they are going to settle in the US. Sponsors advise, but do not dictate. I now have eight Ukrainian sponsorees. To my knowledge, never once has a federal official attempted to plan where they live and work, or even offered advice on that subject.

Instead of planning and controlling, U4U mostly lets the market and civil society work. That, I think, is the real key to its success. While I don't myself have CNVH sponsorees, I know people who do; that program seems much the same.

Demsas also notes that, even when it comes to asylum seekers, the  dfficulties encountered in New York and Chicago have largely been avoided in cities like Houston and Miami, even though the latter also have experienced recent influxes. What's the difference between these cases? I don't know for sure. But a major factor is likely that the cities with serious problems also tend to have highly restrictive zoning rules, which make it difficult or impossible to build housing in response to demand. I have previously noted this issue in the case of New York.

By contrast, Houston is famous for not having zoning at all (thereby making housing construction easy, and housing itself very affordable). And Miami is at least less restrictive than cities like New York and Chicago.

In New York, housing issues have been exacerbated by the city's ill-advised free shelter guarantee, which incentivizes both migrants and poor natives to seek out free housing at public expense. New York would be well-advised to end the guarantee, while simultaneously ending exclusionary zoning rules that block new housing construction.

It is also true, as Demsas notes, that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's migrant busing program—which has heavily targeted New York and Chicago—has caused disruption in those cities:

When immigrants make their way to a city in an organic fashion, they usually are drawn to a place where they have family ties, job leads, or other connections and resources available….

That's very different from the haphazard Texas busing program. When Abbott's buses arrive at their destinations, many of them are filled with people who had specific plans to go somewhere else. Cities then re-ticket many of the passengers. The mayor of Denver told me that roughly 40 percent of asylees who are bused into his city have no intention of staying there.

Abbott should stop the busing program, and instead let migrants choose their own destinations and pay their own way. In addition to increasing the migrants' economic productivity (thereby boosting the US economy) and reducing disruption in New York and Chicago, it would also save Texas taxpayers money. The state has spent some $148 million busing migrants to other parts of the country.

In sum, the "migrant crisis" is largely caused by a combination of perverse federal, state, and local policies that bar asylum seekers from working legally, artificially restrict housing construction, and bus migrants to places other than where they actually want to go. Migrants who enter by programs that avoid these obstacles don't cause any crises. Indeed, they are actually assets to the economy. If governments want to end the "crisis," for the most part they need only get out of the way.

The post The "Migrant Crisis" is Caused by Flawed Work and Housing Policies, not Migrants appeared first on Reason.com.