The Why, When and How of Immigration Amnesties

This paper presents some of the many issues involved in the granting of an amnesty to illegal immigrants. Complementing studies by Chau (2001, 2003), Karlson and Katz (2003) and Gang and Yun (2006), we consider government behavior with respect to allocations on limiting infiltration (border control) and apprehending infiltrators (internal control) and with respect to the granting of amnesties, the timing of amnesties, and limitations on eligibility for those amnesties. We demonstrate the effects of government actions on allocations and the flow of immigrants, and how the interactions between these factors combine to yield an optimal amnesty policy. We also consider two extensions – intertemporal transfers of policing funds and “fuzziness” in declarations regarding eligibility for an amnesty aimed at apprehending and deporting undesirables.Amnesty, Immigration, Illegal Immigration, Border Controls, Internal Controls

A Theory of Immigration Amnesties

This paper presents a first attempt at understanding some of the many issues involved in the granting of an amnesty to illegal immigrants. We consider government behavior with respect to allocations on limiting infiltration (border control) and apprehending infiltrators (internal control) and with respect to the granting of amnesties, the timing of amnesties, and limitations on eligibility for those amnesties. We demonstrate the effects of government actions on allocations and the flow of immigrants, and how the interactions between these factors combine to yield an optimal amnesty policy. We also consider various extensions such as intertemporal transfers of policing funds, risk-aversion, and -fuzziness, in declarations regarding eligibility for an amnesty aimed at apprehending and deporting undesirables.Amnesty, Immigration, Illegal Immigration, Border Controls, Internal Controls.

Be Careful What You Wish For? Reducing Inequality in the 21st Century

Stanford historian Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton Univ. Press, 2017), is, in some respects, the anti-Piketty. Scheidel accepts Piketty’s view that inequality tends to grow over time, but adds a crucial caveat that runs directly opposite to Piketty’s optimistic proposals. Scheidel argues that the historical record demonstrates that inequality can only be reduced by violent means. Therefore, the Piketty proposals to reduce inequality peacefully are unrealistic, and Scheidel concludes his book by arguing that we should accept inequality as the price of peace: “All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions, it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for.” This review will first summarize Scheidel’s thesis and the evidence for it (part 2). It will then argue that the twentieth-century history of the United States shows that in fact inequality can be reduced by peaceful means, even though such reductions are not easy to achieve and usually require bipartisan consensus (part 3). Next, the review will address why the Great Recession of 2008-9 did not lead to a reduction in inequality, unlike the Great Depression (part 4). Finally, the review will ask what can be done, and propose certain steps that may be more achievable than Piketty’s proposals (part 5)

Be Careful What You Wish For? Reducing Inequality in the Twenty-First Century

A review of Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

Translation in Theory and Practice: The Case of Johann David Michaelis’s Prize Essay on Language and Opinions (1759)

In this article Johann David Michaelis’s views of language and translation are juxtaposed with his own experience as a translated and translating author, especially with regard to the translations of his prize essay on the reciprocal influence of language and opinions (1759). Its French version originated in a close collaboration with the translators, while the pirated English edition was anonymously translated at second hand. The article reconstructs Michaelis’s relationship with the French translators and his renouncement of the English version, publicly condemned in London by Robert Lowth at the author’s request. These two processes represent different contemporary modes of translation and shed new light on emerging theories of linguistic and cultural transfer

Problems in the Re-classification of the Balance Sheet as Part of an Integrated Information System

The integrated information system is an IT and information structure that includes financial reporting and management control analysis. This system requires that each accounting item is linked to every other object. In the integrated information system, it is also necessary that each item has a unique meaning. Therefore, it is impossible to have several implications or several accounting items with special meanings. The reclassification of the balance sheet in an integrated information system requires the adoption of an extraordinarily complete and exhaustive scheme. All this is indispensable for implementing a balance sheet/budget analysis that can be useful to company management for the implementation of a decision-making process that maximises management and decision-making efficiency and effectiveness. The correct reclassification of all balance sheet and financial items sometimes requires reasoning that does not always appear linear and straightforward. For this reason, in the following pages, we will analyse the balance sheet items that, in general, are the precursors of reclassification errors that can invalidate the entire analysis of the balance sheet and the balance sheet budget

Language as the Key to the Epistemological Labyrinth: Turgot’s Changing View of Human Perception

A belief in a firm correspondence between objects, ideas, and their representation in language pervaded the works of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot\u3cbr\u3e\u3cbr\u3e(1727–1781) in 1750. This conviction is particularly manifest in Turgot’s sharp critique of Berkeley’s philosophical system and his remarks on Maupertuis’s reconstruction of the origin of language. During the 1750s Turgot’s epistemological views underwent a change, apparent in two of his contributions to the Encyclopédie: the entries Existence and Étymologie (1756). These articles included a reassessment of Berkeleyan immaterialism, facing an ultimate crisis of definition and representation. A similar development may be traced in contemporary works by Condillac and Diderot. Turgot’s Encyclopédie entries also envisaged a new science, an archeology of the human mind aided by the examination of linguistic development and change. This entailed the scientific verification of conjectures in any historical account of ideas, turning etymological\u3cbr\u3e\u3cbr\u3eand psychological inquiries into what Turgot termed ‘experimental metaphysics’

The Enlightenment revival of the Epicurean history of language and civilisation

The Epicurean account of the origin of language appealed to eighteenth-century thinkers who tried to reconcile a natural history of language with\u3cbr\u3e\u3cbr\u3ethe biblical account of Adamic name-giving. As a third way between Aristotelian linguistic conventionality and what was perceived as a Platonic supernatural congruence between words and things, Epicurus’\u3cbr\u3e\u3cbr\u3etheory allowed for a measure of contingency to emerge in the evolution of initially natural signs. This hypothesis was taken up by authors as different from one another as Leibniz, Vico, Condillac and Mendelssohn. By integrating the Epicurean account of language into their own theories, however, these authors also revived the tensions inherent in the ancient thesis and had to confront the ensuing difficulties in innovative way

From the Corruption of French to the Cultural Distinctiveness of German: The Controversy over Prémontval’s Préservatif (1759)

In July 1759 the French philosopher Andre´ Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval (1716-1764) published in Berlin a diatribe against the excessive and incorrect use of French in the Prussian capital. Far from being a mere guide to linguistic style, the Préservatif contre la corruption de la langue françoise generated a heated debate, attested by an official threat to ban its publication. The personal animosity between Prémontval and the perpetual secretary of the Berlin Academy, Jean Henri Samuel Formey (1711-1797) was amply demonstrated over the pages of the Préservatif, offering a rare insight into the complex web of social and intellectual tensions in mid eighteenth-century Berlin and its Academy of Sciences. At stake were the social status and the philosophical outlook of local Huguenots, compared to that of French philosophers who were granted asylum in Prussia by Frederick II. The debate also concerned the issues of academic freedom in an absolutist regime, the material production and distribution of texts, conduct and etiquette in the Republic of Letters and the formation of group identities in eighteenth-century Germany. Drawing on manuscripts preserved in Berlin, Göttingen and Krakow, this article traces the development of the controversy and the reception of Prémontval’s work by both French- and German- writing authors at the Berlin Academy and beyond its confines