conuly

A quick one on vintage base ball (note spelling)

One on traditional diagramming of sentences

Crackdown on Migrants Tugs at Soul of Israelis
This one comes with pictures!

One by one, immigration inspectors escorted the migrants out of a dilapidated building into an alley teeming with African-run stores and hair salons. Then, they were led onto a waiting bus, in the first steps on the way to deportation to their native South Sudan.

One woman grasped a leopard-print purse. A man left with a book in his hand. Some wore brightly colored shirts and held their heads high. One shouted “Juba! Juba!” — the name of South Sudan’s capital — and raised his hands in a victory sign.

“It must be done,” said Mor Sheffer, an Israeli bystander, “or tomorrow we will have no country and we will have to look for another one.”

Many residents here in the Neve Shaanan area of south Tel Aviv complain of rampant crime by migrants and say that it has become “Soweto,” a reference to the site of a 1976 uprising in South Africa. At a recent protest fanned by right-wing politicians, one lawmaker described the Africans, known here as “infiltrators,” as “a cancer in our body.” Later, Africans’ stores and apartments were attacked.

But the government clampdown is also ripping at Israel’s soul. For some, the connotations of roundups and the prospect of mass detentions cut too close to the bone.

“I feel I am in a movie in Germany, circa 1933 or 1936,” said Orly Feldheim, 46, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, as she doled out food last week to a long line of immigrants in the neighborhood’s Levinsky Park.

Since 2005, about 60,000 sub-Saharan Africans have surreptitiously crossed the porous border from Egypt into Israel after traversing the rugged desert of the Sinai Peninsula.

The rising tensions caused by their presence have prompted the government to announce a tough new policy to stem the influx of African immigrants and asylum seekers. The interior minister, Eli Yishai, has vowed to clear the country of all illegal immigrants within three years.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu contends that most of them are economic immigrants and that they threaten the Jewish character of Israel. On Sunday, he said that all new arrivals would immediately be placed in detention.

Mr. Netanyahu told his cabinet that Israel was “building holding facilities to house tens of thousands of infiltrators until they can be sent out of the country.”

For now, most of the immigrants and asylum seekers — about 50,000 — cannot be deported, in line with international conventions. They come from Sudan and Eritrea, countries considered too dangerous for their repatriation, and so they are afforded temporary collective protection in Israel. That protection was recently lifted for immigrants from South Sudan. On June 7, a Jerusalem court ruled that it was safe enough to repatriate them to South Sudan, a newly independent nation that has diplomatic ties with Israel.

There are 1,500 South Sudanese here, according to Israeli officials; South Sudanese activists put the number at 700.

In recent days, about 300 South Sudanese have been detained for hearings pending deportation. Hundreds more have agreed to leave voluntarily to avoid arrest and to qualify for a departure grant of $1,300. The first planeload was to depart late Sunday.

Some immigrants tell harrowing tales of cruelty by Bedouin smugglers in Sinai. They recounted how, after dashing across the border, at risk of being shot by Egyptian officers, they sought out the Israeli border patrols. The soldiers who picked them up, they said, told them they were safe and welcomed them to Israel.

The immigrants were then taken to Saharonim, a prison near the border, and registered. Israel carried out no background checks to sort the genuine asylum seekers from opportunists or fugitives. Most, mainly Eritreans and Sudanese, were released after a few days under the collective protection provision. They were put on buses and dropped off at Levinsky Park or other locations, ending up in a kind of limbo.

Their visas state that they are not permitted to work. The new government measures include hefty fines for employers of illegal immigrants. Most immigrants end up doing odd jobs for low wages.

Under the recently amended infiltrators law, even those entitled to collective protection can be detained for up to three years. Along with a fence that Israel is constructing on the border with Egypt, these measures are meant to deter more immigrants from coming.

People can apply for refugee status, but priority is given to those not covered by collective protection, said Sabine Haddad, a spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry’s Population, Immigration and Border Authority. The approval rate is negligible. Since 2009, out of 7,000 applications, 16 people were granted refugee status or asylum.

Critics say that Israel, a nation largely founded by refugees, lacks a proper immigration policy.

“We say: ‘Be fair, we are Jews. Decide who is or isn’t a refugee,’ ” said Iftah Cohen, a lawyer working for We Are Refugees, an Israeli organization that provides free legal aid to asylum seekers threatened with deportation.

One of them is Mary Eze, a widow who has a 4-year-old boy, Valentine. Ms. Eze left Nigeria in 2007 with her husband after his family disapproved of their marriage. They went to Cairo, where Valentine was born. But even after her husband died in a car accident, his family tracked her down in Egypt. “They came to take Valentine,” she said.

Ms. Eze and Valentine escaped to Sinai, where, she said, over 15 months they were beaten and abused by Bedouin smugglers. Eventually, one tribesman took pity and sent them to Israel. After five months in Saharonim Prison, she and Valentine were taken to the airport to be sent back to Nigeria where, she believes, they would be killed.

Then, We Are Refugees lawyers intervened. Ms. Eze’s case is now in court.

“We came with nothing,” she said. “We have nowhere in the world.”

Another case taken on by We Are Refugees is that of Takleb Melake Abtew and his wife, Lamlam. Of Eritrean origin, they met and married in a refugee camp in Sudan. In 2009, they crossed into Israel with their son, Ermias, then 3.

In Israel, they were detained and separated for two years. Denied collective protection after their release, because, their lawyers said, the authorities decided they “looked Ethiopian,” they are threatened with deportation.

For now, they live in a tiny apartment in Or Yehuda, a town south of Tel Aviv. Ms. Abtew, who is pregnant, rarely leaves home, afraid of being rearrested. Mr. Abtew said that in Eritrea he would be considered an army deserter for avoiding conscription, though he was 10 when he left.

“I’d prefer to be here in prison,” he said. “Whatever the Israelis say, we will do.”

Some Israelis invoke the biblical injunction to “love the stranger for we were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Others say they now feel like strangers in their own country.

In Levinsky Park, an Israeli veteran who refuses to be identified helps immigrants find jobs. “My head tells me that it is not good that they are here,” he said, “but I follow my heart. I am split half and half.”

American Children, Now Struggling to Adjust to Life in Mexico

Jeffrey Isidoro sat near the door of his fifth-grade classroom here in central Mexico, staring outside through designer glasses that, like his Nike sneakers and Nike backpack, signaled a life lived almost entirely in the United States. His parents are at home in Mexico. Jeffrey is lost.

When his teacher asked in Spanish how dolphins communicate, a boy next to him reached over to underline the right answer. When it was Jeffrey’s turn to read, his classmates laughed and shouted “en inglés, en inglés” — causing Jeffrey to blush.

“Houston is home,” Jeffrey said during recess, in English. “The houses and stuff here, it’s all a little strange. I feel, like, uncomfortable.”

Never before has Mexico seen so many American Jeffreys, Jennifers and Aidens in its classrooms. The wave of deportations in the past few years, along with tougher state laws and persistent unemployment, have all created a mass exodus of Mexican parents who are leaving with their American sons and daughters.

In all, 1.4 million Mexicans — including about 300,000 children born in the United States — moved to Mexico between 2005 and 2010, according to Mexican census figures. That is roughly double the rate of southbound migration from 1995 to 2000, and new government data published this month suggest that the flow is not diminishing. The result is an entire generation of children who blur the line between Mexican and American.

“It’s really a new phenomenon,” said Víctor Zúñiga, a sociologist at the University of Monterrey, in Nuevo León State, which borders Texas. “It’s the first time in the relationship between Mexico and the United States that we have a generation of young people sharing both societies during the early years of their lives.”

Critics of immigration have mostly welcomed the mass departure, but demographers and educators worry that far too many American children are being sent to schools in Mexico that are not equipped to integrate them. And because research shows that most of these children plan to return to the United States, some argue that what is Mexico’s challenge today will be an American problem tomorrow, with a new class of emerging immigrants: young adults with limited skills, troubled childhoods and the full rights of American citizenship.

“These kinds of changes are really traumatic for kids,” said Marta Tienda, a sociologist at Princeton who was born in Texas to Mexican migrant laborers. “It’s going to stick with them.”

Jeffrey’s situation is increasingly common. His father, Tomás Isidoro, 39, a carpenter, was one of the 46,486 immigrants deported in the first half of 2011 who said they had American children, according to a report by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Congress. That is eight times the half-year average for such removals from 1998 to 2007.

Mr. Isidoro, wearing a Dallas Cowboys hat in his parents’ kitchen, said he was still angry that his 25 years of work in the United States meant nothing; that being caught with a broken taillight on his vehicle and without immigration papers meant more than having two American sons — Jeffrey, 10, and his brother, Tommy Jefferson, 2, who was named after the family’s favorite president.

As for President Obama, Mr. Isidoro uttered an expletive. “There are all these drug addicts, drug dealers, people who do nothing in the United States, and you’re going to kick people like me out,” he said. “Why?”

White House officials have said that under a new policy focused on criminals, fewer parents of American children are being deported for minor offenses. On Friday, the Obama administration also announced that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who came to United States as children would be allowed to stay without fear of deportation. The policy, however, does not grant legal status, and because nearly half of the country’s 10.2 million illegal immigrant adults have children, experts say that inevitably more families will be divided — especially if deportations over all hold steady around 400,000 a year.

But for Jeffrey, the impact of his father’s removal in June last year was immediate. His grades dipped. His mother, Leivi Rodríguez, 32, worried that he had become more distant, from both his friends and his studies. Almost every day, Jeffrey told her he wanted to see his father.

So six months after her husband’s deportation, she sent Jeffrey to live with his father in Mexico, and she followed with Tommy a few months later. It was December when he arrived here in a hill town south of Mexico City, surrounded by fields of swaying sugar cane. On Jeffrey’s first night, he noticed something strange in his bed. “Dad, what’s that?” he asked.

“A scorpion,” his father said.

School here presented new challenges, as well. Jeffrey went hungry at first because neither he nor his father realized that without a cafeteria, students relied on their parents to bring them food at recess.

In class, Jeffrey’s level of confusion rises and falls. His teacher said she struggled to keep him from daydreaming. “His body is here, but his mind — who knows where it is,” she said.

Houston — that is where Jeffrey’s thoughts typically drift. There, he had friends, McDonald’s, the zoo. It is where he lingered at the library at Gleason Elementary to catch up on his favorite series of books, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” There, his school had a playground; here, there is just a concrete slab. There, computers were common; here, there are none.

“It was just better,” Jeffrey said.

The educational disparities between Mexico and the United States are not always so stark. At the elementary level, some of Mexico’s schools are on par with, or even stronger than, the overcrowded, underfinanced American schools that serve many immigrant children, education experts say.

But Mexican schools lag when it comes to secondary education. In many areas of Mexico, especially places where the tradition of migration is not as well established, Mexico’s educational bureaucracy can make life difficult for new arrivals like Jeffrey. It is not uncommon for American students to be barred from enrollment for a year or more because they lack proper documents.

“The established rules for registration don’t need to be so severe,” said Armando Reynoso Carrillo, a state legislator from Malinalco, a rural area in Mexico State where dozens of American children have arrived in recent years.

The problems extend beyond registration. Mexicans have a long history of greeting returnees with skepticism — for abandoning Mexico, or because they resent the United States, or view those who moved there as materialistic, culturally out of touch and arrogant. The prejudice often extends to their children.

Graciela Treviño González said that when she returned to Malinalco three years ago, after more than a decade in California, she could not get her American son onto a soccer team because the coaches refused to accept him without Mexican identification. “He felt rejected by everyone,” she said. “The kids called him ‘leche,’ ‘gringo’ — it was awful.” Leche means milk and gringo can range from a neutral reference to a foreigner to a slur.

Here in the central state of Puebla, Mexican children are especially likely to see transnational students as different, according to surveys by Mr. Zúñiga, the sociologist. Some have come to Mexico because of deportations. Others arrived because relatives were sick or without work.

But regardless of the cause, Mexican students tend to see their American-educated colleagues as strangers. Jeffrey’s experience is typical: He is friendly and quick to open up in English, but quieter at school, where Spanish is the only language one hears.

At one point this spring, as Jeffrey sat at the edge of the playground, a larger boy approached from behind and asked if he was from Florida or Houston. When Jeffrey pulled away because the boy had leaned into him, the bigger boy seemed surprised. “Are you mad?” he asked.

Later, other boys tested Jeffrey on his English, asking him in Spanish to translate various body parts.

“How do you say foot?” one asked. “Finger?”

“Eye?”

Jeffrey provided one-word answers without enthusiasm. At home, a three-room concrete box with furniture hauled from Houston, he said that many of the children called him Four Eyes. He said he was starting to feel more comfortable academically and socially, but even in a school with 11 other children born or educated in the United States (out of 296) he is still a foreigner. Sometimes, he confuses the Mexican pledge of allegiance with the American version.

Ms. Tienda, at Princeton, said children of Jeffrey’s age were more likely to struggle with such a difficult transition. “This is the age where they start to be aware of each other’s differences,” she said. “They’re preadolescents and their identity is being crystallized.”

She added that how these students fared over the long term will probably vary widely. Some will make the transition easily while others will suffer setback after setback. It will depend on their language skills, school and family dynamics.

Jeffrey, like many other children whose parents have moved them to a country they do not know, seems to be teetering between catching up to his classmates and falling further behind. His parents are struggling to find work and keep their marriage together. Jeffrey, in quieter moments, said he was just trying to endure until he could go home.

“I dream, like, I’m sleeping in the United States,” he said. “But when I wake up, I’m in Mexico.”

In a Shift, Biggest Wave of Migrants Is Now Asian

Asians have surpassed Hispanics as the largest wave of new immigrants to the United States, pushing the population of Asian descent to a record 18.2 million and helping to make Asians the fastest-growing racial group in the country, according to a study released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

While Asian immigration has increased slightly in recent years, the shift in ranking is largely attributable to the sharp decline in Hispanic immigration, the study said.

About 430,000 Asians — or 36 percent of all new immigrants, legal and illegal — moved to the United States in 2010, compared with 370,000 Hispanics, or 31 percent of all new arrivals, the study said. Just three years earlier, the ratio was reversed: about 390,000 Asians immigrated in 2007, compared with 540,000 Hispanics.

“Asians have become the largest stream of new immigrants to the U.S. — and, thus, the latest leading actors in this great American drama” of immigration, Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center, wrote in the report.

Immigration scholars have attributed the decrease in Hispanic immigration to a mix of factors, including the economic downturn in the United States, increased deportation and border enforcement by the American authorities, and declining birthrates in Mexico.

Tougher enforcement measures have made a greater impact on the Hispanic immigrant population than on the Asian immigrant population because a much higher percentage of Hispanics are in the United States without immigration papers, experts said. About 45 percent of Hispanic immigrants in the United States are here illegally compared with about 13 percent to 15 percent of Asian immigrants, Pew demographers found.

Under this pressure, Hispanic immigration dropped 31 percent from 2007 to 2010, while Asian immigration increased about 10 percent.

Pew researchers estimated that Asian immigration surpassed Hispanic immigration by 2009. Mr. Taylor said in an interview on Monday that the delay in identifying this shift was due in part to the fact that the analysis relied on later demographic data, including the 2010 American Community Survey.

The findings are part of a study called “The Rise of Asian-Americans,” a comprehensive analysis of the Asian population in the United States. The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan organization in Washington that has provided some of the most reliable estimates for illegal immigration.

Drawing on Census Bureau and other government data as well as telephone surveys from Jan. 3 to March 27 of more than 3,500 people of Asian descent, the 214-page study found that Asians are the highest-earning and best-educated racial group in the country.

Among Asians 25 or older, 49 percent hold a college degree, compared with 28 percent of all people in that age range in the United States. Median annual household income among Asians is $66,000 versus $49,800 among the general population.

In the survey, Asians are also distinguished by their emphasis on traditional family mores. About 54 percent of the respondents, compared with 34 percent of all adults in the country, said having a successful marriage was one of the most important goals in life; another was being a good parent, according to 67 percent of Asian adults, compared with about half of all adults in the general population.

Asians also place greater importance on career and material success, the study reported, values reflected in child-rearing styles. About 62 percent of Asians in the United States believe that most American parents do not put enough pressure on their children to do well in school.

The growth of the Asian population has been noteworthy for its speed. In 1965, after a century of exclusionary, race-based policies, the Asian share of the American population was less than 1 percent. But immigration reform legislation that year opened the door to broader immigration from around the world. The Asian share of the total population is now about 5.8 percent, the Pew study said.

“A century ago, most Asian-Americans were low-skilled, low-wage laborers crowded into ethnic enclaves and targets of official discrimination,” the study said. “Today they are the most likely of any major racial or ethnic group in America to live in mixed neighborhoods and to marry across racial lines.”

A closer look at the numbers can reveal sharp differences between subgroups.

At least 83 percent of the total Asian population in the United States traces its ancestry to China, the Philippines, India, Vietnam, the Korean Peninsula or Japan — and demographic characteristics can vary widely from group to group.

Indians, for instance, lead all other Asian subgroups in income and education, the report said. Indians, Japanese and Filipinos have lower poverty rates than the general public, while Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese have higher poverty rates.

But Mr. Taylor said there was still value in the macroanalysis. “For better or worse, throughout our history, we’ve always used race as a prism to understand who we are,” he said. “Anything that illuminates the latest immigration wave, that illuminates a growing race group, helps us to understand ourselves better.”

Forced Move Raises Anger in West Bank Villages

Moving day is any day now for both the Avodrahams and the Kitays, 2 of the 30 families expected to be the first Jewish settlers in years forcibly removed from their homes under a Supreme Court order declaring that parts of their neighborhood, Ulpana, were illegally built on private Palestinian land.

So David Avodraham, who was one of the first to move to Ulpana a decade ago, spent Monday dismantling the kitchen cabinets his father built and loading boxes into a truck bound for storage, leaving little more in the apartment where he lives with his wife and six children than a portrait on the living room wall of a rabbi said to have predicted the Holocaust. “I’m trying to separate my brain from my feelings,” he explained.

But in the next building up the hill, Brad Kitay’s bookcases lined with Talmudic texts sat untouched, his toddler’s toys primed for play. The sole sign of something going on was five small stacks of essentials — baby clothes, a pack of diapers, two bottles, a nail clipper and a few plastic utensils from the girl’s miniature kitchen — piled on the dining room table.

“I can’t bring myself to pack,” said Mr. Kitay, 26, who recently became a rabbi. “My soul is connected with this land.

“It’s not an issue of five buildings,” he added. “It’s whether Jews have a right to live in their homeland.”

Ulpana, founded a dozen years ago in memory of a woman and boy fatally shot by Palestinians, has become the center of a fierce debate here, with right-wing lawmakers threatening to leave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition if he follows through on the evacuation, and hard-core settlers vowing to die rather than allow the ouster. Early Tuesday, a West Bank mosque was burned and vandalized, with the words “Ulpana War” scrawled on an outside wall; by nightfall, hundreds of Jews convened at Ulpana for a mass prayer in what they described as a mini-Yom Kippur, invoking the “harsh decree” from the High Holy Day liturgy.

Wednesday morning, shortly after midnight, Dani Dayan, head of the settlers’ Yesha Council, said that leaders in Beit El had reached an agreement with government officials to evacuate peacefully and voluntarily, in exchange for a promise that 300 additional units would be added in Beit El and that Ulpana would not be used as a precedent for policy on settlements elsewhere. Mr. Netanhayu has also offered to remove the buildings from their foundations and move them, rather than demolish them, an engineering feat whose prospects remain uncertain.

Of the more radical settlers presumed responsible for the mosque burning and the threats of violence at Ulpana, he said, “No one can control them.”

More than 1,000 police officers trained in the desert Monday for the operation, aiming to avoid a disaster like the last such evacuation, in 2006, when more than 200 people were injured as thousands protested the demolition of nine houses in the outpost of Amona that were also on private land. While much of the world considers all Jewish settlement in the West Bank illegal, Israel distinguishes between government-approved projects on state lands and so-called outposts built without proper papers or on Palestinian-owned plots; there are as many as 9,000 such units housing perhaps 70,000 people.

“This changes the rules of the game,” said Michael Sfard, a lawyer who brought the case on behalf of one of the Palestinian landowners through the human rights group Yesh Din. “No sound-minded settler will initiate today construction on private land because they would risk significant money.”

For Mr. Netanyahu, generally a settlement supporter, Ulpana is a critical test, particularly in the wake of his expanded power under the broad unity coalition formed last month. He has promised to follow the Supreme Court ruling, but has tried to appease the settlers, culminating in Tuesday’s marathon negotiations that yielded the deal with Beit El’s leadership. “We want to have a situation where that extremist fringe will be isolated,” said a senior aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the situation.

It is an important moment, too, for the settler movement, which has battled to control its radical branches as it grows in influence in mainstream politics. Beit El’s rabbi, Zalman Melamed, declared last week that Ulpana was an occasion for “mesirat nefesh,” a biblical concept of self-sacrifice, and in recent days West Bank youths have warned of violence.

Mr. Dayan joined Mr. Netanyahu in condemning the attack on the Grand Mosque of Jabaa early Tuesday morning, the fourth such religious vandalism in the West Bank in the last 18 months, the police said. After midnight Tuesday, several suspects broke a window of the two-story structure with a recognizable yellow dome and set fire to a carpet inside, the police said.

“This time we succeeded in controlling the fire, but I don’t feel this is over,” said Abdul Kareem Bsharat, the mayor of Jabaa, a village of 4,200 people about five miles from both Jerusalem and Ramallah.

The residents of Ulpana, and Beit El more broadly, are mostly middle-class, Orthodox families seen as mainstream and responsible. But in recent days their neighborhood has been flooded with outsiders: well-wishers bringing homemade cakes; a food-charity truck filled with fresh cherries; yeshiva boys poring over sacred texts in a 24-hour vigil; and a small tent city reminiscent of the Occupy movement. Some have strategically placed tires on pathways, ready to be set ablaze to block the police; others stand guard at driveways entering the neighborhood with makeshift weapons.

“I hate it,” said Yael Yosef Chai, 25, one of those to be evacuated. “Youth have inclinations. People who have families are more balanced. They feel humiliated, they feel frustrated, but they will go on.”

In the nearby Palestinian village of Dura al-Qar, the Palestinian owners of the disputed land are also somewhat conflicted: thrilled by the Supreme Court ruling, but dubious of actually getting access to their land, which sits behind a fence and adjacent to other settlement buildings. “After I will put my hand on my land I will talk about it,” said Khaled Yassin, a 47-year-old father of five who said Israeli officials once offered him $16 million for his plot of about three acres. “I don’t want to make dreams before it happens on the ground.”

Harbi Ibrahim Mustafa Hasan, 70, who owns the neighboring plot, recalled riding donkeys through it before 1948 and collecting grapes his family cultivated for eventual sale in Tel Aviv. Mr. Sfard, his lawyer, said that while the evacuation of Ulpana would be a significant political victory, his full goal was “to see Harbi’s family planting new vineyards on their land.”

“I’m not so naïve as to think it will happen in 2012,” Mr. Sfard said. “And when we went to court in 2008 I didn’t think we’d see houses demolished in 2012.”

So You Think You Can Be a Hair Braider?

Jestina Clayton grew up in a village in Sierra Leone where every girl learns traditional African hair-braiding. Then, when she was 22, she moved to Centerville, Utah, a place where no one learns traditional African hair-braiding. So Clayton was pleasantly surprised to find a niche in the market among a small group of Utah parents who had adopted African children but didn’t know how to style their hair.

Clayton moved to the United States as an 18-year-old and headed out to Centerville to be near her in-laws. After graduating from college, she considered getting an office job but decided instead to start her own hair-braiding operation and began advertising on a local Web site. “It’s not like it was bringing me millions,” she says, “but it was covering groceries.” At least until a stranger who saw the ad e-mailed her a demand to delete it. “It is illegal in the state of Utah to do any form of extensions without a valid cosmetology license,” the e-mail read. “Please delete your ad, or you will be reported.”

A cosmetology license required nearly two years of school and $16,000 in tuition. But Clayton hoped for an exemption. After all, many Utah cosmetology schools taught little or nothing about African-style hair-braiding, and other states allowed people to practice it after passing a hygiene test and paying a small fee. Clayton made her case (via PowerPoint) to the exhaustively named governing body of Utah hair-braiding, the Barber, Cosmetology/Barber, Esthetics, Electrology and Nail Technology Licensing Board. The board, made up largely of licensed barbers and cosmetologists, shot her down.

This isn’t just a random Utah law. There are more than 1,000 licensed professions in the United States, partly a result of more than a century of legal work. As the country industrialized, state governments wanted to protect their citizens and create standards not just for lawyers and doctors but also for basic services. It didn’t take long for professional groups to find that they also stood to benefit from the regulations. Over the years, more and more started to lobby for licensing rules, often grand­fathering in existing professionals while putting up high barriers to new competitors. In fact, businesses contorting regulation to their own benefit is so common that economists have a special name for it: regulatory capture. “Everyone assumes that private interests fight like crazy not to be regulated,” says Charles Wheelan, who teaches public policy at the University of Chicago. “But often, for businesses, regulation is your friend.”

After being shot down by the board, Clayton allied with a Utah state representative who had adopted several children from Africa. The representative proposed a bill that would exempt hair-braiding from the cosmetology licensing law, but she was no match for the cosmetologists, who have started grass-roots campaigns in several states to fight the loosening of license rules. They turned out in full force in Utah. “We encourage regulation,” says Brad Masterson, a spokesman for the Professional Beauty Association. “Why should everyone else who’s doing hair have to conform to requirements and not her?”

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Once upon a time, these barriers weren’t such a big deal. In 1950, fewer than 5 percent of Americans worked in jobs that required licenses. Today, it’s roughly 30 percent, and that number is likely to grow. In the coming years, global competition and the increasing rate of technological change will force many workers to bounce from career to career throughout their working lives. Nearly 13 million Americans are out of work; since the start of the recession, the manufacturing sector alone has lost about two million jobs. There’s little doubt that laid-off factory workers will find themselves increasingly looking for opportunities in landscape contracting, athletic training and in hundreds of other professions that require licenses. “When, say, the tattoo artists come up for licensure, nobody follows the debates, nobody outside the profession cares about the resolution,” Wheelan says. “You add up how many of these there are — hundreds — and suddenly we’re talking about a sizable portion of the labor market.”

Almost nobody is calling for wholesale abolition of professional licensing. I sleep better at night knowing that the commercial pilots flying over my apartment are trained and licensed. A wide range of economists and activists, however, are looking for ways to loosen the rules in a productive way. Michelle Obama has been pushing to make it easier for military spouses, who move frequently, to pursue their careers in new states without bureaucratic entanglements. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal group, has filed lawsuits in several states arguing that certain licensing rules are “arbitrarily interfering with citizens’ ability to earn an honest living.” The group, which represents Jestina Clayton in Utah, has filed cases on behalf of African-style hair braiders in several other states. Dean Baker, the well-known liberal economist, argues that if we have free trade for goods, we should also have it for high-end services.

A bolder idea, of course, would be for states to get rid of the licensing rules that are doing more harm than good. A group of economists, including Alan B. Krueger, now the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, proposed something along these lines last year. But pushing this sort of policy, beyond being a logistical nightmare, can be “political suicide,” says Morris Kleiner, a University of Minnesota economist who co-wrote the proposal. “When you talk about reductions in licensing, you have every occupation from the plumbers to the C.P.A.’s to the electricians lining up to argue why regulation should not be reduced,” he says. Arguing for the other side you have, basically, Jestina Clayton.

This is the pattern that creates regulatory capture — the people with the biggest stake in any regulation are usually the ones who are being regulated. When there’s a public hearing on, say, implementing new rules for trading derivatives, most of the people who show up are the people who trade derivatives. And these people, who generally know the most about trading derivatives, can use their expertise to try to create rules that benefit themselves. In the high-school-­civics model, the insiders would be countered by smart, well-informed opponents who could argue for the public interest. But real life has nothing to do with high-school civics.

The challenges to the U.S. economy are obvious. Millions of people are unemployed, underemployed or giving up on finding work while nations like China, India, Brazil and South Africa are nimble and growing fast. Our best shot at creating a decent economy in the future will come from making it easier for workers to shift out of dying careers and into promising ones. Workers need to be able to experiment and to fail (quickly and often) until they find the real, valuable skills that customers will pay for. This will take years. And in order for them to do that, we need to start by making it easier to braid hair in Utah.