Category: Law
My Conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe
One of my favorites, David was great, here is the link to the podcast, video, and transcript. Here is the opening summary of the chat:
Named one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of our time, Rabbi David Wolpe joins Tyler in a conversation on flawed leaders, Jewish identity in the modern world, the many portrayals of David, what’s missing in rabbinical training, playing chess on the Sabbath, Srugim, Hasidic philosophy, living in Israel and of course, the durability of creation.
Here are a few bits:
WOLPE: So as my friend Joseph Telushkin says, “Polygamy does exist in the Bible, it’s just never successful.” David does have many wives, and very strained and interesting and complex relationships with women. David has the most complicated and most described relationships with women of any character in the Hebrew Bible.
Those qualities that can be negative, in David are to some extent positive. One of the things that draws David out of the charge of simple narcissism is that he really listens, he pays attention — he pays attention to women over and over again. He listens to what they say and changes himself because of it. And that’s not a characteristic of men in the ancient world or the modern one that you can rely on.
And:
COWEN: So again, I’m an outsider in this dialogue, but say I were thinking of converting to Judaism and I were asking you about Hasidic philosophy. Now in terms of some social connections, I probably would fit better into your congregation than into a Hasidic congregation. But if I ask you, on theological grounds alone, is there a reason why I should be hesitant about Hasidic philosophy? From the point of view of theology, what do you think is the greatest weakness there, or your biggest difference with it, given how much you like Heschel?
And:
COWEN: How would you alter or improve rabbinical training?
WOLPE: I’ve given this a lot of thought. Let me just mention one area. When I speak to rabbinical students, I tell them all the time that the single most valuable commodity you have as a rabbi . . . you can answer that yourself, and then I’ll tell you what I think: your voice. Most people are going to come in contact with you when you speak to them. Not all of them, but most. There’ll be more people who come to your services than the number of people at whose bedside you will sit as they die.
And yet, most rabbis — most people — don’t know how to speak.
There is much more at the link, including about Israeli TV, where to visit in Israel, whether King David parallels Trump, the future of biblical commentary in a world of context-less social media, whether Canadian Jews are more likely to stick with the faith, whether Los Angeles is underrated, what is beautiful and significant in Islam, and the Iran nuclear deal and the settlements, among other topics. Self-recommending…
And again, here is David Wolpe’s most recent book David: The Divided Heart, which was the centerpiece for the first part of the discussion.
Reciprocity and Muscular Dystrophy
For years, muscular dystrophy patients in the United States have been purchasing the drug deflazacort — used to stabilize muscle strength and keep patients mobile for a period of time — from companies in the United Kingdom at a manageable price of $1,600 a year.
But because an American company just got approval from the Food and Drug Administration to sell the drug in the United States, the price of the drug will soar to a staggering $89,000 annually, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.
Because the FDA restricts the importing of drugs from overseas if a version is available domestically, patients are stuck with the new, expensive version. This makes deflazacort the perfect case for advocates of international drug reciprocity — a reform that would make it easier for consumers to buy drugs that have been approved in other developed countries.
That is the introduction to an interview with yours truly in the Washington Post. I discuss thalidomide and the race to the bottom argument. Here is one other bit:
IT: Do you have any thoughts about the potential for FDA reform under this new administration and Congress?
AT: Peter Thiel’s speech at the Republican National Convention reminded us that we used to take big, bold risks — like going to the moon. Today, to say a project is a “moon shot” is almost a put-down, as if going to the moon never happened. We have become risk-averse and complacent, to borrow a term from my colleague Tyler Cowen. The result of the incessant focus on safety is playgrounds without teeter totters, armed guards at our schools and national monuments, infrastructure projects that no longer get built, and pharmaceutical breakthroughs that never happen.
The new administration is unpredictable, but when it comes to the FDA, unpredictable is better than business as usual.
The administration has yet to appoint a great FDA commissioner. Early names floated included Balaji Srinivasan, Jim O’Neill, Joseph Gulfo, and Scott Gottlieb but Srinivasan seems to have removed himself from the running. O’Neill would be great but I don’t think the US is ready, so that leaves Gulfo and Gottlieb. My suspicion is that Trump will like Gulfo because of Gulfo’s entrepreneurial experience but, as I said, the new administration is unpredictable.
*Eurasian Mission*, by Alexander Dugin
I had heard and read so much about Dugin but had never read him. The subtitle is Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism, and here were a few of my takeaway points:
1. His tone is never hysterical or brutish, and overall this comes across as scholarly (except for the appended pamphlet on “Global Revolution”), albeit at a semi-popular level.
2. He is quite concerned with tracing the lineages of Eurasian thought, thus the “neo” in the subtitle. Nikolai Trubetzkoy gets a lot of play. The correct theories of history are cyclical, and the Soviet Union was lacking in spiritual and qualitative development and thus it failed.
3. Dugin is a historical relativist, every civilization has different principles of development, and we must take great care to understand the principles in each case. Ethnicities and peoples represent “inestimable wealth” and they must be preserved against the logic of a globalized, unipolar world.
4. Geography is primary. Russia-Eurasia is a “steppe and woods” empire, whereas America is fundamentally an Atlantic, seafaring civilization. Globalization tries to universalize what is ultimately quite a culture-specific point of view, stemming from the American, Anglo, and Atlantic mindsets.
5. Eurasian philosophy ultimately can contain, in a Hegelian way, anti-global philosophies, as well as the contributions of Foucault, Deleuze, and Debord, not to mention List, Gesell, and Keynes properly understood.
6. “It is vitally imperative for Turkey to establish a strategic partnership with the Russian Federation and Iran.”
7. The integration of the post-Soviet surrounding territories is to occur on a democratic and voluntary basis (p.51). The nation-state is obsolete, so this is imperative as a means of protecting ethnicities and a multi-polar world against the logic of globalization. Nonetheless Russia is to be the leader of this process.
8. “America’s influence is the most negative tendency in the world…”, and American think tanks and the media are part of this harmful push toward a unipolar world; transhumanism is worse yet. Tocqueville, Baudrillard, and Dugin are the three fundamental attempts to make sense of America. The Statue of Liberty resembles the Greek goddess of hell, Hecate.
9. The Eurasian economy must be subjugated to “higher civilizational spiritual values.” City-dwellers are often a problem, as they too frequently side with the forces of globalization.
10. “Japan…is the objective leader of the Pacific.” It must be liberated from the Atlanticist sphere of influence. Nary a nod to China.
11. On Moldova: “Archaic? Let it be archaic. It’s great!” At times he does deviate from #1 on this list.
12. Putin is his own greatest enemy because he leans too far in the liberal direction.
13. Dugin enjoys writing with bullet points.
14. “Soon the world will descend into chaos.”
Apart from whatever interest you may hold in these and other particulars, this is a good book for rethinking the notion of intellectual influence. Very very few Anglo-American intellectuals have had real influence, but Dugin has. That is reason enough to read this tract.
Addendum: Here is good background on what Dugin is up to these days. His current motto: “Drain the swamp.”
*Fascism: 100 questions asked and answered*
That is the 1936 book by British fascist Oswald Mosley, and it is arguably the clearest first-person introduction to the topic for an Anglo reader, serving up less gobbledygook than most of the Continental sources. Mosley actually makes arguments for his point of view, and thinks through what possible objections might be, which is not the case with say Marinetti. Beyond the basics, here are a few points I gleaned from my read:
1. Voting still will occur, at least once every five years, because “The support of the people is far more necessary to a Government of action than to a Democratic Government, which tricks the people into a vote once every five years on an irrelevant issue, and then hopes the Nation will go to sleep for another five years so that the Government can go to sleep as well.”
2. Voting will be organized by occupation, not geographic locality.
3. If an established British fascist government loses a vote, the King will send for new ministers, but not necessarily from the opposing party.
4. The House of Lords is to become much more technical, technocratic, and detailed in its knowledge, drawing more upon science and industry. The description reminds me of the CCP State Council.
5. A National Council of Corporations will conduct much of economic policy, and as far as I can tell it would stand on a kind of par with Parliament.
6. “M.P.’s will be converted from windbags into men of action.”
7. A special Corporation would be created to represent the interests of women politically. Women will not be forced to become mothers, but high wages for men will represent a very effective subsidy to childbirth.
8. The government will spend much more money on research and development, with rates of return of “one hundred-fold.”
9. Wages will be boosted considerably by cutting out middlemen and distribution costs. The resulting higher real wages will maintain aggregate demand. Cheap, wage-undercutting foreign imports will not be allowed.
10. Foreign investment abroad will be eliminated, as will the gold standard and foreign immigration into Britain.
11. “…foreigners who have not proved themselves worthy citizens of Britain will deported.” And “Jews will not be afforded the full rights of British citizenship,” as they have deliberately maintained themselves as a distinct foreign community.
12. Any banker who breaks the law will go to jail, just as a poor person would.
13. Inheritance will not be allowed, but private property in land will persist and will be accompanied by with radically egalitarian land reform.
14. To restore the prosperity of coal miners, competition from cheap Polish labor and Polish imports will be eliminated.
15. The small shopkeeper shall be favored over chain stores, especially if the latter are in foreign or Jewish hands.
16. All citizens, rich and poor, are to have the right to an education up through age 18. Overall there is considerable emphasis on not letting human capital go to waste, and a presumption that there is a lot of implicit slack in the system under the status quo ex ante.
17. Hospitals will be coordinated, but not nationalized. That would be going too far.
18. Roosevelt’s New Deal is distinct from fascism because a) the American government does not have enough “power to plan,” and b) it relies on “Jewish capital.”
19. The colonies will sell raw materials to Britain, and produce agriculture for themselves, but will not allowed to compete in manufactures. And this: “If we failed to hold India, we should be 1/100th the men they were.”
20. By removing the struggle for foreign markets, fascism will bring perpetual peace.
Mosley was later interned from 1940 to 1943.
Extra innings start with a runner on second base
Here is a description of the proposed rule change. Felix Salmon asked:
I know nothing about baseball, but wouldn’t this give even more of an advantage to the team batting first?
I would expect the opposite (NB: I am not suggesting a weakness in Felix’s analytical abilities, only that British people don’t usually “get” baseball). The team batting second in the inning always has more information than the team batting first, because the home team (which bats second) knows what the visitors scored in their half of the inning.
The closer you are to “runs,” the more valuable is this differential in information. To see this, take those cases where the first-batting team fails to score in the top of the tenth inning. The home team can then play for “only one run.” If no one is on base, the strategies for “only one run” and “a bunch of runs” aren’t that different. You’d like to start with some extra base hits, home runs, etc., in either case. But with a man already on second (or on third, to see the point more clearly), you can consider some alternate strategies, such as just poking the ball to the opposite field. You don’t need to swing for a home run so much, or try to stretch a single into a double, and so on. You can play more conservatively in the offense, because you know that a single run suffices to win the game.
For the team that bats first, playing for “only one run” isn’t the sure-fire clincher, and so this helps the team that bats second in the inning, the home team.
Or so it seems to me.
Addendum: Via J.C. Bradbury, Cowen’s Second Law!
What do we know about the judicial contempt power?
Nicholas R. Parrillo of Yale Law School has a new paper on this topic. I have not yet read it, but here is the abstract:
Scholars of administrative law focus overwhelmingly on lawsuits to review federal government action while assuming that, if plaintiffs win such lawsuits, the government will do what the court says. But in fact, the federal government’s compliance with court orders is imperfect and fraught, especially with orders compelling the government to act affirmatively. Such orders can strain a federal agency’s resources, interfere with its other legally-required tasks, and force it to make decisions on little information. An agency hit with such an order will often warn the judge that it badly needs more latitude and more time to comply. Judges relent, cutting slack and extending deadlines. The plaintiff who has “won” the suit finds that victory was merely the start of a tough negotiation that can drag on for years.
These compliance negotiations are little understood. Basic questions about them are unexplored, including the most fundamental: What is the endgame? That is, if the judge concludes that the agency has delayed too long and demanded too much, is there anything she can do, at long last, to make the agency comply?
What the judge can do, ultimately, is the same thing as for any disobedient litigant: find the agency (and its high officials) in contempt. But do judges actually make such contempt findings? If so, can judges couple those findings with the sanctions of fine and imprisonment that give contempt its potency against private parties? If not, what use is contempt? The literature is silent on these questions, and conventional research methods, confined to appellate case law, are hopeless for addressing it. There are no opinions of the Supreme Court on the subject, and while the courts of appeals have handled the problem many times, they have dealt with it in a manner calculated to avoid setting clear and general precedent.
Through an examination of thousands of opinions (especially of district courts), docket sheets, briefs, and other filings, plus archival research and interviews, this Article provides the first general assessment of how federal courts handle the federal government’s disobedience. It makes four conclusions. First, the federal judiciary is willing to issue contempt findings against agencies and officials. Second, while several federal judges believe they can (and have tried to) attach sanctions to these findings, the higher courts have exhibited a virtually complete unwillingness to allow sanctions, at times swooping down at the eleventh hour to rescue an agency from incurring a budget-straining fine or its top official from being thrown in jail. Third, the higher courts, even as they unfailingly thwart sanctions in all but a few minor instances, have bent over backward to avoid making pronouncements that sanctions are categorically unavailable, deliberately keeping the sanctions issue in a state of low salience and at least nominal legal uncertainty. Fourth, even though contempt findings are practically devoid of sanctions, they have a shaming effect that gives them substantial if imperfect deterrent power.
The efficacy of litigation against agencies rests on a widespread perception that federal officials simply do not disobey court orders and a concomitant norm that identifies any violation as deviant. Contempt findings, regardless of sanctions, are a means of weaponizing that norm by designating the agency and official as violators and subjecting them to shame. But if judges make too many such findings, and especially if they impose (inevitably publicity-grabbing) sanctions, they may risk undermining the perception that officials always comply and thus the norm that they do so. The judiciary therefore may sometimes pull its punches to preserve the substantial yet limited norm-based power it has.
For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis, note the link to Kevin is Kevin survey some new and interesting papers on international trade.
India Fact of the Day
In India it is illegal for the police to arrest a woman after dark. The law apparently stems from a case decades ago when a woman was arrested at night and raped by the police. The law doesn’t seem like the second-best way to prevent police rapes let alone the best way. But what should an enlightened court do? Rape is already illegal. The courts create law but the law doesn’t rule. Thus, instead of obliging the police to control themselves the law gives women the grounds to refuse arrest. Imperfect but perhaps easier to monitor. In India the state is so weak that third and fourth best solutions may be the only ones possible.
VIX is down, again, or the show so far (again)
A few days ago Conor Sen tweeted:
It’s close right now, but today might be the lowest close for the VIX since February, 2007.
Here is the broader chart. How can that be? Not to mention a high Dow.
The consensus view is that the first two weeks for Trump have been an extreme disaster. But is that true? Protest has been robust, and so far checks and balances seem to be working.
He issued a bunch of executive orders that mostly cannot be carried through. He still hasn’t filled most of the second-tier positions of import, and for the State Department he fired/induced to quit a whole bunch of senior figures. That militates in favor of not much getting done. Obamacare abolition and tax reform are being postponed until next year it seems, for better or worse. The Wall is stupid but won’t matter much and may not even happen, given environmental review, Native American rights, and the preferences of Texas Republicans.
Trump also trampled on just about every sacred icon held by those who inhabit my Twitter feed, most of all by having Bannon insult the press by telling them to shut up for a while, and the steady stream of absurdities continues. Yet the underlying story (NYT) seems to be about six guys in the White House who don’t know how to use the levers and pulleys of the Executive Branch.
Or consider the assessment of E. Richards:
As of now, however, events since January 20 support the conclusion that Donald Trump is not very sincere about actual, rather than verbal chaos and that his administration will mostly defend the world order status quo.
As for beating up on the marmite crowd, is there a better form of training wheels?
People, I do not favor this kind of experiment with governance or with rhetoric. And the market is by no means always a correct forecast. But right now it is worried less than many of you are. I do understand that America is consuming some of its political and reputational capital. Yet so far the best prediction is that the relatively manageable scenarios are coming to pass.
Addendum: Just think what kind of embedded embarrassment this is for the Democrats. Whether you agree with Democratic economic policy or not, and whether you agree with the markets or not, the Democrats in effect cannot convince the markets that their presidential rule is better for capital values than is the…scenario of Trump. The more stupidities you see, and the more you criticize him, the more painful that ouch should become.
Great Britain fact of the day
Britain has changed since 1998.
Back then, it only took workers about three years to save enough money for a down-payment on a house. Now it takes 20 years, on average, according to the Resolution Foundation, which published a landmark report on income, housing, and inequality in Britain last week.
Here is further information, via the excellent Samir Varma.
A very good sentence
“Unless the goal is to have an outright travel ban forever, and we should take the president at his word that that’s not the goal, then let’s just have calmer heads prevail and conduct the security analysis that was going to be conducted during these 90 days.”
Here is the WaPo article, citing Leon Fresco, the deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Immigration Litigation in Obama’s Justice Department.
The Long-Term Impact of Price Controls in Medicare Part D
There is a new paper on this topic, by Gigi Moreno, Emma van Eijndhoven, Jennifer Benner, and Jeffrey Sullivan. The upshot is to beware price controls:
Price controls for prescription drugs are once again at the forefront of policy discussions in the United States. Much of the focus has been on the potential short-term savings – in terms of lower spending – although evidence suggests price controls can dampen innovation and adversely affect long-term population health. This paper applies the Health Economics Medical Innovation Simulation, a microsimulation of older Americans, to estimate the long-term impacts of government price setting in Medicare Part D, using pricing in the Federal Veterans Health Administration program as a proxy. We find that VA-style pricing policies would save between $0.1 trillion and $0.3 trillion (US$2015) in lifetime drug spending for people born in 1949–2005. However, such savings come with social costs. After accounting for innovation spillovers, we find that price setting in Part D reduces the number of new drug introductions by as much as 25% relative to the status quo. As a result, life expectancy for the cohort born in 1991–1995 is reduced by almost 2 years relative to the status quo. Overall, we find that price controls would reduce lifetime welfare by $5.7 to $13.3 trillion (US$2015) for the US population born in 1949–2005.
I would insist that we do not have good enough models of the innovation process to really understand the price elasticity of supply. Nonetheless it is surely not zero, and under plausible assumptions the price controls are a bad idea.
We need a new rooftop chant: “Beware analyses that neglect supply elasticities,” to sweet cadences of course. They should play that on AM radio as well.
For the pointer I thank the still excellent Kevin Lewis.
Who wants more coal company pollution in water streams?
That is one of the news stories of the end of this week, namely that the Trump administration eliminated a previous Obama administration ruling on this, see Brad Plumer for details. That sounds horrible, doesn’t it?
I took a look at the cost-benefit study (pointed out on Twitter by Claudia Sahm, or try this link, and please note it was prepared by consultants, not by the government itself). I spent some time with these hundreds of pages, and they are not always easy to parse (my apologies to the authors for any misunderstandings). Anyway, I quickly came upon this and related passages (p.45, passim):
In summary, the Final Rule is expected to reduce employment by 124 jobs on average each year due to decreased coal mined while an additional 280 jobs will be created from increased compliance activity on average each year.
Of course those “newly created jobs” are a cost, not a benefit, and should be switched to the other side of the ledger. That is not what this study did. And if I understand p.4-31 correctly, this study is using a multiplier of about 2. This approach is completely wrong, and if it were right Appalachia would love a lot of this coal regulation for its job-creating proclivities, but of course the region doesn’t.
The claimed annual benefit from the changes, from the side of coal demand (not the only effects), is $78 million, fairly small potatoes. Note the study doesn’t consider what are commonly the most significant costs of regulation, namely distracting the attention of managers and turning companies into legal and regulatory cultures rather than entrepreneurial cultures. The study does mention uncertainty costs from regulation, although I could not find any quantification of them.
Furthermore, I am not able to scrutinize the introductory section “SUMMARY OF BENEFITS AND COSTS OF THE STREAM PROTECTION RULE” and figure out the final assessment of net benefits for the rule and where that assessment might come from. I find that worrisome, and paging through the study did not put my mind at ease in this regard.
Now, I know how this works. Many of you probably are thinking that we need to do whatever is possible to attack or shrink the coal industry, because of climate change. Maybe so! Maybe we want to stultify the coal companies, for reason of a greater global benefit. But a) there is still a role for evaluating individual policy changes by partial equilibrium methods and reporting on those results accurately, and b) “putting down the coal companies,” as you might a budgie, is not what the law says is the proper goal of policy.
Imagine holding an attitude that places the Trump administration as the actual defenders of the rule of law! Besides, don’t get too worked up (p.174):
Our analysis indicates that there will be no increase in stranded reserves under any of the Alternatives.
There is, however, a very small decline in annual coal production (pp.5-20, 5-21) from the rule that had been chosen. Water quality is improved in 262 miles of streams (7-26), in case you are wondering, that’s something but hardly a major impact and that almost entirely in underpopulated parts of the country. All the media coverage I’ve seen implies or openly states a badly exaggerated sense of total water impact, relative to this actual estimate (are you surprised?). Returning to the study, there is also no region-specific estimate of how large (or small) those water benefits might be, at least not that I could find (again, maybe I missed it, but I did find some language suggesting that no such estimate would be provided).
Chapter seven calculates the benefits of the resulting carbon emissions, but after reading that section my best estimate for those marginal benefits is zero, not the postulated $110 million. The “social cost of carbon” is actually an average magnitude, and it does not measure benefits from very small changes. Again, you might think there is an imperative to consider “this policy is conjunction with numerous other anti-coal changes,” but that is not what the law stipulates as I understand it and furthermore it hardly seems that many other anti-coal regulatory changes are on the way.
If it were up to me, I would not have overturned the coal/stream regulations, and my personal inclination is indeed to fight a war on coal. But if you look at the grounds for evaluation specified by law, and examine the cost-benefit study with even a slightly critical mindset, we don’t know what is the right answer on this individual policy decision. The study outlines nine different regulatory alternatives and it is not able to conclude which is best, nor is the quantitative thrust of the study aimed toward that end.
Mood affiliation aside, to strike this regulation down, as the Trump administration has done, is in fact not an indefensible action.
On a more practical political level, Trump wishes to send a signal to Appalachian voters that he is looking out for coal and looking out for them. This is actually a very weak action, and it was chosen because for procedural reasons it was quite easy to do. The more you complain about it, the stronger it looks, and that’s probably a more important fact than any of the particular details of this study. Whether you like it or not, the coal debate is not really one that favors the Democrats.
Addendum: Here is the CRS paper, which seems to be derivative of other work, most of all this study.
Why is male life expectancy so high in Israel?
A new study by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel finds a relationship between the longevity of men in Israel and army service, which contributes to Israeli men’s better physical fitness
Main findings:
- In 2013, the average life expectancy for men in Israel was 81 years, in contrast to the OECD average of 77.7 and a world average of 68.8 years.
- Considering other variables that influence longevity – including wealth and education levels, the health system and the country’s general demographic profile – the Israeli advantage is large and increasing.
- An analysis based on a sample of more than 130 countries found that military service added more than three years to male life expectancy.
- This conclusion is reinforced in data showing the differences in the average life expectancy of men and women in Israel and in the OECD. In the 34 OECD countries, women live an average of 5.5 years longer than men, but in Israel, where military service is shorter and in most cases less physically demanding for women, women’s life expectancy is only 3 years longer.
- While military service is an important component in public health, it has not yet been discussed in the academic literature on general health factors, nor has it been discussed in Israeli health literature.
Here is further information. Here is a link to the cited report. Here is the study itself.
I am very much against the draft outside of extreme military emergencies, but I suspect when the economic history of the American 20th century is written, the end of the draft will play some significant role in explaining the evolution of conditions for the deplorables.
For the pointer to this work I thank Rafi Bryl.
Supreme Court Justices’ Loyalty to the President
That is a recent paper by Lee Epstein and Eric A. Posner, and here is the abstract:
A statistical analysis of voting by Supreme Court justices from 1937-2014 provides evidence of a “loyalty effect” — justices more frequently vote for the government when the president who appointed them is in office than when subsequent presidents lead the government. This effect exists even when subsequent presidents are of the same party as the justices in question. However, the loyalty effect is much stronger for Democratic justices than for Republican justices. This may be because Republican presidents are more ideologically committed than Democratic justices are, leaving less room for demonstrations of loyalty.
You can read it here.
Frederick Douglass on Immigration
Let’s recognize Frederick Douglass more and more for his terrific views on immigration:
I submit that this question of Chinese immigration should be settled upon higher principles than those of a cold and selfish expediency.
There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are external, universal, and indestructible. Among these, is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity. I have great respect for the blue eyed and light haired races of America. They are a mighty people. In any struggle for the good things of this world they need have no fear. They have no need to doubt that they will get their full share.
But I reject the arrogant and scornful theory by which they would limit migratory rights, or any other essential human rights to themselves, and which would make them the owners of this great continent to the exclusion of all other races of men.
See also this earlier post by Ilya Somin.