Another race question: murder in Atlanta

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. As a bloc, Europe has its own governance, its own diplomats, and mostly its own currency, but until recently, not its own border enforcement agency. We look at Frontex, the border force, whose budget, jurisdiction and arsenal are all growing and plenty of workplace rules do nothing more than gum up processes and annoy people, employees and customers alike. We make an argument in favor of common sense amid some uncommonly nonsensical policies. But first, today, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will meet with leaders from Atlanta's Asian American community following eight murders in the city.

Our country, the president and I and all of us, we grieve for the loss. Our prayers are extended to the families. It speaks to a larger issue, which is the issue of violence in our country and what we must do to never tolerate it and to always speak out against it.

Six of the people killed at two massage parlors on Wednesday evening were women of East Asian descent. The alleged shooter, who's been charged with murder, is a white man. The police haven't confirmed a motive for the killings, but the incident has increased discussion about anti Asian prejudice and attacks, an issue acknowledged by Atlanta's mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Obviously, whatever the Motivation. We know that many of the victims, the majority of the victims were Asian. We also know that this is an issue that's happening across the country. It is unacceptable, it is hateful, and it has to stop.

Anti Asian sentiment has a long history in America, but a recent surge in incidents has left communities like Atlanta's on edge.

There's a lot of fear and concern in the community in general, and the Asian American community in metro Atlanta specifically is taking a lot of extra precautions.

Erica Shin writes for the Economist and is based in Atlanta.

For example, there are many Asian American organizations coming together to try to protect and support individuals and businesses. Also, there are some people that I know who have been wondering whether they should start buying guns or other weapons to be able to protect themselves, whereas before they hadn't really considered these things.

And what do we know so far about the attacks?

Currently, the police are attributing the alleged shooter's actions to a sexual addiction.

I can say that he had frequented.

Both of those locations.

Yes. Again, I would say for context, these massage parlors that he attacked may have offered sexual services. And the police said that he saw these spas as a temptation that had to be eliminated. We also know that there were eight victims in total and six of them were women of Asian descent. In terms of the shooter himself, we know that he's a 21 year old male man from Georgia. And police currently haven't explicitly said whether there was a racial motive.

The investigation into a possible hate crime.

Is that still on the table?

Our investigation is looking at everything, so nothing is off the table for our.

Investigation, but the possibility is still there. So they haven't ruled it out.

And how common are anti Asian incidents in the States? In a general sense?

So there have been a lot of anti Asian incidents throughout American history. Probably one of the most notable ones is the Chinese Exclusion act, which was signed into law in 1882. This law barred Chinese immigrants from citizenship and was not repealed until 1943. And of course, during the Second World War, there were around 120,000 Japanese Americans who were put in concentration camps. But specifically during the pandemic, there has been a rise in anti Asian sentiment. And you can see this in the data because, for example, the center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that hate crimes against people of Asian descent rose by almost 150% from 2019 to 2020, while overall hate crimes dropped by 7%. And the Pew Research center, for example, also said that in June 2022, fifths of Americans said that People expressed racist views about Asians more often than before the pandemic.

And why might it be that a particular anti Asian sentiment would go up during the pandemic?

Well, at least some people say that it can be attributed to Donald Trump's rhetoric. He has called COVID 19 the Chinese virus or the Kung flu because the virus was first identified in Wuhan, China.

And.

And some people are saying that his words are emboldening others to act upon their prejudices.

And what kind of incidents are we talking about here?

So they run the gamut from verbal harassment to being spit upon, which is particularly egregious considering that we're in the middle of a pandemic that's caused by a virus that spreads through respiratory droplets. And there is a report from a coalition of Asian advocacy groups that says that perpetrators tend to target Asian women more than men.

And how widely acknowledged is the anti Asian sentiment that's evident in those data?

It hasn't historically been widely acknowledged, but it's slowly starting to. For example, the House Judiciary Committee yesterday held a hearing on anti Asian violence. It was organized before the shootings had taken place, but it's a good example of anti Asian sentiment being recognized at a national political level. One of the people who gave testimony was Congresswoman Grace Meng. She is a Democrat from New York. She gave a heartfelt statement about the discrimination that Asian Americans are subjected to.

Our community is bleeding. We are in pain. And for the last year we've been screaming out for help. Asian American discrimination, however, is not new in this country.

And she has also published a video compiling some of the verbal harassment that she has received as an Asian American herself.

Or maybe Wuhan, about the Karate Kid virus or the Kung Fu virus or the.

Well, I call the FBI and put you in jail.

And so do you think that the sort of early signs of it becoming part of a national discussion will change matters?

There hasn't been really been such open wide acknowledgement, I believe, of the discrimination that Asian Americans face. So this seems like it could be a really big turning point.

Thanks very much for your time, Erica.

Thanks for having me.

For most of its history, the European Union commanded no troops. The idea of a continental gun toting force was more something to be feared than cheered. Yet earlier this year, an agency of the bloc sent out a tweet set to rousing music. It declared that for the first time, the EU had its own uniformed force. But the rise of that service, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, more widely known as Frontex, has been unsteady and halting, much like the broader project of European integration itself.

For a long time, the European Union member states didn't actually want a joint border force. They thought this was a kind of infringement on a core sovereign capability, something that touched at the heart of what it means to be a state.

Shashank Joshi is the Economist's defence editor.

But there was a surge of migration into the Canary Islands, which are a Spanish territory, and that prompted the creation of Frontex in 2004. But it was still a really small agency. It had a tiny budget and a very limited mandate. So it wasn't much of an agency. It wasn't much of a political force in Brussels.

But that seems very much to have changed. Why?

I think the short answer is the 2015 migrant crisis. This was not just a migration crisis, it was a political crisis that profoundly affected big, powerful member states like Germany, that directly impacted and really troubled border states in Southern Europe and Eastern Europe. And in response, politicians gave Frontex huge bucket loads of money. Its budget leapt from under 100 million euros in 2014, up to 280 million euros by 2017, and almost 400 million euros last year. So it's grown in size and it has also grown in the sorts of powers it has and the things it's being asked to do.

How so? What's it being asked to do today?

Well, for a long time, Frontex was effectively staffed by border agents that were seconded from the various European member states. What's happened more recently is that the agency has been given the right to recruit personnel and buy equipment directly, rather than borrowing those from member states. And that is a big shift. It effectively means the European Union commands its own standing corps of people, some of whom carry guns. And I should say, clearly, although it is bigger and more powerful, it still typically answers to national border forces. It isn't turning up at the Greece or Italian border and just doing its own thing. It's supporting those national agencies, but it's also increasingly doing a whole bunch of other things that I think reflect its new prominence and power. So, for example, it is running, or it will run, the system for screening and authorising all the non EU citizens that enter the borderless Schengen Zone, the zone inside the EU where you can travel to without any internal borders. It's also running the European Border Surveillance System, which is a system that takes information from drones, from ships, from social media, from satellites and monitors migrant flows. It is encroaching in areas that previously would probably have been the preserve of.

Defense agencies, but why is an entirely separate agency even required for this? What are they doing that individual states couldn't do on their own borders?

Well, the idea, Jason, is that if you're going to have big, drastically open borders within Europe, which of course is a core part of the European Union's philosophy, then you need to have really strong external borders if you're going to maintain domestic political support for that system. And so the idea is that Frontex is not only supposed to help individual member states that are under pressure, countries like Italy or indeed Greece, that have faced big surges of migration at times, but also to kind of look back beyond the immediate borders to what the EU calls its pre frontier areas. And so, for example, Frontex has deployed officials to places like Albania, Montenegro, but also Niger, Turkey, Senegal, Serbia, places where, you know, you would never have imagined European officials deploying border officials. But they now see it as a critical part of managing and monitoring the European Union's common front.

And in that regard, is it succeeding? Are all of those member states happy with having this force guarding those borders and beyond?

I think member states are happy to have an agency that is supporting their work that is doing some of this, but there's also a lot of criticism. So for example, last year an investigation by Bellingcat, which is an investigative organisation and other news outlet, said that Frontex's vessels had been either actively involved or present during so called illegal pushbacks of migrants at the Greek Turkish border. Now, Frontex denies this, I should say, but what we have seen in December is that the EU's Anti Fraud Office raided the offices of Frontex's director and a senior official as part of a probe into misconduct. And in January, Frontex said it has suspended operations in hungary after the EU's court criticised that country's forcible return of migrants to Serbia. So guarding these borders is a really messy process. And Frontex, by being thrust into the heart of that and becoming such a key player in this area, has really been pulled into the heart of these legal, political and ethical disputes.

And how are those disputes being dealt with?

Well, there have been internal inquiries within Frontex, there is a probe by the European Parliament. But I think what's interesting is that a lot of these problems are structural. You now have border guards who, if something goes wrong, are not directly accountable to a particular member state who put them there, who armed them or equipped them, but to the European Union directly. So there's a new kind of accountability problem. And I think you also now see interesting geographic divisions within the organisation. One Thing that was pointed out to me is that Frontex's foot soldiers, its frontline border guards, are mostly drawn from low wage eastern and southern European member states, but its leadership is drawn from wealthier states in northwest Europe who actually haven't got all that much experience of guarding land borders in the last 30 years. And I think some of these tensions, some of these growing pains, are going to get worse in the next couple of years.

And yet it seems Frontexis is pressing on and growing rapidly anyway. Why is that?

I think it reflects the mood, which is a mood that some people would call Fortress Europe. The idea that as Europe integrates internally as it pools even more sovereignty, that the more you do that inside your borders, the more you man the ramparts and put up your defences against the outside world. Now, a lot of people, particularly human rights activists, think that the way Europe has done this is often inhumane, is often without sensitivity to the underlying sources of this migration all around Europe. But I think that there is a consensus that Europe has to have tough, firm borders. And if that process is ugly, if that process is messy, so be it.

Shashong, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

Businesses are sometimes good at making money, but. But they're frequently terrible at making rules. A former employer of mine used a third party travel company that found fares way higher than I could find on my own, but I wasn't allowed to. And don't even ask about the restrictions on which hotels I could stay in. To get to them, I often spent a small fortune of their money on taxis.

Companies often enforce excessively complicated and rigid rules that alienate both their customers and their employees.

Philip Coggan writes Bartleby the Economist's column on work and management.

A new book by Danish author Martin Lindstrom called the Ministry of Common Sense is trying to combat this nonsense.

So what kind of nonsense are we talking about here?

One example is a banker who taped a picture drawn by his child to his office wall and came in the next day to find a notice saying it was in violation of company policy about leaving personal items in the office overnight. Another example is the kind of rules that many of us face where you're going on a business trip and you're told you can only fly economy, even though it might be cheaper to go by train or to go in a special offer business class flight. But the rules are the rules and you will not be compensated if you do something more sensible, even if it saves the company money.

And aside from the frustrations that come with that what kinds of issues do these kinds of rules cause?

Well, the great problem with this is that it demotivates people. You know, if you feel you're having to obey silly rules, you kind of lose agency to try and take the initiative and you feel, why are they so petty? There are many of these rules which just seem pointless. It's hard to find exactly where the rule originated and to get someone who can take it away.

Again, the old it was like that when I got here defense, I guess. I mean, how has the author, Mr. Lindstrom, tackled this?

Well, sometimes he's called in by companies and tries to illustrate the problem. It's not just, of course, for employees. Customers face a lot of uncommon sense rules. So in one case he was dealing with a credit card company and they were failing for their appalling customer service, particularly at the call centre. Probably have all faced this. So one time he arranged to go out to dinner with the executives and got the fraud department to cancel the executives credit cards. So when they went to pay for the taxi, the credit card didn't work. And then they had to call their own call center and then were just outraged at how long it took to get through. And that was the best way of bringing home to the executives what happens.

So what's the structural suggestion here? What would you tell managers out there who want a more common sense operation?

First thing is to ask the staff. All of us who work for a company know the things that irritate us and the things that make it harder for us to deal with customers or clients. And so if you ask the staff for suggestions, you'll probably get dozens. And not all of them will work, of course, but quite a lot of them will be extremely sensible. If you think about this, this is about the equivalent of the Toyota lean manufacturing approach, where the workers can stop the production line if they see a fault. And this is the same kind of thing in a service company. We can see what's going wrong in the business and we can find ways with enough ingenuity to get around them. After all, if you didn't have employees who can get around these problems, why did you hire them in the first place?

Okay, I'm going to take your advice. I'm going to ask the staff. Then you, Phil, what bit of uncommonly nonsensical stuff would you get rid of at the Economist?

Well, it's really to do with the Economist's office building. You can go to our offices up and down in the lift, but there are two sets of stairs in the building, and for some reason, you can only go up and down on one set of stairs. Just dropping that needless bureaucracy would save a lot of stress when we eventually get back to the office.

Philip, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Marguerite Howell and Kim Gittleson. Our senior producers are Chris Impey, Hannah Mourinho and Sam Colbert. Our producers are Stevie Hertz and William Warren and assistant producer Jason Hoskin, with additional production help from Pete Naughton. Our sound engineer is Daniel Lloyd Evans, and our trainee is Abasoye Oshindairo. We'll all see you back here on.