When President Trump talks about immigration in his first State of The Union speech tonight, people are likely to hear him use one phrase in particular: “merit-based immigration.”

As part of his offer to put 1.8 million young, unauthorized immigrant “Dreamers” on a path to citizenship, Mr. Trump also wants to shift legal immigration away from prioritizing family reunification to a system based on individual qualifications. It would be a significant change – if lawmakers could agree on what constitutes “merit.”

The president and his supporters in Congress appear to be defining merit as highly skilled, well-educated immigrants who speak English and can support themselves. But what about strawberry pickers or hotel workers? Those jobs are commonly performed by low-skilled immigrants. And then there’s the brother or sister of a legal resident who comes to America and starts a business, whose family helps him or her adjust to a new culture.

“Nobody has a set definition of ‘merit.’ Everyone uses it for his own purpose,” says Theresa Cardinal Brown, the director of immigration policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. The term sounds positive, she says, while a phrase like “chain migration” – or family-based immigration, which the president wants to stop – sounds negative, like a weight.

These terms – and their political shadings – are meant to sway public opinion, Ms. Brown says. And they hide a legitimate question: “When you are talking about a merit-based system in the US context, are you looking to decrease the overall number of immigrants, or are you looking to adjust the criteria of who comes in?”

Today, America’s legal immigration is demand-oriented – it relies on the demand of families in the US to sponsor relatives and American employers to sponsor foreign workers. It also includes a relatively small visa diversity program to allot slots to underrepresented countries (the “visa lottery,” which the president wants to end) and a humanitarian component for refugees and asylum seekers, which the administration is radically scaling back.

The system heavily favors families, which advocates describe as consistent with American values. About two-thirds of the slightly more than 1 million people granted legal status (known as green cards) in 2015 were family-based, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Only 14 percent were employer-sponsored.

This is a problem, the administration and many Republicans in Congress maintain. Low-skilled immigrants are low taxpayers – a burden on public services, oversaturating the job market, and stagnating wages, in their view. And family-based immigration poses a security threat, says Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In an opinion piece published Jan. 21 in The Washington Times, he cites a report from the Department of Justice and DHS that since Sept. 11, 2001, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has removed more than 1,700 unauthorized immigrants with “national security concerns.”

“The American people have known for more than 30 years that our immigration system is broken. It’s intentionally designed to be blind to merit,” Mr. Sessions said in a speech Friday. “It doesn’t favor education or skills. It just favors anybody who has a relative in America – and not necessarily a close relative.”

Sessions and others in the administration point to countries such as Canada and Australia that have supply-oriented policies. These countries have long used point systems to qualify applicants, assigning them points for education, working age, employment, language, and other skills that determine their likelihood of assimilation and contribution to the economy.

As a result, these countries’ intake is the reverse of the US: About two-thirds of their legal immigrants are employment-based, rather than family-based, writes immigration expert Daniel Griswold in a recent op-ed in The Hill.

But these countries also have family components, and they adjusted their programs when they saw that their criteria did not automatically mean immigrants could easily adjust or work in their fields. Their systems are also more flexible to changing economies, while immigration policy in the US is heavily dependent on a gridlock-plagued Congress.

'Green cards just for computer engineers'

“I don’t want green cards just for computer engineers,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina told reporters during the recent three-day government shutdown. Senator Graham has been in the thick of working on a bipartisan deal for Dreamers. “If you are out there working in the fields, if you are a construction worker, I want some of those people to have a way to stay here. If you are running a business, I want them to have a chance to get a green card.”

He blasted the president’s immigration policy expert, Stephen Miller, for wanting to restrict legal immigration at a time of a worker shortage. Demographers also point to an aging US population and warn about turning into a Russia or Japan without enough immigrants to support their seniors.

Indeed, the president’s immigration framework, released last week, echoes a bill by Sens. Tom Cotton (R) of Arkansas and David Perdue (R) of Georgia that would end “extended-family chain migration” and only sponsor spouses and minor children. The bill would cut in half the number of legal immigrants by eliminating many family-sponsored categories and significantly cutting the cap on such family-based visas.

Evelyn Huron, the director of Caritas Legal Services with Catholic Charities in San Antonio, Texas, says the president’s one-page immigration policy framework is vague. But the apparent emphasis on a merit-based system that rewards high-skilled and more affluent immigrants has her worried.

Even if the path to legal residency in the US narrows for poorer and less-skilled workers, Huron doubts that those workers will stop coming into the country looking for work.

“There are always going to be jobs for unskilled workers,” she says. “Are you going to have less people come? No. More people leave? No. You are just going to have less applying” for legal status.

Getting in the harvest

Take Dixondale Farms in Carrizo Springs, Texas, the largest and oldest onion plant farm in the country.

Bruce Frasier, the fourth-generation president of the family farm about 45 minutes from the US-Mexico border, has seen his workforce shrink by half in his time running the farm. He has been calling for the government to streamline the H-2A visa program – the main tool for foreign agricultural workers to gain seasonal access to the country – for years to supplement his dwindling workforce of legal residents.

“The number of [farm owner H-2A] applications are going up each year because more and more people are realizing they can’t get local [legal] workers, or even illegal workers, to do this,” says Mr. Frasier.

Last summer, with relatively little fanfare, the US Department of Homeland Security raised the cap on H-2B visas for foreign guest workers, a program favored by the hospitality industry, but not on H-2A and H-1B visas, programs favored by the agriculture and technology industries, respectively.

With fewer US residents looking for agricultural work, and an unreliable foreign guest worker program, many farmers – particularly in the interior of the country – turn to illegal workers to make sure they harvest their whole crop in time, Frasier continues.

The US food supply “is going to be harvested eventually by more foreign workers,” he says, because so few US residents want to do the work. “It’s whether you want to grow it in Mexico or want to grow it in the United States.”

Congress has grappled with the merit issue before. The bipartisan 2013 immigration reform bill that passed the Senate and wilted for lack of interest in the GOP-controlled House included a point-based merit system. It also eliminated the diversity visa lottery and restricted family-based immigration.

But that was part of a comprehensive immigration reform bill that not only had a path to citizenship for Dreamers, but also for millions of other unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the US before 2011. What Trump is offering is not this grand bargain, and has drawn many critics on the left – and on the right, including those who object to Dreamer "amnesty," and his costly $25 billion trust fund for a border wall and other enhancements.

“I am forever looking for that thing that can break through the noise and make progress on a deal,” says Brown. At the end of the day, she says, everybody – but most especially the Dreamers – have to figure out how important it is to get their protections back.

“What is the price that everyone is willing to pay for them to feel safe? That debate is ongoing.”

Fred Weir

Grigory Yavlinsky, presidential candidate for the liberal Yabloko party, sits in his office in Moscow.

The idea of Russian democracy has been pretty much a pipe dream through most of recorded history. There are many who claim that only the window dressings on an essentially authoritarian state machine have been changed since the collapse of the USSR a quarter century ago.

And as Vladimir Putin launches his fourth bid to win the supreme Kremlin job in polls slated for March 18, critics deride the coterie of “contenders” that has been assembled to oppose him as Kremlin puppets – or worse, enablers – in a process designed to anoint a preordained result with a few sprinkles of democratic oil.

Grigory Yavlinsky, one of those contenders, tends to agree. He has been running for president of Russia at almost every opportunity for the past 25 years, and he cheerfully admits there’s no chance of winning.

But he disagrees with many of his fellow opposition-minded Russians who argue that it’s pointless – or even playing straight into the Kremlin’s hands – to try.

Mr. Yavlinsky says that the elections represent a small window in which opponents of Mr. Putin can stand forward and receive legally mandated media coverage to say what they think. A staunch pro-Western liberal – a vanishing species in Russia – Yavlinsky is fearless in expressing his views, which include opposition to the annexation of Crimea, Russia’s interventions in Ukraine and Syria, and the Putin-era oligarchic economic system. Even if the outcome is foretold, he says, the election provides the sort of public stage that is otherwise unavailable in Russia.

“Russia has no future under Putin, but someone needs to say this,” he says. “A person has to live in his own time and place. This is mine. So, I have a choice between doing nothing and doing this.”

Changing the process

The debate concerns not just the current state of Russian democracy, but where it might be headed. Even the Soviet Union held elections, with a single candidate embracing the Communist Party’s monopoly of power, but that dissolved one day and the world discovered a Russia that believed it must become a democracy in order to move forward. Both former President Boris Yeltsin and Putin have acted to severely curtail that vision, yet the orchestrated multi-party elections that take place today are a world away from the Soviet variety. For those who believe in evolution, there is hope that pushing the envelope wherever possible might eventually result in lasting change.

“There are two people in this election, [Alexei Navalny, Russia’s best-known opposition figure,] and Yavlinsky, who are contributing a lot to make it as real as it can be,” says Nikolai Petrov, an expert at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “Yavlinsky is trying to shape a positive agenda, to make that part of public discussion. Navalny is an engine pushing the Kremlin, from the outside, in certain directions. What they do and say is noticed.”

Mr. Navalny is one of several opponents of participation in the upcoming election, which he describe as a stage-managed farce, in part due to his own ouster from it. Navalny was barred from running due to a criminal conviction widely regarded as politically motivated. He and 600 followers were arrested in Moscow last weekend for staging unsanctioned street rallies against the elections. 

Quite a few serious Kremlin critics view boycotting the upcoming vote as the only way a Russian citizen can demonstrate free choice. “I cannot change the situation, but I can stay out of it,” says Yevgeny Roizman, mayor of the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, an opposition stronghold. “This is an election without choice. Candidates participate in it because they were asked to, allowed to, and that’s their choice. Mine is to have no part of it.”

But the political excitement that Navalny has generated, especially among youth, Mr. Petrov says, has forced the Kremlin to offer a wider spectrum for Russians to choose from. Indeed, Petrov argues, the participation of two fresh and outspokenly critical candidates, liberal journalist Ksenia Sobchak and the Communist entry, socialist collective farm director Pavel Grudinin, is Navalny’s achievement.

“Navalny has established a huge network that can bring people onto the streets. Though it is unregistered, it is very much part of the election process,” Petrov says. “And the campaign is just beginning. We need to talk not only about how the next elections might be better, but how to improve and broaden these ones.”

The Putin hurdle

Putin’s vaunted popularity is a very real thing. There is no denying that Russia today is a more unified, socially stable, and even prosperous place than the country he inherited from Mr. Yeltsin almost 20 years ago. Though Yavlinsky rages against Putin’s foreign policy adventures, which have brought Western opprobrium and sanctions down on Russia, polls show that these too enjoy overwhelming public support.

Yet there is no doubt that the system is heavily gamed, with unwanted candidates excluded from the ballot and government resources focused on ensuring a single outcome.

“Putin’s support is the product of an information monopoly,” says Sergei Davidis, a human rights lawyer and organizer of the opposition Solidarity movement. “For the past 18 years people have been told that Putin is the state. No wonder few can imagine the country without him. Focus groups show that the mechanism of his support is not positive, but negative. People fear collapse, unrest, a return to the turmoil of the 1990s. Even people who support Putin do so because they believe there is no alternative.”

Another factor is the decline of Western democracy as a guiding light for Russian liberals, Yavlinsky says. Though he strongly opposed the way the US chose to help Russia in the 1990s, by backing Mr. Yeltsin’s undemocratic methods, at least Yavlinsky’s campaigns two decades ago could point to orderly, free, and open Western democracies as a destination for Russia to aim for.

“It's hard to name any shining examples today,” he says. “Europe is in a difficult condition. Let's not even talk about the US. How can it be that after 230 years of constitutional democracy, America has a leader like Trump? We have barely 25 years of experience, we lack the habits and the culture, we are still learning. But now we hear people saying things like: Putin is manipulating elections everywhere, even in America! What kind of elections are we supposed to expect here in Russia then?”

Enemy No. 1: apathy?

Some argue that Putin’s main opponent in these elections is apathy. In the 2016 parliamentary elections, less than half of Russia’s voters turned out, a result that might tarnish Putin’s victory much more than a high vote for any of his rivals. Experts say the Kremlin has set a target of 70 percent turnout, of which Putin should receive 70 percent support. That may not be realizable.

“Apathy is enemy No. 1, but it’s the enemy of all candidates, not just Putin,” says Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the independent Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. “Apathy might grow into protest, as happened in Soviet times” when people lacked any belief that the system might be improved. That’s a problem that might yet be corrected, Mr. Makarkin says, as surveys show the majority of Russian voters do not yet believe that elections are fake.

Yavlinsky says that although he is trying to shape his campaign on values rather than some percentage of votes, it does matter what the ballot box reveals.

“If 5 or 10 million people would vote for what I am saying, that would have positive results on Russia's political direction,” he says. “If my participation had some impact on taking our troops out of Ukraine and Syria, and improving Russia's relations with the West, I would count that as a great success.”

On a good night, Melissa Aucoin clears $150 in tips from the tables she waits on at a suburban Italian restaurant, where entrees start at $16.

Her hourly salary is only $3.75, so like many tipped hospitality workers she relies on gratuities to pay the rent.

“Whatever tips you get from those tables are yours,” she says.

Back in the kitchen, cooks and dishwashers make more per hour, but don’t see any of the tips from customers, creating a widening disparity in earnings that has vexed some restaurant owners and raised public discussion about where tips go and who should benefit. 

Ms. Aucoin, who has worked as a waitress for more than two decades, among other jobs, says that it’s only fair that she keeps the tips since she’s hustling to satisfy her customers, though she understands the frustrations of cooks who also work hard. Still, she adds, “It’s up to the restaurant to pay the kitchen staff and ‘back-of-the-house’ fairly.”

Fairness is one thing. Federal law is another. Since 2011, employers have been barred from pooling tips, except among staff like Aucoin who work in tipped positions like waiter or bartender or busboy. That Obama-era ruling infuriated restaurant-industry groups who, along with individual restaurant owners, have sued in federal court to overturn it.

Now the litigants seem likely to get their way under a controversial new proposal from the Department of Labor that would give a free hand to employers to run tip pools. The proposal issued last month is subject to public comment through Feb. 5, after which a final decision is expected.

How the debate plays out could put a stamp on issues of fairness that affect millions of workers in hospitality industries who don't always fit neatly into minimum-wage policies. Should tips go to line cooks and dishwashers, or should they simply earn more? And will some employers unfairly raid the tip jar?

While it won't settle those questions, the Labor Department's pending action is stirring public discussion, from worker outcries to pundits questioning whether America's culture of tipping – bigger than in many nations – makes sense.

The new regulation’s biggest effect would likely be in California and six other Western states that don’t allow tips to count toward servers’ incomes. In other states, employers pay as little as $2.13 an hour to tipped workers and claim a “tip credit,” under a requirement to ensure that employees are paid at least the equivalent of the minimum wage.

Not all employers are likely to adopt tip pools, say employment-law experts, as they can be tricky to manage and only apply to tipped staff making minimum wage or above. But the proposal has sparked outrage from pro-labor groups who say the Trump administration is opening the door to wage theft by allowing employers to decide how to pony up gratuities.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Owner David Doyle poses in Tres Gatos tapas restaurant in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood on Jan. 29. Mr. Doyle started adding a service charge to diners' bills to help raise the pay of his chefs and dishwashers, while retaining the tradition of tipping for servers.

The risk of cheating

The amount of earnings at stake isn’t trivial. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, estimates that tipped workers earn $36.4 billion a year in tips, based on tax returns that underestimate actual earnings. Surveys of tipped workers and prosecutions of abusive employers show that wage theft is already a persistent problem.

Critics point out that the Department of Labor’s proposal doesn’t require managers to share tip pools with employees; gratuities can be diverted to cover other business costs or can simply be pocketed by unscrupulous managers.

“There’s a lot of different ways you can cheat workers out of their pay, and when you add tips into the mix it adds a whole 'nother way to do it,” says Patricia Smith, the former solicitor of the Department of Labor under Obama.

She says the existing rule is designed to ensure that customers know that their tips are going to the employees that they see serving them and not being withheld, particularly when most bills are settled by card, not cash, so there’s no tip jar to monitor. Take away that certainty, and tippers might reconsider their generosity.

But this setup doesn’t benefit workers in the kitchen, argues Angelo Amador, who runs the legal arm of the National Restaurant Association, which has sued the Department of Labor. “We think that if you pay your employees above the minimum wage in cash, you should be able to share tips with the back of the house, which are also helping with customers’ experiences,” he says.

This is also about fairness, he adds, pointing to those who are grilling steaks and washing pots. “If you look at the back of the house, it’s mostly minorities.”

Still, there’s no guarantee that tip pools will benefit those workers – or those at the car wash or nail salons where there is no back of the house, says Ms. Smith, who is the legal counsel at the National Employment Law Project. “If the employer starts paying them $7.25 an hour, there’s nothing to stop them pocketing the rest.”

Some employers don’t need encouragement. In 2014, a Philadelphia sports bar and restaurant chain, Chickie’s & Pete’s, was forced to pay $6.8 million to more than 1,000 current and former employees after the Department of Labor found that it was illegally stealing tips, among other abuses. Managers forced servers to pay cash into a tip pool at the end of their shift and would pocket more than half of the money.

State laws will matter

Such practices could still be illegal under state law: Many states explicitly prohibit management sharing in tip pools. And any employer who seeks to exploit the proposed federal rules could face expensive litigation, says Francis Bingham, an employment attorney in Boston who has represented large restaurant companies.

He’s skeptical that many restaurants will embrace tip pools and says those that do would need to be upfront with servers about where the money goes, given the potential for mistrust.

“You’re probably not going to see see a tidal wave, but a trickle of employers doing this model,” he says. “Dealing with tips is a headache for restaurant owners. It engenders mistrust.”

Joshua Chaisson, a restaurant server in Portland, Maine, argues that concerns over wage theft by employers running tip pools are overblown. “No tipped employee in his or her right mind would sign up to work in a restaurant where the agreement between staff and management says that all tips are kept by the owner,” he wrote in the conservative Washington Examiner, which titled his opinion piece, “The progressive case for Trump’s tip-pooling rule.”

Last year Mr. Chaisson and other servers successfully lobbied lawmakers in Maine to retain the tip credit under the state’s new minimum-wage law, arguing that forcing owners to pay them a higher wage could, paradoxically, lower their income if customers then tipped less. He’s suspicious of labor-funded groups that push for minimum wages in lieu of tipped positions.

But Chiasson, who says he’s “a staunch Democrat,” is fine with restaurants having the flexibility to share tips with kitchen staff under the proposed rules if it closes the pay gap.  

Some restaurants have tried to tackle pay imbalances by changing their pricing structure.

In 2015, Danny Meyer, a prominent chef and owner in New York, made waves when he ended tipping at his restaurants, raised menu prices, and added a service charge to be shared among workers, echoing a common practice in Europe. Other upscale restaurants in New York and other cities have followed suit, despite complaints from some waitstaff of lower incomes under the no-tipping model.

One owner's new approach

“We’re trying to address a long-standing disparity in wages between the front and back of house,” says David Doyle, a restaurant owner in Boston who praises Mr. Meyer’s approach.

His solution is not to end tipping at Tres Gatos, his restaurant-cum-book-and-record store, but to add a 3.75 percent administrative fee to the bill and share the proceeds with back-of-the-house employees. On average, he says, this means an extra $2 or $3 an hour, which is a nice bump for junior cooks making $12 or $13 an hour.

Mr. Doyle sees this as a better alternative than tip pools that may stir resentment among tipped employees. Before the new charge was introduced in late 2015, he held “intense meetings” with staff who were concerned that they could lose out on tips. That hasn’t happened, he says, as customers continue to tip – and to expect good service.

“Servers and bartenders work really hard for their tips. It’s a reflection of the services that they give to their guests,” he says. “Tipping is an entrenched part of our culture.”

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

‘I PUT MY OWN STEPSON IN JAIL AND IT SAVED HIS LIFE.’ – Jerry Flowers, chief of an Oklahoma law enforcement unit that investigates agricultural crimes.

The first time Scout Thrasher stole two cows and hauled them across a state line and sold them, he was 17 years old. After he pocketed the cash and drove home, his stomach-churning fear of being caught in the act turned to euphoria. “After you make that much money that quick, [there’s] really no other way to do it,” he says.

Over time, Mr. Thrasher became convinced that he was invincible – that the law enforcement officials devoted to tracking down cattle rustlers in this state of farms and feedlots and ranches would never get him. Not Scout Thrasher. “I had that mentality that I was bulletproof,” says Thrasher. “They couldn’t catch me.”

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Convicted cattle rustler Scout Trasher leans on a fence on the ranch where he lives in Texhoma, Okla. He is on five years of probation.

Jerry Flowers thought otherwise. Mr. Flowers is a veteran city police detective turned “cattle cop” who looks as if he just stepped out of a Louis L’Amour novel: He wears a bone-colored cowboy hat, cowboy boots, bluejeans, and a pinstriped vest with a badge pinned to it. His belt buckle is the size of a small hubcap. His white mustache droops from his upper lip like a horseshoe.

Flowers spent 36 years at the Oklahoma City Police Department battling every conceivable form of crime, including gang violence. In April 1995, he was one of the first officers to rush into the wreckage of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where 168 people died in a truck bomb attack by Timothy McVeigh. Later he took a job as an investigator in a special state agricultural crimes unit. Working with eight field agents, he drives thousands of miles across Oklahoma each year probing reports of farm thefts and break-ins. That means trying to stop things like cattle rustling. That means trying to stop people like Scout Thrasher.

The trails of Flowers and Thrasher would eventually intersect at, of all places, a ranch owned by Thrasher’s grandfather. The younger Thrasher, desperate to raise money to support a drug habit, stole cattle from his grandfather Dean, the man who had raised him and taught him how to handle livestock, how to be a cowboy, how to be a man. 

“Once you get so far gone on drugs, it doesn’t make a difference to you anymore,” Thrasher says.

When Flowers finally arrested Thrasher for that heist in August 2014, it seemed like an open-and-shut case. But Thrasher’s outlaw career didn’t end there, nor did Flowers’s pursuit of him. 

This is a story of two men – a lawman and an outlaw – and of promising lives shattered, of families betrayed, and, maybe, just maybe, of redemption. It is a story of a crime as old as the country (cattle rustling) and of a scourge as new as last night’s news (methamphetamine use). More than anything, it is a story of two men on opposite sides of an often overlooked drug epidemic that is roiling rural America. 

To cross the Mississippi River going west is to cross a continental divide between towns hit by the opioid crisis and those where meth is the No. 1 drug threat. While opioid addiction and its dark trail of overdoses has preoccupied much of America – and understandably so – meth remains the drug of choice in large swaths of the rural heartland.

In popular culture, methamphetamine is portrayed as a backcountry drug, a homemade stimulant used by mostly white, working-class Americans. That socioeconomic status still applies, but the “Breaking Bad” era of mass production is over. A decade ago, states began to restrict the over-the-counter sale of cold medicines used to cook meth – starting with Oklahoma in 2004 – which resulted in a precipitous decline in backyard labs.

But even though the garage cook shops disappeared, the demand for meth didn’t. Mexican cartels began producing crystal meth in bulk and supplying existing networks of dealers and users. Nearly all the meth trafficked across the United States can be traced to Mexican superlabs run by criminal organizations.

In 27 states, meth offenders now make up the largest number of drug offenders in federal prisons. Of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s 21 mainland US field divisions, half reported in 2017 that meth was their greatest drug threat. “We’re saturated in methamphetamine,” says Richard Salter, the DEA’s assistant special agent in charge in Oklahoma. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Special agent Paul Cornett (l.) and chief agent Jerry Flowers, part of an investigative unit with the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry, discuss a cattle rustling case with prosecutors.

Along with meth use goes crime to pay for the next fix. In rural towns like Texhoma in Oklahoma’s arid panhandle, that means agricultural theft, above all livestock. Every year, thousands of beef cattle are reported stolen, largely because rustling is so simple and lucrative. A stolen cow sold at the market price at an auction house is a big payoff for thieves.

“If they break into your house and steal your box of jewelry or your TV or your gun, they get pennies on the dollar,” says Flowers, who is now chief of the Investigative Services Unit at the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry (ODAFF).

Flowers joined the unit in 2008, just as it was being overhauled to address a gap in law enforcement. Sheriffs and local police departments didn’t have sufficient time or resources to devote to agricultural crimes. Missing, too, was a deep familiarity with the industry, something that Flowers and his field agents, who all raise their own livestock and work as cowboys, have embedded in their DNA. 

“These guys aren’t all hat and no cattle,” says Flowers, who talks in folksy clichés. He jokes about them, then spits out another. “When they walk onto a ranch or meet a livestock owner, they know how to walk the walk and talk the talk.”

While Flowers and his agents have helped break up multistate theft rings that traffic in stolen farm equipment – tractors, trailers, trucks – much of their time is spent trying to recover pilfered cows. “In the 1800s, you’d catch a cattle rustler out on the plains, [find] a good strong rope and a horse to set him on – and that problem is handled,” he says.

Now it takes longer to put thieves away, and the wheels of justice don’t always turn smoothly.

Thrasher was 16 when he first smoked meth. A friend told him the stimulant would give him more energy – and it did.

He played tackle for the Red Devils, the high school football team in Texhoma, a town of 1,000 people and 10 churches that sits astride the state line with Texas, where the tallest building is a pockmarked grain elevator.

Thrasher was a middling student but took a particular interest in farming and ranching. He would travel with his agricultural science teacher, Ashley Harrison, to livestock shows on class field trips, and Mr. Harrison was impressed by Thrasher’s knowledge and passion. “Scout was a hardworking kid,” he says. “He was a good kid to have around.”

But as time went on Harrison noticed the teen growing more distant.

Thrasher at first was spending $100 a week on his habit, but soon it became much more. What he didn’t put toward gas for his truck and feed for his horses went for meth. Eventually the horses went, too. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

‘I GREW UP AROUND CATTLE. I KNOW CATTLE. I KNOW HOW TO LOAD AND HAUL THEM, WHERE TO TAKE THEM. YOU GET A LOT MORE MONEY THAN ROBBING CONVENIENCE STORES.’ – Scout Thrasher, who stole cattle to support a drug habit, with his wife, Morghin, and their newborn daughter, Stetson

Going into his senior year, Thrasher was struggling with poor grades and asked Harrison for advice on how he might graduate. That was before the Thanksgiving break. Thrasher never came back to school, says Harrison. 

Thrasher drifted between casual jobs at ranches and feedlots in Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. Caught up in his addiction, he turned to cattle rustling to pay for his drugs. “I grew up around cattle. I know cattle. I know how to load and haul them, where to take them,” he says. “You get a lot more money than robbing convenience stores.”

In cattle country, livestock and land are king, and the Thrasher family had both, giving Scout an advantage that poorer kids didn’t have. “He’s a smart, good-looking kid,” says Flowers. “He’s healthy and could work to make a living. At some point in his life, his grandfather could set him up.”

Instead, Thrasher fell in with other meth users, including a girl he was dating, and began involving more people in his heists. 

On Aug. 16, 2014, Thrasher pulled a trailer of cows up to a small livestock auction in Geary, a four-hour drive from Texhoma. He unloaded 13 head of cattle, worth $21,000, and registered them as his own. After Thrasher left, the auction owner called an ODAFF agent to report her suspicions about the bona fides of the seller.

“There were red flags all over this,” recalls Flowers. 

It wasn’t just that Thrasher had driven so far to sell the cattle. The auction house had earlier received a specific warning by phone. “If Scout Thrasher showed up at the sale barn to sell cattle, they were stolen,” the caller had said. The tip came from Linda Pollock, a local rancher – and the grandmother of Thrasher’s girlfriend. 

Flowers drove to Geary to check the sale documents and inspect the cattle. Branding isn’t mandatory in Oklahoma, but these cows had a distinctive T on their hips, which Flowers checked against a livestock database and came up with a name: Dean Thrasher. 

The ODAFF agent, Paul Cornett, confirmed that the cattle had vanished the night before. And that wasn’t all that was missing: Scout Thrasher and two buddies were suspected of breaking into a house on the ranch rented to a family friend and taking off with his TV and guns. Within days, agents had recovered the stolen items and had Thrasher in custody after local police had pulled him over for a license plate violation. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Black Angus graze on Doug Barnes’s ranch in Okeene, Okla., one of many places hit by cattle rustlers in the state.

At the jailhouse, Flowers and Mr. Cornett grilled Thrasher, who they figured was the ringleader. He claimed his grandfather had told him to sell the cattle on his behalf. But they pressed him on why he had the check from the auction house made out in his name and why he had picked up the cows at 2 a.m.

Flowers then told him he had full confessions from his accomplices and showed him pictures of the stolen goods in their homes. “When Scout looked at the photographs ... he dropped his head and began to confess,” according to Cornett’s investigation report.

Facing felony charges, Thrasher was released on bail. He then went on the run. It would be another year, and another string of cattle thefts in Oklahoma, before Flowers was back on the outlaw’s scent. In the fall of 2014, Thrasher spent four months at two drug treatment centers in Texas, getting clean. He says it worked, and in early 2015 he found steady work on a ranch near Lubbock, Texas, before getting hired on a gas-line crew. 

“Then I fell off and started using drugs again,” he says. 

Thrasher’s experience isn’t unusual. In one study of a 90-day residential program in California, 80 percent of patients who finished the treatment went back to using meth within six months. Even in well-designed programs that address underlying behavioral problems, the risk of relapse with meth is high, says Richard Rawson, a professor emeritus of psychiatry and expert on substance abuse at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Part of the challenge for meth users is their social networks. “You need to have an alternative that doesn’t involve your old drug-using friends,” he says. 

Thrasher couldn’t lay off his old friends. By the summer of 2015, he was back in Oklahoma and getting high with his buddies. And he began rustling again, looking for more easy targets in cattle country. 

One of those, say investigators, was Doug Barnes, an older rancher. That summer he had hired a local teenager to mind his herd while he recuperated at home from surgery. Months later, he ran into a neighbor who said 10 of his cows had disappeared, so Mr. Barnes drove out to his own ranch. “I had a sinking feeling in my heart,” he says. 

Sure enough, 20 cows were missing, a third of his herd. When ODAFF agents eventually cracked the case, they determined that 63 cattle worth $69,000 had been stolen from properties in three counties. One of the victims was Ms. Pollock, who had called in the tip about Thrasher. Her daughter, Khristie Taylor, and granddaughter, Thrasher’s 17-year-old girlfriend, were among seven arrested.

Thrasher himself was caught in October 2015 driving a stolen trailer through the same town where he’d been arrested the previous year. He was eventually convicted of five criminal felonies, including animal larceny and drug possession.

In jail, inmates would ask him how to steal cattle. He would tell them it’s easy if you know the ropes. “Everybody’s got a different way to do it,” he says. But you have to watch your accomplices because they will let you down – “that’s how I got caught,” he says.

Rustlers need to worry about more than unreliable co-
conspirators. As cattle theft has persisted, fueled in part by the meth epidemic, ranchers have become more savvy about protecting their livestock.

On a recent morning, Barnes shows Flowers the security cameras he’s rigged up to monitor the gate at his 800-acre ranch. It’s nearly winter, and the grass is stubbled. While it’s impossible to secure the open land on which Oklahoma’s 2 million beef cattle roam, Flowers encourages ranchers to install cameras and reinforce locks on gates and pens to make it harder for rustlers. 

Flowers lingers on the dirt road, swapping livestock lore with Barnes. Flowers raises his own cattle and loves to hunt deer – he shows off photos of his two young granddaughters on their first hunt – as well as feral hogs. He looks at ease, his thumbs tucked into his belt, hat tilted against the sun. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

‘I HAD A SINKING FEELING IN MY HEART.’ – Doug Barnes, an Oklahoma rancher who lost cattle to rustlers.

In past years, ODAFF has reported as many as 3,000 head of cattle stolen in Oklahoma, but Flowers reckons that number may fall to 1,400 for 2017, which could be a sign of farmers’ increased vigilance and declining prices for livestock. It may not hurt that Oklahoma lawmakers have tripled the amount of money that convicted rustlers must pay in restitution to owners. The Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, a private organization that has its own law enforcement agents in Texas and Oklahoma, says cattle thefts peaked in 2014, a year of record-high auction prices. 

Still, it doesn’t take many stolen cows to mar the bank accounts of the people with calloused hands and sun-creased faces who work the area’s ranch lands. The thievery takes an emotional toll, too. Barnes suspects a former ranch hand tipped off the rustlers who took his livestock.

“It hurts to know someone that close to you would steal from you,” he says.

The sun slides behind low hills as Thrasher, now out of prison, drives along an unpaved road on his grandfather’s ranch. He pulls up at a dun-colored house, where two young girls, bundled in fleece jackets and wearing hats, are playing inside a fenced-off yard along with a limping goat. “Daddy! Daddy!” the girls chant, hopscotching toward the fence. 

Thrasher is stocky and six feet tall. He has short brown hair and a goatee, and wears a green western shirt and jeans, along with a baseball cap, which he swaps for another when he goes inside. “That other one smelled too much of pig,” he says. In conversation, he’s polite and attentive, and open about his crimes, though vague on some details, in part because of ongoing civil litigation (Barnes is suing him and other gang members for allegedly stealing his cattle. Thrasher denies being involved in that heist.)

On Jan. 18, 2017, Thrasher was released from prison, after 15 months behind bars, and now faces five years of probation for his crimes. Since then, he’s gotten married, had a baby, found a full-time job at a pig farm, and turned 22. “I’ve got some years to put it back together again,” he says.

The two-bedroom house he’s living in on his grandfather’s ranch is the one he helped burglarize in 2014 during the late-night cattle theft. Now he lives there with his wife, Morghin, two stepdaughters, and Stetson, their baby, who was born in November.

He’s made amends with his family, including his father, who lives in another property on the ranch, and with Dean. Thrasher does volunteer work with a youth group at church, where Dean is an elder. He knows some people crack jokes about his criminal past. But that’s not who he is today, he insists. “You make some bad choices. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”

“He just got with the wrong people,” says Dean of his grandson. “I ain’t given up on him yet.”

Morghin, herself a former meth addict who quit a year ago, began visiting Thrasher in jail, while she was divorcing her previous husband. Two months after his release, they got married. 

“I gained two stepdaughters. They call me ‘Dad’ now, and that’s pretty special to me,” says Thrasher, as he cradles Stetson on a dark leather sofa under a large painting of a bull. 

Outside, the howls of coyotes echo in the night. Thrasher tells Rhylie, his older stepdaughter, to help her sister put away their toys. “We can’t. The coyotes are out there,” she replies. Thrasher keeps his voice low. “How are the coyotes going to stop you from cleaning your playroom? Come on, honey.”

Thrasher is saving money with the hope of buying a few head of cattle of his own so he can one day help pay for his children’s education. He also wants to acquaint them with the cowboy lifestyle. Perhaps they’ll want to rodeo, he muses. More than anything, he wants them to learn from his errors – stay away from drugs.

Thrasher says he sometimes thinks about meth; he knows it’s easy to score in town. When temptation beckons, he tries to focus on his new family. “I know if I ever got in trouble again it would be a long time [in jail] and the kids don’t deserve that,” he says. 

Flowers knows what addiction does to a family, too. His stepson Cody became a meth user after college while working on an oil rig. He lost his home, his job, and his wife, and stole from his mother and Flowers. “It totally destroyed him,” says the lawman. “That’s what meth does.” 

One day, Flowers caught Cody raiding his medicine cabinet and called the cops. It was Christmas Eve. “I put my own stepson in jail and it saved his life,” he says. Today his stepson is clean and recently moved out of their house.

While Flowers considers addiction a disease, he doesn’t think that absolves drug users like Cody or Scout of responsibility for their actions. In his eyes, they’re not victims. A victim is a rancher whose cows are stolen while he recuperates from surgery. “They made their choices, and you have to live with those choices,” he says.

Flowers’s role in this morality tale on the wind-swept plains of Oklahoma is simple: Put the bad guys in jail – a role he relishes. One evening he and Cornett slide into a booth at a Tex-Mex steakhouse in Guymon. They are in town for a court hearing for one of Thrasher’s accomplices who also went on the run after the 2014 theft.

Flowers keeps his cellphone on the table. His team is on a sting operation in southeastern Oklahoma, waiting to catch a suspect in the act of stealing 24 cows for a buyer who is actually an ODAFF agent, and he’s awaiting updates. It’s another inside job: a ranch hand rustling his employer’s cattle. Flowers devours his steak, bristling with anticipation.

At 8:36, his phone buzzes. “IT’S FIXIN TO GO DOWN,” reads the message. An hour later, the suspect is in custody. Two days later, Flowers and the sting operation are on the evening news in Oklahoma City.

Another accused rustler is behind bars.

Carlos Jasso/Reuters/File

Indigenous Guna women dance to traditional music in Ustupu island, Panama, in 2013. Every known human culture produces some form of song, but scientists are divided over music's origin.

Every human culture, without exception as far as anyone can tell, produces some form of music. And yet it seems as though the music that human cultures produce could hardly be more varied: From Italian opera to Croatian klapa to Tuvan throat singing, the assortment of rhythms, melodies, dynamics, and harmonies found in cultures large and small around the world stands as a testament to human creative diversity.

Like language, music is universal among humans and nonexistent – or at least unintelligible to us – in even our closest nonhuman relatives. But music, unlike language, has no obvious adaptive function, prompting scientists who study music to wonder what forces originally gave rise to it. Is music an evolutionary adaptation, or is it purely a human invention?

It’s an old question, one that Charles Darwin took up in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man,” in which he suggested music might have evolved to help our species’ forebears woo potential mates. Others have argued that music evolved from coordinated territorial defense vocalizations, such as those observed in other social animals, including chimpanzees.

But many scholars, particularly ethnomusicologists, have been wary of this so-called adaptationist approach, which was heavy on thought-provoking explanations but light on hard evidence that links music with reproductive fitness. Musicality, according to one prevailing argument, is not a trait, but a technology, a happy result of pre-existing adaptations that, beautiful and uplifting as it may be, confers no evolutionary advantage.

One approach to resolving the debate has been to search for universals in music, commonalities in the pitch, melody, rhythm, harmony, timbre, texture, in the music of societies with no contact with each other. If music is, as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said “the universal language of mankind,” the reasoning goes, then humanity’s penchant for music may arise from a biological substrate.

“Any study that’s looking at comparisons of lots and lots of cultures, by its nature, is telling us something about human nature,” says cognitive scientist Sam Mehr, director of the Music Lab at Harvard University’s psychology department. “It’s telling us something about how all humans are alike in some way.”

Psychologists have long argued that human language contains such universals. Beginning in the 1920s, the German-American Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler conducted experiments in which he showed participants images of two shapes, one jagged and spiky and the other bulbous and rounded. When asked to label the shapes with the nonsense words “takete” and “baluba,” participants overwhelmingly associated the spiky shape with “takete” and the rounded shape with “baluba.” This effect has been shown to work in children as young as two and a half years old.  

And perhaps a similar effect exists for music. In a paper co-authored with Harvard evolutionary biologist Manvir Singh and published last Thursday in the journal Current Biology,  Dr. Mehr and his colleagues gathered samples of vocal recordings from 86 small-scale societies, from the Highland Scots of the Outer Hebrides to the Chuukese of Pulap, Micronesia, to the Nanai of Russia’s far east. The team played 14-second excerpts to 750 internet users in 60 countries, and they found that listeners could correctly identify whether a sample was from a dance song, a lullaby, a love song, or a healing song.

“It doesn’t seem to matter where the listeners are,” says Mehr. “They all seem to agree with each other quite quite strongly. There’s a very high consistency.”

But why would songs from radically different cultures trigger the same feelings in diverse listeners?

“There are some words that sound like the thing they represent,” says American-Canadian cognitive neuroscientist, musician, and record producer Daniel Levitin, author of two popular science books on music – “This Is Your Brain on Music“ and “The World in Six Songs.” “And there are some aspects of music that sound like the thing they represent. Very slow music sounds more like somebody’s walking slowly.... And fast music sounds more like someone running or celebrating,” he says. “These kinds of mappings have crept their way into this wonderfully diverse collection of different music.”

Mehr, who says that this experiment is just the first of several in his multidisciplinary Natural History of Song project, is particularly interested in researching lullabies. These songs are thought to exist in every culture but have been historically ignored by researchers, who have tended to focus on music associated with courtship or public celebration.

“If there is music happening by women, and it’s usually the case that there is, you often don’t see it, or it doesn’t get reported,” says Sandra Trehub, a psychologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga who specializes in how infants respond to music. “It tends not to be the music of that culture that celebrated or considered important.”

As any parent of young children knows, efficiently getting one’s kids to sleep can free up resources that can be used for completing chores, sleeping, or even producing more children.  

“In the western world, we take pride for some reason in having babies who can soothe themselves,” says Dr. Trehub. “But elsewhere, singing babies to sleep is the name of the game, and it works. I’ve seen it work like magic everywhere.”

Of course, lullabies are likely only part of the picture. “Music didn’t evolve for a single reason but for several reasons. I think that new study supports that notion,” says Dr. Levitin. “I don’t know of a primate group where more than 18 males can live together before rivalries and jealousies tear them apart. And yet humans have been living in cities of hundreds of thousands of people for thousands of years. So we came up with some way to get along and communicate our desire to get along.”

AP Photo

New England Patriots fans cheer during an NFL football Super Bowl send-off rally for the team Jan. 29, in Foxborough, Mass. The Patriots are to play the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl 52, Sunday, Feb. 4, in Minneapolis.

One national tradition that helps bridge differences between Americans is that secular holiday called Super Bowl Sunday. Even if they differ over their favorite National Football League team, a third of the population comes together for this TV spectacle, fans and nonfans alike. They share a communal dish (guacamole). They grade the commercials. They loathe or love the halftime show.

This one annual sporting event helps transcend the nation’s widening political divide. For one day, the gridiron is the anti-gridlock.

The TV audience for the Super Bowl still far surpasses that for the Oscars ceremony or popular entertainment programs. Yet in the past two years, the numbers have declined. And they are expected to drop again for Super Bowl LII on Feb. 4.

The reasons are unclear. Perhaps many viewers now prefer to stream the commercials later online. Some may be concerned about player safety. Or perhaps fans have tired of the New England Patriots.

Other major live events, such as the Academy Awards, have also seen a drop in viewers. One producer of the Oscars told The New York Times that “vast swaths” of people turned off their televisions when celebrities used the Oscars to jab political opponents.

This decline in shared national experiences is a reminder of the need to maintain such bridging rituals. Traditions, even a spectacle like the Super Bowl, create a unity of purpose and promote mutual affection. They help overcome the loneliness of interacting online. They may last only a few hours. Yet they reflect an intentional community.

Most of all, by coming together for a transcendent moment, they allow people to feel connected and want to listen to others with whom they may otherwise disagree.

The Super Bowl, like the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving, is a test of the nation’s spiritual literacy. These rituals foster the opportunity for friendly conversation. They fill the emptiness left by highly partisan politics. A door for love is opened. They bring out a higher longing to affirm a grander identity.

Yes, Tom Brady may win again on Sunday. The commercials may not be that funny. And the snacks could be boring. But watching the Super Bowl isn’t just watching a game. It is a respite from politics and a bridge to each other.