Monthly Archives: October 2011

Thoughts on Immigration

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Most modern Conservatives agree that our borders need to be secured, including against illegal immigration.  This need is based on national security imperatives, recognition of the need to preserve the integrity of our being a nation of laws, and not a nation of personal convenience, and our need to foster an environment of respect for law.  This also is based on the right of any nation—the right of any society in their social compact—to determine for themselves who they will allow into their nation: no foreign entity has an inherent right to enter another nation without that nation’s permission.  I won’t pursue the matter of secure borders further.  However, this is only part of the immigration problem that any nation faces.

There are two additional aspects to immigration, and if these are not also solved, the immigration matter will continue to be a serious risk to our national security.  These two aspects are what to do about the population of illegal aliens currently present in the United States, and what to do about legal entry for immigrants into our country.  On the matter of the illegal aliens present, I frankly don’t have any good answers to offer.  We tried a general, one-time amnesty in the ’80s, and that was a dismal failure.  Rep Luis Gutierriz (Dem, IL) has suggested something along the lines of requiring current illegal aliens to register, pass a background check, and pay a fine, as well as undergo certain education training.  This seems inadequate by itself, but combined with a requirement to leave the United States and then come back (paying the fine on the way out or as a condition of being allowed back in) this might form the seed of a proper, effective treatment of our illegal aliens—the very great majority of whom are decent and honorable people who have committed the single crime of entering our country illegally—their only crime, but a serious crime, nonetheless.

But a successful solution for our present population of illegal aliens, together with a successful solution to our border control problem, still are a complete failure to successfully address our immigration problem until we also (mind that: also, not in isolation from the other two) solve the problem of entry into our exceptional country.  For the fact is, the United States needs immigration to survive as a free and prosperous nation that fosters individual liberties and individual responsibilities.

We benefit from immigration from a national security perspective.  We get significant numbers of immigrants who have left nations who are our enemies and nations who would like to see harm come to us even if they aren’t overt enemies.  These immigrants aren’t the dregs of those nations’ societies; they are as brain- and talent- and work ethic-laden as any of the other immigrants we receive.  And our gain from these men and women is our enemies’ direct loss.

We need immigration because immigrants bring with them dedication and work ethic.  They’re here because they want to be, sometimes at great personal cost and risk.  None of them is forced to be here, and no one has been for nearly 150 years.  Immigrants bring with them new ways of looking at old problems, including the seemingly intractable ones that we face.  Immigrants bring with them good ideas and a great deal of individual talent.  Even when their ideas are bad, the discussions and debates over ideas only serve to sharpen our thinking concerning our own ideas and solutions.

Finally, we need immigration for our survival as a nation.  Like most national populations of the world, ours is an aging population, and we would face a dramatic implosion from this simple demographic fact were it not for immigration.  (If you doubt the power of demography consider Social Security: a program conceived in the 1930s when post-retirement life expectancy was about 6 years, and there were roughly 7 workers paying for each retiree, now must cover the retirement costs of a population whose post-retirement life expectancy is some 16 years and do so with only 3 workers per retiree, and with that number falling to 2 over the next couple of decades.)  Immigration is, literally, our country’s life’s blood; it keeps our population younger and refreshed.

Against a replacement birthrate of, roughly, 2.1 babies per woman to maintain a stable population that is neither growing nor shrinking, the United States’ birthrate is around 1.8.  We’re not alone in this.  China is an aging population, with a birthrate of around 1.5 children per woman (1.8 if you believe Chinese government figures), and the Chinese failing demographic situation is exacerbated by its one-child policy and its cultural preference for boy babies to the extent that girl fetuses are routinely aborted, and girl babies all too frequently are simply abandoned soon after birth.  France (birthrate of around 1.9 in 2009) and Germany (birthrate of 1.37 in 2007, perhaps rising some since then) are aging populations.  They have significant immigration, but they’ve also made, to their current chagrin, the deliberate decision not to assimilate those immigrants—these live apart from the “native” French and Germans.  Russia’s birthrate is around 1.3, and its population already is demonstrating the effects of this: its 1990s population of 148 million has fallen to 143 million today, and it’s projected to be in the neighborhood of 110 million by 2050—just two generations from now, in our grandchildren’s time.  Iran is an aging population, with birthrates collapsing from 6.6 babies per woman as recently as the ’80s to its present 1.9.  These nations are not producing babies from “native” families at a replacement rate, and with the apparent exception of France and Germany, they’re not gaining from immigration (arguably, France and Germany are not gaining in any meaningful way); their populations will continue to shrink and to age.

We don’t need this implosion, or even “mere” shrinkage or aging; we need immigration.  This means we need to remove the impediments to legal immigration, we need to eliminate the quotas that put an upper bound on the number of talented who want to work here, on the number of foreign-born who are educated in our Universities and want to stay past their college days.  As I wrote earlier, it can take a couple of months to get a non-immigrant visa; B-1 visas can take a month, H-1B visas as long as six months, and the H-1Bs have very low annual quotas. It simply shouldn’t be that hard to enter the United States legally.  There should be border crossing stations every mile along our border—yes, a practical exaggeration, but my point is clear, and just incidentally, easier to reach and more frequent border crossing stations would put the human traffickers—the mules, and worse—immediately out of business (and could serve as staging locations for more effective border patrols).  Visa approval should occur in days, not months (in today’s computerized world, it shouldn’t take months to run a background check), and there should be no quotas.

Holidays and Insensitivity

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Are we going too far with our concern for civility and sensitivity in our speech?  A Massachusetts elementary school is having trouble with the sensitivity of our fall holidays, as reported here by FoxNews.

Essentially, the problem seems to center on celebrating Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the New World, that sailor having committed “atrocities” and “annihilated” peoples; Hallowe’en’s connection to witchcraft, and Thanksgiving insensitivities “on the same lines” as Columbus Day celebrations.  FoxNews’ juxtaposition of the Columbus Day and Thanksgiving objections seems to imply that the latter is somehow connected to the former, but that could be a misunderstanding on my part.

Accordingly, I have emailed the following to Dr Anne Foley, Principal of the John F Kennedy School in Somerville, MA, hoping to gain clarity on the matter.

You are quoted by FoxNews as saying  “”For many of us and our students celebrating this particular person is an insult and a slight to the people he annihilated. On the same lines, we need to be careful around the Thanksgiving Day time as well.  …celebrating this particular person is an insult and a slight to the people he annihilated….”  Is this an accurate quote?  If not, please clarify.

On the assumption that this is an accurate quote, my questions are these:

What atrocities, exactly, did Christopher Columbus commit; whom did he annihilate?

Should we return to European religious persecution and murder all North American colonists and their descendants, escape from which was made possible by Columbus’ discovery?

What did the first Thanksgiving celebrate?

What does it celebrate today?

What is the connection among that celebration, the Mayflower (or the Margaret, or Juan de Onate, or Pedro Menéndez de Avilés),  and Christopher Columbus?

What history lessons will your teachers hold on these holidays?

Thank you for your kind attention to these questions.  I look forward to an informative and fruitful dialog.

In the same vein, I emailed the following to Dr Tony Pierantozzi, Superintendent of Schools for Somerville, MA, also seeking clarity.

You are cited by FoxNews in this way: “Superintendant Tony Pierantozzi told The Herald that Halloween is “problematic” because of connections to witchcraft.”

Is this an accurate paraphrase?  If not, please clarify.

On the assumption that this is an accurate quote, my questions are these:

What is the connection between Hallowe’en and witchcraft?

Who does this connection harm?  In what way?

Should we also ban All Saints’ Day (All Hallows) celebrations, that being the second day of the two-day celebration of All Hallows’ Eve and All Saints’ Day?

What about All Souls’ Day, which follows All Saints’ Day?

Thank you for your kind attention to these questions.  I look forward to an informative and fruitful dialog.

When I get responses, or when it becomes clear that no clarification will be forthcoming, I’ll post again on this.

Update: Corrected Dr Pierantozzi’s name.  He’s entitled to have it spelled right.

Cynicism

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Fred Barnes writes in The Weekly Standard about the boneheaded economics of “liberal Democrats.  With all due respect to Mr. Barnes, who is a far better writer than I, I beg to differ with his characterization.  Here are the examples he presents of their boneheadedness.

Barbara Lee, a House member from California, is upset about computerized checkout lines at grocery stores. She avoids lines with no flesh-and-blood checker.  “I refuse to do that,” Lee said at a House Appropriations Committee hearing, “I know that’s a job or two or three that’s gone.”

Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois is up in arms about the iPad, which he declared on the House floor recently is “now probably responsible for eliminating thousands of jobs.”  Alas, “what becomes of bookstores and librarians and all the jobs associated with paper?” Quite soon, he said, “such jobs will simply not exist.”

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi has her own remedy for the jobs dearth: Extend unemployment benefits.  “It injects demand into the economy,” she insists.  “It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.” It has the “double benefit” of putting money in the pockets of the jobless and acting as a “job creator.”

Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota is the champion of job creation by adding to the regulatory burden of businesses. Sounds counter-productive, right? Not so, Ellison told MSNBC. Companies will have to hire more people to comply with new regs.  “If the government says, look, we have got to reduce our carbon footprint, you will kick into gear a whole number of people that know how to do that or have ideas about that, and that will be a job engine,” Ellison said.

These are all very smart people; they know better, Mr. Barnes notwithstanding.  Rep Lee knows that technology creates more, and better, jobs than its lack.  Otherwise, she’d be pushing legislation to return us to the 19th century when roads were built with shovels and picks, there’d be no electricity to light her reading lamp, and there’d be no telephones or cars to ease her communication or travel.

Rep. Jackson had just been extolling the virtues of the iPad a few months prior to his remarks above.  I don’t think this flip-flop is an indication of any boneheadedness on his part.

Rep Pelosi didn’t get to be the Representative of the 8th District of California for 24 years and Speaker of the House of Representatives for 6 years because she’s a ditz.

Finally, Rep Ellison knows regulations don’t create jobs.  If they did, we’d have full employment, what with the number of government regulations expanding from 2600 pages in the Federal Register in 1936 to over 80,000 pages today.

It’s clear that these Progressives do think we are boneheaded, though.  It’s been their mantra for the last couple of years, for instance, that if only we understood what they were saying to us we would, perforce, agree with them and fall right in line with their government-will-take-care-of-us meme.  But since we don’t agree, they say it must be because we don’t understand; there must be something wrong with their messaging.  They need, they say, to keep adjusting their message until we do understand them.  They just need to keep dumbing down their message until we finally get it.

No, these Congressmen aren’t boneheaded.  Nor is their economics; those words aren’t intended to have any meaning.  This is just part of their messaging, and part of their cynical attitude toward us.  They’re used to having us dependent on themon government for our welfare, and they’re loathe to lose that power.  When they were swept to dominant positions by the 2008 elections, they rolled the dice on their control of our welfare.  They passed “stimulus” spending for the benefit of their unions, then they rammed through Obamacare to drastically increase our dependency on themon government, and then they rammed through Dodd-Frank to hamstring American businesses so as to increase our dependency.  Only three years on, with unemployment ranging between 9% and 10% the entire time, did they finally get around to paying lip service to a “jobs” bill.  But this is, in the event, just an attempt to push class warfare, while looking to continue paying us for (still) not working with yet more “unemployment insurance”—insurance designed to insure that we continue to not work and remain dependent on…government. Oh, and it has further spending for their unions.

After the midterm elections last year, and with the continuing disaster of their policies these last three years, they’re simply worried about losing their power.  This latest round of claims which Mr. Barnes provides just shows the Progressive cynical attitude toward us: they’ll say anything they can think of to pander to us, get our votes, and stay in power.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

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Yesterday I wrote about government intervention and personal responsibility.  Now we have corporate America looking for government protection from themselves and from their responsibilities.  Here’s the money quote, from Joe Sullivan, Chief Security Officer at Facebook, who was speaking at a recent cyber security panel discussion (a link is in the above The Daily Caller article):

We’re going to be making crazy products in 10 years and you guys [the government] are going to have the responsibility for protecting people using those products.

Meanwhile, financial leaders of the G-20 (read: leading politicians of the G-20) are still trying to find ways to bail out bankrupt countries and to inure private investors against the outcomes of their decisions to continue investing in these countries’ junk sovereign debt.

If we still believe in the truths identified in our American social compact’s principles statement

  • all men are created equal
  • they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights
  • among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
  • to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men
  • whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People—it is their duty—to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government

then we cannot accept either of these sets of behaviors.  Government can help, but it’s Facebook’s responsibility (to take the particular case) to build in capability to use their products safely, and it’s our—us individual users’—responsibility to use Facebook’s products safely and securely.  Government can certainly help in this—as a follow-up to corporate efforts and our own, or as a last resort.  However, government has no obligation, can have no obligation, under our social compact to come in a priori to protect us from ourselves.  Or to regulate their product or our use of it.

If the birth place of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, early articulators of the concepts of rights inherent in the existence of individuals and of those rights’ associated individual responsibilities, at all accepts those principles, then Europe cannot continue its efforts to bail out failure and thereby relieve those who’ve failed of their responsibility for the results of their actions.

To relieve investors—or consumers—of our responsibility for our own decisions and shift that responsibility onto government is to destroy all sense of our personal responsibility.  Greece is exactly the result we get when government takes responsibility away from its citizens.  Greece is what we get when there is no (short term—i.e., within a single generation) result accruing to the individual for his own poor decision—indeed, when poor decisions are not even possible because government will fill in any shortfall from that decision.

Bobby Seale shouted “Power to the People!”  But he was a piker.  Thomas Paine had been shouting “Power to the People!  Responsibility to the People!” 200 years prior.  Mr. Zuckerberg seems to have forgotten that whole second half of our civic duty (Europe may never have learned it).  The Reverend Jesse Jackson used to challenge people to chant, “I am somebody!”  Apparently, today’s chant is “Government, make me somebody!”

Duty and Market Intervention

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I want to describe a few of instances of government intervention into our free market, then I want to describe a couple of cases of civic duty avoidance.  Then I’ll tie these two together.

Scott Gottlieb, an ex-deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, describes in a recent The Wall Street Journal a case of FDA intervention in our market.  The salient parts of the intervention, for our purposes, are these: a superior means of repairing an aging (and so failing) valve that allows blood to flow from the heart into the aorta, a means in use in Europe for four years, is finally becoming available in the US.  The FDA insisted on increasingly extensive, slow, and costly animal and clinical studies—all for our own good.  One result of this sort of delay is that more and more American medical device makers are moving their businesses overseas, at the expense reduced availability of medical innovations to Americans.

John Carreyrou, in another The Wall Street Journal article, describes a different case of medical industry market intervention.   What’s relevant here is this: in response to the method by which Medicare measures the efficiency with which services are delivered to patients receiving home-health care, the nation’s three largest home-health care companies altered their delivery methods to maximize their reimbursements under those measurements.  Of course, this may have affected the efficiency of the care actually delivered.

In the third instance, Bob Greifeld, CEO of Nasdaq OMX, describes in a recent The Wall Street Journal article, problems with Sarbanes-Oxley’s market intervention.  Here, Greifeld notes that small business’ portion of job creation in the US has fallen from 64% of the new jobs in the period from 1993 through 2008 to 51% in 2010.  Further, initial public offerings—a primary means by which companies raise capital besides borrowing—by small companies (IPOs of $50 million or less) fell from 300 per year, on average, in the ’90s (before Sarbox’ enactment in 2002) to 30 in 2010.  These reductions, while also depressed by the current economic Panic, are due largely to the cost of Sarbox compliance, which hits small companies far harder than it does the large corporations, and this in turn inhibits their growth and hiring.  Sarbox’ efforts to protect investors from their own decisions is hurting small business growth and employment.

Here, now, are the civic duty items; both involving jury duty.  In Hillsborough County, FL, a judge there was confronted with no less than 387 individuals who had ignored their jury summons on a single day (it took him 3 hours to gather 22 good citizens for a single jury pool).  His response was to issue summons to those “absentees” to explain their absence; unsatisfactory excuses could earn their offerors a fine or 6 months in jail.  In Midland County, TX, the judges faced a similar situation, with 294 no-shows on a single day.  Similar summons for show-cause hearings were issued, with unsastisfactory excuses similarly earning fines or jail for their offerors.  These two examples are all too typical, both for the two counties and for the nation.  Such skips not only are individually wrong; in their aggregate they degrade the defendant’s right to a fair and prompt trial.  And they degrade the government’s ability to obtain justice for the victims of the miscreancy in question.

Thus, on the one hand, we have government interfering with individuals’ free choice and assuming outright the responsibility for those choices, and on the other hand we have free individuals shirking their duty to their neighbors and to their community (and ultimately to their country).  Here’s how they’re related, as if you haven’t figured that out by now.  When we allow government to interfere with our choices, when we allow government to protect us from ourselves, when we allow government to assume responsibility for the outcomes of our choices, we become habituated to government handling our responsibilities for us.  And we lose our sense of responsibility.  And we shirk our responsibilities, assuming always that someone else will take care of the matter for us.

The outcome of this is not just that we grow lazy and amoral.  We lose our freedom: the only way government can take care of us, can satisfy our responsibilities for us, is by managing our outcomes for us, by managing our choices for us.  By controlling our behavior.