Setting the Filter

The words “bigoted,” “racist,” “Islamophobic,” “xenophobic” are being flung around in lieu of real analysis of real problems to be solved.

In each case, the liberal narrative deals with a multitude of issues as if they were all ones of racism and white nationalism, so much so that the House of Representatives last week had a special hearing on the scourge of “White Nationalism.” “White Nationalism, “ in my view is not a major problem in the U.S.  and has not been for decades.  Sure, you had the Charlottesville incident, but that was a clash between the far left and the far right, with other elements mixed in.  The follow up march of white nationalists in Charlottesville a year later was so sparsely attended that it barely filled out a baseball roster.  Leaving aside the issue of whether nationalism is a negative, white nationalism is an issue of relatively minor import.

Our social issues are much more complicated than passing them off as due to White Nationalism and have little to do with modern day KKK or neo-Nazis.  Rather, they are about reasonable people that cannot come to a consensus on how to set a filter.   The New Left wants little or no filter applied in certain instances and that is simply an untenable position.    But if we think about these issues in terms of filter setting, we might be able to have a more constructive conversation.

Immigration

The United States needs immigration to fuel our economy.  Our native population is not growing fast enough to fill the projected labor needs of our economy.  But we also need it to be sensible, and in line with our nation’s needs.  An immigration policy that was appropriate 100 years ago, or 50 years ago is not appropriate today.  We cannot be the welfare state and health care provider to the world.

There are actually two pieces to this problem.  Assimilation is one, and that is for another essay.  But how to set the filter is another.  When an immigrant arrives, that person can land in only one of three buckets.   He or she can be employed or employable and self-sustaining.   If that person cannot be self- sustaining, without family help, he or she will end up in the social welfare system or the criminal justice system.  Those are the only three viable alternatives.  There are no other outcomes.  

A sensible immigration policy is one in which the migrants have skills to be self-sufficient and can readily assimilate into American life.  With the demand for unskilled labor projected to decrease in the coming decades, this means filtering out more uneducated, low-skilled people.  It is true that the waves of European immigration are over.  Europe is having trouble enough sustaining their own populations.  The result is that any attempt to put sensible limitations or qualifications on immigration will trigger charges of xenophobia.  A saner approach is to set the filter so that we screen out prospects for the social welfare and criminal justice system and let in people that will likely be self-sustaining.

Islam

Islamic immigration presents a unique filter setting problem.  Despite the howls from the New Left, we are generally a nation that is very tolerant and accepting of diverse religious beliefs and that tolerance has been codified into our legal structures.  

We have Christians and Jews, Catholics and Presbyterians, Hindus and Sikhs.  But Islam appears to be a different matter.  Unlike other religions, Islam does not uniformly recognize the separation of religion and state, and certain segments of Islam have a propensity for violence.  We cannot turn a blind eye to those realities.  I will have more to say on Islam in future posts, but for purposes of this post, suffice it to say that Islam presents a tremendous filtering problem.  That is so because we reflexively want to tolerate and accept other religions but the risk of violence and the social norms embedded in Islam make integrating Islam a more difficult proposition. 

The experience of large Muslim populations in Europe has generated a plethora of difficulties and is responsible, in part, for the Brexit vote and the rejection of Muslim immigrants by several of the Eastern European countries. 

Donald Trump understands this and attempted to address filtering Muslim immigration with the Travel Ban, which was met with lawsuits and howls from the Left.  The Travel Ban was imperfect and inaccurate---a clumsy filter—but it was an attempt to set a filter with some logic behind it.  Filter out people that come from terrorist hotbeds to reduce the risk that they with inflict damage on us.

So far, Muslim immigration has not had wide reaching consequences here, except in a few pockets.  But it does raise issues in places like Lewiston, Maine and Minneapolis.   The election of Ilhan Omar in Minnesota’s largely Somalian 5^th district, her firebrand anti-Semitism, association with CAIR and remarks about 9/11 don’t help matters.

The trouble is that we do not have a good way to distinguish between Islamic and Islamist and that IS a distinction with a difference.  It is a knotty filtering problem.

Mass incarceration.

I don’t pretend to be an expert in the criminal justice system, but by sheer numbers we know that something is out of kilter.  We have learned a few things since the 1980’s when the conservatives won the day by claiming liberals were too soft on crime and we locked people up in large numbers.   We learned, for instance, that it is age demographics rather than harsher punishments that have the larger affect on crime rates.  Today we find ourselves with a mass incarceration problem.  The U.S. has the highest per capita incarceration rate and the largest prison population. 

Again, criminal justice reform comes down to setting an appropriate filter.  It is a mistake to condemn someone to a life sentence of poverty because of a mistake, especially a youthful mistake.  We desperately need to be able to distinguish between people that should be in a mental health system from the criminal justice system.  Setting filters here is an enormously difficult task but an important one.  It is also one that is bound up with racial issues because of the disproportionate number of blacks that end up in the criminal justice system.

Currently, our unemployment rate is at a decade low 3.8% with many employers complaining of acute labor shortages.   With 2 million people on the bench, this represents a tremendous human capital mismatch.

But I am not naïve about this.   Separating redeemable people that made mistakes from bad people and sociopaths is a hard, hard problem.  And getting it wrong can have catastrophic consequences.

Still, some are trying hard.  I recently read a story about one food company whose workforce consists of 40% ex-offenders.  They have done a tremendous job of screening and monitoring these people and giving them a second chance at becoming a productive member of society.

Again, Donald Trump has attempted to address this with prison reform, but more needs to be done.  It would be better for all of us if we can find ways to get more of those 2 million back at work.

Each one of these issues generates hot rhetoric, accusations and name calling, none of which is useful.  I believe that the conversation in each one of these issues should revolve around how to set an appropriate filter.  Rather than charge anyone with an opposing viewpoint as being inherently prejudiced,  reframing the problem as a filtering problem may help take some of the heat out of the discussion.