Our Children Part II

Last March, I wrote a post following the terrorist bombing in Manchester England, which targeted mostly young girls attending a concert.   I asserted that if the West could not protect its most precious gift, its children, then it was in deep, deep trouble. (See my post Our Children, May 23, 2017 http://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2017/05/our-children.html following the Manchester bombing).

Once again, I am sadly writing about the failure to protect our children and the heinous and egregious lapses of institutions that should protect them, and the inverted priorities of these structures.

Again, Pope Francis is in the spotlight (pun definitely intended as a reference to the film on topic).  Last week,  it was revealed that the Catholic Church had systematically covered up the sexual abuse of 1,000 children over 70 years with some 300 priests involved. 

I wish I could say I was shocked.  After the exposure of the massive cover-ups in the Boston Archdiocese and others worldwide, the church had announced that it put into place safeguards and a zero tolerance policy.   Francis turned his attention elsewhere—mostly criticizing the West for not doing enough on climate change, for having borders and not doing enough for Middle Eastern refugees, and criticizing capitalism generally.   He began to dial back the “zero tolerance” policy and made comments about forgiveness of these predators.  He enraged many Catholics by re-instating Fr. Mauro Inzoli (who had been defrocked by Pope Benedict for sex abuse,  and by giving the blessing at the notorious Cardinal Law’s funeral.   In a slap to victims in Chile, he accused the victims of slandering Bishop Juan Barros  for covering up abuse, and demanded proof of their claims (comments for which he later expressed regret).  The Vatican’s third highest ranking official, Cardinal Pell of Australia, is going on trial for sex crimes.

Now the issue is back with a vengeance. 

Francis is the most progressive and politically active pope in my lifetime.  And as with most progressives, Francis has exposed himself to charges of hypocrisy.   On the heels of criticizing Trump for allowing children to be separated from their parents, Francis is now faced with a crisis of his own.

C.S. Lewis, arguably the most important Christian writer and thinker of the last 100 years, wrote “Children are not a distraction from more important work.  They are the most important work.”  I argue that, especially in this time of fractured families, the most vital function of the Church and the Christian faith in general is the protection and nurturing of its children.

Instead, the Catholic Church, in a widespread way, over and over again, abused them. 

Francis responded with a letter that could have been written 5 years ago.  He expressed shame and repentance, and admitted “we abandoned the little ones.”  He admitted that the Church “delayed in applying these actions [to deal with the abuse].”   He offered little more that “prayer and fasting” as concrete actions the Church would take in the future.

We are well beyond that now.   This is a grave crisis for the Catholic Church, and a crisis often gives leadership the latitude to take immediate and radical steps to if it is to show that it is serious about this.  And symbolic moves are just as critical.   It needs to show that perpetrators of these acts and those that would cover them up will be expunged, exposed, humiliated, shamed, and where appropriate, prosecuted.   The first step needs to be a purging at the highest levels.   When the sexual abuse scandal at Michigan State came to light, its president and athletic director immediately resigned.  Pope Francis is the only person with sufficient authority to make symbolic and actual changes, and these changes need to happen now.    Following a high level bloodletting, Francis needs to make some bold initiatives, like permitting priests to marry and allowing women to become priests.   If he does not take bold and decisive steps, the Catholic Church will continue to lose members in the West, at a time when the pillar of Christianity is needed now more than ever.

During the same week that the crisis broke with the Catholic Church, we learned about another massive failure to protect our children.   The body of young Mollie Tibbets was found in a cornfield in Iowa a month after her disappearance and an illegal alien was taken into custody and charged with her murder.

After weeks of caterwauling about separating illegal border crossers from their children, protests from the open borders folks, politicians like Dick Durbin vowing to work full time for “Dreamers,” and others campaigning on the abolition of ICE, one of the so-called Dreamers took one of our own and separated her from her family permanently. 

The primary purpose of government is to protect its citizens from harm, whether it be harm from foreigners or from our own citizens.   Our government’s failure to keep people out that have no legal right to be here cost Mollie her life.

And the reaction from the Left has been predictably nauseating.   Some tried to divert blame by throwing around  buzzwords from the social justice lexicon like “toxic masculinity.”   Others, like Elizabeth Warren clumsily and coldly tried to switch the topic, “I’m so sorry for the family here…BUT…we need an immigration system that’s effective; that focuses on where REAL problems are.”

Illegal aliens murdering young women like Kate Steinle and Mollie Tibbets—two beautiful young women with bright futures--- ARE a real problem, Elizabeth.

The Catholic Church and our own government have had massive failures in their primary purposes.   The reaction of Pope Francis to the Pennsylvania grand jury report and the Left to Mollie Tibbets’s murder was weak, tepid and unconvincing.  In both cases, we are seeing leaders that are more dedicated to protecting their agenda and their institutions than our children.

Modern Day Abolitionist

The American Writers Museum opened a new exhibit last week: Frederick Douglass-Agitator, celebrating the life and work of Frederick Douglass.  In connection with the exhibit, the museum has lined up a series of events and speakers to honor the life of this great American.  I attended the first event, featuring Kenneth B. Morris, Jr., a direct descendant of both Douglass and Booker T. Washington.  On a beautiful, warm summer Chicago night, a night on which most people would prefer to be outside, the place was nearly full, with only an empty seat or two.

The charismatic Mr. Morris spun his connection to the legendary Frederick Douglass in a moving presentation.  Morris’s grandmother lived to be 103, and actually knew Mr. Douglass first hand.  “I touched the hands that touched the hands,” Mr. Morris proclaimed.  He went on to share anecdotes about the indominable Mr. Douglass, about his struggle for freedom, his drive to educate himself despite obstacles and actual laws that forbade educating slaves, “because they would not be fit to work in the fields.” He talked about how his mother would work the fields, walk 12 miles to see Frederick and then walk back at night to work another day just to spend time with him.  He talked about his abolitionist friends purchasing Frederick’s freedom. 

Morris reveled in his connection to both Douglass and Washington.  He told the story about his visit to Douglass’s home, where Douglass’s shoes are next to his bed stand, and how he had to fight the urge to step into his shoes.

I was captivated by Morris and his obvious pride in his lineage and his connection to this great man.   His testimony helped me think about the great stain of slavery more deeply and will propel me to read Douglass’s biography.  Morris has dedicated himself to eliminate slavery as it exists currently around the world.  His message is that American slavery was not that long ago, really, and that it exists in many forms in different places globally.

I bought a coffee table book of photographs of Douglass, for which Morris had written the afterward.  I waiting in line to get my book signed and in front of me was a middle aged, dapper African American man, who grasped Morris’s outstretched hand with both hands and pulled him close.  “He [Douglass] was right.  It’s all about education, isn’t it?”   “You bet.”  There was something about that exchange that heartened me in this crazy political climate.

Likewise, I have visited the Illinois Holocaust Museum to attend programs and to hear testimonies of the camp survivors.   As the number of actual camp survivors has dwindled with age and time, the Illinois Holocaust Museum has harnessed technology to keep them alive and relevant and has used holographic imagery that is interactive to permit virtual discussions and question and answer sessions that bring the camp experience to life.

In my own life, the oral histories of the Communist terrors have been passed down either first hand or second hand and, like the Gulag Archipelago, they have been formative in shaping my views of Communism.  I heard first hand stories of the Stalin purges, of teenagers being shot in the head in front of their friends.   Parents of my friends fled and hid in ditches and sewers.  The parents of one of my friends fled a Stalin concentration camp and were chased by guards and dogs through the woods before winding their way to America.  He was a teacher and she wrote childrens’ books, so as “intellectuals” they would almost certainly have been murdered during the deportations from Lithuania.

The three great stains that landed on American and European soil were slavery, Nazism and Communism.  All three crushed the human spirit and all three resulted in people being hunted like animals.   It’s fine to read about these horrors in books, and we should.   But the oral histories given by people that either experienced it or have a personal connection to it are what bring them alive and keep them relevant to us, so they are not forgotten.   We need to hear these stories so we can stay vigilant against evil forces that are capable of unspeakable cruelty and stripping us of our freedoms.   We cannot leave them solely to books or digital archives.

Places like the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the American Writers Museum can and should do that for us.  I was honored and grateful to have an opportunity to meet Mr. Morris and “touch the hands that touched the hands that touched the hands.”

Trifecta

If you want to grasp how far left the Left has moved, just consider who is coming out of their youth movement as their Next Gen.   Everyone can see that the old guard is getting really old.  Hillary continues to sound like a bitter old lady.   Nancy Pelosi is now routinely incoherent.   Elizabeth Warren is near 70.  Joe Biden makes the most sense of this bunch but he is 75.  In the next group, Kamala Harris and Corey Booker are making a play for leadership.   But it’s with the young starlets, that you can see where things are headed.

A mere half dozen years ago, the anointed young star was Sandra Fluke, who made it to the DNC podium with her plea for State mandated and subsidized birth control.   She drew the scorn of Rush Limbaugh and others on the right for her assertion that the citizenry should underwrite her love life before jetting off to Europe with her boyfriend.   She briefly flirted with a senate run and has since disappeared from the public eye. 

Since Fluke’s flameout, the Left now has put forward a trifecta of young firebrands tauted as the future of the Left in politics and in the media.   Their elevation and the commonality among them tells you a lot about where the Left is headed---much farther left.

The most recent addition to the team is Sarah Jeong, who was announced as a member of the New York Times editorial staff.   Jeong was hired despite (or because of) her vitriolic anti-white, anti-male tweets.  They were so vile that when conservative Candace Owens tweeted them and substituted “black” for “white” she was immediately temporarily suspended from Twitter.  And Jeong’s racist rants were not a one-off.   There were several that occurred over a long period of time.  The New York Times justified her tweets claiming that she was merely responding to people that had trolled her---of course framing Jeong as a victim.   The truth is that the New York Times boldly and unashamedly hired exactly the kind of person with the kind of views that they wanted to hire.  Earlier this year I wrote a strong response to the op-ed of Ekow Yankah in the NYT, who said that he was going to teach his kids not to be friends with white people.   The NYT has made a decision that bigotry and hatred is a one way gate, that if it is directed at whites, particularly white males, it is fine and justifiable.   I eagerly await Jeong’s first op-ed piece claiming that Trump (or some other Republican) is a racist or a bigot.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the next young starlet of the Left.   Ocasio-Cortez, a 28 year old bartender and economics major from BU beat Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary.   Ocasio-Cortez, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist immediately drew the adoration of Tom Perez, who extolled her as the “future of the party” and she recently appeared with Bernie Sanders.   Her extremist positions include abolishing ICE, and providing “free” education and health care, which are clues to whether she actually attended any actual economics classes.  She spouts the standard lines about the “occupation” of Palestine and asserts that “capitalism will not always exist in the world.”     Ocasio-Cortez has yet to articulate precisely how she expects to pay for her grand plans or how they can be distinguished from Venezuela’s “democratic socialism” where people are eating their pets and dumping their children on orphanages.

It didn’t take Ocasio-Cortez long to do a photo-op with her new BFF and sister-in-arms Linda Sarsour (or as the conservative pundits have labeled her, Jihad Barbie).   Sarsour is famous for leading the Women’s March in D.C., teaching American girls how to adorn themselves with that international symbol of female subjugation, the hijab, speaking in the language of jihad, and imploring Muslims not to assimilate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThJdMXbxChs).   Sarsour openly peddles Sharia law and anti-Semitism and brands herself as a Muslim feminist (an oxymoron by definition).   Ironically while Iranian women are defying Iranian authorities by tossing their hijabs, Sarsour is peddling them here.

Many commentators have noted the aging of the old guard of the Democratic party, citing the age of their leadership and the average age in Congress (61), and the need for young blood.  But we are now seeing what is coming up from the minor leagues--- virulently and unashamedly anti-capitalist, anti-male, anti-white and anti-Semitic.   If you want a clue as to where the Democratic party is headed, take note of the speaking and writing of  Jeong, Ocasio-Cortez, and Sarsour

Outsourcing the Erosion of First Two Amendments

The MSM and the Left went bonkers again last week when the White House barred CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins from a Rose Garden event after Collins blurted out a staccato of questions at a news conference with EC president Jean-Claude Juncker.  The subject of the press conference was the resolution of tariffs between the US and the EC but Collins refused to leave and shouted out a number of off-topic questions about Michael Cohen.   I do not agree with the White House barring her but It’s also the case that Trump is being treated by the MSM in a completely different manner than Barack Obama was.   The MSM seized on the response to the White House as yet another indication that Trump is hostile to a free press. 

Leaving aside the question of whether an independent press exists anymore, the Collins incident is an appropriate jumping off point to talk about the indirect ways in which the Left continues to violate the spirit of Constitutional guarantees.  The Left really doesn’t like the 1^st Amendment and the 2^nd Amendment.   But it has had little luck denting them directly, so it has turned to a new tactic.

It outsources it. If you can’t do it yourself, find someone to do it for you.

And it has worked.

Over the past few years, the Left has attacked religious freedom in the courts, and it is openly contemptuous of Christianity.   It has brought lawsuits against Little Sisters of the Poor, Hobby Lobby and the cake bakers for not knuckling under to their demands.   But it has had a bad run of luck using the courts directly to force believers into subordinating their loyalties to the State.

But the Left has been more successful at chipping away at Constitutional protections by recruiting allies.

While the Left howled at Trump for banning the rude, out-of-line Collings, Twitter and Facebook have purportedly “shadow banned” conservatives, either curtailing where they show up in feeds, or in the case of Twitter, dropping their followers.   There have been other reports of users being flagged for “hate speech” for voicing opposition to Muslim immigration or gay marriage.  Increasingly, social media is becoming a more important platform than the MSM.   So shutting down particular points of view may carry more import than banning a single rude cub reporter.  But because the management and staff of the social media giants are merely allied with big government progressives and are not government, they are largely free to insult notions of free speech and stifle speech they don’t like.  Government can’t lay siege on free speech but others can.

It has worked wonderfully for the Left in academia.  “Safe spaces” have proliferated.  Schools have imposed “free speech zones.”   Universities have set up hot lines to report offensive speech.  They have permitted hecklers and disrupters to shut down conservative speakers.  Much has been written about on this topic, so I won’t delve deeply here.  Suffice it to say, with a few exceptions (The University of Chicago, I am proud to say, being one of them), most colleges have been willing allies in the Left’s attempt to curtail free speech rights.

Nongovernment entities have similarly stepped in to assist government impinge on 2^nd Amendment rights.   Barack Obama tried to circumvent Congress in a number of ways in his zeal to take away 2^nd Amendment rights.  He issued executive orders placing restrictions on ammunition.  He attempted to cut off financing to the arms industry by “operation chokepoint” which subjected banks that loaned money to firms in that industry to a higher level of scrutiny and possible criticism.

Obama’s leaving office didn’t end it.  Since the Parkland shooting, Dick’s has stopped selling “assault-style” weapons and destroyed the ones it had in stock.  Walmart announced that it would stop selling guns to anyone under 21 (never mind the anomaly that a 20 year old could do a tour of duty in Afghanistan and prevented from buying a weapon).   Citibank and Bank of America announced that they would no longer lend to firms in the arms industry.   Now, thought, at least we know where the Left is headed with guns.   Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens argued for the abolition of the 2^nd Amendment in a NTY op-ed piece earlier this year. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/john-paul-stevens-repeal-second-amendment.html)

In the interim, they will try to water it down with “commonsense gun control” and by enlisting their corporate partners to make it difficult to exercise the right to bear arms.

Even though Ms. Collins needs to learn some manners and something about protocol, the White House should not have banned her from the next event.   But we also need to be honest about private companies and institutions taking away rights otherwise guaranteed under the Constitution.  The same people that gripe about NFL owners punishing players for exercising their free speech rights during the national anthem are fine with Walmart and Dick’s deny citizens’ access to arms guaranteed under the 2^nd Amendment.

 Obama’s hot mic comment about people “bitterly clinging to their guns and religion” had real meaning.  While the Constitution has made it difficult to snuff out guns and religion in our society, the Left has been successful in recruiting allies to try to do it indirectly.

Best Summer Film- Leave No Trace

When I was a boy, I saw a film that captured my imagination for a long time afterwards.  My Side of the Mountain was an innocent film about a boy that leaves his family and goes out into the woods to live a solitary life and live off the land in Canada.   He meets up with a vagabond that helps him survive the harsh Canadian winter, and the boy eventually returns to his worried parents but not before an unrealistic adventure about what survivalist life would be like for a 10 year old.  Critics said the film departed from the novel, was cheesy and unrealistic, but the scenery was great and it introduced us to the simultaneous conflicts between the desire to live in the state of nature, coupled with a child’s natural pull to separate from his or her parents.

Fast forward nearly 50 years and director Debra Granik (Winters Bone) tackles the same themes in a much more sophisticated and updated way in Leave No Trace.   Ben Foster plays a PTSD afflicted man who lives on public lands in Oregon with his 13 year old daughter, Tom, played by Thomasin McKenzie.  The two live deep in the woods in a primitive lean-to shelter, living off the land, gathering mushrooms and collecting rainwater.   Will teaches his daughter survival skills and home schools her so that she is academically proficient as well.

The two live a life separate and apart from civilized society.   They forage for food, collect rainwater, and entertain themselves with chess and books.  Like Thoreau, their cleavage from modern society is not complete.   They occasionally go into town (Portland) for some necessities funded by Will’s small time trade in black market drugs.   Will wants as little to do with civilization as he can get away with, presumably because civilization has cut him a raw deal for his service.  The film does not tell us how long they have been living like this, only that Will lost his wife some time ago as Tom has no memory of her.

McKenzie plays the pre-adolescent girl superbly.  At some times we see an obedient daughter, wholly devoted to her dad.   At others, we see flashes of a very capable, smart, deeply thinking and very disciplined young woman.  Her single instance of a breakdown in discipline leads to the discovery of the pair by the authorities and they are taken into custody by the local authorities for illegally living on public land.

After being forcibly removed from the forest, the civilized world is actually kind to them.  The social welfare and private charity system spring into action, find them temporary housing and find Will a job.  But Will struggles to adapt to civil society.  He can neither cope with the government bureaucracy (he cannot finish the psychological test administered to him) and chafes at working for someone else.   The announcement by the business owner that “this is how I make my money” sets the independent Will’s teeth on edge.  Tom cannot find it within himself to be subservient either to the State bureaucracy or to to a business owner.  Tom, on the other hand, wants to adapt to society and in a telling scene at the child welfare agency, her interaction with two other girls there tells us that she wants to fit in.   The divergence between father and daughter is the central drama in this wonderful film.

Good films reflect the tensions of the society in which they find themselves.   Leave No Trace is a quintessential American film.   As I discussed in my blog post last week, Laura Ingalls Wilder is an iconic figure, a true pioneer woman that was resilient enough to live much of her life very independently and even rejected social security payments from the government.   It’s no accident that we see the same themes here in this film.    Will rejects not only the government bureaucracy and charity, but struggles even to become part of the capitalist structure.   The struggle for independence has been a basic tension and struggle since Thoreau and Wilder’s childhoods.   Today, we see this being played out today in an intensifying way in our politics.  One of the basic struggles is between citizens that wish to have an expansive cradle-to-grave role for government in our lives (see Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and those of us that wish to push government away and severely limit it, even at the risk of exposing us to a harsh and unforgiving environment.

Leave No Trace is the must see film of the summer, especially for those of us with a libertarian bend.  It will leave a trace of things to think about.

Prairie Girl

 I am a charter member of the American Writers Museum (AWM).  My love for American literature was instilled in me by Robert Streeter at U of C and by my high school English and American History teachers that ran a joint program at my Chicago Public High School in which we read the literature of the historical period that was being taught in American history.  I was thrilled when I learned that AWM was opening in May of last year.  I signed up immediately and attended the museum’s inaugural day.  Since then I have attended many wonderful programs and have handed out guest passes to many people.  AWM, together with the Newberry Library and the Poetry Foundation cements Chicago as a literary and cultural center.

I am hoping that the Board of Directors and leadership of the AWM does not succumb to the insidious trend of purging writers that do not conform to the norms of political correctness or otherwise engage in censorship or de-legitimizing American authors.

The Association for Library Service to Children recently voted to change the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award to the bland and innocuous Children’s Literature Legacy Award.  The ALSC’s board made that decision because, “her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness.”  It is widely thought that this “demotion” of Ms. Wilder is yet another instance of politically correct administrators and educators lowering the stature of a noted author because he or she does not conform to today’s social norms and viewpoints or what a select group of individuals believe that the correct social norms and viewpoints ought to be. 

The demotion of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the commensurate implied criticism of her work is all the more ironic since the American Writers Museum recently had a special exhibit dedicated to her life and work.  The exhibit nudged me to read Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser.   I also attended the presentation at AWM by Marta McDowell and purchased her work The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and have begun to read some of Wilder’s work.  In doing so, I learned a great deal about this remarkable woman.  She was not only a gifted writer but a true American.   Her work belongs on the same shelf with Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, Thoreau’s Walden and Cather’s My Antonia as a testament to the American pioneer grit.  She lived through economic downturns, including the Great Depression, lived in poverty most of her life, suffered numerous personal setbacks, began her writing career late in life and remained resilient and undeterred throughout.  Wilder moved from place to place, trying to make a go of it, suffering through fires, droughts, grasshopper plagues, and other disasters.   She exemplified the American spirit and found joy and happiness in many of the simpler things in life, and left a legacy for generations of children. 

Yet, the ALSC chose to demote her while the AWM chose to honor her.

Her demotion by the ALSC comes at a time of other similar occurrences.   Mark Twain was taken off the reading list at a Minnesota school district as was Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.  Penguin recently removed literary giant Lionel Shriver from her position as a judge of literary short story works largely because of her criticism of Penguin’s emphasis of “inclusiveness” over quality.   It’s one thing to relegate  a team mascot such as Chief Illiniwek or Chief Yahoo of the Cleveland Indians to the dustbin.  It is yet another to purge authors and writings from our literary heritage.

Wilder’s depictions of Native Americans were borne out of a time in which the brutal Indian Wars were still fresh in the memory of her family.   While some of her references to Native Americans were racist, there is also evidence that she also empathized with them, as biographer Caroline Fraser asserts.   And the narrative of the clashes between the settlers and Native Americans is still being re-examined as evidenced by the recent book The Earth is Weeping by Peter Cozzens.

Technology changes.  Social norms change.  Even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton opposed marriage equality a decade ago.  If we purge our literary heritage of every writer that evidenced a whiff of racism or racist language, misogyny, religious bigotry, homophobia or other kind of bias from pre-WWII writing, there likely wouldn’t be much left to read.  Writers such as Ezra Pound and James T. Farrell would certainly be thrown overboard.

AWM is doing a fine job of bring back into our consciousness important writers from all periods of our rich literary tradition—from Thoreau to Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells and James Baldwin. That approach permits us to take pride in the glorious parts of our past, as well as face the inglorious parts.   I applaud AMW’s decision to honor Laura Ingalls Wilder and I am grateful that it did.  It exposed me to her remarkable work and life.   I implore AWM to continue in this vein, to continue to honor America’s literary giants that have withstood the test of time,  to highlight great writers that have added to America’s literary tradition, whether or not their writing conforms to today’s language and social norms.  We desperately need to hear their stories in the context in which they were written and not sanitized through the filter of political correctness.  

Sensible Immigration

The recent dust up on the border enforcement raises again the need for a sane immigration policy, which the country has struggled with for a decade or more.   I will try to cut through the demagoguery and name calling to lay out some broad principles for immigration that I hope you will find sensible, but perhaps difficult to implement.

Along with abortion, no other issue seems to elevate emotions quite like immigration.  The position of Democrats has gotten so extreme that many Democrats – like Dick Durbin of Illinois- have elected to spend more time representing the interests of noncitizens, rather than citizens of the U.S.  Many jurisdictions, including my home town of Chicago, have declared themselves sanctuary cities, and thus we are seeing the practice of nullification employed in a manner that we have not seen since the Civil War.  Cities like Chicago are permitting illegals to obtain state ID’s which will make it very difficult to prevent them from voting.  Many Democrats are now beginning to take a position that the U.S. should get rid of ICE entirely, and that includes DeBlasio, Kirsten Gillibrand, and the new Social Democrat candidate darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Increasingly, there is a segment of the Democratic party that is championing an open borders policy.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has announced a zero tolerance policy, has begun (in some way) the construction of a border wall, and has otherwise strengthened enforcement, although he was pushed into issuing an executive order preventing children from being separated from their parents (never mind that a shoplifting mom will be temporarily separated from her child if she is caught stealing socks at Macy’s).  Trump offered a path to citizenship for the 1.8 million “dreamers” that are already here in return for wall funding and other enforcement mechanisms, which the Democrats have rejected.  

But is there a sane set of principles for all this?

Yes.

My principles are broad, yet simple.  The hard part is how to set the filters, and implement them, although I have some ideas for that, too. 

When someone comes to America, there are only three possible buckets he or she can land in:

1.      Working and supporting themselves.

2.      Social Welfare system.

3.      Criminal justice system.

Those are the only possibilities.   There are no others. We want people that are going to end up in the first category, and we need to reject individuals that are likely to end up in category 2 and category 3, or bounce between category 2 and category 3 over time.   This means doing exactly what Donald Trump has in mind—implementing a merit based system.   If you go to the Department of Labor website, you will see that the forecast for unskilled labor over the next ten years is to go DOWN dramatically.   The modern economy is going to need a lot fewer unskilled people, as opposed to the first 60 years or so of the 20^th century, when the need for unskilled labor was greater.  Because if a person isn’t in category 1, they will necessarily end up in category 2 or 3 unless they have someone to support them.  What does this mean?  It probably means taking fewer people from Mexico and Central America, and more people from places with good educational systems like India.  

In order to implement this policy, we need to be honest about the data we collect on people, correlate it to where we get them from, and track what happens to them after they get here.   With a dynamic economy, this will necessarily be an iterative process.  And we need to be honest about the costs of immigrants—both legal and illegal—that end up in buckets 2 and 3.  And we need to be honest about the total costs – that includes the costs of educating their children.  We have assumed that immigrants are good for our country (and I believe they are), but at $21 trillion in debt, we need to be more certain about it.  For instance, an illegal Mexican immigrant that works for cash and has 3 children that the American taxpayer is educating and who sends the bulk of his remittances back to Mexico is probably not a good deal for us.

With this in mind, I’ve developed three key principles for a sensible immigration policy and process, and who we let in to become part of the American fabric.

1.      Don’t kill us.  A sensible immigration policy and process should address border safety, and maintain a low level of risk that we are letting in people to do us harm.  From MS-13 to Islamic terrorists to the illegal immigrant that killed Kate Steinle, the idea that we could do away with ICE is simply insanity.  Merkel’s open borders policy is insanity.   Government’s primary job is to protect its citizens and we need to tighten up these processes, not loosen them.

2.      Pay your own way.  As discussed above, we need to ensure that immigrants don’t end up in the criminal justice or social welfare systems.  

3.      Adapt to our culture and social norms--don’t expect us to adapt to yours.  It’s fine to be proud of your heritage, but there are elements that need to be left behind.  And here I am speaking directly to immigrants from Islamic countries.   No burkas, no FGM, no child marriage, no assaulting people for drinking alcohol or refusing to serve it if you get a restaurant job.  If you don’t like our free and open society—don’t come.

These are simple, straightforward guidelines but hard to develop processes around them.  The key is how you set the filter so that we get the kind of immigrants we want.  And we MUST set filters.   No matter how you set filters, you will be open to the charge that you are racist and bigoted.   That is because the era of European immigrants is largely over.   Those nations are having a hard time maintaining their populations, and are in no position to export them.

How is Trump doing?  Actually, fairly well.  The travel ban is an attempt to set some filter, albeit imperfect.  He is enforcing border security and pushing the legislature to legislate on the issue.  With Venezuela in crisis and Mexico electing a leftist (we know where that takes economies), it will be more important than ever to solidify our border security.  But we need to do it in a way that lets in the people we want and need to be a prosperous nation.