The Political Landscape

Living in Illinois is like being trapped in Dante’s Inferno.

We’ve got all the main characters in spades, all set in the Dark Wood of Error.

See if you can pick out these cast members:

• The Opportunists
• The Virtuous Pagans
• Gluttons, Hoarders and Wasters
• The Violent Against (fill in the blank)
• The Panderers
• The Flatterers
• The Seducers
• The Simoniacs
• The Grafters
• The Hypocrites
• The Thieves
• The Sowers of Discord
• The Falsifiers
• Compound Fraud

No wonder it seems like we’re living in Hell.

Trayvon in context

Obama grabbed the spotlight when he declared, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

It’s seems ironic that Obama wouldn’t say that about victims in his own political hometown.

I’m not surprised, since making noise about mostly black-on-black, mostly gang-related and overwhelmingly deliberate killing in Chicago on a regular basis would be political suicide.  After all, these are Obama’s core constituents and he cannot be critical about them.

Any such, “If I had a son…” comments would be an indictment of both the Daley Machine and Hillary’s village mentality.  The Democrat way of raising children simply doesn’t work.

Below is a sampling of recent headlines in Michelle Robinson Obama’s hometown and the place Barack made his political fortune:

Chicago Tribune, April 14, 2012

10 shot, 3 dead, on South and West sides

Chicago Tribune, April 12, 2012

Chicago homicides soar in first quarter of 2012

“Homicides in Chicago soared by 60 percent in the first three months of 2012, continuing a troublesome trend that began late last year. Nonfatal shootings also rose sharply in the first quarter, Police Department statistics show.”

Chicago Tribune, April 7, 2012

1 killed, 3 wounded in Saturday afternoon shootings

Chicago Tribune, April 6, 2012

5 people shot Friday night, Saturday morning across city

Chicago Tribune, April 1, 2012

1 dead, 8 wounded in overnight shootings

Chicago Tribune, March 25, 2012

1 killed in Northwest Side shooting

Chicago Tribune, March 18, 2012

5 dead, 12 wounded in attacks across Chicago

Chicago Tribune, March 17, 2012

16 shot, 1 dead, in overnight violence

Methinks the President acted stupidly to make comments in the case…but it is an election year.

Obama's Immigration Report Card

On the 2008 campaign trail Obama promised to tackle Comprehensive Immigration Reform during his first year in office.  It maked sense.  He had Pelosi and Reed in his pocket.

But like so many other promises, Obama didn't get it done.  But his critics suggest he didn't even try.
Not since the Carter days has a president come to Washington with such naivete about national politics.  Poor Barack expected it to be like Chicago where the GOP doesn't exist and money buys all the votes you need.  Not so in the White House.

Amnesty was a dirty word, given the lousy economy and the instant spotlight that shines on the issue whenever it comes up.  So Obama ignored the issue...for three years.
Now he faces the ballot box again.  So what does he do?  He returns to the Bill Clinton days for ideas.

Idea number one: Port Court.  Clinton had good success in his test of the idea, an idea that isn't bad.  You set up a court system that tags and bags illegals at the border and holds them for a day or two while a judge makes a ruling, almost always to send them back home.
(You would think that has been happening all along, but it hasn't.  Usually the illegal alien is simply spun around 180 degrees and sent walking back home.  No arrest.  No court.  Just turned back south-TBS.)

The advantage of Port Court is that you have a record on the fact that you sent them home and told them not to come back.  When they are caught again, the stakes are higher.  A couple of Port Court convictions and you are a felon, subject to hard prison time.

But Port Court never has the money or space to do that for very long.  What Clinton did was set it up in one area - San Diego - and run up some big numbers.

So Obama did the same thing, and admits that his high deportation numbers are inflated and misleading.  He told reporters in September of 2011: "The statistics are actually a little deceptive," Obama said last month during a discussion with Hispanic journalists. There has been "a much greater emphasis on criminals than non-criminals." And "with stronger border enforcement, we've been apprehending folks at the borders and sending them back. That is counted as a deportation even though they may have only been held for a day or 48 hours."
Source: http://articles.cnn.com/2011-10-19/politics/politics_deportation-record_1_ice-director-john-morton-undocumented-immigrants-criminal-alien-program?_s=PM:POLITICS

So all Obama has done is duplicate Bill Clinton's Port Court program to run up high numbers.
As I said before, Port Court is a great idea, but it needs to be wide-spread and permanent.  And we need to be willing to back up our threat of imprisonment whenever someone crosses the line after being sent home.

The other Clinton idea is a form of silent amnesty. 
Clinton's was 245i.  It went like this:
1) Prove that you came here illegally.
2) Prove that you got a job illegally.
3) Get a family member or and employer to sponsor you.
AND YOU GET AMNESTY.

Well, Obama's amnesty program is what I call the Aunt Zeituni plan.  It goes like this:
1) Prove that you came here illegally.
2) Get caught and get a deportation order.
3) Ignore that order (which about 99% of them do).
4) (Optional: Get public housing and disability)
5) Get caught again.
6) Get the same judge to rescind your deportation order.

Yes, Obama has indeed instructed immigration officials to review 300,000 deportation orders and reverse them if the illegal alien is not a violent criminal.

So you see, he's just dusted off the Bill Clinton playbook rather than put forth an amnesty proposal of his own.

In the end it really doesn't matter.  The Latino activists and most ghetto minorities will vote for him regardless.  They are entitlement voters and will vote for the one most likely to give them a paycheck.  And that's always a Democrat.

Romney has pretty much come out against amnesty and can't backpedal.  (I may regret writing that.  Politicians always surprise me with their lack of integrity.)  So maybe Mitt will get 35-40% of the Latino vote unless he can shift their cause célèbre to something other than amnesty.  It's never been done before and so far his strategists haven't impressed me.

Florida belongs to the GOP this time based on three words: Medicare, Israel and Cubans.  Of all Latinos Cubans and the most conservative.  They really don't care about amnesty.  They care about our asylum policy.
The only thing Obama loses with his lack of immigration progress is Latino turnout.  They may not vote for Romney, but they sure will stay home.

Don't look for Mitt to say much about deportation or enforcement.  That'd be a negative.  (And that's why I dislike politicians.) 

Immigration Morality

I was reading a blog recently written by an obviously conservative Mormon opining about illegal aliens.  His position was that the Mormon Church was right to influence Utah politics regarding the Utah Compact and the state guest worker program because it was a moral issue.

It got me thinking about the many facets of morality that come into play here.

First, I think any discussion about illegal aliens and morality must begin with the poster child used in the discussion.  When advocates for amnesty make their pitch it isn’t long before they portray a man and his wife with children in tow crossing the desert in darkness.  They are fleeing a cruel existence in search of a better life.  All he wants to do is feed his children.

George W. Bush liked to portray them as good, Christian families.  His tag line was, “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande River.  If you're a mother and dad, and you got kids to feed, and you're making 50 cents and you see someone in Iowa making $50, and you care about those kids, you're coming.”

 

What a nice sentiment.  Unfortunately, the demographics he portrays simply aren’t there.

In June of 2005, Pew Hispanic Center issued a report about the characteristics of illegal aliens.  Only 17% of their families consisted of non-citizen children.  83% had no children at all when they came to the United States illegally.  The largest cohort was single men at 36% of all illegal alien families! 

 

That squares with the videos we see of young men crossing over the border with their backpacks.

It doesn’t preclude the fact that those people begin having children once they get here.  The demographics reveal that the fertility rate of foreign-born jumps when they live in the United States.  For example, in Mexico the fertility rate is 2.4.  A Mexican woman living in the USA boosts that figure to 3.5.

So, the premise is all wrong.  They aren’t families fleeing the horrors of the third world.  They are young, single adults coming here to make money.  Worse, they are ill-prepared.  Few of them have adequate schooling or skills to contribute to society.  In essence, we are importing high school drop-outs.

And their behavior is not unpredictable.  A friend who is an LPR from Venezuela has worked alongside illegal aliens for 15 years.  He explains that the family men are hard workers.  They don’t want any trouble.  But the single guys are the worst.  They drink too much, goof off and have trouble showing up on Mondays.  But the meme is that they are all hard working family men who came here fore a better life and are diligently doing the work our own citizens will not.

With a clearer understanding of the people we are talking about, let us proceed by talking about the morality of fairness.  Surely we can agree that from the lofty view of religion they ought to speak out against the lack of fairness when they see it.  That’s the moral high ground, to demand the world that ought to be by exposing the inequities.

When an illegal alien goes to work in the United States he is typically young, unskilled, uneducated and working for less money than a person with the legal right to work here.  He is also less likely to have benefits and more likely to skirt the tax laws.

It is not disputed that this competition tends to lower wages and benefits for all workers.  Simply put, if an employer can get away with lower labor costs he will.

So, who are the victims in such a scenario?  The most vulnerable of our own.  They are the adults with little education and low skills who need a job.  And the notion that there are jobs Americans won’t do is hogwash.  The truth is Americans are doing those jobs every day.  The truth is more of them would do those jobs if the wages weren’t artificially depressed by illegal aliens in the workplace.

I might add that there isn’t a labor shortage.  Even before the recession of 2008 there were plenty of people who needed work.  According to the March 2007 US Census data there were 6.8 million illegal aliens working in the United States.  At the same time there were over 32 million Americans with low skill sets needing jobs.

 

So, where is the morality in that?  How can it possibly be considered the moral high ground to steal jobs from our own?  How can someone who has broken the law to come here and then entered our labor force through fraudulent means have any claim on decency?  And why would a church defend such a person, knowing that people who have broken no laws NEED those same jobs?

Further, why would a church endorse a program to legalize those same workers?  Would it not be ethical to ask those workers to step aside?  Would it not be right to demand that employers follow the law of the land?  Would it not be more ethical to put our own people to work?

While on the subject of fairness, it needs to be pointed out that our social safety net is stressed.  There simply is not enough to go around.  And yet, we are importing needy people through both legal and illegal means.

On the most blatant level, there are children being excluded from benefit programs because their identity has been stolen and used by aliens to work illegally in the United States.  An audit in Utah alone places that number at 50,000 children.

But even without the ID theft problem, there are finite resources at stake.  Schools, clinics and welfare offices are providing services to illegal aliens and their families.  How is that fair to those who need those resources but cannot get them because the demand is artificially high?

We would do well to remember that every time we say “yes” to someone here illegally, we are in effect saying “no” to a needy citizen.

The very existence of illegal aliens in our society makes all of us participants in this form of slavery.  And for what? …a $2 savings on a meal at a restaurant?  …or $5 less for a hotel room? …or a $300 discount on a new roof? … or a year of lawn care for $60 less?

Somehow that brand of morality rings hollow to me.

It is not morally correct to give away what does not belong to you.  To be sure, any church with a global mission sees itself as an international institution.  Despite their origins the Catholic Church is more than just the Italian Church, the Mormon Church is not the Utah Church, the Lutheran not the German Church…and so forth.

Notwithstanding the Biblical edict to “teach all nations” churches must abide by the laws of the land unless they take up swords and crusade their way across the borders.

The endorsement of amnesty by churches seeks to give away what is not theirs to give.  They may sponsor immigrants.  They may pay for their immigration paperwork.  But they may not give away sovereignty, for it does not belong to them.

Furthermore, the position taken by churches tends to foment anarchy as others are embolden by these institutional endorsements of unlawful presence. 

As the federal immigration commission of 1981 (SCIRP) reported: “The existence of a fugitive underground class is unhealthy for society as a whole and may contribute to ethnic tensions. In addition, widespread illegality erodes confidence in the law generally, and immigration law specifically, while being unfair to those who seek to immigrate legally.”

Parenthetically, when a group advocates transforming the lawless into law-abiding through edict, that does not settle the question.  It merely emboldens another wave to hunker down and wait for amnesty.

Making comparisons in a welfare state

Poverty is a serious problem in the United States.  People are going to bed hungry and naked.  And look at all those students who qualify for free or reduced lunch.

But unless you live in the hills of West Virginia or some rural town in Mississippi you probably don’t see it, because it is relative poverty.  In fact, being poor looks very much like the rest of us.

Author Jamie Whyte explains it in his book, “Crimes Against Logic.”  Here’s the British version according to Whyte:

British Poverty

Soon after coming to power in 1997, the New Labour government drew our attention to a shocking fact: 35 percent of children in the United Kingdom live in poverty. Not absolute poverty, of course; even the poorest are at no serious risk of going without food, housing, schooling, or Medical care. Rather, 35 percent of children live in relative poverty: by the standards of modern Brit­ain, they are relatively poor.

On pages 99-102, I complained that the Labour government played fast and loose with this ambiguity in the word poverty. “We need to fight poverty,” they claimed. Why? Because poverty is dreadful and there is so much of it. But this is merely a play on words. Absolute poverty is dreadful (but rare); relative poverty is common (but not so dreadful).

In this chapter, however, I want to set that issue aside and examine only the claim that 35 percent of British children live in relative poverty. This claim illustrates a common way in which statistics can mislead: by being based on an improper measure of the phenomenon in question.

The government measures the number of people who live in relative poverty as the number living in households with incomes less than 60 percent of the national median income. We must accept that 35 percent of children live in such households. Still, why should we conclude that 35 percent live in relative poverty? Why, in other words, is household income less than 60 percent of the national median a good measure of relative poverty?

The short answer is that it isn’t. In a country like the United Kingdom, disposable income inequality is a hopeless way of measuring relative poverty.

To see this, consider two twelve-year-old boys who live next door to each other. They live in the same quality of house, attend the same school, go to the same doctor when they are sick, wear the same brand of athletic shoes, and so on. Indeed, their material well-being differs in only one respect:

Jimmy’s parents give him £10 a week in pocket money, Timmy gets only £5 pounds from his. Should we conclude that, since his disposable income is only half of Jimmy’s, Timmy is a pauper relative to Jimmy?

Obviously not. Jimmy and Timmy’s consumption is almost identical. Let’s suppose that the housing, clothes, schooling, med­ical care, and so on that they both receive are worth £100 per week, and that both spend all of their pocket money. Then Jimmy consumes £110 per week and Timmy consumes £105 per week. Though Jimmy’s disposable income is double Timmy’s, he is only 5 percent better off.

When a large percentage of consumption is not paid for out of disposable income, differences in disposable income will always exaggerate differences in the ability to consume. And it is the ability to consume that is important with regard to poverty, including relative poverty.

So the government’s measure of relative household poverty is wrong. Like Jimmy and Timmy, British households need not pay for much of what they consume out of their disposable incomes. Most importantly, medical care and education are delivered by the state, funded out of tax revenues. And, so far as the govern­ment’s measure of poverty is concerned, housing is free too, since it uses disposable income after housing costs.

In a paternalistic society like Britain differences in disposable income will overstate differences in consumption capacity and hence in the number suffering relative poverty. This point has nothing to do with redistribution of wealth. If taxes were high but all benefits were paid in cash rather than state services, then disposable income would accurately reflect consumption capacity, and relative income would be a reasonable basis for evaluat­ing relative poverty. The further a society moves from the” all cash” model toward an “all state services” model, the worse is the disposable income measure of poverty. And Britain is very far from the “all cash” model.

That’s quite an explanation.  And if you think about it, the poverty problem can never be solved with our system.  The measurement would never recognize an improvement.

I know a couple pulling down about $3,500 a month because they are both “disabled” and they have an adult son living with them who belongs in a state mental hospital but we don’t do that any longer.

That’s not a bad family income, but it doesn’t count on your 1040.  In fact, they get money back on their return.  Officially, they live in poverty. 

But their $3,500 a month goes much further than the family in the apartment across the hall from them.  You see, this “low income” family (according to their tax return) is getting subsidized rent, and food stamps (LINK card), and a free cell phone, and Medicaid, and at school their student got free lunch/waived fees/ free physicals/free coats-hats-boots-gloves…and out of high school they got free community college tuition and Pell grants.

Meanwhile, the family across the hall is paying the full amount for all these things.  And they try to set aside a little each month to keep a bank account for emergencies.  Because they are working and have some money in the bank, they can never qualify for these social programs.

Aside from being an absurd system it also discourages people from taking care of themselves and planning ahead. 

Two conclusions:

Poverty is overstated.

Self-reliance is overrated.

Meanwhile, to pay for it all we are ruining the “full faith and credit” of the American dollar.

Did Affirmative Action kill Assimilation?

As another MLK day passes, I ponder all the special interest groups who have jumped on the civil rights bandwagon in the name of the black martyr.

Here we see the Occupy movement using Dr. King for their own cause:
http://biggovernment.com/rebelpundit/2012/01/20/breaking-video-occupy-the-dream-or-occupy-church-and-state-occupychicago/

And here we see a local "Prayer Breakfast" carrying the water for the liberals:
http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20120114/news/701149858/

Meanwhile, AG Eric Holder is guest speaker in Red-State Utah:
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/53296781-75/holder-rights-shurtleff-attorney.html.csp

And they use all sorts of machinations to "prove" that King would have been a Democrat...or sided with the gays...or Latinos...or the 99%.....

But it set me thinking about the divisive nature of all this grouping.

Two college professors, one in California and the other in Florida, set out to study racial/ethnic identity of children over time.  They published a book about it called, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation.

One of the fascinating tidbits they discovered is that all this identity stuff evolves in a child's life in high school.  As Mark Krikorian explains it:

“When first surveyed, the majority of the students identified themselves as American in some form, either as simply “American” or as a “hyphenated” American (Cuban American, for instance, or Filipino American).  After several years of American high school, barely one third still identified themselves as Americans, the majority choosing an identification with no American component at all, opting for either a foreign national-origin identity (Cuban, Filipino) or a panracial  identity (Hispanic, Asian).  The antiassimilationist slant of modern American education is perhaps most visible from this fact: Of the one eighth of immigrant children in the study who identified themselves as simply “American” at the beginning of high school, only 15 percent still thought of themselves that way at the end of high school.”

(quoted from Krikorian, The New Case Against Immigration, 2008, p 32)

“The shift, therefore, has not been toward mainstream identities but toward a more militant reaffirmation of the immigrant identity for some groups (notably Mexicans and Filipinos in California and Haitians and Nicaraguans in Florida) and toward panethnic minority-group identities for others.”

(quoted from Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation, 2001, p157)

So, it all starts to gel in high school.  And who can blame them?  Who wouldn’t want to be part of a protected class?  It offers some job protection, a leg up in hiring and scholarships.

But it is a far cry from the efforts 100 years ago to Americanize immigrants.  Such talk would be bigoted to say the least today.

But the protected classes must stick together and find opportunities to show strength in numbers.  And so…MLK is co-opted and public sector workers take the day off.  Meanwhile, the rest of us go to work while the left plots the demise of the American identity.  And the candidates fall in line to glad-hand potential special interests.

Border Security

As we embark on another year of Presidential Candidate rhetoric it is important to talk about the illegal alien problem.  One can quickly dismiss candidates who call them "Undocumented," for they are more interested in skirting the issue than actually addressing it.

As I've said before, candidates who simple want to "Build the dang fence," aren't selling anything of value either.  Border security along with interior enforcement and deportation are worth a listen.

Beware the reporters and moderators who begin with the statement, "We all know you cannot deport 12 million people or secure 2,000 miles of border...."  Of course, you cannot do that, but you must do SOME of it to show that we mean to enforce our laws.

Back to the border security question.  When I think of the muddle the TSA has made in the interest of airport security, I can scarcely suggest that Homeland Security embark in a new initiative at the border.  That would be throwing good money after bad.

Any effort to build the fence needs to take into consideration the following:
1) We need to have open borders.  Millions of legitimate people have legitimate reasons to enter the United States.  Some cross daily for work.  Some are tourists.  Some are businessmen.  Some are US Citizens returning from a trip abroad. 
2) The target (illegal aliens and drug traffickers mostly) is mobile and flexible.  You build a fence, they'll cross somewhere else.  You build a longer fence, they'll find a torch or a ladder and go through it or over it.

Indeed we need fences where entry is hard to detect or hard to access.  Beyond that we need to have extra eyes and quick access.  We need to be mobile and flexible as well.  We need intelligence.  And we need tough sanctions against violators.

But the border is only a small piece of the puzzle.  We need to send the message to those who have already arrived: We will catch you and we will send you back home.  Furthermore, we will ban you from returning.

Let's not overthink this border fence.