Archive for April 2010

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Those who came to our shores were not, for most of our history, “illegals.”

April 29, 2010

“Before 1882, immigration to the United States was barely regulated at all. Passports weren’t required, and 98 percent of all immigrants to Castle Garden in New York Harbor were admitted. Citizenship was not as easy to acquire, but the concept of illegal immigration did not yet exist. Almost anyone who wanted to move to America was free to do so.” (see How Illegal Immigration Was Born By Claire Lui)

What has happened during the intervening 100 years or more that now some 12 million immigrants to our country are labeled illegal? Well what happened was that we made rules and regulations, laws, that suddenly and arbitrarily made “illegals” of the millions who came here. These people, now “illegals,” were no different from the millions who came here in earlier times when there were no laws.

Why did we do this? And were we right to do so? Has our anti-open immigration policy, begun with the Chinese Exclusion act of May 6, 1882, signed into law by President Chester Arthur, and continuing on right up until the present time with the tough illegal immigration measure signed into law by the governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, and requiring state police to question people about their immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion,” has any of this somehow protected us, made us safer, let alone more prosperous?

Isn’t it a fact that those who are violently opposed to our making it easier for immigrants who are here without visas or other permissions (“illegally”) to remain here, that those who are opposed to amnesty of any sort, are opposed for the single reason that these people are here sans papiers?

But these people coming to our  shores are not criminals. The anti-immigration voices would make them so. These voices never tire of repeating that we are a country of laws, and that those already here who have not obeyed our laws should be deported, and that those who are not yet here, but who would come here illegally, should be kept out by strict border controls including impassable physical barriers.

The opponents to open immigration seem not to be aware of the history of immigration to our country, and the fact that our country owes everything to the contributions of successive waves of immigrants, and for hundreds of years to successive waves of “illegal” immigrants.

Nor do the opponents seem aware that even today those who are here sans papiers contribute significantly to our country’s wealth by the work that they do. For if it’s not a fact it’s not at all clear that the presence of the so-called illegals among us, as was the case for the millions of their predecessors, is not a net benefit to the country.

So why don’t we welcome them and find a way to help them to remain here and make a good life for themselves, again just as the millions who preceded them, strengthening the country by their work and their presence? Aren’t we by our more and more draconian anti-immigration policies only shooting ourselves in the foot?

Furthermore the vast majority of the illegal immigrants come from a single country, Mexico. We ought to be working closely with this country, facilitating the process of Mexican guest workers coming here in response to our need for the work that only they seem able to provide. We ought not to be keeping them out, or making things difficult for those already here.

And finally, rather than building walls between ourselves and Mexico we ought to be furthering the economic cooperation between our two countries, and Canada. The Mexicans who come here to work ought to have special status and consideration. The “illegal” problem created by our own lack of vision, as well as by an ignorance of our history, would disappear if the Mexicans who want to live and work in our country were helped to do so.

Categories: Immigration

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If we would watch the sunrise we should go on burning oil.

April 28, 2010

I don’t know about you, but I can’t resist mentioning a news item from today’s Times on my Blog. You may have been reading of the long controversy (going on for nine years now) over Cape Wind, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The plan is still after all these years to place 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound, about five miles from the shoreline, with blades reaching as high as 440 feet above sea level and covering some 24 square miles, an area nearly the size of Paris where I am currently living.

Well today the federal government gave the green light to this project, that which, if all goes through as planned, will become the nation’s first offshore wind farm. And this one will make it easier for others to follow, although mostly on the Atlantic coast where the waters are shallower and the costs are not prohibitive.

Of course and in spite of the government’s action the controversy over the wind farm remains. And the project will certainly encounter further blows before being realized.

But the reaction on the part of the Wampanoag Indian tribe deserves special mention. As I read what their spokesperson had to say I almost blessed the controversy that could bring this out in the open. And I smiled, laughed to myself, and was just happy to be a witness to all of it.

Here is what brought the smiles:

“The coastal Wampanoag tribe, which requires unobstructed views of the sunrise for sacred ceremonies, said Monday that it was preparing to challenge the project for violations of tribal rights. Andra Parker, president and chief  executive of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, added:

‘We will not stand by and allow our treasured public lands to be marred forever by a corporate giveaway to private industrial energy developers.’”

Actually Senator Kennedy a resident of the same Nantucket shore line was right there on the side of the Wampanoags. Although he never mentioned that his view of the sunrise from the Kennedy compound was obstructed I’m sure he felt that way. He chose to be safe and to say only that the whole project was a giveaway to a private developer.

Don’t you like it? Alternative energy sources, those things that might some day free us from our dependency on Arab oil, are out because they would block our view of the sunrise.

Categories: Thoughts

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“Will the sense of obligation meet the sense of entitlement?

April 27, 2010

Our country is confronting a geometric rise in the growth of entitlements, more and more of which more and more people consider it the role of government to provide, even if the government has to go deeper and deeper into debt to do so. The very latest of the entitlements, health insurance for all, or almost all, has just been enacted by the Congress, and was done so irresponsibly, almost without regard for the need or ability to pay of the beneficiaries.

More and more our government does seem to be in the business of giving us something “for nothing,” such as arms, —aircraft carriers, and wars —in the mountains of Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East, both of which we can’t afford and don’t need, and most recently, home ownership and now health care, both of which have somehow become in the thinking of those in the government the right of all.

Home ownership was going to make responsible citizens of everyone, in this case responsibility following rather than as in the past preceding the ownership of one’s home. Instead the resulting housing bubble and burst nearly brought down our entire economy.

For it didn’t turn out that people living in homes they couldn’t afford become responsible home owners, anymore than people with the gift of government provided health care now become more responsible for their own health.

Nothing new about any of this. Just recently I was rereading David Halberstam’s 1992 book, The Next Century, which was not so much about our century, as the last one. Halberstam was writing in a second epilogue about the “new,” Yeltsin led Russia, in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup to ouster Gorbachev and return Russia to the Soviet Union.

Halberstam was not hopeful that the new Russia would be much different from the old Soviet Union (and during the nearly 20 years since then his opinion seems to have been borne out). For in order for it to happen, that Yeltsin’s new Russia become anything at all like a Western liberal democracy, the people’s sense of obligation would have to meet [and overcome] the people’s sense of entitlement. Individual responsibility would have to suddenly appear, and from nowhere.

From nowhere because for the nearly 70 years of Soviet rule, as well as during the prior centuries under the Czars the people were never allowed to grow and develop responsibility for their own lives. Instead, they grew to accept, became habituated to, knew nothing other than the Tsarist or Communist leader who made all the important decisions for them including what kind of clothes and shoes would be made, what the schools would teach, what jobs would need to be done, what positions filled etc.

Under this system in regard to basic needs the people were provided for, although minimally, but the only freedom they knew came in the form of the crash of trees falling in the forest out of the purview of the government, or the sound of their own voices restricted to the spaces about a kitchen table.

Now our own past is diametrically opposed to that of Russia. Our country got its start by the people, one succession of immigrants after another, taking on from the moment of their arrival here the responsibility for their own lives. And this current is still very much alive (although centuries of open immigration are now threatened, as in the new Arizona police state) and with any luck it may continue to provide us with a bright future.

Unlike Russia our history has been as much that of the people, and what they have done with their freedom of thought and movement, as that of the government and what it has done with its power of command.

But will it continue, the story of our country as being mostly that of hundreds of thousands of individuals coming here and finding themselves free to do whatever they want as long as it didn’t interfer with the freedom of others? Now, perhaps for the first time other than in war time, there are large and growing numbers of people, although probably not yet a majority, who depend more on government than on their own actions for their livelihood. We don’t yet know what this will mean for all of us.

Writing about Yeltsin’s Russia Halberstam said, “Russia was a nation which resisted all the implications of political and economic democracy, a nation which lived by decree and by diktat….Is there [now] enough of a tradition of individual responsibility to give the nation a beginning of modernization? Or have expectations and a sense of entitlement already exceeded the reality of the amount of obligation required?”

We might ask of ourselves a similar question, now in the aftermath of the passage of the health care legislation, whether the people’s growing sense of what is theirs, what the government owes them, whether this now threatens to overshadow, if not overcome their own sense of personal obligation and responsibility.

Or will it be in our country, as David asks about Russia, that “the sense of obligation meet that of the sense of entitlement?” He doesn’t say so, but I would add, “meet and overcome.”

Categories: Political Science

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This Land is your Land, this Land is my Land…

April 19, 2010

There are things that are happening in our country. There are trends not of our own making, or rather not the result of our own planning. Should we be concerned? Should we be doing something to reverse those trends that seem to be a threat to our liberal democracy?

What about this one:

Should we be concerned that the top 1% of taxpayers are now paying more taxes than the bottom 96%? Does this mean that more and more the richest few own the country, that our land is now their land? Perhaps it’s always been this way, that the country is the property of the rich and powerful, but we still talk as if the country were our country, the country of all of us. Is it?

Categories: Political Science

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SinisterSceptic on the Paradox of Tolerance

April 19, 2010

I was about to write a post on the so-called paradox of freedom as described by Karl Popper in his, The Open Society and its Enemies, when a Google search led me to SinisterSceptic’s Blog post, The Paradox of Tolerance.

Mr. SinisterSceptic had said pretty much what I wanted to say, juxtaposing Popper’s ideas with our tolerant/intolerant words and attitudes towards the Muslims living among us, — in America, yes, but also in Australia and France.*

Here with recognition and thanks is the post from SinisterSceptic:

13 July, 2008
The Paradox of Tolerance

Couldn’t we just talk about the weather instead?

http://sinistersceptic.blogspot.com/2008/07/paradox-of-tolerance.html

In his Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper argued that the only thing that a tolerant, open society cannot tolerate is intolerance:

The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

He sounds like he thinks he’s solved the problem just by rephrasing the sentence as reserving the right to be intolerant in certain situations.

I used to think that this was a crude but effective solution. Now I’m not even sure how effective it is. But then I found this extra explanation:

All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands in… some such manner as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism [sic.] and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and is accountable to, the public.

So just maybe Popper is already talking about a sui generis system, something akin to a Kuhnian paradigm.

I expect he would deny such a similarity and that he would argue that, just as two sciences can be assessed according to their verisimilitude, falsifiability and lack of falsification (a claim thoroughly debunked by Lakatos), so societies can be compared by their degree of openness and the governments’ accountability to the people. But I think the questions of incommensurability come through here too.

(Leaving aside all Rousseau/Thoreau problems regarding the lack of freedom to opt-in or -out of a society) the question remains, how to explain cross-cultural tolerance. Specifically, is there any way to say who is the originator of the intolerance? Who started it? What to do when neither side tolerates the other? Isn’t that just maintaining the status quo (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing)?

For example, “Islamic values are sometimes quite different from Western values”. When you say this sort of thing in Australia or America, most tolerant people interpret it as xenophobia, pure and simple. (Most of the time it is, but not always.) In Australia when the Howard govt introduced the Australian values test for citizenship it was widely ridiculed, because, among other things, knowing who The Don was is not really a good indication of the values one holds dear. When you ask an Australian about these things the answers are quite vague, words like “mateship” and “a fair go” pop up but interpretations of these words differ widely.

On the other hand, France recently denied citizenship to a Muslim woman for not being sufficiently integrated into French society. You see, she wasn’t just Muslim, she and her husband are Wahabi. They’re proud of the fact that they don’t think men and women are equal. She has shown a “comportment in society incompatible with the essential values of the French community”. While that statement would seem a bit vague in Australia (where such values are not enshrined in law; or even in America with its bill of rights), apparently it’s quite clear to the French. When I asked Cindy she replied immediately, “Égalité is commandment number two. Obviously that means equality between the sexes. If you don’t believe in that, then you don’t believe in the French Republic.”

So if we frame this as an intolerance of women acting in certain ways, the Islamic value is a type of intolerance. Then we are able to recast the refusal to allow these practices as an intolerance of that particular intolerance (rather than an intolerance of religious practices in general). But of course the Muslim will insist that this is a mischaracterisation, that it really is intolerance of her religion and thus she may reserve the right not to tolerate that. Where do we end up? This is not much like Popper’s example of someone wanting to commit murder (although it may seem rather similar to his other example of reïntroducing slavery!). If we see both these values as central to a society (both the Frenchman and the Wahabi Muslim will tell you that they are central) then isn’t each of them right sui generis?

I’d much prefer to believe that societies are not incommensurable and that there are some underlying values that all can agree on but this sort of thing makes me wonder.

*We learn, à propos, from an article in today’s New York Times, that Hillary Clinton has reversed George W. Bush travel bans to the U.S. for two prominent Muslim thinkers,

Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Swiss Muslim academic,

and Adam Habib, a well-known South African Muslim professor.

Both good moves on Hillary’s part, here where tolerance was called for.

Categories: Thoughts

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Jaime Escalante’s Example to which few have responded

April 2, 2010

Andrew, it’s just not going to happen. (I’m writing this in response to Andrew Coulson’s piece in the WSJ today, Escalante Stood and Delivered. It’s Our Turn.) Andrew, “Our Turn” is just never going to be. Only a tiny few will ever respond in their turn, if at all, to Escalante’s example.

Instead, what works, say Jaime Escalante’s calculus class as Coulson describes it, is going to remain isolated from other educators, even as it was at the time from those sharing the same school building with him.

What works is going to remain enclosed in its own niche until whatever original life force that brought it into being dies out, taking along with it into oblivion even the memory, as in this example, the memory of Jaime Escalante’s calculus class.

Coulson understands this, but he (I too) would like to believe otherwise, to say it ain’t so, that the system, and not just a part here and there, can be changed.

If it can’t perhaps it’s because public education is too much like a piece of the country’s infrastructure, and infrastructure, without experiencing a war or other destructive juggernaut, cannot be changed except piece by piece over lifetimes.

New bridges don’t make the old ones disappear. In fact, most of us for most of our lives go on using and crossing the old ones.

And new schools don’t do away with old schools, always in the majority, and in spite of the endless reforms that come along most kids continue to still spend their school time in the old schools.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Didn’t you know this, Andrew?

And successful schools, be they KIPP or Achieve, or any number of selective and high performing public schools, have never much influenced, let alone done away with the majority of our public schools, still unsuccessful, still uninspired and, helas, still uninspiring.

But you knew all that, Andrew, when you wrote today in the Wall Street Journal about Jaime Escalante, didn’t you? I wonder why we don’t tire of saying the same thing over and over again?

You note that Bill Clinton in 1993 didn’t hesitate to say it (yet once again): “People in this room who have devoted their lives to education, are constantly plagued by the fact that nearly every problem has been solved by somebody somewhere, and yet we can’t seem to replicate it everywhere else.”

And of course it’s true as you say while writing about Jaime Escalante who recently passed away, “America not only needs more teachers like Jaime Escalante, it needs an education system that recognizes them and helps them to reach a mass audience.”

But again I cite the bridge comparison —there’s just too much concrete out there to move. It can’t be done. And this must be the reason, there’s just too much, what, “dead wood,” inertia in the present system for us to move it.

This is the reason why (tell Bill Clinton) we’re not able to bring to scale the things that do work, such as Escalante’s successfully teaching calculus to poorly prepared and thoroughly disadvantage kids at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles in the 1980s.

The reason why we haven’t been able to reach by this example the kids in the hundreds of failing school systems throughout the country.

This is especially troubling when we have before us one example after another of successful technological innovations, Facebook, the iPod, the iPhone, and now perhaps the iPad, and many others, all bringing successful innovations up to scale almost effortlessly and in the process reaching, if not bettering the lives of, hundreds of millions.

Categories: Education

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On the Tea Party Opposition to Obamacare and the Libertarian Opposition to Global Warming

April 2, 2010

In regard to the first of these, the Senate health care reform bill,  Atul Gawande writes, in the New Yorker of April 5, “The major engine of opposition remains the insistence that health-care reform is unaffordable….In 1965, health care consumed just six per cent of U.S. economic output; today, the figure is eighteen per cent.

“[Health care] costs are curtailing all other investments in the economy, and, if they continue to rise as they have been doing—twice as fast as inflation—the reform’s subsidies, not to mention America’s prosperity, will indeed prove unsustainable.”

Are the Tea Partiers right? Should we all be opposed to the Senate Bill? Gawande would say no. Why? He points out that the Bill recognizes what is driving costs up, —a system that pays for the quantity rather than the value of care,—and agrees that this can’t continue without undoing the country’s prosperity.

But, he says, the same Bill has within it the power to change the cost equation. Furthermore, without the Bill, or something like it, health care costs will continue their steep rise.

For the Bill, he says, replaces the present emphasis on quantity of care, that which is most of all driving costs up, on value, and on the quality of care eventually driving out quantity and the associated high costs.

And to this end the Bill creates a new Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation that will permit communities and local health systems to promote value, by experimenting on their own with ways to deliver better care at lower costs.  You’d have thought that the Tea Partiers, most of all, would have recognized this.

So that “far from being a government takeover,” the health care reform Bill “counts on local communities and clinicians for success.”

Gawande admits that the assumption that communities and clinicians, that individuals, all at the local level will do the right thing, is a bit “scary,” but at the same time isn’t it common sense that only at the local level, where health decisions are made, or should be made, by individuals and their doctors, can the costs of care be lowered?

What then about the libertarian refusal to accept the evidence for global warming? Why is this? Robert Crease writing in the Wall Street Journal about this year’s annual “Gathering” in honor of Martin Gardner, the author of Scientific American’s “Mathematical Games” column, suggests the reason for this. He says,

“Mr. Gardner’s fans include psychologists and cognition researchers interested in discovering why people regularly and seemingly inexorably fall victim to optical illusions, faulty logic and pseudoscience. … Al Seckel, a former Caltech cognitive neuroscientist, used sensory illusions to demonstrate how humans “map” incoming information to support pre-existing organizational perceptual frameworks, even if the incoming information is contradictory or false.

“As an example, Mr. Seckel noted that global-warming skeptics who lack training in science yet appear to argue on a ‘technical level’ tend to be libertarians. If global warming is correct, that suggests large-scale governmental regulation is needed, contrary to the core beliefs of a libertarian. ‘It is easier for a libertarian to attack the science of global warming,’ Mr. Seckel said, ‘than to alter one’s core libertarian beliefs.’

Here again, isn’t it common sense that one often attacks, be it the government takeover of health care or the theory of global warming, that which is at odds with one’s core beliefs, even when the evidence for it, say in the case of global warming, is widely accepted by the scientific community?

For the libertarian to accept global warming (no less than for the Tea Partier to accept the Senate health Bill) would be to accept a dominant role for government, because global warming, if it is in fact a threat, can only be adequately countered, if at all, by world wide government action, anathema probably to Tea Partier and libertarian alike.

Categories: Current Affairs

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