About Immigration
Monday, May 17th, 2010
I highly recommend the recent white paper by the ERLC (Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission) as a starting point for a rational discussion about immigration. (Richard Land, the head of the ERLC, has a briefer statement about the issue here.) I believe the statements about immigration coming out of the ERLC right now are the sanest and most transparent of any I hear from either side.
My approach to the issue itself is simple. I believe any real solution to immigration reform must involve three things (which I will get to in just a moment), whether anyone in particular likes them or not. I don’t mean that statement as an arrogant disregard for public or private opinion. Rather, I mean by it that this problem, once properly defined, will neither simply go away because we build a bigger fence or stop offering ballots in Spanish, nor because we grant amnesty to everyone here illegally and open the borders completely. And for the problem to become something other than just that, we are going to have to be smarter than we have been for the past hundred years—on both political sides. Liberals have tried amnesty and other floods of illegal immigration have followed. Some conservatives have at times raised the ugly face of misoxeny. Yet the problem has persisted, partially because each side only acknowledges half of the problem from the outset.
So what is the problem? It is NOT simply that millions of people have entered the country illegally and that many if not most have stayed. And it is NOT simply that the illegal immigrants who are here are taken advantage of as they live on the fringes of society. It is rather BOTH the influx of immigrants who are neither fully accountable to nor fully protected by the law AND the things in our society which attract them and keep them here—basically economic interests. It doesn’t matter how big a fence we build as long as employers are motivated to pay sub-minimum wages to people who regard dirt-cheap work as so much better than what they can do at home that they leave everything else behind to get to it. Both sides of the issue must be addressed in order to effect real improvement. That is, laws must be BOTH enforced and morally and economically sane. The current law is neither enforced nor is it either morally or economically sane.
So here are the three components (more…)
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The college where I teach, Criswell College, owes a huge debt to the spirit, generosity, and vision of Andy Horner. Here’s a quote from Andy Horner’s booklet Jewels for Life. Written in 1994, every word is three times as significant today:
I read this quotation yesterday on the air and I’ve had a few people ask about it. I received it by e-mail from Penna Dexter so I don’t know the original source, but It is right on the mark, so I’m happy to post it here:
Nancy Pelosi’s Fallacy: Here’s a part of how Nancy Pelosi justified her party’s decision to include family planning and contraceptive funding in the stimulus plan working its way through Congress. “The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now, and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help states meet their financial needs. One of those—one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception—will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.” Representative Pelosi has crammed two enormous errors into this one small statement.
Someone e-mailed me this picture with the caption, redneck seafood. Since I now have less than half-inch hair, I believe I can use the word “redneck” with some impunity. And I must admit, the appearance is better than the traditional “tube steak” look.
The closer an election, the greater the shallow promises intended to convince a few more voters toward one side or the other. Since by definition the majority of people are not wealthy, many of those shallow promises are aimed at the middle class and lower. “We will not raise taxes (or we will lower taxes) for anyone making less than $xxxx.” But promises are not the only way to win a middle-class heart. There are also attacks on a minority, in this case the wicked people who make more money than they do. “Greedy corporate executives have abused the free market and they ought to be punished.” Never mind that it is not greed, but the success at acting on their greed which actually aggravates the critic’s audience. That is, there is no political bounty to be had by attacking those who are greedy but fail to gain wealth through it: only those whose greed brings them wealth face the criticism, revealing the hypocrisy of a criticism motivated more by its disdain for wealth (or even profit) than for greed.
