Immigration Revisited

Friday, July 23, 2010

On Immigration

I pity the poor immigrant, who wishes he'd stayed at home

--Bob Dylan

The immigration issue has been heating up in recent months, especially here in the west. Arizona has passed draconian measures to control illegal entry to their state and similar proposals are before other state legislatures. Hispanic residents of these states are indignant, feeling they are being subject to police harassment and are being used as a political football.

The number of people living in the US illegally is estimated as somewhere between four and twenty million. They came for numerous reasons, but economic opportunity certainly is the most often cited enticement for people to enter the US. In this, they are no different from generations of people who came to America in the last four hundred years.

 Current immigration law favors people who have a skill or profession that will (allegedly) be of benefit to our country, or who have money to invest here. So, if you're a doctor, or can hit a breaking pitch, or have a large wad of cash in your pocket, you can go to the front of the immigration line. Such folks are not exactly your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Other applicants are admitted by quotas among the nations on a lottery basis.

Naturally, the numbers of people in foreign lands who want to reside in America vary widely. People in nations where there is a huge demand for legal emigration might wait all their lives for a chance to come here legally. Is it any wonder that desperate people are not willing to wait patiently for legal status?

Since illegal immigrants risk deportation to the place they risked their lives to leave, we can hardly expect them to come forward and meekly accept expulsion. Even if all immigrants did volunteer for repatriation, however, the logistics of removing them are daunting. If we use the commonly cited total of twelve million illegals and an average capacity per airplane of two hundred (a generous average) then it would require sixty thousand flights to carry all of them out of the country. The country's bus lines could help take deportees to adjacent lands, but this would not diminish the number of flights very much. I'm not saying it couldn't be done or shouldn't be done, but lets not kid ourselves into thinking it would be quick, easy or inexpensive.

This also gives rise to another question. Can we ethically just dump deportees in the country they left at a border town or their capital? It might be argued that what happens to them once they're across the line is not our business, but the problems of one country often become the problem of other nations. Economic stress in other countries is the reason we have this situation in the first place.

The Obama administration has proposed that illegal immigrants will be obliged to pay a fine for entering the country and back taxes and then can be placed at the back of the line for those awaiting citizenship. Much as I like and respect President Obama, I think this is ludicrous. Illegal residents of the US are paid in the underground economy and records of their earnings will be spotty at best. Would you tell the truth about your earnings if doing so would cost you money you worked hard to get, and the government couldn't check your statement? I suspect this proposal is just a sop to conservative critics.

So here's my immodest proposal. The quota of legal immigrants from high demand countries like Mexico should be raised drastically. Three million legal permits per year is reasonable to me. Applications for legal entry could only be received and processed in the individual's home country. A criminal check would be made on prospective immigrants, confined to felony warrants or convictions or outstanding judgments against the person. No fees or taxes would be collected.

What would we get by doing this? Well, start with regaining control of the border. Once there is a real chance of coming to America legally, I suspect the incentive to enter by breaking our law will diminish. In addition, once immigrants have legal status they can take jobs in the above ground economy, pay taxes and contribute to social security. Five million additional contributors to social security would not solve all the problems of the fund, but would certainly help.

And why would anyone who is here already return to his native land to re-enter legally? They could demand at least minimum wage for their work. They would not have to fear the police, and if victimized by crime could seek justice in the legal system. They would have the same chance to advance and prosper as any American citizen.

There is one exception to this policy. The parents and siblings of so-called "anchor children" must be given legal status immediately. I realize this is not fair to other immigrants, but there is no other workable solution. Kicking the family of such a child out of the country effectively means deporting an American from our country, or leaving the child behind. Neither of these constitutes a family value in my opinion.

For those who want to expel illegal immigrants from the US, I ask that you examine your motives. If you're outraged because our laws have been broken, I'm with you, but if your objection to illegals is cultural, or you think they drain the economy, we part company.

I welcome comments on my plan.

The Life and Times of Jesus

Recently, I read Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan. This is my book report.

First of all, let us say that Professor Aslan has excellent credentials concerning the first century and events in southwest Asia at that time. That is to say, he holds a PhD degree in religious studies and is a tenured professor, I think I recall, at North Carolina State University. 

Dr. Aslan says in his preface that he became absorbed into the Christian tradition and fascinated by it as an adolescent. Since he has become an adult, however, he has decided that Islam is the truest reflection of God's desires for humanity. He is able to look at the life of Jesus with some detachment therefore. The first question any Christian would ask, of course, is whether Aslan is prone to prejudice concerning Jesus. Let's allow him to speak for himself, through his book, and then decide.

Judea, Galilee, and to a lesser extent the Jewish diaspora in Greece and what's now Turkey, were in a state of ferment at the time Jesus was born. Occupied and tyrannized by successive foreign powers, most recently the Romans, the Jews could hardly have helped being resentful and living in anticipation of a great leader, a warrior king, a messiah, who would expel the pagans and restore the kingdom of David in all its glory. That, Dr. Aslan writes, is what they believed in as the messianic tradition. Also, the Jews were furiously resentful of the priestly caste who lived in (comparative) luxury while trying to appease the Roman authorities. More than one high priest was assassinated during the years around the lifespan of Jesus.

The time and place were rife with would-be messiahs. Often considered outlaws by the Sanhedrin and the Romans, they zealously proclaimed the coming kingdom and offered themselves as kings. Almost all came to violent ends, usually at the hands of the Romans. 

It was into this world that Jesus was born. Professor Aslan dismisses the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke out of hand, however. He claims that Caesar Augustus never ordered a census, though Quirinius did. This occurred in 6 CE, when Jesus would have been about ten years old. No shepherds, no wise men, no birth in Bethlehem, and no virgin birth.  

He does believe that Jesus was a Nazarene. Nazareth was a tiny hamlet then, perhaps home to one hundred people. Certainly, it was not populous enough to support a carpenter, much less a family of carpenters. (Dr. Aslan pays considerable attention to James, Jesus' brother, as well as at least one other brother and possibly sisters.) There was a new Roman town abuilding near Nazareth, however, Sepphoris by name, and Aslan speculates that Jesus would have found work there as a day laborer.

Exactly when Jesus encountered John the Baptist is not known with any certainty, but the professor feels it was a hugely significant event. Jesus remained as a disciple of John until the wild holyman was arrested. Only then did Jesus start a ministry of his own. 

The men who wrote the gospels, of course, emphasized that Jesus was unlike the false messiahs of those times, that he proclaimed a kingdom not of this world, and by inference at least, that good people must comply with civil authorities, even tyrants. Dr. Aslan just doesn't think this was the real Jesus at all. "I come not with peace but with a sword," Jesus says, contradicting this view of a non-violent savior. That's the Jesus of Dr. Aslan.

Now, about the passion and death of Jesus. According to the professor, Jesus arrives in the big city of Jerusalem for the passover, perhaps greeted by enthusiastic crowds, perhaps not. He does go to the temple on Tuesday for the ritualistic cleansing and there causes a great disturbance. The temple was huge, however, and Aslan tells us it's likely that many people there that morning never noticed what was happening. 

The Jewish priestly class certainly noticed, however, and decided Jesus had to go. By Thursday night they had assembled a large arrest party, and, tipped off as to Jesus' location by Judas Iscariot, they made the pinch in the garden of Gethsemane. Please notice, Aslan says, that they took a bunch of people, expecting a brawl, and that Peter drew a sword to defend Jesus, confirming the professor's view of Jesus as not abjuring violence. Jesus, however, knowing his arrest must lead to his death, tells Peter to stop. He skips over the episode of Jesus putting the high priest's servant's ear back on, perhaps not believing it happened.

Of the trial, the crucifixion, and Jesus' death, Aslan follows what many other secular historians believe. Jesus was condemned as a blasphemer by the Sanhedrin, taken before Pontius Pilate (And there is documentary evidence that he existed.), who sentenced him to death after only a moment or two - just one more bit of business on a Friday morning - and Jesus suffered an awful death in the time honored Roman way.

What happened then? The gospels tell us that Jesus rose from the dead, and appeared to many people before ascending into heaven. Dr. Aslan does not believe in the resurrection - it does contradict everything we know about death after all - saying it's irrelevant what happened to Jesus' body. What is important is that the apostles began telling the Jews about Jesus and gathering a small number of believers. One of them, Stephen, was soon stoned to death in Jerusalem for blaspheming.

The murder of Stephen was a great event, Dr. Aslan claims. It clarified the thinking of the apostles and placed them squarely outside the mainstream of Jewish thought and practice. Led by James, Jesus' brother, they continued to tell any Jews who would listen that Jesus was the messiah and the fulfillment of the Hebrew prophesies. (Aslan says the Hebrew prophesies cannot be interpreted as leading to Jesus by any reasonable person.) Gradually the apostles and their followers became more and more estranged from the Jews of Jerusalem, though still complying with the Hebraic laws concerning diet and circumcision.

Enter Paul. Sometime during the two or three decades after Jesus' death Paul, who had been a Pharisee, comes to believe in the Jesus of the apostles and begins preaching to the Jews of the diaspora and to gentiles. He is soon summoned to Jerusalem by James and the others to answer for what they regard as apostasy - that gentile believers need not abstain from foods the Bible forbids, or undergo circumcision. Paul agrees to mend his ways, though he does call Peter to book for trying to have it both ways, but now carries his message further afield, ultimately to Rome, though Peter arrives first and warns the church there to be wary of Paul. How or when the two men died is not very important to Dr. Aslan. 

What is important is the Jewish rebellion against Rome and the suppression of that rebellion by the imperial legions. Wholesale murder, rape and destruction accompanied the Roman army, culminating in the famous mass suicide at Masada. Thereafter, the locus of Christianity shifted away from Israel and the church grew among the gentiles much much more than among the Jews. 

Dr. Aslan thinks it would have been impossible for Jesus to have become knowledgeable about the Hebrew Bible, growing up in what was almost literally the back of beyond. His scanty knowledge of the Bible explains the often confusing acts and sayings attributed to him. Now, I quarrel with that. I much prefer to think of Jesus as a bookish boy, a real Yeshiva paragon, devoting every spare moment to studying the Torah and the other books of the Bible. It's hard for me to imagine any other version of Jesus arguing successfully with his neighbors, much less the Pharisees. 

Likewise, I think Dr. Aslan takes some interpretive liberties. Documentary evidence about Jesus by contemporaries is almost entirely non-existent, it's true, and the historian must speculate a bit. Aslan is right to say the first gospel, Mark's, was written something like forty years after Jesus' death, meaning by someone who probably didn't know him, but that doesn't give him license to guess about Jesus' life any more than it gave to Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. (On the other hand, if Mark was writing his gospel at about the age I am now - sixty-four - he might well have known Jesus, or known of Jesus, as a young man.)

Get this book and read it. I think Dr. Aslan has made an honest effort to explain Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity, though his version of it is much different from what we learned in Sunday school. 

This is a post from three years ago, but it seems as relevant now as it was then.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Wing Nuts

This morning while driving I tuned in to one of talk stations I refer to as "right wing radio." The host today was a man named Bob Beauprez who two years ago was the Republican candidate for governor here in Colorado. I was deeply disappointed when he agreed with a caller who claimed the Obama campaign deliberately brought about the economic downturn of 2008 in order to win the election!

Here was a supposedly responsible politician accusing a member of the other party of wrecking the nation's economy on purpose, putting millions of people out of work, causing massive defaults on home loans and subsequent foreclosures, probably shortening many lives, to win an election. And all this, according to the caller, with the connivance of the (Republican) Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulsen.

I bring it up as one more example of the insanity, the paranoid hatred that parts of our American population are exhibiting. The credulous are being driven by hate mongers who, for reasons known only to themselves, have adopted the old Bolshevik strategy for gaining political power: "The worse things are, the better they are for us." They are pursuing a deliberate course aimed not merely at defeating a president and his party but at dividing the nation into two warring camps. They will have a heavy reckoning before the bar of history.

More on Obamacare

There were no comments concerning "Obamacare" after my last piece, so I guess either everyone agrees with me and Time magazine, or no one read the darn thing. Therefore, I'm going to wing it with a few more remarks of my own.

Just what do opponents of the law object to? Public opinion polling is touted by the Republicans to the effect that most Americans don't like the law, but it only takes a second looking at the poll numbers to realize that part of that opposition is from people who don't think the act went far enough. If those people are included with supporters of the law, there's a rather healthy (Irony intended in use of this word.) majority for it, or for a more comprehensive involvement of the government in health care.

Perhaps we could parse the law to find out what the objections might be. Young people can remain on their parents' health insurance policies until age twenty-six now, instead of nineteen or twenty-two. I doubt anyone outside the insurance business finds that onerous. Applicants for insurance cannot be denied coverage because of pre-existing illnesses. That too seems innocuous, actually I think very popular with the public. Premiums for women cannot be higher than premiums for men. Some men might object, thinking they're effectively subsidizing women's health care, but I think they must be very few in number.

We've knocked down the straw men, so now lets consider what I imagine people really do find troublesome. Obamacare obliges people to buy health insurance coverage or pay a tax penalty that starts out kind of small, but becomes larger over several years to the point where it is truly punitive. The fury of the opponents of the law centers on the cost of non-compliance and the infringement on individual liberty they think the law comprises.

Given the changes the law makes, that I pointed out already, it seems to me there must be some negative incentive to get people to buy a policy. If you can't be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition, what's to stop people from doing without insurance until they're truly sick, then rushing to buy coverage, literally on the way to the hospital? Normally I'm not sympathetic with the insurance companies, but I can see that they wouldn't stay in business very long under those circumstances.

My readers, a small but honorable group of people, say they would never abscond on a bill, or declare bankruptcy to get out from under a mountain of debt. Still, it must be admitted that a majority of personal bankruptcies in the United States come about because of large medical bills, and part of the reason those bills are so high is because a percentage of hospital patients don't pay for their treatment, effectively sticking the rest of us for the cost of their care. Most of these people, I'm convinced, truly want to pay their own way, but either don't know how expensive medical care is, or are of such modest means that they would be hard pressed to buy a plan, and decided to take a chance that they wouldn't get sick.

My brother is a perfect example of this. Insurance is a racket, he said for years, and when he was ill he paid cash for doctor services. "But what if you need surgery?" I used to ask him. "You could be wiped out financially by a week in the hospital."  

Now he's covered by Medicare, and he managed to keep all the money he might have spent on health insurance. He's a lucky winner, and there are other people like him, but for the great majority of us, there will be a need for expensive hospital care before we're on Medicare. A Facebook friend posted not long ago that he spent a week in the hospital after a heart attack and (I presume) heart surgery, and received a bill for $144,000. He did have a very good policy that paid all but $500 of his bill. Without it, he'd be working until the day he dies to settle the cost of one week of his life.

And what about people who have no intention of paying for emergency medical care? There are some, we all know it, whether we like to admit it or not. How do we get them to do the right thing? Obamacare requires that they buy insurance too, or pay the tax penalty. It might be a weakness in the act that there will still be people - drifters, the chronically unemployed, substance abusers, and their children - who don't file tax returns and therefore won't be troubled by any provisions of the tax code. To opponents of the law, this is egregiously unfair, but the solution, I think, lies not with getting rid of Obamacare but in strengthening it.

By the way, the tax for not buying insurance is a civil matter. No police officer will call on anyone who decides not to get insurance, a la my brother the Libertarian.

Once again, I welcome comments, and will print them in a future posting.

Obamacare

This week's issue of Time magazine contains an article on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, that's worth the time and trouble it takes to read it. So, if you don't have a subscription to Time, hie thee to the public library and get ahold of it.

According to Time, there have been significant computer glitches associated with the roll-out of the health care exchanges. Moreover, there is a real concern that many people - particularly healthy young people - will not sign up for insurance and pay the tax surcharge instead. Without a base of younger people, the program will be crippled by insurance coverage for people who are in poor health to begin with, and will make larger claims to the insurance companies than they can pay from the premiums they collect.

Moreover, Time says that 27 states have opted out of the state health exchange part of the Act, and some state officials are doing what they can to sabotage the whole scheme. (I used that word "sabotage" deliberately, and I don't think it's too strong a term for what is happening.) Here's an excerpt from the Time article.

"The day before a federally operated exchange launched in Missouri, the state's lieutenant governor urged residents not to sign up. In Florida, a directive from Governor Rick Scott blocks navigators - consumer-assistance workers paid through the ACA - from working with county health departments. And Georgia's insurance commissioner has said his department will do 'everything in our power to be an obstructionist.' Such efforts guarantee that a federal law may look very different depending on what part of the country you're in."

There is a certain amount of confusion about the Act. Subsidies are available for people who are living in poverty as defined by the government. Also, people who are above the official poverty line but not very far above it can qualify for Medicaid, unless they live in a state that has decided not to expand Medicaid coverage, even thought the federal government will pay the entire cost for three years and ninety percent of the cost in perpetuity. Here's more from Time.

"It is not a coincidence that the marathon speech meant to defund the Affordable Care Act was delivered by a Texas Republican. Senator Ted Cruz's 21 hour sermon on the danger of Obamacare was just the latest broadside against the law from Lone Star State lawmakers. Under Governor Rick Perry and the Republican-controlled state legislature, Texas has opted out of nearly every aspect of the law it is legally allowed to.

In addition to not expanding Medicaid, the state has declined to set up its own insurance coverage, ceding the task to the federal government. The Texas department of insurance says it will not enforce ACA regulations, like those requiring insurers to cover pre-existing conditions. In September, Perry called for a law limiting the role of navigators, and the day enrollment began, he called the ACA ' a criminal act.' Unlike the robust public-service campaigns in some states that support the law, in Texas, ACA information is not even available on the state's official website."

And,

"In Texas, opposition to the ACA is both philosophical and financial. The law is seen as an unwelcome federal intrusion into the affairs of a state that doesn't want any part of a massive new entitlement program. Perry also points out that expanding Medicaid would add costs to a program that already consumes one-quarter of the state's budget. About half of all children in Texas are covered by existing government programs. Medicaid alone pays for more than half of all births in then state. The law is 'a recipe for disaster. . . an asteroid about to enter the atmosphere,' says Representative John Culberson, a Republican who represents southwest Houston in Congress.

But the terms of the Medicaid expansion might seem to cast doubt on such economic reasoning. The federal government would pay 100% of the cost of covering those newly eligible for the program until 2017, phasing down to 90% after 2020. . . A recent report by Texas' former deputy comptroller found that while a Medicaid expansion would increase the cost of the program, much of the extra spending would be offset by savings in other state-funded programs that pay for health care for the poor. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Texas will leave $79 billion in federal funds on the table over the next 10 years by not expanding Medicaid."

One thing that bothers me about the opposition to Obamamcare -aside from the apocalyptic rhetoric being used - an asteroid? - is that the opponents never come to grips with why they are so adamantly against a law that would provide - at no cost to the states initially - decent health coverage to people who otherwise would be clogging emergency rooms and often absconding on their bills. I'm honestly curious. Can any reader explain how providing people with insurance is worse than what we've had before the ACA was enacted? I promise to listen and to reprint rational comments on my next blog entry.