Immigration Strategies

The dilemma we face in dealing with immigration is that, on the one hand, we want immigrants to join us both (1) to honor our heritage, our self-image, our American Dream; and (2) to make their diverse contributions to our future as a nation, to our strengths. But on the other hand, (1) our resources are not boundless--there are a hundred times more persecuted and downtrodden people in the world than we have resources to rescue, and (2) our national security demands that we protect ourselves from alien threats. How can we best balance these factors?

First and foremost, the tide that washes onto our shores is not uniform; in fact, it is very diverse. There are students and teachers (and skilled administrators and researchers, etc.) who are smart and knowledgeable; there are laborers who are unskilled and hungry; there are the threatened and abused fleeing religious or political persecution; and there are other types or categories who seek to join us as citizens.

First principle: All newcomers should make a contribution, for example, in community service or in agreeing to pursue their skills and professions for the public good. Those who are in this country illegally should pay taxes on everything they have earned here--imputed to cover undocumented and unprovable years, and all brought forward as if they had been earned in the year of application for citizenship (so that the longer one waits, the higher percentage income tax bracket one falls into). These taxes are, of course, not due all at once; the IRS already has mechanisms for installments and for carrying forward overdue amounts.

Second principle: Those with the most to offer our society and those with the most to fear abroad should have the highest priority for favorable immigration action (this is already in place to a large extent).

Third principle: Our borders and air and sea ports should be guarded according to a realistic risk/cost assessment. Customs can never be 100% secure. And if it costs $100 billion a year to secure our entry points at the 95% level, then it costs $200 billion to achieve the 97% level, and $300 billion to reach the 98% level, and $400 billion to secure at the 98.5% level, etc. We can never reach 100% security; we should plan security expenditures with this in mind--explicitly, realistically.

Effective immigration strategies for our vast and diverse land will require thoughtful planning, strong leadership, and long, hard implementation and management.

Incarceration Milestone

According to The New York Times, the U.S. achieved a milestone earlier this year. The incarceration rate in the U.S. has been high and growing for decades; in February 2008 it passed 3,000,000. This means that 1 in 100 U.S. citizens are behind bars.

The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world.
The second highest country, Russia, has a rate about 2/3 as high.
And our peers, European countries, Canada, and Mexico have rates about 1/10 as high.

Moreover, most of the U.S. citizens behind bars are there for non-violent crimes.
In fact, most of the U.S. citizens behind bars are there for drug-related offenses.

It is appalling to realize that the E.U. has 100 million more citizens than the U.S., yet the U.S. locks up 100,000 more of its citizens for drug offenses alone than the E.U. does for all offenses.

The fiscal impact is staggering.
$40 billion was spent on prisons and jails in the U.S. in 2000.
Of that, $24 billion was spent to incarcerate non-violent offenders.
Several states (including CA and NY) have larger budgets for prisons than for education.

But the price is not just fiscal. Consider the impact on society of millions of people out of the workforce, out of their communities, cared for by taxpayers. And not just while they are incarcerated, but afterward as well because they are under-trained and under-educated, out of step with social changes, and stigmatized legally and socially.

On Sept. 14, 2008 The New York Times ran an interesting article about disenfranchisement of ex-felons. The following is quoted from it.

“ 'I can’t vote because I got three felonies,' Mr. Benton told Ms. Bell. He had finished a six-month sentence for possession of $600 worth of crack cocaine, he said. But Ms. Bell had good news for him: The Florida Legislature and Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican, changed the rules last year to restore the voting rights of about 112,000 former convicts.

“ 'After you go to prison — you do your time and they still take all your rights away,' Mr. Benton said as he filled out a form to register. 'You can’t get a job. You can’t vote. You can’t do nothing even 10 or 20 years later. You don’t feel like a citizen. You don’t even feel human.'

"Felony disenfranchisement — often a holdover from exclusionary Jim Crow-era laws like poll taxes and ballot box literacy tests — affects about 5.3 million former and current felons in the United States, according to voting rights groups."

The harshness of sentencing practices and the incarceration of such a large fraction of our U.S. population is an embarrassment and blight on our national reputation; a violation of our most deeply held ideals and self-image as the "land of the free," a beacon of civil liberties around the world; and source of personal tragedy for many millions of our fellow citizens.

It is an important problem. What can we do about it?

Source: http://corporatism.tripod.com/world.htm and elsewhere

Barack Obama says he is concerned about this problem and has plans to attack it. His extensive staff has made special efforts to enroll ex-felons in states where they are eligible.
John McCain has made no comment about it.

The Prison Door

After a stay in a penitentiary (sometimes referred to among inmates as "crime school"), even after parole or probation--that is, after the convicted felon has supposedly "paid his debt to society," he still cannot vote, is barred from employment, and is restricted from living in some areas (and in other areas cannot, in fact, sign a lease). So the minions who are incarcerated represent only the tip of the outlawed iceberg.

There are three main reasons for this outrageously un-American situation: histrionic media, pandering politics, and elected judges.

Histrionic Media: News media want exciting "news" stories--they sell papers (or in this day and age, advertising Web pop-ups and their equivalents). This has been true at least since William Randolph Hearst invented Yellow Journalism over a hundred years ago. But, coiffed in academic ethics and rhetoric, histrionic media have had a renaissance over the past couple of decades due to business pressures to make money. The gist of the problem is that histrionic media use violent crime--especially crime that can be painted tinged with religious blasphemy, sexual titillation, or sanctimonious lack of ethics--to gather a crowd, attract interest, and send cash flowing to a media outlet's bottom line.

Pandering Politics: Couple such histrionic media with politicians' desires to get elected and re-elected, and a social mechanism for vindictive sentencing laws is created.

Elected Judges: And judges are commonly elected and re-elected based on their records of being "tough on crime," that is of dispensing lots of sentences, and long sentences.

The cure:

(1) Stop locking people up for non-violent crimes, which are typically the three so-called "victimless crimes" (crimes related to sex, drugs, and gambling), and also white-collar crimes in which typically no physical injury is done or even attempted.

(2) Legislate maximum (not minimum) sentences that are long enough to provide for rehabilitation but not so long as to alienate an individual from society and incapacitate social functioning.

(3) Turn penitentiary "crime school" into effective rehabilitation, education, retraining, and, in general, preparation to reenter and succeed in society.

(4) Develop post-incarceration follow-up that provides social, emotional, and vocational reintegration into society (with voting privileges, a job, a place to live, even healthful social and community connections).

Rehab Plan

There are many factors that affect sentencing for crimes:
Laws and legal precedents (including plea bargaining and social evaluations)
Election of judges (who often earn reelection by being harsh)
Societal prejudices (against "sex" crimes, for example)
Crowded, hurried court calendars and public-defender responsibilities
Availability of incarceration facilities (short- and long-term)
Etc.

Many of these factors are complex, hard to deal with, and resistant to reform.

But there are some general principles to apply to how long a person serves in jail and deciding whether a person is ready to be released.

First: An inmate should be required to complete educational and training experiences that will better equip them for discharge. These might be general education leading to a high-school diploma or a junior college, or even college, degree. Or they might be specific education for vocational roles, for example in information technology (IT), auto mechanics, or health or emergency-service occupations. These days there are thousands of courses that can be taken on-line or through the mail, or "canned" so that they can be provided to inmates at very little cost to an institution. Many institutions have laundries, auto shops, and other "hands-on" practice resources. Individuals can also go out on tutorials or apprenticeships at the institution's expense (thereby providing valuable incentive for employers to develop such resources).

This requirement has several advantages
It outfits a person to take on a productive role in society after jail.
It facilitates an inmate's organizing personal time productively.
It demonstrates a person's expanding ability to set and meet personal goals.
It enhances an individual's self-esteem and self-confidence.

Second: An inmate should be required to have a post-incarceration job and place to live. This requires that an inmate learn to present his or her personal life story, abilities, and training/educational achievements effectively via e-mail and s-mail, and make positive connections and commitments to the outside world. (There are already organizations that serve this function, but could get more involved during inmate's prison time.)

Third: Each inmate should have a strong connection with responsible family or friends, or perhaps with a probation officer, while in jail that will continue after discharge. Discharge should be a smooth transition, not a jolt or disconnection, not a collapse of one social support system with a hopeful leap into the dark, grasping and struggling to create and hold onto another.

In the U.S. we should send fewer people to jail (especially for non-violent crimes), and for shorter sentences. But especially, any time someone spends in jail should be productive--in education and training, in learning personal organizing and self-image skills, and in forming healthy connections with post-incarceration resources.

Reallity

What is "reality"? Why do we see things and expect things to be the way they are (that is, the way we do)?

An interesting way to understand our concept of "reality" is Darwinian--looking at it from an evolutionary perspective. Our species' early years were fraught with danger. Our early ancestors were plagued by predators; beaten down by natural forces (storms, fires, earthquakes, ice ages, etc); savaged by fellow members of our own species; and eternally pursued by thirst, hunger, injury, disease, and death. Life, from the time one got up in the morning until one lay down the mantle of struggle and called it a night, was a series of challenges to be met, problems to be solved. (OK, if it wasn't this way all of the time, it was some of the time, and those "some" were the times one was likely to drop off the evolutionary ladder--as an individual or as a species--if one didn't handle things right.)

How can an emerging consciousness best solve problems? What mental perspectives best equip an early simian climbing down out of the trees to confront and overcome new kinds of threats? Well, as I see it, seeing the world as things and forces (rather than a continuum), as actions and reactions (causes and effects), and as a continually forward progression of time (rather than frozen, non-progressive existence or "being"). In other words, developing and using a picture of "reality" in which challenges and problems had meaningful parts, a flow of changes, and outcomes and solutions.

It is easy to say, "Reality is the way it is because it (obviously) just IS that way." But this overlooks that we create and respond to a mental image of the sensory inputs that flow in through our eyes and ears and fingers, etc. When we solve problems or handle difficult situations in life, we do so by conjuring up internal pictures, imagining scenarios and outcomes, and choosing from among these just how to "be" in the world and how to respond--what further input to seek to enrich the mental pot and to decide what steps to take.

Surely it is clear from close encounters with our dearest animal friends--with dogs, and cats, and birds--that they do not see and understand the world as we do; they do not fantasize and problem-solve and decide among alternative courses of action as we do. Sure, they have their own perceptions and thoughts and expectations, which in some ways seem much like our own, but they also seem significantly different.

Even different cultures see the world significantly differently. The Hopi, for example, do not distinguish "before" vs. "after" or "earlier" vs. "later" from "near" vs. "far." Something imagined from "long ago" is in the same mental category as "far away." Recently a primitive language stock was delineated in South America that essentially counts "one, two, few, many" without a more extensive series of number names.

Certainly religious mystics, fully indoctrinated scientists, and psychotics have different senses of "reality" from what is considered stock in trade in Western European and American culture.

And what about the "reality" of quantum physics with mysterious instantaneous action at a distance, time reversal, and determinative action of observation? Responsible nuclear physicists have said that "quantum mechanics has a well-earned reputation for being weird." In fact, "it is not just stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine" because its "reality" violates so basically and dramatically our common concepts of "reality."

There is a humorous oxymoronic quip that goes, "Objectivity is whatever I say it is." Perhaps "reality" is best defined similarly--"Reality is whatever I believe is real." That is certainly the way most people, in fact, define it, though there are quite a number of good reasons to think more relativistically about it.

The "Prime Mover" Conundrum

Clearly the concept of "Prime Mover" (or "First Cause" or "Original Creator") doesn't work because it regresses infinitely. No matter how "prime" or "first" or "original" you get, there always (by this concept) has to be something that originated that.

Perhaps our cultural conditioning, or even our basic brain functions themselves, cannot tackle this problem. Perhaps our cognitive abilities (i.e., our capacity for making reproducible observations and for using logic in thinking about them) or our intuition (that is, our sense of what is real or possible) cannot encompass this. If so, that would be nice to know--and we must accept our limitations. But on the other hand, perhaps there is more ground we can gain.

During the past hundred years, cosmology and nuclear physics have given us some remarkable, counter-intuitive perspectives on reality. First to fall thanks to Einstein's theories of Special and then General Relativity were the sacrosanct objectivity and separability of time and space. On a cosmological scale, how fast time flies depends on one's location and movement through space; so do distances and speeds and accelerations. Einstein's theories were derived mathematically from a few basic ideas and observations, but they seem to violate our previous Newtonian picture, a picture which had become deeply embedded into our cultural consciousness. During the 20th century there were several sets of observations (such as measurement of the precession of the orbit of Mercury and the bending of light in a strong gravitation field visible during an eclipse of the Sun) that have supported Einstein's relativity picture of reality.

Also during the first few decades of the 20th century another set of theories, quantum mechanics, emerged from studies in nuclear physics. Quantum mechanics is devilishly counter-intuitive, that is, its theories and observations violate our comfortable Newtonian picture of how the world works. For example: (1) At the sub-atomic level, particles appear and disappear--they are created out of nothing and disappear into nothingness. (2) Pairs of particles can be so intimately entangled that even though they are millions of miles apart, a change in one is instantly reflected in a corresponding change in the other--far faster than the speed of light could carry a message between them. (3) Every particle has an anti-particle with equal and opposite properties. (The positron, for example, is the antiparticle counterpart of the electron; it has the same mass but equal and opposite charge and spin.) When a particle meets its antiparticle, they are both annihilated. (4) When their interactions are depicted in Feynman diagrams, antiparticles can conveniently be considered to be particles traveling backward in time. (5) One of the most curious and unreasonable discoveries of quantum mechanics is that certain characteristics of a subatomic particle are not established until they are measured--that is, observed or brought into consciousness; but after they are thus established, the particle somehow revises its history so that further observation reveals it has always been thus; however, if a different measurement is made, the particle was always different.

This last point raises the philosophical ogre that creation doesn't happen until we observe it--even though, once observed, it clearly had to happen at the temporal beginning of the Universe 13+ billion years ago.

So how's this for a resolution of the "Prime Mover" conundrum: the linearity or progression of time is a cultural (or even biologically inbred) illusion; time, in fact, happens all at once; and creation represents the interaction of the realm of consciousness (i.e., observation) with the realm of physical reality? Since consciousness clearly depends on a physical brain with neuronal connections, one could say that neither realm exists until the other makes it so. Which (time being what it is) is continually happening and always fully complete, though not in consciousness.

Why Are We Here (Cosmically, That Is)?

It is mysterious and wonderful to find that when one picks through the dust and shards of nuclear physics, one finds a series of curious coincidences--nigh-miraculous near misses, if you will. From the size and constancy of the incredibly tiny particles and forces that make up the Universe to discoveries about vast interstellar space, it seems terribly unlikely that there should be any such thing as life, and human beings, and the physics and art we have produced.

The easy answer to "Why?" is "That's just God's will." But there are good reasons that is not a very good answer. One is the "First Cause" dilemma: If it's all the way it is because God made it this way, where did God come from? Several years ago I wrote a little poem that goes, "Where is God tonight? If He is wise and holy--as I know He is--then He is in His heaven praying to His God." Attributing the miraculous unlikeliness of the Universe we find ourselves in to mysterious unknown forces and sources merely kicks the can down the road. If we postulate that those forces and sources are "unknowable," that is just kicking the can out of sight. It's not a very satisfying solution, and it's certainly not very scientific; the core of the scientific outlook--which has made such amazing discoveries and wrought such incredible changes in the world we live in--is to keep looking deeper and trying harder to explain things no matter how inaccessible any answers may seem.

Almost as easy (and almost as unscientific) is the Anthropic Principle. It says that if things weren't just right--just exactly the way they are--so that life and humans and scientists could exist, we wouldn't be here looking back and asking the question. The "strong" Anthropic Principle says, so that's WHY it was all designed this way--to produce us. The "weak" Anthropic Principle says, maybe it just happened to come out "right," but if it hadn't, we wouldn't be wondering about it.

Some cosmic theoreticians carry the Weak Anthropic Principle a step further. They say, maybe there are many, many universes with all sorts of different kinds of dust and shards (particles and forces) but this is the one that happened to have the right stuff to produce us, so this is the only one we know about.

Is that about as far as we can go for now? No, not quite. Because nuclear physics has also introduced a curious discovery into the equation. It seems that at the sub-atomic level, things are often not true until we observe them. Think about that. It is a momentous discovery. It is completely counter-intuitive, in other words, it's just not the way things "should" be. But after decades of head-scratching puzzlement and tight, reproducible experiments and observations, we simply know it is, in fact, the way things are. Some of the findings of quantum nuclear physics are devilishly strange, but they have been clearly demonstrated again and again. Two particles that are millions of miles apart can be so entangled that a change in one immediately dictates a change in the other--with no possible time for any signal to pass between them. But worse than that, a particle's characteristics do not become established until someone observes or measures them; but then the particle somehow looks backward in time and dictates that it always was the way it has now become. This seems crazy--this seems wrong--this seems absurd. But experiment after experiment establishes that it is so.

What is observation? What is consciousness? Why are we so special that when we let something into consciousness, it becomes real--it becomes so? This is not the way we thought the world works. It seems there may be an answer somewhere in there to the question, "Why are we here (cosmically, that is)?" but it is a very strange answer indeed.