America in Chains

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The Republicans, with the help of the Orwellian Frank Luntz, are fond of renaming things their rich donors dislike to make them sound bad enough for their poorer voters to oppose. So, the estate tax became the death tax, though the orphan tax would have been even better. Healthcare reform became a government takeover, and now bringing your family with you when you move is chain migration.

President Trump, who never met a lie he wouldn’t tell, denounced chain migration in his State of the Union, saying “a single migrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives. Under our plan, we focus on the immediate family by limiting sponsorship to spouses and minor children.”

The “unlimited” claim is a complete falsehood, and what “our plan” would dictate is essentially what current law permits, though we do presently allow the spouses of married children to be considered as well as fiancées of citizens.

Then there’s the issue of restricting immigrants to people who score 30 more on a proposed point system which takes into account 1: Age (26-30 preferred, and worth ten points, over 50, zero), 2: English language proficiency, 3: Education (13 points for a Ph.D. in STEM fields, college graduate, 6), 4: Income (maximum pts. 13, for 300% of median income or more ), 5: Extraordinary achievement (25 pts. for a Nobel Prize, 15 pts. Olympic Medal), and 6: Investment (12 pts. for investing $1.8 million in American enterprises for three or more years).

So, if you are an under thirty, English-speaking, millionaire, PH.D. winner of the Nobel Prize whose income is 3 times $53,000 or $159,000, come on down. Ruth Marcus has wittily pointed out that Trump himself would have trouble passing this test, as would many of his voters. Surely, Frank Luntz’s chain-migrating grandfather would have failed, as would Trump’s grandfather Friedrich Drumpf. He emigrated illegally at 16, dodging the German draft, and made the beginnings of his fortune in the Alaska gold rush where he appears to have run a restaurant/hotel/brothel.

Trump’s system would allow more H2B visas to be issued for “seasonal, non-agricultural work in the US,” perhaps because his properties like Mar-A-Lago employ such persons who can be paid less than Americans and given no benefits. Whereas, the H1B visas that Silicon Valley relies on for person with specialized skills might not be treated so favorably. As usual, the kind of immigrants you want to admit are the kind you need in your business. The kind you don’t want are the kind who might do your job for less. Or vote for the other party.

Chain migration is nothing new, of course. James Boswell tells of relatives of 18th century Scots weeping and wailing as they watched their kin sail away to America, but a year or two later they waved good-bye to the next boatload without batting an eye since it seemed likely they would soon follow and be reunited on the other side of the Atlantic.

When the English passed laws discriminating against sects other than the Church of England, whole congregations and their ministers emigrated together. Many were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians whose skills, according to one of them, James Webb, were “fight, drink, sing, pray.” This would not have earned them 30 points on the Trump test, but it didn’t stop them from winning the Revolution in the South at battles like King’s Mountain, Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse.

Today, of course, it makes sense to impose limits on the numbers admitted each year and to require a slightly different skillset than a century ago, education especially. But Trump’s plan calls for cutting legal immigrants a year in half. Surely our aging population and low birth rate suggests more skilled taxpayers would be an economically useful import.

Finally, we forget our roots at our peril. Restrictions on immigration in the past have focused less on numbers than on undesirables – first the Scotch-Irish, then the Germans, the Irish, Jews, Catholics, swarthy persons from southern Europe, and Asian were all found inferior. Trump seems to be following in this unfortunate tradition of racial and ethnic bias with his antipathy for Hispanics and Muslims, his recent love of Norwegians.

Once the Republican Party was the party of business and entrepreneurial zeal. If it still wants to claim that distinction, it ought to also be the party of immigration. A study by the Center for Entrepreneurship found that 216 of the Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Du Pont, Bell, Carnegie, Proctor and Gamble were immigrants. Walt Disney, Ford and Edison were the sons of immigrants.

You may say that was then, this is now. But Elon Musk, Sergey Brin of Google, and Jerry Yang of Yahoo are immigrants as was Intel’s Andy Grove. Amazon and Apple’s founders are children of immigrants. The men who made the companies that make American great, came not only from Trump’s preferred northern European countries, but from Syria, Cuba, Russia, Iran, South Africa, Brazil, Poland, Greece, Zambia, Turkey, Hong Kong, Taiwan and so on.

It is worth recalling that those willing to dare migrating are often not running to something better, but fleeing from something worse. And when they came here seeking a better life for themselves, they often helped make a better life for all of us. If we start turning strivers away, they will migrate elsewhere for opportunity, and make our competitors great. This doesn’t seem like a hard choice. For most of American history, it wasn’t. The lady in the harbor, “mother of exiles,” lifted her light by the golden door. And it made us what we became.

But the Republicans seem intent on pleasing their isolationist, nativist base. That may win some votes, but it also risks turning the GOP into a 21st Century version of the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party. It’s narrow vision of America was rejected in favor of admitting the men and women who, by the sweat of their brows, fire of their ambition and power of their brains, turned the 19th century into the Gilded Age, and America into the largest economy on earth.

That Sinking Feeling

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Four months late, the Congress has produced a budget, something most families, businesses and countries can mange without Sturm und Drang. But in Washington, it counts as a titanic achievement.

Unfortunately, the Titanic in this case is the ship, and the iceberg is the looming debt. Once it was considered almost sinful to run whopping budget deficits year after year since a most unpleasant collision with reality would inevitably arrive.

The last time we amassed a national debt of the present proportions was during World War II, an emergency that justified extreme measures. The postwar boom erased it, though defense spending remained high and social programs increased.

Nevertheless, a generation that remembered the Great Depression acted responsibly under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Until the so-called Reagan Revolution. It achieved one revolutionary change by falling for the siren song of supply side or voodoo economics. It promulgated the fantasy that cutting tax revenues would so juice the economy that tax revenues would increase. Voila, the free lunch.

It never worked, of course. Republican administrations began to run up huge deficits leaving the next Democratic incumbent to clean up the debris. Under Clinton, annual deficits were briefly eliminated and an actual surplus achieved, only to have W spend trillions on war and unfunded entitlements.

Then, Dick Cheney famously said, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” But they did. They left Obama with a sea of red Ink and a financial collapse second only to the Great Depression. Now, under Trump, centrist deficit hawks of both parties like Bob Kerry, Paul Tsongas, Mitt Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, Pete Domenici, Prescott Bush, Warren Rudman, Russell Long, Pete Peterson, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, have become as extinct as the dodo.

We are left with Tea Party libertarians like Rand Paul who want to eliminate the deficit by eliminating almost all that government does. This is clearly a non-starter. At the other extreme are social democrats who favor a lot more social spending and a lot more taxation. Another politically impossibly hard sell. Unfortunately, we are left with a majority of elected cowards or trimmers who pay lip service to fiscal austerity while letting the bon temps rouler.

So, a Republican Congress that bewails a national debt of $20 trillion, conservatively calculated, has just agreed to increase it by several trillion more over the next few years. The huge tax cut, 80% of which goes to corporations and the already rich, will add another $1.5 to $2 trillion to our indebtedness.

On top of that we will now borrow almost another half trillion to spend on the military, on domestic spending, childcare, opioid treatment, veterans programs, disaster relief and the like. Worthy investments, perhaps, but what will be cut to pay for them? Nothing. What taxes will be raised to pay for them? None. And on top of this Trump wants to borrow another trillion or more for infrastructure.

All of this has produced a fiscal 2018 budget that projects a $1 trillion deficit. And next year the same, and, if no one comes to their senses, forever. But nothing lasts forever. The iceberg of debt gets bigger and bigger. The collision comes closer and closer.

Yet those at the helm of the Titanic do nothing to alter course. Why? It would be painful and unpopular. It’s more fun to hang around the ship’s casino and gamble away the future of the passengers in steerage than to chart a safer course.

Giving away things by simply saying, “Charge it,” is popular. Paying bills is a drag. Why worry? The music will never stop. The ship of state sail on. If trouble is ahead, it won’t come until the crew of perpetrators has abandoned ship, leaving the rest of us without a lifeboat.

But we elected the crew because they promised a free ride. Alas, it doesn’t work that way. We should have listened to an occasional pessimist rather than all the happy talk. Thomas Hardy, perhaps, He said of the Titanic in “The Convergence of the Twain,”

…as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace and hue
In shadowy silent distance, the Iceberg too.

Preserve, Protect, and Defend

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One of my readers, a small, select company, urges me to let my inner conservative out of the closet. Okay, I’m game. But first, a big, fat caveat. Most Americans aren’t ideological and don’t even vote. When then do, many are Republican or Democrat only because the ballot offers no other choice.

In fact, even self-styled conservatives or progressives are self-interested first and foremost. They favor the pols that pander to their preconceptions or promise them something they covert — food stamps, tax cuts, protection from threats — real and imagined, better roads or schools, fewer of the kinds of people they dislike — illegal aliens, the minority du jour, Wall Street crooks, polluters.

They are pragmatic, not principled partisans. They are also inconsistent. The same people who abhor government restrictions on their guns may demand government regulation of their neighbors sexual lives, and visa versa. Are they big government liberals of small government libertarians? It depends on the issue.

So, am I conservative? Sometimes. I believe in the rule of law, especially the Constitution. I believe we should strive to provide what is carved on the Supreme Court’s frieze, “Equal Justice Under Law.” The scales shouldn’t be tilted to favor those with money, power, or a popular cause, nor against those who are minorities or poorly represented or unpopular.

I believe in a social safety net and a strong defense, but I also believe we should be taxed sufficiently to pay for the amenities the public desires, not sink the country into debt year after year. Conservatives used to believe that, but now a Thelma and Louise pact to drive off the fiscal cliff together afflicts both parties.

I believe we occupy a small, fragile planet and have nowhere else to hide if we ruin it. Therefore we had better conserve it. We’re mayflies who live a brief hour, but rather that eat, drink and be merry, we have a duty to the generations who follow us not to poison the earth or fritter away their inheritance with selfish actions and profligate living. Is that conservative enough?

I believe in the Bill of Rights and find the current President especially repulsive because he clearly does not. We all have free speech rights, not just him. It is not treason to fail to applaud his every utterance. That’s straight out of the Nuremberg rallies, the Moscow May Day parades of the 1950s or today’s North Korea. So is denouncing a free press as an enemy of the people. So is treating the armed forces of the United States as a personal plaything, providing parades as a backdrop for the Dear Leader.

I believe Congress is responsible for declaring war, not a man with a big button, and it should jealously guard its Article I prerogatives, not cede them to the executive branch. I believe the government should protect its citizens, but the Constitution also protects the citizens from their own government. (See Amendments I-XI, XIV-XV, XIX, XXIV in particular.)

And I believe any attempts to infringe or deny voting rights is deeply Un-American — from gerrymandering to poll taxes to bogus literacy tests to efforts to suppress voting or turnout for partisan advantage. I also believe Citizens United was wrongly decided. Elections should not be for sale to the highest bidder. In Russia the oligarchs answer to Putin. Increasingly, our elected representatives answer to the oligarchs. This is neither liberal nor conservative nor democratic. At best, it is the return of a Tory aristocracy, at worst rule of the serfs by feudal barons.

And, I believe Russian attempts to tilt the 2016 election was an act of war, must be thoroughly investigated and any future attempts guarded against by whatever means necessary. And if Americans collaborated in such an effort, we really are talking about something approaching treason. Any attempt to cover up what happened, failure to vigorously root the truth or to take steps to prevent a recurrence is not the act of a conservative, but of a radical, and an enemy of the state and the institutions upon which it is founded.

I could go on, but I will close by saying I believe we are meant to be a society of laws, not men. In our media-saturated, interconnected world, politics has become more and more a species of show business instead of a sober attempt to do the people’s business with probity, discretion and impartiality.

I end with a quaint reminder of the kind of thoughtfulness with which this Republic began. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, there was much debate about the presidency. Should we have a king? Trump would have liked that. He’s a “l’état, c’est moi” kind of guy. But the attendees put the kibosh on any imperial or dynastic nonsense.

Should the president rule for life? Hamilton wanted a long term because he feared the mischief that might come from a half dozen former presidents “wandering among the people like discontented ghosts…” Others thought the chief magistrate might feel degraded by leaving high office to become just another citizen.

Obviously they were imagining a former president to be equivalent to a deposed monarch. Ben Franklin, a pure, self-made, product of America, set them straight by saying such thinking was “contrary to republican principles.”

“In free governments, the rulers are the servants (public servants, in fact) and the people their superiors and sovereigns. For the former therefore to return among the latter is not to degrade, but to promote them.” That is, the people are the rulers here, or are supposed to be, and those they elect are meant to serve them. And when they fail to satisfy, they should be dismissed.

Someone, perhaps General Kelly, should take away Trump’s tweet button and read him a bedtime story each night. He could start with “Miracle at Philadelphia,” a fine narrative of that summer of 1787, and go on to “The Federalist Papers,” and Madison’s “Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention.”

And since Trump desires something French to amuse himself, instead of a parade he might try one of the best books ever written on our system, Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” In these he might learn to honor his conservative oath, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”