The immorality of Trumpist immigration enforcement

I've suggested before that Trumpist immigration enforcement might be an act of injustice far worse than the offense of illegal immigration. We have two more examples this week of why it might be so.

First, we have the story of Jorge Garcia, a Detroit man being deported after 30 years in the United States. He was brought to the United States when he was 10; his deportation separates him from his wife and two children, all of them U.S. citizens. Please, read his story.

 Second, we have this atrocity:

US border patrol agents are routinely sabotaging water supplies left for migrants in the Arizona desert, condemning them to death, humanitarian groups have said. Travellers attempting to cross into the US from Mexico regularly die of dehydration, as well as exposure to extreme heat or cold, so aid groups leave water bottles and emergency stocks such as blankets at points throughout the Sonoran desert. A video released by the groups showed border patrol agents kicking over water bottles and pouring away their contents. A statement from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said it was aware of the footage and that it was filmed around six years ago.

In the first case, a family is destroyed and disrupted — no doubt causing ripple effects in the community — because a man was born on one side of the border but, through circumstances not of his making, lived on this side of the border. As best I can tell, his actual presence in the country was doing nobody harm. Which means the greater harm is done by deporting him.

In the second case, people are being condemned to death and suffering to thwart the possibility of them being on the wrong side of the line.
 

 My friends in favor of immigration restrictions believe that a country has a right to make rules about who gets to come in and who doesn't. They are correct. But that doesn't make these kinds of enforcement actions moral. We're condemning people to death for, in essence, not following bureaucratic rules. We're destroying families whose only offense was actually committed by an older generation — unless, of course, you want to start making the case that 10-year-olds are in control of where older relatives take them.

 That is wrong. It is a sin. It is a sin being carried out in our name.

Henry Olsen's conservative lesson that liberals should hear

I've made little secret of my disdain for the Trump-loving website American Greatness. Part of this, I guess, is personal: I know a couple of the people who run the site and, until about a year ago, thought that though they were conservative, they'd still avoid Trumpian nonsense. That was wrong. I'm still working that out.

But it's also the case that I think 99 percent of what happens at AmGreatness is mean-spirited and unreflective, so sure of itself and its own rightness, yet small in soul and generosity. "Greatness" seems to be defined almost as its inverse. I'm not a conservative, but I don't think that has to define conservatism or my friends. Yet, for the moment, it does.

One other problem: The central conceit of American Greatness, to my mind, is that "saving America" means an end to politics. Progressives are always plotting to destroy the country — as are NeverTrump conservatives and Mitch McConnell, apparently. And in a way, this makes sense: The surest route for people to back a clear charlatan like Donald Trump is to convince oneself that America is perpetually on the brink. One outcome of this: Writers at the sight veer, from time to time, into pondering how to make liberal criticism of Donald Trump punishable by law. In any case, the language of the typical AmGreatness article is one of preparing for Civil War.

AmGreatness also seems unable to define America in ways that include people of color to any significant degree.

An exception to all of this is the writings of Henry Olsen. He's a a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative. But his appearance at the site gives me hope, because he's counseling his Trump-loving fellows to, uh, maybe ease up on the war talk. Here's an excerpt from his latest that I think my left-of-center friends could well afford to hear:

There are many Americans who do not see our politics as a fight between good and evil. Their votes will determine which side, progressives or conservatives, wins the conflict. If we are in a Flight 93 moment, if we do need to fight to preserve American ideals, then it behooves conservatives to try to attract those people’s votes rather than to denigrate them as “squishes” or as other sorts of undesirables whose company we deign to keep. That requires more than shouting our own principles more loudly and more clearly. It means speaking in such a way that can appeal to these voters and invite them to be a part of our coalition. 

That does not mean abandoning principle. It does mean understanding how to talk with and attract people who do not necessarily share your core premises. That in turn requires some degree of toleration, some degree of kindness, some degree of inclusion. Is your neighbor who thinks abortion ought to be legal in the first trimester but not thereafter, your enemy or a potential ally? Is your co-worker who thinks everyone should have decent health coverage but doesn’t think the government should run the health care system a squish or a potential convert? These are the questions I want us to ask and answer, as I think these are the questions that answering can help determine victory or defeat.

Emphasis added. Olsen's clearly speaking to conservatives here, but again, liberals might consider what he says here.

Since the moment Donald Trump won, the sense I've heard from my lefty friends regarding anybody who voted for him boils down to: "Fuck 'em."  I get the impulse, but ultimately think it's wrong-headed. Why? Well, for one thing, we share a country with these folks: If we're not going to actually go to war with them, we need to figure out how to live with them. But also: We live in a democratic republic. To take power back means winning elections. That means it behooves liberals to try to attract those people’s votes rather than to denigrate them as “deplorables,” or writing them off altogether.

That does not mean abandoning principle. It really does not mean silently nodding along when your neighbor says racist things, in hopes you can still grab their vote. But as Olsen says: It does mean understanding how to talk with and attract people who do not necessarily share your core premises. That in turn requires some degree of toleration, some degree of kindness, some degree of inclusion.

I'd rather attempt that than live in a country where roughly half of us would be happy, more or less, to see the other half silenced — or even die. The task of winning minds is hard. Very hard. But it's the worthy way. I'm glad somebody on the Trumpist side seems to think so, too.

The 'other' Ferguson effect

Jesse Singal at NYMag says the murder rate is going up, for whites and blacks, for different reasons. And the researcher he talks to endorses a "Ferguson effect," but different from how it's usually defined. There's a crisis of police legitimacy that is enabling the bad guys.

The Ferguson effect is a thoroughly politicized concept at this point, because it contains an implicit rebuke of the protests that exploded in the wakes of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and other young black boys and men who have been unjustly killed by police. The thinking goes that all those angry, loud protesters are making it harder for police to do their jobs. 

But there’s another way of looking at this: It could be the case that yes, deteriorating relationships between communities and the police are helping drive the increased homicide rate, but that things go in the other direction. That is, some communities have come to view the police with such profound anger and fear that their members are less likely to seek out the assistance of law enforcement, and this is making it easier for people to get away with murder.

So how do we know which Ferguson effect might be causing the spike in murders?

A rather ingenious study lead-authored by Matthew Desmond, a MacArthur-winning sociologist at Harvard (and the author of the truly excellent 2016 book Evicted), lends some solid support to this hypothesis. As I explained in a study write-up, Desmond and his colleagues obtained detailed emergency-call data from the city of Milwaukee, and showed that after a horrific, high-profile event in which a group of police brutally assaulted a young black man, 911 calls appeared to be significantly depressed in black neighborhoods relative to what Desmond and his colleagues’ number-crunching suggests they should have been.

We need for the police to be seen as legitimate enforcers of law in the communities where they serve. It matters. But that legitimacy earned, and easily forfeit.

The other takeaway: White on white crime is a BIG driver of the rising murder rate.

Rosenfeld and his co-authors explain that increases in the white homicide and homicide-victimization rates are a big part of the story here — “the growth in the non-Hispanic white victimization rate was greater than in any year since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack.” In fact, according to some calculations Rosenfeld ran for me, the increase in the white murder rate drove a large chunk of the overall increase. “If white homicides had not increased from 2014 to 2016, the 2016 homicide rate would have dropped from 5.3 per 100,000 population [in 2016] to 4.8 per 100,000, 9.4% lower [than the actual rate],” he said in an email, meaning the overall trend would look quite different and less worrying.

It's hard to avoid the thought we're entering an ugly era.

No, the New York Times isn't normalizing Nazis.

Yes, this story could be better — for it to have some meaning, we'd get some insight as to why Tony Hovater became a Holocaust-denying Nazi sympathizer. But the critics go further, saying that the story "normalizes" Nazis.

I dunno. Not sure how you can read this and think "gosh, that's normal":

Or this:

It's true, the story doesn't spend a lot of time screaming "this is bad!" But I suspect that's because the NYT editors know their audience probably doesn't include a lot of Nazi sympathizers, or even many folks who are Nazi agnostic.

When bad cops get fired and rehired

Great Washington Post piece about Gene Gibbons, a lawyer with remarkable success in getting bad cops rehired by the same police departments that deemed them unfit for duty. The un-shocking thing? He's from Philadelphia. His origin story is a little bit unexpected, though.

For Gibbons, an affable, barrel-chested man, the path to becoming an advocate for embattled police officers began when he was a teen growing up outside Philadelphia in the early 1980s. 

Then 16, Gibbons was driving home in the family station wagon when a Philadelphia police officer pulled him over. Gibbons sat quietly while the officer ran his license. When he returned, the boy asked the officer why he had been stopped. Gibbons said the officer abruptly punched him in the face and told him to go home.

“I was stewing mad,” he said. “The police had tremendous power.”

So, naturally, he made a career of ... enabling those abuses of power. Huh.

Anyway, there are lots of examples in the story of officers who had long documented patterns of bad behavior who got their jobs back anyway. Important thing to note: The examples are from Florida, which is renowned for its "sunshine" laws. In most states, police unions have persuaded legislatures to close such records to the public, making it very difficult for the public to know about problems in their local department. Police, who keep the rest of us accountable to the law, are practically immune to any such accountability themselves.

The book I'm most thankful for in 2017

Buzzfeed checks in with writers to find out which books they're most thankful for.

First, I'm thankful to be back in the book-reading business in a serious way. I had a nasal reconstruction surgery this year that largely alleviated some sleep deprivation issued I'd had in recent years. I'm able to concentrate on an enjoy long-form reading again.

Second: The book I'm thankful for this year is Alan Jacobs' "How to Think."

Here's what I wrote on Facebook after completing it:

Finished reading Alan Jacobs' "How to Think" after two days. It's that good (and also that slim - about 160 pages). I want to sit with it a couple of days before writing about it more, but it gets at some thoughts I've had since the Trump Election and how I've tried - with varying degrees of success (and by "varying," I mean outright failure at times) - not to write off people with whom I have disagreements. 

Mostly it boils down to: They are human. With different journeys than I have. If I had made their journey, maybe I'd think the way they think. And having made my own journey, I might be blind sometimes - almost assuredly am - to errors in my own thinking. 

This doesn't mean I'm wrong or my Trump Voter friends are right, nor does it mean there is no truth to strive for - no right or wrong - but it does mean we are occasionally limited in our capacity to know it. And knowing those limits, it's good open our ears to people who think differently: We may never change our minds about anything, but to be somewhat open to the possibility is to be alive and self-aware and striving to be bigger and better than you are. 

That's my hope, anyway.

I'm currently reading Stephen L. Carter's "Civility." It shares some themes with Jacobs' book. I'll share more in the near future.

Why are Dems opposed to Trump's tax reform bill?

The Weekly Standard seems genuinely mystified.

Bringing U.S. corporate taxation in line with that of our global peers will spur the sort of broad-based growth that the Obama administration’s central planners could never achieve and that will benefit middle-income families quite as much as “the wealthy.” 

Ahem.

The first question was straightforward. Would they agree that if the US passed a tax bill “similar to those currently moving through the House and Senate,” GDP would be “substantially higher a decade from now”? Of the 42 economists polled, only one thought the Republican bill would boost the economy. The plurality said it wouldn’t, and the remainder were uncertain or didn’t answer.

Back to the Standard:

But the House bill, at least, contains some needed simplification: It cuts the number of brackets from seven to four, abolishes the estate tax, and gets rid of arbitrary breaks for such things as medical expenses, student-loan interest, and rehabilitating a historic home.

So. The promise of economic growth seems like a promise that might not materialize for the middle class or anybody else — but the loss of "arbitrary breaks" that help the middle class, for medical expenses and student loan interest — are pretty clear. The payoff may not come, but the sacrifice definitely will. This isn't that confusing.