Some studies on immigrants, legal and illegal:
A recent study on illegal immigrants: "Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S." from the Pew Hispanic Center. I stole this from someone, but I don't recall where I saw it.
A comprehensive 1997 study on immigrants legal and illegal: The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration.
And just for kicks, and dated and extremely immigration-positive study from Cato (yes, you read that right): "Immigration: The Demographic & Economic Facts". It turns out that a lot of libertarians are extremely positive towards immigration, some out of principle and some - well, not so much. I obviously am sympathetic to the ideological arguments in favor of immigration, though. (I realize that immigration is not the same issue as illegal immigration - but illegal immgration happens in part because we are afraid of legal immigration. If immigration limits were loosened we would not presently be having this argument.)
Just in case anyone ever tries to tell you otherwise, it didn't take modern feminism for women to become involved as leaders in modern church ministry (I say modern because their role in the ancient church is not as clear). I am actually not sure how far back it goes, but I knew, of course, that women were on an equal footing (in terms of teaching) among the Quakers from basically the beginning, which was in the Seventeenth Century. So they were more than three centuries ahead of modern feminism. I already knew this, but what occasions this post is a post by Suzanne McCarthy reproducing part of Margaret Fell's 1666 pamphlet Women's Speaking Justified. Regardless of whether the Quakers are right or not, the point is that women in teaching positions in the church is not directly a result of modern feminism. It may have made the practice more acceptable, but it certainly didn't create it. (Although in many of the denominations where women are ordained today, such as the Salvation Army, the practice begain in the middle of the Nineteenth Century - still too early for modern feminism.)
I am firmly convinced that over the course of the next century, probably within the next half-century, freedom of movement (not just for travel, but for immigration, as well) will come to be recognized as as fundamental a right as the right to free speech, the right to assembly, or the right to a free press. Why? For one reason, democracy requires that persons be able to choose their own government. Immigration is a very basic way to do so. But, more importantly, on what grounds will a democracy reject immigrants? If people are to be free, how can we prevent them from choosing their nation? Should we simply tell them that they were unlucky in their birth place, and leave it at that? As uncomfortable as the idea may be economically, in all other ways, we must admit that any person willing to abide by the principles of the land must be allowed in.
And note that when I say "principles of the land," restrictions on immigration are by definition excluded - assuming that we allow that freedom of movement is a fundamental right - since assertions of rights cannot be prohibited even by law, and if they are, they can be disregarded. (This is the political argument anyway - I do not believe one should break the law unless absolutely necessary, and cases where immigration could be interpreted as "necessary" are few, but this does not mean that I believe people should be punished for it either. The violation of a law, and a law itself can both be wrong. Some theories of civil disobedience would doubtless have a different interpretation.)
I think that it is doubly hypocritical for our nation to ever turn away an immigrant, since only a minute fraction of us are not immigrants (within a historic timeframe, of course), and furthermore since we drove out the original inhabitants to build such a nation. If we have benefited from this, on what moral ground will we oppose immigration? The only possible option is to say that that is too long ago (though immigration has not ended, and we were still killing the native populace only a century ago) and that now we must not bring our current citizens to any economic harm. This may or may not be a good argument, but if we come to recognize immigration - as a specific form of freedom of movement - as a fundamental right, the economic condition of our nation can not be used to override that right. Fundamental rights are supposed to trump all else in a liberal democratic system.
Of course, I understand that almost no one today views immigration as a fundamental right. But I think it is a logical extension of current ideas about rights and liberty, and, as I said, I believe it will be the consensus opinion within a few decades. I thus look forward to a day when debates like the one presently raging in Washington will be viewed much the same way we view the past debates about integration.
It has been frequently said that you can prove anything with the Bible, by merely pulling the proper quotations out. We sometimes agree to this intellectually while not fulling considering the force of this fact, I think, or at least I have been guilty of that.
One classic example is the argument about "eternal security." For every passage someone who believes in eternal security can quote (say, "...no one will snatch them out of my hand" in John 10:28) someone who does not can quote one as well (say, Hebrews 6:4-6, or some such). That one doesn't really worry me much (frankly, I am not one who believes that a firm opinion one way or the other on eternal security is anywhere near to affecting my salvation). Sometimes, however, the issue may be more practical, such as women's role in the church. Of course, in both of these examples, both sides will have reasons why the other's interpretation is not the correct one. But that is not relevant to my point, since the way most persons (myself usually included) read Scripture, we might never think twice about these passages if we could not find somewhere else (often in a book by the same author or even in the same book) another passage "contradicting" them. (This problem - lack of awareness, absent apparent contradiction, of interpretice difficulty - should make us think about how we read Scripture, indeed. I do not mean that we merely fail to consider it in the larger textual context, which is what I am mainly getting at, but also that we assume too much straightforwardness in Scripture and read it too recklessly, forgetting the situational context, the genre, and so on. But this is a topic for another time.) While it may be true that one side is consistently misinterpreting the text, the fact of the matter is that in most cases it is not obvious which side is doing so. Or even if it is, it is often not grossly negligent misinterpretation by our present, inadequate, standards. What I am really trying to say is that we must always be careful when using Scripture to support an argument, even if we do not see such contradictions. Which, I emphasize, is not to say anything about the authority or correctness of Scripture, but rather, as usual, about how we must read it, which is to say, on its own terms. (I probably do not need to point out that often, for many Christians, the interpretation and Scripture itself have become so entangled that persons will accuse others of holding "un-Biblical positions" even when the other position is itself argued entirely from Scripture. Which is not to say that no position is ever un-Biblical, merely that not all that are accused of being such are.)
All of this has made me think of something I learned in real analysis (stay with me, here) about infinite series. An infinite series is what most of us would think of as sum of an infinite amount of terms . While that explanation has some mathematical inadequacies, it will do for our present purposes. Anyway, an infinite series may either diverge (that is, continue to grow to infinitely to infinity or shrink to negative infinity) or converge to some finite value. Among series that converge, some converge because their terms become small enough that eventually the series stops growing. Others, the ones we are interested in, converge because some terms are negative and offset the positive terms (if the absolute values of the terms was being added together instead, the series would diverge). Such series are called conditionally convergent. Conditionally convergent series are interesting because the terms must be added together in the proper order. The conditionally convergent series can be rearranged such that it will converge to any value we choose, or to diverge (this is Weierstrass' Theorem). The terms must be added in the correct order to converge to the actual value to which the series converges. Now, a conditionally convergent series by definition converges. What has gone wrong if we add its terms out of order is that we have made a mistake! This says nothing about the series itself, and everything about our treatment of it. A conditionally convergent series is not meant to be added however we feel like.
I find this a wonderful analogy for the danger of assembling an argument out of Scriptural quotations. Just as adding terms out of order can give us any value with an infinite series, assembling passages incorrectly (not in order, but in some other way, like context) can give us any argument, or just about any argument. Which is to say again, we must approach Sripture on its terms, not ours. How we do that is something I think we should continue to worry about, and I suspect I will spend much of my life addressing that very issue.
(I have used the word contradiction above, in quotes, so let me expound a little on it. I do not think that in many cases we have any reason to see a true contradiction in the text. Some of these might be legitimate possibilities for contradiction if we had different theology or none, but some are clearly artifacts of the limitations of language and logic - difficult concepts sometimes require long, shaded expositions, which can be misread. Sometimes, the author is intentionally asserting a paradox. Admittedly, there are some cases that are harder to resolve. Solutions to the apparent conflict between the two geneaologies presented for Jesus, are, for example, as far as I know, "non-trivial." I think such conflicts say less about the robustness of divine truth than they do about how God has chosen to reveal that truth, and I think that they should give us pause. Indeed, that may be entirely the point in some cases.)
Okay, I hate to admit that I first heard this story from Mr. Robertson and company after channel flipping (yes, yes, I know), but this is eminently newsworthy unfortunately. The AP for one has an article (yes, I know that that's a link to Yahoo! news, but I couldn't find another source for the whole article; USA Today has a shorter version) about the prosecution in Afghanistan of a Abdul Rahman, who converted to Christianity 16 years ago. Supposedly, he could receive the death penalty. Disturbing. The ruling will come within two months supposedly.
A Michael Kazin has apparently recently published a biography of William Jennings Bryan. I heard about it from a review by one Russell Fox. The review would pretty much fit right in around here, so it should be a good read, and the book is probably worth it too. Bryan is definitely one of the figures in our history who deserves a second look - a lot of interesting things going on there.
[Update, March 8: This analysis is actually pretty bad; what was I thinking? Most notably, the apparent aggregation of "white" and "hispanic" into "white" screws everything up.]
Lately, masochist that I am, I have been keeping an eye on some of the rhetoric coming out of the racialist camps on the Internet. The first step to defeating an opponent is always understanding the opponent. You have to always make sure not to get sucked in, though. When I saw several times the frequently repeated claim that blacks commit some ridiculous proportion of crime in the United States, a claim that I have seen before but hadn't thought about in a while, it gave me pause. Now, of course, due to certain of my ideological leanings (ones which most conservatives, even arch-conservative backwards ones, should agree with), it doesn't really matter if blacks really did commit crime at a hugely disproportionate rate without any other explanatory factors, since everyone deserves to be treated as an individual. But you know me, I'm not the kind to let that sort of thing fly without ripping it to shreds, so, let me do so.
[Remainder of article]From the New York Times:
New Budget Delays or Cancels Much-Promoted NASA Missions
Ben orignally brought this to my attention and I have been following it since. All or almost all my favorite missions seem to be in jeopardy. That includes missions to look for life on Mars, Europa, and extra-solar planets. The main reason? Does anybody remember that silly "vision for space exploration" Bush promoted during his 2004 campaign for re-election? He directed NASA to return to the Moon and then send people to Mars. Very ambitious and very, VERY expensive, and having very little to do with science, but everything to do with politics. Alas, Bush allocated only a marginal increase in NASA's budget. Most unfortunately, NASA took him seriously (as it must) and now is cutting out the science from its budget. Needless to say scientists (specifically astronomers) are outraged.
Here are some snippets from the NYT article:
Some of the most highly promoted missions on NASA's scientific agenda would be postponed indefinitely or perhaps even canceled under the agency's new budget, despite its administrator's vow to Congress six months ago that not "one thin dime" would be taken from space science to pay for President Bush's plan to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars.
(snip)
The cuts come to $3 billion over the next five years, even as NASA's overall spending grows by 3.2 percent this year, to $16.8 billion.
Among the casualties in the budget, released last month, are efforts to look for habitable planets and perhaps life elsewhere in the galaxy, an investigation of the dark energy that seems to be ripping the universe apart, bringing a sample of Mars back to Earth and exploring for life under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa - as well as numerous smaller programs and individual research projects that astronomers say are the wellsprings of new science and new scientists.
The agency's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, says NASA needs the money to keep the space shuttle fleet aloft, complete the International Space Station and build a new crew exploration vehicle to replace the shuttle.
(snip)
The cuts have alarmed and outraged many scientists, who have long feared that NASA will have to cannibalize its science program to carry out the president's vision of human spaceflight.
The new cuts, they say, will drive young people from the field, ending American domination of space science and perhaps ceding future discoveries to Europe.
"The bottom line: science at NASA is disappearing - fast," said Donald Lamb, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and chairman of a committee on space science for the Association of American Universities.
Representative Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who is chairman of the Science Committee, called the new budget "bad for space science, worse for earth science," adding, "It basically cuts or de-emphasizes every forward-looking, truly futuristic program of the agency to fund operational and development programs to enable us to do what we are already doing or have done before."
(snip)
Astronomers and planetary researchers say space science has provided NASA's brightest and most inspirational moments in recent years: the landing on Saturn's moon Titan, the exploits of the Mars rovers and the stream of cosmic postcards from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Despite Dr. Griffin's assurances, they say that delaying space missions can be a death sentence if there is not money to continue developing technology and to keep teams together until the mission is ready to fly again.
That is the case, said Charles Beichman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with the Terrestrial Planet Finder missions, which are intended to produce images of Earth-like planets around other stars. They are the culmination of a line of missions devoted to hunting for planets around other stars and investigating if they are habitable or already harbor life, a goal, planetary scientists point out, that is explicitly endorsed in Mr. Bush's space vision.
"We're getting ready to fire all the people we've built up," said Dr. Beichman, who is the project scientist for the second of the two spacecraft missions, once scheduled for about 2020. Once those scientists have found other jobs, he said, they are not likely to come back.
(snip)
Much of the concern among scientists is for the fate of smaller projects like the low-budget spacecraft called Explorers. Designed to provide relatively cheap and fast access to space, they are usually developed and managed by university groups. Dr. Lamb referred to them as "the crown jewels in NASA's science program."
In recent years, one such mission, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, produced exquisite baby pictures of the Big Bang, while another, the Swift satellite, has helped solve a 30-year-old mystery, linking distant explosions called gamma-ray bursts to the formation of black holes.
Explorers, Dr. Lamb said, are where graduate students and young professors get their first taste of space science. Until recently, about one mission was launched a year, but under the new plan, there will be none from 2009 to 2012. In a letter to Dr. Cleave last fall, 16 present and former Explorer scientists said, "Such a lengthy suspension would be a devastating blow to the program and the science community."
One author of the letter, Fiona Harrison, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, said she first learned from a news conference that her own Explorer project, an X-ray satellite observatory called NuStar, was being cancelled after several years of development. Dr. Harrison said that she had been invited to reapply in 2008, but that in the meantime she had to tell her graduate student to find another thesis project.
Dr. Harrison said she was thinking of leaving the country or perhaps even the field of astrophysics.
In another move last month, NASA reduced this year's budget for individual research projects by 15 percent, retroactive to last fall, taking money from researchers and their institutions that had already begun work.
(snip)
Many scientists said the roots of their plight lay in the Bush administration's refusal to ask Congress for enough money to carry out the Moon-Mars program, announced with fanfare two years ago. But others said they were partly to blame as well for pursuing an overly ambitious agenda in the face of cold realities like the Columbia shuttle disaster and concern about the mounting federal deficit.
(snip)
"People assume that when Congress votes for something they send extra money," Mr. Mather said. "They don't."
Dr. Griffin and his colleagues, the scientists agree, have tough choices to make, but so far, the space scientists say, the choices have been made in a vacuum, without input from the community most affected, namely them.
Last year NASA dismantled a longstanding network of scientific advisory committees, and while a new network is in the works, it is not yet in place.
Alright, an actual news item for a change (and sans analysis, no less): C-SPAN had on the other day the launch of the National Popular Vote advocating, as you can probably guess, a popular rather than electoral vote for choosing the president. It sounds like they want to rely on a state-based approach (indeed, the subtitle of their proposal is "A State-Based Plan For Electing The President By National Popular Vote") rather than necessarily push for a constitutional amendment. They have a book available on their site outlining their plan.
I don't really know the background on this, and at the moment I am not especially interested in doing research on it, though I don't rule out the possibility. I thought I should mention it though, since I have long advocated a popular vote. If someone could get an initiative to go through, I would almost certainly be all for it. (I admit I have seen some positive analysis of the current system, but I don't find it sufficiently compelling.)
I think, unfortunately, that the time has come for me to undertake a more rigorous study of the present economic and social situation in Europe. I tire of hearing (and ocassionally giving) hand-waving arguments for and against the Euroean economic models; I want to see the economic numbers, the opinion surveys, the suicide rates, whatever. I want to know what's really going on over there. We've all read articles about the problems with health care in the U.K. - what about health care in, say, Belgium? Is there any real advantage to doing things the European (nice catch-all, eh?) way? Are the economic costs really worth it? Time to roll over some new rocks. I know what I expect to find, but, will I find it, and if I do, can I convince someone else? Now, if I can just invent enough time to do all of this in...
I finally found a term I like for anabaptists and Quakers: Black hat Christianity. It's cute, succint, and, of course, ironic.
Proverbs 29:7: "The righteous person cares for the legal rights of the poor; the wicked does not understand such knowledge" (NET, copyright 1996-2006 Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C).
I know that my biases influence me to interpret that certain ways. I also know pulling random verses out of Proverbs is dangerous (not that you have to worry about context as much there, but some proverbs might be misunderstood all the same, it seems). But I can't think this one is not clear.
Let me explain how I interpret this in a political context. It appears, to me, that our laws are structured for the most part around the rights of the rich (whether individuals or corporations). This is almost undisputed. We don't want to take their money, or cost them too much money from lawsuits, or prevent them charging whatever price they want on products, however essential. Meanwhile, some persons are not paid enough to live on (even in the United States), are charged more than they could ever afford for critical products that could be sold for a lower margin, are required to work under terrible conditions, or are treated as dispensable temporary labor (without being told this). This is part of the reason I am, in my words, "anti-corporate" - which I don't take to mean corporations are automatically evil, but that I think that many of the mega-corporations in this nation (though, technically, many of them are not in this nation, but rather international) should be kept on a shorter leash. Should we be more concerned about the rights of those who have no recourse because of their economic situation or the rights of some entity with, quite literally, no soul? Obviously, large multi-national corporations provide many useful services, but I don't think we should therefore let them do whatever they feel like.
I almost got by with not commenting on certain controversial cartoons, but a letter in Time finally got me. I hope I don't offend anyone. I'm doing the best I can, and don't take this personally, I just felt moved to offer what I hope is helpful advice.
Mir Shokvat Ahmad, of Leeds, England, self-described moderate Muslim, "integrated into the Western world," had a letter printed in the most recent edition of Time. The letter says, in part:
...The Muslim world has unfortunately been hijacked by its real enemies, Islamic terrorists. While moderate Muslims are trying to find their voice and salvage their religion, the Western media help the radicals by making fun of everything that's precious to a common Muslim.
Joe Carter, whom, I never agree with on anything, did write an interesting piece about the Danish cartoons. You can read it for yourself, but he basically argued that, while the violent protesters were in the wrong, and that that was a different level of wrong than drawing offensive cartoons, that both were still at some level wrong. He brought up the language of - remember this word? - responsibftility - a word oen mentioned in connection with free speech. It's a truism that people looking for a fight will find it, and it seem that the editors of Jyllands-Posten unfortunately found their fight.
This whole episode has highlighted for me the difference between peacemakers and self-righteous warriors. Some people are trying to prevent an all out war between radical elements in the Middle East and... well, everyone else. Others (I don't mean anyone directly responsible for the cartoons - I am thinking now of the reaction elsewhere in Europe and the United States) seem to be looking for such a fight, thinking that ultimately they will prevail (and they are probably right). But how much blood will flow on the way? They want a bloodbath, which they will blame on the Muslims, as if that were possible. And, indeed, people who commit violence will be guilty. But if you knew in advance that your speech would be answered violently, are you not culpable as well? Most certainly, you are.
In short, sure, in the U.S. the Danish cartoonists and editors would certainly have had the right to draw and publish the cartoons (we see worse things all the time here, in fact). That doesn't mean we should encourage them, though. In this nation, neo-Nazis have the right to write, speak publicly, and protest. That doesn't mean we should encourage them. What this Danish paper printed was not vile in the same degree as what "racialist" groups in this nation print, but much of it was still intentionally provacative. Unsurprisingly, provocation worked. It angers me that some people - I mean here certain parties in the Middle East - would take this opportunity to lie (I assume the false cartoons were spread intentionally, though I could be wrong), to provoke, and to incite violence, but I will not as a result of that anger advocate making the situation worse by using the same tactics back.
Proverbs 29:8 says, "Mockers stir up a city, but wise men turn away anger" (WEB). I admit to some prooftexting there, but there are many examples in the Old Testament of the dangers of unrestrained speech.
I understand that many in our nation have wanted to stand up for free speech. It is certainly one of the most important freedoms we have. So I understand that some people have a different opinion on this. I just encourage us all to be wise, and not give in to heated speech. To quote an even more famous passage from Proverbs, "A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger" (Proverbs 15:1, WEB).
(Incidentally, with somewhere around 1 billion Muslims in the world, if Islam really lent itself to the rate of radicalization and violence that some people claim that it did, we should all have been dead a long time ago.)
