Monthly Archives: July 2017

The other night, I was watching Mel Brooks' hilariously funny Blazing Saddles, possibly the most politically incorrect movie ever made. The n-word is used more often in the opening scenes than Donald Trump says "trust me" in a week.

Yet somehow, it isn't really offensive, because the movie is poking fun at us and our weaknesses as a society.

Every sexist and racist stereotype is gleefully invoked, parodied and thereby, effectively demolished.

When it was over, I suddenly realized something: Sadly, that movie could never be made today. Not because we are more enlightened, but because we no longer are self-confident enough as a people and a nation to laugh at ourselves.

Not that everything was peachy when Blazing Saddles was being made. The film was released when the country was neck-deep in the Watergate scandal. Inflation was rising. America's participation in the Vietnam War had ended just a year earlier, and we all knew it was a horrible failure.

Yet we still believed in the idea of America, that this was the best nation in the world. The next year, when the tottering corpse of South Vietnam finally collapsed, we took in thousands of refugees. We knew immigrants had made this nation great.

Not anymore.

Flash forward four decades, to a nation whose president won his office in large part by stirring up everything in the dark recesses of the American soul. That meant, first of all, attacking immigrants and blaming them for society's ills.

Donald Trump ran the nastiest anti-immigrant campaign this nation has seen since the Know Nothing movement back before the Civil War. He managed to make millions feel that Muslims were terrorists and Mexicans drug dealers and rapists.

What's more, he made people feel that immigrants, legal as well as illegal, were taking their jobs, and vowed to crack down on immigration and get Americans their jobs back.

Enough people in the right places believed him to put him in the White House. Yes, we will be sorting out and dealing with the ramifications of that for the rest of our lives.

We can, as a result, only hope that the babies being born this year will someday live in a United States of America with a government they can be proud of.

But that's not the topic today. Immigration is.

What I fear is that people will still believe Trump's lies about immigrants and immigration even after he is discredited and disgraced, is hauled out of office, is defeated, dies, or decides to leave of his own accord. So now, here's the truth:

Immigrants are right now perhaps more than ever the best thing to happen to Michigan.

They create more jobs than native-born Americans. They improve communities, start businesses, and invent things needed to make us economically competitive again.

That's been clear to everyone who worked with immigrant communities for a long time. But now, we have documented proof of that. Earlier this month, the Michigan Economic Center, a non-profit based in Ann Arbor, released a carefully researched study on immigration's impact on this state.

The study, "Michigan: We Are All Migrants Here," conclusively shows that we would be in a lot worse shape without the immigration we've had in recent years.

John Austin, who was until January president of the State Board of Education, founded the center and is a main author of the study. "Michigan relies on legal immigrants to grow our economy, and we literally cannot afford policies that discourage them from coming, or that chase away those who are here," he says.

The study, which Austin did in collaboration with former State Rep. Steve Tobocman's group Global Detroit, effectively exposes many myths about immigrants as blatant lies.

Far from being a drain on Michigan, immigrants are essential to its economy. Detroit hasn't stopped losing people in the last few years, but the outflow has slowed dramatically.

This is, however, almost entirely due to immigrants. Detroit's immigrant population grew by 13 percent between 2010 and 2014; the native-born kept heading for the exits.

Statewide, the picture was much the same; Michigan's foreign-born population has grown nearly 25 percent since 2002 which more than accounts for what growth there's been.

That doesn't mean they are taking over. Far from it; Michigan has the smallest percentage of its population born outside this country of any state except Louisiana.

That's only 650,000 people, or just over six percent. But as Austin likes to say, economically they "punch above their weight." About 31,000 are self-emplyed, and they employ some 150,000 people.

Immigrants are, the study says, responsible for nearly all the net new growth in mid-sized, "Main Street" businesses.

They aren't just running hotels and hiring counter help; they are creating the economy of the future. Immigrants are behind 25 percent of the state's high-tech startups.

They are the owners or co-owners of more than three-quarters of the patents issued to the state's top research universities. They are, on average, better educated than the native-born, especially in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) areas and jobs.

They are, in short, Detroit and Michigan's economic future if we are to have one. Gov. Rick Snyder can be a bumbler, but he understood that much; to his credit, he tried (unsuccessfully) in 2014 to get Washington to give Michigan 50,000 extra visas for skilled or highly educated immigrants.

To be sure, some immigrants aren't well-educated; one of the curious findings of the study was that while immigrants on average have more education than the native born, a higher percentage of them have less than a high school degree.

But the study notes that "research strongly indicates ... that far from being an economic drain, these immigrants are important to many Michigan industries," because they are willing to do the jobs those born here are seldom willing to do.

Few Michigan immigrants are undocumented, aka "illegal." But that doesn't mean Trump's persecutions don't have an effect. Austin told me that after dozens of Chaldeans were rounded up and arrested in the Detroit suburbs last month, that "sent a chilling message to Michigan's legal immigrants, current and future: You are not welcome here."

Trump's anti-immigrant policies are, in fact, more damaging to Michigan than most places. What the Michigan Economic Center study recommends is that the politicians collaborate with business leaders to make this the most welcoming state in the nation.

Otherwise, we may get to see immigrants fleeing or shunning our state and what prosperity we have with them.

What about terrorism?

Those wanting to severely limit immigration, especially from the Middle East, often parrot fears about Islamic terrorism. This, to be sure, deserves consideration, but the government has been doing rigorous screening since 9/11, long before Trump arrived.

Except for that event, virtually all of those committing terrorist acts in this country have been Americans born here.

Some have been Muslim, or pretended to be, but the worst domestic terrorist attack by far, apart from 9/11, was the Oklahoma City bombing, carried off by those two good old Christian boys, Timothy McVeigh and the mauler from Michigan's thumb, Terry Nichols.

And whether Trump fears assassination isn't known, but he might be interested to know that most of our famous assassins or would-be assassins Lee Harvey Oswald, Arthur Bremer, Mark David Chapman, Sirhan Sirhan, John Hinckley were young, white, and mostly Christian men.

What about leaving the job-creating immigrants alone, and deporting all the native-born white male 20-somethings instead? Frankly, that might make more sense.

See the original post:
Why immigrants are the best thing to happen to Michigan - Detroit Metro Times

O.J. is free again.

As a society we seem to tolerate and even encourage bad behavior. Our major institutions, such as public schools and government, do not do a very effective job of using rewards to incentivize good behavior and punishments to dis-incentivize bad behavior.

We can debate the relative merits of using rewards and punishments as tools to influence conduct, whether in parenting, the justice system, or other areas of human endeavor. Rewards today are handed out indiscriminately, while punishments tend to be scarce.

To the extent that carrots and sticks are employed as behavior modification techniques, the former are much more in vogue than the latter, as positive reinforcement is viewed as far superior to negative sanctions. From Dr. Spock disciples to character education gurus to penologists, experts on human behavior seem punishment-averse.

The no-spanking philosophy of child-rearing has morphed into a no-consequences culture generally. There is the self-esteem driven trophy syndrome in school and little league sports that rewards the slightest accomplishment. The reluctance to penalize poor performance extends now to college, where the customer is always right, everyone is a critical thinker and coddling paradigms combine to produce ever-increasing grade inflation.

The ultimate example of our punishment-averse mindset is the growing deincarceration call to release inmates from prisons on the twin assumption that sentences are too harsh and jails only produce more hardened criminals. The once ballyhooed broken windows theory of policing, which prescribed zero tolerance for accepting even the most minor infractions, has gone out the window, a victim of the post-Ferguson demonization of law enforcement. Where once we tried to internalize the norm that it is wrong to jump subway turnstiles, the new norm is it is wrong to lock up folks who steal and reveal 750,000 classified, highly sensitive national security documents.

Is it possible we are devaluing punishment as a way to help shape behavior that benefits both the individual and society? We constantly hear about research claiming punishment does not work. Yet, speaking for myself, when I was driving on Highway 40 recently and saw a sign warning Hit A Worker Pay $10,000 Fine and Lose License, it got me to slow down. I doubt I was the only motorist so impacted.

It got me to thinking, why dont we put up signs on the roadway warning Get your high school diploma, then get a job, then get married, and only then have kids, or else you have a high probability of ending up poor? Even more incentivizing, how about a sign that says Put marriage before the baby carriage, and you will have an 86 percent chance of having an income in the middle or top third of all incomes?

These data are based on numerous empirical studies done by both liberal and conservative research organizations, such as the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, which conclude that, if one were to follow a relatively simple sequence of behaviors, poverty could be virtually eliminated. (See George Will, Listen Up, Millennials, Theres Sequence to Success, Washington Post, July 5.)

But instead of sending a message to young people that bad life choices have consequences, our leading institutions excuse such behavior as rooted in poverty and addressable through massive welfare programs.

This is not rocket science. It is common sense, backed by science. The same folks on the left who criticize Donald Trump as (being morally flawed and anti-scientific) are in no position to throw stones themselves. They have contributed to the collapse of the norms Will and others celebrate, as liberal media such as The New York Times are at best nonjudgmental about marriage and having kids out of wedlock and at worst question and thus undermine the institution of matrimony and family values. And they ignore the substantial science behind the sequencing hypothesis.

We have no problem growing the nanny state when it comes to education campaigns and laws relating to climate change, seat belt safety, labeling of cigarette packages, anti-bullying, multicultural competency, and other such issues. Is it too politically incorrect to hammer away, also, at the themes suggested above, at a time when the Pew Research Center reports the share of Americans who are married is at its lowest point since at least 1920 and the out-of-wedlock birthrate is roughly 50 percent?

The larger matter here is that social justice and compassion, which are wonderful aspects of Judaism, must be joined with some sense of personal responsibility, which has been lost along the way. Granted, some people have more choices than others. Nonetheless, we all have choices.

A good place to start is in the schools. There is a big movement in schools today to teach the whole child, that is, to cater to not just the academic but also social-emotional needs of students. Grit is the latest educationist buzzword, referring to developing ones capacity for self-control, delayed gratification, persistence, and resilience. However, it is not clear how such qualities can be cultivated in a no-consequences environment.

Many schools no longer allow students to get a failing grade, which means students rarely have to test their coping mechanisms. As a result, on those occasions when they are faced with adversity, they get stressed easily and can experience serious mental health problems, a growing reality widely reported by school counselors at every level.

Of course, poverty, mental illness, crime, and other problems are complicated and defy simple solutions. One modest proposal is that, from the cradle to the grave, we give a little more love to the first half of the tough-love equation. Each of us and the society as a whole will be the better for it.

Follow this link:
Time to punish bad behavior - St. Louis Jewish Light