Are we civilized? Not really.

When families or single mothers are apprehended at the US border with Mexico, the Border Patrol agents will often take the children away from their elders and send them to a separate detention facility. These children do not have papers of their own. In the border crossing detention system they become anonymous and reuniting them with their parents becomes extremely difficult.

This story really stayed with me as an example of exceptional cruelty. Imagine managing to flee economic deprivation or continual violence in your home country, traversing several Central American countries and Mexico, succeeding to avoid police, and the military, and private parties preying on refugees. Finally you arrive at the United States borders where you hope to find work and security. But instead your children are taken away and cannot be found again. What a terrible fate.

The Border Patrol claims to follow this practice in order to protect the children. But that is so implausible an explanation; it has to be a blatant lie. In rare moments of frankness, officials of the Border Patrol have admitted that they are using this blatant brutality in the hope of discouraging others from Central America to try to enter the United States.

The story reminds us once again of the pervasiveness of cruelty in the world. Notorious examples are everywhere from the Nazi genocide of Jews in Europe to the oppression of Palestinians by Israelis, to the continued destruction of Syria’s towns and villages, leading mass deaths and deprivation of refugees from Syria, from Yemen, and from Somalia and many other places. Everywhere we see armies, civilian government bureaucracies use their power to injure and kill innocents. These cruelties are as old as humankind.

It is tempting to adopt anarchist beliefs that the state is by its very nature coercive and if we want to live in a world without constant brutalization of the weaker members of society, we need to build a society that has no state, no government, no bureaucracies, no standing armies that lord it over citizens.

But this grand project has serious shortcomings. We need bureaucracies to build roads, to install sewer pipes, water pipes, gas pipes. Someone needs to build and staff schools and many other public utilities. The initiative of individual persons does not suffice to provide the infrastructure for villages towns and cities. So it must be someone's job provided those infrastructures.

In addition someone needs to make rules and enforce them. We do not only need schools and teachers in the classrooms. We need to make sure that children go to school until their 16 (or older). And rules need to be enforced. Someone needs to make sure that food sold in stores is not adulterated or contaminated. Someone else needs to make sure that the gallon of milk you buy is indeed a full gallon and that the butcher does not have his thumb on the scale where he sells you a pound of meat. Someone needs to be available to make sure that the house you buy is safe and healthy.

Rules are needed; rules not enforced are useless. It is a waste of time to try to develop reasonable rules if no one is going to make sure that they will be observed. Making sure that the rulings are observed will involve coercion.

And here we face the terrible dilemma. A livable society appears to require rules and their enforcement through coercion. The institutions that administer coercion are the same institutions that act with terrible brutality such as the Border Patrol that tears families apart.

How can we control all the agencies established to enforce laws so that they will not be brutal and, for instance, murder unarmed young black men and women? The question does not seem to have an answer. The question does not get asked very often.

Our history documents barbarity in the treatment of one group by another. We regard ourselves as more civilized than many other nations or cultures but our behavior gives to lie to that claim. We are not merely as barbaric as any of our ancestors, but we are not even willing to consider how that barbarity may be reduced. We must not remain silent about the children taken from their parents.

Violence and Forgiveness

Violence and forgiveness.

Violence has been a frequent topic in my recent blogs. Not only the street violence that kills 14-year-old boys for no reason whatsoever, or the violence of war, but the violence that permeates every day life. In case after case we rush to punish and inflict pain instead of looking for and trying to remove the causes of problems. No one asks why there are illegal immigrants. Instead we rush to punish them. When children bully each other in schools, parents do not ask where they went wrong in their parenting. They can't wait to punish school administrators and members of the school board. Instead of looking for the origins of conflicts and removing them, we try to get our way by threatening our opponents.

I have recently encountered several thoughtful people who suggest that we respond to and overcome this everyday violence by practicing forgiveness. Instead of looking for the guilty party and imposing a penalty on them, we should forgive them.

This forgiveness is not just shaking-hands-and-making-up or saying “I forgive you” but is a major effort to rid oneself of anger, of the desire to hurt others. Forgiveness requires working on oneself, attempting to transform oneself from one seething with resentment to a person at peace with himself and his neighbors.
I have no doubt that this is good advice. The effort required to overcome one's anger will make one a better citizen and ease life in a society.

But while I can forgive those who injure me, I cannot forgive those who injure others. I can try to forgive the Nazis for the pain they inflicted on me by killing most of my childhood friends. But I cannot forgive them for the lives of my friends cut short early and horribly. It is not up to me to forgive the injuries done to others.

If my work and my pay are not being threatened by illegal immigrants, I may have nothing to forgive them for. Nevertheless the problem of undocumented workers concerns me as a citizen and I still need to face the choice between imposing punishment on undocumented workers and on their employers, or trying to devise a solution that will end the problem. (I have suggested raising the minimum wage as one attempt to reduce the problem of undocumented immigration.)

Even if someone treats me badly,  forgiving may not be the best response. Take the everyday example of your child acting out, being disobedient and shouting insults at you. Yes, you can just forgive the child. But it would be much better to try to find out what she is trying to tell you, what she needs from you, where, perhaps, you have injured her. Forgiving in the sense of trying to overcome your anger is difficult. But it is often still too easy. It's too easy to try to forgive the disobedient, the angry child and much more difficult to discover the sources of that anger and disobedience and to try to mend the relationship.

Yes, by all means forgive. But you also need to know that forgiveness is just the beginning of trying to repair a broken relationship. I need to be aware of the needs of those who injure me, whose injury is trying to tell me something. Forgiveness is important but is not enough. We need not only rid ourselves of anger but also find solutions to problems that anger may blind us to. We must try to repair injustices that are done to others where we have nothing to forgive. We need to address the injustices done to others which we have no business forgiving.

Persecuting Immigrants. Give Peace a chance!

Persecuting Immigrants. Give peace a Chance.

Undocumented immigration creates real problems.

There are millions upon million desperately poor people in Latin America. Will they all come to the US sooner or later?

Undocumented workers make very little money. If US employers can get the work done by workers paid  a lot less than minimum wage, that will have a negative effect of on the wages of American low wage workers and reduce their employment possibilities.

Workers, whether undocumented or legal, pay taxes. But the people who earn desperately little pay very low taxes. Iif their children, especially the American born children, go to school, get free lunches or other services, that tends to cost more than these parents put in when they pay taxes.

Undocumented workers are in the country illegally. We need to enforce the laws we have.

But a lot of the heated discussion about immigration does not stem from an attempt to face and resolve these and other problems. It originates instead in hysterical xenophobia. This is proved by the following hair raising quotes:

“Consider the great increase in hepatitis A and B, drug resistant tuberculosis, and leprosy. Think about this the next time you go out to eat at a restaurant that hires illegals that sweat into your soup!”

^{State Rep. John Kavanagh [An Arizona legislator ], a co-sponsor of the [Arizona anti-immigrant] law, said of illegal immigrants, "They bring a lot of crime with them."}

^{“One of the clinching arguments for Arizona’s tough new law aimed at illegal immigration has been the perception in that state that crime has been rising, and that undocumented workers are largely to blame. Yet the Journal reports that the incidence of violent crime in Phoenix last year plunged 16.6 percent compared to 2008, a rate of decline that was three times the national average.”}

^{People who fear immigrants believe that undocumented immigrants are diseased and will pass their diseases on to US citizens. They are criminals, a threat to all citizens. Folks believe that even though the Arizona crime rate has gone down more than the national average.}

This is crazy, right? The actual differences between us and the people perceived as different is not as important as what differences people “see”--that is, actually, imagine.

^{We need to notice that this is a world-wide phenomenon. Anti-immigrant parties have gained in several European Countries. The President of France, Sarkozy, has been in a big sweat for several years about women wearing head scarves. It is “un-French” he thinks.}

^{Let us also remember what white Americans used to believe about all African-Americans. Or how during World War II we interned all Japanese-Americans, even if their sons were serving in the US Army, because we did not trust their loyalty to the US.}

^{There are currently 30,000 non citizens in the US military. Some of them after fighting bravely in Vietnam, the Gulf War, or Iraq, come back to the US and get into trouble, as happens to a significant number of combat veterans. Non-citizen vets are deported to the country of origin while their friends and family are all in the US..}

^{These are some cases of xenophobia. All nations, all historical periods, seem to be affected by it. It clearly plays a role in the current immigration debate.}

^{For those of us who are hoping and working for a more peaceful world, this should be a matter of grave concern. As long as nations will again and again succumb to fear of the perceived stranger, there is no hope for world peace. There is not even hope for peace at home.}

^{Think about that the next time you hold hands with a stranger singing “Give Peace a Chance.” The first step towards world-peace is to overcome this blind fear of people whom we regard as different and whom we believe without any evidence to be a threat to our security.}

^{Many people think that xenophobia will always be with us. “Its human nature, “ they say. But it is of course not human nature because not all of us are xenophobic. One can overcome the tendency to fear that shadowy stranger.}

^{But how will humanity rid itself of this scourge? We would be better served by leaders who devoted resources to studying this question instead of pandering to these fear as our politicians are doing today.}

Undocumented workers

May 1 has come to be one of the days when the advocates of undocumented workers demonstrate their support for immigrants. It is also a day for their opponents -- mostly persons who feel threatened by the job competition of the immigrants -- to emphasize that the immigrants are here illegally.

Alan Greenspan, for many years the head of the Federal Reserve and now, in his retirement, the grand old man of the business elite of this country, used the occasion to declare that "illegal immigration has made a significant attribution to US economic growth by providing a flexible workforce."

Translate that into English: businesses can pay undocumented workers very low wages. That saves them money. It also allows them to pay less to American workers because there is always a threat of being replaced by the undocumented low-wage workers. Undocumented workers have no protection from laws or from unions. You can hire and fire them at will.

Greenspan represents the point of view of employers. Many of them like undocumented workers. They also like that the undocumented and their supporters fight with American workers worried about their jobs. The presence of undocumented immigrants provides them with one more way of keeping all wages low and thus making more money.

Both American and undocumented immigrant workers make it easier for their employers to depress their wages when they fight with each other. They would be better off trying to support each other. In work places where there are unions, workers should insist that the undocumented be paid the same wages as they themselves. They should talk to their elected representatives about a reasonable immigration policy that would, for instance, allow long-term undocumented workers to get green cards and, eventually, become citizens and that would allow every workers to come here from abroad for a limited number of years.

The real fight is between employers and their employees. Since real 1970 wages for most Americans have hardly gone up. When workers wanted higher wages, business moved the jobs off-shore. Now they can also use the presence of undocumented workers to keep wages low. As a consequence many people today have less buying power than their parents had.

We can no more stop illegal immigration than we can stop off-shoring jobs. It is important to respond to these facts in ways that do not allow employers to use the undocumented to depress all wages.