You’re not the victim

Tags

9/11, Berlin, Charlie Hebdo, Donald Trump, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, John Kennedy, Le Monde, Victimhood, West Berlin

Or are you?

After a tragedy, people sometimes show solidarity with the victims by calling themselves the victims.

• When Donald Trump abused immigrants, sympathetic people born in this country said, “I’m an immigrant, too.”
• After terrorist shootings at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, compassionate and caring people declared, “Je suis Charlie.”
• In 1963, when a hostile dictatorship surrounded the city of West Berlin, President John Kennedy told its citizens, “You live in a defended island of freedom, but your life is part of the main. . . . All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ ”

But native-born people aren’t immigrants, only the Charlie Hebdo staff were attacked in the shootings, and John Kennedy wasn’t a Berliner. No matter how much you or I (or Kennedy) might sympathize with the people who suffered inhuman assaults, they didn’t damage us anywhere near as much as they damaged the victims.

Supporting victims is good, no question. If you identify with them and their terrible situation, and if you want to stand shoulder to shoulder with them, I think you’re great. You have a warm heart and a passion for humanity.

And some “I’m a victim, too” sentiments fit better than others. After the 9/11 attacks on New York, the French newspaper Le Monde ran the headline “Nous sommes tous Américains”: “We are all Americans.” I suppose you can defend Le Monde’s headline, because the people who attacked Americans on 9/11 would have been just as happy to attack the French.

If you want to support victims, announce that you’re on their side. Donate your time and money to organizations working to help them. Join public demonstrations that protest their suffering.

But don’t say that you’re one of them.

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Ann Coulter and the Jews

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Ann Coulter, Anti-semitism, Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Jews

Recently, Donald Trump’s supporter Ann Coulter started criticizing him. Ordinarily, I welcome Trump fans who turn against him. But not this time.

Half of the problem is that she’s turned on him because he hasn’t made enough progress on his border wall, and I don’t want him to build the wall at all. But the other half is her anti-Semitism.

In criticizing Trump, Coulter asked, “Why would you [vote for Trump again]? To make sure, I don’t know, Ivanka and Jared can make money?”

Coulter didn’t mention Donald Jr. or Eric Trump, who oversee The Trump Organization. When she talked about money, she mentioned only Jews.

Anti-Semitic allusions are nothing new for Coulter, as The Daily Beast pointed out two years ago. Recently, she’s attacked “globalists,” a code word for “Jews.” And she’s lied by saying that Jews and other groups hate white men.

I’m a Jew, Ann, and I don’t hate white men. But don’t ask how I feel about you.

Trump’s wall could work. That’s the problem.

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Donald Trump, Mexico, Wall

If Donald Trump builds his wall, it’ll probably succeed to some extent. Every obstacle keeps some people from overcoming it.

My main problem with the wall is that it embodies the hurdles that our immigration system puts up to keep people out. Entering this country should be easier, not harder.

Keep out criminals, except “political” criminals like those jailed for protesting dictatorships. Keep out people with infectious disease. Keep out people too physically or mentally damaged to survive on their own (unless their friends or relatives will support them).

But let others be free to come here and make a better life. That’s the American Dream, and it makes our country better.

My other problem with the wall is the political message that it sends. From the Berlin Wall to the barrier between Israel and the West Bank, walls or fences or whatever you call them say, “Outsiders scare us.”

Sometimes it’s sensible to be scared. Israel built a wall because it had a legitimate fear of terrorists, and the wall seems to have reduced terrorism, though it’s also had terrible effects.

But America doesn’t have Israel’s problems. We’re stronger and more secure. We don’t need to fear immigrants, and we don’t need a wall.

The cost of executive orders

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Donald Trump, Executive orders, Immigration, Muslims, Soviet Union, Trans-Pacific Partnership

Donald Trump’s executive orders may cure some problems, but the cure may be worse than the disease.

Under Soviet rule, Moscow was one of the world’s safest big cities. I remember hearing people who had been there talk about how they could walk around late at night with no fear of muggers. They couldn’t do that in New York.

The Soviets controlled street crime as they controlled other activities, but would you want to live under a Soviet regime?

So it may go with Mr. Trump.

His ban on Muslims from various nations may reduce extremist Islamic terrorism in the U.S. (not that we’ve seen much lately; see here and here). But the Muslim ban makes the United States oppose and alienate one of humanity’s most widespread and fast-growing faiths.

His opening the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines may make more oil flow. But it violates the wishes (and, I believe, the rights) of Native Americans and endangers the environment.

His withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership may have some economic advantages (although I doubt it). But reducing our economic ties to various Asian nations allows China to gain more leverage in that region.

And so on.

Donald Trump may improve certain things. But I expect the cost of the improvements to be way too high.

Presidential immigrants

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Arnold Schwarzenegger, Constitutional amendents, Immigrants, Orrin Hatch, Presidency

If you could change the requirements for the presidency, how would you do it?

I’d remove the requirement that the president be native-born. A lot of immigrants have served this country with honor and deserve a shot at the highest office.

“Among those barred from the presidency are Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, a Canadian-born Democrat; Labor secretary Elaine Chao (Taiwan); Housing and Urban Development secretary Mel Martinez (Cuba); former secretaries of State Henry Kissinger (Germany) and Madeleine Albright (Czechoslovakia); and of course, California governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger,” CBS News reported in 2003, when Senator Orrin Hatch proposed eliminating this rule.

By the way, I realize this change would mean a Constitutional amendment. It wouldn’t come easily.

In any case, that’s my idea. What do you think, and what would you propose?

After you, Mr. President-Elect

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Chuck Schumer, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Immigration, Muslims, Nancy Pelosi

Donald Trump and his supporters have asked since the election that we all come together. Very good. I’m looking forward to seeing President-Elect Trump . . .
. . . meet with Muslim leaders to find common ground on national security;
. . . talk with advocates for immigrants about paths to citizenship;
. . . seek compromises with incoming House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer;
. . . ask Hillary Clinton for insights and advice;
. . . and welcome the press into his office regularly for friendly, open-ended conversations.

Yes, indeed. Let’s all come together. Lead the way, Mr. President-Elect.

Donald Trump, weakling?

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Affordable Care Act, Donald Trump, Immigration, Obamacare

Donald Trump has presented himself as a strong man, with statements like “I alone can fix it.” And people have feared that he’d be a strongman like Vladimir Putin, whom Trump has praised along with other tyrannical foreign thugs.

But what if Trump is actually weak?

In recent days, he’s apparently wavered on issues central to his campaign:
Obamacare, Muslim immigration, and the Mexico border wall.

I’m not complaining. I like Trump’s backing away from some elements of these pledges. I wish he’d back off even further.

But the fact is that he’s wavering even before he’s been sworn in.

When I was growing up, I heard that all bullies are cowards: Pressure them and they’ll fold.

Is Trump folding under the pressure of becoming president?

I reject thee, aristocracy of Americans!

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Congress, Immigration, Mexico

If one thing has made America different from other nations, it’s that we’re not supposed to have an aristocracy. Some people may be born with more money or brains or beauty than others, but no one is born with more legal rights. All men and women are supposed to be equal under the law.

Except immigrants.

The native born get the right to live here automatically, at birth, but an immigrant has to earn it (if he can become a citizen at all) via a long and hard process. The native born can become president, but immigrants can’t. The government can deport the immigrant, but not the native born. And so on.

What did the native born, including me, do to earn superior rights in the land of the free? All we did was get born, and our mothers did most of the work in that process. Good fortune, the grace of God, or parents determined to give us an American life decided that we would be born here rather than elsewhere. We did nothing ourselves.

Meanwhile, immigrants value the United States so much that they deliberately abandon everything that they know, including the nation where they were born and grew up and lived for years, to come to our country. Legally or illegally, they make a difficult and expensive trip to come here and often have to struggle to make a bare living here. Immigrating to the United States is the greatest compliment that anyone could pay to America.

Yet somehow we feel that we deserve the American dream more than the people who worked so hard to be here. Donald Trump wants to exclude Muslims and build a wall barring Mexicans. He’s part of a long line of anti-immigrant politicians. In March 2005, for instance, Congressman J.D. Hayworth (R-Arizona) led more than 30 other Representatives in a letter to the Secretary of State to denounce what they called “Mexico’s long-standing invasion of America.”

Like aristocrats throughout time, many native-born Americans see the teeming non-aristos as an enemy army. We feel entitled to better treatment than the swarthy foreign masses, simply because we were lucky enough to be born in the right place, and they weren’t.

Now, I am not saying that we should simply open the floodgates. (Elsewhere in this blog, I’ve laid out a plan for immigration.)

But behaving as if the native born somehow deserve American life more than those who work hard to get here and stay here — I don’t like it at all.

It’s not aristocratic. It’s just bigoted.

Muslim immigration

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Donald Trump, Immigration, Mafia, Muslims, organized crime, Terrorists

An intellectual exercise: Let’s say that, in the wake of the horrific Orlando shooting, the United States restricts Muslim immigration.

By that logic, should the U.S. have restricted immigration from Italy during the 1920s and ’50s, when the Mafia was at its peak? The Mob, after all, was more widespread — and more dangerous to more Americans day by day — than Islamic terrorists are.

(Personally, I want Immigration and Customs Enforcement to investigate every newcomer to the United States and refuse entry to anyone who might have terrorist sympathies, but not to ban anyone based solely on religion.)

And what should the U.S. do about American-born killers like Orlando’s Omar Mateen, San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook, and Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan? Do we shutter U.S. mosques and block Internet sites based in areas under repressive Islamist regimes?

(l like freedom of religion, speech and political opinion, so I prefer monitoring them rather than shutting them down.)

Of course, another option is blocking the sale of AR-15 assault rifles to suspected terrorists — but that’s another topic altogether.

Becoming American

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Immigration

A presidential election year always gets me to thinking about what I like (and dislike) about my country. One thing that I like most is that an immigrant can become American — not just by the rules of the law and the government but in the minds of fellow Americans.

That may not sound like much — but consider: no matter how long an immigrant lives in, say, Japan or France, will the natives ever say that the immigrant is truly Japanese or French? Some countries’ cultures are so strong and sometimes so xenophobic that many or even most natives never consider an immigrant, or even the native-born children of immigrants, to be one of them.

But Americans have accepted plenty of foreigners as Americans: Henry Kissinger, Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin, Andrew Carnegie, Michael J. Fox, Wolfgang Puck, Charlize Theron, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili — and Ted Cruz, for that matter. Heck, my fellow Californians elected Arnold Schwarzenegger governor. And millions of not-famous immigrants have seen their native-born neighbors accept and even welcome them.

Millions of immigrants have seen uglier responses, of course. While many Americans accept outsiders, we’ve also displayed far too much xenophobia and nativism.

I hope that it diminishes. The ability to accept outsiders has enriched and strengthened the United States.