The Trust Manifesto

Every week night, Lou Dobbs rants about the evils of illegal immigration, and many politicians also get mileage out of that.
However a recent study shows that one argument they use is simply wrong:

“Immigrants in [California], about 35 percent of adults, are far less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes, according to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan research group. Among men ages 18 to 40, the group most likely to commit crimes, native-born Americans were 10 times more likely than immigrants to be incarcerated for crimes in California prisons and jails. The study included both legal and illegal immigrants, without focusing separately on illegal immigrants. But it found that native-born American men ages 18 to 40 were at least eight times more likely to be imprisoned for crimes than Mexican immigrants in that age range who were not naturalized citizens — a group likely to have a high percentage of illegal immigrants.” – New York Times.

No Comments

Bob Herbert wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on January
5, 2006 about a new law that requires people to prove U.S. citizenship
to receive health care under Medicaid.

He says that this will be especially hard on the people who need Medicaid
the most … poor people, because they are less likely to have passports
or birth certificates. He writes:

There are no exceptions to this onerous provision, not even for
people with serious physical or mental impairments, including
Alzheimer’s disease.

You haven’t heard much about this latest threat to the republic
because there is no evidence it is much of a problem. As the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has reported, an
extensive study by the inspector general’s office of the
Department of Health and Human Services “found no substantial
evidence that such false applications are actually occurring …

Many poor people live far from the cities or towns where they were
born and do not have ready access to their birth certificates. And, as
the center said, a large number of African-American women,
especially in the South, were unable to give birth in hospitals
because of racial discrimination. Many of them never received
birth certificates for their babies.

The whole thing is preposterous, both on moral grounds and on
economic grounds. I know of many senior citizens, whether they
grew up poor or middle class, who have no birth certificates.
Record keeping wasn’t so great 80 years ago, and town halls
burned down, and all sorts of other things. Even if the birth
certificate exists, it is not always easy to get. My kids were born
in the same wealthy town as a recent president, and the process
for getting a copy of a birth certificate is a nightmare. When I
finally made it, I asked for five copies. The snotty bureaucrat
said “What do you need five for?”, and I muttered “So I never
have to see you again as long as I live.” But I digress.

So there are two sets of people who would be trying to get health
care from Medicaid: people who are citizens, and for which getting
the documentation of citizenship could be a huge pain at a time

when they are quite sick, and people who are not citizens, and who
want some sort of free health care. First of all, I doubt that anyone
would come to the US specifically for free health care, because a
plane ticket from some third world countries would cost more than
the medical care would in that country, and really sick people
would not be keen on boarding a plane anyway. Still, some would
certainly make the journey, and some non-citizens might be here
for a visit and fall sick when they are here. But remember, the
law already exists that people have to BE citizens. This new
provision says they have to PROVE that they are a citizen. So
anyone trying to get free health care is already breaking the law,
and their resistance to buying or creating a fake birth certificate
might be pretty low, especially if it were a life and death matter.

Creating a phony US passport is way beyond the skill level of
amateurs, but a fake birth certificate is a breeze. There is no standard
format, and the ones I have seen look like they could be done in about
10 minutes by anyone with a scanner and a laser printer. I can
almost hear you say “but they have an official embossed seal”,
but those kinds of raised seals are custom made as graduation
gifts for $29 all the time. If my non-citizen parents needed a
$50,000 operation, I would make a seal that said “Town of Rye,
NY” instead of “From the Library of Timmy Haskell”.

By the way, creating a phony passport from other countries is not
even so hard, or at least it wasn’t 10 years ago. A colleague of mine,
who will remain nameless, had his passport confiscated by his country
of birth. Yet he had bought a ticket home. I asked him what he was
going to do, and he said “I’ll buy a passport at the travel agent’s office
in Queens.” I explained that I didn’t think it worked that way, and
he’d be arrested for using a phony passport.” He said “they are real
passports.” Sure enough, I asked around, and real passports, stolen
from the official printing office of that country, could be had for a price.
And the name of the person and vital information was handwritten
anyway (at least in those days). Yikes!

So come on, let’s face it. This will prevent plenty of entitled people
from receiving Medicaid, waste everyone’s time getting the
documentation and attempting to verify its authenticity, and will
create a cottage industry of birth certificate fakers. The people
who were breaking the law anyway, by pretending to be citizens,
will get fake documents and just be guilty of a different law. Now
what happens if they get caught? Let’s see, we prosecute them, and
send them to jail … where they receive free medical care! As Homer
Simpson would say “Doh!”.

No Comments

When the Oklahoma City bombing happened 10 years ago,
Bill and Hillary Clinton gave some moving speeches. At the time,
that was one of the biggest terrorist acts ever done on American
soil, and actually, it still is. I remember quite vividly one thing
that Hillary said in a speech to some kids around that time.
She said roughly “there are more good people in the world than
bad people”. I have thought about that line constantly since then.
It really sums things up perfectly. It is comforting, but at the same
time realistic. There are bad people in the world. It is just
that they are outnumbered, so you need to think about what that
means.

Thanks to Google, I found the original quote in context.

MRS. CLINTON: I’m very happy to have this chance to talk
with children here in the White House and children who maybe
have been watching cartoons or just getting up around the
country and turning on the television set. I know that many
children around the country have been very frightened by
what they have seen and heard, particularly on television, in
the last few days. And I’m sure that you, like many of the
children I’ve already talked to, are really concerned because
they don’t know how something so terrible could have happened
here in our country.

But you know, whenever you feel scared or worried, I want you
to remember that your parents and your friends and your family
members all love you and are going to do everything they can to
take care of you and to protect you. That’s really important for
each of you to know.

I also want you to know that there are many more good people
in the world than bad and evil people. Just think of what we
have seen in the last few days. Think of all the police officers
and the firefighters, the doctors and the nurses, all of the
neighbors and the rescue workers, all of the people who have
come to help all of those who were hurt in Oklahoma. Think
about the people around the country who are sending presents
and writing letters. Good people live everywhere in our country,
in every town and every city, and there are many, many of them.

No Comments

My grandfather wrote a newspaper column during World War II called “Daily Until
Victory”. Over the past year, I have been making prints of his old columns, which
are only on microfilm at this point. The column was seven days a week, and I
also found that he had many guest columnists helping him out on certain days.
I think it made for a more interesting column.

A friend of mine stationed in Iraq is a regular reader of my blog, and he’s been
corresponding with me about issues of trust. I will leave his name out of this until
he’s permanently back home.

In the spirit of my grandfather’s columns, the rest of this posting is directly from
Iraq. Thank you, sir. Your Trust Manifesto shirt was mailed last week.

“So I have been reading your blog, and it got me thinking about the kinds of trust I
see around me everyday. As a soldier in Iraq, I have a completely different environment
than most, but since I actually started analyzing what I was seeing, I determined that
it is not just here, but really all over the world. Hear me out:

And that is why trust is important. “

No Comments

On 60 Minutes this week, there was a story about illegal immigration along
the Mexican border. This fits in well with my theory that certain things
can’t be secured anyway, so you might as well not bother trying. Some
excerpts from the transcript:

Just last week, President George W. Bush promised to spend
billions of dollars to stop illegal immigrants from crossing our
2,000-mile border with Mexico. It’s not the first time a
president has pledged to do that. In the early 1990s, the
Clinton administration also vowed to tighten the U.S.-Mexican
border.

Since then, the U.S. government has tripled the budget for
border control, spending a small fortune on surveillance
technology, not to mention thousands of additional border
patrol agents. All of that was supposed to make it harder for
illegal immigrants to cross over in cities and towns along the
border.

This year, about 500,000 illegal migrants will come from
Mexico to live and work in the U.S., about twice as many
as came before the border was fortified.

“It actually encouraged more people to enter the country
because what we did is we took away the ability of a worker
to come into the country and cross back and forth fairly
freely. So they started bringing their families in and actually
domiciling in the United States with their entire family
because they knew they couldn’t go back and forth,”
says Reed.

Fortified fences like the one in Nogales, Arizona, protect
only about five percent of the U.S.-Mexican border.

Bonner thinks that the number of illegal migrants has
actually gone up since the barrier went up. Does he think
the millions spent on the fence were a waste of money?

“I think that’s a fair assessment,” says Bonner.

The U.S. government has spent about $20 billion on
border control over the past 12 years. But Republican
Congressman Tom Tancredo insists that is just not enough.

“If you only put the fence for this five miles of border,
people will go around it, naturally. You have to secure
your borders!” says Rep. Tancredo.

He recommends sealing off the entire border, building
fences. How much more should the government spend?

“Whatever it takes,” Tancredo says. “Billions more. Billions
more. Ed, why not? It is our job. It is what the federal
government should be doing!”

So what are taxpayers getting for the billions of dollars
spent on border security?

“Getting a good story,” says Reed. But not a secure border.

1 Comment

Magnetic ribbons are ubiquitous on the backs of cars these days. There are yellow ones
for the troops in Iraq, pink ones for breast cancer awareness, and red, white and blue ones
for general patriotism. There are so many that I barely notice them any more. In fact, I
found one on the ground and stuck it on my neighbor’s car to see how long it would take
him to notice. After a few weeks I mentioned it to him, and he barely noticed it on his
own car.

But yesterday for some reason I decided to look at the words on one in front of me, and
saw something pretty funny.

2 Comments

You would hope that the president would have a good intuition about this in advance.

Meanwhile, the Daily News says, the president is growing paranoid about the people around him, furious over leaks about the mood inside the White House but unsure which of his aides is spreading the stories. One “knowledgeable source” says: “He’s asking [friends] for opinions on who he can trust and who he can’t.”

1 Comment