Obama's talk about how we should not make religious distinctions might make sense if we were talking about handing out entitlements. But we are talking about distinguishing between different populations posing different levels of danger to the American people.
When it comes to matters of life and death, that is no time for the kind of glib, politically correct rhetoric that Barack Obama specializes in. Obama may think of himself as a citizen of the world, but he was elected President of the United States, not head of a world government, and that does not authorize him to gamble the lives of Americans for the benefit of people in other countries.
The illusion that you can take in large numbers of people from a fundamentally different culture, without jeopardizing your own culture — and everything that depends on it — should have been dispelled by many counterproductive social consequences in Europe, even aside from the fatal dangers of terrorists.
Most refugees in the Middle East can be helped in the Middle East, and many Americans would undoubtedly be willing to financially help Muslim countries like Jordan or Egypt to care for these refugees in societies more compatible with their beliefs and values. The history of millions of European immigrants who came here in centuries past was fundamentally different from what is happening in our own times.
First of all, those immigrants were stopped at Ellis Island to be checked medically and otherwise, and were allowed to get off that island to go ashore only after they had met whatever legal standards there were. Otherwise, they were sent back where they came from. More fundamentally, people came here to assimilate into the American society they found, not to become isolated enclaves of aggrieved foreigners, demanding that Americans adjust to their languages, their values and their ways of life.
The sharp rise in violent crime in our inner cities coincides with the increase of black leaders in many of those very same cities, which makes it hard to argue that racist or indifferent authorities are to blame. What can be said of Baltimore is also true of Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, New Orleans and Washington, where black mayors and police chiefs and city councilmen and school superintendents have held sway for decades.
Moreover, low-income blacks lost ground to low-income whites over the same period. Between and , incomes for the poorest fifth of blacks declined at more than double the rate of comparable whites. This history should have served to temper expectations for the first black president. The proliferation of black politicians in recent decades — which now includes a twice-elected black president — has done little to narrow racial gaps in employment, income, homeownership, academic achievement and other areas.
Most groups in America and elsewhere who have risen economically have done so with little or no political influence, and groups that have enjoyed early political success have tended to rise more slowly.
Similarly, the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, the English in Argentina and Jews in Britain, among many other examples, all prospered economically while mostly shunning politics.
A counterexample is the Irish, whose rise from poverty was especially slow even though Irish-run political organizations in places like Boston and Philadelphia dominated local government. The Irish had more political success than any other ethnic group historically, according to Sowell. The wealth and power of a relatively few Irish political bosses had little impact on the progress of masses of Irish Americans.
German immigrants to the US in colonial times were not lacking in numbers. In Pennsylvania they were one-third of the population, a situation that was not lost on non-Germans. Nevertheless, Germans, many of whom arrived as indentured servants and focused initially on paying off the cost of their voyage, had other priorities and were well known for avoiding politics.
Germans began entering politics only after they had already risen economically. The black experience in America is of course different from the Irish experience, which in turn is different from the Chinese or German or Jewish experience. Many different racial and ethnic minority groups have experienced various degrees of hardship in the US and in other countries all over the world.
How those groups have dealt with those circumstances is something to study closely and draw lessons from going forward — even if the only lesson is to manage expectations. One of the clear lessons from this history is that human capital has proven to be far more important than political capital in getting ahead. Where was the outrage then?
Outside a court of law, there is no reason to presume anyone innocent until proven guilty. It is especially dangerous to presume a President of the United States — any president — innocent until proven guilty. Whoever is president has the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans, and the fate of a nation, in his hands.
It is those millions of people and that nation who deserve the benefit of the doubt. We need to err on the side of safety for the people and the country. Squeamish politeness to an individual cannot outweigh that. We need to keep that in mind for the next president, and for all future presidents.
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