Open minds to immigration

This week Congress and the President may determine the fate of 12 million illegal, mostly Hispanic immigrants in the United States.

Some lawmakers want our current immigration laws enforced and to seize, jail and deport the illegals. Others want a wall built between the U.S. and Mexico to prevent future influxes. Still others believe that illegals already in the U.S. should be given amnesty, and that future government efforts be directed to enforcing the border with more manpower and technology.

The other choice - the one that gets no play in the major media - is the open immigration policy that the federal government employed for our country's first four score. It was only after several states passed their own immigration laws following the Civil War that Congress made immigration a national issue.

In 1875 Congress restricted the immigration of prostitutes and felons. In 1882 it barred the insane, the mentally handicapped, people likely in need of public care and Chinese immigrants. The Immigration Service was not established until 1891. Racial and national quotas became the norm during the 1920s.

This is to say that the federal government's role in controlling immigration is largely ahistorical and tainted with prejudice, which should be morally objectionable to all of us. Modern proponents say immigration control is necessary because of advances in technology, but their anti-immigrant attitudes began long before modern transportation and weapons of mass destruction.

Make no mistake that today's immigration debate is not about preventing white Canadians from immigrating to this country, but instead over people with a different skin color, language, culture and wealth than most of the Americans who object to them. Race and other socio-economic issues are at the heart of their objections.

The moral, political and economic answer to immigration is to embrace it, not fight it. There should be no barriers to opportunity. There is nothing moral in our use of threats and violence against people who peacefully seek better lives for themselves and their families. And we shouldn't blame them if we stupidly vote to tax ourselves to give them free benefits.

Open immigration and few government benefits was the policy of our lawmakers until about a hundred years ago, and is the policy of modern libertarians. Libertarians believe that government should be used to support freedom and opportunity for less fortunate people, not to give fortunate people control over opportunity.

We also should make immigration easier for those from countries other than Mexico. Current regulations and thin staffing at immigration offices force immigrants to choose between wasting time, effort and thousands of dollars to comply with the law or to risk deportation.

As confusing as the immigration debate may seem, our political choices are really quite clear. Either we support people's natural rights to seek better lives, or we vote for policies to suppress them. An open immigration policy does not preclude our federal government from screening for diseases, weapons and other contraband, just as it does today.

The Golden Rule says to treat other people as we would like to be treated. Wouldn't we find it objectionable, immoral and even primitive if Mexicans built a wall against us and used threats and violence to send Americans packing?

Bad monkey !

The email’s title innocently read: "Please sign the petition," so I clicked the hyperlink (http://www.indyzoo.com/content.aspx?cid=879) to see what it was about.

To my surprise appeared the following petition on the web site of the Indianapolis Zoo and Gardens. With all due respect to the Zoo, this petition is so politically senseless on so many levels that it's a perfect example of what not to do.

"We, the undersigned, ask Congress to provide $2 million for each of the wildlife species covered under the Multinational Species Conservation Fund program -- African elephant, Asian elephant, rhino, tiger, great apes and marine turtles. Thank you."

Unfortunately this petition will not help any wild animals by any measurable degree - only self-interested Homo sapiens.

The wild African and marine animals will get virtually nothing because it will take at least $2 million for the federal government to execute any plan to help them. This makes the $2 million request an insult to every animal on the list. Please don't sign a petition that insults politically helpless animals that can't speak for themselves!

I'm not a zoologist. I study political animals. From what I know about their governments, I would turn to politically tainted government programs as the last resort to save wild animals.

This is not to say that governments have no role in protecting wild African and marine animals - just not our federal government. Certainly the governments of Africa, for example, need to secure their public lands from poaching, and to prosecute violators. Good governments also promote the expansion of private property and provide legal systems to protect property rights, which offer wild animals their best chance of survival.

But otherwise, private organizations like the Indianapolis Zoo are wild animals' best hope - not governments. Other groups include the African Wildlife Foundation, American Oceans Campaign, Elephants of Africa Rescue Society and the Elephant Sanctuary of Hohenwald, to name a few. Petitioning government to help wild animals only competes with the organizations that can do the animals the most good. Each tax increase by government makes it more difficult to help wild animals.

There is very little that governments do well. By their very nature, they use and manage resources unwisely. This means that - to any extent possible - we should not entrust wild animals to government programs, which are far too subject to bureaucracy and politics.

If wild animals could speak for themselves, they'd likely ask us to funnel our contributions through private zoological organizations instead of government. It would be money much better spent.

Straight talk on school choice

Let me state up front that I am an unadulterated supporter of competition in publicly funded education, better known as school choice.

However, having said this, I think the Florida Supreme Court correctly struck down Governor Jeb Bush's Opportunity Scholarships - a voucher program for students attending failing public schools - as contrary to Florida's constitution.

The Florida constitution calls for “a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high-quality system of free public schools.” The 5-2 decision held that Bush's voucher program “diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools that are the sole means set out in the Constitution for the state to provide for the education of Florida's children.”

Don't blame school vouchers for this constitutional defeat. Vouchers will ultimately save Florida's public education from the people who run it today and are running it into the ground. Instead blame the defeat on Florida's archaic state constitution. It clearly calls for “a uniform ... system of free public schools,” which publicly funded vouchers in private schools clearly are not.

Unfortunately, Indiana's constitution suffers the same malady. Our General Assembly is mandated to provide “a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all.” Just as in Florida, this wording is all that the Indiana Supreme Court would need to strike down most voucher legislation. This is why we should not rely on our courts to do a political job. It’s the legislature’s role to change our laws to make real educational improvements possible.

Indiana's constitution is nearly 190 years old, and so are its educational provisions. The idea of voucher education just turned 50 this year. We must bring our state constitution and political discussion up to date by focusing on the value of competition in education.

If competition provides accountability among competing merchants, mechanics and ministers in our society - which it does - then competition should be used to bring accountability to our public education system, also.

Accountability woefully lacks in Indiana’s government-run monopoly school systems. While our students are being taught how to pass the ISTEP test, students elsewhere are reading books, doing math exercises and learning foreign languages.

Yet school-choice opponents say accountability is not the issue, that school choice proponents like me are just hostile to public schools. This is how Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union for Florida, put it: “What fueled Opportunity Scholarships and other programs was not the inability of public schools to provide the needed programs but rather the opposition and hostility to public schools and the desire to create a competing school system.”

This is both silly and disingenuous. Most school choice advocates oppose neither public schools, which I attended, nor public funding of schools. Most of us are motivated strictly against the government monopoly of educators that run and control our public schools to the detriment of children and our society.

Even the most socially democratic of nations such as Belgium and Sweden give parents universal choice where to send their kids to school. These liberal systems, which educate children far better than ours does, prove that there is nothing inherently contradictory between providing public education and allowing educational choice and competition among educational providers.

These social welfare systems can teach American liberals that it is only through competition that excellence in public education can be achieved.

If we can all agree that competition is good and monopolies are bad, then our discussion should focus on how to infuse competition into publicly funded education and how to bust the government's bureaucratic education monopoly.