“Tribalism, Narcissism, Nationalism, and their Offspring”

“Tribalism, Narcissism, Nationalism, and their Offspring”   Oct. 1, 2017

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Roger Ray, pastor

Philippians 2:1-4    If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.                                              

Many of my messages this summer and fall are first drafts of chapters of my current book project, “America Will Be Great When…” The whole project is obviously a push back response to President Trump’s vision of making America great, which appears to be a rather racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, islamaphobic, smokescreen to cover up a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the super rich.

I am working with David and Holly Ketchum, Dr. Paul Thomlinson, to address issues of addiction, access to education, as well as poverty, gender and sexual prejudice, matters of war and peace, environment, racism, gun control, the judicial and penal system, and maintaining democratic values.

Our book is largely a spiritual look at ethics and the challenges that face our nation. The underlying theme of the book is that most of these horrible problems have fairly simple solutions that are being successfully implemented in other countries and all we are trying to do is to help Americans to wake up to these facts.

The other author working on the project that I have not yet mentioned is Dr. Nicole Fisk. We have both written on immigration and the refugee crisis. And, in keeping with the rest of the book project, we have written from a spiritual and ethical perspective trying to dispel inaccurate prejudice and to call upon our better angels to take a more compassionate approach to both immigrants and refugees.

Today I would like to add one more segment to that section of the book but I would like to step out of my role as a pastor and ethicist to talk about this from a more flat-footed, economic self interest perspective. I believe the real “art of the deal” is not to win by making someone else lose but rather to find a way where everyone wins. When it comes to the topic of immigration, those of us on the church side where we want to compassionately “welcome the stranger” really have common ground with Wall Street, corporate interests, and even the Pentagon.  

I was intrigued by a lecture delivered by Dr. Richard Wolff, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Michigan at Amherst. He explains that, looked at from a purely economic perspective, a person’s least productive years are the first 20. Children consume goods but they don’t produce goods, or at least they shouldn’t be expected to. In most countries, parents sacrifice to raise and educate their children who, for a generation, are consuming medical services, food, and housing while they also require expenditures in education and childcare.

So, when a 20 year old immigrant comes to the United States, we are inheriting an economic asset that is ready to enter the productive, income generating, tax paying, time of their lives.

Which is why both countries and communities complain about “brain drain” when too many of their young people leave to seek their fortunes elsewhere. A child is a huge investment in the future. Every immigrant who comes here is an investment that is being made in our country, often by a much poorer country that can hardly afford to lose them.

We often hear that illegal immigrants are a drain on our tax supported services and while there are some medical and educational expenses involved in their presence here, by and large, they are paying taxes and cannot legally receive the benefits of what they pay into Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. I personally think that it is wrong to make them pay into a system they can never legally draw out of but, again, looked at purely from an economic perspective, illegal immigrants are not only doing back breaking labor that few American citizens would do for two or three times as much money, but they are subsidizing our social safety net.

I personally wish that we could turn Central, North and South America into the kind of union that Europe created in which people could move as freely as capital now moves. We have strict immigration laws and Trump wants to build a fence all along our southern border but, folks, while you can restrict the movement of people, controlling the movement of money is quite another thing. Money is fungible. Money can go to where labor is cheaper and where safety and environmental laws are more lax.

If we made it so that people could move as easily as money, we could keep production closer to the point of consumption while keeping workers’ salaries higher.

It would be good for Wall Street, good for the environment, good for labor and it would give we liberals one fewer thing to be mad about. Speaking of things liberals are mad about, just think about how this would solve the DACA problem where now we are threatening 80,000 young, productive, law abiding, and tax paying people with deportation because they were brought here illegally when they were children.

Many of these people were born in Central America but brought here at such a young age that they don’t even speak Spanish. Deporting them to Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, or El Salvador would be an absurd loss to our nation’s workforce and an almost certain condemnation to unemployment and poverty for them in their country of birth. Sure, they need for us to allow them to stay but, again, from a purely economic perspective, we need for them to stay and keep doing what they are doing.

It is also relevant to point out that statistically both the Dreamers and other illegal immigrants have a much lower crime rate than native born Americans. Think about it, if you are not a citizen and you draw legal attention to yourself, you don’t get a fine or sent to jail for a few months, you get deported. The undocumented are even much more careful drivers than the rest of us because they don’t want so much as a speeding ticket to drag them into court. By and large, our cities are safer and more civil when we have more undocumented workers among us.

When it comes to matters of what has truly made America the world’s center for invention in the STEM topics of science, technology, engineering, and math, we have a crucial and tragically over-looked economic issue. When I was at Harvard, I often rode the subway line that connects Harvard and MIT. Boston’s subway system is a virtual United Nations that puts the world’s top scholars in close proximity to one another as we all tried to make our way to class.

It was inescapable to notice that when the subway stopped at MIT that most of the Asian and Arab students got off the train. Unlike Harvard, you can’t gain admission because your parents or grandparents went there. They admit only the best of STEM students to their program, at least 10% of which are foreign students.

One of the ways that America became such a global force in science and technology is exactly because we have had the best schools so we attracted the geniuses from all over the world to come and study at our universities and for the past 100 years, it was most common for those geniuses to stay here when they graduated. In recent years, as competition for green cards has become more intense, very many of these brilliant young inventors, physicians, and scientists have been told to take their very valuable educations and just go home.

Many of you know a great deal more about American history than I do, but I believe that it is fair to say that if we had the aggressive immigration restrictions that we have today in the first half of the 20^th century that immigrants such as Albert Einstein, and the German parents of Robert Oppenheimer, would have been in Germany during WWII. Without them, it is difficult to believe that we could have won WWII and if they had been pressed into the service of the Nazis, we might well have lost that world changing war.

It is difficult to imagine what American science as well as art, music, theater, movies, or culture would be without the influence of the Jewish immigrants who came to America early in the 20^th century. But, like many of you, my day begins and ends and is impacted all day long by my iPhone, iPad, and Apple laptop, all of which are traced to the genius of the son of a Syrian immigrant, Steve Jobs.

Might this little Syrian refugee have been the next Steve Jobs? Due largely to our self-defeating refugee policy, we will never know.

I’m more than a little uncomfortable talking about public policy issues from the perspective of practical economics. Ethics is my religious language and I would much prefer to talk about what is right and what is good rather than what is profitable and useful but when it comes to matters of refugee resettlement and immigration, ethics and economics share, albeit uncomfortably, the same policy interests.

Our spiritual instincts, as articulated by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Philippi, are to make the plight of others our own concern. Religious people instinctively know that compassion is our default setting and so from the days of the ancient Israelites, we have known that welcoming the stranger and treating the foreigner in our midst with justice and mercy is the right thing to do.

Our irrational fear of others has stupidly led us to leave our farming industry so bereft of workers that our food is rotting in the fields and while we still can boast that we have most of the best universities in the world in these United States, we are ignorantly exporting many of the world’s greatest geniuses, preventing them from keeping our country in the forefront of invention and innovation.

Several Republican leaders have lately been bemoaning the fact that they have become, to a very large extent, the “party of stupid.” They desperately want to change that and we who may typically consider ourselves to not be Republicans also want very desperately for them to stop being the party of stupid because whether you come at some of these issues purely from an accounting bottom line or from some tree-hugging, bleeding-heart, snowflake perspective, we have every reason to stop this expensive and poorly thought-out wall on the Mexican border, we need to absolutely refuse to accept this Muslim ban, and we need to come from the back of the pack to a point of leadership in refugee resettlement.

And that, you may say, is just my opinion but if you check my facts you will also discover that I happen to be right.