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ISLAMABAD: President Asif Ali Zardari announced on Thursday political, judicial and administrative reforms for the tribal areas, allowing political activities in Fata, setting up an appellate tribunal, curtailing arbitrary powers of political agents, giving people right to appeal and bail, excluding women and children from the territorial responsibility clause and envisaging audit of accounts by the auditor general. Addressing a ceremony held in the Presidency to mark the 62nd Independence Day, the president announced the reforms package that had been worked out in consultation with all stakeholders and approved a day earlier in a meeting. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani attended the meeting. ‘President Asif Ali Zardari tonight announced major legal and political reforms in the tribal areas to extricate them from a century of bondage and subservience and usher them into the mainstream of national life, describing it as a gift to the nation and the tribal people on the nation’s 62nd Independence Day,’ said presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar. He said the reforms envisaged extension of the Political Parties Order of 2002 to the tribal areas and changes in the century-old anachronistic Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) to make it responsive to human rights. After amendments to the law approved on Wednesday, the powers of arbitrary arrest and detention without the right to bail had been curtailed, he said. ‘The FCR was a draconian law under which there was no provision of appeal, wakeel or daleel (lawyer or reasoning) against the orders of the executive,’ the spokesman said. The tribesmen were subject to the whims of administration officials as people were arrested and kept in jail for years without trial under the FCR, he said. A person could be sent to jail for three years without trial. The jail term could be extended indefinitely. Under the territorial responsibility clause, women and children were being jailed. The administration will have no arbitrary powers of arrest as checks have been placed on them. The accused shall be brought before the authority concerned within 24 hours of arrest. They will have the right to bail. Women and children below 16 years of age shall not be arrested under the Collective Responsibility Clause of the FCR. The changes lay down a time limit for disposal of cases. The spokesman said a major initiative was in the field of judicial reform. The package envisages setting up the Fata Tribunal with powers similar to those of the high courts. The tribunal shall have powers of revision of orders and judgments of the appellate authority. The spokesman said the funds received and disbursed by political agents would be audited by the Auditor General of Pakistan. In his address, President Zardari said Pakistan was created through a democratic struggle and it would be made strong and prosperous through democracy. ‘As we celebrate we should also pause and reflect whether and where we are going. Unfortunately, over the years as democracy was trampled, an extremist mindset was allowed to grow. I don’t want to go into who nurtured the militants and how they were aided. It is all too well known.’ The militants, he said, posed the greatest threat to the country as they were out to destroy the very fabric of society. ‘They want to impose their political and ideological agenda on the people of Pakistan through force and coercion. They reject the state, the Constitution, democracy and, indeed, our very way of life,’ he said. He said the government had tried negotiations but the move was rejected. ‘Now they are on the run. The nation stands united and all parties and parliament have rejected militants and militancy. Our valiant defence forces stood up against this new and great threat to the country,’ he said and thanked parties, parliament, the people and the forces. The president congratulated the nation and said that millions who had fled their homes in Swat and Malakand had started returning home. ‘But a bigger challenge awaits us. In the long run we must defeat the militant mindset to defend our country, our democracy, our institutions and our way of life.’ Praising the people of tribal areas, the president said they were being governed by a hundred-year-old obsolete system of administration that did not allow their creative potential to come into full play. He said the law had been changed in accordance with the aspirations of the people and democratic principles. |
| http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/13+far-reaching+fata+reforms+unveiled-za-12 |
Aug 14, 2009
Far-reaching Fata Reforms Unveiled
English Still 1st Language
| Aug 14, 2009 |
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| It will be decisive for career advancement for all, says MM Lee |
| By Clarissa Oon & Goh Chin Lian |
| ENGLISH will remain Singapore's master language even as the country nurtures more bilingual talents who can do business with China, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said on Thursday. 'The command of English is a decisive factor for the career path and promotion prospects of all Singaporeans. 'For Chinese Singaporeans and those who want to study Chinese, Mandarin will be an added economic advantage with a thriving economy in China for many years to come,' he said. Even new residents from China know they will not go far without an adequate grasp of English, he added. 'And they are pushing their children to master English, otherwise they will be disadvantaged in getting places in our good schools and universities, and in getting scholarships and eventually jobs.' However, he drew the line at making it a requirement for permanent residents and new citizens to be fluent in English. 'We cannot make (the requirements for residency) so onerous that they will not come, for example, by requiring permanent residents or new citizens to be fluent in English, which even some existing citizens are not.' His remarks at a constituency dinner follow a recent debate in The Straits Times Forum pages on whether Mandarin is slowly replacing English as the language on the streets, and its consequences for Singapore's multiracial society. One ST reader, Ms Amy Loh, wrote how Geylang has evolved from a racially mixed, multilingual area into an enclave for new residents from China, with a growing prevalence of Chinese-only shop signs. Another letter writer, Mr Samuel Owen, said it is becoming increasingly difficult to order in English in some Chinese restaurants and shops because many workers from China cannot speak English. While agreeing that Mandarin proficiency was important to Singapore society, Mr Owen urged the Government to strike a balance between that and English as a lingua franca. MM Lee called on Singaporeans to give the new arrivals from China some time to adapt to life here. 'It is not easy to adjust to a different society, multiracial, multilingual, multi-religious, with different customs and ways of life,' he said. People also need to be circumspect about the Government encouraging Singaporeans to speak more Mandarin and take scholarships to study in China's top universities Said MM Lee: 'Do not be misled by the emphasis on Chinese language and culture... It does not mean we are displacing English as our working and common language, our first language.' |
Leaders: China Seeks Friendly Ties with Islamic Countries
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| China would cement friendship and cooperation with the Islamic countries based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence, President Hu Jintao told visiting Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayedal-Nahayanon, Aug. 14, 2009.(Xinhua Photo) |
BEIJING, Aug. 14 (Xinhua) -- China would cement friendship and cooperation with the Islamic countries based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence, said President Hu Jintao on Friday afternoon.
China and the Islamic countries have maintained mutual respect and trust for a long time, and shown understanding and supported each other on issues concerning the core interest of the other side, Hu told visiting Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayedal-Nahayan.
Hu said China would like to promote dialogues and exchanges with different cultures and civilizations on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence.
Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that is now China's second largest trading partner and important supplier of energy resources in the Arab world.
China and the UAE had enjoyed political trust, mutual support and reciprocal trade cooperation since they forged diplomatic ties25 years ago, said Hu, adding they had also maintained consultations on the international and regional issues.
"We appreciate the UAE government for its adherence to the one-China policy, as well as its support on the Taiwan issue and the issues concerning Tibet and Xinjiang," Hu said.
The president said the two countries were facing new opportunities for furthering relations, and China would work with the UAE to enhance cooperation to benefit the two countries and peoples. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao meets with Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayedal-Nahayan, Aug. 14, 2009.(Xinhua Photo)
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Also on Friday, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao met with bin Zayedal-Nahayan.
Wen said the common grounds had increased between China and the UAE in coping with the global financial crisis, and both should take effective measures to expand cooperation on energy, trade, investment and financial fields.
He also said China would like to actively consult with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) on the early signing of a free trade zone agreement.
bin Zayed al-Nahayan, who is making his first China tour since he became crown prince, said the UAE hoped to establish strategic cooperation with China in trade, oil and petrochemical fields.
He also said the Xinjiang riot on July 5 was China's internal affairs, and his country supported the Chinese government's effort to safeguard national unity, security and stability.
Ingush Minister Shot Dead at Work
Two masked gunmen have shot dead the construction minister of the volatile Russian republic of Ingushetia, local officials say.
Ruslan Amerkhanov was killed in his office in the town of Magas on Wednesday. The gunmen then fled by car.
Attacks on government officials have become more common in the troubled, mainly Muslim North Caucasus republic.
In June, Ingushetia's President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt.
The Ingush interior ministry said the gunmen shot and killed Mr Amerkhanov at point-blank range in his office.
His assistant, Magomed Amerkhanov, was wounded in the attack.
Ingushetia has seen escalating clashes between security forces and armed militants in the past year, similar to the violence that continues in neighbouring Chechnya.
Ingush security officials quoted by Itar-Tass news agency said Wednesday's killing might be linked to a recent review of construction projects in the republic. Ingushetia is plagued by corruption, including in the construction sector.
Three employees of Russia's emergencies ministry were shot dead in Ingushetia ten days ago.
In Chechnya, Russian forces were engaged in heavy fighting with separatist rebels until a few years ago, though the fighting has become much less intense recently.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8196689.stm
Published: 2009/08/12
Gang Kills Seven in Russian Sauna
Russian police are hunting gunmen who killed seven women at a sauna and four policemen at a checkpoint in the troubled southern region of Dagestan.
The attack happened on Thursday in the town of Buynaksk, 41km (25 miles) from the regional capital Makhachkala.
Police say they know the identities of some of the gunmen, who fled into a forest after the attack.
Separately, four policemen and two militants were killed in a clash near Grozny, in neighbouring Chechnya.
Moscow has been keen to portray Chechnya and the region as an area returning to normal after years of unrest.
But these latest attacks form part of a wider pattern: a growing anti-Kremlin, Islamist insurgency that appears to be spreading across the North Caucasus, the BBC's Gabriel Gatehouse reports.
On Friday police shot and killed three militants near a village in Dagestan's Derbent district, officials say.
In Thursday's attack in Dagestan, at least 15 gunmen opened fire on a traffic police checkpoint on the edge of Buynaksk, Russian media quoted local police as saying.
The gunmen are reported to have hijacked a minibus, which they later abandoned.
They went on to attack a sauna at a nearby health complex, killing seven women workers there.
Dagestan has been plagued by violence in recent years, much of it linked to the conflict between security forces and separatist rebels in Chechnya, a mainly Muslim Russian republic.
Russian forces have fought two wars against Islamist rebels in Chechnya since 1994. The conflicts claimed more than 100,000 lives and left it in ruins.
Clashes with militants are also common in Ingushetia, which borders on Chechnya to the west.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8201054.stm
Published: 2009/08/14
Obscure Borneo Tribe to Get Citizenship
MIRI: A minority ethnic group living in obscurity in the deep interior of Sarawak in the island of Borneo, called the “Sabans,” will be given citizenship status despite being left out of the state government’s official citizenship list.
Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Nazri Abdul Aziz said he had learned about the plight of the Sabans, most of whom are living in rural northern Sarawak, at the start of his four-day official visit to Sarawak.
Officials at the Miri High Court chamber here also briefed him on the plight of other stateless natives like Penans with no birth certificates or MyKads.
The Sabans number between 5,000 and 10,000, and like the Penans, are facing a number of problems related to their personal documents.
Nazri said he would meet with Sarawak leaders and seek their cooperation to solve the woes faced by these minority folk.
“I will speak with Datuk Seri Awang Tengah (State Minister of Public Utilities and State Second Minister of Planning and Resources Management) and inform him of the problem.
“This ethnic group can be recognised as citizens once the state government includes them by making some amendments to the state constitution. There is no need for the Federal Constitution to be amended.
“This is a problem confined to Sarawak. It is not widespread and can be dealt with,” he said after visiting the court complex with a delegation of senior officials from the Prime Minister’s Department.
Mobile Court officials who have been visiting the interior of Sarawak regularly in the past two years have found tribes like the Sabans who face problems because they are not officially recognised as Malaysians.
Nazri said he was very happy with the role of the Mobile Court in helping the rural natives living in isolated regions in Sarawak and Sabah, and praised Chief Justice Tan Sri Richard Melanjun whose brainchild it is.
Nazri will travel some 1,000km in his Sarawak trip. After Miri, he will visit Bintulu, Sibu and Kuching.
Aug 13, 2009
The End of Christian America
Published Apr 4, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Apr 13, 2009
It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohler—a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life—the central news of the survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, "this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified." As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America's religious culture was cracking.
"That really hit me hard," he told me last week. "The Northwest was never as religious, never as congregationalized, as the Northeast, which was the foundation, the home base, of American religion. To lose New England struck me as momentous." Turning the report over in his mind, Mohler posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the decline—and, by implication, the imminent fall—of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity. "A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us," Mohler wrote. "The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture." When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote this, he had grown even gloomier. "Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society," he said from his office on campus in Louisville, Ky.
There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.
According to the American Religious Identification Survey that got Mohler's attention, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008—roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States.)
While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called "the garden of the church" from "the wilderness of the world." As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America's unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom—not least freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall of the modern religious right's notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.
Let's be clear: while the percentage of Christians may be shrinking, rumors of the death of Christianity are greatly exaggerated. Being less Christian does not necessarily mean that America is post-Christian. A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that "these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more 'evangelical' outlook among Christians." With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious—far more so, for instance, than Europe.
Still, in the new NEWSWEEK Poll, fewer people now think of the United States as a "Christian nation" than did so when George W. Bush was president (62 percent in 2009 versus 69 percent in 2008). Two thirds of the public (68 percent) now say religion is "losing influence" in American society, while just 19 percent say religion's influence is on the rise. The proportion of Americans who think religion "can answer all or most of today's problems" is now at a historic low of 48 percent. During the Bush 43 and Clinton years, that figure never dropped below 58 percent.
Many conservative Christians believe they have lost the battles over issues such as abortion, school prayer and even same-sex marriage, and that the country has now entered a post-Christian phase. Christopher Hitchens —a friend and possibly the most charming provocateur you will ever meet—wrote a hugely popular atheist tract a few years ago, "God Is Not Great." As an observant (if deeply flawed) Episcopalian, I disagree with many of Hitchens's arguments—I do not think it is productive to dismiss religious belief as superstitious and wrong—but he is a man of rigorous intellectual honesty who, on a recent journey to Texas, reported hearing evangelical mutterings about the advent of a "post-Christian" America.
To be post-Christian has meant different things at different times. In 1886, The Atlantic Monthly described George Eliot as "post-Christian," using the term as a synonym for atheist or agnostic. The broader—and, for our purposes, most relevant—definition is that "post-Christian" characterizes a period of time that follows the decline of the importance of Christianity in a region or society. This use of the phrase first appeared in the 1929 book "America Set Free" by the German philosopher Hermann Keyserling.
The term was popularized during what scholars call the "death of God" movement of the mid-1960s—a movement that is, in its way, still in motion. Drawing from Nietzsche's 19th-century declaration that "God is dead," a group of Protestant theologians held that, essentially, Christianity would have to survive without an orthodox understanding of God. Tom Altizer, a religion professor at Emory University, was a key member of the Godless Christianity movement, and he traces its intellectual roots first to Kierkegaard and then to Nietzsche. For Altizer, a post-Christian era is one in which "both Christianity and religion itself are unshackled from their previous historical grounds." In 1992 the critic Harold Bloom published a book titled "The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation." In it he cites William James's definition of religion in "The Varieties of Religious Experience": "Religion … shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine."
Which is precisely what most troubles Mohler. "The post-Christian narrative is radically different; it offers spirituality, however defined, without binding authority," he told me. "It is based on an understanding of history that presumes a less tolerant past and a more tolerant future, with the present as an important transitional step." The present, in this sense, is less about the death of God and more about the birth of many gods. The rising numbers of religiously unaffiliated Americans are people more apt to call themselves "spiritual" rather than "religious." (In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 30 percent describe themselves this way, up from 24 percent in 2005.)
Roughly put, the Christian narrative is the story of humankind as chronicled in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament—the drama of creation, fall and redemption. The orthodox tend to try to live their lives in accordance with the general behavioral principles of the Bible (or at least the principles they find there of which they approve) and anticipate the ultimate judgment of God—a judgment that could well determine whether they spend eternity in heaven or in hell.
What, then, does it mean to talk of "Christian America"? Evangelical Christians have long believed that the United States should be a nation whose political life is based upon and governed by their interpretation of biblical and theological principles. If the church believes drinking to be a sin, for instance, then the laws of the state should ban the consumption of alcohol. If the church believes the theory of evolution conflicts with a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, then the public schools should tailor their lessons accordingly. If the church believes abortion should be outlawed, then the legislatures and courts of the land should follow suit. The intensity of feeling about how Christian the nation should be has ebbed and flowed since Jamestown; there is, as the Bible says, no thing new under the sun. For more than 40 years, the debate that began with the Supreme Court's decision to end mandatory school prayer in 1962 (and accelerated with the Roe v. Wade ruling 11 years later) may not have been novel, but it has been ferocious. Fearing the coming of a Europe-like secular state, the right longed to engineer a return to what it believed was a Christian America of yore.
But that project has failed, at least for now. In Texas, authorities have decided to side with science, not theology, in a dispute over the teaching of evolution. The terrible economic times have not led to an increase in church attendance. In Iowa last Friday, the state Supreme Court ruled against a ban on same-sex marriage, a defeat for religious conservatives. Such evidence is what has believers fretting about the possibility of an age dominated by a newly muscular secularism. "The moral teachings of Christianity have exerted an incalculable influence on Western civilization," Mohler says. "As those moral teachings fade into cultural memory, a secularized morality takes their place. Once Christianity is abandoned by a significant portion of the population, the moral landscape necessarily changes. For the better part of the 20th century, the nations of Western Europe led the way in the abandonment of Christian commitments. Christian moral reflexes and moral principles gave way to the loosening grip of a Christian memory. Now even that Christian memory is absent from the lives of millions."
Religious doubt and diversity have, however, always been quintessentially American. Alexis de Tocqueville said that "the religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States," but he also discovered a "great depth of doubt and indifference" to faith. Jefferson had earlier captured the essence of the American spirit about religion when he observed that his statute for religious freedom in Virginia was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination"—and those of no faith whatever. The American culture of religious liberty helped create a busy free market of faith: by disestablishing churches, the nation made religion more popular, not less.
America, then, is not a post-religious society—and cannot be as long as there are people in it, for faith is an intrinsic human impulse. The belief in an order or a reality beyond time and space is ancient and enduring. "All men," said Homer, "need the gods." The essential political and cultural question is to what extent those gods—or, more accurately, a particular generation's understanding of those gods—should determine the nature of life in a given time and place.
If we apply an Augustinian test of nationhood to ourselves, we find that liberty, not religion, is what holds us together. In "The City of God," Augustine —converted sinner and bishop of Hippo—said that a nation should be defined as "a multitude of rational beings in common agreement as to the objects of their love." What we value most highly—what we collectively love most—is thus the central test of the social contract.
Judging from the broad shape of American life in the first decade of the 21st century, we value individual freedom and free (or largely free) enterprise, and tend to lean toward libertarianism on issues of personal morality. The foundational documents are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (though there are undeniable connections between them). This way of life is far different from what many overtly conservative Christians would like. But that is the power of the republican system engineered by James Madison at the end of the 18th century: that America would survive in direct relation to its ability to check extremism and preserve maximum personal liberty. Religious believers should welcome this; freedom for one sect means freedom for all sects. As John F. Kennedy said in his address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960: "For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist … Today I may be the victim—but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped."
Religion has been a factor in American life and politics from the beginning. Anglican observance was compulsory at Jamestown, and the Puritans of New England were explicitly hoping to found a New Jerusalem. But coerced belief is no belief at all; it is tyranny. "I commend that man, whether Jew, or Turk, or Papist, or whoever, that steers no otherwise than his conscience dares," said Roger Williams.
By the time of the American founding, men like Jefferson and Madison saw the virtue in guaranteeing liberty of conscience, and one of the young republic's signal achievements was to create a context in which religion and politics mixed but church and state did not. The Founders' insight was that one might as well try to build a wall between economics and politics as between religion and politics, since both are about what people feel and how they see the world. Let the religious take their stand in the arena of politics and ideas on their own, and fight for their views on equal footing with all other interests. American public life is neither wholly secular nor wholly religious but an ever-fluid mix of the two. History suggests that trouble tends to come when one of these forces grows too powerful in proportion to the other.
Political victories are therefore intrinsically transitory. In the middle of the 19th century, the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney argued that "the great business of the church is to reform the world—to put away every kind of sin"; Christians, he said, are "bound to exert their influence to secure a legislation that is in accordance with the law of God."
Worldly success tends to mark the beginning of the end for the overtly religious in politics. Prohibition was initially seen as a great moral victory, but its failure and ultimate repeal show that a movement should always be careful what it wishes for: in America, the will of the broad whole tends to win out over even the most devoted of narrower interests.
As the 20th century wore on, Christians found themselves in the relatively uncontroversial position of opposing "godless communism," and the fervor of the Prohibition and Scopes-trial era seemed to fade a bit. Issues of personal morality, not international politics, would lay the foundations for the campaign for Christian America that we know as the rise of the religious right. The phenomenon of divorce in the 1960s and the Roe decision in 1973 were critical, and Jimmy Carter's born-again faith brought evangelical Christianity to the mainstream in 1976.
Growing up in Atlanta in the '60s and '70s, Joe Scarborough, the commentator and former Republican congressman, felt the fears of his evangelical parents and their friends—fears that helped build support for the politically conservative Christian America movement. "The great anxiety in Middle America was that we were under siege—my parents would see kids walking down the street who were Boy Scouts three years earlier suddenly looking like hippies, and they were scared," Scarborough says. "Culturally, it was October 2001 for a decade. For a decade. And once our parents realized we weren't going to disappear into dope and radicalism, the pressure came off. That's the world we're in now—parents of boomers who would not drink a glass of wine 30 years ago are now kicking back with vodka. In a way, they've been liberated."
And they have learned that politics does not hold all the answers—a lesson that, along with a certain relief from the anxieties of the cultural upheavals of the '60s and '70s, has tended to curb religiously inspired political zeal. "The worst fault of evangelicals in terms of politics over the last 30 years has been an incredible naiveté about politics and politicians and parties," says Mohler. "They invested far too much hope in a political solution to what are transpolitical issues and problems. If we were in a situation that were more European, where the parties differed mostly on traditional political issues rather than moral ones, or if there were more parties, then we would probably have a very different picture. But when abortion and a moral understanding of the human good became associated with one party, Christians had few options politically."
When that party failed to deliver—and it did fail—some in the movement responded by retreating into radicalism, convinced of the wickedness and venality of the political universe that dealt them defeat after defeat. (The same thing happened to many liberals after 1968: infuriated by the conservative mood of the country, the left reacted angrily and moved ever leftward.)
The columnist Cal Thomas was an early figure in the Moral Majority who came to see the Christian American movement as fatally flawed in theological terms. "No country can be truly 'Christian'," Thomas says. "Only people can. God is above all nations, and, in fact, Isaiah says that 'All nations are to him a drop in the bucket and less than nothing'." Thinking back across the decades, Thomas recalls the hope—and the failure. "We were going through organizing like-minded people to 'return' America to a time of greater morality. Of course, this was to be done through politicians who had a difficult time imposing morality on themselves!"
Experience shows that religious authorities can themselves be corrupted by proximity to political power. A quarter century ago, three scholars who are also evangelical Christians—Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch and George M. Marsden—published an important but too-little-known book, "The Search for Christian America." In it they argued that Christianity's claims transcend any political order. Christians, they wrote, "should not have illusions about the nature of human governments. Ultimately they belong to what Augustine calls 'the city of the world,' in which self-interest rules … all governments can be brutal killers."
Their view tracks with that of the Psalmist, who said, "Put not thy trust in princes," and there is much New Testament evidence to support a vision of faith and politics in which the church is truest to its core mission when it is the farthest from the entanglements of power. The Jesus of the Gospels resolutely refuses to use the means of this world—either the clash of arms or the passions of politics—to further his ends. After the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the dazzled throng thought they had found their earthly messiah. "When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him by force, to make him a king, he departed again into a mountain himself alone." When one of his followers slices off the ear of one of the arresting party in Gethsemane, Jesus says, "Put up thy sword." Later, before Pilate, he says, "My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight." The preponderance of lessons from the Gospels and from the rest of the New Testament suggests that earthly power is transitory and corrupting, and that the followers of Jesus should be more attentive to matters spiritual than political.
As always with the Bible, however, there are passages that complicate the picture. The author of Hebrews says believers are "strangers and exiles on the earth" and that "For here we have no lasting city, but seek the city which is to come." In Romans the apostle Paul advises: "Do not be conformed to this world." The Second Vatican Council cited these words of Pius XII: the Catholic Church's "divine Founder, Jesus Christ, has not given it any mandate or fixed any end of the cultural order. The goal which Christ assigns to it is strictly religious … The Church can never lose sight of the strictly religious, supernatural goal."
As an archbishop of Canterbury once said, though, it is a mistake to think that God is chiefly or even largely concerned with religion. "I hate the sound of your solemn assemblies," the Lord says in Amos. Religion is not only about worshipping your God but about doing godly things, and a central message of the Gospels is the duty of the Christian to transform, as best one can, reality through works of love. "Being in the world and not of it remains our charge," says Mohler. "The church is an eternal presence in a fallen, temporal world—but we are to have influence. The Sermon on the Mount is about what we are to do—but it does not come with a political handbook."
How to balance concern for the garden of the church with the moral imperatives to make gentle the life of the world is one of the most perplexing questions facing the church. "We have important obligations to do whatever we can, including through the use of political means, to help our neighbors—promoting just laws, good order, peace, education and opportunity," wrote Noll, Hatch and Marsden. "Nonetheless we should recognize that as we work for the relatively better in 'the city of the world,' our successes will be just that—relative. In the last analysis the church declares that the solutions offered by the nations of the world are always transitory solutions, themselves in need of reform."
Back in Louisville, preparing for Easter, Al Mohler keeps vigil over the culture. Last week he posted a column titled "Does Your Pastor Believe in God?," one on abortion and assisted suicide and another on the coming wave of pastors. "Jesus Christ promised that the very gates of Hell would not prevail against his church," Mohler wrote. "This new generation of young pastors intends to push back against hell in bold and visionary ministry. Expect to see the sparks fly." On the telephone with me, he added: "What we are seeing now is the evidence of a pattern that began a very long time ago of intellectual and cultural and political changes in thought and mind. The conditions have changed. Hard to pinpoint where, but whatever came after the Enlightenment was going to be very different than what came before." And what comes next here, with the ranks of professing Christians in decline, is going to be different, too.
Read more about NEWSWEEK's poll on religion in America here .
With Eliza Gray
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/192583
'Postracial' at Princeton
Published Apr 18, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Apr 27, 2009
Alexandra Kennedy was on the inside looking out. For much of the evening, streams of Polo-clad students had sped east across the Princeton campus, flooding Prospect Avenue and breaking in waves against the row of imposing mansions, called eating clubs, where most upperclassmen "take their meals"—and where nearly all undergrads go for their regular dose of dancing, drinking and hooking up. Now hundreds filled Ivy, the oldest of the clubs. Among them was Kennedy. After a season spent clamoring at the door for admission like the rest of the rabble, Kennedy, a svelte, self-assured African-American sophomore with straight, shoulder-length hair and a fondness for cable-knit sweaters, had recently emerged from Ivy's Darwinian "bicker" process—a prim rendition of rush—as one of the chosen few: a member of the club.
It was a natural next step in the Kennedy family story. Alex's father, Henry Kennedy Jr., the son of Southern blacks, arrived at Princeton in 1966 from a middling Washington, D.C., public school. Now his daughter had joined a club where all-black waiters had, until recently, served an all-white membership—a place where, as a guest, her own father had "felt very uncomfortable."
Still, change creates its own complications. As a bouncer restrained the hopefuls and '80s rock blared on the sound system, Kennedy resolved to put her new status to use. Tonight, she decided, she would reach across Ivy's intimidating threshold and distribute her share of admission passes to a select group of beneficiaries: "the black people." "I thought about it," she says. "I know how hard it is for African-Americans to feel welcome in these clubs." But as Kennedy ushered the first lucky recipients inside, a cold voice cut through the crowd. "I was literally on my knees signing passes," she recalls, "and this black girl waiting outside was like"—Kennedy adopts a deeper, mocking tone—" 'This club's racist. They're not letting us in because we're black'." She rolls her eyes. "And for me, I'm like, 'I am standing out here trying to get you in. This isn't a race thing. It's a pass thing'."
Two elite African-Americans on either side of a velvet rope: one feeling excluded, the other exhausted. Such is life on the cutting edge of "post-racial" America, where race isn't supposed to matter anymore. Except when it does.
Linked in the public consciousness to Barack Obama, the term "post-racial" has now expanded to encompass the era his election has ushered in. But in the real world, post-racialism is something of a mirage. Detroit is not post-racial. Neither is Congress, nor Wall Street, nor prime-time TV. Black people pretty much refuse to utter the word, Obama included. For most Americans, it's little more than a convenient cable-news catchphrase.
It's only at places like Princeton—selective, self-sufficient institutions that have spent many years (and millions of dollars) cultivating climate-controlled biospheres of diversity—that anything even remotely resembling a post-racial America is supposed to have taken shape. A quarter century ago, the future Michelle Obama, then a Princeton senior, confessed that her time as a Tiger had left her feeling "black first and a student second"—the result, she wrote, of "a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society … never becoming a full participant." But decades of progress have proved that prediction wrong, propelling Michelle to the White House and creating for her descendants a university that boasts 17 tenured black professors, an ambitious new Center for African American Studies and a black population larger and more integrated than the one she left behind. In 1981, 18 percent of her fellow freshmen were minorities. Last year that number hit 39 percent. Back then the university had perhaps 1,000 black alumni; now it's more like 4,000. At Princeton, the periphery has become the mainstream.
But living in a post-racial bubble—a place that expects everyone to have gotten over race—isn't as easy as it looks, especially if you happen to be black. Last month NEWSWEEK asked two of the first multigenerational African-American families to pass through Princeton—Henry Kennedy, '70, and Alex Kennedy, '09; Jerome Davis, '71, and Kamille Davis, '05—to map out, in miniature, how life on the front lines of racial progress has changed over the past four decades. The contrast was stark. The fathers—among the first generation of black students accepted into the upper echelons of society—arrived at a time of political unrest and, whether they engaged or retreated, drew strength from their common challenges. But their daughters—among the first African-Americans to enter Princeton with the same advantages as the most privileged of their white peers—have struggled to satisfy the competing demands of the black world they've inherited and the white world they inhabit. In the Age of Obama, the old battle lines may be disappearing. But in a certain sense, that's only made it harder for the next generation of black elites to know where they stand.
Jerome Davis's standing was never in doubt. On a Thursday night in October 1968, Davis's sophomore year, a student named Reginald Peniston called in a noise complaint against the raucous Rockefeller Suite, then accompanied police as they broke up the party. Unfortunately, Peniston was one of only about 60 black students on a campus of 3,300, while the "Rock Suite" boys, mostly football players, were white—and drunk. When Peniston left the dorm, a suite window swung open and a stream of urine rained on his head; the words "n––––r" and "black bastard" soon followed. Davis smiles as he recalls what happened next. By midnight, all the black men on campus had assembled; moments later they stormed the suite. "We … told them we would kick their f––king asses," says Davis.
The Princeton that welcomed Jerome Davis and Henry Kennedy in the late 1960s had spent much of its history on the wrong side of America's struggle with race. As the school's president from 1902 to 1910, Woodrow Wilson refused to admit blacks, informing African-American applicants by mail that "the whole temper and tradition of the place" made it "altogether inadvisable for a colored man to enter." It wasn't until 1947 that the university, forced to admit four blacks into its wartime ROTC program, became the last Ivy League school (and one of the last colleges in the North) to graduate an African-American. Even then, Princeton accepted few additional black students until Davis, Kennedy and their contemporaries arrived two decades later.
With fewer than 20 African-Americans per class, "fitting in" wasn't an option. (Each black student went by two names, says Davis, "so people would think there were more of us.") Instead, undergraduates like Davis and Kennedy gravitated toward one of two roles: activist or invisible man. Kennedy chose the latter. A D.C. native, he came to campus without "any expectations in terms of social life." But when his freshman roommate requested a room change to avoid living with a black student, Kennedy realized he wasn't entirely welcome. He coped by retreating into coursework. "My overwhelming sensation," he says, "was one of being 'different'."
In contrast, Davis channeled his "otherness" into political action. As leader of the Association of Black Collegians (ABC), he protested unfair university policies and assembled a mixed-race ticket for student government; it won with 60 percent of the vote. A popular figure on campus, Davis had white roommates and friends, and pursued issues that affected the entire student body. But his fondest memories involved a smaller core of black peers who partied together on weekends and all "agree[d] with the ABC's program." For Davis, the personal and the political were inextricable. "I simultaneously felt alienated from Princeton and deeply in love with it," he says.
Despite their differences, however, Davis, Kennedy and their peers were ultimately bound together by a common challenge: being "black first" in what Davis calls an "enormously white" world. At 6 a.m. on a cold March day in 1969, for example, "all but one of the black men who were currently at Princeton" participated in the takeover of a key campus building to protest the university's investments in South Africa—including Kennedy. Unthinkable today, that sense of solidarity would endure until long after Michelle Robinson (whose freshman roommate, like Kennedy's, demanded a room change) arrived on campus 12 years later. It would even become the subject of her senior thesis—a study that found, to her surprise, that black alumni identified more strongly with fellow African-Americans while at Princeton than before or after. As she recently told the school's alumni magazine, "it's a very isolating experience—period." That said, the experience seems to have been galvanizing as well. Kennedy became a university trustee and federal judge in Washington. Davis became a student-body president, Rhodes scholar, Yale Law alum and Columbia University administrator. And Michelle became first lady.
In most visible ways, race relations at Princeton have improved dramatically since the 1960s, '70s and '80s. While black students used to cluster together in self-defense, their children are active throughout the Princeton community. They room, dine and socialize with diverse groups of classmates. They even join eating clubs. But as racial polarization has declined on campus, a new dynamic has taken its place. And like their fathers, Kamille Davis and Alex Kennedy embody the two primary roles available to African-Americans in Princeton's post-racial bubble—and the confusing challenges they must now confront.
Kennedy is the insider—calm, cool, at ease. One of her earliest memories is the royal reception that greeted her at her father's 25th reunion: the daughter of "someone important," she remembers being treated like the "princess of Princeton." Then 7, she never considered another college, and when she finally arrived on campus after more than a decade at D.C.'s most prestigious private schools, she meshed effortlessly with her upper-crust peers. Soon she was declaring that she'd "love to be a CEO" and jetting to Acapulco for spring break. "I was so accepted partially because I was economically in a better situation," Kennedy says. "I was more relatable." While race may have been swept under the rug at Princeton, class, its not-so-distant cousin, still holds sway. So it's no wonder that Alex says she's been "more than included"—a black girl who "never ... felt like I was the 'black girl'."
But even now, being included can clash with being black. Asked how it felt to be called "racist" that night at Ivy, Kennedy stammers as she struggles not to offend either the students stuck outside the club or the ones huddled inside—then quickly seeks refuge in stats. "My year, we have seven [black members]," she says. "Seven is actually 10 percent of my class … so if 10 percent of the country's population is black, then OK, there you go." Ultimately, Kennedy believes the eating clubs are exclusive, not discriminatory: "a little intimidating" for black students, sure, but "also just intimidating for everyone." When pressed, however, she admits to grappling with occasional pangs of guilt. "There's still some stigma and some obstacles," she says. "I was particularly lucky. I don't think maybe all my black colleagues would have felt the same way." Having to please everyone as she defines herself in two worlds is a heavy load to shoulder, and most of the time Kennedy acts as if it isn't there. But it always is.
Half black, half Puerto Rican, Kamille Davis entered Princeton with the same advantages as Alex Kennedy—Princeton legacy, "mostly white" schools, no real racial barriers to overcome. But unlike Kennedy, she soon drifted away from the white mainstream. "Princeton was the first chance [Kamille] ever had to be around a lot of highly intelligent, broad-interest black kids," says her father, Jerome. "She definitely seized it." An active member of the Black Student Union, Davis spent much of her time volunteering at a local middle school, talking to kids about race, class and violence; she even joined an effort to establish an all-black eating club. As a result, she left Princeton with a social circle much smaller, and much blacker, than her father's, and even now, no one in her self-described "core group of seven [Princeton] friends" is white. Asked to explain why "it looked like all of her friends were black," as her dismayed dad recently put it, Davis emphasizes that Princeton has changed since the time when African-Americans "really had to bond together or [they] would be completely isolated." She's quick to characterize the BSU as "just another group of friends."
Still, there's a reason that Davis felt more connected to her black classmates than their white counterparts: at post-racial, meritocratic Princeton, it's often impossible to say where color ends and exclusivity begins. Like any other a cappella leader, she was upset when her group, Culturally Yours, was rejected from the "arch rotation"—a lineup of eight premier outfits selected to sing together under the school's ancient Gothic portals. Her girls had worked for weeks to perfect their harmonies. But unlike her fellow runners-up, Davis was forced to confront something deeper than disappointment—namely, the suspicion that "maybe it was race-motivated." After all, Davis thought, Culturally Yours is the only all-black, all-female group on campus. After struggling to decide whether to stay silent or risk backlash by protesting, she eventually sent the other a cappella presidents a message detailing the ways "we'd been kind of discriminated against." She received some sympathetic responses—but nothing changed. "It was such a stressful, almost kind of infuriating thing," she admits. It wasn't the last time Davis would feel out of place. In a seminar on discrimination and the law a year later, a white student suggested that Princeton settle the reparations dispute by forcing his fellow Caucasians to serve black classmates as "slaves for a day." Shocked, Davis spoke up, but her peers mistook her protest for hypersensitivity and kept laughing. In both cases, Davis quickly backed down. Even today, she says she feels guilty for complaining.
The problem is, she might've felt the same guilt if she hadn't. In a post-racial bubble, it's no longer the initial incident that makes being black uncomfortable; when everyone has "gotten over" race, any controversy can be easily explained away as a joke, or a misunderstanding, or ordinary, colorblind Ivy League exclusivity. But while Henry Kennedy and Jerome Davis had an outlet for their concerns, Alex and Kamille don't. Even worse, they have the uncomfortable burden of deciding whether they should even be concerned to begin with. As a result, they, like many young, elite African-Americans, can feel boxed in. When injustices do arise, there's pressure to brush them aside. To do otherwise would be to think too clearly in racial terms—to clash too openly with post-racial expectations. Ignoring them entirely, though, might look like a retreat from community obligations. Everyone's a loser and everyone shares the guilt.
There is, of course, no one "black experience." And Princeton hardly represents America at large. But despite its past, the institution and others like it have recently become surprising models for how post-racialism, if it ever arrives, will take shape.
It's clear from the collegiate careers of Alex Kennedy and Kamille Davis that the transition won't be trouble-free. But what's also clear is that this friction may have more to do with us than them. Lucky enough to have grown up as "princesses" in places where race was irrelevant, Kennedy and Davis have the luxury of no longer fighting their father's battles—or living in black and white. But while they see themselves as "students first," the rest of us are still catching up. Even now, we're tempted to typecast these women in stereotypical molds: Davis is defending her roots; Kennedy is retreating into an Ivy fortress. The opposite also has its appeal: Kennedy might seem more progressive; Davis, confined to her comfort zone. Ultimately, it's these conflicting expectations—and not an internal identity crisis—that make the post-racial life so disorienting for members of the new black elite.
Alex Kennedy hasn't tried to hand out passes since that spring evening at Ivy. Now a senior, she'll give them to anyone who asks, but standing outside every night would be impractical. More than that, it would be strange. There's no reason to spend her days helping black students she doesn't know. "In a sense it's privilege," she says. "But it's also just my life." As Kennedy sees it, she's simply asking to be judged for who, not what, she is. Will institutions like Princeton show us how to make that happen? Kennedy sighs. "I don't think," she says, "that we can move too much faster than the world."
With Brian No
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/194592
Despite Backlash, Illegal Immigrants Stay Put
Margarito has a decision to make: After more than a decade of living and working illegally in the U.S., is it time to go back home to Mexico? He and his wife lost their jobs recently (he from a pallet factory, she from Burger King, both for having invalid Social Security numbers). He has been looking for other work, but his search is greatly complicated by measure 5-190, a ballot initiative enthusiastically approved by his neighbors and former colleagues that will, if it survives a court challenge, impose a $10,000 fine on anyone in the county who gives Margarito — or any other undocumented worker — a new job.
If Margarito, 39 (who, like the other illegal immigrants in this story, requested that only his first name be used), leaves the U.S., it will qualify as a self-deportation, which has long been a grail of the Galahads who wish to protect America's borders. What could be simpler, after all, than watching the 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants — too many to forcibly remove from the country — simply leave on their own?
To help nudge undocumented workers out the door, states, towns and counties have been busily legislating against them. In Georgia, both houses passed a bill that would make the written driver's license test English-only. Farmers Branch, Texas, continues to fight for the right to require that all renters in town show proof of citizenship. In 2008, statehouses passed more than 200 laws relating to immigration, the majority of them looking to clamp down on illegal immigrants or their employers. And there are plenty of signs that as joblessness grows, so too could populist outrage against undocumented workers and their families. Think of Fox News host Glenn Beck and his suppurating monologues about dark forces allied against real Americans and you can get a sense of the escalated tensions facing illegal immigrants. (See pictures of the fence between the U.S. and Mexico.)
As a candidate, Barack Obama campaigned on a moderate mix of increased border security and a path to legality for long-term residents, but the economic crisis has pushed immigration reform off the White House agenda. At the end of March, Vice President Joe Biden told a summit of Latin American leaders that "it's difficult to tell a constituency while unemployment is rising, they're losing their jobs and their homes, that what we should do is in fact legalize [undocumented workers] and stop all deportation." Congress is similarly disinclined to tackle the controversies of reform this year, so the near future of illegal immigration will ride on millions of decisions like the one facing Margarito.
There's just one problem: illegal immigrants aren't going, at least not yet. Their ties to their home countries have grown too tenuous; their investment in their off-label version of the American Dream is too great. Tougher border enforcement makes leaving a more final and difficult decision. They don't go home because they know they probably won't get to return. This has Americans in St. Helens, Ore., and elsewhere facing a set of decisions of their own: How hard should they press the case against illegal immigrants? And will putting more pressure on the undocumented end up damaging the community in the process?
Payroll City
St. Helens, a town of about 12,00, lies along a riverfront rust belt that extends northwest from Portland as the Columbia River leads to the Pacific Ocean. From the downtown shoreline, where the historic courthouse stands near the chain-link fence surrounding an aging lumberyard, one can watch freighters laden with Chinese goods heading east to Portland and then watch them returning with little or no American merchandise out to the open ocean. (See pictures of the high-seas border patrol.)
It's just one sign that long before there was an immigration crisis in St. Helens, there was a globalization crisis. "This is a timber town that never came out of the recession in the 1980s," says Marcy Westerling, a longtime resident and pro-immigrant activist. Blessed by an abundance of Douglas fir and hemlock, the town once hummed with pulp plants, stud mills and palletmakers. A few decades ago, though, the mighty Columbia began delivering logs from Canada, then ready-made office paper from Asia. The financial swoon of 2008 was just a final insult to what remained of the town's manufacturing base. Most of the major employers have closed in the past six months or drastically cut hours and staff. The town, whose motto in the good times was "The Payroll City," is on the brink of economic ruin or, perhaps worse, of becoming a bedroom community for Portland, with no economic life of its own.
See pictures of the U.S. border patrol tracking illegal immigrants.
Watch a TIME video on border-crossing adventure tourism.
Local contractor Wayne Mayo, 54, has watched this long slump up close. Like many other people in St. Helens, he used to work in the timber industry, as a lumber broker. But his more recent turn, as a general contractor, brought him face-to-face with an economic force he felt he could influence: illegal immigration. Although St. Helens has a relatively small Hispanic community — some legal, some illegal — the town is just 30 miles (about 50 km) from major population centers like Portland and Beaverton, close enough that out-of-town contractors with crews of underpaid, underdocumented construction workers began bidding on jobs around town eight years ago, says Mayo. Local contractors had a stark choice: either go out of business or stop paying their workers enough to support their families. (See pictures of three generations of immigrant workers.)
Mayo is a former lay minister whose brand of genial grievance would make him a perfect AM-radio host. He had long been a presence in the local Op-Ed pages, campaigning vigorously against everything from a porn store near the high school to an unsafe highway pass. He started speaking out on illegal immigration, hectoring elected officials and writing a stream of e-mails to local newspapers. Eventually he wrote a ballot initiative, a bill to levy fines against employers of illegal immigrants. He was outspent and outorganized by regional activist groups — he raised $430, they raised more than $70,000 — but his proposal still won by 15 percentage points. (A more ostentatious second proposition, to post 4-by-8-ft. [1.2 by 2.4 m] plywood signs at certain job sites declaring them for "Legal Workers Only," failed at the ballot box.) Like many others in the fight against illegal immigration, he sees himself as a reluctant warrior drawn to action by federal timidity. If the government had done its job and enforced laws against illegal immigration, he argues, he wouldn't have had to go through the initiative process. "Just start putting a few folks in jail and the world will change," he says.
Mayo's bill has won him plenty of enemies among the illegal immigrants I spoke with. None knew him personally, but they spoke of him with equal parts fear and resentment. "That is the man who started this racism," says Margarito's uncle Ramón. "He is the Deceiver."
But Mayo's supporters are just as impassioned. At a February demonstration against Mayo's law, a passel of counterprotesters, VFW types in trucker caps, spoke reverently about "Pastor Mayo" and the movement he started. Mayo didn't show up for the demonstration because he — shrewdly — didn't want to be seen as endorsing the idea that his opposition to illegal immigration is necessarily an attack on Hispanics in general.
There are inevitably some racial tensions in St. Helens. Most residents probably don't care to know much more about Mexico than what they can glean from the menu of Muchas Gracias or the two other Mexican restaurants in town. Westerling, whose Rural Organizing Project canvassed St. Helens and surrounding towns as it fought against 5-190, says voters were truly undecided about the measure until the fall, when the worsening economy hardened their opinions. "Immigrants are serving as a great dog for people to kick when they're frustrated," says Westerling. But there is a sincerity to the most ardent activists against illegal immigration in St. Helens, a sense that their town is trapped in the swale of a very bad economic cycle and that the undocumented workers might be making things worse.
Travis Chamberlain, 30, shares this sincerity. I met him halfway through the protest march, where Columbia Boulevard starts to sag toward the Columbia River. Tall and broad-shouldered, he was leaning against a stone wall, filming the protesters — for Mayo, he said — with a small Taiwanese Aiptek HD camera. After the marchers passed, Chamberlain lit a Marlboro Light and climbed up the embankment to where his wife Kristy, 30, and friend Heather Douglas, 28, were drinking Starbucks coffee drinks near two homemade signs they had hung for the occasion: "Our Country, Our Jobs" and "We Welcome Legal Immigrants."
See pictures of protests for immigration reform.
See pictures of migrant workers from the gulf states.
Travis pointed past the empty cul-de-sac toward a huge, silent box of a building. "That's where I worked," he said, "the plant with no smoke coming out of it." Even without a college degree, he had been making $24 an hour there, at the Boise Cascade paper mill, which was the town's largest employer. And then he was fired, along with most of the other employees, in January. Kristy had been running a home day-care center, but that income vanished when laid-off millworkers started taking care of their kids themselves. Douglas had her own sorry landmark, the ranch house across the street that her family abandoned because they couldn't afford the payments. The three friends couldn't say illegal immigration had visited all this hardship on them, but they felt it was just another threat to their town. That's why they were protesting the march and why they were supporting Mayo. "[Mayo] has been slandered," said Travis. "I'll take the heat from now on if that helps. Let them come to me."
The Outmigration Myth
Those who battle illegal immigration make an attractively simple argument: Pressuring illegal immigrants will make them go away, thereby saving jobs for Americans. The enthusiasm for the prospect of a great outmigration is such that pundits and politicians began lining up early to take credit for it. Last summer the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors tougher enforcement of immigration laws, released a report with the somewhat triumphal title "Homeward Bound." Its authors argued that census data showed that approximately 1.3 million illegal immigrants had left the U.S. from August 2007 to May 2008. At that rate, their number would be halved in five years. Because the drop-off predated the worst of the recession, the report argued, the decline showed that the get-tough policies passed at the end of the Bush Administration were working. Members of Congress like Republican Representative Tom Feeney of Florida were on hand for a press conference with the report's authors. He celebrated the end of "perverse incentives" that had kept illegal immigrants in the U.S. "Obviously," Feeney said, "illegals are getting the message." (Watch TIME's video "Blocking the Border Fence.")
The celebration was premature. It remains almost impossible to accurately track the population of illegals using data from the census, which doesn't ask people their legal status. Harder still is to tell whether people are leaving the U.S. or simply deciding not to enter in the first place. (Many researchers believe it's the latter.) There's anecdotal evidence that more young workers are staying home in the south than before. Border-patrol arrests are down 24% this year on the U.S.-Mexico border. But for those who are in the U.S., the twin pressures — increased enforcement and a worsening economy — have actually made it harder for them to return home.
Salvador, 27, emigrated from El Salvador eight months ago and is resolved to stay. He knows that he arrived at perhaps the worst time in the past 20 years, confronting a cauldron of economic and legal risk, but he says those pressures can't compare with what he faces back home: a young wife who hasn't been able to work since experiencing complications during childbirth four years ago and a rural hometown where the global downturn hit with brutal effect almost two years ago.
One unintended consequence of increased enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico border is that smugglers are charging far more than they used to. Fewer people may be crossing, but those who are already in the U.S. feel more compelled to stay just to pay off their debts. Coyotes charged Salvador $8,500 for his journey; he is paying it off in $150 installments every two weeks (the same amount he sends his family). At that rate, it will take him two more years just to break even on the debt. He doesn't fear detention; he fears failure. "I'm afraid of not making it work here," he says. "It needs to work."
Communities like St. Helens often have more invested in the newcomers' success than they might imagine. A Pew Hispanic Center survey in November found that the median income for noncitizen Hispanics fell at a rate almost six times as high as that of other workers in 2008. In January 2009, a new report said more than half that group reported being worried that their home will end up in foreclosure. Many illegal immigrants are homeowners, and driving them from their houses would be a Pyrrhic victory for any community fighting blight. Salvador's father-in-law Alejandro, an undocumented immigrant who owns a home in St. Helens, says the Anglos who target him hurt themselves. "I own this house and am making my mortgage payments on time," he says. "But what happens if I lose my job? Then the bank takes my house, and this place becomes the city's problem."
See pictures of Americans in their homes.
See 50 authentic U.S. travel experiences.
Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute, says an overlooked complexity of the immigration issue is that one worker's leaving doesn't necessarily equal one job free for an American. "For every job that comes into an economy or leaves, there is a part of another job that comes or leaves with it," he says. In other words, if Salvador and his father-in-law leave, it isn't just the bank that would see its revenues go down. So would the Safeway down the street from their house and the Ace store where they buy spark plugs for their car and hardware for their home. These may be slight hits, but businesses are working on rail-thin margins, and even small reductions in revenues could result in the loss of hours or an entire job for someone else — an American worker. It's a reminder that in St. Helens as elsewhere, undocumented workers, whose numbers grew wildly during the boom years, were an integral part of the growing economy. (See pictures of Mexico's drug wars.)
Papademetriou also argues that undocumented workers will play a role in getting the economy on its feet again. They represent, he says, exactly the kind of workforce that employers will turn to at the first blush of recovery. "If you're going to ramp business up quickly, where are you going to get the workers?" he says. Businesses may have new orders coming in, but they're not going to hire permanent workers until they're sure the recession is over.
Choosing to Stay
All this could be putting St. Helens at a competitive disadvantage to other towns in neighboring counties. Because the choice facing Margarito in the absence of a federal plan on immigration, it turns out, isn't St. Helens vs. Mexico but St. Helens vs. Woodburn, a heavily Hispanic town 60 miles (about 100 km) south with businesses that are still hiring (including at least one firm that just relocated from St. Helens).
Margarito and his wife would not have chosen to go back to Mexico anyway. Margarito's 8-year-old son, one of four U.S.-born children, is autistic. They've tried to find a program in Mexico that would work for him. There was a trip to Puerto Vallarta for dolphin therapy, which yielded little. They went to Morelia — the hometown of Margarito's wife — and found that the public schools would offer him only one hour of special education every three days, compared with 24 hours each week in St. Helens. All of which they could handle in the short term if it meant waiting out the recession in Mexico and returning to the U.S. when jobs were available again.
But they have no such guarantees. So Margarito and his wife will stay in Oregon, but not in St. Helens. One of the couple's last paid assignments in the town was a typical task for people who have been made unemployable by 5-190: a store manager hired them and a friend to clean out the back of the store overnight. "It was disgusting work," says Margarito. At the end of the five-hour job, they were given $60 total, or about $4 an hour for each worker. Margarito cajoled $20 more out of the boss for the three to split, but it's clear to him that he can't raise a family by working in St. Helens anymore.
Over drinks at El Tapatio, a half-empty restaurant near the highway, Margarito, his wife and uncle talked about the financial crisis — how Wall Street had binged on mortgages while Washington looked the other way. The parallels to immigration were pointed: during the boom years, the U.S. binged on cheap labor while politicians neither legalized workers nor prevented them from sneaking across the border. It was a grossly laissez-faire policy that has left everyone — Americans and immigrants alike — with a postboom hangover.
As tempting as it is in places like St. Helens to try to send the illegal immigrants packing, it would be a bit like letting AIG or GM collapse: it might feel good and it might be morally justified, but in the long run it would just increase the misery on Main Street. Like it or not, with more than 10 million Margaritos from coast to coast, illegal America is simply too big to fail.
Clinton Has Praise and Criticism for Nigeria
ABUJA, Nigeria — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sent a message of tough love to Nigeria on Wednesday, praising the country’s strong military and showing public appreciation for its huge oil industry, but also harshly criticizing the government for being corrupt.
Mrs. Clinton thanked Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and typically its biggest oil producer, for its help in resolving wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone and for providing peacekeepers to Sudan.
“The people in Liberia owe their freedom to you,” she said. “People across Africa owe so much to you.”
But when it came to the topic of corruption — and Nigeria is notoriously corrupt, from top ministers in the government to the plump police officers on the street — Mrs. Clinton took a decidedly different tone.
She told a crowd of civic leaders that the reason so many millions of Nigerians were desperately poor, despite the nation’s having so much oil, was “a failure of government at the federal, state and local level.”
She also spoke of flawed elections and a lack of public trust that has seriously eroded the credibility of the Nigerian government.
“Nigeria is at a crossroads,” she said.
America’s ties to Nigeria are a crucial piece of the reinvigorated relationship that the Obama administration is trying to strike with Africa. It has 150 million people and is the world’s fifth largest supplier of crude oil to the United States. It could supply even more, but heavily armed insurgents in the oil producing areas have hampered drilling operations by blowing up pipelines and kidnapping oil workers, seemingly at will.
There is some hope that this problem, which has been raging for years, may finally be easing. The Nigerian government recently offered an amnesty program to rebel fighters, and despite ample skepticism from experts and the rebels themselves, Nigerian officials said that many combatants had indicated that they were willing to surrender.
“There was a need to be bold and imaginative,” said Nigeria’s foreign minister, Ojo Maduekwe, who met with Mrs. Clinton for more than an hour on Wednesday. “Old methods were not going to be good enough.”
The United States and Nigeria already cooperate closely on military affairs, with many of Nigeria’s top officers having passed through American military academies. Mrs. Clinton said that the Nigerian defense minister asked her on Wednesday for specific American military help to quash the remaining rebels in the oil producing areas, and that the American government would look closely at the request.
Nigeria is the fifth stop on Mrs. Clinton’s 11-day, seven-nation African tour. Next she will go to Liberia and Cape Verde, then head home on Friday.
Earlier on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton struck a more conciliatory tone with Nigeria’s leaders. At a news conference with Mr. Maduekwe, she said, “We strongly support and encourage the government of Nigeria’s efforts to increase transparency, reduce corruption” and prepare for a clean national election in 2011, after a deeply flawed one in 2007.
Mrs. Clinton avoided answering a question about the Nigerian government’s recent crackdown on an extremist Islamic group. According to some reports, more than 700 people were killed a few weeks ago, many of them civilians, and the rebel leader was widely believed to have been executed in police custody.
Mrs. Clinton said she did not have enough information to comment on the operation. The group at the heart of the government’s assault — Boko Haram, a Hausa expression meaning “Western education is prohibited” — has no known links to any broader organizations. Still, Mrs. Clinton said that “we have no doubt that Al Qaeda has a presence in North Africa” and that terrorists would “seek a foothold wherever they can.”Soldiers in Philippines Attack Militant Group, Abu Sayyaf
MANILA (AP) — Hundreds of soldiers began an assault on Wednesday in the southern Philippines on two jungle encampments of militants linked to Al Qaeda, killing at least 20 gunmen and seizing bombs that had been set to explode, military officials said.
The simultaneous predawn attacks on the militant group, Abu Sayyaf, on Basilan Island, set off fierce fighting that continued late in the day. Maj. Gen. Benjamin Dolorfino, the regional military commander, said 23 soldiers had been killed.
Abu Sayyaf, which has about 400 gunmen on Basilan and nearby Jolo Island and the Zamboanga Peninsula, is on a United States list of terrorist organizations because of its involvement in bombings, ransom kidnappings and beheadings of hostages. The group is suspected of having received money and training from Al Qaeda.
Abu Sayyaf has been weakened by American-backed offensives for the past several years, and has turned to kidnappings for ransom in recent months.
Filipino security officials fear that the ransom payments could revive the group on Basilan and Jolo, two predominantly Muslim regions that are among the country’s poorest areas.Iraqi Immigrants Struggle to Adjust to Life in the U.S.
Not long after the Iraq war began in 2003, Uday Hattem al-Ghanimi was accosted by several men outside the American military base where he managed a convenience store. They accused him of abetting the Americans, and one fired a pistol at his head.
Now, after 24 operations, Mr. Ghanimi has a reconstructed face as well as political asylum in the United States. On July 4, his wife and three youngest children joined him in New York after a three-year separation.
But the euphoria of their reunion quickly dissipated as the family began to reckon with the colder realities of their new life. Mr. Ghanimi, 50, who has not been able to work because of lingering pain, is supporting his family on a monthly disability check of $761, food stamps and handouts from friends. They are crammed into one room they rent in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a city whose small Iraqi population is scattered. And Mr. Ghanimi’s wife and children do not speak English, deepening their sense of isolation.
“They say, ‘Let’s go back,’ ” Mr. Ghanimi said glumly. “It’s not what they were thinking. I told them, ‘Just be patient.’ ”
For years after the American invasion of Iraq, thousands of Iraqis clamored for admission to the United States and found the door all but closed — until the government reacted to widespread criticism in 2007 by making it easier for more to enter with special visas or as refugees.
But now that Iraqis are arriving in larger numbers, many are discovering that life in the United States is much harder than they expected.
A report released in June by the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement organization in New York, said that many Iraqi immigrants have been unable to find jobs, are exhausting government and other benefits and are spiraling toward poverty and homelessness.
Advocates for immigrants in New York and elsewhere say that Iraqis have had more difficulty getting settled than most migrant populations. Many are well educated and arrive with unrealistically high expectations of the life that awaits them. Though most have received assistance from government or private agencies, large numbers have immigrated in the depths of the recession.
Many also need help dealing with the physical and emotional wounds of war.
“I’ve never seen a population where the trauma is so universal,” said Robert Carey, vice president for resettlement and migration policy at the International Rescue Committee.
More than 30,000 Iraqis have been resettled in the United States since the 2003 invasion as refugees, or with special visas for those who worked closely with the American government. At least 1,500 more have been granted asylum, federal officials say.
A vast majority have arrived in the past two years, settling thinly across the country, with larger concentrations in San Diego, Phoenix, Houston and Dearborn, Mich. More than 1,100 have been resettled in the New York region, with at least 100 in New York City.
In Iraq, many worked as doctors, teachers, scientists and interpreters — often for Americans, giving some the hope that they would be rewarded with a comfortable life here. But like accomplished immigrants from other countries, most have found that overseas credentials do not always apply in the American market, compelling them to compete for lower-skill jobs.
Nour al-Khal, 35, who arrived in New York as a refugee in 2007, has been mentoring several Iraqi families. Among the hardest adjustments, she said, is accepting the likelihood that they will not make a lateral professional move.
“We fight over that,” said Ms. Khal, who was shot in Basra, in southern Iraq, in 2005 while working as an interpreter for Steven Vincent, an American journalist who was killed in the attack. Ms. Khal was a senior manager for an American development contractor; in New York, the best job she could initially find was as a receptionist at a real estate firm.
“I just accepted it,” said Ms. Khal, who now works as a translator. “It was so hard.”
The New York region offers notable opportunities for newcomers. Public transportation is good, and social service agencies have a wealth of experience with recent immigrants. But living costs are high, and the Iraqi population — unlike other immigrant groups that have colonized neighborhoods and formed associations — is atomized, fostering an alienation that is aggravated by the city’s relentless pace.
“My life is miserable,” said Dunya al-Juboori, 29, a former hair salon owner in Baghdad who came as a refugee in 2007 and lives in Medford, N.J. She has been working for minimum wage at a salon in the mornings and attending cosmetology school the rest of the day, leaving no time or money to develop a social life. She has not seen her family since 2006, when she left Iraq to seek treatment in Jordan for advanced lymphoma.
“I cry every day,” she said, adding quickly, “Not in the morning, because I’m too busy.”
Ehab, 34, who worked for a development contractor in Baghdad but fled after receiving threats, said recent immigrants from Iraq are in need of profound guidance. (He spoke on the condition that his surname not be published, saying he feared that insurgents in Iraq would attack his family.)
“An Iraqi who is transitioning from a country in war needs a lot of care,” said Ehab, who arrived in New York as a refugee in 2007 and works as a project coordinator for Proskauer Rose, a Manhattan law firm that has helped hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers.
Mr. Ghanimi, the store manager who was shot, is deeply grateful for the free medical care, legal assistance and housing he received while his face was repaired and his family’s asylum applications were processed.
But the tasks still at hand are overwhelming, he said — like finding a new apartment, getting his wife treatment for a variety of physical and emotional ailments and enrolling his children, 21, 17 and 11, in classes.
His most important job, he said, is to convince them all that they are better off here than in Baghdad — at the very least, because their lives are not at risk.
“I told them everything here is beautiful,” he said. “Electricity 24 hours, not like in Iraq. The weather is very good, not like in Iraq. There are many things you can’t get in Iraq. And they come and say, ‘Yeah, but you can’t get it.’ ”
A few days later, he took the family to Times Square at sunset, to experience the full effect of the lights. They were wide-eyed, dazzled by the swirl of activity.
“Maybe it will take time to put everything in place,” Mr. Ghanimi said. “But I feel like everything will be good.”