Jay Ambrose: Trump’s immigration plan a step forward

Back in the middle of his campaign for president, Donald Trump outlined an immigration plan that would base more legal entries on merit, but it still came as a surprise to illiberal liberals when he recently said he was going to act on it.

What’s more, they were horrified, because, if we start searching for job skills, educated minds, entrepreneurial energy and that sort of thing that improves life for all, we will not be focused on saving the down and out. Isn’t that racist, nativist and jingoistic?

Well, no, because, the betterskilled may also be fleeing desperate circumstances and should hardly be denied our sympathy because, for instance, they’re better at English. And it’s also worth noting the current system of selection has been a disaster. Although a mix of many ideas, its main feature has been referred to as nepotism writ large: It extends special invitations to those who are relatives of citizens.

While all sorts of marvelous people have arrived under this plan (and the Trump plan will continue to give preferences to spouses and minor children), it has also become a means of importing poverty to the benefit of no one.

That phrase, “importing poverty,” has been used by particularly alert students of the subject who were pointing out some years ago how vast numbers of the new, mostly Hispanic arrivals were virtually the sole cause of increases in American poverty rates. It should be no surprise since we know the vast majority lack the education and skills our ever more complicated society increasingly demands, to the detriment of many natives, too, of course.

No less a poverty expert than Ron Haskins of Brookings Institution has pointed to the problems, and the astute Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has noted how assimilation has been more and more to the underclass. A devotion to family has given way increasingly to single- parent homes with children as victims less likely to do well in school and move up, as one result.

For a variety of reasons, the flow from Mexico has decreased as the flow from Central America and Asia — a fount of needed skills — has increased. Something like a million Mexican families headed back home during the recession, and some industries that depend on unskilled labor and understandably like it to be cheap detest the Trump plan.

Here are understand.

First, as a study by George Borjas of Harvard shows, legal and illegal unskilled immigrants drive down the wages of native unskilled workers by something like a whopping half trillion dollars a year. It’s also the case, he says, that immigrants get significant amounts of government some things to assistance while paying very low taxes, meaning taxpayers must come up with about $ 50 billion annually to make up the difference.

It is still the case, as Borjas notes, that immigrants are a net economic gain, but that is in large part because there are educated, highly skilled immigrants who mightily boost businesses with their knowhow. This nation has a deficit of sorely needed skills, as illustrated by the fact of 5.6 million unfilled jobs requiring special competence. Trump has a plan to help fix that through more vocational training, but also through his growth- spurring merit plan.

That plan calls for cutting legal entries of about a million a year to about half a million a year, and that big a drop is debatable because we need all the highly skilled workers we can get and still some unskilled, if tens of thousands fewer. At the same time, however, there are accommodation problems throughout the country, especially at our schools, and lowering the numbers will make it more reasonable on fiscal and other fronts to move toward legalization of the 11 million illegal aliens in the country now.

That’s something Trump said he would consider when the illegal flow was stopped ( we’re making headway) and legal immigration was reformed.

It’s easy to understand why discussions of religion, no matter where they take place, make some people uncomfortable. But that’s no reason to ban the topic from American classrooms.

Many of the people who first came to America were seeking a place to freely practice their faith. The majority of our colonies, at one time, had official churches.

Over time, the idea of religious toleration developed, in which colonies with established religions would tolerate the practice of other faiths. By the time of America’s founding, we had moved beyond religious toleration to an American understanding of religious liberty, which is enshrined in our founding documents.

But in protecting “the free exercise of religion,” as the Bill of Rights puts it, we have sometimes gone too far. The separation of church and state does not require that the government shun religion, only that government not compel worship or favor a particular religion.

The American social studies classroom is the ideal place to talk about the role religion and faith have played in American history. As the National Council for the Social Studies writes, “Knowledge about religions is not only a characteristic of an educated person but is necessary for effective and engaged citizenship in a diverse nation and world.”

Even the American Civil Liberties Union agrees with this. “It would be difficult to teach art, music, literature and most social studies without considering religious influences,” notes a statement on religion in public schools jointly signed by the ACLU and numerous other organizations spanning the ideological, political and religious spectrum.

At the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, academic programs are all based on the premise that the best way to learn about American history and government is to learn it from those who lived and shaped it.

To know what they thought, how they felt, and what motivated them personally and intellectually — in many cases their faith — our students read their letters, speeches, pamphlets and books.

The role of religion in American history and politics is part of this ongoing first-person story.

To understand the motivations and thinking of the early colonists, for example, we suggest that students read John Winthrop’s 1630 discourse, “A Model of Christian Charity,” which lays out a vision for building a godly commonwealth and urges Massachusetts Bay colonists to “be generous with their resources … considering the good of their neighbor to be integral to their own good.” Good advice for today as well.

Our suggested reading list on religion in American and politics includes 25 core documents that helped shape our nation, such as:

—Cotton Mather’s 1718 essay on “the principles of reason”

—George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport R.I.

—Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, delivered in 1865, and

—Henry Ward Beecher’s “Moral Theory of Civil Liberty,” written in 1869.

More recent writings include Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 address to the National Conference of Catholic Charities, the Rev. Martin Luther King’s 1962 Ebenezer Baptist Church sermon, “Can a Christian Be a Communist,” Ronald Reagan’s remarks at the 1983 annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, and Barack Obama’s 2009 address at Cairo University.

As any honest historian will attest, there is no way to divorce American government and history from the religious beliefs of those who created our government and lived that history.

The National Council for the Social Studies puts it like this: “Only through learning about religions and beliefs will young people be adequately prepared for citizenship in a religiously diverse society and world.”

Schools shouldn’t run from the topic; they should embrace it.