Way back at the beginning of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt uttered the famous words, “We have nothing to fear bur fear itself.” He was very right, for while it is right to fear and respect God, earthly fear is not a virtue. In fact, a close examination of the Bible will see that fear is a debilitating emotion that is the opposite of faith, just as hate (often fueled by fear) is the opposite of love. Fear is the basis of prejudice, which spawns violence, abuse and war.
Yet many supposedly well-meaning Christians get caught in fear traps when it comes to the deceitfulness of much of election season politics. Red flag, hot button issues are often sent up the pole to distract the voters from the real issues that actually affect them in much greater ways.
Issues like gay marriage and flag burning draw much ire and discussion, while issues that actually affect get little reflection. Really crucial issues like many jobs and industries moving to other countries, a spiraling national debt, a costly war with seemingly no end in sight (the army is preparing for troop levels to remain the same through 2010), a terrible trade deficit, and a decimated environment that spawns such evils as global warming and acid rain, are seldom discussed.
But this year you can add immigration to the hot button talking point issues that seem designed to raise the blood pressure and voter turnout of certain groups, but not the level of intelligent discussion. In a country whose enduring symbol is the Statue of Liberty, a shining reminder of our immigrant beginnings, the current strident remarks against immigrants seem sadly out of place. May we all remember that only Native Americans are not immigrants or from immigrant stock. The rest of us come from visitors who decided to stay.
The recent decision to spend $1.2 billion for a high-tech fence along the Arizona border will solve very little, disrupt wildlife migration routes, and cause more consternation to the long-ignored Native American Tohono O'odham Nation, whose land straddles the border and whose citizens oppose the fence. But, as usual, no one seems to care what the first people think, even though they have original rights to this land.
President Bush, for his part, has had a more reasoned approach than many of the ones who rally round this red flag issue. "The funds that Congress has appropriated are critical for our efforts to secure this border and enforce our laws, yet we must also recognize that enforcement alone is not going to work," the AP quoted Bush as saying at the bill-signing ceremony. "We need comprehensive reform that provides a legal way for people to work here on a temporary basis." In the past he has called for guest worker permits and paths to citizenship for the 12 million illegal workers who are already here.
The interesting thing is that the illegal workers come here and do jobs that most Americans do not want to do, yet the jobs we like are all moving to Mexico and other countries, so that corporations can make more money by paying people in those countries far less with no benefits. And many of our businesses, like Walmart, purchase goods from other countries, like the communist and still oppressive China, a nation with forced abortion and underground and endangered Christianity.
Greed conquers all when the bottom line is profit. Yet our Savior preached love, not greed. And so should we.
And while we are yammering to keep the illegal Mexicans out, foreigners are buying up our real estate and our companies at record rates, and much of our national debt is owed to foreign banks. Greater foreign ownership of U.S. assets is an inevitable consequence of the reckless tax-cutting, deficit-ballooning fiscal policies that Congress and the White House have pursued. By encouraging the United States to consume more than it produces, these fiscal policies have sucked in imports so fast that the nation is nearing a trillion-dollar annual trade deficit. Those are IOUs on America's future, issued by a spendthrift Congress.
The best quick analysis I've seen of the fiscal squeeze comes from New York University professor Nouriel Roubini, in his useful online survey of economic information, rgemonitor.com. He notes that with the U.S. current account deficit running at about $900 billion in 2006, "in a matter of a few years foreigners may end up owning most of the U.S. capital stocks: ports, factories, corporations, land, real estate and even our national parks." Until recently, he writes, the United States has been financing its trade deficit through debt -- namely, by selling U.S. Treasury securities to foreign central banks. That's scary enough -- as it has given big T-bill holders such as China and Saudi Arabia the ability to punish the U.S. dollar if they decide to unload their reserves.
But as Roubini says, foreigners may decide they would rather hold their dollars in equity investments than in U.S. Treasury debt. "If we continue with our current patterns of spending above our incomes, by 2013 the U.S. foreign liabilities could be as high as 75 percent of GDP and an increasing fraction of such liabilities will be in the form of equity," he explains. So it would seem that the greater threat to our national well being is not from foreign workers, but from foreign ownership of our country.
This is a real issue, but instead we debate illegal workers and whether English should be our official language. All the while, we are losing a grip on our country and our blessed way of life -- and the illegal workers have very little to do with it.
But now we will have a wall along 700 miles of our southern border. Outgoing Mexico President Fox compared the fence to the Berlin Wall. While the Berlin wall was built to keep people in, not out, I must admit that the American wall will be sending quite a different message than our beautiful Statue of Liberty. As for me, I prefer Lady Liberty over the wall of fear.
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