Politics

From an article of the same title by Peter Wallsten in the LA Times:

As discontent with the Republican Party threatens to dampen the turnout of conservative voters in November, evangelical leaders are launching a massive registration drive designed to reach religious voters in battleground states. The program, coordinated by the Colorado-based group Focus on the Family and its influential founder, James C. Dobson, will use a variety of methods -- including information inserted in church publications and booths placed outside worship services -- to try to recruit millions of new voters in 2006 and beyond... The new voter-registration program -- with a special focus on eight states, including Michigan, with key Senate, House and state-level races -- comes as Republicans are struggling with negative public sentiment over the war in Iraq and other administration policies. Turning out core GOP voters is central to the party's strategy to retain control of Congress... The program, announced in an e-mail last week, is seeking county and church coordinators in the targeted states of Maryland, Montana, Tennessee, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Minnesota. "In 2004, about 25 million evangelicals failed to vote. Now is the time to reverse the trend," the e-mail said. According to the e-mail, county coordinators are being asked to work about five hours a week and would be responsible for "recruiting key evangelical churches." The church coordinators, devoting one or two hours per week, would be in charge of "encouraging pastors to speak about Christian citizenship, conducting a voter-registration drive, distributing voter guides and get-out-the-vote efforts." Registering voters in churches is not a new tactic for either party, but Republicans have proved far more effective in recent years at combining religion and politics for electoral gain. Critics say the practice is potentially illegal, citing tax laws that prohibit churches from engaging in partisan activities.

From an article of the same title by Ted Wendling on beliefnet:

A national coalition of Christian ministers threw down the gauntlet Monday (Aug. 28), endorsing GOP candidate Ken Blackwell for governor and challenging an IRS crackdown on political activities by churches. Implored by the Rev. Russell Johnson of Fairfield Christian Church in Lancaster to "show your heart," the 28 ministers calling themselves Clergy for Blackwell said they had a legal right and moral responsibility to endorse the Republican secretary of state over Democratic Rep. Ted Strickland. The group noted the candidates' contrasting positions on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and placement of the Ten Commandments in public buildings... Asked about the endorsements, IRS spokesman Chris Kerns declined to comment. Donald Tobin, who teaches courses on tax-exempt organizations at Ohio State University, said he saw nothing improper. He said the event was not held on church property and didn't employ church resources and the pastors emphasized they were speaking as individuals.

From an article of the same title by Amy Sullivan on Slate.com:

When Democratic Party leaders "found God in the 2004 exit polls," as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. likes to say, no one expected instant results. Many of the party's early efforts to attract religious voters, after all, were scattershot and not a little awkward. No one knew quite what the "faith staffer"-a new breed of legislative aide-was supposed to do, and random-seeming insertions of Bible verses into floor speeches came off as Tourette's syndrome for Democrats. In the longer run, though, the new focus on forming relationships with religious communities and voters has been the right move for a party that had essentially limited its religious outreach to black churches. Democratic campaign trainings now smartly include tips for communicating with Catholic voters. Candidates are starting to appear on religious radio outlets. And Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has even stopped saying things to intentionally antagonize evangelicals. Which is why it is startling that in the two years since this Democratic revival began, the party's faith-friendly image has dimmed rather than improved. The Pew Research Center's annual poll on religion and politics, released last week, shows that while 85 percent of voters say religion is important to them, only 26 percent of Americans think the Democratic Party is "friendly" to religion. That's down from 40 percent in the summer of 2004 and 42 percent the year before that-in other words, a 16-point plunge over three years. The decline is especially troubling because it cuts across the political and religious spectra, encompassing liberals and conservatives, white and black evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. The Republican Party also experienced a drop in the percentage of Americans who say it is friendly to religion-eight points over the past year. But that decrease occurred mostly among white evangelicals and Catholics and the reasons for it seem obvious: Two years of broken promises by the GOP. In contrast, the Democrats' crumbling credibility on religion wasn't caused by one thing. And that may be the problem. All at once, the party needs to counter conservative attacks, change the conventional wisdom that Democrats just aren't religious, and expand the party's reach to moderate religious voters. To do that, the party will need a little more faith and a whole lot more work.

A different point of view on the immigration debate than would normally catch my eye...via the August 18, 2006, issue of The Week, from an article by Steven Malanga in City Journal:

Since the mid-1960s, America has welcomed nearly 30 million legal immigrants and received perhaps another 15 million illegals, numbers unprecedented in our history. These immigrants have picked our fruit, cleaned our homes, cut our grass, worked in our factories, and washed our cars. But they have also crowded into our hospital emergency rooms, schools, and government-subsidized aid programs, sparking a fierce debate about their contributions to our society and the costs they impose on it. Advocates of open immigration argue that...[it] is essential for our American economy: our businesses need workers like him, because we have a shortage of people willing to do low-wage work. Moreover, the free movement of labor in a global economy pays off for the United States, because immigrants bring skills and capital that expand our economy and offset immigration's costs. Like tax cuts, supporters argue, immigration pays for itself. But...America does not have a vast labor shortage that requires waves of low-wage immigrants to alleviate; in fact, unemployment among unskilled workers is high-about 30 percent. Yet while these workers add little to our economy, they come at great cost...Increasing numbers of them arrive with little education and none of the skills necessary to succeed in a modern economy. Many may wind up stuck on our lowest economic rungs, where they will rely on something that immigrants of other generations didn't have: a vast U.S. welfare and social-services apparatus that has enormously amplified the cost of immigration.... Unlike the immigrants of 100 years ago, whose skills reflected or surpassed those of the native workforce at the time, many of today's arrivals, particularly the more than half who now come from Central and South America, are farmworkers in their home countries who come here with little education or even basic training in blue-collar occupations like carpentry or machinery. (A century ago, farmworkers made up 35 percent of the U.S. labor force, compared with the under 2 percent who produce a surplus of food today.) Nearly two-thirds of Mexican immigrants, for instance, are high school dropouts, and most wind up doing either unskilled factory work or small-scale construction projects, or they work in service industries, where they compete for entry-level jobs against one another, against the adult children of other immigrants, and against native-born high school dropouts... Although open-borders advocates say that these workers are simply taking jobs Americans don't want, studies show that the immigrants drive down wages of native-born workers and squeeze them out of certain industries. Harvard economists George Borjas and Lawrence Katz, for instance, estimate that low-wage immigration cuts the wages for the average native-born high school dropout by some 8 percent, or more than $1,200 a year. Other economists find that the new workers also push down wages significantly for immigrants already here and native-born Hispanics... Because so much of our legal and illegal immigrant labor is concentrated in such fringe, low-wage employment, its overall impact on our economy is extremely small. A 1997 National Academy of Sciences study estimated that immigration's net benefit to the American economy raises the average income of the native-born by only some $10 billion a year-about $120 per household. And that meager contribution is not the result of immigrants helping to build our essential industries or making us more competitive globally but instead merely delivering our pizzas and cutting our grass. Estimates by pro-immigration forces that foreign workers contribute much more to the economy, boosting annual gross domestic product by hundreds of billions of dollars, generally just tally what immigrants earn here, while ignoring the offsetting effect they have on the wages of native-born workers. If the benefits of the current generation of migrants are small, the costs are large and growing because of America's vast range of social programs and the wide advocacy network that strives to hook low-earning legal and illegal immigrants into these programs. A 1998 National Academy of Sciences study found that more than 30 percent of California's foreign-born were on Medicaid-including 37 percent of all Hispanic households-compared with 14 percent of native-born households. The foreign-born were more than twice as likely as the native-born to be on welfare, and their children were nearly five times as likely to be in means-tested government lunch programs. Native-born households pay for much of this, the study found, because they earn more and pay higher taxes-and are more likely to comply with tax laws. Recent immigrants, by contrast, have much lower levels of income and tax compliance (another study estimated that only 56 percent of illegals in California have taxes deducted from their earnings, for instance). The study's conclusion: immigrant families cost each native-born household in California an additional $1,200 a year in taxes. Immigration's bottom line has shifted so sharply that in a high-immigration state like California, native-born residents are paying up to ten times more in state and local taxes than immigrants generate in economic benefits.

What to do about it then? The author basically says, stop coddling them so they'll go back home:

...end the economic incentives that keep them here. We could prompt a great remigration home if, first off, state and local governments in jurisdictions like New York and California would stop using their vast resources to aid illegal immigrants. Second, the federal government can take the tougher approach that it failed to take after the 1986 act. It can require employers to verify Social Security numbers and immigration status before hiring, so that we bar illegals from many jobs. It can deport those caught here. And it can refuse to give those who remain the same benefits as U.S. citizens.

All in all, this article makes me think...but the tone is still distasteful...the author seems to take the point of view that there is one and only one criterion for making decisions...what is best for native-born Americans. It's not that simple.

The blending of faith and politics seems to be a big controversy these days in the Christian community. Of course, it exists in other communities as well. There's an interesting article of the same title as this blog post by David Haldane in the LA Times about a controversy that broke out in a Jewish community when a Democratic rabbi, Nancy Meyers, spoke from the pulpit about Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay.