My friend Poppy, a better New Yorker

This past weekend, my wife and I took our three girls to the Cradle of Aviation Museum not far outside the New York City border in Nassau County, Long Island, New York. The museum is located on the spot where Charles Lindbergh took off on his historic first trans-Atlantic flight in 1927.

The museum is a nice one and wasn’t too crowded even though it was a Saturday. There is a play room for children that our older girls enjoyed as well as plenty of airplane and helicopter cockpits they enjoyed climbing into and pretending to fly.

As we were busy wrangling our children and enjoying the exhibits, I saw people I recognized. I saw my friend Poppy and his son Mike there at the museum. It was a great coincidence.

I worked with Poppy years ago when I first moved back to New York City and worked as an immigration inspector at JFK Airport. Even though I was only on the job for about two years and left it more than sixteen years ago, it remains the most interesting paying job I’ve ever held.

The immigration service attracted an interesting mix of people, and most of my fellow immigration inspectors were excellent people. Some of them, particularly some of the supervisors, liked to put on airs even though they did little but order people around and make things easy for the airlines. Some people like to inflate themselves or wear needless tactical gear and pull power trips on passengers or other inspectors.

Poppy didn’t have to yell at people or strut around pretending to be tough. He’s a decorated veteran of both the U.S. Army and the New York Police Department. He saw combat in Vietnam and on the streets of New York as a housing cop during some of the most violent times of the city’s history. Rank-and-file inspectors like me respected the retired cops like Poppy because they had real and more impressive law enforcement experience and had no use for the petty politics of the federal bureaucracy. There was nothing that a paper-pushing supervisor could threaten him with that was going to scare him. He’s fought off Vietcong and hardened criminals. He’s seen humanity at its worst, repeatedly, and retained the ability to laugh at it.

His ability to laugh at bullshit that would otherwise drive a normal person insane is one of the qualities makes him so valued. After I left the airport to work in journalism, I worked with Poppy to write a book of funny stories about his time as a police officer. He gave me some recordings of conversations he had with fellow retired officers so I could write them up. I decided to listen to a few minutes one day before heading out, but these stories were so funny that I couldn’t stop listening and sat in my apartment listening to these stories and laughing out loud.

Among all the people I am in touch with from the airport, Poppy is the central figure in our network of friends. He is the one we will plan to meet for dinner months in advance, the one we’ll call when we make our one pilgrimage to a wrestling show for the year, the one we want to go to opening day at Yankee Stadium with. Some of the most memorable dinners I’ve had were with Poppy and other JFK friends at TwoToms Restaurant in Brooklyn.

Poppy has faced his share of troubles. He has faced health problems, his house burned down, and the useless airport bureaucrats held up his retirement paperwork. But despite that he has lost none of his humor or his ability to make you feel like you are one of his crew. My discussion with him and at the museum lasted only a few minutes, but it brightened my entire weekend. 

We live in troubling times and we’ve seen New York and America enter difficult times that strain our concept of survival. But I take comfort that our country produces men like my friend Poppy, who is strong enough to face any danger and help you laugh at the absurdities of life. 

Guns, terror and our half-assed responses to both

The slaughter of 49 people at a gay club in Orlando earlier this month by a man who pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State has set off an all-too familiar routine of outrage and stalemate.

The battle lines are drawn quickly and both sides of the political spectrum only wanted to focus on the problem that appeals most to its relative base of support. But that guarantees little or no progress.

The facts are this: An Islamic fundamentalist who should not have been in this country was able to get his hands on weapons he should not have been allowed to buy. Addressing only the immigration angle won’t prevent another mass shooting and calling for some kind of assault weapons ban won’t solve this issue either. If you don’t address both problems you’ll have more of these kinds of attacks.  

The gun-control advocates want to ignore the terrorist aspect of this massacre. The shooter was a U.S citizen after all, Democrats like President Obama were quick to point out. He was a troubled person who beat his wife and may have been gay himself, they argue. He didn’t know his ass from his elbow as far as the Islamic terror elements fighting in the Middle East, paying homage to both ISIS and a Floridian jihadist who died fighting ISIS.

But a confused, closeted gay terrorist is still a terrorist. And if you talk like an Islamic terrorist and act like an Islamic terrorist…

The rapid reaction to focus on guns and the burying of heads in the sand on the fact that this was a terrorist attack sends the message loud and clear: multiculturalism is a faith that people will stick to despite multiple bloodbaths. It demands that you look the other way and not institute any reforms that might tangle with the theory that we can somehow fill the American melting pot with religious crazies and walk away unscathed. 

Even when the perpetrator is a brown-skinned closeted gay Muslim who pledged allegiance to ISIS, it’s somehow dumb rednecks and their love of guns that’s responsible for this. It’s easy to paint the N.R.A. as the villain here because it makes it easy to fall into the same old political roles we are comfortable with. Violence, outrage, stalemate, repeat.

The other side of the issue is more troubling to think about. That is the idea that our immigration policies over the last several decades have placed a fifth column of potential terror recruits that are replenish and multiplied with each generation. We’ve seen this with other populations of Muslims in the U.S. as well, most notably with the children of Somali refugees from the Minneapolis area that have returned to their homeland to join the extremist Al Shabaab group. The Orlando shooter was a U.S. citizen; that’s true, but his family came here under a refugee program. If we had a well-functioning immigration and refugee system, this guy would not have been here.

Curbing home-grown Islamic terrorism means making massive immigration reforms that are currently labelled xenophobic by open borders advocates. We cannot bring large numbers of Muslims into the country and not expect to have some of them become radicalized. This doesn’t mean banning all Muslims from entering the country—that would be asinine and alienate some of our most stalwart allies in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism. But it means having a stringent program to weed out potential troublemakers, institute swift deportation programs for those refugees and immigrants that prove themselves undesirable, and bring in much lower numbers of refugees and immigrants.

Limiting access to assault rifles or “assault style” weapons means that we develop a very well-defined and expensive system for keeping track of people who are not worthy to own firearms. And let’s not confuse the issue: the overwhelming majority of murders in this country are not mass shootings with assault rifles but handgun murders. You could eliminate all “assault style” rifle killings and still not put much of a dent in the murder rate. You have to keep track of the people who should not own guns. Piddling over what guns are legal or not will do little.

And my fellow gun owners need to fess up that the situation is out of hand when home-grown jihadists can be better armed than our police. Yes, our crime problem is more one of demography than armaments, but the patchwork gun laws we have in the U.S. does not serve us well. We will be better with a centralizedsystem with a full due process that overrides restrictive local laws but allows the government to stop bad guys from having guns.

Both of these reforms mean that we admit that very powerful partisan articles of faith are wrong. We have to admit that large-scale availability of military-grade weapons is a bad idea and needs major reform. We also have to admit that large-scale immigration from dangerous parts of the world is an abject failure and needs to be sharply restricted if not curtailed with minimal exceptions for outstanding allies and truly deserving and well-vetted refugees.

We have had too much God in America

In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the novel’s protagonist Stephen Dedalus is listening to an argument his father and aunt Dante are having with a Mr. Casey about the place of the clergy in Irish society. The talk was prompted by the scandal surrounding Charles Stuart Parnell, an Irish nationalist leader who was condemned by the Catholic Church. This condemnation set back the movement for Irish independence considerably.

—God and religion before everything! Dante cried. God and religion before the world!

Mr. Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash.

—Very well then, he shouted hoarsely, if it comes to that, no God for Ireland!

           

The passage came to mind as Pope Francis, traveling in Mexico, commented that political leaders who wanted to build barriers to illegal immigration were not truly Christian. He was referencing Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican Party nomination for president, who has made opposition to illegal immigration a central part of his campaign.

Who are we to argue what is Christian with the Pope? We’ll take him at his word: building walls instead of bridges is not the Christian thing to do. Trump is a big phony and a blowhard who is not a good Christian. Sure thing, Francis.

Let’s not jump on the Trump bandwagon, but let’s also be fine with giving Christianity the boot in the ass out of public life that it richly deserves.  Let’s be absolutely fine with America not doing the Christian thing; we’ll be a better and stronger country for it.

Building a society around a holy book isn’t a recipe for success. And like many other religious documents, the Gospel of Christ is full of a lot of very bad ideas. Loving your enemies is masochistic. Turning the other cheek only gets you hit twice. The current Pope comes from the Kumbaya school of Christianity that holds that if we all just love everyone enough, we can create a just and peaceful world. Christianity has (in theory at least) been trying this for more than 2,000 years, I think it’s safe to say it doesn’t work.

Where are the secular social-justice warriors telling the Pope to butt out of our national debate on immigration and sovereignty? Where are all the self-proclaimed “male feminists” objecting to the import of thousands of the unenlightened?

The Christians who are promising love and world peace are just as delusional and self-righteous as the ones threatening fire and brimstone. Both camps will gladly lead us to ruin, if not by the Christian right’s aversion to science and obsession with gays and abortion then by the Christian left’s naïvely embracing those who would destroy us.

Donald Trump is a fraud and a buffoon, and he’s not the answer to our national question. But for all Trump’s idiocy, his campaign understands this simple fact: if you don’t have real borders, you don’t have a real country.

We cannot solve the world’s problems by inviting people from all corners of the world to come live with us. There are other ways to help that won’t harm our country. Any charitable efforts ought to be tempered with a measure of rational self-interest.

Our well-meaning religious friends think that they are doing God’s work and that the magic of their good intentions will somehow turn bad people good and make everything OK. I wish them luck with that, but these beliefs are not a basis for a responsible immigration policy. As a country we need to be the adult in the room. 

Two Presidential campaigns, one city

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have their presidential campaigns based in New York City. If both get their respective party nominations, we will have an all-New York presidential campaign. New York loves a big media circus, but America can do better.

Hillary Clinton moved to New York so she could someday run for president. She wasn’t the first person to do so. It was fitting that she held the seat Robert F. Kennedy once held, she was following his example. New York is now her political home. New Yorkers don’t resent her for this. Ours is the city of opportunity and even our current and most recent former mayor are originally from Boston. If she hadn’t quit her seat to run for president, New York voters would have returned her to the Senate even if she was found in bed with a dead girl or live boy.

Now Hillary Clinton is running for president again and her campaign headquarters is in fashionable Brooklyn. Democratic voters are desperate for someone else. She has unexpectedly fierce opposition from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who originally hails from the Brooklyn that was. There are so many strikes against Sanders by the dictates of conventional wisdom that his rise as a viable candidate is somewhat astounding. There are a few other candidates in the running for the Democratic nomination: former Virginia Senator JimWebb and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley.

Donald Trump has been a New York City fixture since he was born. His father, Fredrick Trump, was actually a self-made man who started his construction business at age 15 and built things that weren’t tacky pieces of crap. Some of his earlier buildings have historic recognition in Queens. Donald Trump gets credit for investing and revitalizing parts of Manhattan and Atlantic City, but his business acumen is highly suspect and he’s been a famous bloviating loudmouth for decades. Like Democratic voters who are drawn to Bernie Sanders, Trump supporters are desperate for anyone who is not an empty suit corporate mouthpiece. Trump has taken populist positions that run counter to what corporate donors want to hear. If he’s not willing to spend a lot of his own money on his campaign, he will likely not win since his campaign will run out of money without the support of large wealthy donors.

            Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump share some important things in common: both coasted to their notoriety through family connections, both will take whatever position will earn them the most votes, and both would rather enjoy the trappings of power without having to talk to real people.

Clinton at least comes across as knowing what the job actually entails and having the capacity to do it, but she would be the same kind of vacillating, self-interested establishment politician the public despises; it’s no mystery that many Democratic voters are sick of her and rightly so. Donald Trump may not realize that being President would seriously restrict his accustomed lifestyle, and what works in closing real estate deals in Atlantic City isn’t going to work when negotiating nuclear arms deals. The cabinet is not a game show.

Trump has at least pushed the Republican Party to the right on immigration. His plan for mass deportations is poorly thought out but at least he’s saying a resounding “no” to what was considered standard conventional wisdom. 

New York City would benefit from the media circus a Trump-Clinton matchup would bring, but we already are a 24-hour media circus. And New York and the country can do a lot better than a Clinton or Trump residency. A Trump nomination, or another Clinton or Bush nomination, will demonstrate that our republic has slipped past the point of no return down the slope of oblivion. 

Go Beyond Your Politics to Help the Climate

This past weekend saw a very large demonstration in New York in favor of addressing climate change. Support for helping the environment is widespread and spans a lot of political and cultural chasms. You don’t need to be a climatologist to know which way the wind blows.

Even if the case for climate change is oversold, and I’m not convinced it is, the kinds of policies that are most often advocated are policies that we already largely agree are good on their own merits. It is good to lower carbon emissions because pollutants are bad and oxygen is what humans and other animals breathe. Moving towards greater adoption of renewable energy sources is a good idea from a cost savings and energy conservation standpoint already. 

Real policy solutions are always going to involve embracing policies you don’t like. No political ideology have a monopoly on the facts, and one of the things that make science so great is that it will never fall completely in line with the preconceived notions of any activist party line.

So it is with climate change. If we are going to improve the environment, it’s going to mean that friends on the left and the right are going to have to embrace or at least tolerate policies that would normally be anathema to them.

Here are five points that people should look at that will be sure to irritate the normal politics of right and left, but will be important to making environmental change. 

Invest in public transportation. New York is able to be the size that it is population wise because we have a real public transportation system. It is often a nightmare of ineptitude and maddening lateness and overcrowding, but it exists and millions of people are able to use it each day. Take a look at cities that have had no planning and lack a suitable public transit system for their populations. Atlanta is a morass of strip malls and traffic jams. Los Angeles is a smoggy land of idle chrome and gas fumes. New York is more competitive than these cities because it can attract people and move them around even if they don’t have enough money for a car. That cuts pollutants and allows for more economic growth.

Limit immigration. Immigration, legal or otherwise, increases carbon emissions because it increases the population of the largest carbon emitting countries. Some environmentalists understand this but in the U.S. only the most marginalized political groups are calling for any meaningful immigration reform.   

Agree to expand the use of natural gas and nuclear power. Wind and solar energy are great, but we don’t have the time or the money to increase its use enough to meet our current energy needs. Even in European countries where renewable energy is at its greatest use, it still accounts for a relatively small percentage of power use. Nuclear energy allows for maximum power generated with a small amount of fuel and carbon emissions. Also, natural gas deposits in the U.S. can now be tapped with hydro-fracking. Natural gas is cleaner and it holds the possibility of making the U.S. an energy exporter.

Start holding corporate polluters accountable. If I threw a dirty diaper over the fence and onto the White House lawn, I’m pretty sure I’d be held accountable and not only charged criminally but made to foot the bill for cleaning up my mess. Yet BP took a giant oily dump in the Gulf of Mexico and it is still in business. If the U.S. Coast Guard says you still have a mess to clean up, finish the job or go broke trying. There’s nothing socialistic about asking someone to clean up their own mess. If personal responsibility is good for me, it’s good for BP and like corporate polluters.

Keep money local. Embrace capitalism and consumerism in the best way possible and support local farmers. Buy American when you can, and that includes in the vegetable isle. I’d rather keep as many dollars as I can in the U.S.A. as long as they are still worth something. Also, it takes less energy and carbon emissions the shorter distance the food has to travel to you. It may sound like some real hippie shit, but in this case the hippies are right. 

The Great Immigration Scam

The same kind of myopic subservience to special interests that brought us the credit crisis and other gems now brings us a host of proposals to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.

The media have refused to look at the situation critically and have helped push the amnesty plan on everyone. To oppose it is to be branded a racist troglodyte of the lowest order. But the truth will set you free, and the truth is an amnesty plan will be bad for everyone but the wealthiest among us. 

When I moved back to New York after several years away, I had a job as an immigration inspector at JFK airport. It was the job that enabled me to move back, and I worked at JFK for about two years. We were trained at a federal law enforcement training center like law enforcement officers. We were given badges and guns, even bullet-proof vests. But many of us, particularly those of us who were sent to work at airports as opposed to land borders, were more like glorified clerks than real law enforcement officers.

Here's an illustration of our immigration system at work: A passenger from India stood before me with a regular tourist visa. "How long do you plan to visit the United States?" I asked. 

"Well maybe two weeks, but you will give me six months," was her reply. Now, unless you are very, very wealthy, you cannot afford to go on vacation halfway around the world for six months. Most well-off Americans can't afford that, and this woman was a middle-class Indian at best. If she was going to stay for six months, there was little doubt she'd be working here illegally. 

We were under strict orders to give every regular tourist or business visa six months no matter what, because that was the maximum allowed under law. Back when more inspectors were giving people two weeks in the country when the person said they were only staying for two weeks, federal offices would be flooded with people working here illegally asking for their time extended for some bullshit excuse or another. To avoid this bureaucratic flood, the answer simply became to give everyone more time here. They could go home to visit every six months to keep up appearances and not technically overstay their visas, and they could go on living and working here illegally so long as they didn't get caught. 

The government knew exactly what was going on, but instead of doing something to solve the problem, they just set policies in place so that no one had to. It is pretty disheartening to see people day after day skirt and break the laws you are supposed to uphold.

Not every part of my experience working for the immigration service was a frustrating disappointment. I saw many people coming into the U.S. who exemplified the best parts of our immigration tradition. I met hard-working people who were proud to be coming to America. I met people who had endured great human rights abuses. I met people who would rather be fry cooks in the U.S. than engineers in their native countries.

But every American with eyes knows that our current immigration system is failing at its function of bringing in people who will be productive citizens and keeping out those that won't. There is not a well-funded lobbying effort among disaffected Americans seeking any real reforms. The U.S. government is allowing unprecedented amount of people into the country, and long ago gave up on the policies that made past generations of immigrants a success. 

Our tradition of immigration worked because it was well managed. Immigrants who came to this country were able to assimilate because we had a system in place that demanded they do so, and selected who was more likely to succeed in the U.S. We are now bringing in large numbers of people less likely to assimilate, and making no demand that they do so. This is a recipe for failure, and both major political parties have embraced this policy of failure. 

Allowing in millions of uneducated people who don't speak English is not good for the country, and it's not racist to say so. We already have too many immigrants, legal and illegal, to assimilate reasonably well. Enacting any kind of amnesty plan will only make this problem worse in the future. A reasonable immigration policy means many good people wouldn't be able to come to the United States, but being a responsible adult means sometimes saying "no" to good people.

But large numbers of unskilled, uneducated workers help create a glut of labor that keeps wages artificially low, and that pleases the moneyed interests that control our political leaders. That is one of the reasons why the current amnesty push has so much bipartisan support. It also puts on a path to citizenship millions of nonwhites, who will presumably all vote Democratic, creating a permanent demographic majority. This scares Republicans enough to try to jump on the bandwagon so as not to be branded as racists—even Rand Paul has sold out.

In fact—and even Paul Krugman agrees— lower wages for blue collar work will have a disproportionate effect on blacks and Hispanics. Where is your disparate impact theory now, Democrats? 

This is the country's last chance to put a stop to short-sighted policies that have screwed over the working and middle classes for decades, and try to turn things around. If immigration amnesty goes through, generations from now our descendants will ask us why we let it happen.

Good Riddance to Bad Frogs and Bogus Claims

After several months, New York’s District Attorney dropped rape charges against former International Monetary Fund leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn. It would be a bigger hullabaloo today if there had not been an over-hyped earthquake on the East Coast today.

In my experiences in working for the immigration service at JFK, diplomats are the most arrogant and entitled people you will ever have the displeasure to meet. They can, in many cases, literally get away with murder and don’t mind letting you know how important and above the law they are at every opportunity. They treat everyone in front of them as if they are there to do nothing but serve and dote on them. Carrying their own passport is beneath some of them, really.

So it would not surprise me at all if the accuser’s account of being sexually assaulted by Strauss-Kahn was truthful. He apparently had tried to rape a young writer in France years ago. And by his diplomatic logic, any maid who enters his hotel room while he’s there must be there to give him a blow job.

But the case fell apart completely and it became evident over a month ago when prosecutors leaked information about there being trouble with the case that it would eventually be dropped. The problem wasn’t physical evidence or even diplomatic immunity, it was the accuser’s big gang rape lie, and it’s the fault of our country’s asylum and immigration system.

The accuser told prosecutors that she had been gang raped in her native Guinea. She provided graphic details over several interviews. When her lawyer convinced her to come clean, she admitted it had been a total fabrication and said she had memorized the story to help gain political asylum and stay in the U.S. The problem with that is that she failed to mention being gang raped in her asylum application. The fact that she was willing to repeatedly lie about a vicious rape left prosecutors with no case; it even left them vulnerable to being called as defense witnesses.

It had nothing to do with the wealth and powerful position of the defendant. Any decent defense attorney would have shredded the case based solely on the litany of lies told by the victim. Her very presence in the country is buoyed by a raft of untruths.

A recent article in The New Yorker follows the case of a young asylum seeker and documents how she rehearsed a false story about rape to help her case for winning asylum. Immigrants from many parts of the world know they can do an end-run around our clogged legal immigration system if they fabricate details of abuse and torture. Who gets asylum is often determined by the luck in getting a sympathetic or gullible asylum officer. It is a system rife with abuse, where many people come from places they have settled and were not in danger and many asylum seekers return to visit their countries once they receive a green card.

The government has to reform the asylum process and let it be known that people getting asylum will be the real thing or will be gone and that asylum is just that, and not a path to being a legal immigrant in the U.S. Until that happens, the people who continue to flock here with fabrications will find few reasons to tell the truth.