With Merkel's Foes in Disarray, Germany Defies the Trump Trend

[Dill]

(05-01-2017, 01:41 PM)masterpanthera_t Wrote:  The question here is, what is the right degree of vetting those we allow to enter into the U.S.  Between the extremes of no one from a certain religion  and everyone from everywhere, lies the spectrum.  The problem I believe is that to reach the right balance we must be a bit more open to using "facts"/surveys (facts here in quotes to really mean some defensible reasoning/interpretation obtained from facts or studies, not the actual data itself) to understand any population's "fit" for our cultural fabric.  I'm sure you would agree that this will at least inform us either way on what would be the expectations when people with different values are allowed to enter.  And at the least provide a framework not only to clarify what exactly our values are, but to appreciate how we differ from other regions of the world, and how our immigration policies reflect how we strengthen the framework of our own values and to inform our population why people whom we've allowed to immigrate here, are actually a reflection of those policies.  And to get here, I think one of the things we must understand better is why certain populations of Muslims in Western Europe hold certain views that are at least on the surface,  antithetical to the core values  of those nations.  This would definitely include a thorough analysis on whether such "surveys" were actually conducted properly and without skews etc.   I feel like you've actually come around to my point in the first place.  What I'm calling for is a detailed discussion which would also educate some of the less educated views in the populace and hopefully provide a defensible reasoning for whatever policy results from such an endeavor.  Now if we can arrive at the factors which would prime someone to hold views which we find are not conducive to our core values, we can create policies which have the right level of scope, i.e. I'm not doing surgery with an ax, but a scalpel.  Maybe we find out we don't even need surgery in the first place, and now our population is aware.  

Another thoughtful post, Masterp. I will try to do it justice. Let me be clear that I am not confusing you with those Trumpsters who do not take this kind of care in articulating their thoughts, and certainly do not choose scalpels over axes.

And I want to acknowledge that we certainly agree discussion is needed.  Educating the populace—including ourselves—about Islam is very important at this moment in US history, though I would add that this education cannot just be about Islam. It has to be about the history of policy as well.

Here are our areas of apparent disagreement.

1. We assign different roles to religion as a guide to vetting, especially Islam.  In the 1970s, known IRA terrorists were forbidden entry into the U.S., but so far as I know, no one considered “Catholic” an optimal term of categorization in that exclusion.  The terrorism was not seen as intrinsic to Catholicism as a world religion, though it certainly was intrinsic to terrorist identity in that case. Excluding these terrorists was not anti-pluralist, though excluding Catholics certainly would have been.  I would make the same analogy to Islam. People from certain regions or with certain backgrounds certainly need to be vetted, but tracts purporting to help us understand monolithic concepts like “Islam” or “Sharia” are not much help.  Nevertheless, it is the intent of some groups in the US to make Islam the central criterion of defining Middle Eastern terrorism—a thing which has to be understood to grasp terrorism rather than specific regional conflicts and their various histories.

2. This brings us to a second area of disagreement—the use of polls and “facts” about Islam. These produce a kind data which can be deployed in context-free fashion. A nose-count of who thinks homosexuality is an abomination or whether adulterers should be stoned supposedly gives us adequate clue to what any random Muslim thinks, or even what Muslims in aggregate think.  Consider this—in Qatar (the most liberal of the Gulf states) two things are important about the death penalty for adultery: The first is that it be written into their laws, the second is that it never actually be carried out.  In no other place that I have lived have “unwritten” laws had such force. This presupposes a rather different concept of and stance toward laws than we commonly find in “The West.”  I can think of similar examples applying to the UAE, especially Dubai.  So what would you make of a poll in which 60% of Qataris  agree that adultery should be punished with death, but the poll does not add that since the institution of government in the 19th century no one ever has been stoned in that country? Qatar also has the death penalty for murder, but your chances of execution for that crime are arguably greater in Texas than in Qatar. The execution rate in Texas is comparable to China or Saudi Arabia.

From your post, it is not clear exactly what role polls would play in vetting immigrants. Would we poll a country and then make policy based upon a poll?  Also, who is interpreting the polls—Steve Bannon or Elizabeth Warren? Would you agree with me that some of those wielding polls in contemporary debates about Islam do not care much about adding contextualizing information to those polls? Their goal is not to educate but to increase hostility towards Muslims.
Is it possible that we already have the tools for excluding dangerous terrorists, but some would enlarge the toolbox to include an entire religion?

I like the idea of “clarifying our values.” When people brag about the US, as I pointed out in an earlier post, they do not point to the Trail of Tears or the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese Americans to affirm American values.  Even conservatives are eager liberals in this respect, touting “FREEDOM” in everything from choice of religion to  consumer goods. For liberals, of course, the history of the US is a conflict between those who would exclude Catholics and Jews and Italians and Russians and Native Americans and African Americans and those who would add them to the melting pot—a battle between those who would stereotype exclude based upon race, religion and ethnicity and those who would exclude intolerance.

In each of the aforementioned exclusions, concerns about American culture and even Anglos as a "race" were at the forefront of the discussion.  It is supposed that even a small number of the offending population can "pollute" or otherwise threaten the whole.  While we are educating Americans about Islam, we ought to be educating them out their own history as well, and which policies choices have brought us to the current state of "American values" and which have been rejected.