4A
OPINION
Sttnes
gainesvilletimes.com
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
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The First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right
of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
To stop illegal
immigration
allow more to
Ayers’ resignation a red flag
about Trump administration
enter legally
BY MICHAEL COON AND ABIGAIL R. HALL
Tribune News Service
President Donald Trump’s insistence on tighter
immigration policies could reach an apex by Dec.
21, when a partial government shutdown looms
without a new funding bill. Trump, no fan of
immigrant “caravans” heading our way through
Mexico, is pushing to include $5 billion for his long
sought-after border wall.
Oddly enough, to stop illegal immigration we
need more — not less — immigration (of the legal
variety).
Trump’s solution resonates with many Ameri
cans who believe entering the country illegally
makes one a criminal by nature and likely to com
mit future crimes, or that disregard for U.S. bor
der policy undermines law and order in America.
The president himself has referred to these immi
grants as drug dealers, rapists and gang members.
And indeed, most Americans would never sneak
into another country, right? Probably not.
But why? Is it out of respect for other countries’
laws and borders? Surely that’s true, but no. Most
Americans would simply never need to. Anyone
who holds a U.S. passport can legally enter 186
countries around the world — many without a visa
and essentially no questions asked. By contrast,
the United States only extends this courtesy to 40
countries, primarily to European and high-income
countries.
The easiest way to stop illegal immigration into
the United States — and even address related
border security and public safety issues — would
be extending this benefit to more countries. The
vast majority of individuals crossing the southern
border pose no threat to public safety. Recent
research by the Cato Institute showed that fewer
than 1 percent of Texas’ undocumented population
had criminal convictions, consistent with earlier
nationwide research. The only crime most undoc
umented immigrants will ever commit is crossing
the border, which they only do because there is
no legal alternative. Allowing them through legal
ports of entry would prevent them from break
ing the law and also allow officials to screen and
record their identities.
Since 1990 the budget for the Border Patrol has
increased tenfold with no real impact on illegal
border crossings and apprehensions. Apprehen
sions were largely unchanged between 1990 and
2007, yet the undocumented population grew. Both
declined after 2008, though this was largely due to
economic factors, not enforcement.
There is one discernible impact of increased
enforcement: higher costs associated with cross
ing the border. Smugglers charge higher prices to
get people over the border, and those crossing face
higher risk of injury and death on more dangerous
terrain.
Higher smuggling costs make it more appealing
for criminals to establish sophisticated smuggling
operations. Once across the border, gangs will
often hold their clients for additional ransom or
traffic them into sex work.
More legal, documentable border crossings
would undercut the profitability of smuggling,
keeping thousands of people from the mercy of
truly violent criminals. It would also remove pres
sure from the Border Patrol and allow them to
more effectively keep America safe. Every hour
the Border Patrol spends stopping, transporting,
and filing paperwork for economic migrants is
an hour they are not out patrolling for dangerous
criminals.
It is possible that once legal immigrants enter
in the United States, they might not return home.
The Department of Homeland Security estimates
that in 2016,1.25 percent of legal entrants (or more
than 600,000 people) did not leave when they were
supposed to. While this percentage might increase
if we allowed more Mexicans and Central Ameri
cans to come in legally, history shows that it likely
wouldn’t increase by much.
Prior to the dramatic increases in border
enforcement in recent years, many who came
into the United States illegally would only stay for
short periods of time to, for example, work sea
sonal agricultural jobs. However, after the costs
and uncertainty of crossing the border increased,
more chose not to return home for fear they could
not cross again. Somewhat counterintuitively,
more legal immigration would actually allow
many undocumented immigrants to return to their
native countries.
But what if they didn’t? Suppose they did decide
to stay. Many would ask, “How could we be so
foolish and let them in when we knew they would
stay?” The real question we should be asking our
selves is, “why were we trying to keep them out in
the first place?”
Michael Coon and Abigail R. Hall are assistant
professors of economics at the University of Tampa.
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When someone who has
gone as far and as fast as
Nick Ayers slams his foot on
the brakes and says “whoa,”
there’s something big and
scary in the road ahead.
Ayers, the 36-year-old Ken-
nesaw State graduate who
began his political career as
a college volunteer in Sonny
Perdue’s 2002 campaign for
governor, was considered to
be President Donald Trump’s
choice to replace John Kelly
as White House chief of staff. According
to reports, he actively lobbied for the
position.
After Trump said Saturday that Kelly
would be leaving by the end of the month,
however, Ayers surprised Washington,
announcing Sunday that he’s leaving his
post as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief
of staff at the end of the month and return
ing to Georgia. He won’t be taking Kelly’s
job.
“I am in the process of interviewing
some really great people for the position
of White House Chief of Staff. Fake News
has been saying with certainty it was
Nick Ayers, a spectacular person who
will always be with our #MAGA agenda,”
Trump tweeted Sunday night.
The president is said to have seen a little
of himself in Ayers, who in addition to ris
ing through a series of prestigious political
jobs has amassed between $12 million and
$54 million, according to financial dis
closures. Much of that has come through
political consulting and ad-buying com
panies, but Ayers also has investments in
everything from pecans to health care
technology.
The official unofficial expla
nation for the abrupt break
down was that Trump wanted
the aide to commit to two
years, while Ayers wanted to
be able to go back to Georgia
sooner. Maybe that was part of
it, but it wasn’t the larger part.
There have been the usual
reports of palace intrigue.
Ivanka Trump and Jared
Kushner are said to be big sup
porters of Ayers, while Mela
nia Trump has been cool. It’s generally
agreed, however, that Ayers had emerged
as the president’s choice for the job.
The real reason for Ayers’ abrupt
change of course is obvious, and for an
administration facing growing chal
lenges, ominous.
Ayers is the prototype of a young,
ambitious Republican operative, well
versed in the ways of both Washington
and Red State America. When he was
gunning for the job, Ayers would have
known that getting it would involve
lawyering up and facing closer scrutiny
of his own affairs, not to mention a tem
peramental boss. Until this weekend he
seemed ready for those risks.
At a decisive point, Ayers has to have
reached the judgment that taking this job
with the administration, or even keep
ing the job he has, would no longer be
good for Nick Ayers. Already, there are
stories about Trump White House staffers
being unable to land midlevel corporate
jobs. Ayers reportedly is set to run a pro-
Trump Super PAC, so that’s not an issue.
But he will be doing so from a distance of
several hundred miles.
As much as any court statement filed
or House Democratic Caucus press
release, Ayers’ departure is a sign of
darkening prospects for this administra
tion. When the president can no longer
attract raw ambition, he loses the real
ity show dynamic of “The Apprentice,”
which has worked so well for him. You
can’t say “you’re fired” if nobody wants
to be hired.
The president reportedly hasn’t spoken
to Kelly in weeks, so maybe it won’t mat
ter if Kelly leaves before his replacement
can be recruited, but it would be inter
preted as another sign of a White House
in disarray.
Last week’s news was filled with the
parsing of largely redacted sentencing
statements, producing little to fashion
headlines from but providing mute evi
dence of an avalanche of information
yet to come from special counsel Robert
Mueller and the Southern District of New
York.
A true chief of staff would be respon
sible for breaking a lot of bad news to
the president over coming months, not
just with regard to the investigations into
his Russian connections and payoffs to
women, but about the Democratic House,
the teetering economy and the military
buildup on the Ukrainian border.
That might be what some would call a
nightmare job, but it was one Ayers has
been pointing toward his entire career,
one that he wanted badly, right up to the
day he could have claimed it.
Tom Baxter is a veteran Georgia journalist
who writes for The Saporta Report.
TOM BAXTER
tom@saporta
report.com
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DANA SUMMERS I Tribune News Service
Law versus morality in the Trump
campaign-finance development
Let’s imagine that Presi
dent Trump gave a White
House news conference in the
nude. “As you can see,” he
might say, paraphrasing the
semi-apocryphal quip Win
ston Churchill made when
FDR accidentally encoun
tered him emerging from a
hot bath in the White House,
disrobed. “I have nothing
to hide from the American
people.”
In the District of Columbia, public
indecency of this sort is a misdemeanor
punishable by a fine of $500 and up to 90
days in jail. Yet few people would imme
diately defend the president’s behavior
as nothing more than a minor legal faux
pas. (Save, perhaps, the vice president,
who might applaud such presidential
transparency.)
This kind of violation of norms and
decency would have the Cabinet scram
bling to invoke the 25th Amendment.
Even the Republican House Freedom
Caucus would talk openly about impeach
ment, because the public would have
lost faith and confidence in the president
almost as quickly as it would if he had
stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and
shot someone.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the presi
dent stands credibly accused of violating
far more serious laws than misdemeanor
public indecency. In filings last week, the
U.S. attorney for the Southern District of
New York told a judge that the president
abetted campaign finance violations
— felonies that come with a maximum
prison sentence of five years.
But the reaction to these accusations,
from both his defenders and his critics,
is a fog of legalisms. The only differ
ence between the two sides
is whether or not the alleged
illegalities are grave or
trivial.
The real issue should be
whether or not the president
has violated the public trust, a
concept that covers far more
than squabbling between
lawyers.
In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s
legendary 1978 commence
ment address at Harvard,
he lamented how in the West, law had
replaced higher notions of morality.
“Any conflict is solved according to the
letter of the law and this is considered to
be the supreme solution,” he observed.
“If one is right from a legal point of
view, nothing more is required. Nobody
will mention that one could still not be
entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a
willingness to renounce such legal rights,
sacrifice and selfless risk. It would sound
simply absurd.”
This is a point that conservatives once
understood. Here is Franklin Graham,
the son of Billy Graham, writing about
Bill Clinton in the Wall Street Journal
in 1998: “If he will lie to or mislead his
wife and daughter, those with whom he
is most intimate, what will prevent him
from doing the same to the American
public?”
Graham added: “The private acts of
any person are never done in secret. God
sees and judges all sin, and while he seeks
to restore the offender with love and
grace, he does not necessarily remove all
the consequences of our sin.”
In May, when weighing in on the alle
gations of infidelity against Trump, Gra
ham completely reversed his stance on
the topic of private versus public behav
ior. “That’s for him and his wife to deal
with,” he told the Associated Press. “And
I think this thing with Stormy Daniels and
so forth is nobody’s business.”
The point here isn’t hypocrisy, though
there’s plenty of that going around.
Before the Monica Lewinsky scandal,
Clinton’s defenders considered his past
sexual behavior “old news.” After the
revelations, they insisted that perjury
about sex was no big deal. Now, many of
those same people are arguing that ille
gal cover-ups of affairs are grounds for
impeachment.
It’s not quite an apples-to-apples com
parison, but that’s irrelevant. The point is
that we’ve lost the ability to speak clearly
across partisan lines about basic notions
of decency and morality.
The debate over impeachment high
lights the problem. A president can be
impeached for any reason Congress sees
fit. It’s a political tool for sanctioning a
president who violates the public trust.
The rules of criminal procedure are only
relevant, if at all, procedurally. Instead,
they are used as a substitute for moral or
civic judgment.
I am not arguing for impeaching
Trump based on what we know now. The
precedent of Clinton’s impeachment (but
acquittal in the Senate) demonstrates,
among other things, that politically
you need more than this for a binding
national consensus.
I am arguing that we’ve lost anything
remotely like a moral consensus in this
country because legalism has crowded
out morality. That’s the naked truth.
Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of
National Review Online and a visiting
fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute.
JONAH GOLDBERG
goldbergcolumn@
gmail.com
She Stines
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