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4th of July Newsflash – America Ain’t So Bad
By Brian | July 5, 2007 | Share on Facebook
Waking up on July 5th and perusing the news, I came across two articles that strike me as encouraging and, sadly, ironic.
The first is from the New York Times and entitled Surge Seen in Applications for Citizenship:
The number of legal immigrants seeking to become United States citizens is surging, officials say, prompted by imminent increases in fees to process naturalization applications, citizenship drives across the country and new feelings of insecurity among immigrants.
The citizenship campaigns have tapped into the uneasiness that legal immigrants, especially Hispanics, say is a result of months of debate over an immigration bill that failed last week in the Senate. Although illegal immigrants were the center of attention in the debate, it prompted many legal immigrants who have put down roots here to seek the security of citizenship, as well as its voting power, immigrants’ advocates said.
One radio listener was Angel Ivan Alvarez, 24, a legal immigrant from Mexico who said he had never thought of becoming a citizen until last week when the Senate bill failed. “I realized that I want to be able to vote and speak up for my people, because they are not getting enough support,” Mr. Alvarez said yesterday in a telephone interview. “I want everybody to be able to come out of the shadows.”
Federico Gutierrez, 53, a longtime legal resident of Chicago who was born in Mexico, said large protests in March 2006 in support of an immigration overhaul made him decide that it was time to engage in American politics. He prepared his application and brushed up on his English and American history in classes offered by the New Americans Initiative, a citizenship campaign financed by Illinois. He became a citizen in May. “Now if I don’t like the way things are going, I can let the government know my opinion,” Mr. Gutierrez said in a telephone interview.
Maybe it’s just me, but this strikes me as our government getting something positive done in spite of itself. After months of debate that resulted in no new laws being passed, it’s easy to think that the whole thing was a waste of time. But here we see law-abiding people, unsatisfied with the status quo, addressing their concerns through the established immigration channels, becoming more engaged in the policy debates, and seeking to affect change by exercising their right to vote.
We’ve seen people with similar concerns, in places like Iraq or the West Bank, addressing those concerns by blowing something up. We’ve also seen people with similar concerns in this country marching down major thoroughfares with signs and/or effigies referring to our leaders as evil, criminal, or worse.
I’ve heard it said recently that we’ll win the hearts and minds of the world by setting an example of how free people behave, rather than exporting our freedom on the backs of soldiers with bombs. If that’s true, then the hundreds of thousands of people (including 4,000 who were sworn in yesterday) who are going through this process are our ambassadors. Thank you and welcome aboard!
The other article I saw was in USA Today, entitled Guard passes goal for recruits:
New recruiting techniques and appeals to patriotism have helped the National Guard achieve its highest level of troops since 2001.
Through May, the Guard had 351,400 troops, the most since November 2001, according to data provided by the National Guard Bureau. It’s also the first time the Guard has exceeded its target of 350,000 troops for three consecutive months since May 2002.
In the three years the Guard fell short of its manpower target it also saw its largest deployments, peaking at 98,493 in 2005. That year Guard membership bottomed out at 333,177 members. This year 44,723 members have been deployed.
With idle talk circulating about the low morale of our troops (refuted daily by those actually in the military) it’s good to see some quantitative data about the country’s support for our military (the article also mentions that the army is meeting its recruiting goals as well). Also, when talk of troop deployment levels is focused almost exclusively on the “surge,” it’s a pleasant surprise to hear that we’re leaning on the National Guard less than we were a couple of years ago.
Yesterday marked our sixth Independence Day in a row with troops in harm’s way, so none of this is cause for celebration. But it’s reassuring to know that those patriots we speak so blithely of while the fireworks light up our skies are still out there, and that there’s more where they came from to boot.
God Bless ’em all & God Bless America. Happy 231! You don’t look a day over 206…
Topics: Political Rantings | 2 Comments »
1) are you suggesting that instead of marching, I should apply for citizenship?
2) are you suggesting that it’s more patriotic to sign up for the National Guard than to, say, exercise your constitutional right to free speech when your country has turned away from its historical values?
3) the quantitative numbers you cite are very neat. A little too neat, in fact. Something here is not passing my smell test, but I’m a bit too tired to hit Google. Random thoughts:
3a) raw numbers are great, but I’m curious to know how many of our current numbers are new recruits, and how much we lost of the experienced soldiers during the attrition years.
3b) November 2001 is a convenient cutoff; did we have higher numbers under Clinton?
3c) more to the point, what numbers do we *need* given the current deployment status of the Guard? I don’t care much about highest ever, I care about “won’t screw up the next Katrina as badly as we screwed up the last one.”
2) Hmm…trick question.
Short answer: Yes. Signing up to potentially die for your country is more patriotic than exercising your right to free speech. I say this humbly, noting that I do the latter on these pages all the time, but couldn’t possibly imagine mustering up the bravery to do the former.
That said, I think both are patriotic, which I think goes more to the heart of your question. I didn’t mean to knock those who protest, only to point out that it’s more pragmatic, particularly for those who are not citizens today, to become citizens and then affect change through their involvement in the political process (which may simply be their vote, but may also involve deeper involvement, up to and including candidacy) than to simply walk down the street with a sign and scream into the wind.
The point of the Times’ article seemed to be that many legal aliens are coming to the realization that all the protesting isn’t getting them anywhere, since Congress responds by debating immigration reform for a couple of months and then doing nothing about it, so they’re getting more involved. And I think that’s a good thing.
3a) Can’t help you here. Good question, though…
3b) You’re reaching for a well known statistics trick, where you set the parameters of a date range to maximize your message, but that doesn’t apply here. They’re saying that the number of guard troops peaked in 11/01, then began falling, and has reached that peak again for the frist time recently. There may certainly be higher peaks prior to 11/01, but you couldn’t say “highest since 6/99,” because 11/01 would make you wrong.
FYI: USA Today says the data is coming from the National Guard Bureau, so it appears to be primary source material.
3c) “How much do we need” is another great question, although answering it properly requires a crystal ball.
As to “highest ever,” that’s not what they’re saying – they’re saying highest since 11/01. Huge difference…
Your implication that National Guard troops were light during Katrina is a myth. Three days before the storm hit, there were 10,000 Guard troops on the gulf coast. Two days after it hit, the number increased to 30,000. Two days after that, it went to 40,000 (along with 7,200 soldiers). At the time, roughly 5,600 of Mississippi & Louisiana’s 18,000 national guard troops were deployed in Iraq.
Not only that, but additional support was offerred by Texas and Oklahoma, as well as more distant states like California, New Mexico and Michigan. Governor Blanco didn’t get the necessary paperwork to them for days.
As we’ve discussed before, there’s plenty of blame to pass around for the aftermath of Katrina, but it’s hard to put much of it on the National Guard.
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