On November 13, 2015, a juvenile court judge in Utah rescinded his order that an 9-month-old foster child be removed from the home of a lesbian couple and placed in the home of a straight couple, citing research that says children experience greater emotional and mental stability with heterosexual parents. While the baby girl won’t be taken from the couple at this time, a hearing December 4th will determine her fate.  

The alleged research, which the judge hasn’t bothered to make public, reminded me of a study out of the University of Chicago published a weeks ago that found children raised in religious homes are less likely than children from non-religious homes to share with others; they were also more likely to judge and punish others for disagreeable behaviors.

I suppose foster children should therefore be removed from religious homes.

Clearly, even if the mystery study the judge cites is actually legitimate, it is not reason enough to remove children from foster homes. It does not constitute neglect or abuse.

And it is fueled not by concern for children, but by religious hysteria over homosexuality, in the same way conservative terror over gay marriage was not actually driven by a legitimate threat to heterosexual marriage, the so-called “institution” or “tradition.”

Many religious Americans perceive homosexuality as “unnatural” or “a perversion” based on ancient writings of primitive Middle Eastern tribes. Within the Torah, the Christian Bible, and the Koran, we find these descriptions of homosexuality, as well as barbaric edicts from God calling for the execution of homosexuals.

Fortunately, most people (but not all) no longer take such edicts seriously, preferring to focus on more ethical commandments about loving others and judging not. Many of these individuals nevertheless maintain homosexuality is a “sin” because of these ancient texts, a sin that must be “resisted,” “forgiven,” or even “cured.”

Biological research paints a very different picture, one that leads any reasonable person to conclude there is nothing more natural than homosexuality in the human species.

Homosexuality has been observed in many animal species, not just humans. It is often a very small percentage of a group’s population, as with humans, but it persists over generations. And it can actually more accurately be called “bisexuality,” rather than absolute “homosexuality.”

Male lions have sex with each other often. The entire species of dwarf chimpanzees practices bisexuality. Male dolphins sometimes stay with their male mates for years, as can killer whales. Many female Laysan Albatroses pleasure each other and raise children together, as do the males. They are “married” for life. 4-5% of geese and duck couples are homosexual couples. 8% of male domesticated sheep prefer other males, ignoring females completely; their hypothalamus, which releases sex hormones, is smaller than straight male sheep.

Petter Bockman of the University of Oslo, highlighting the difficulty of proving a negative statement like “No geckos are gay,” says, “No species has been found in which homosexual behaviour has not been shown to exist, with the exception of species that never have sex at all, such as sea urchins and aphis.”

Some 1,500 species so far have been researched and found to engage in homosexual intercourse.  

“How would this contribute to the survival of a species?” many ask. Isn’t it unnatural and counterproductive in that sense?

Simple as this sounds, some animals presumably do it because it feels good. This has nothing to do with reproduction. Female Japanese Macaques have lesbian sex much more often than sex with males, and have been observed experimenting with each other to “maximize the genital sensations.”

Other animals, like male fruit flies, simply try to mate with any member of their species the instant they are born, desperate to quickly pass on genes before death. Male flour beetles deposit sperm in each other and then mate with a female to increase their chances of passing on someone’s genes.

In some species, female couples are a response to a shortage of males — raising youth as a couple helps the young survive better than going it alone. Bonobos have a lot of both gay and straight sex, not to mention oral sex, hand jobs, orgies, kissing, and sex with youths.

Scientist think it reduces stress and cements social bonds — it makes the group feel close. Some scientists suggest homosexual males might, by avoiding females, inadvertently maintain female fertility or the female desire to mate. However, some evolutionists suggest it may be a form of population control. There is much more to learn.         

But how did homosexuality arise in the first place? While homosexuality still may not seem conducive to evolving and reproducing, even after noting most creatures that enjoy gay sex still reproduce with a member of the opposite sex, the same can be said of many mutations in genes: Most genetic mutations are not “helpful” in evolution. That is the nature of random mutation. Some will be beneficial, and will be passed on rapidly, others unhelpful, passed on in limited fashion, or eliminated from the gene pool entirely.

Homosexuality has not been eliminated, perhaps because it is helpful in a small way, as noted. In any case, evolution keeps “unhelpful” mutations in check. If all bottlenose dolphins were homosexual, and had no desire for heterosexual sex, the species would fail. But if bisexuality is the norm, or if only 5%, 7%, or 8% of the creatures reject straight sex, the species will survive.

What is clear is that there are genes that determine sexual orientation, discovered through genetic mapping and sociological studies, like looking at twins separated at birth that both turn out to be homosexual. Identical twins are much more likely to have the same sexual orientation as fraternal twins–see Levay’s work below.

A geneticist named Dean Hammer lead the way in this research in the 1990s, discovering a genetic marker on X chromosomes that homosexual men had, but (nearly all) heterosexual men did not. A breakthrough study last year looked at over 800 gay brothers, including non-identical twins, and found similar layouts of genes on the X chromosome and chromosome 8 that aren’t usually a feature in straight men.

A study in 2015 looked at 47 pairs of identical twins and found that homosexual males have a genetic structure difference in nine places compared to their straight identical twins. The presence of these differences predict homosexuality with an accuracy of 70%.  

One might also look into the work of Simon Levay, who discovered in the 1990s that a region of the gay male hypothalamus is smaller than in straight men–just like domesticated male sheep that show homosexual behavior.

What notice when studying all this is that scientists have not yet ruled out environmental factors in homosexuality, as there is increasing evidence that your environment can actually change your genes. Religious persons who insist homosexuality is a choice may delight in this, until the realization dawns that the altering of the epigenome via external influences doesn’t actually constitute a conscious choice.

What is clear is that genetics are everything; that homosexuality is, to an undeniable degree, an integral part of what it means to be human. The only thing that stands in the way of accepting this, for many people, is religion.

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If one thing is certain after 50 years, it’s that the CIA and President Johnson wanted the Warren Commission to conclude that Oswald worked alone.  

*   *   *

President John Kennedy was assassinated in his limousine on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. In September of the next year, the Warren Commission, a task force selected by President Lyndon Johnson made up of congressmen, the Supreme Court Chief Justice, the former head of the CIA, the former head of the World Bank, and a small army of lawyers, concluded that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald alone.

The Warren Commission

According to the Warren investigation, Oswald shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza. He fired three shots from behind Kennedy as the limousine moved away from his location.

Doubts about this account arose immediately. Critics maintained that someone fired from ahead of Kennedy and to his right, from the infamous Grassy Knoll. John Kelin wrote in his 2007 book Praise from a Future Generation of the earliest skeptics of the Warren Commission, like Vincent Salandria. Kelin summarizes in an op-ed for U.S. News and World Report:

Of the 121 Dealey Plaza witnesses whose statements appear in the commission’s published evidence, 51, by one count, said gunshots came from the right front – that is, from the infamous grassy knoll. Only 32 thought shots came from the building, while 38 had no opinion.

Former Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell, who rode in the ill-fated Dallas motorcade, said he heard two shots from the grassy knoll. He did not tell that to the Warren Commission, but later conceded, “I testified the way they wanted me to”…

[There were] Dealey Plaza witnesses who saw unidentified armed men in the vicinity; witnesses whose observations suggest a radio-coordinated hit team; three Dallas cops who encountered fake Secret Service agents; and one who testified to meeting an hysterical woman screaming, “They’re shooting the president from the bushes!”

Graphic footage taken by a bystander, Abraham Zapruder, has caused the most controversy of all. Kelin writes:

The 8mm Zapruder film of the assassination unambiguously shows JFK’s head and upper body slammed back and to the left. Newton’s third law of motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Thus the bullet that destroyed JFK was fired from the right front – from the grassy knoll – far from the alleged location of the alleged assassin.

Anti-conspiracy writers, like journalist Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed, counter:

As the cortex of the brain is destroyed, a neuromuscular response shoots down the spine, sending a seizure through the body. The body’s muscles twitch, with the large muscles in the back predominating.

Remember, Kennedy’s wrapped into a back brace. It’s wrapped right underneath his breast all the way down and wrapped around his legs. You can’t tell from that seizure where he’s going to move in the car. But then something happens. Out the right side of his head, an explosion takes place. On the enhanced Zapruder film, you can see a cloud, a red mist of brain and blood tissue moving forward. It’s almost a jet effect. As that propels out his head, it has much more force than the force of the bullet moving in, and it shoots him in the opposite direction. It shoots out to the right front and left, violently.

But as Life magazine noted in 1966, the two shots that hit Kennedy in the film go off within one second of each other, an impossibility for the weapon Oswald allegedly used, the Italian Carcano bolt action rifle.

Italian weapons experts in 2007 concluded that the 8.3 seconds the Warren Commission insisted Oswald took to make three shots with that rifle is less than half the time needed for even the most advanced shooters (19 seconds), contradicting tests conducted by the FBI and U.S. marines and police.

A Cuban Revenge Hit?

As reported by Politico in 2015, a declassified CIA report written two years ago states CIA director John McCone was involved in a, in the CIA’s words, “benign coverup” to keep the Commission focused on the agency’s view “that Lee Harvey Oswald…had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.”

McCone told the CIA to give “passive, reactive and selective” assistance to the Warren Commission, possibly at the request of President Johnson.   

The most important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its 1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia. Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots.

The U.S. has a long history of violence against Cuba, invading and occupying the nation three times (1889-1902, 1906-1909, 1917-1922), controlling Guantanamo Bay since 1903, and of course the CIA operation to overthrow Castro, prepared before Kennedy took office but approved by him: the landing of 1,400 Cuban exiles, armed and trained by the CIA, on the southern shore of Cuba–the Bay of Pigs.

Castro had overthrown the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista, an American ally, in 1959, and launched Communist programs typical of revolutionary movements: public education and housing, and distributing land formerly held by foreign corporations to landless peasants–Castro took back over 1 million acres from three American corporations alone. For this, the U.S. sought to eliminate Castro. The Bay of Pigs was followed by five decades of economic warfare that, despite recent steps by the Obama administration to ease relations with Cuba, remains U.S. government policy. It was also followed by the CIA introducing the African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971 (see Zinn, A People’s History of the United States).

One might be inclined, in the light of this history, to doubt the CIA had evidence of Cuban involvement. The U.S., determined to oust Castro, would have had no better justification for an invasion of the island than the murder of a sitting president. With a history of deceitful justifications for intervention (such as “liberating” Cuba from Spain at the end of the 19th century, only to become its occupier; or the needs of American corporations), it could have been open season on Castro. The Bay of Pigs disaster, so embarrassing to the government not only for its failure but because officials, including the president, were caught in a lie about American involvement, would have become a distant memory.

Castro reportedly said after he heard of Kennedy’s death, “They will try to put the blame on us for this.”

Yet perhaps the government had credible evidence, but feared an invasion of Cuba would lead to a nuclear response from the Soviet Union. There is evidence these fears prompted the government to keep the Warren Commission focused on Oswald and him alone (see below).

The CIA report Politico covered was declassified–it was not leaked by a whistleblower–and had 15 redactions. That is, some information was blacked out. What was left reveals the CIA was willing to hide information from the Warren Commission, at the very least to protect its secret assassination plots from becoming public. (The plots became public anyway in the 1970s.)

Of course, those who believe the CIA took the lead in killing Kennedy might look at the report differently. One might suppose that in the same way the CIA kept the Warren Commission focused on Oswald, perhaps the declassification of this report is meant to keep the public speculating about a Cuban revenge hit on Kennedy, rather than CIA involvement. Indeed,

In a statement to POLITICO, the CIA said it decided to declassify the report “to highlight misconceptions about the CIA’s connection to JFK’s assassination,” including the still-popular conspiracy theory that the spy agency was somehow behind the assassination.

After all, would the CIA declassify information that incriminated it in Kennedy’s killing?

Did the CIA kill Kennedy?

Like others, Vincent Salandria, a history teacher in the 1960s, spent decades independently investigating the assassination and believes the CIA assassinated Kennedy with the military’s approval because he was moving toward ending the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the war in Vietnam. He believes the Warren Commission was a fraud, that it was instructed to conclude Oswald worked alone to cover-up the coup.

Salandria has chipped away at members of the Commission. Even Arlen Specter, a prosecutor who investigated for the Commission and later became a U.S. Congressman, told Salandria in 2014, after spending decades defending the validity of the findings of the Commission, that he would prefer to be called “incompetent” rather than “corrupt.”

Salandria suggests James Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable as the best book on the topic.

Oliver Stone, who directed JFK, agrees:

Douglass lays out the “motive” for Kennedy’s assassination. Simply, he traces a process of steady conversion by Kennedy from his origins as a traditional Cold Warrior to his determination to pull the world back from the edge of destruction.

Many of these steps are well known, such as Kennedy’s disillusionment with the CIA after the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion, and his refusal to follow the reckless recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. (This in itself was truly JFK’s shining moment in the sun. It is likely that any other president from LBJ on would have followed the path to a general nuclear war.) Then there was the Test Ban Treaty and JFK’s remarkable American University Speech where he spoke with empathy and compassion about the Soviet people, recognizing our common humanity, the fact that we all “inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”

But many of his steps remain unfamiliar: Kennedy’s back-channel dialogue with Khrushchev and their shared pursuit of common ground; his secret opening to dialogue with Fidel Castro (ongoing the very week of his assassination); and his determination to pull out of Vietnam after his probable re-election in 1964.

All of these steps caused him to be regarded as a virtual traitor by elements of the military-intelligence community.

Indeed, the feelings may have been mutual. Kennedy, feeling the heat after the Bay of Pigs disaster, told White House staff, “I’ve got to do something about those CIA bastards.”

The Intercept writes,

John F. Kennedy famously described his desire to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds” after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Peter Kornbluh points out in his book Bay of Pigs Declassified that the State Department at that same time proposed the CIA be stripped of its covert action capacity and renamed.

Enter Oswald, conspiracy theorists say. According to Politico, the 2013 CIA

…report identifies other tantalizing information that McCone did not reveal to the commission, including evidence that the CIA might somehow have been in communication with Oswald before 1963 and that the spy agency had secretly monitored Oswald’s mail after he attempted to defect to the Soviet Union in 1959.

This confirms earlier evidence.

Historian John Newman of the University of Maryland, citing CIA documents ordered released in the 1990s, writes that in September and October of 1963, Oswald visited Mexico City to try to get a visa to travel to Cuba. Politico writes that he met with “spies for the Cuban and Soviet governments.”

The CIA station in Mexico noticed his activities and requested information on him from CIA headquarters, which falsely informed them that it had no information on Oswald since he returned to the U.S. from Russia. In truth, they had received and studied many reports on Oswald, sent by the FBI.

Note this was before the assassination. After Kennedy died, the CIA claimed it did not know of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City before they investigated Kennedy’s death (the FBI went along with this lie) and also falsely claimed that the tapes of the calls from the CIA station in Mexico City were destroyed. These lies could have been told to protect the CIA’s image after the assassination, but why did the CIA lie to its station in Mexico, as this was before the assassination?

That question has yet to be answered. If the CIA is seeking to clear its name, an explanation for this would be a good place to begin.

Additionally, some FBI files on Oswald from 1959-1960 remain classified, and could give us a better understanding of what the CIA didn’t want to relay to its Mexico station.

However, an additional detail begs attention:

…after Oswald failed to get the visas, CIA intercepts showed that someone impersonated Oswald in phone calls made to the Soviet embassy and the Cuban consulate and linked Oswald to a known KGB assassin — Valery Kostikov — whom the CIA and FBI had been following for over a year.

Who was this impersonator? Someone Oswald recruited just to make a few phone calls, without knowledge of the plot? Or a co-conspirator, an ally of Oswald, in the hit on Kennedy? Or was it someone with knowledge of the upcoming hit, someone attempting to frame Oswald by impersonating him and mentioning KGB hitmen?

Whatever the case, an implied Russian connection to Oswald was a terrifying notion to the United States.

The Soviet Union

The FBI informed President Johnson of the impersonator. According to Newman, Johnson said that

Oswald’s apparent connection to Castro and Khrushchev had to be prevented “from kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.”

[At first] Chief Justice Warren…refused at first to take the job even after both Robert Kennedy and Archibald Cox had asked him. [Johnson] “ordered” Warren to come to the White House and in that meeting Warren had twice refused the president’s request. LBJ continued, “And I just pulled out what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City.” The president told Warren this would make it look like Khrushchev and Castro killed Kennedy. LBJ said that Warren started crying and agreed to take the assignment.

In a 1972 documentary for public television Warren himself told the same story — except for the tears. He said that Johnson felt the argument that Khrushchev and Castro had killed Kennedy might mean nuclear war.

Was the Warren Commission told to focus solely on Oswald because a deeper investigation might reveal Oswald’s connection to Cuba or Russia? If Khrushchev and Kennedy were forming a bond, would the Russian leader order his death? Or did the KGB circumvent Khrushchev?

Having just come back from the brink of nuclear war with the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was a successful assassination of a U.S. president by a foreign power covered up, ignored, for the sake of the human race? Would the proudest and most powerful nation on Earth let that slide?

If so, the tapes of someone impersonating Oswald would have to be covered up.

Yet again, those who believe the CIA orchestrated the assassination might suspect the whispers of foreign involvement to be a sideshow. Here again we have a public confession (via Warren in the 1972 documentary) of the government’s goal for the Warren Commission: to focus on Oswald and him alone because of possible Cuban or Soviet connections.

Better a conspiracy theory involving foreign powers than one involving the CIA, perhaps? Johnson told Walter Cronkite in a 1969 television interview, “I’ve never been completely relieved of the fact that there might have been international connections.” In private conversations, it was a different story. Arthur Schlesinger of the Washington Post reported in 1977 that Johnson told his White House staff that “the CIA had had something to do with this plot” as early as 1967.

The Unanswered

There is much we do not know, yet without question the government wanted the Warren Commission to conclude Oswald was a lone wolf.

It is interesting indeed that President Johnson, who selected the members of the Warren Commission, should include the former head of the CIA, Allen Dulles. The CIA is the foreign intelligence branch of the U.S. intelligence community, while the FBI handles domestic cases. This at the least hints at suspicion of foreign involvement in the assassination, at the worst CIA involvement.

If Dulles was on the Commission to steer it in the right direction–not an unreasonable assumption considering the evidence–he did his job. The former head of the World Bank on the Commission, John J. McCloy, was originally skeptical of the lone assassin theory, but it was his old friend Allen Dulles who convinced him (see Kai Bird’s biography on McCloy, The Chairman). McCloy became a staunch supporter of the lone wolf theory.  

The volume of conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy’s murder is immense.

Over the decades, theories have been fueled by the alleged deathbed confession of a CIA agent that said Johnson ordered the hit. And a man who said his father, a Dallas police officer who served in the Marines with Oswald, was one of the assassins. And another man who claimed to be one of the shooters, hired by the Mafia to get revenge for Robert Kennedy’s war on the mob, who allegedly was photographed by Oswald, ate pancakes with Jack Ruby (Oswald’s killer), and accidentally left behind a .222 cartridge with his teeth marks on it in the Grassy Knoll (dug up in 1987). And Johnson’s alleged mistress who claimed the vice president told her hours before the assassination, “After tomorrow, John Kennedy will never embarrass me again. That’s no threat. That’s a promise.” And journalists, witnesses, and investigators who died in allegedly mysterious circumstances. And theorists who think a Secret Service agent accidentally shot Kennedy.

It is even theorized that Kennedy was murdered because he was about to reveal that extraterrestrial beings were taking over Earth.

Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign in June 2015 with a vulgar attack on the nature of a group of people:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best…they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists…and some, I assume, are good people.

To stop these horrors, among others (Trump believes illegal immigration “destroyed our middle class,” “holds down salaries,” and “keeps unemployment high” because the undocumented steal our jobs), he wants to deport over 11 million people, including so-called “anchor babies,” children who were born in the U.S. and thus have constitutionally-guaranteed citizenship.

He laments these illegal “aliens” have meant that “U.S. taxpayers have been asked to pick up hundreds of billions in healthcare costs, housing costs, education costs, welfare costs, etc.”

He loudly obsesses over the need to build an impenetrable wall between Mexico and the U.S. (even though 25-40% of illegal immigrants come by air, simply overstaying their legal visas!). Showcasing his iconic narcissism, he told one gleeful crowd:

This is serious. This is a Trump wall. This is a real wall… If they ever put my name on it, I want a gorgeous wall. The Trump wall, oh won’t that be a beautiful wall. That’s why I have to make it beautiful. Because some day when I’m gone they’re going to name that wall after Trump, I think.

Nothing quite says “presidential” like speaking in the third person, the diction of Elmo.

The wall, Trump insists, will be paid for by the Mexican government as some sort of restitution for making the U.S. “a dumping ground for the rest of the world.”

A spokesman for the Mexican government said this idea “reflected an enormous ignorance.” Apparently, Mexico won’t pay for Trump’s project, despite Trump’s despicable threat of higher tariffs on Mexican goods if they don’t.  

I’ll do the spokesman one better: Trump is an enormous ignorance.

Illegal Immigrants Are Less Likely to Commit Crimes than the Native-Born

Trump’s generalization of illegal immigrants as prone to criminality is demonstrably false. The American Immigration Council states:

As numerous studies over the past 100 years have shown…immigrants are less likely to commit crimes or be behind bars than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are not associated with higher rates of crime. This holds true for both legal immigrants and the undocumented, regardless of their country of origin or level of education…

For example, in 2010, native-born men age 18-39 without a high school diploma had an incarceration rate of 10.7%, triple that of equally-educated Mexican men (a rate of 2.8%) and five times that of Salvadoran and Guatemalan men (1.7%).

Studies show immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated because they are less likely to commit crimes to begin with, and those who do are less likely than native-born people to be repeat offenders.

The Council explains:

This is hardly surprising since immigrants come to the United States to pursue economic and educational opportunities not available in their home countries and to build better lives for themselves and their families. As a result, they have little to gain and much to lose by breaking the law. Undocumented immigrants in particular have even more reason to not run afoul of the law given the risk of deportation that their lack of legal status entails.

If only Trump and other conservatives based their beliefs not on “fear and myth, but on sound analysis and empirical evidence.” Their beliefs are inspiring violence.

Illegal Immigration Does Not Kill Jobs

Examining data also reveals there is very little connection between native unemployment rates and immigration. Rather, illegal immigrants have filled a void in the economy. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center,

in the United States, two trends—better education and an aging population—have resulted in a decrease in the number of Americans willing or available to take low-paying jobs… To fill the void of low-skilled American workers, employers often hire immigrant workers… These workers are more likely to be employed by the service industry, while native-born workers are more likely to hold jobs in management, professional, sales and office occupations.

There is much evidence that immigration–of both high-skill and low-skill labor–creates more jobs, rather than destroys them. Research from the Manhattan Institute in December 2014 concluded that the expanded workforce provided by immigration created more jobs and boosted economic growth.

Geovanni Peri of the University of California – Davis compared labor markets in states with high immigration vs. low immigration and concluded that undocumented workers, by taking over routine and low-skill tasks, allowed skilled workers to be more productive, work longer hours, and make higher incomes.

The Los Angeles County economy alone would shrink by an estimated $100 billion if illegal immigrants disappeared.

As a side note, Trump even thinks the Mexican government is “taking our jobs, they’re taking our manufacturing and they’re taking our money.” He thinks bad trade deals, where Mexico supposedly got the better of the U.S., are the cause of outsourcing, of U.S. factory jobs heading to Mexico. This is incorrect.

American corporations outsource jobs. The pursuit of profit moves jobs in many sectors of industry from advanced capitalist nations to poorer, less developed ones. Millions of jobs are outsourced by just a handful of firms alone.

Firms outsource their workforces to places like Mexico, China, Bangladesh, and the Philippines because in these places they can pay workers pennies in comparison to American employees, with the added benefit of weaker environmental and workplace safety regulations.

Multinational corporations are the driving force behind the loss of American manufacturing jobs. Trump can blame the U.S. or Mexican governments for allowing or facilitating it, but the idea of Mexico “taking” these jobs by bullying or besting the U.S. is delusional.

Wages Are Driven Down When Part of the Workforce is Exploited, With No Minimum Wage or Benefits. The Solution is to Level the Playing Field.

So illegal immigrant labor can raise incomes for skilled native workers. But what of unskilled natives? Is there any truth in Trump’s assertion that the undocumented “hold down salaries”?

Actually, yes.

The miserable pay employers get away with giving illegal immigrants (employers can threaten to fire or turn them in if they push for decent wages) drives down the wage of native workers seeking employment in the same sectors of industry.  

While illegal immigration doesn’t seem to be eliminating jobs for low-skill native workers, it is lowering their wage–anywhere between 0.4 to 7.4% for 25 million U.S. adults without a high school diploma. Native workers must accept a lower wage or seek work in other sectors, because they are forced to compete with extremely low-cost labor. Employers can turn to the undocumented if native-born won’t work for a comparably low wage. Competition drives down price, even the price of labor.

Making illegal immigrants citizens would boost their wages and thus alleviate their exploitation and raise the wages of low-skill native workers.

That sounds more humane than mass deportation.

The Best Way to Stop Illegal Immigrants From Using Services They Don’t Pay For? Make Them Citizens and Tax Them Like Everyone Else.

Yes, we could spend $100-200 billion on an Orwellian mission in which the State rounds up 11 million people–men, women, children, the elderly–and trucks them back to another nation. This would include people born and raised in the U.S., people with college degrees, even veterans.  

However, it would save time, money, and perhaps America’s moral soul to simply grant immediate amnesty to all undocumented immigrants.

“Illegals are using our healthcare system and schools without paying a dime into them!” is a common complaint. True, this is a problem. But granting citizenship brings illegal immigrants deeper into the tax system right away.

I say “deeper” because one-half to two-thirds of illegal immigrants contribute to Social Security in the form of payroll taxes. 10% of the Social Security fund comes from illegal immigrants. Since most are not eligible for Social Security, they only take out 1/15th of what they contribute to the fund.

Further, like the rest of us, undocumented workers pay sales taxes on everything they buy and property taxes when they rent or pay for a home. These taxes fund schools, roads, fire departments, and countless other services we all benefit from.

Amnesty would give the U.S. a much-needed tax boost. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates billions. For more, see The Economic Effects of Granting Legal Status to Undocumented Immigrants from the liberal Center for American Progress, or Why Immigration Reform Would Boost the Economy from the conservative Forbes Magazine.

A Moral Imperative

Trump and conservatives like him insist the undocumented cannot be allowed to stay or given citizenship because they broke the law.

This is a thoughtless appeal to authority, and can be easily dismissed. Sometimes, laws are wrongheaded, unwise. There have been many times in U.S. history when laws have been discarded when they proved ineffective, wasteful, or harmful. 

What someone like Trump needs to show is that maintaining current law does the most good for the most people, whether the most native-born citizens or (if you believe in the brotherhood of man) the most legal and illegal people alike. We’ve seen how amnesty can be a benefit to the native-born. One can argue amnesty is unfair to those who waited to enter legally, but what’s most fair is not always what’s most moral (think of students who receive more attention than others because they most need help). Amnesty does very little harm to current or future legal immigrants. There may be frustration, anger, a sense of unfairness. But the harm of deportation to poorer, more violent nations is far greater. The harm of tearing families apart is greater. The harm of casting children away from the only home they can remember is greater. The harm of not being allowed to vote or have the full protection of a citizen is greater, because that’s how oppression so easily takes root: make and keep victims powerless. The harm of discrimination because undocumented persons are the “other” and not “real Americans” is greater. The harm of continued exploitation of undocumented workers is greater. And so on. 

Overall, this is one of many absurd situations where the punishment is more immoral than the “crime” (think spending years in prison for smoking marijuana). It is more immoral for the State to round illegal immigrants up, imprison them, tear apart their families, and ship them back to more dangerous or poverty-stricken lands than for a person to sneak across the border illegally looking for a safer, better life in the U.S. There is no question on the ethics of this matter. Therefore, let us support both amnesty (just like with marijuana users wasting away in prison; they should be released at once) and changes to the law (just like drug law itself), namely making a quick, cost-free entry available to anyone who wants to come here (no quotas) who does not have a violent criminal history, links to terror groups or gangs, and so on. No, this does not mean immediate entry, because checking backgrounds does take time (special measures will have to be taken for people without papers of any kind), but if entry is guaranteed upon passing and if it is a much speedier process then we can largely eliminate the incentive to illegally cross (the current legal method of immigrating can take years, even decades, and costs over $1,000, often much more). After that, only illegal immigrants with violent criminal histories will be deported. Those without such histories who avoided an easy entry process will still be granted amnesty while facing a light punishment that fits the “crime,” such as community service hours. All this is a big part of what justice is: change bad laws for the better and give justice, restitution, to those harmed under bad laws in the past.

These are innocent families escaping dire poverty, joblessness, drug wars, and gang violence throughout Central and South America. In the U.S., illegal workers often face dismal pay, harsh working conditions, and an inability to organize and unionize to improve their position. They are not entitled to a minimum wage, nor benefits, nor overtime, nor child labor protections, nor in most states injury compensation. We saw children as young as 13 working in an Iowa meatpacking plant, and beaten and bruised adults working 17-hour days. Undocumented persons live in fear of being caught, when an ethical society would lend a helping hand and make them feel welcome. Hispanics as a whole suffer from police profiling and mistreatment from bigoted citizens (including harassment and violence) because they are thought to be illegal immigrants. Where is our empathy, our compassion?

We have the power to end all that, broadening liberty, happiness, and prosperity for millions.

Perhaps some day we will care more about human beings than who is or who is not an “American.” We will have no need for giant walls. Perhaps we can, as Jack London hoped, care “more for men and women and little children than for imaginary geographic lines.”

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