Has our compassion gotten far out ahead of careful thinking?

Are the Middle East refugees seeking sanctuary from violence? Ian Tuttle examines some statistics at National Review:

Perhaps the most telling statistic is the ratio of men to women and children in the overall migrant population: 72 percent to 13 percent and 15 percent, respectively, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Why is it that over five times as many men as women are fleeing violence?

Tuttle continues,

According to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, 21,000 foreign volunteers had signed on with the Islamic State as of January; nearly one-fifth were from Western Europe. With effective control of 115,000-plus square miles and an online presence that tallies upwards of 90,000 social-media posts daily — much of that total from Islamic State supporters posting independently — the Islamic State’s ability to manipulate the migrant crisis to its ends is hardly negligible. Given the sheer magnitude of the migration, it is a virtual certainty that terrorist organizations are taking advantage of the crisis to insinuate themselves into Europe.

...The U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement reports that 91.4 percent of refugees from the Middle East (the definition of which does not include Somalia) were on food stamps in Fiscal Year 2013, and 68.3 percent were on some type of cash assistance.

And, of course, the economic burdens of resettling Syrian migrants would come atop the burdens American taxpayers have assumed following last summer’s influx of unaccompanied minors across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Read more here.

Feckless

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead puts the European immigration crisis into context:

What we are witnessing today is a crisis of two civilizations: The Middle East and Europe are both facing deep cultural and political problems that they cannot solve. The intersection of their failures and shortcomings has made this crisis much more destructive and dangerous than it needed to be—and carries with it the risk of more instability and more war in a widening spiral.

The migration crisis enveloping Europe and much of the Middle East today is one of the worst humanitarian disasters since the 1940s. Millions of desperate people are on the march: Sunni refugees driven out by the barbarity of the Assad regime in Syria, Christians and Yazidis fleeing the pornographic violence of Islamic State, millions more of all faiths and no faith fleeing poverty and oppression without end. Parents are entrusting their lives and the lives of their young children to rickety boats and unscrupulous criminal syndicates along the Mediterranean coast, professionals and business people are giving up their livelihoods and investments, farmers are abandoning their land, and from North Africa to Syria, the sick and the old are on the road, carrying a few treasured belongings on a new trail of tears.

The crisis in the Middle East has to do with much more than the breakdown of order in Syria and Libya. It runs deeper than the poisonous sectarian and ethnic hatreds behind the series of wars stretching from Pakistan to North Africa. At bottom, we are witnessing the consequences of a civilization’s failure either to overcome or to accommodate the forces of modernity. One hundred years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and 50 years after the French left Algeria, the Middle East has failed to build economies that allow ordinary people to live with dignity, has failed to build modern political institutions and has failed to carve out the place of honor and respect in world affairs that its peoples seek.

Today we are watching the failure of Islamism. From the Muslim Brotherhood to Islamic State, Islamist movements have had no more success in curing the ills of Arab civilization than any of the secular movements of the past. Worse, the brutal fanaticism and nihilistic violence of groups like Islamic State undercuts respect for more moderate versions of Islamic spirituality and thought.

The Turks and the Iranians have had more economic and institutional success than the Arabs, but in both Turkey and Iran today, the outlook is bleak. Iran is ruled by a revolutionary alliance of reactionary clerics and hungry thugs, and it is committed to a regional policy of confrontation and sectarian war. Like the Soviet Union, Iran is an uneasy conglomeration of national and cultural groups held together by a radical but increasingly stale ideology. Turkey, too, is cursed by blind Islamist enthusiasm and unresolved ethnic and ideological chasms. Neither country is immune to the violence sweeping the region, and neither country has been able to develop policies that would calm rather than roil their turbulent surroundings.

At the same time, foreign values are challenging traditional beliefs and practices across the region. Women throughout the Islamic world are seeking to shape theological and social ideas to better reflect their own experience. Modern science and historical and textual criticism pose many of the questions for traditional Islamic piety that 19th-century science and biblical criticism posed for Christianity. Young people continue to be exposed to information, narratives and images that are difficult to reconcile with traditions they were raised to take for granted.

As hundreds of thousands of refugees stumble from the chaos of an imploding Arab world toward Europe, and as millions more seek refuge closer to home, we see a crisis of confidence in the very structures of Middle Eastern civilization, including religion. Reports that hundreds of Iranian and other refugees from the Islamic world are seeking Christian baptism in Europe can be seen as one aspect of this crisis. If people feel that the religion they were raised in and the civilization of which they are a part cannot master the problems of daily life, they will seek alternatives.

In eastern and central Europe, the social and economic conditions for absorbing mass migration from the Middle East simply don’t exist. The relatively homogenous ethnic nation states that now comprise the region were created through generations of warfare, often accompanied by episodes of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Most of these states enjoyed a brief period of independence between the two world wars and were then engulfed, first by the Nazis and later by the Soviet empire. Their independence and security still feel fragile, and most of their citizens still believe that the role of the state is to protect the well-being of their own ethnic group and express its cultural values.

And the flow of refugees to Europe could easily grow. The Turkish war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party could escalate. Social breakdown or the victory of radical Islamist forces in Egypt could provoke a mass flight of the Copts, the last remaining large Christian population in a region that has seen one Christian community after another exterminated or forced into exile over the last 150 years. The sectarian war in Syria could intensify and spread into Lebanon. The intensifying religious conflict across the Sahel and northern sub-Saharan Africa could create the kind of political and economic insecurity that would produce vast flows of desperate migrants and asylum seekers.

The humanitarian question of refugees and asylum seekers cannot be separated from the bankruptcy of Western security policy in Syria and Libya, and the bankruptcy of Western policy cannot be separated from the long-standing difficulties that many European states have in taking a responsible attitude toward questions of military security.

The utter failure of Western policy in both Libya and Syria has to be seen for what it is: not just a political blunder but a humanitarian crime. The feckless mix of intervention and indifference in Libya and the equally feckless failure to intervene in Syria have helped to trigger the flows of migrants that are overwhelming Europe’s institutions.

...Capitalism, the social engine without which neither Europe nor the U.S. would have the wealth or strength to embrace liberal values with any hope of success, is often seen as a cruel, anti-human system that is leading the world to a Malthusian climate catastrophe. Military strength, without which the liberal states would be overwhelmed, is regarded with suspicion in the U.S. and with abhorrence in much of Europe. Too many people in the West interpret pluralism and tolerance in ways that forbid or unrealistically constrain the active defense of these values against illiberal states like Russia or illiberal movements like radical Islam.

Read more here.

What policies allow for all Americans to enjoy fully the bounty of this country?

Joel Kotkin writes at Real Clear Politics,

...what has not been looked at nearly as much are the underlying conditions that either restrict or enhance upward mobility among racial minorities, including African-Americans, Latinos and Asians. In order to determine this, my colleague at Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism Wendell Cox and I developed a ranking system that included four critical factors: migration patterns, home ownership, self-employment and income.

We found, for all three major minority groups, that the best places were neither the most liberal in their attitudes nor had the most generous welfare programs. Instead they were located primarily in regions that have experienced broad-based economic growth, have low housing costs, and limited regulation. In other words, no matter how much people like Bill de Blasio talk about the commitment to racial and class justice, the realities on the ground turn out to be quite different than he might imagine.

...Today almost all the best cities for blacks are in the South, a region that has enjoyed steady growth and enjoys generally low costs. Indeed, of the top 15 cities for African-Americans, 13 are in the old Confederacy starting with top-ranked Atlanta, No. 2 Raleigh, No. 4 Charlotte, No. 6 Virginia Beach-Norfolk, No. 7 Orlando, No. 8 Richmond (a distinction it shares with Miami and San Antonio), as well as four of Texas’ large metro areas: No. 12 Houston, No. 13 Dallas-Ft. Worth and No. 8 San Antonio. The only two other metros are “inside the Beltway”: the metropolitan expanses of Washington and, surprisingly, Baltimore.

...Ironically, blacks – 6 million of whom moved to the North during the great migration -- are once again voting with their feet, but back to the same region in which, for so long, they were so harshly oppressed. Between 2000 and 2013, the African-American population of Atlanta, Charlotte, Orlando, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Raleigh, Tampa-St. Petersburg and San Antonio all experienced growth of close to 40 percent or higher, well above the average of 27 percent for the nation’s 52 metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents.

In contrast, the African-American population actually dropped in five critically important large metros that once were beacons for black progress: San Francisco-Oakland, San Jose, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit. In many cases, most notably in San Francisco, blacks have become the unintended victims of soaring housing prices and rampant gentrification, with little option to move to the also high-priced suburbs. Today, suggests economist Thomas Sowell, the black population of the city itself is half that of 1970; the situation has changed so much that former Mayor Gavin Newsom even initiated a task force to address black out-migration.

Yet if many African-Americans can be seen “going home” to their native region, the South is also doing well among ethnic groups that have historically had little attachment to Dixie. For Latinos, now the nation’s largest ethnic minority, seven of the top 13 places are held by cities wholly or partially in the old Confederacy, led by No. 1 Jacksonville, Fla., as well as No. 4 Houston, No. 6 Virginia Beach, No. 7 Dallas-Ft. Worth, No. 9 Austin, No. 12 Tampa and #13 Orlando.The majority of newcomers to the South, notes a recent Pew study, are classic first-wave immigrants: young, 57 percent foreign-born and not well educated -- but they see the South as their land of opportunity.

In Florida, no stranger to Latino populations, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Orlando and Jacksonville all experienced Hispanic growth rates since 2000 between 100 and 150 percent, well above the average of 96 percent among the 52 metropolitan regions. Lower housing costs and better prospects for advancement drive this change. Despite their historically large populations in Texas, Latino populations still grew at a rapid rate in Houston, at 68 percent, Dallas-Ft. Worth at 70 percent and Austin, 83 percent. "You go where the opportunities are," explains Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C.

Asian-Americans, although their economic and educational performance tends to be better than other minorities, follow a surprisingly similar pattern. Seven of the top 10 regions for them also were in the South, as well as two others, Washington and Baltimore, that abut the old Confederacy. Most of the best metros for Asians were in the Sunbelt, starting with No.1 Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif., No. 2 Richmond, No. 4 Raleigh, No. 5 Houston, No. 7 Dallas-Ft. Worth, No. 8 Austin, No. 9 Las Vegas, No. 12 Phoenix, No. 13 Atlanta and No. 15 Jacksonville.

Some of the worst results -- in terms not only homeownership but income -- are ironically in those part of the country that purport to be most sympathetic to minority interests. In New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, between 25 and 30 percent of African-Americans own their own home. In Atlanta it’s nearly 50 percent and well over 40 percent in most of the other Dixie metro areas.

Ultimately what really matters are the economics of opportunity. Many of the cities that scored best for all three groups -- the Washington, D.C. area, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin -- have enjoyed stronger than normal economic growth over the past decade. In the areas around the nation’s capital, government employment has been a critical factor; in the other areas more generalized business growth has taken the lead. In contrast, notes University of Washington demographer Richard Morrill , many regions that have seen rapid de-industrialization and slow housing growth have developed “barbell” economies based on a combination of ultra-high-wage industries, like technology and finance, and low-end service jobs.

There are other policy implications. Blue state progressives are often the most vocal about expanding opportunities for minority homeownership but generally support land use and regulatory policies, notably in California, that tend to raise prices far above the ability of newcomers -- immigrants, minorities, young people -- to pay. Similarly blue state support for such things as strict climate change regulation tends to discourage the growth of industries such as manufacturing, logistics and home construction that have long been gateways for minority success.

Given the persistence of racial tensions, this data begins to give us a clearer understanding of what actually works for America’s emerging non-white majority. Denunciations of racism, police brutality and xenophobia may be all well and good for one’s sense of justice. But if you want actually to improve the lives of minorities, we might consider focusing instead on policies that promote economic opportunity, keep living costs down, and allow for all Americans to enjoy fully the bounty of this country.

Read more here.