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Page 6A OPINION East Oregonian Tuesday, July 5, 2016 Founded October 16, 1875 KATHRYN B. BROWN DANIEL WATTENBURGER Publisher Managing Editor JENNINE PERKINSON TIM TRAINOR Advertising Director Opinion Page Editor OUR VIEW Congress makes it, president enforces it The Supreme Court last week upheld the separation of powers as provided by the Constitution, ending President Barack Obama’s attempt to change immigration law by iat. Driven by crushing poverty illegal immigrants have looded across the border. They have found ready employment, illing vital but tiring manual labor jobs Americans shun. But they have placed strains on public education, health care and law enforcement. Late in 2014, the president issued executive orders temporarily lifting the threat of deportation for as many as 5 million illegal immigrants who have been in the country for ive years and who have children born in the United States, and to children brought here by their parents prior to Jan. 1, 2010. His orders also granted these immigrants temporary legal status and work permits. Twenty-six states sued, alleging the action violated the president’s constitutional duty to faithfully execute laws passed by Congress, and had not been carried out in accordance with the Administrative Procedures Act. The district court in Texas and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. On a 4-4 vote due to the death this year of Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court leaves in place the ruling by the federal appeals court in New Orleans. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress sole power to “establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” Congress has enacted laws that outline the process for immigrants to be granted legal status in the United States. In granting illegal immigrants temporary legal status and work permits contrary to those laws, the president exceeded his constitutional authority. We concede that the president and his law enforcement agencies have great prosecutorial discretion in pressing deportation cases, even if applying such discretion so broadly stretches the common exercise of the authority. We could argue that we have 12 million illegal immigrants and all the issues inherent in their presence in large part because presidents of both parties have not, for a variety of reasons practical and political, fully enforced existing law. While the president can within legal boundaries enforce laws as he sees it, he cannot make or change those laws. That’s the job of Congress. And for the sake of this exercise, it matters not that Congress has failed to address these issues with changes to existing law despite nearly universal dissatisfaction with the status quo. Last week’s ruling set no national precedent and changes nothing in practical terms. Few illegal immigrants outside those convicted of felonies will be repatriated. The millions who, armed with fake papers, hold jobs and live quietly will continue to do so in the shadows without legal status. As we’ve said, the law should be changed to provide a pathway to permanent residency, but not citizenship, to deserving illegal immigrants living and working in the United States who meet strict requirements. But whether we let illegal immigrants stay or force them to go, in the end it is most important that we do so under laws passed by Congress and enforced by the executive branch. Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board of Publisher Kathryn Brown, Managing Editor Daniel Wattenburger, and Opinion Page Editor Tim Trainor. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. OTHER VIEWS Early childhood is public investment By TIM MABRY AND MAX WILLIAMS Oregon Community Foundation e shouldn’t be pointing ingers; we should be offering helping hands. This was the theme when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof spoke recently at The Oregon Community Foundation annual meeting. He was there to educate, support and inspire us to do better in our efforts to give all Oregon children the opportunity to succeed in school and, ultimately, in life. Although our state has many accomplishments, our performance in educational outcomes is considerably below our aspirations. Many Oregon children lack opportunities that lead to economic prosperity — and subsequently diminish our overall state economic and social health as well. At OCF, we strive to tackle these issues with grant programs and partnerships that target education, parenting, children’s dental health, and the economic strength of communities. We focus on early childhood education — including parenting — because that’s where we can make the biggest impact. Because brain architecture is 90 percent complete by age six, parents play a deeply inluential role in early childhood development. By age three, children with college-educated parents or primary caregivers have vocabularies two to three times greater than those whose parents did not complete high school. By the time they start school, children who have limited exposure to vocabulary are already behind their peers. Many never catch up. Our concern at OCF is that this opportunity gap for children and youth is widening. We know that effective parenting and early childhood reading and vocabulary have a huge impact on preparing children for kindergarten — and that readiness affects their ability to succeed later in life. Here’s where the Oregon Parenting Education Collaborative comes in. A partnership between four of Oregon’s largest foundations (OCF, The Ford Family Foundation, Meyer Memorial Trust and The Collins Foundation) and Oregon State University, the collaborative supports parenting education programs. These combined W efforts have also resulted in the development of regional “hubs” to coordinate resources and make parenting education easily accessible. These hubs now operate in 29 counties, including Union-Umatilla-Morrow (Morrow County Head Start) and Wallowa-Baker- Malheur (Building Healthy Families). Eastern Oregon University is heading in the right direction with construction of an Early Childhood Development Center to serve the communities of La Grande, Elgin, Imbler and Union. With grant funding from OCF, EOU will be offering high-quality early childhood care and education along with a training site for professionals in the ield. Beyond social equity concerns, there are also economic issues at play. Economists who have looked at the cost-beneit equation say that there is no question that dollars spent in the early years pay off many times over. We can save anywhere from $3 to $17 for every $1 invested in early childhood programs because of lower costs for remedial education, lower crime and incarceration costs and higher productivity over a life-time. The bottom line: Kids are a worthwhile public investment. Oregon is poised to play an important role in the early childhood education discussion. In 2015, the Oregon Legislature enacted House Bill 3380, which created a new, publicly funded, preschool system. Called Preschool Promise, the system leverages high-quality, local and culturally-relevant early child care and education programs, allowing families with incomes up to 200 percent of the poverty level to access and choose the preschool program which best meets their needs. This is a signiicant milestone for the state and we need to safeguard it. Providing equal access at the starting line is exactly what we need to do. Kindergarten is too late. It is ultimately only by closing what Kristof calls our “collective effort gap” that Oregon can — and will — be better than it is today. And by not pointing ingers, but by offering helping hands. ■ Tim Mabry of Hermiston is board chair of the Oregon Community Foundation. Max Williams is OCF’s president and CEO. OTHER VIEWS Myth of cosmopolitanism N or eccentric or natural outsiders to ow that populist rebellions begin with — like a young writer I are taking Britain out of the knew who had traveled Africa and European Union and the Asia more or less on foot for years, Republican Party out of contention not for a book but just because, or the for the presidency, perhaps we should daughter of evangelical missionaries speak no more of left and right, who grew up in South Asia and lived liberals and conservatives. From in Washington, D.C., as a way station now on the great political battles before moving her own family to the will be fought between nationalists Ross and internationalists, nativists Douthat Middle East. They are not the people who ascend to power, who become and globalists. From now on the Comment the insiders against whom populists loyalties that matter will be narrowly revolt. tribal — Make America Great Again; In my own case — to speak as an insider this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England — or multicultural and cosmopolitan. for a moment — my cosmopolitanism probably peaked when I was about 11 Well, maybe. But describing the division years old, when I was simultaneously this way has one great law. It gives the elite attending tongues-speaking Pentecostalist side of the debate (the side that does most of the describing) too much credit for being truly worship services, playing Little League in a cosmopolitan. working-class neighborhood, eating alongside Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. aging hippies in macrobiotic restaurants on It requires comfort with real difference, with weekends, all the while attending a liberal forms of life that are truly exotic relative to Episcopalian parochial school. (It’s a long one’s own. It takes its cue from a Roman story.) playwright’s line that “nothing human is Whereas once I began attending a global alien to me,” and goes outward ready to be university, living in global cities, working transformed by what it inds. and traveling and socializing with my The people who consider themselves fellow global citizens, my experience of “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, genuine cultural difference became far more are part of a meritocratic order that transforms supericial. difference into similarity, by plucking the Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong best and brightest from everywhere and with this. Human beings seek community, and homogenizing them into the peculiar species permanent openness is hard to sustain. that we call “global citizens.” But it’s a problem that our tribe of self- This species is racially diverse (within styled cosmopolitans doesn’t see itself clearly limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming as a tribe: because that means our leaders bits of foreign cultures — food, a touch of can’t see themselves the way the Brexiteers exotic spirituality. But no less than Brexit- and Trumpistas and Marine Le Pen voters see voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens them. think and act as members of a tribe. They can’t see that what feels diverse on They have their own distinctive worldview the inside can still seem like an aristocracy to (basically liberal Christianity without Christ), the excluded, who look at cities like London their own common educational experience, and see, as Peter Mandler wrote for Dissent their own shared values and assumptions after the Brexit vote, “a nearly hereditary (social psychologists call these WEIRD — for professional caste of lawyers, journalists, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly and Democratic), and of course their own hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of outgroups (evangelicals, Little Englanders) cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored to fear, pity and despise. And like any tribal by multinational corporations.” cohort they seek comfort and familiarity: They can’t see that paeans to multicultural From London to Paris to New York, each openness can sound like self-serving cant Western “global city” (like each “global coming from open-borders Londoners who university”) is increasingly interchangeable, so love Afghan restaurants but would never that wherever the citizen of the world travels live near an immigrant housing project, he already feels at home. or American liberals who hail the end of Indeed elite tribalism is actively whiteness while doing everything possible encouraged by the technologies of to keep their kids out of majority-minority globalization, the ease of travel and schools. communication. Distance and separation They can’t see that their vision of history’s force encounter and immersion, which is arc bending inexorably away from tribe and why the age of empire made cosmopolitans creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like as well as chauvinists — sometimes out of something familiar from eras past: A powerful the same people. (There is more genuine caste’s self-serving explanation for why it cosmopolitanism in Rudyard Kipling and T.E. alone deserves to rule the world. Lawrence and Richard Francis Burton than in ■ a hundred Davos sessions.) Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as It is still possible to disappear into an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. His column someone else’s culture, to leave the appears every Wednesday and Sunday. Previ- global-citizen bubble behind. But in my ously, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic experience the people who do are exceptional and a blogger for theatlantic.com. Culture Corner Life is full of small mysteries, odd moments and curious coincidences that leave you bafled. Many people are good at dismissing and forgetting such occurrences. Starlee Kine is not. Kine, an alum of public radio’s “This American Life,” just inished the irst season of podcast “Mystery Show,” where she solves real-life minor mysteries for friends and listeners. The only rule is that the mystery can’t be solved on the internet. In one episode, a friend of Kine’s shows her an intricately crafted belt buckle he was given as a child by a boy who found it in a gutter. The buckle is entirely unique and features images of breakfast being cooked, but contains few clues as to where it came from. As Kine follows leads on the trail of the enigmatic cowboy chef, she meets interesting people who share small glimpses of his life, friends, colleagues and former protégés. The belt buckle becomes secondary. Each of the six episodes in the irst season unfold this way, with the initial mystery giving way to Kine’s fascination with the lives of each person she meets. It’s also an entirely clean podcast, if you’re looking for something to listen to on a family road trip this summer. — Daniel Wattenburger, managing editor LETTERS POLICY The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our website. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual services and products or letters that infringe on the rights of private citizens. Submitted letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. Unsigned letters will not be published. Send letters to Managing Editor Daniel Wattenburger, 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.
