An open realm

Envisioning a Sooner State with borders like welcome signs

Oklahomans are friendly people, right?

We pride ourselves on our open, unstuffy mien. We claim to welcome people from other places. Supposedly, we don't put on formalities or manifest the reserve, the aloofness, of easterners and others.

This conceit looks deeply hypocritical at the moment. All the talk of late—including the recent screed from Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin on how several hundred child immigrants from Central America might degrade health care and schools in Oklahoma—makes me sick.

Fallin's talk is only part of the toxic stream flowing from our state leadership in the last two weeks. The influx of unaccompanied refugee children from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, and Oklahoma's tiny, temporary role as host, has sparked a terrible, xenophobic reaction among Oklahoma's leadership cadre. Fallin's pointless, negative musings about ridding the state of 1,500 children temporarily placed by the Feds at a facility at Fort Sill is exhibit A. As The Tulsa Voice went to press, the Fort Sill facility was closing, at the election of the Feds.

Fallin’s claims that these children could have an impact on health care and our public school system is laughable. A simple analysis would show how off-the-mark Fallin and her crew are: the Governor's decision to forestall state participation in the multibillion-dollar Medicaid expansion and her alliance with Oklahoma legislators who have signed on (again) to many millions of dollars of tax relief for one of the healthiest industries on the planet (the fossil-fuel sector) are the true drivers of our health and public education dilemmas. From The Oklahoman: "The state of Oklahoma ranks among the worst in the nation in the overall well-being of its children, according to the 25th edition of Kids-Count Data Book released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The state’s ranking dropped from 36th in 2013 to 39th this year among the 50 states; one of the largest declines in the U.S..."

A vapid petition, which asserts Fallin's whacked opinion with a demand that Sill and such facilities housing juvenile immigrants be closed, signed by most of the State's congressional delegation, is exhibit B.

Congressman Jim Bridenstine is concerned about what’s going on at Fort Sill, too. He said those kids are squeezing out training space for military folks. The Congressman surely realizes that the U.S. military is among the largest, most powerful organizations on Earth. Securing training space at Fort Sill or anywhere else in the country, or in most parts of the planet, would not pose a real challenge for our commanders.

For me, borders—including our now-fortified fence lines—are increasingly problematic, even anachronistic. The Economist estimated U.S. "wall" costs of about $18 billion annually. But the "border" fixation is more than monster costs and hapless kids from south of the border, driven northward by drug-war fueled violence.

Think about the current round of the never-ending Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or the struggle in Ukraine, monstrously illuminated by last month’s shoot-down of airliner MH 17, apparently by pro-Russian, eastern-Ukrainian separatists. Borders, borders, borders, and a passel of hyper-nationalism.

When Tulsa was the "Oil Capital of The World" in the late '70s and ‘80s, it was a wonderful enclave for "out-country" folk and their compatriots. I lived in Tulsa then. The city was more cosmopolitan, decidedly more international, and much more savvy from an economic, social, and cultural standpoint. Tulsa's Sister Cities program has been successful in sustaining connections to partner communities across the globe, providing a robust port of call to international visitors. There is a spectrum of associations here that offer a link to the near and abroad. The science and tech programs at our universities, especially those at The University of Tulsa, University of Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State University are packed with students from other realms.

Our hangups may stand in the way of Tulsa's next economic transformation—a job-rich and promising flight with international possibilities.

Open Borders

I'm reading a recent book by Josh Riley, a columnist, more or less conservative, for The Wall Street Journal, called, "Let Them In: The Case For Open Borders." Mr. Riley and I surely have little in common apart from his view that we need to re-think our obsession with immigration, legal and not. An excerpt:

“In the spring of 2007 the Council on Foreign Relations, long a fount of center-left received wisdom, published a paper by Gordon Hanson titled ‘The Economic Logic of Illegal Immigration.’ Hanson is an economist at the University of California at San Diego, and the paper’s somewhat cheeky thesis is that, from a purely economic standpoint, undocumented immigrants do a much better job of responding to the demands of the U.S. labor market than their lawful counterparts. It is frequently said that legal immigrants are a net benefit for the economy and that illegal immigrants are a net drain...Hanson’s paper, however, is narrowly focused on whether our economic welfare is helped or harmed by porous borders...‘This analysis concludes that there is little evidence that legal immigration is economically preferable to illegal immigration,’ writes Hanson. ‘In fact, illegal immigration responds to market forces in ways that legal immigration does not.’”

Riley isn't the only advocate for open borders. There’s Alex Nowrasteh, an economist and libertarian partisan at the Cato Institute. He has said that America should "let almost everybody in."

"My dream setup would be a system where only criminals, suspected terrorists and those with serious communicable diseases like drug-resistant tuberculosis are barred from coming to the United States to live and work," he said.

Nowrasteh illuminated something Americans need to remember: a piece of now mostly forgotten, but critical U.S.history: "Open borders," he said in a 2011 interview, "were the law of the land for almost 100 years of American history—from about 1792 to 1882." 

‘At war with the facts’

What is the fear, anyway? If we let outsiders in, will we die from "their" diseases?

This narrative is painfully ironic. The historian and writer Charles Mann, known for two epic works, "1491" and "1493," penned two panoramic looks at the Americas prior to the arrival of the European conquistadors and, critically, the death-filled landscapes their diseases spawned on their arrival. Mann synthesizes a consensus on this long-dead world from dozens of observers across disciplines. He offers some startling conclusions, among them: the population of North and South America, at between 90 and 112 million, probably exceeded that in all of Europe in the 15th century. A decade later, he and others suggest, the total population may have been less than 20 million.

In a recent piece on the Fort Sill  crisis for Reuters, Oklahoma City-based writer Heide Brandes wrote:

"...Central American countries fare relatively well in terms of immunization rates thanks to public health programs, according to U.N. and World Bank data. ...The immunization rate in 2012 for measles for children aged 12 to 23 months was higher in Nicaragua at 99 percent, and El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras at 93 percent than the 92 percent rate in the United States, according to the World Bank data..."

But what about overcrowding? Riley, in “Let Them In” answered: “Once again, however, this dour outlook is at war with the facts. To begin with, the United States is nowhere close to being overpopulated. America is a very large country, and the vast majority of it remains quite empty. About 75 percent of the population lives on 3.5 percent of the nation’s land. In all, only about 5 percent of America’s total land area is even developed. According to a 2006 U.S. Department of Agriculture report, ‘as of 2002, urban land plus rural residential areas together comprise 154 million acres, or almost 7% of total U.S. land area.’”

Another Oklahoma?

Our current cadre of state and congressional leaders is far from the best face of Oklahoma. I'm inclined to embrace someone like Oklahoman James Garner, who died last month at 86. Garner of course, was a star of the big and small screen, having appeared in a score of films, including my personal favorite, the epic racing movie “Grand Prix” (1966). There was a slew of others, including the gender bender “Victor Victoria,” ahead of its time, and a movie on cultural provincialism and interracial romance, “Sayonara” (1957).

Mr. Garner was also an active citizen. He reportedly sat on the third row at Martin Luther King’s Washington march, sharing a perch with writer James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, and Paul Newman. Garner was a pioneering civil rights advocate, a weed-legalization proponent, an early environmentalist, and an advocate for an open, more tolerant world.

He was also unwilling to be a chump for rapacious capitalism. He sued and got a multimillion dollar settlement when Universal Studios failed to pay him fair compensation for his Rockford Files work.

The challenge

Harnessing the energy and, yes, the tension at the core of America's immigration challenge is a historic opportunity for Tulsa.

National changes in immigration, if the logjam is ever broken in D.C., may offer a chance to turbo charge Tulsa's economy. Putting together more portals for development and business support like those Sean Griffin of Tulsa’s instance of StartUp Cup, a global network of accelerator programs, have been hatching with the U.S. State Department, the City of Tulsa and our Sister City network would be one way.

I once wrote about the "International Start-Up Cup" and how it might catalyze small and medium-size firms in Tulsa by harnessing foreign markets, foreign technologies, and their buyers and investors. We could go a step further by turning Tulsa into a new-wave immigrant "talent haven." We could be an open-door community.

It's a complicated world, but trade and a welcome mat for newcomers, especially those in dire need of our help, is surely part of the way forward for Tulsa, and indeed for the state. We need to be the Oklahoma of James Garner, not the feckless face of xenophobia, anti-immigrant hysteria, and ignorance.