Brookings: Experts - Peter Skerry

It Takes Two: Immigration and the Rule of Law

Peter Skerry — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:20:00 -0400

With an immigration bill finally on the table, Republicans would do well to stop and ponder how they have arrived at this juncture. Since the November election they have been preoccupied with how to approach Hispanics on this critical issue. Because almost 80 percent of illegal immigrants are Hispanic, conservative elites have—appropriately—been wrestling with terminology and have just about persuaded themselves that “illegals” are more prudently referred to as “the undocumented.”

But the soul-searching seems to have stopped there. Whatever they call them, Republicans continue to insist that the undocumented must be treated as law-breakers, even as criminals, who must be penalized and not allowed to benefit from their transgressions. For a party struggling to renew itself, this isn’t much progress. What Republicans now need to consider is that the undocumented are hardly the only law-breakers here. More precisely, Republicans must assess how much responsibility for illegal immigration can be fairly attributed to employers.

This won’t be easy. Especially at this juncture in the process, no one wants to point fingers—certainly not at employers who are complicit in illegal immigration. To be sure, back in 2009 the Obama administration prioritized the criminal prosecution of employers who hire the undocumented and brought some large firms to heel. But right now, Democrats want to mobilize their troops and focus attention on the travails of worthy newcomers who just happen to be here without documents.

Republicans, as I have suggested, have their own problems. For them, immigration enforcement has meant securing our border with Mexico, for which public support has been readily mobilized with images of imposing physical barriers, sophisticated surveillance technology, and thousands of Border Patrol agents. By contrast, interior enforcement has been a much tougher sell. After all, it arouses images of busy Americans being hassled at highway checkpoints or hard-working businessmen wasting their time filling out government forms and answering the questions of intrusive bureaucrats. And since employers tend to be well organized and vocal when it comes to immigration, Republicans have sought to avoid offending what looks to be a natural constituency. But then so have many Democrats.

As for the rest of us, Americans tend to identify with employers, who are like “us.” In many cases the employers are us, insofar as they are homeowners relying on laborers, gardeners, painters, carpenters, cleaning ladies, and nannies, who are typically undocumented.

In fact, casual reliance on illegal immigrant workers is unlikely to run afoul of the law. Individuals who hire fewer than 10 illegal workers during any 12-month period are effectively exempt from prosecution. To be sure, candidates for high government appointments and politicians are subject to embarrassing exposure on this point, and they might be legally vulnerable for failing to pay Social Security taxes for undocumented workers. But the average American can still drive down to the Home Depot parking lot and hire a day laborer without fear of violating the law.

And so it has been for most of our history. It was not until 1986, when Congress enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), that employers were prohibited from hiring noncitizens lacking work authorization. Up to that time, to be sure, it had been a felony to harbor illegal aliens. But at the insistence of agricultural interests, the so-called Texas Proviso stipulated that employing illegals was not to be construed as harboring them. So those who insist on upholding “the rule of law” would do well to consider how immigration law has evolved and changed.

In any event, IRCA changed all that, and for the first time, employers—excepting the homeowners described above—became subject to fines and prosecution for hiring undocumented immigrants. Yet an unholy alliance of immigrant advocates, business interests, and civil libertarians raised alarms about the creation of a “national identity card” and stymied efforts to create a secure means of identification that would allow employers to reliably determine the legal status of job applicants. At the same time, Congress enacted anti-discrimination provisions to discourage employers from avoiding the risk of hiring illegal immigrants simply by not hiring foreign-looking applicants. The result is that employers have been required to ascertain the legal status of their employees but discouraged from doing so aggressively.

It gets worse. To establish their eligibility for employment, applicants may rely on driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, and birth certificates—all of which can be counterfeited. Yet employers are not required to verify the authenticity of such documents, merely to confirm that they “reasonably appear on their face to be genuine.” Documenting all this on the now-infamous I-9 form completes the ritual and allows employers to satisfy the letter of the law by affirming that they did not knowingly hire undocumented workers.

Despite such ease of compliance, employers—no one knows how many—still evade or violate the law outright. Many hire undocumented workers indirectly by relying on subcontractors who assume the risk of skirting the law. Perhaps most notorious for this tactic is Walmart, which has used subcontractors who secured undocumented workers to clean its stores. Much less notoriously, homeowners routinely hire, for example, landscaping contractors who employ illegals. Technically, such homeowners are not in violation of the law, but this was small consolation to Mitt Romney a few years back. More blatant is the hiring of undocumented workers off-the-books and paying them substandard wages “under the table” with no benefits.

Such common practices highlight why American employers have grown so dependent on illegal immigrant workers. The usual explanation is lower wages, which are undeniably part of the story. Yet not to be overlooked is the willingness of undocumented workers to work long hours on short notice. As economist Gordon Hanson has pointed out, illegals are valuable to employers precisely because they are more flexible and responsive to market forces than other workers. This is particularly true in agriculture but also in construction and the service industry.

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: The Weekly Standard

Image Source: © Joshua Lott / Reuters

Welcome to America: The Business of Immigration Is More than Business

Peter Skerry — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:51:00 -0400

Editor’s note: Peter Skerry reviews the book Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution by Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick. The following is reprinted with the permission of The Weekly Standard.

Immigration Wars has gotten a lot of attention because of its proposal to offer undocumented immigrants permanent legal resident status in lieu of citizenship—and because of Jeb Bush’s subsequent walking it back and expressing a willingness to support some kind of a path to citizenship for illegals. Just as noteworthy is the book’s critique of the bedrock of our immigration policy—family reunification—and its proposal to eliminate preferential visas for immigrant parents of U.S. citizens over 21, who, along with the noncitizen spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens, are currently granted permanent residence outside of otherwise rigid quotas. Similarly significant is the book’s support of an array of biometric identification procedures to monitor the entry and exit not only of visitors to this country, but also of individuals, including citizens, seeking employment.

The most striking, and unremarked on, proposal is for a “market-driven system of immigration,” with the number of work visas “automatically adjusted...on an annual basis to reflect changes in market needs.” Emphasizing the importance of “priorities based on objective criteria,” authors Bush and Clint Bolick acknowledge that “any future Congress could, of course, adjust the formula.” But as they envision, “the point is that appropriate shifts in immigration numbers would not require congressional action and thus would not be subject to the vicissitudes of politics.”

How seriously should we take these proposals? Bush and Bolick’s critique of family reunification is bold and seemingly strikes at the heart of a policy framework under which two-thirds of the more than one million green cards awarded annually are on the basis of family ties, as opposed to about 13 percent on work-based criteria. But when it gets down to specifics, our authors do not actually eliminate visas to the immigrant parents of citizens, or to their adult sisters, brothers, and children—the sources of so-called chain migration. Indeed, Bush and Bolick end up either bungling or fudging the overall number of immigrants to be admitted under their proposal. Undoubtedly, this is because they are intent on increasing the number of immigrants arriving here annually (despite current political resistance, which they acknowledge). But if they don’t really mean it, why raise the issue of family reunification and antagonize its primary beneficiaries: Asians and Hispanics?

Under the Bush-Bolick proposal, increased numbers of immigrants would be driven by employment criteria—either as skilled or unskilled workers, the latter as “guest workers” on renewable annual visas who, after five years, would be eligible for green-card status and eventual citizenship. But the more fundamental point is that all such workers would be admitted on the basis of market demand, as determined by employers, with minimal input from politicians, bureaucrats, or labor unions.

It is, of course, unlikely that such “objective criteria” would ever be agreed upon, and equally unlikely that Congress would cede its authority in this critical domain—either to employers or to bureaucrats. But even if we assume that allowing high-tech firms to hire as many skilled employees as they claim to need would help achieve the 4 percent annual growth in GDP that Bush and Bolick set as their goal, would affording similar latitude to landscapers, restaurants, and hotels to hire unskilled laborers result in commensurate growth? The answer depends, in part, on the fiscal demands such unskilled immigrants put on public services. Addressing this point, Bush and Bolick emphasize that America needs high levels of immigration precisely because “the diminishing ratio of workers and those whose social services depend on them is shrinking alarmingly.” To back this up, they cite an authoritative 1997 study by the National Research Council reporting that “immigrants on average pay $1,800 more in taxes than they consume in services.”

Unfortunately, Bush and Bolick misinterpret this finding. Piling error upon error, they cite a Brookings Institution study that, itself, misinterprets the 1997 research. The original study does conclude that the average immigrant pays more in taxes than he receives in government benefits. But it then clearly notes that “most people would find this figure misleading...because it does not include the fiscal impacts of the immigrants’ young children born in the United States.” When such impacts are factored in, the $1,800 fiscal surplus turns into a $370 fiscal deficit.

A related issue involves our emerging reliance on skilled immigrant workers in the critical STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. According to Bush and Bolick, one reason for our lack of STEM graduates is our poor performance in educating immigrant children, especially Hispanics. Thus, they acknowledge that “we would not need nearly so many immigrants if we were able to produce more highly skilled American students, workers, and creators.” But at what point do we get caught up in a kind of Ponzi scheme in which we take in educated immigrants to make up for our inability to educate the children of other immigrants?

Bush and Bolick argue that the remedy for such ills is “a market-driven system of education” that would afford immigrant families substantially greater school choice. And yet, however worthy such proposals may be, might it not also make sense to limit the number of unskilled immigrants until we do a much better job of educating their children? The authors feint in this direction—only to retreat and argue for increased numbers of both unskilled and skilled immigrants.

Yet the larger problem with the Bush-Bolick proposal goes deeper than mere numbers. They fail to articulate what the national interest is in increased levels of both unskilled and skilled immigrants. To be sure, they invoke the usual rhetoric about ours being “a nation of immigrants,” but they quickly reduce immigration to a matter of revitalized economic growth. As they put it, “Getting immigration policy right will enable us to reclaim the prosperity that in recent years has eluded our grasp.” This is obviously an important objective, and one which immigration policy can do a lot to help us achieve. But it will also require difficult policy choices that will hardly be guided by “objective criteria” determined outside of the political process. Nor should those choices be delegated to the legitimate, but inevitably narrow, self-interested needs of employers.

At one point, Bush and Bolick highlight how much agriculture in Alabama suffered when the state clamped down on illegal immigration, warning that if we don’t fix our overall immigration policy, agriculture there and elsewhere will be lost to overseas competitors. They specifically point with alarm to China, where “half the world’s apples are now grown.” But what they fail to do is make a serious case as to why we should care if China dominates the world apple market. To be sure, we would have reason to be concerned if China were a serious competitor in computer sciences or genetic research. But is there some strategic reason to protect the world market share of American apple growers—other than the obvious self-interest of the growers themselves? About the former, we hear nothing from Bush and Bolick, which clearly reflects their preoccupation with the latter. And that is simply not an adequate or realistic basis on which to achieve the kind of reform that immigration policy so desperately needs.

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: The Weekly Standard

Image Source: © Seth Wenig / Reuters

A Path to Citizenship — or a Maze?

Peter Skerry — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

President Obama wants the path to citizenship for illegal immigrants to be simple and direct. Yet the likely vehicle for any immigration reform will be the bipartisan framework produced by eight senators in January, and the path to citizenship it offers will be neither simple nor direct. The undocumented will be required, through lengthy, sometimes confusing procedures, not only to demonstrate their seriousness about becoming Americans but also to atone for having lived here illegally.

Such requirements are necessary to placate outraged Americans. But as a path to citizenship, they will be counterproductive. If anything, these requirements threaten to reinforce the ambivalence and indecision many undocumented immigrants demonstrate about remaining here. Sending them into procedural limbo is not the way to integrate them into American society. Counterintuitive though it may sound, a far better response would be to grant these immigrants status as "permanent non-citizen residents" with no option of ever naturalizing.

According to the bipartisan framework, the path to citizenship would be "contingent upon securing our borders and tracking whether legal immigrants have left the country when required." The latter point refers to an entry-exit visa monitoring system that Congress has authorized several times but never succeeded in implementing. The former point is even more problematic, especially for immigrant-rights advocates: Border security would hinge on an ill-defined recommendation from a panel of elected and civic leaders from Southwestern border states.

Pending that recommendation, illegal immigrants would register with the government. Those passing preliminary background checks and "settling their debt to society by paying a fine and back taxes" would then be granted "probationary legal status," allowing them to live here and work legally.

The next step would be applying for lawful permanent residency — a green card, which typically leads to eligibility for citizenship after five years. But this step could only be taken once the Southwestern commissioners certify the border as secure. At that point, individuals on probationary legal status would have to "pass an additional background check, pay taxes, learn English and civics, demonstrate a history of work in the United States, and current employment."

Even then, none of today’s illegal immigrants could obtain a green card until all those currently waiting receive theirs. The undocumented, says the bipartisan framework, "will be required to go to the back of the line." But his line includes about 5 million people, some of whom have been waiting 20 years for a green card.

One needn’t be a Democratic Party activist anticipating millions of new Hispanic voters to have misgivings about such a cumbersome process. Many of the immigrants who are supposed to benefit will instead get bogged down in the procedural maze. Yet there is more at work than the inevitable bureaucratic delays. Of the 2.7 million who qualified for the amnesty granted by Congress in 1986, barely 41 percent had become citizens as of 2009. After nearly a quarter century, the rest have remained permanent residents with green cards. Simply put, not all illegal immigrants are sure they want to be US citizens.

Well over half of the undocumented come from Mexico, and an additional 20 percent from Central America — close enough that many arrive here with the intention of eventually returning home. As activist lawyer Jennifer Gordon, who sought to organize undocumented day laborers, has observed, "many were ambivalent about settling in the United States," characterizing them as "settlers in fact but sojourners in attitude." Sociologists Richard Taub and William Julius Wilson reported similar patterns among Mexican immigrants in Chicago.

Such findings are hard to hear — and not just for immigrant-rights advocates. Americans cling tightly to the image of "huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Yet for much of our history immigrants have often arrived intending to return home. Even though things have seldom worked out that way — yesterday or today — many continue to see themselves as sojourners in America.

Given this social reality as well as the political realities in Washington, an alternative would be to devise an easier path — not to citizenship but to "permanent non-citizen resident status." This would have the advantage of imposing up front a clear penalty that would satisfy those Americans who want to see illegal immigrants make amends. But it would also give the undocumented what most seem to want: the ability to remain here, raise their families, and work without fear of arrest or deportation.

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: Boston Globe

Image Source: © Edgard Garrido / Reuters

Bumps Along the Path to Citizenship

Peter Skerry — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

President Obama and the Democrats have made clear that their “path to citizenship” for illegal immigrants should be as direct as possible. Many Republicans are not sure they want any such path. Those who do, like Senator John McCain, call for “a long and arduous process.” His fellow Arizona senator Jeff Flake agrees: “As more people learn of all these requirements that are put in place—back taxes, pay a fine, learn English not just for citizenship, to get your green card—and learn that it’s going to take a while, they’ll be more comfortable with this path.” Yet the longer and more arduous this path, and the more twists and turns it involves, the less effective it will be in reassuring Americans that illegal immigrants aren’t being given an unfair advantage.

Republican lawmakers are appropriately attentive to such anxieties, but in the aftermath of the November elections, they are also straining to be fair to millions of undocumented immigrants, who came here, after all, because other Americans wanted to hire them. To negotiate this minefield, Republicans should consider simpler options that offer prompt relief to the undocumented, while imposing fewer complicated rules and penalties that necessarily get administered by government bureaucracies in which so many Americans justifiably lack confidence.

Our experience with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) confirms suspicions that whatever Congress manages to agree on in the months ahead will not be satisfactorily implemented. Most glaring has been the complete inadequacy of IRCA’s sanctions against employers hiring illegal immigrants. As for IRCA’s notorious amnesty program, it was thrust upon an already poorly managed agency—the Immigration and Naturalization Service—that was more focused on keeping illegals out than on letting them in. Yet under pressure from immigrant advocates and activist lawyers, INS transformed itself into a legalization machine. In California, the hardline, Reagan-appointed INS regional commissioner literally donned a sombrero and went on the road with two compadres as “the Trio Amnestía” to promote the amnesty program.

There was nothing objectionable in any of this. In fact, it reveals how well-orchestrated external pressure can overcome bureaucratic inertia. But for many Americans, IRCA has left a disturbing legacy—hundreds of thousands of fraudulent amnesty applications that were passed on favorably. New York Times reporter Roberto Suro characterized one of the two major components of the amnesty program as “one of the most extensive immigration frauds ever perpetrated against the United States government.”

It seems doubtful that this specific fiasco will be soon repeated. We do learn some things. And the INS has been absorbed into the monstrous Department of Homeland Security, which has plenty of problems but is undoubtedly an improvement over the old INS. In any event, DHS would almost certainly do a reasonable job of collecting the fines that just about everyone agrees must be levied on illegals wanting to regularize their status.

One looming challenge here is the English-language requirement. Existing ESL programs are already oversubscribed and woefully underfunded. Even if additional resources were appropriated for such efforts—a dubious proposition in the current context—it is not clear how well English is currently being taught to poorly educated immigrants preoccupied with working to support their families. This reflects a deeper neglect of assimilation, which Americans routinely call for but invariably do little to promote. None of this is likely to change under pressure to process millions of immigrants suddenly eligible for legalization. Indeed, the likely scenario is increased demand, inadequate resources, oversubscribed classes, and the inevitable—and in the event, understandable—lax enforcement of standards so as not to obstruct the path to citizenship. After all, who’s going to want to stand in the way of a middle-aged cleaning lady with three kids becoming a citizen just because she doesn’t speak much English?

As for collecting back taxes from illegals, prospects are even dimmer. To begin, illegals already pay sales and property taxes. Many also pay Social Security and other payroll taxes. But because they use fraudulent documents, those funds go to accounts under someone else’s name. Some pay income taxes using Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs), devised by the IRS as an alternative to Social Security numbers for foreign nationals, including the undocumented.

The overarching question is whether the tax proceeds to be collected from low-income, unskilled workers would exceed the costs of securing those taxes. It would be a nightmare, for example, to reconstruct work histories in the informal sector where the undocumented typically labor. Even Steven Camarota, research director of the restrictionist-oriented Center for Immigration Studies, concludes that “this is not a provision to generate income, it is a provision to create the illusion of toughness the public likes.”

The irony is that as Republican lawmakers attempt to respond to popular outrage about illegal immigration, they turn to procedures and agencies that their constituents typically—and justifiably—distrust. Put another way, Republican immigration reformers are relying heavily on an administrative state whose routine functioning is the source of much of the disaffection with government on which their party’s political success has been based.

When it comes to immigration policy, popular skepticism is not misguided. Americans’ diffuse anxiety about illegal immigration is no match for the narrower, well-organized immigrant advocates who will be litigating in the federal courts, plying the halls of Congress and the agencies, and working the media long after voters have focused on some other issue. Americans may not be able to articulate this scenario, but they feel in their bones that something is wrong when their elected representatives in Washington resort to such complicated schemes.

There is no silver bullet here. Given the institutional context within which Republicans must function, there is no avoiding such dilemmas. But Republicans must manage them skillfully and avoid alienating their base as they struggle to address immigration more responsibly than they have in the recent past.

My own view is that Republicans must keep their immigration proposals tough, fair, and simple. This is why I have argued for awarding illegals permanent noncitizen resident status—with no option ever of naturalizing. Such an approach would deliver up front a clear and decisive penalty to illegals and avoid -complicated schemes designed to elicit remorse, levy fines, and extract back taxes. Meanwhile, illegal immigrants would receive what I believe most of them really seek—the ability to live and work in America without fear of arrest and deportation. Now that’s simple!

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: The Weekly Standard

Image Source: © Robert Galbraith / Reuters

A Third Way on Immigration

Peter Skerry — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The debate over U.S. immigration policy has been rebooted. There now appears to be bipartisan support for what's generally called comprehensive reform. But a stumbling block remains: What to do about the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants among us. Deportation? Complete amnesty? A "path" to citizenship?

There is a way forward, and it can be best summarized by "none of the above." It lies, instead, between these choices. It's legalization without citizenship.

With as few conditions and as broadly as possible, we should offer undocumented immigrants status as "permanent noncitizen residents." Unlike current green card holders, these individuals would never have the option of naturalizing and becoming U.S. citizens. The only exception would be for minors who arrived here with their parents. Provided they have not committed any serious crimes, such individuals should be immediately eligible for citizenship.

Simplicity is one distinct virtue of this approach. The prospect of mass deportations (or the hope of mass self-deportations) is both unpalatable and impractical. And establishing and implementing a complicated pathway to citizenship — or even to a lesser legal status — requires more faith than most Americans have in our government's ability to administer programs effectively and fairly.

For example, one proposal has called for the undocumented to return to their native countries for some period of time and then apply for a visa and "get in line" to return to the U.S. legally. But how would the return trip be monitored? And after that, how effectively would the visa quotas and readmission processes be administered? What would happen when an aging grandmother is returned to a "home" she left 30 years ago, or when illegal parents and their U.S.-born teenagers find themselves on different sides of the divide?

Most Americans understand that undocumented immigrants came here primarily because there were jobs waiting for them, and that American employers and consumers have benefited from their labor. They find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that all Americans are complicit in this problem.

Yet in an era of increasing inequality, others insist they do not see themselves benefiting from the presence of illegals, or of unskilled immigrants generally. And while economic studies consistently demonstrate that there is substantially less competition with immigrants for jobs than many believe, opponents of immigration, especially of illegal immigration, are not wrong when they point to negative impacts on the quality of life in their neighborhoods and to the fiscal burdens on their schools, hospitals and other social service providers.

My proposal — let's call it "mere legalization" — speaks directly to these Americans. To be sure, it would not treat undocumented immigrants as criminals, as many insist. But neither would it treat them as mere victims. It would, as President Obama put it at American University in 2010, "demand responsibility from people living here illegally." Those who chose as adults to take enormous risks and break our laws would be held accountable as responsible agents who must now pay a clear and enduring penalty. Looking forward, any such initiative would have to be accompanied by rigorous and comprehensive enforcement efforts not only along our borders and ports of entry but at work sites throughout the land.

Immigrant advocates and their supporters may reject mere legalization as too punitive, as "second-class citizenship." Yet a quarter of a century after President Reagan's amnesty went into effect in 1987, only two-fifths of those who became legal permanent residents through that program have gone on to become citizens. In light of restrictions imposed in the 1990s on noncitizen eligibility for various federal social welfare benefits, and subsequent programs to increase naturalization rates, such low numbers are particularly striking. Traditionally low levels of naturalization among eligible Mexican-origin immigrants are one factor at work here. Yet the point remains: The overwhelming majority of those covered by Reagan's amnesty have settled for less than full citizenship. So what exactly are we arguing about?

To those who think that permanent noncitizen status is too lenient, I would respond that much would depend on the specifics of any such program, about which Congress would have enormous latitude to do as it sees fit. Even so, under current law and policy, green card holders are treated differently from citizens. Besides not being eligible for certain government jobs and social programs, they are not permitted to serve on state or federal juries. And of course noncitizens do not vote in federal and state elections, though they may in a few local jurisdictions.

When green card holders travel outside the U.S., especially for extended periods, they currently risk being not allowed to reenter. As UCLA law professor Hiroshi Motomura concludes, under prevailing rulings "the Constitution protects a returning lawful immigrant no more than a first-time entrant."

More generally, noncitizen residents have no absolute assurance that they will be allowed to remain here. Failing to keep documents current or committing various crimes, including tax evasion and shoplifting, could result in their deportation. So the status of green card holders is highly contingent on their own behavior and on global politics. And unlike U.S. citizens, they cannot obtain visas for immediate family members outside the usual numerical quotas.

The underlying point is easily lost in the fog of rancorous debate over punishment or amnesty for the 11 million undocumented immigrants among us: The United States is a remarkably absorptive and open society, where newcomers and their children put down roots and develop ties very quickly. Indeed, our openness is so powerful that many among the undocumented have been noisily demanding relief. Why not allow ourselves to feel good about this and use it to propel us toward a middle path?

We don't have to choose between granting citizenship to lawbreakers or imposing onerous penalties that we lack the will and means to implement and enforce. We can choose instead a practical, achievable policy that acknowledges Americans' share of responsibility for this mess, but that also requires illegal immigrants to acknowledge theirs.

This piece originally appeared in the LA Times »

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: Los Angeles Times

Memorial Day with Muslims in America

Peter Skerry — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 10:34:00 -0400

Over the recent Memorial Day weekend, several thousand Muslims gathered in Hartford for the annual convention of the Islamic Circle of North America. ICNA was founded almost 40 years ago by Indian and Pakistani university students intending to return home. Most of them never did, but their organization still has ties to Pakistan’s Jama’at-I Islami, the Islamist party founded by Sayyid Mawdudi, one of the twentieth century’s most notorious Muslim intellectuals.

So this event featured much that would alarm or offend many Americans. Yet it also revealed how even Islamists here are adapting in ways that many of us would find encouraging, even gratifying. Nevertheless, these Islamists have yet to address the political realities of life in America.

ICNA’s Islamist lineage explains why its convention has been cosponsored by the Muslim American Society, or MAS, an affiliate of the Arab-oriented Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s more visible Islamist movement. But visibility was hardly the problem on Hartford’s deserted weekend streets. Among the many bearded men in conventional American garb were others in ankle-length thobes and kufi caps. Still more visible were the women, virtually all of whom were “covered” — most with head-scarfs (hijabs) and not a few in niqab, a veil covering the face, leaving only the eyes exposed.

Inside the convention center, there were several “sisters only” sessions. But most events were open to men and women, though the 2,200 seats in the main auditorium were divided by a barrier of large potted plants that shielded women choosing not to sit with their male relatives on “the brothers’ side.”

The conference theme was: “Defending Religious Freedom, Understanding Shariah.” All the more surprising, then, was the well-attended session on business start-ups. Another panel featured a Muslim-American academic arguing that mosques here are “failing to make a connection to our young people.” And in response to complaints from women in the audience that they had been discouraged from praying at their local mosque, the researcher agreed that “many of our mosques don’t make sisters feel comfortable.”

Particularly compelling was a “brothers only” session about avoiding the lure of drugs, alcohol, and pornography. At previous such events I have attended, middle-aged or elderly immigrant imams would cite passages from the Qur’an. But on this occasion, hundreds of adolescent males listened intently to two young imams only a few years older than they. These two spoke with the authority of individuals raised in this society, hinting that they understood the power of such temptations from their own experiences. One imam spoke especially persuasively of pornography’s destructive impact on marriages, emphasizing the alienation of Muslim wives from their addicted husbands.

Earlier that evening another young imam, American-raised but Saudi-educated, spoke on “the challenges of modernity.” He reminded the crowd that Islam had for too long resisted modernity, citing how Muslim societies had banned the printing press up to the middle of the nineteenth century. He then described a recent white-water rafting trip on which the guide advised that in case of capsizing not to fight the torrent but to “go with the flow.” So, too, this imam argued, must Muslims learn to adapt to modernity. Citing the example of homosexual marriage, he then argued while Muslims here did not have to endorse it morally, they would probably have to accept it as a matter of law.

For anyone familiar with these organizations, such assertions are startling for their insight and force. Clearly, a new generation of American-raised Muslims is emerging to take over from their decidedly less-effective immigrant elders. Such leaders will undoubtedly help Muslims adapt and integrate to our changing society and culture.

Yet glaring issues remain unaddressed. As at other such gatherings I have attended, there was complete silence about political obligations that Muslim Americans have to this country. Though convened on a national holiday commemorating those who sacrificed for the rights that Muslim Americans now demand as citizens, there was not a single mention all weekend about how those rights have been secured.

To be sure, there was one panel session on “Giving Back to the Homeland,” where ICNA highlighted its emergency relief efforts to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Yet one searches in vain for any display of the American flag or acknowledgment of the political obligations as well as the benefits of American citizenship.

This silence is no accident. In part it reflects decades of “rights talk” in America to which Muslims generally have readily assimilated. But this silence more fundamentally reflects the Islamist ideology on which ICNA, MAS, and other such organizations are founded — an ideology that has yet to come to terms with loyalty to the nation-state, particularly where Muslims are in the minority.

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: The Telegram

Image Source: © Rebecca Cook / Reuters

Gingrich vs. the Immigration Status Quo

Peter Skerry — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:18:00 -0500

Last week presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich proposed granting legal status—but not citizenship—to some of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States today. Many Republicans are now howling about "amnesty" while Democrats are sitting back and watching the infighting from a safe distance. Which party is likelier to benefit from this latest round of immigration politics?

Democrats would be happy to have Republican criticism kill Mr. Gingrich's idea. Liberals may advocate the maximalist position of full citizenship rights for illegals, but they're content with the status quo. They know that keeping illegals in limbo works to the political advantage of liberals and Democrats. Republicans ignore this at their own peril.

Mr. Gingrich's idea is crucially different from what was offered to illegals under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. That program, unlike Mr. Gingrich's proposal, provided a direct "path to citizenship" for millions of undocumented immigrants who qualified.

At a time when cosmopolitan elites are devaluing citizenship, conservatives in particular should appreciate the critical distinction between citizenship and mere legal residency, a status that would not afford the beneficiaries voting rights. If Mr. Gingrich's critics have any doubts about this, they should listen to those few on the left who have already criticized the former House speaker for advocating a form of "second-class citizenship."

Liberal activists and Democratic Party leaders understand that illegals are not voters and are therefore not well-situated to press their claims. Neither are the relatives of illegals (about 80% of whom are Latinos) who are citizens. Over the last few decades, Democrats and especially liberal advocacy groups have gotten used to "representing" constituents like these without being accountable to them, because they are relatively quiescent and certainly not well-organized. This is the beneficial status quo to which Democrats have grown accustomed.

Democrats plausibly assume that Latinos will generally vote for them and don't really have anywhere else to go—especially when conservatives demand the mass deportation of illegals. Such calculations are certainly reflected in the way that the Obama administration has managed to completely avoid anything like the comprehensive immigration reform that candidate Obama promised Latinos in 2008.

Undergirding the Democrats' acceptance of the status quo is what no politician dares to say: Being an illegal immigrant in contemporary America is not as onerous as the pervasive rhetoric suggests. Even George W. Bush missed this. Back when he was advocating for a way to bring illegals "out of the shadows," they were not only gainfully employed but in many instances joining labor unions and securing schooling for their kids, who then began demanding in-state tuition at public universities.

In the middle of the last decade, illegals in most major cities demonstrated visibly and loudly against the tougher enforcement measures then being proposed in Congress. And although illegals have never been eligible for Social Security numbers, with the help of the IRS they are eligible for Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, which during the real-estate boom allowed hundreds of thousands of them to purchase their own homes.

But while life in America may generally be tolerable for most illegals, their situation is hardly enviable and certainly not without anxiety, especially given the persistent threat of deportation. Their advocates understandably seek to dramatize their plight, and the politics of this issue consequently get more and more hyped, especially as the media focus on the inevitable horror stories.

Whatever the plight of individual illegal immigrants, the problem of 11 million of them constitutes a blemish on the body politic that taints us all—and one that certainly won't be healed by the draconian policies most Republican candidates seem to advocate. Mr. Gingrich's proposal, or something like it, could actually address this genuine dilemma while acknowledging the legitimate anxieties that many Americans have about illegal immigration.

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: The Wall Street Journal

Image Source: Â© Randall Hill / Reuters

The Muslim-American Muddle

Peter Skerry — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:45:00 -0400

A decade after 9/11, America has reached a political and intellectual stalemate regarding the Muslims in its midst. Many Americans continue to fear their Muslim neighbors and fellow citizens, if not as potential terrorists then as terrorist sympathizers — or, more generally, as the bearers of an alien culture shared by America's enemies.

Stoking these fears are a handful of zealous investigative journalists and bloggers who recycle a body of facts about the Islamist origins of most Muslim leaders and of virtually all major American Muslim organizations. Largely taken from the federal government's successful prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, a Hamas front group, this evidence is incontrovertible — yet its implications are far from clear. As critics repeat and re-examine them, the facts take on a frozen-in-time quality, like artifacts of political archeology never put into any wider context. The critics fail to acknowledge that individuals who once espoused Islamist views do not necessarily remain committed to them over time. People do mature beyond youthful folly and rage, and America causes immigrants to change.

On the other hand, our political, media, and intellectual elites routinely dismiss these findings as irrelevant ancient history. This, too, is a mistake, both substantively and politically: Though these Muslim leaders and organizations do not represent all (or even most) Muslim Americans, they do dominate the relevant political space. Moreover, their Islamist ideology has had, and continues to have, a formative influence on how Muslims think of their place in America and of America's relationship to the Islamic world. Elite opinion also systematically denies or ignores the fact that Islam is a dynamic, even aggressively proselytizing religion. This is not to suggest that Muslim-American leaders are terrorists or terrorist sympathizers; nor is it to criticize how they interpret the call to advance Islam. Like many Christians, many Muslims regard their own exemplary actions as the best way to spread their faith. Nevertheless, Muslim leaders readily acknowledge that not so long ago they dreamt of, as some have put it, "the crescent flag one day flying over the White House." For most leaders, perhaps for all, this fantasy long since collided with reality. Yet its influence lingers.

The failure of our elites to acknowledge such evidence has fueled the anxieties of Americans. But if elites have been too cavalier about the challenges Islam poses to America, ordinary citizens and their tribunes have been too alarmist, depicting scenarios in which Muslim leaders are not only devious (which many have been) but also omniscient — as if they were exempt from the difficult trade-offs that all political actors inevitably face. In fact, Muslim leaders have typically been recent arrivals largely ignorant of America's huge, dynamic society and its complicated politics. Like other immigrants forced to learn and adapt, they have made many mistakes.

Remarkably absent from both the elite and popular story lines is an appreciation of how America has changed Muslims. To be sure, not all of these changes have been benign. But we must address them all the same. Such a reckoning would not only abate our credulity about the competence of Islamists, but would also help to restore our faith in the resilience of American values and institutions — a faith that has been strikingly absent among American Islam's most strident critics. Most important, it would facilitate our addressing the real challenges posed to America by Islam.

Among these challenges, the most salient is the loyalty of Muslim Americans. This is not to suggest that Muslims are actively disloyal. Yet their loyalty to this nation is muddled. This confusion is due in part to the influence of cosmopolitan values and corresponding policies (such as dual citizenship) and to contemporary America's apparent unwillingness to place serious demands on its citizens. But the Muslim-American confusion over loyalty also clearly reflects the lingering influence of Islamist leaders, institutions, and ideology. This more subtle challenge is hardly unprecedented in our history as a nation of immigrants — but in our debates about America's Muslims, it has been overlooked both by complacent elites and by alarmist populists.

WHO ARE AMERICA'S MUSLIMS?

In assessing America's Muslim community, even basic facts can be hard to come by. For example, after years of interviews and field research, I have met only one Muslim who did not confidently assert that there are 6 to 10 million of his brothers and sisters in the United States, and that their number is growing all the time. This second point is correct, but the first certainly is not. The U.S. census is prohibited from collecting information about religion, so there are no precise data about the size of the Muslim community. The most authoritative, however, are those from the Pew Research Center, which estimates that there are about 2.75 million Muslims in the United States. Of those age 18 or older, more than 60% are foreign-born. Other reliable estimates tend to hover in the same range.

Muslims therefore represent less than 1% of the U.S. population, a much smaller proportion than in the nations of Western Europe. In further contrast with European Muslims, Muslims in the United States tend to attain education and income levels roughly comparable to those of the broader population. For instance, according to Pew, the share of Muslims who have graduated from college is about the same as the portion of all American adults who have done so: 26% of Muslims, compared to 28% of the population at large. Similarly, American Muslims report household incomes of $100,000 or more at about the same rate as Americans generally: 14% of Muslims, compared to 16% of all U.S. adults. These figures undoubtedly reflect the fact that Muslims have typically come to the United States in pursuit of higher education. Yet as pockets of poverty among groups like Somalis and Yemenis suggest, this has not always been the case: Pew also finds that, in 2011, a higher percentage of Muslims than Americans generally reported household earnings under $30,000 (45% of Muslims, compared to 36% of all Americans).

In light of questions about Muslim loyalty to the United States, it is also worth pointing out that Pew reports high naturalization rates among Muslims. Seventy percent of foreign-born Muslims here are American citizens. Among those who arrived before 1980, virtually all are now citizens; among those who arrived during the 1980s, about 95% are; and of those who arrived in the 1990s, 80% are citizens.

Frequently remarked on, but little appreciated, is the enormous diversity of this small (but growing) population. America is home to the most varied agglomeration of Muslims on the planet. The overwhelming majority are Sunnis, but Shias represent about a tenth. Among the Sunnis, there are also significant differences stemming from allegiances to different interpretive legal traditions, or madhhabs. For instance, the leaders of the largest Muslim-American organization, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), cope every year with disputes among their primarily Sunni membership over how best to determine by moon-sighting the start of Ramadan. And because Islam is an "orthopractic" religion — concerned more with appropriate behavior than with doctrine — similar disputes abound.

There are also racial and ethnic differences. The most visible and important is that between immigrant-origin and African-American Muslims. This refers not to Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam — a small, racist cult that never had much to do with Islam — but to African-Americans either raised in or converted to orthodox Islam, typically Sunnis but also a few Shias. Overall, according to Pew, these represent 13% of all Muslims in America. (If one includes the substantial number of Muslim immigrants from Africa, then about 23% of Muslims here are racially black.)

African-American Muslims typically gather in their own mosques and have their own distinctive styles of worship. Generally unfamiliar with Arabic, the language of the Qur'an, they often feel at a disadvantage relative to their immigrant-origin brothers and sisters. Such feelings are exacerbated by glaring disparities in income, education, and occupational status. And because African-Americans are typically drawn to Islam's emphasis on equality among believers, they are often disappointed when practice falls short of the ideal. Disappointment can sometimes turn to outrage; both sides, however, make continual efforts to overcome this divide, driven in part by political expediency.

Less volatile are ethnic, national-origin, and linguistic differences. The Pew Research Center identifies at least 77 source countries for Muslims residing in the United States. The most salient distinction is between Arabic speakers from the Middle East and Urdu, Pashto, and Hindi speakers from South Asia. In most metropolitan areas, one finds "Arab mosques" and "Indo-Pak mosques," at least among Sunnis. Among Shias, the most relevant ethno-national distinction is between Iranians (Persians) and Indo-Pakistanis.

To be sure, neither South Asians nor Arabs necessarily cohere to form distinct groups. The line dividing Indians from Pakistanis (and Bangladeshis) is obvious. Different Arab sub-groups also have divergent histories and political contexts. Egyptian-Americans, for instance, do not see the world the same way Moroccan-Americans do, nor do they have the same concerns about American policy toward their respective countries of origin — where they invariably have continuing family, business, and political ties. Palestinians have their own unique and tragic experience. And as the Arab Spring reminds us, when it comes to U.S. policy, individuals often organize not as Muslim Americans but as Libyan-Americans, Syrian-Americans, and so forth.

Another fault line emerges based on the relevance of religion to people's lives. According to Pew, nearly seven in ten Muslims in America say religion is "very important" to them. Yet less than half report performing the five daily prayers required of all Muslims. Most Muslims in the United States do not attend mosque regularly; indeed, about one-fifth seldom or never attend. Only about one-third report to Pew that they go to a mosque to participate in social or religious activities other than the customary religious services. It is difficult to say what exactly explains these differences, of course. Some Muslim Americans regard religion as a private matter that does not belong in the public square, and many of these presumably do not attend a mosque or get involved in Muslim-American organizations. But there is also a sizable segment of Muslims here who have rejected the faith, or at least have chosen not to act on it in any obvious way. Such individuals are likely to identify themselves simply in terms of their national origins.

Taken together, these differences make it highly problematic to speak of any single Muslim-American community. Non-Muslims generally fail to appreciate how challenging this extraordinary diversity is to Muslim-American leaders. Indeed, the imperative of overcoming fragmentation and forging a "Muslim-American" political identity explains a good deal of the behavior of both the leaders and their organizations.

THE CHANGING FACE OF ASSIMILATION

The other prominent element in any demographic portrait of Muslim Americans is the extent of their social and cultural assimilation. In this case, too, reliable data are difficult to come by. But there is a good deal of anecdotal and fragmentary evidence underscoring how much Muslim immigrants have adapted to life in America.

One reason this trend has not received more attention may be the embarrassment of Muslims at where they began, in cultural terms. Like many other immigrants, the Muslim students who started arriving in the late 1960s did not typically intend to remain permanently; even after securing jobs in their chosen professions, most planned to return home someday. But unlike other immigrants, these newcomers were profoundly alienated from American culture and society. Not only did they regard Islam as superior to Judaism and Christianity, they also feared that their salvation was threatened by their very presence in America.

This was certainly what their leaders were telling them. Consider, for example, the Parents' Manual: A Guide for Muslim Parents Living in North America. It was first produced in 1976 by the Women's Committee of the Muslim Students' Association of the United States and Canada, and was re-issued in 1992 by American Trust Publications — both organizations established by Muslim Brotherhood activists. Widely available for many years from book merchants at Islamic conferences and meetings, the manual states that "Islam is a total system of life for man and his society . . . hence it is infinitely superior to any system or ideology which man can devise." And as the chapter on sex and marriage declares, "We are actually living in an environment in which our Islamic standards of purity and modesty meet with a continual threat and can easily be destroyed altogether." The authors then urge Muslims to avoid Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and even birthdays:

The sincere Muslim is very modest about himself and is shy of being the center of attention. He knows that he did not create his own life, does not sustain it day by day and year by year, and does not consider his particular existence as deserving public attention on the anniversary of his birth.

Even more revealing is the manual's depiction of America as jahiliyyah. As the authors explain, the term designates "a society which is ignorant of the purposes of man's creation, his relationship and responsibility to his Creator, and the goals for which he should strive in this world." Jahiliyyah comes from the lexicon of Islamist intellectuals such as Abul A'la Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb; in the hands of violent Islamists, it has justified terrorism. The manual does not use the term this way, but it does urge parents to "strive to keep our Islam and the Islam which we pass on to our children pure and uncontaminated by the attitudes of this jahiliyyah, and . . . to change this jahiliyyah little by little into Islam."

At the same time, the manual states that "none of these ideas is offered as a fatwa or dogma," and invites readers to be reasonable and rely on common sense. Indeed, despite its clear condemnation of birthday celebrations, the manual acknowledges that "if the young Muslim child feels very strongly about it, probably little harm will be done to celebrate his birthdays in a moderate manner during his early years." Regarding non-Muslim acquaintances, it says that while one's closest friends must necessarily be Muslims, parents should teach their children that "Muslims must treat non-Muslims just as kindly and fairly as they treat Muslims so that [they] will never use their being non-Muslim as an excuse for misconduct toward them."

A similar pattern is evident in a more authoritative source: Muzammil Siddiqi, a graduate of the Islamic University of Medina, former official at the Saudi-backed Muslim World League, and long-time member of the Fiqh Council of North America (the juridical body interpreting sharia law for Muslims here). In a 1986 article in Islamic Horizons, a periodical sent out by ISNA to thousands of Muslim households, Siddiqi invokes the classic distinction between Darul-Islam, those places where Islamic law prevails, and Darul-kufr, those where it does not. Citing the teaching that a Muslim may reside in the latter to perform a specified task but "must return to Darul-Islam as soon as the task is finished," Siddiqi leaves no doubt that America is Darul-kufr, and that "we are in real danger of assimilation to a non-Islamic culture." But then, surprisingly, Siddiqi concludes, "We do not suggest that Muslims should leave America or go back home whence they came." And he reassures his readers that his proposed course of action "will not deprive you of your jobs or your professions."

So what does this leading Islamic jurist propose? That Muslims "make the intention of hijra for the sake of Allah." Hijra literally means migration, but here the allusion is to the flight of Mohammed and his followers from Mecca, where they were being persecuted, to Medina, where they formed the first Muslim community. In contemporary Islamist thought, hijra refers specifically to withdrawing from modern secular society. Accordingly, Siddiqi urges Muslims in America to establish and support mosques, to build Islamic schools and colleges, to read Islamic books and magazines, and to ensure "an Islamic system of marriage for Muslim youth."

Is this a viable strategy? Siddiqi was proposing a bargain that other immigrant groups have managed to pull off, at least for a generation or so. But the stakes are different — and higher — for Muslims. Indeed, Siddiqi, the authors of the Parents' Manual, and other Islamists left their people in a real dilemma: You have chosen to live in a corrupt and ungodly society where the fabric of daily life is completely at odds with the teachings of Allah, they told their followers. Yet you should be nice to your non-Muslim neighbors and co-workers, pursue your careers in medicine and engineering, and send your children to American universities, as long as you stick close to your mosques and schools and make sure your daughter marries a good Muslim.

No wonder so many Muslims have shunned this advice. As noted above, most American Muslims do not attend mosque regularly. Moreover, the available evidence indicates that fewer than 5% of Muslim-American children attend full-time Islamic schools. Even if many Muslim immigrants have not quite assimilated to the broader American culture, in many respects their children have.

From another perspective, though, Siddiqi's formula can be deemed a success. Before 9/11, many Muslims managed to pursue careers and education while remaining aloof from the mainstream of American life. Fueled in part by continuing immigration and some conversions, mosques and Islamic schools grew in size and number. The few Muslim forays into the wider society, particularly into politics, were defensive in nature — for example, the response to fallout from the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Many Muslims, probably most, continued to believe that it was haram (forbidden) to vote in America. In any event, those interested in politics tended to focus on developments back in their home countries, to which many still planned to return.

By the 1990s, a few Muslim leaders were heard to complain that mosques were "ethnic country clubs" and "Islamic fortresses." Islamic schools, they felt, were too isolating. As countless Muslims have recounted to me, however, it took the events of 9/11 to finally "force us out of our cocoons."

Over the past decade, Muslim leaders have seriously endeavored to get ordinary Muslims to engage with American society and politics. Yet there are still counter-currents pulling them away from anything not tied to their faith. For example, at meetings nominally devoted to Islamophobia or civil-rights issues, attendees not infrequently change the subject and ask leaders if it is permissible to befriend non-Muslims or attend business luncheons where alcohol is served.

Such questions do not necessarily come only from recent immigrants. At one memorable session at the 2004 annual conference of the Islamic Circle of North America, Siddiqi found himself before a roomful of agitated young men preoccupied with the upcoming presidential election. They fervently wanted to punish George Bush for both his domestic and foreign policies and to vote for Bush's Democratic opponent, John Kerry. One young man stood and pleaded: "Imam, wouldn't my support for the Democrats, who clearly favor homosexual rights, jeopardize my good standing as a Muslim?" Another queried: "Does voting for Democrats make you complicit in homosexuality?"

Siddiqi's response was direct and startling: "Let them have homosexuality . . . . No one is forcing you to be a homosexual." He continued: "If you think Kerry and the Democrats are the best candidates, then vote for them."

There is no way of proving that Siddiqi meant what he said that day, though I believe he did. In either case, as noted by Olivier Roy, one of the foremost students of Muslims in the West, "Politics has little to do with sincerity." More important is that Siddiqi and other Muslim leaders are publicly pushing back against the same conservatism they once worked to instill. We should be under no illusion that his foundational views have changed, but Siddiqi, like other leaders, has been desperately trying to extricate Muslims from the bind he helped lead them into.

Back in his 1986 Islamic Horizons article, Siddiqi discussed da'wah — the practice of inviting others to accept Islam — as one potential way out of that bind. Da'wah is analogous to Christian missionary work, though it is important not to lose sight of contemporary Islam's particular dynamism and the triumphalism of many of its adherents. Muslims debate the precise nature of the obligation to do da'wah, but because there are no clergy specifically tasked with it, Muslims regard it, one way or another, as the responsibility of each individual. In his article, Siddiqi presented da'wah as the only possible justification for permanent residence in America.

Yet these leaders — and many of their non-Muslim critics — fail to consider how da'wah is to be pursued by Muslims bound in their self-protective cocoons. How can Muslims engage non-Muslims about the virtues of Islam if they are not allowed to have lunch with them? One legitimate response has been to do da'wah among lapsed Muslims. But this has only exacerbated the isolation of Muslims from the broader American community.

Thus, after decades of calling for more engagement with non-Muslims, Muslim leaders are still caught up in habits that undermine their stated goals. For example, I recall the 2007 annual convention of the Muslim American Society (MAS) at a hotel outside Chicago. Taking advantage of low rates, Muslim organizations typically schedule their major gatherings over holiday weekends, including Christmas and Easter. On this occasion, MAS leaders were especially mindful of the need to reach out to non-Muslims, but also mightily aware that few if any were in attendance. Speaker after speaker urged that next year's convention involve more non-Muslims. Yet as my conversations and interviews revealed, even the most earnest did not realize that this objective would require that they not gather on Christmas Eve. (Last year, MAS again convened over the Christmas holiday.)

PARAMOSQUE ORGANIZATIONS

The Muslim American Society is one of several national organizations dominating the political space of the Muslim-American mainstream. The others are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). As a recent Gallup survey confirms, only a small segment of American Muslims (12%, at most) regard any one of these organizations as representing their interests. Nevertheless, these groups define and articulate the Muslim-American agenda and they are where non-Muslim elites in the media, the government, and the academy turn for Muslim interlocutors.

As noted above, these national organizations were all initiated and shaped by Islamists. Nevertheless, they differ in revealing (but overlooked) ways. The oldest and largest is ISNA, which attracts more than 30,000 Muslims to its annual convention. Over the years, however, ISNA has evolved into an all-purpose umbrella organization that lacks a clear mission. It is therefore more useful to examine ICNA and MAS — smaller activist groups founded for the explicit purpose of building an Islamist movement in the United States — and to then turn to the newest and most controversial Muslim-American organization, CAIR.

ICNA and MAS are sufficiently alike that, over the past decade, they have been pursuing a gradual merger. These so-called paramosque organizations were both founded to overcome the inevitable parochialism of mosques. In this sense, they can be likened to the YMCA, whose Protestant founders were similarly impatient with the way that individual congregations sapped energy that could otherwise be used for more dynamic outreach.

Membership in ICNA and MAS is open to both mosques and individuals. The latter, known as "Islamic workers," are critical to the mission, meeting frequently in small, tightly knit groups called usra (meaning "family") for study, discussion, and outreach. Their reading lists inevitably include a few Western authors, but the emphasis is on the Islamist canon: Abul A'la Mawdudi, founder of the Pakistani Islamist party, Jama'at-i Islami; Hasan al-Banna, Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood; Sayyid Qutb, Islamist theoretician and martyr; and Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, contemporary Islamist theologian.

Yet ICNA and MAS differ in critical ways, which helps explain why their merger is expected to fail. ICNA emerged from ISNA in 1974, when a group of Indo-Pakistanis caucused to form their own organization. For many years, ICNA meetings were conducted entirely in Urdu, reflecting the group's immigrant membership. Today, business is conducted in English, but large gatherings inevitably include break-out sessions in Urdu and other regional languages. From its inception, ICNA has had direct ties to Jama'at-i Islami, and in the early 1990s a prominent insider wrote that ICNA was "controlled" by that Islamist party. Today that link looks to be much more attenuated.

By contrast, MAS traces its lineage directly to the Muslim Brotherhood, and most of its membership is Arab. For many years, MAS was not a single organization but a network of affiliates tied to Brotherhood organizations back in Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, and other Arab countries. Focused on developments back home, these groups lacked coordination and were often at odds. Periodically, the Egyptian Brotherhood would seek to impose order through mediators dispatched to the United States. Over time, these groups did come together and in 1992 formed MAS, making it a much younger organization than ICNA. Up to that point, these networks had operated clandestinely in America, reflecting habits developed to evade intelligence services back home, where comrades and families remained vulnerable. As a result, MAS and its predecessors did not proselytize — and even today, after almost 20 years aboveground, it still does not focus on da'wah.

ICNA, on the other hand, has always operated openly in America, just as the Jama'at-i Islami does in Pakistan. Thus ICNA has engaged in da'wah, especially among non-Muslims. Its workers compete to spread the faith, and it is clearly more preoccupied with outreach than any other mainstream Muslim organization. Indeed, the only time I have ever been pressed to convert was by a young physician, an immigrant from India, working at an ICNA-sponsored health clinic in Chicago.

This focus on da'wah has led to ICNA's commitment to providing social services to struggling families, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. The organization's national headquarters has long been in Jamaica, Queens, where many of its resources are devoted to assisting neighbors, including many African-Americans. Indeed, ICNA has particularly strong ties to American blacks, who are noticeably present at its meetings and conventions. In this same vein, ICNA has long been engaged in da'wah to prisoners. No similar commitment is evident at MAS.

ICNA has also spawned a media initiative, SoundVision, which operates bookstores and produces videos on topics ranging from the life of the prophet to teen sex. In the aftermath of 9/11, ICNA established a hotline — 877-WHY-ISLAM — to inform non-Muslims about the faith. Most recently, the organization has sponsored an annual ad campaign in transit systems in New York and other cities. Typical messages placed on the sides of buses are: "Why Are So Many People Like You Becoming Muslim?" or "Islam — Submission to God." Such efforts reveal ICNA's commitment to da'wah, as well as its naïveté, as its leaders fail to appreciate how provocative and threatening such campaigns can be to non-Muslims.

There is considerable irony in the contrast between ICNA's sustained outreach to non-Muslims and its institutional ethos, which is strikingly parochial and rigid, especially when compared to that of MAS and the other mainstream organizations. For instance, one encounters more niqabs and burquas (though relatively few in absolute terms) at ICNA gatherings than at MAS and ISNA conferences. Even more telling is the segregation of the sexes: Along with a Sisters' Wing, ICNA holds separate "sisters' sessions" at its conventions, and in joint sessions enforces separate seating and other arrangements more fastidiously than do other organizations. When a woman was elected president of ISNA a few years ago, an ICNA leader commented to me, "It will be a very long time before a woman ever heads ICNA!"

MAS leaders display a similar conservatism, but also a certain cosmopolitanism, expressing disdain for ICNA's naïve approach to da'wah or criticizing its rigid sex segregation. In general, one finds in MAS greater openness to American culture, especially popular culture, than in ICNA. For example, at a lecture on relations between the sexes for male college students sponsored by the Bay Area chapter of MAS, the speaker indicated that it was not absolutely mandatory that a Muslim woman wear hijab, and also argued that dating was not necessarily contrary to Islamic law. What Islam does require, he said, is respectful and decorous relations between the sexes, based on an understanding of their critical emotional as well as physical differences. Toward that end, he urged his young listeners to read linguist Deborah Tannen on gender differences in language.

Then there was the national hip-hop concert tour sponsored by MAS in the summer of 2007. Featuring the group Outlandish (consisting of two Danish-born Muslims and one Honduran Catholic), the tour was an effort by some MAS leaders to reach out to their youth. It proved controversial when, at the Manhattan concert I attended, scores of Muslim teenagers began to move to the music in a way that looked a lot like dancing, which Muslims typically do not condone. Failing even to turn a profit, the tour antagonized conservatives in MAS, and its sponsors eventually left the organization. When I related this episode to an ICNA official, he rolled his eyes and declared that nothing similar would ever have been attempted by his organization.

STASIS AND CHANGE

Despite these differences, ICNA and MAS share the same basic Islamist ideology and place the same emphasis on the work of the usras. They also organize very similar regional and national conferences. Indeed, the most visible step toward a merger between the two groups has been their joint sponsorship of each other's annual conventions — events that attract between 5,000 and 10,000 Muslims and also resemble (in format if not size) the massive annual convention of ISNA.

To a non-Muslim observer, perhaps the most striking aspect of these gatherings is the complete absence of any acknowledged tie to the United States. While immigrant organizations typically find ways to demonstrate loyalty to their adopted country, ICNA and MAS do not. No one pledges allegiance to the flag, and indeed there are no flags on display. (This is also true of the typical Islamic school.) When attending an ICNA convention over a Fourth of July weekend, I heard not a word about the significance of that date in American history. Convention-goers are routinely urged to mobilize and vote to overturn the Patriot Act and protect their civil rights, but they are almost never urged to consider the obligations that their fellow Americans typically understand as a condition of citizenship.

This lack of any overt display of loyalty to America may in part reflect the disdain expressed by non-Muslim elites toward patriotism and the nation-state, which tend to be viewed as outdated, unnecessary, or even dangerous. And with elimination of the draft and our reliance on a professional military, the signal sent to earlier immigrant groups about the importance of military service as a way to demonstrate their commitment to America is now far weaker.

Yet the absence of acknowledged obligations to America is also directly attributable to Islamist ideology. For instance, the leaders of these organizations have never explicitly renounced the caliphate — the dream of a restored sovereign Islamic regime ruled by an individual understood to be Allah's vice-regent. Failure to reject this notion obviously engenders confusion among many Muslim Americans, especially youth. Similarly, the routine invocation of the ummah — the worldwide community of Muslims that transcends all barriers of ethnicity, race, and nationality — fosters ambivalence, and reinforces the already pervasive inclination to avoid military service or to oppose any use of American force in Muslim countries.

Equally striking, though, is the fact that the vast majority of people attending such gatherings do so for non-ideological reasons. The substantive sessions are typically a backdrop against which entire families — parents, children, grandparents — catch up with old friends and associates, often in the hope of finding suitable marriage partners for the young. Normally discreet Muslims refer to these get-togethers as "meat markets," and it is easy to see why, as adolescent girls dressed in stylish hijab — sometimes coordinated with tight designer jeans and painted toenails — glide around checking out the boys, who of course return the compliment.

Generations cross paths at the conferences' bazaars, where scores of merchants and non-profits sell halal foodstuffs, ethnic clothing, sharia-compliant mortgages and investments, educational materials for children, satellite TV subscriptions, religious videos, and books. Others feature information about Islamic charities operating here and overseas, advocacy and political groups, and, on occasion, a recruiting officer from the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security.

Despite such fellowship and commerce, the conventions' formal purpose is to hold plenary sessions, panels, and workshops where "scholars" hold forth on topics ranging from Qur'anic notions of jihad to getting fathers more involved in parenting. The term "scholar" gets used indiscriminately to describe anyone presuming to address such gatherings. The speaker might be a high-school teacher talking about American youth culture, a political activist denouncing the Patriot Act, or an imam with a Ph.D. from Harvard examining what the Qur'an says about marriage. In traditional Islam, "scholar" is an honorific, reflecting a deeply ingrained respect for religious learning. Among Islamists, it represents a challenge to such authority, and a willingness to hear Islam interpreted by individuals with no recognized religious training.

In any case, the same individuals speak at all these events, and their presentations are invariably tedious and pedantic, especially when addressing religious topics. Tacitly acknowledging the problem, organizers routinely call upon a few reliable African-American Muslims, who combine Islamic themes with a personal, evangelical style that is especially appealing to young Muslims raised here. Unfortunately, these speakers also tend to express their alienation from America.

It is ironic that these two organizations, ICNA and MAS — founded to advance the Islamist movement by transcending the inertia and insularity of mosques — have become mired in the consuming task of staging all-too-predictable events. As one insider articulates the resulting problem: "We don't have leaders, we have managers. We have speakers."

But this deep organizational stasis has not always been evident to outside observers, in part because of the many surface changes that have taken place in recent years. As noted above, Muslim leaders struggled during the 1970s and '80s to adapt their Islamist ideology to American life by urging Muslims to get along with their neighbors and co-workers while at the same time utterly rejecting American values and encouraging efforts to convert non-Muslims. The result was "Islamic fortresses," whose inadequacies became evident to all but the most obdurate in the wake of 9/11. Since then, the leaders have adapted further, urging Muslims to secure their rights as American citizens through full civic and political engagement. Yet these leaders have not reconciled these adaptations with the Islamist ideology that they continue to uphold, or that they at least have not renounced.

How these leaders and groups manage this posture is difficult to fathom. Deception and dissembling should not be ruled out, but these do not provide a satisfactory explanation. More likely factors are habit and filiopietism. For many Muslims, even those who are not Islamists, figures such as Qutb and al-Banna are simply part of their heritage. Among the more initiated, these two figures are also revered as martyrs. A further factor is the sheer opportunism of the leaders involved, which typifies the Muslim Brotherhood wherever it has been closely examined. The result, according to one former Muslim leader, is that his colleagues "refuse to deal with their baggage."

OVERSEAS INFLUENCE

The place of Islamist ideology in the contemporary life of American Muslims is thus more complex than their critics suggest. But what about the critics' other common theme — the influence of foreign Muslims on their American co-religionists? As noted earlier, there has been considerable contact between ICNA and MAS and their Islamist colleagues in Pakistan, Egypt, and elsewhere. But these ties have likely diminished over time. Even critical analysts of the Muslim Brotherhood downplay the influence of Egyptian leaders on affiliates in Europe and America, emphasizing that the latter respond mostly to local political dynamics.

Even more scrutinized is the influence of the Saudis, who have spent millions on initiatives in the United States, such as the distribution of Qur'ans and other books, salaries to imams, contributions to build mosques and schools, and generous funding for Middle East studies and other departments at American universities. In Los Angeles, the Saudis built and have maintained the lavish King Fahd mosque. In Northern Virginia, the Islamic Saudi Academy — funded and operated by the Saudi government — has dominated Islamic education in the nation's capital for years. And the Saudis have contributed financially to Muslim Brotherhood initiatives throughout the world, including in the United States.

Yet all this money has not earned the Saudis as much support and goodwill as their critics tend to believe. On the contrary, Muslim leaders have frequently criticized, privately and on occasion publicly, heavy-handed efforts by the Saudis to manipulate them. At least one major organization, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, has long had a policy of refusing to accept any overseas support; its founder, Maher Hathout, has specifically bemoaned the Saudis' influence on American mosques.

The biggest rift arose in 1990 and '91 over the Saudi-backed deployment of U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf region in Operation Desert Storm. The Saudis leaned heavily on all the major Muslim-American organizations to denounce Saddam Hussein's invasion and annexation of Kuwait. This effort was not very successful: In fact, all but one of those organizations refused to back the Saudis. This response was attributable primarily to the leaders' ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose affiliates for the most part supported Saddam (who had positioned himself as the champion of the Palestinians and the Palestine Liberation Organization). Only the Kuwaiti and Iraqi affiliates of the Brotherhood supported the U.S. invasion, for obvious reasons. Hardly gratifying from the American perspective, this story nevertheless underscores the fact that the interests of Muslims here do not always converge with those of their overseas benefactors — even the Saudis.

The Saudis did score one success, however, and it was revealing. The only Muslim organization to support Desert Storm was the American Muslim Society, a group of African-Americans headed by Wallace D. Mohammed, son of Nation of Islam founder Elijah Mohammed. Having long since rejected his father's racist, anti-American cult, W. D. Mohammed was drawn to the Saudi position for two reasons. First, he was dependent on the Saudis both for validation as a genuine Sunni Muslim and for financial support. Second, he was a staunch patriot willing to back an American-led effort abroad. This episode highlights the fact that Saudi influence on Muslim Americans is hardly uniform: Though not widely noted, that influence has been greater on African-American Muslims than on those of immigrant origins. W. D. Mohammed is a benign example, but for some other African-Americans, Islam — especially Saudi-backed Salafism — reinforces an already profound sense of alienation. As former MAS leader Souheil Ghannouchi has written: "Immigrant leaders preached a version of Islam that made many African American Muslims feel like foreigners in their own country."

Clearly, overseas influences on Muslims in America are limited and conditioned by domestic social and political dynamics. A particularly salient example of the latter surfaced at an ISNA convention a little more than two years after 9/11. At one morning session, an ISNA leader took the podium and delivered an unscheduled talk about the Noble Qur'an, a handsome, hardbound edition in numerous translations underwritten and distributed worldwide by the Saudis for free. Yet the speaker was there to criticize the Noble Qur'an, not to praise it. He pointed out that its annotations included offensive characterizations of Christians and Jews, which the Saudis had not removed despite ISNA's repeated protests over several years. He stated that many "good Muslims" who bear no malice toward Christians and Jews were not taking such offenses seriously enough. He then told his listeners: "If you see copies of this edition of the Qur'an, buy it and destroy it. It is a weapon of mass destruction."

The reception to these comments was mixed. Among the thousand or so Muslims in the room, there was a good deal of fidgeting and murmuring beneath the polite surface. In conversations later that day, I heard considerable discomfort with such criticism of the Saudis. A few weeks later, I caught up with the speaker and remarked that I had never heard such a blunt public rebuke of the Saudis by a Muslim-American leader. I then asked if he had ever made such comments outside the confines of his organization. His immediate, reflexive response was: "Of course not, I'm creating a constituency here!"

IDENTITY POLITICS

As we have seen, one of the major challenges facing Muslim leaders eager to create constituencies is overcoming the sources of division among the array of groups that comprise their community. Before 9/11, one way of bridging these divides was to appeal to the Palestinian cause. This strategy worked at times, but the issue was generally too fraught with disagreement to promote genuine cohesion. Since 9/11 and the resulting scrutiny under which Muslims have come since the attacks, civil rights has emerged as the leaders' most powerful tool for mobilizing and unifying their co-religionists. The challenges inherent in both approaches become evident when considering the most visible, and most notorious, Muslim-American organization — the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR.

CAIR was established in 1994 by two Palestinians — Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad — who had come to America as university students. Before conceiving of CAIR, Ahmad and Awad were active in the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), founded in 1981 by the Muslim Brotherhood to promote the Palestinian cause. Until its demise in 2004, the IAP was closely tied to Hamas, raising funds for the terrorist group and publishing its materials in America.

The idea for CAIR emerged from an infamous meeting convened in Philadelphia in 1993 by another Brotherhood affiliate, the Palestine Committee. The early 1990s were tumultuous years for the Brotherhood and Palestinian Islamists: Their support for Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War had alienated their Saudi backers. The implosion of the Soviet Union cost them another sponsor. And the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, signed in September 1993, not only threatened Hamas's declared goal of eliminating the state of Israel, but also legitimated its secular rival.

Meeting in Philadelphia a few weeks after the signing of the Olso Accords, Ahmad, Awad, and their colleagues conceived of an organization that would engage the wider community of Muslims in America — not just Palestinians — to work against the accords, by raising funds for the Palestinian struggle and encouraging Muslims to get more involved in American politics. They had in mind a broad campaign to influence American media, public opinion, and eventually policy. A year later, the Council on American Islamic Relations — a direct outgrowth of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas — was open for business in Washington, D.C.

It is astonishing, given this history, that the mainstream American media should routinely describe CAIR as "a Muslim civil rights organization." It is one thing for CAIR's leaders to ritualistically deny and obfuscate the organization's origins; it is quite another for America's academic, political, and media elites to systematically ignore them.

There are, however, two notable exceptions. The first is the FBI. After a long and difficult legal battle, the Bush administration successfully prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation, a Texas-based Hamas fundraising front to which Ahmad and Awad were clearly connected. CAIR was an unindicted co-conspirator in the case; as a result, the FBI eventually suspended formal contact with the group.

The second exception is the investigative journalists mentioned earlier. These indefatigable critics rush into the vacuum left by reticent elites, but they don't quite fill it. Habituated to recycling the same old facts, such critics fail to step back to examine the larger picture. If they did, they would see that CAIR has adapted in many ways to American political culture, and that this process of Americanization has made CAIR a much more formidable organization than any of the other prominent Muslim-American groups. Indeed, while Gallup reports that barely 12% of Muslims regard CAIR as representing their interests, that figure is higher than the one reported for any other Muslim-American organization.

Since 9/11, CAIR has emerged as the pre-eminent advocate for Muslim Americans. Like other nationwide advocacy groups in America, its efforts and ethic are dominated by its Washington headquarters, where a full-time professional staff works under the direction of political entrepreneurs adept at identifying causes capable of generating contributions from widely dispersed supporters. In other words, CAIR is a "checkbook organization": Members are not connected to it through any enduring ties of friendship or social solidarity, but rather through their commitments to its specified goals. And as those commitments inevitably ebb and flow, members routinely join up and drift away. To keep ahead of "the churn," holding on to existing members and attracting new ones, headquarters must continually demonstrate its effectiveness through lawsuits, administrative rule changes, studies, congressional testimony — any accomplishments that can be communicated to members through newsletters, e-mails, and the media.

For their substantial start-up costs, advocacy groups rely on wealthy sponsors, often foundations. Since few foundations have been willing to risk their tax-exempt status on pro-Muslim advocacy, CAIR partly relied on the Holy Land Foundation. Subsequent support has come from various Saudi and Persian Gulf sources, almost certainly rendering CAIR more reliant on overseas funding than any other major Muslim-American organization.

From the outset, CAIR made its name denouncing bias against Muslims. Its breakthrough came in 1995, when it publicized harassment and hate crimes against Muslims in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. CAIR also picked fights over apparent offenses to the prophet Mohammad by Simon & Schuster and U.S. News. The organization's most visible early victory came against Nike in 1998, when it orchestrated a global protest against a line of athletic shoes whose logo could be mistaken for the Arabic script for "Allah." More generally, CAIR has urged Muslim immigrants to become citizens, and has encouraged Muslim Americans to register and vote, pressure their elected officials, and demand their rights. Toward this end, the organization literally waves the flag: Unlike ICNA and MAS, it displays Old Glory at its events, and its U.S. Congress Handbook devotes several pages to proper flag etiquette. That publication also prints the full text of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and all four stanzas of The Star-Spangled Banner.

CAIR has thus overcome many of the limitations, both organizational and ideological, of ISNA, ICNA, and MAS. Unlike these organizations, CAIR is not rooted in face-to-face immigrant networks. Nor are its members involved in usras or similarly intense small groups. CAIR does not get involved in the religious development of its members, among whom are a diverse array of young, educated second-generation Muslim Americans. In these ways, CAIR transcends the ethnic boundaries defining other groups and constitutes the first genuinely Muslim-American organization.

Nor does CAIR get bogged down in planning annual conventions. Not reliant on social networks requiring constant renewal, CAIR has not been drawn into hosting "meat markets" for families, bazaars for merchants, or panels for scholars. The organization does hold an annual banquet in Washington with the usual after-dinner fundraising appeal, but this is a far cry from the large gatherings that are a year-round preoccupation for other groups.

Still, as often happens in advocacy organizations, CAIR's members eventually sought one another out and organized local affiliates. And CAIR National has welcomed these regional chapters, granting them considerable autonomy as local franchises with their own boards, staffs, and web sites. This laissez-faire response to grassroots spontaneity has afforded CAIR much dynamism and visibility, especially in the crucial period after 9/11. But it has also led to new challenges.

Regional affiliates like CAIR-Chicago have in recent years hired lawyers to litigate civil-rights complaints, which CAIR National has not typically done. College students flooding in as interns and volunteers at local chapters have included substantial numbers of women, some of whom wear hijab while others do not. This is one of many signs that the regional chapters have been less rigid than CAIR National, where wearing hijab has been enforced. Indeed, some regional leaders can be heard criticizing the influence of Islamists at Washington headquarters, especially with regard to the Palestinian question.

Such local initiatives have exacerbated longstanding tensions within CAIR, between those members focused on the needs of Muslims here in America and those focused on developments overseas, especially building support for the Palestinians and Hamas. In theory, CAIR was founded to mobilize the former to benefit the latter. These tensions have roiled CAIR National for some time, and in 2007 they came to a head in a protracted internal battle that has been largely ignored by the organization's many critics. That battle resulted in the defeat of the overseas contingent, led by Omar Ahmad, who effectively withdrew from any further involvement in the organization he had helped create.

CAIR has thus emerged, at both the national and regional levels, as the most Americanized of all the mainstream Muslim organizations. Yet this is hardly good news, because the style of politics now practiced by CAIR makes it more difficult than ever to deal with the organization's Islamist "baggage."

CAIR's strident brand of identity politics may seem less frightening than fifth-column activism on behalf of Hamas, but it remains highly problematic. In a style as relentless as that of its critics, CAIR denounces the indignities visited on Muslims by government bureaucrats and Islamophobes across America. Such grievances are not without merit, but CAIR infuses them with the hyperbole that pervades advocacy politics in contemporary America. And this only deepens the self-absorption of educated young Muslims who refuse to acknowledge that their organizations and leaders bear any responsibility for the suspicions that other Americans continue to harbor toward them, their leaders, and their faith. Instead, these young Muslim Americans, unlike their immigrant parents, lay full and unapologetic claim to their rights as citizens, while admitting no corresponding duties — other than the familiar "duty" to dissent and demand more rights. This is perhaps the most significant and complicated challenge posed to the nation by contemporary American Islam.

CONSTRUCTIVE PRESSURE

How should we respond to this challenge? We must begin by recognizing that the legal and political values and institutions that helped Americans to avoid overreacting after 9/11 have subsequently hindered us from facing up to the more subtle threat from Islamism. No longer should mainstream American institutions routinely and uncritically engage with Muslim leaders and organizations that have not — at some point, in some way — demonstrated a willingness to address questions about their history, and about the compatibility of their views with American values and political principles.

This means, however, that non-Muslims must pose such questions in reasonable and constructive ways. We must move beyond the inquisitorial stance of critics engaged in mere political archeology. The repeated unearthing of the same damning facts only encourages Muslims, goaded by the strident advocacy of groups such as CAIR, to wrap themselves in resonant but evasive rights talk.

The fundamental problem is not disloyalty among Muslim Americans, but their reluctance to confront the implications of the Islamism that has been part of their milieu and that their leaders continue to invoke, however ritualistically or unreflectively. Thus, the primary goal should be to exert constructive pressure, in different ways and to different degrees, on Muslim Americans — leaders and ordinary citizens alike — to "deal with their baggage." An exemplary step in this direction is the FBI's policy shift away from contact and cooperation with CAIR. So was the Bush Justice Department's prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation. Today, however, the Obama administration is pursuing a more accommodating policy toward Muslim-American organizations. This is regrettable, but in truth there is only so much the government can or should do on this front. The most appropriate and effective source of pressure will be non-governmental actors, especially universities, think tanks, and the media.

If any such substantive engagement with Muslims is to be undertaken, then non-Muslim Americans will need to be much better informed. We must overcome the populist paranoia, fueled by the evasiveness of our elites, that demeans a free people. And rather than obsess over the presumed influence of overseas ties on Muslims in America, we need be cognizant of how American Muslims have adapted to some of the most dysfunctional aspects of our own politics.

Essential to any improved understanding will also be a greater appreciation of America's history — not its mythology — as a nation of immigrants. There are, for instance, relevant parallels between Islam as an assertive, triumphalist, immigrant faith and Catholicism in the last century. Still more relevant are the parallels with German-Americans during World War I, and then, immediately after the war, with anarchist terrorists and the resulting Red Scare. Perhaps the most striking parallel of all emerges from later in the 20^th century, when radical socialists and communists clung to utopian illusions of a workers' state, even as they progressed up the social and economic ladder in America — much as successful Muslims today continue to invoke the notion of the ummah.

The lessons of this history are many and complicated. But surely one is that, ordinarily, questions of loyalty have been worked out over time, as immigrants and their offspring assimilate and adapt to American society. Another is that these tensions have rarely been acted upon or seen as mortal threats.

But we are not living in ordinary times, and today's threats are more immediate. We do not have the luxury of time to allow Muslims to sort out their loyalty to America. We — and they — must face the challenge now.

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: National Affairs

Image Source: Â© Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters

On the Peter King Hearing and Islamism in America

Gary Schmitt and Peter Skerry — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

How worried should we be about Muslims in America?

That question lies at the heart of this week’s controversial hearing about radicalization in America’s Muslim community chaired by Rep. Peter King (R) of New York. Supporters call it a timely investigation. Critics call it a witch hunt.

But as Arab uprisings raise prospects for broader Islamist governance in the Middle East, both sides should use the hearings to reflect on how U.S. policies toward Islamists overseas could inform the way we address Muslim activists here at home. Despite obvious differences, there are some parallels worth pondering.Whether overseas or at home, we have typically muddled along, often pursuing the path of least resistance.

In Egypt, this meant supporting a dictator who kept the Islamists at bay. Here in the United States, our approach has been more multifaceted, but ad hoc and opportunistic nevertheless.

A day of reckoning

Consequently, the day may come when we wake up, as we have in Egypt, to the realization that our aversion to more-demanding, far-sighted approaches leaves us with fewer and less-palatable options here at home than we would like.

At bottom, Islamists are Muslims who want to make the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad the basis of government. In Egypt, they are organized as the Muslim Brotherhood, exercising their clout through social, charitable, educational, and political channels. Islamists don’t enjoy similar influence here, but they have long been a prominent factor in the political life of American Muslims.

This does not mean that Islamists reflect the views of the majority of Muslims in either country. Nor does it mean that most Muslim-American leaders are members of the Muslim Brotherhood, though many have been and some may still be. The key point is that the leadership of the Muslim American community does have historical ties and intellectual debts to Islamism. Here, as in Egypt, Islamism has importantly shaped the discourse and the organizations that Muslims are now using to carve out civic and political space for their religion.

Does this mean that America’s freedoms are in danger from these same Islamists? We think not. But we are struck as well by the tendency of many in the United States, including the media and various government agencies, to ignore the Islamist influences on established Muslim-American organizations and their leaders. For example, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has origins and ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, is routinely described and treated as though it were just another civil rights or advocacy organization.

The price of ignorance

In turn, such studied ignorance in the face of this easily verified history, has created a backlash among other Americans that something important is being hidden from them – a sure recipe for generating conspiracies and popular distrust of Muslim Americans more generally.

Not unlike former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s approach toward his opponents, this has led others to indulge such instincts and fixate exclusively on these organizations’ links to Islamism, however remote or attenuated.

These divergent responses are each in their own way inadequate. Not surprisingly, both sides reach out to Muslims who suit their purposes. Such “user-friendly Muslims” either denounce extremism, paint mainstream Muslim-American organizations in the worst possible light, or gratify some other positive or negative interpretation of Islam. One way or another, these individuals embrace some value or values that resonate with non-Muslims – whether secularism, humanism, feminism, pacifism, or gay rights.

The problem is that such Muslims tend to come from minority sects, like the Ahmadiyya and Ismailis, or the more numerous Sufis. Despite their many talents and often good intentions, these “represetatives” aren’t really representative: they lack meaningful connections to the vast majority of Muslim Americans. And while the leading organizations may not adequately reflect the views of all Muslim Americans, or even a majority, their well-established and ongoing relationships with Muslim communities across the United States afford them better street-level credibility than the “user-friendly” alternatives.

Separate fact from fiction

What to do?

First, our elites, ever prone to political correctness, must face up more forthrightly to the Islamist origins and lingering influences on mainstream Muslim-American leaders and organizations. Once this step is taken, we can begin to sort out genuine concerns and threats from presumed ones.

Although Islamists might seek to convert their fellow citizens to their faith, they do not pose the threat that many Americans might assume. Muslims are simply too few in numbers to produce any real change in this deeply Christian country. Moreover, as we have seen with other immigrant groups, and to the credit of the American way of life, the passage of time, the pursuit of successful careers, and the raising of families in tolerant and religion-friendly communities have smoothed the rough edges of many an Islamist. After all, if the Muslim Brotherhood has earned much less than majority support in the fertile environment of Egypt, what exactly do we have to fear from Islamists here?

For their part, Muslim Americans must face up to the full implications of the Islamist origins and history of their leadership. To be sure, for many, this is a legacy of struggle and pride. Yet here in America it is also a source of confusion among many Muslim Americans as to their obligations to Muslims around the globe – the ummah – and to their fellow Americans.

At a time when Americans, including some Muslims, are in combat overseas against Muslim adversaries, Muslim Americans cannot afford to consider themselves as a community apart. If they are to realize full citizenship, it is not enough for Muslims here simply to assert their rights but also to address questions whose continued neglect fuels understandable anxieties about Islam among their fellow citizens.

Authors

Gary Schmitt
Peter Skerry

Publication: The Christian Science Monitor

Image Source: © Reuters Photographer / Reuters

Silence from Muslim-Americans

Gary Schmitt and Peter Skerry — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Amid the uproar earlier this month over the assassination of Salmaan Taseer, the secularist governor of the Pakistani province of Punjab, Muslim-American organizations have been largely silent. At a time when mainstream Muslim leaders have been trying to demonstrate their embrace of religious tolerance and pluralism to their fellow Americans, few have had a word to say about this People’s Party leader whose denunciation of Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy law led to his death at the hands of a Muslim zealot — a zealot who has since been celebrated by fundamentalists around the globe.

The most notable silence is on the part of the Islamic Circle of North America. Operating in this country for about 40 years, this organization has ideological ties to the Jamaat-e-Islami, one of Pakistan’s main Islamist political parties. The Jamaat explained away the assassination of Taseer on the grounds that it could have been avoided if the government had simply removed him from office. Though the Islamic Circle of North America does not necessarily take orders from its Pakistani parent, it appears unwilling to challenge the views of its overwhelmingly immigrant membership from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh — many of whom seem to have little sympathy for the slain politician’s secularist views.

Nor is this the first instance of such silence. Last May, when the Pakistani Taliban slaughtered 93 members of a persecuted Muslim sect, the Ahmadiyya, the Islamic Circle of North America held its annual convention in Hartford. Speakers continually reminded the several thousand attendees that “Islam is a religion of peace,’’ yet one of us in attendance heard not a word about the killings all weekend. Other Muslim-American organizations, none of which has such direct and exclusive ties to Pakistan and the region, had even less excuse for their silence.

While Muslim-American leaders are constantly reminding their followers to exercise their rights as Americans, they also embrace the view that Muslims here are part of the worldwide community of fellow believers — the ummah. As such, these organizations are riven by numberless fissures that run along linguistic, ethnic, racial, and doctrinal lines. Their leaders are preoccupied with not saying or doing anything that would cause such fissures to develop into major ruptures.

So while many Muslim-Americans may abhor what happened in Pakistan, others may agree with friends and relatives back home that Taseer’s killing was justified, or at least to be tolerated. In between are Muslims who are conflicted about such events but who get little guidance from leaders who seem to lack either the wisdom or the courage to speak with moral clarity. Some of these leaders are not the pluralists they claim to be. Others have simply grown accustomed to avoiding the difficult choices facing them and instead, especially since 9/11, would rather mobilize and unify their fractious members by pointing to a common enemy — whether it is the FBI, the Patriot Act, or Islamophobes.

The situation is not hopeless, however. It is certainly noteworthy that all the leaders and organizations that have been silent about Taseer’s assassination have been equally vocal and explicit in their denunciation of the slaughter of Coptic Christians in Egypt on Jan. 1. They clearly understood that the killing of Christians by Muslims is not something about which they could remain silent. Now these leaders must confront the reality that in contemporary America, genuine religious pluralism requires them to be just as outraged when Muslims kill Muslims.

In the name of Muslim unity, many Muslim-American leaders and organizations have been less than coherent when it comes to violent extremism. As a result, they have confused their members as to what true religious toleration and pluralism require, and consequently feed the very suspicions of those inclined to doubt the possibility of Muslims fully assimilating to the American way of life. This is a profound disservice to the many Muslim-Americans who are doing just that.

Authors

Gary Schmitt
Peter Skerry

Publication: The Boston Globe

Image Source: © Rebecca Cook / Reuters

The Real Debate is Among Muslims

Peter Skerry — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The mosque near ground zero should be built, but not merely on account of the lofty principles about religous freedom articulated by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In fact, when it comes to Islam, Americans have good reason to be suspicious of high-minded pronouncements by their leaders. A more compelling argument for building the mosque is to get beyond the current controversy, because it empowers the most opportunistic elements in the Muslim community and fosters an us-versus-them mentality that stalls a much-needed debate among Muslims about their place in American society.

Time and again, our political leaders have demonstrated an unsettling eagerness to put a positive gloss on troubling scenarios involving violent jihadists. After the failed Times Square bombing by self-proclaimed “Muslim soldier’’ Faisal Shahzad in May, Bloomberg declared: “So far, there is no evidence that any of this has anything to do with one of the recognized terrorist organizations.’’ Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano characterized the incident as “a one-off’’ event. Attorney General Eric Holder virtually refused to associate the plot with “radical Islam.’’

Reasonable people have good grounds to be distrustful of Muslim leaders and of the proposed prayer space. US mosques have often been battlegrounds between contending Muslim factions. A typical scenario is for one group to go to the trouble and expense of building a mosque, only to have it taken over by some other group. Although extremists have sometimes prevailed in this way, terrorists and would-be terrorists have typically operated outside mosques — either because they chose to or because they were forced out by fellow Muslims.

To be sure, such expulsions illustrate a reassuring process of self-policing by Muslim Americans, especially since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Yet this coexists with a striking degree of evasion and self-delusion, typified by the claim, frequently made by Muslims, that “religion had nothing to do with 9/11,’’ or the plaintive query “why didn’t anyone ask about the religion of the Unabomber?’’

More disturbing is the lack of candor on the part of many Muslim leaders about their past associations. As federal prosecutors established in the recent Holy Land Foundation trial, many leaders have had ties to Hamas and to the Muslim Brotherhood. To be fair, the implications of such ties may not be as dire as anti-Muslim zealots suggest. The Muslim Brotherhood is, after all, an encompassing movement in the Arab world, with divergent tendencies responsive to the different contexts in which adherents operate.

Nevertheless, such concerns need to be addressed. But far from compelling Muslim leaders to do so, controversies like this one allow them to change the subject. And the accompanying media storms also help such leaders to overcome daunting obstacles to mobilizing their co-religionists. An overlooked irony about the proposed mosque is that as many as 80 percent of Muslims in the United States lack a regular relationship with any mosque. Of these, some probably reject Islam and organized religion altogether. A larger number likely continue to identify with Islam but do not seriously observe its tenets. In addition to the usual reasons why immigrants do not get involved in civic or political affairs, such “unmosqued’’ Muslims are particularly difficult for leaders to communicate with and mobilize.

Adding to the difficulty is the diversity of Muslims in the United States. Not only are they divided among Sunni, Shia, and Sufi, they are separated by language and ethnic ties to their homelands. There is also a gulf between immigrant Muslims and their African-American brothers and sisters, who are themselves riven into many different sects. Finally, there are differences among traditionalists, fundamentalists, and Islamists.

In light of such fault lines and obstacles, controversies and attacks from non-Muslims afford leaders a singular opportunity to unify and mobilize their people, as Muslims. But the more the frame becomes Muslims versus non-Muslims, the more responsible leaders get pushed aside by the most opportunistic purveyors of victim politics.

This is the real tragedy of disputes like the present one. For the critical debate that must proceed is not between Muslims and non-Muslims, but among Muslims themselves.

To facilitate this process, the rest of us should follow Bloomberg’s imperfect example, support the building of the mosque near ground zero, maintain our vigilance against our true enemies in the Muslim world, and encourage Muslims here to get on with the critical business of coming to terms not only with their rights but also with their responsibilities as citizens.

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: The Boston Globe

Image Source: © Rebecca Cook / Reuters

The Immigration Vote: Ineffective Policies Do Little but Energize Advocacy Groups

Peter Skerry — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:03:00 -0400

Last week's decision by a federal judge in Arizona to block parts of the recent state measure targeting illegal immigrants may be good law. It is definitely good politics, especially for Democrats but even for Republicans. But it is also bad policy.

This decision was engineered by the Obama administration to placate immigrant advocates angered by its unwillingness to invest political capital in any version of “comprehensive immigration reform.’’ In addition, advocates are aroused by the relatively high levels of workplace enforcement and deportations that Obama has achieved by pursing subtler, more targeted policies than his predecessor.

But don’t blame the advocates for the ruling. Blame the administration for pandering to them, which is not the same as giving them what they want: minimal enforcement and amnesty for as many illegal immigrants as possible.

The only thing the ruling does is to keep the immigration pot stirred in politically useful ways. For example, it keeps Hispanics focused on immigration, an issue that in poll after poll does not emerge as one of their key voting concerns. Contrary to conventional wisdom, immigration was clearly not what drove Hispanics to vote for Obama in such high numbers in 2008. Indeed, the candidate who staked the most on that issue was Senator John McCain. In November 2008 Hispanics voted for Obama largely for the same reasons that so many other Americans did — the economy and health care reform.

If the current strategy succeeds, the administration will have managed to mobilize Hispanic voters for Democrats this fall, substantially around immigration. By 2012, Obama may have delivered genuine immigration reform. But this will prove difficult if he continues to antagonize Republicans with initiatives like the one that culminated with last week’s ruling. Yet if this is the path he does end up pursuing, Hispanics will likely be all the more aroused in support of Obama.

But good politics, in this case, does not lead to good policy. To be sure, the administration is also sending 1,200 more National Guard troops to the Southwest border. But this initiative won’t do much to stem the continuing influx. Nor will it do anything to placate restrictionist activists and other Americans for whom the court ruling was a poke in the eye. It certainly won’t satisfy Republican officeholders and candidates like Senator McCain who are struggling mightily to keep up with the surge of populist sentiment against illegal immigration. From the right, Obama will only get more and more pressure for border enforcement.

Meanwhile, the judge’s ruling, whatever the specific merits of the Arizona law, will undercut efforts at the kind of interior enforcement that Americans understandably expect to see more of. The Obama administration has been enforcing federal immigration law at workplaces so as to avoid the gut-wrenching mass roundups and deportations pursued by the Bush administration. Yet with 11 million illegal immigrants in our midst, Americans see myriad other opportunities in civic and public spaces where enforcement efforts could be more visible. These are typically contexts - for example, day laborer hiring sites or overcrowded housing - where ordinary Americans feel most threatened by the social disorder inevitably resulting from large-scale migration. Not coincidentally, these are also contexts that elites — of both parties — can generally insulate themselves from.

So now we can look forward to more of the same: stymied and ineffective policies that serve mostly to energize advocacy groups and politicians who survive on recrimination and controversy. This is largely how we got into this fix in the first place. Under these conditions we will not soon be seeing any kind of rational immigration policy proposals. And few among us will be gratified — least of all the millions of illegal immigrants in our midst who will survive this imbroglio but will almost certainly not prosper.

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: The Boston Globe

Image Source: © Jason Reed / Reuters

American Culture and the Muslim World

Peter Skerry — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:11:00 -0400

When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, expectations were raised for a new political era. At home, many Americans hoped for an end to political polarization and the so-called culture wars. Abroad, millions more looked forward to America’s recommitment to engagement and consultation with the rest of the world. As the 2010 congressional elections approach and the midpoint of Obama’s four-year term looms, it is a good time to reassess such expectations. Are they on the way to being realized? And if not, why not?

Regarding national unity, the election of the first African-American president did at first lead to a slight but discernible lull in rancorous and divisive partisanship. Yet that brief period is now all but forgotten, as the country continues to suffer from the shock of the 2008 financial crisis — a crisis preceded by years of declining wages among ordinary Americans and handsome rewards to elites from a booming global economy. In 2005 the failure of local, state, and federal officials to respond effectively to Hurricane Katrina reinforced a growing lack of confidence among the American people in their government. Now the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico looks like it could similarly taint the current administration. At the same time, Obama’s successful drive for health care reform exacerbated partisan tensions and helped launch the Tea Party movement. So our domestic politics remain polarized on a host of issues, not just economic but also social and cultural.

Regarding foreign policy, Barack Hussein Obama is the first American president with any knowledge of or immediate ties to Islam. One of his first acts as president was to address the Muslim world directly in an unprecedented interview with Al Arabiya television. He subsequently traveled to Istanbul and then to Cairo, where he spoke persuasively not only to the leaders and citizens of those nations but to Muslims around the world. But when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Obama also explained his rationale for our renewed commitment to fighting Islamist terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere. And now once again, Muslims around the world are expressing disaffection and outright opposition to America’s foreign policy.

It is also worth noting that Obama has acknowledged his ties to Islam much more freely after being elected president than before, and that throughout the long campaign he went to considerable lengths to distance himself from his father’s religion. For example, while Obama visited many churches and synagogues on the campaign trail, he never once visited a mosque. The political realities that drew candidate Obama down that path have hardly disappeared and will continue to shape his choices and those of other elected officials. Indeed, even as president, Obama has yet to visit an American mosque! Nevertheless, Muslim Americans voted for him overwhelmingly in 2008 and continue to support him, albeit with bated enthusiasm.

Yet the purpose of this essay is not to blame President Obama for failing to realize the hopes of his supporters and admirers. Nor is it to blame his predecessor for the country’s current difficulties. American presidents are not all-powerful executives able to force drastic changes on an unwilling or resistant populace. On the contrary, they must struggle to achieve their goals within the constraints of a political system designed to curb executive power. Thus it would be prudent for observers, especially those overseas, to recognize that while these constraints rise and fall in response to events and leadership skills, they never disappear.

For Americans, this is a particularly difficult time, as we are compelled to address internal economic and fiscal challenges even as we take stock of our place in the world. But take stock we must. And as we do so, one of the most elusive challenges that we face is coming to terms with the cultural dimension of our encounter with the Muslim world. Even now, as we continue to skirmish over issues such as abortion and gay marriage here at home, Americans fail to appreciate how our cultural values affect our relations with Muslims around the globe — and with Muslims in our midst, many of whom are fellow citizens. This is in part because cultural forces are downplayed or ignored as relevant concerns by our intellectual and foreign policy elites. This neglect is regrettable, for while there are some aspects of American culture that Muslims find problematic or repellant, there are others that Muslims find appealing, even admirable. Our unwillingness or inability to address any of these cultural phenomena renders America all the more ineffective at addressing the Muslim world. This essay aims to begin righting this imbalance by exploring some cultural differences — as well as some similarities — between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Material Acquisitiveness: One Side of the Coin

The nation’s financial and economic crises understandably command our immediate attention. But as should be evident, we are dealing not merely with an economic system but with the beliefs and values on which it is based, which constitute a way of life.

Many Americans, along with our friends and enemies overseas, routinely attribute our current predicament to our acquisitiveness. Lurking beneath the surface of this particular diagnosis is the conviction that the true source of America’s quest for global dominance, however chastened it may be at the moment, is the inordinate appetite of its people for material possessions and pleasures. But is this, as we so often hear, simply a matter of “greed”?

First, it must be acknowledged that Americans’ enormous consumer wants and our willingness to go into household debt to satisfy them distinguish us from most other advanced industrial democracies. But if we stop to examine the origins of the present crisis, it arises in part from otherwise laudable efforts to satisfy the aspirations of economically marginal African Americans and Hispanic immigrants to become homeowners. Indeed, the specific goal of increasing minority home ownership was a critical component of the rationale for the policies and institutional arrangements that got us into the present mess. Put differently, the greed of investors was gratified in part by an effort to promote what was viewed by Republicans and Democrats alike as a laudable social policy goal, even as social justice. Many would prefer to forget this today, but during the 1990s and well into the first decade of the new century, those who cautioned against increasing reliance on the sub-prime mortgages that were being marketed to economically marginal home-buyers risked being accused of indifference toward those struggling to achieve the American Dream. In some instances, such skeptics were accused of racism.

Moral as well as analytic clarity is essential here. Now that the financial system sustained by those practices and institutions has come crashing down, it is these same economically marginal families who are suffering the most. It would of course be naive to deny that the aspirations of such individuals were at times tainted by poor judgment and excess. Nor are human motives easily disentangled and judged. One person’s drive and ambition is, after all, another’s greed. Nevertheless, pointing out that immigrant and minority aspirations contributed to the debacle should in no way be interpreted as blaming those who have lost their homes. Without a doubt, primary responsibility for our current situation lies with the investors who exploited those aspirations and with the government officials whose lax oversight allowed them to take huge financial risks with borrowed assets.

The point is subtle but critical. Our present predicament illustrates how the extraordinary dynamism and openness of American society are sustained by our people’s appetite for material advancement. Opportunities for the rich to grow richer both encourage and permit the non-rich to move up — and perhaps grow rich themselves. In no small way, American ideals of equal opportunity and social equality depend on our acquisitiveness, even on our greed. This of course is no original insight; it was the preoccupation of eighteenth-century moral philosophy. But as is often the case, the insights of philosophers are overlooked just when they can be most helpful.

The stark fact is that if the American Dream is to be kept alive, it will be through continued economic growth. And if we hope to nurture such growth, we will have to continue to countenance greed. Now, as we are just beginning to re-learn, there is unrestrained and restrained greed, just as there are unregulated and regulated markets. In both instances, we will doubtless be seeing more of the latter. But the basic acquisitiveness of our market-based capitalist economy will not soon be changing.

This perspective is one that some Americans will not readily accept. Among the well-educated and affluent, it has frequently been the fashion to reject “materialism” and to view our high levels of consumption as artificially maintained by hucksters and advertisers. Yet while the impact of advertising on specific demographic groups — especially the young — is not to be denied, it is also true that many of the goods and services that Americans aspire to purchase reflect the necessities of daily life in this society.

Put differently, Americans own two and three cars per family not simply or necessarily because their automobiles flatter their vanity on the road — though auto manufacturers clearly seek to manipulate consumers in such ways. In the first instance, Americans own cars because our cities and suburbs are built to be negotiated by such private means of transportation. The alternatives so evident in other affluent societies — inter-city rail and intra-city mass transit, for example — are far less available in the United States. To be sure, this reality reflects the interests of auto manufacturers and their ability to influence policy makers. But such efforts would not have prevailed if they did not coincide powerfully with deeply ingrained cultural expectations of maximum individual choice and geographical mobility.

Clearly, America’s habits of mass consumption cannot be willed away with moralizing sermons. President Jimmy Carter discovered this to his chagrin when his famous “malaise speech,” which explicitly asked Americans to change their ways, succeeded mainly in exacerbating his political decline. This is not to suggest that we will never reconsider our habits. But it is to assert that if this is our goal, then we must face up to the fact that high levels of consumption and maximum choice are deeply embedded in our way of life. (And in this sense, critics of American society — inside and outside the United States — who argue that fundamental change is needed are correct.) In other words, American consumerism is not impervious to change, but change will not come easily or quickly, because whatever its faults and shortcomings, our way of life still affords extraordinary opportunities to individuals and their families from around the globe.

This basic insight was lost sight of amidst the outrage over the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Critics charged that the United States invaded that sovereign country “just for its oil.” But this was mistaken, in two critical respects. First, the United States did not topple Saddam Hussein just to gain access to Iraqi oil. However ill-advised and poorly executed that campaign was, its objectives were never defined in exclusively material or economic terms. To be sure, securing control or access to Iraqi oil was clearly one consideration. But it was hardly the sole, or even the prime, objective. The security of Israel figured just as prominently, if not more so. Indeed, America’s oil and energy interests have long been at odds with its role as the guarantor of Israeli security.

Second, and more to my point, oil is not a frivolous indulgence, just a luxury that Americans can or should be able to do without. Nor is it any ordinary commodity, the uninterrupted supply of which does not merit political struggle or even military force. However unwise America’s dependence on foreign oil may be strategically, it will not be abruptly curtailed without significant economic and social costs. And those costs will likely be borne disproportionately by those whose aspirations for upward mobility are most compelling. Once again, we are brought back to the central proposition that our material appetites are intimately bound up with the hopes and aspirations of millions of ordinary Americans — including immigrants who connect the United States to the wider world. And among these are growing numbers of Muslims.

Lifestyle Options: The Other Side of the Coin

Yet this is not the whole story. The American way of life is not rooted exclusively in material acquisitiveness. If we are guilty of greed, it is not simply greed for things. We are also a restless people who crave openness and new experiences. We are greedy for what have come to be called “lifestyle options.” This aspect of our national character is manifested by our sprawling cities and suburbs, by our high rate of geographic mobility — picking up and moving from place to place far more often than Europeans, for example, and by our high rates of drug abuse. And contrary to our reputation as Puritans, Americans have long since shed our sexual inhibitions. Young Americans not only begin sexual activity as early as their Western European peers, they also have many more partners. And Americans are certainly one of the world’s leading producers — and consumers — of pornography.

To grasp how profound is the American taste for individual options and maximum choice, consider how it operates in non-market settings — for example, in our family life. As Professor Andrew Cherlin explains in his book, The Marriage-Go-Round, the United States has one of the highest levels of marriage in any Western nation. Yet we also have the highest divorce rate. Outside of marriage, cohabiting couples break up here more frequently than in other Western societies. And then they establish new intimate relations. As Cherlin sums up the evidence: “Having several partnerships is more common in the United States not just because people exit intimate partnerships faster but also because they enter them faster and after a breakup reenter them faster.”

The biggest impact of such disrupted personal lives is of course on the children, who have marked difficulties relative to their peers from stable two-parent families and perhaps even those from stable one-parent households. As Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks has concluded about our social mores more generally, “America’s laissez-faire economy is unusually productive, but its laissez-faire culture produces an unusually high level of short-sighted, anti-social, and self-destructive behavior.”

Jencks does not mention U.S. abortion policy, but it too illustrates the point. As articulated by the federal courts, the United States today has the most liberal — many would say the most extreme — policy in the world, affording women “the right to choose” an abortion throughout her pregnancy, including the third trimester. This right to late term abortions is rarely exercised, but frequently fought over. In any event, the United States also has one of the highest abortion rates in the world.

The U.S. Supreme Court has anchored this policy in what it deems the individual’s fundamental right of privacy. This contrasts with much more restrictive policies in Western Europe, which typically do not frame access to abortion in terms of rights. For example, in Germany, where women have relatively easy access to abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy but much less so thereafter, the procedure is defined not as an individual right but technically as a crime that the community condones under prescribed conditions and that the state declines to prosecute.

Some libertarians understand how our economic freedoms and cultural liberties are linked, and defend both as two sides of the same coin. Yet most Americans have difficulty seeing this, and today’s polarization of our politics further distorts their view. Liberals and leftists denounce the market for undermining community bonds. Conservatives denounce the left’s cultural agenda for its self-indulgence and hedonistic individualism. The left regards dependence on oil as a sign of greed; the right sees easy access to abortion as an indicator of decadence, even depravity. Neither acknowledges — or perhaps even understands — the connection between these two realms of individual desire and choice. The net result is that Americans end up putting minimal constraints on the individual in both the market and the cultural spheres.

The Water’s Edge

Now, we Americans may not appreciate how these disagreements, which have rent our culture and politics for decades, can be seen as different facets of a coherent whole. But this is precisely how many Muslims — friendly and unfriendly, here and abroad — perceive America’s internal cultural conflicts. In their eyes, Americans may disagree about particulars, but we are united in our preoccupation with unfettered, acquisitive individualism.

It is, of course, hardly surprising that Americans fail to grasp this broader view of our culture wars. These are our culture wars, after all, and we have been fighting them in a characteristically self-absorbed way. Yet this is not the whole story. Since 9/11 Americans have taken some tentative steps toward muting our disagreements and presenting a united front when we turn our attention overseas, especially toward an enemy who defines himself in fundamentalist religious terms. To be sure, controversies over abortion and gay marriage continue, but a bit less intensely than before. This may in part be attributable to economic conditions. In any event, just as Muslims have come together to defend themselves from criticism and attack from non-Muslims, so too have Americans closed ranks vis-à-vis Muslims. It used to be said that partisanship stopped at the water’s edge. That is clearly no longer the case. Yet today the American culture wars tend to stop there.

Consider for a moment the height of those conflicts during the 1990s. Not coincidentally, this era began as the Cold War was ending and controversies were erupting over “transgressive” art that depicted sado-masochistic sexual practices and desecrations of Christian religious and patriotic symbols. A few years later, in reaction to President Clinton’s scandalous private behavior, many conservatives were not only denouncing him individually but characterizing his behavior as typical of a generation of Americans whose blatant rejection of conventional morality was damaging the American family. Judge Robert Bork argued in Slouching Toward Gomorrah that American culture was hopelessly debased, and at one point he and a group of colleagues associated with the journal First Things questioned the legitimacy of the American regime.

Today, in the wake of 9/11, such battles have been largely forgotten. Conservatives who launched fulsome broadsides against the excesses of American culture in the 1990s now mount the barricades to defend its virtues — against the practices and criticisms of Muslims, who all along have been troubled by those same excesses. The ironies here are too numerous to count. The most glaring is that conservatives who just a few years ago roundly criticized the feminist movement and routinely dismissed women’s rights as the leading edge of a troubling liberationist agenda now loudly and insistently criticize Islam’s failure to advance gender equality.

Today, conservatives and liberals alike hold up America to the Muslim world as an exemplar of women’s rights and gender equality. In so doing, conservatives get to assert the superiority of the United States, though in a different key than before 9/11. Feminists and liberals join in and get to advance a favored cause and underscore their embrace of American values at time when they are typically voicing opposition to wars that their countrymen are fighting against violent jihadists.

Yet in our preoccupation with how Muslim societies treat women, we turn a blind eye to how our own liberal values have fostered a commercialized culture that condones and even glorifies sexual promiscuity and pornography that denigrate women — and men. These powerful forces that we have helped unleash on the world are one reason why many Muslim women seek refuge in Islamic modesty, including the head scarf. Of course, promiscuity and pornography offend and alarm many Americans. Yet when we turn our attention overseas, we uncritically close ranks and defend “our way of life” — much as Muslim societies have.

Taking Culture Off the Table

In an era noted for its polarized domestic politics, Americans have achieved some unity by focusing on an external foe. This should come as no surprise. Yet it is surprising and especially worthy of note that we have also downplayed our cultural differences with this foe, particularly since he defines himself in religious terms. More generally, we Americans have for a variety of reasons persuaded ourselves that our differences with Islam are not cultural in any important sense.

With regard to gender equality, for example, we consider it not so much a cultural value to be encouraged as a human right to be secured. This perspective is epitomized in a 2007 study from the RAND Corporation. Building Moderate Muslim Networks specifically equates gender equality with freedom of worship and designates both as “internationally recognized human rights.” Here as elsewhere in contemporary discourse, human rights — claims whose infringement on account of societal, cultural, or political conditions is presumptively impermissible — are asserted without any elaboration or justification. This is a complicated and controversial topic that cannot be adequately addressed here. My point is simply to highlight this resort to the language of rights as a salient example of how Americans sidestep the cultural dimension when we turn our attention to the Muslim world.

Another such example is evident among those who interpret the American encounter with radical Islamists through the lens of the Cold War, and insist that we are now engaged in an ideological struggle against “Islamo-Fascism” akin to the battle against communism. Intriguingly, this perspective has typically been advanced by neo-conservatives, who in the past have emphasized cultural factors when, for example, assessing social policy in America or development policy overseas. Yet once the Cold War was won, many neo-cons rededicated themselves to the promotion of democracy and human rights and came to de-emphasize the role of culture in social, economic, and political affairs.

The term “Islamo-Fascism” is clearly offensive to Muslims. Yet it is not without some merit. Like the Cold War, today’s struggle is being pursued incrementally, over a protracted period of time without the sustained engagement of huge armed forces. And as we did in Western Europe and elsewhere during the Cold War, Americans are now attempting to win “the hearts and minds” of millions of ordinary people whose loyalty is up for grabs. Finally, as Francis Fukuyama, among others, has pointed out, extremist Islamists are driven less by religion than by a modern ideology that has clear affinities with communism and fascism.

Yet despite such similarities, the most critical distinction between the Cold War and today’s struggle is that the latter has a substantial cultural component. Indeed, America’s contests against fascism and communism were waged against adversaries who shared our Enlightenment heritage, albeit in perverted forms. Today, we confront enemies who emerge from a distinctive civilization that is not Western and that in fact has a long history of rivalry, contention, and conflict with the West.

The implications of such a cultural perspective are varied and vital. To begin, cultural conflicts are arguably more wrenching — personally and societally — than ideological ones. Consider, for example, the difference between the apostasy of a Communist such as Whitaker Chambers and that of a Muslim such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. While the former clearly pursued a painful and bitter path, sundering ideological ties with and then betraying old comrades, the pain and complexity of that experience must pale in comparison with the latter’s renunciation and condemnation of the foundational beliefs and practices of her own father and mother.

Such treacherous shoals are undoubtedly one reason why our leaders insist that we are not engaged in any such cultural conflict with Islam. Yet on reflection, this hardly seems credible. Recall my earlier point that America’s fiscal and economic crises are rooted in our values — some admirable, others not. Taken together they constitute our way of life. This is certainly how Islamist extremists see us. But so do many ordinary, law-abiding Muslims who are mindful, though perhaps themselves not always observant, of Islamic principles of thrift and self-restraint.

Let me be clear. America is not at war with Islam. Nor is there any unified, global Muslim community that confronts us — however much many Muslims invoke the ummah. Nevertheless, it would be disingenuous and self-defeating to ignore the cultural basis of today’s encounter. In fact, our sometimes violent struggle with extremist Muslims is being fought on cultural terrain — and being watched by a vast audience of non-extremist but culturally conservative Muslims who are keeping close track not only of who is winning but of how Americans are waging the battle.

Those who cavil at such a cultural interpretation of the present struggle should stop to consider why gender equality in Muslim societies (albeit under the rubric of human rights) gets raised by non-Muslims so quickly and so often? Or why many Muslims are so averse to our popular music and figurative art? Or why the Muslim world is so profoundly hostile to any hint of open homosexuality? Such issues clearly loom large for many non-Muslims, as well as for most Muslims.

Nevertheless, America’s political and intellectual elites habitually relegate culture to the background of contemporary discussions and debates. This is not just because doing so suits the immediate political interests of agile liberals or clever conservatives. It is also because, as I have already suggested, broader intellectual currents are at work. With regard to the Muslim world specifically, the mere mention of “culture” raises the specter of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. Indeed, most academics and analysts reject Huntington’s emphasis on the importance of culture in global politics — a backlash that he helped to provoke when, in support of his thesis, he bluntly asserted that “it is human to hate.” Huntington’s point, of course, is that cultural conflicts are nasty and intractable, especially in this post-Cold War era. Yet he did not welcome such conflicts, nor did he regard them as inevitable. Indeed, Huntington opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a fact overlooked by critics who incorrectly associate him with that war’s neo-conservative proponents.

In any event, long before Huntington advanced his controversial thesis, social scientists were vigorously rejecting cultural explanations of human affairs. In part, this rejection of culture reflects among American elites a disaffection with or even an outright rejection of religion as a valid basis of action or of analysis. More specifically, our academics and intellectuals have identified such perspectives as “essentialist,” by which they refer to the imputation of inherent or unchanging traits to groups, especially disadvantaged or marginal groups. The underlying concern here is that such groups will come to be seen as unresponsive to meliorative public policies, thereby fueling negative stereotypes and aiding conservative or reactionary political forces. In contrast, environmental or social structural perspectives have been seen as “progressive,” on the assumption that such factors are more susceptible to governmental interventions. The irony of course, confirmed by several generations now of social policy experience, is that neither cultural nor structural factors are necessarily more amenable to policy initiatives.

Our Cultural Blind Spot

The consequences of disregarding the cultural dimensions of America’s contemporary encounter with Islam are considerable. One such is a failure to reckon with the global impact of our own culture. America’s cultural footprint is arguably just as significant as its economic and military footprints. Yet apart from advocates of so-called soft power, few of us seem to appreciate this. This is not to suggest that our cultural impact is uniformly negative or positive. As I argued above, American appetites and aspirations are of a piece. Just as our extraordinary cultural fare simultaneously attracts and repels many Americans, so too does it attract and repel audiences around the globe. Certainly much of our popular culture appeals to the basest instincts, especially the stuff aimed at adolescent males here and abroad. Yet on occasion, our cultural output also speaks to the better angels of human nature.

Either way, we Americans remain largely oblivious to our cultural footprint. A disturbing example emerged from the shocking behavior of American military personnel in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison. Few Americans have not been exposed to those bizarrely horrific amateur photos, what we might expect from tourists at an exotic zoo. Yet while most of us have regarded this as a nationally embarrassing episode of abuse and torture, John Agresto offers a strikingly different interpretation from a rather unique vantage point. Agresto is an American educator who served in Iraq under Ambassador Paul Bremer as Senior Advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. In his book, Mugged by Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions, Agresto draws on his conversations and experiences in post-invasion Iraq to show that Iraqis were hardly surprised by the egregious behavior at Abu Ghraib. He quotes his Iraqi translator: “We are a cruel people. It’s in our DNA.”

But then Agresto makes a point lost on many Americans: “It wasn’t the revelations of torture, as such, that so troubled Iraqis . . . it was the character and sexual nature of these abuses.” He elaborates:

Abu Ghraib, displayed not only Americans’ abandonment to perverse sexuality, up to and including homoerotic sadism, but also the willingness of American females to be photographed sexually abusing naked men, and the joy that they all seemed to display at not only degrading Iraqis but at degrading their own natures as well.

Agresto goes on to characterize the Iraqi perspective:

Abu Ghraib looked less like severe treatment of detainees in order to wrest important information from them as much as it seemed depraved fun and sexual games . . . To a people told by our enemies that modernity stands for indulgence and the loosening of our moral rules, that America is a perverse and hedonistic culture, that liberty is libertinism and anarchy, and that our secularism is really nothing but irreligion and an affront to God, Abu Ghraib was a gift to our enemies and an utter disaster for America and its friends.

In the understandably outraged commentary on Abu Ghraib here in the United States, the emphasis was just the reverse. That is, Americans were much more focused on this episode as an example of “abuse and torture,” while the specifically sexual nature of many of the misdeeds was relegated to the background. Feminist writers underscore this perspective when they point out that liberals here evaded the pervasively pornographic context of Abu Ghraib because to do otherwise would have forced them to reconsider their fundamental commitment to free speech and, more generally, their understanding of the essentially benign nature of pornography.

The insistence of American elites that culture be taken off the table has had another unfortunate result: we have obscured from our own view critical differences between the United States and Europe. Ironically, these underscore how much better suited we are than our friends and allies across the Atlantic to address the cultural concerns of Muslims around the world. First, the United States is more tolerant and open to newcomers than just about any European nation. Second, we lack the strident, full-throated secularism that in Europe has successfully contained religion’s role in public life and consequently marginalized and alienated many Muslims.

A case in point is the brouhaha over the cartoon depictions of the prophet Muhammad printed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. Unlike their European counterparts, the American media generally refrained from publishing those cartoons. Despite our rough and competitive individualism and our First Amendment protections, the pluralism of American life has apparently instilled certain habits of self-restraint. By contrast, Muslims in Europe routinely encounter free speech absolutists who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of their complaints.

All the more regrettable, then, that some American commentators (including many who contemptuously dismissed Europeans for not supporting our invasion of Iraq) rushed to the defense of Europeans who chose to flaunt the cartoonists’ insulting images. In this instance, apparently, the enemies of our enemies must be our friends — even if they are European social democratic wimps!

In this same vein, American commentators have also staunchly defended the rigid laicism of Kemalist Turkey, out of concern over the presumed religious agenda being advanced by the (twice) democratically elected Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. Yet on other occasions these same American commentators have just as staunchly criticized laicism — especially the French model on which Kemalism draws so heavily — as less commodious than our own Constitution’s explicit protection of religious liberty, tolerance, and pluralism.

None of these vital topics gets the attention they merit, because, to repeat, America’s elites have determined that we are not engaged in a cultural contest with Islam. This is not just ironic, it is also unfortunate, because in fact the United States has the social, institutional, and intellectual resources to address the contentious issues highlighted here. This is not to say that we have not made mistakes in this realm; we have made many. But generally speaking, Americans are better equipped to engage Muslims on cultural terrain than are Europeans.

One final consequence of side-stepping the cultural context of our encounter with Islam is to obscure commonalities across the three Abrahamic faiths. To be sure, such similarities get highlighted in myriad interfaith dialogues in which earnest clergy deftly point them out. But beyond these confines, in the wider, less cloistered public square, the tone is quite different. Listening to commentators there, one would never know that within living memory, Jewish women were confined to the balconies of synagogues (and in some Hassidic sects today still are rigidly segregated); Catholics abstained from meat on Fridays and fasted during Lent; mainstream Protestants denounced gambling and drinking; and Americans obeyed, by and large, a constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages. More generally, one would never suspect that there was a time when Protestants, Catholics, and Jews all taught the virtues of self-restraint in the social, economic, and cultural spheres of life.

To be sure, there are critical differences of culture, history, and theology across Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. But there are also some affinities that invite Americans to put ourselves in the place of contemporary Muslims — not out of misguided guilt, but out of curiosity and a sense of urgency. Curiosity about the way many Muslims see contemporary American life as wasteful, exhibitionist, and self-indulgent, given that it was not so long ago that Americans valued thrift, reserve, and restraint. And urgency because only through such honest and fulsome exploration will we build genuine bridges of understanding and trust between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Let me be clear. I am not suggesting the kind of interfaith dialogue that fatuously asserts common values while lacking the hard-headedness necessary to address fundamental differences. Nor am I suggesting that we focus on building friendships in the Muslim world. It is always desirable to have friends, but friendship can hardly be our primary goal. Indeed, in international affairs it is arguably an inappropriate goal. Right now, we Americans need to identify commonalities with Muslims — not just of history and background but of interest. To do this, we also need to acknowledge our power and dominance in global affairs, neither apologizing for them nor pretending that they do not exist.

In this same vein, Americans must abandon, whether at home or abroad, the fruitless and demeaning search for so-called moderate Muslims. Such Muslims do not really exist — not because all Muslims are extremists or terrorists, but because their cultural premises diverge sharply from our own. As the RAND study cited earlier defines them, “Moderate Muslims are those who share the key dimensions of democratic culture. These include support for democracy and internationally recognized human rights . . . respect for diversity, acceptance of nonsectarian sources of law, and opposition to terrorism and other illegitimate forms of violence.” In other words, a “moderate Muslim” is one who is willing to meet Americans 80 percent of the way.

Here again, a keener cultural orientation would be helpful. It would highlight how such a definition is at once far too broad and too restrictive. Quite aside from the troubling and contentious issue of Muslim sympathy and support for terrorism, this definition conflates “democratic culture” with “respect for diversity” in a tone that even some Americans would resist. Moreover, at a time when Muslims around the world are immersed in a conversation about all of these issues, it is imprudent of Americans to impose a litmus test of what does and does not constitute a “moderate Muslim.” Not to mention the fact that, as the RAND analysts note, there are precious few Muslims out there who would pass such a test — and those who might pass tend to lack meaningful ties to their communities of origin.

A far more promising approach has been suggested by sociologist Amitai Etzioni, who argues that we should seek out “illiberal moderates” in the Muslim world. His point is that the center of gravity in that world is sufficiently distinct from our own that we need to be less preoccupied with who agrees with us than with who is willing to engage with us. Again, the aim is not to find friends but to locate interlocutors who may not be kindly disposed toward Americans or our values, but who are willing to explore areas of potentially mutual interest. This of course is the essence of politics. And politics is what we must be about.

Culture and American Power

Strikingly, the U.S. military — the institution most insulated from other sectors of American society, especially academia — seems to have figured out sooner than many other Americans the crucial importance of culture. Confronting failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, our military leaders have determined that victory is not simply a matter of applying overwhelming force against the enemy, but also of winning “hearts and minds” among civilians. To do this, soldiers need to understand the values and culture of those populations. Not to understand these is to court disaster. That’s why the military has reformulated counterinsurgency doctrine and made efforts to employ social scientists, especially anthropologists. As we saw with the Awakening initiative in Iraq’s Anbar province, this approach means working with erstwhile enemies who are hardly “Muslim moderates” in order to enlist them in the fight against more implacable foes. Now, as I write, the Obama administration is attempting to implement this same strategy on the very different physical and cultural terrain of Afghanistan.

Counterinsurgency requires rethinking generations of military doctrine predicated on overwhelming force and sophisticated technology to intimidate the enemy and minimize American casualties. None of this will come easily, least of all our ability to make foreign cultures legible to young Americans trained to achieve clearly defined military objectives. And if the military strays too far from relying on force or the threat of force to bend the will of our adversaries, then it ceases to be the military — and risks losing more lives than the American public will tolerate. Nevertheless, this is where the U.S. military appears to be heading after near disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet any such policy shift will not alter America’s hegemonic position among the world’s powers. Many Americans object to our pre-eminence; some are gratified by our recent humiliations; and a few look forward to a new era when the United States exercises less power and assume that the world will then be a better place. This last perspective, in particular, is a pipe dream. For the foreseeable future, the United States will remain the most powerful nation on earth, and given our allies, our competitors, and our enemies, this is a good thing — both for us and for those with whom we share this planet.

Understanding these enduring realities, some counsel more subtle exercise of American power: more consultation with our allies and less confrontation with our adversaries. In this vein, it is suggested that our problems with the Muslim world might be mitigated if we pursued a more balanced policy with regard to Israel and the Palestinian question. Although this would hardly mollify our most virulent Islamist foes, it might well get us a better hearing among ordinary Muslims (and non-Muslims) around the globe.

This is clearly the orientation of the Obama administration, though there are real limits to how far the United States is likely to move in this direction. Our fundamental interests are not likely to change any time soon; nor is the way of life that undergirds these interests. Thus our policies are unlikely to take a drastically different course, which is borne out by the record thus far of the Obama administration.

One thing that could change, though, is our understanding of America’s power and position on the global stage. Here I would urge greater self-awareness, something we Americans tend to lack. For example, we should be more mindful of how our idealism turns easily into moralism, whether we are projecting hard military power in Iraq or soft power to promote gender equality in Afghanistan. In this same vein, we would do well to heed French political scientist Pierre Hassner’s admonition that while our own political system is explicitly built on an abiding suspicion of political power and the means to constrain it, our actions on the global stage tend to say to the rest of the world: “We come to you with overwhelming power; trust us.” Needless to say, there is a major discrepancy here between our values and our behavior.

Finally, I would urge greater humility toward Islam and the Muslim world. It is one thing to say that we want to learn about Islam, quite another to express a willingness to learn from it. For example, at a time of great distress in our financial and economic system, non-Muslim Americans might want to examine claims that financial institutions and products that observe Islamic teaching have not suffered nearly as much as those that do not. Many Muslims are certainly inclined to believe this. At a minimum, this would be a more fruitful topic for engagement than still another inquiry into gender inequality in the Muslim world.

Likewise, many Americans, even religious Americans, are uncomfortable with the way Muslims frequently invoke the absolute authority of God. Yet American Christians and Jews do the same, and take such invocations for granted. Even in the apparently secular setting of a twelve-step recovery program modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous, individuals routinely acknowledge their submission to a “higher power” before taking responsibility for defeating their addiction.

In a similar vein, non-Muslim Americans might take note of remarks by the first Muslim elected to Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison (Democrat-Minnesota). In a speech shortly after the 2008 election, Ellison urged his fellow Muslims to be guardedly optimistic about the man who campaigned for president by distancing himself from his father’s religion. As Ellison reminded his audience: “Obama is not our savior, God is.”

This observation may or may not gratify non-Muslims. But it should remind us that we Americans know something about prophetic religion and how it has sometimes served us well as a nation. Certainly, its perspective informed and sustained the civil rights movement led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

One final thought. In the hurly-burly of the contemporary world, non-Muslim Americans routinely overlook those aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition that offer insights into Islam. Ironically, this is precisely where Islam has something to teach us. Rejecting any doctrine of original sin, Islam conceives of human beings not as fundamentally stained by sin, but as basically forgetful of their place in God’s creation. This is why five-times daily religious observance and ritual are so central to Islam: man’s forgetful nature must be constantly contested. So, the tendency of Americans today to forget our own religious heritages and practices is something that Islam can remind us of — leaving us free to disagree about other matters.

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: IjtihadReason

A Testing Attempt for Islam’s Center

Peter Skerry — Tue, 18 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

A crowd of about 500 Muslims gathered on Sunday at the Islamic Society of Boston Community Center in Roxbury to hear Tariq Ramadan, a controversial figure whose grandfather was a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Swiss-born Ramadan has no formal ties to the Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that began in Egypt and is now an important political force throughout the Muslim world, even as its commitment to democracy is widely debated. Yet his passionate criticism of US foreign policy has earned him enemies here.

Ramadan seeks to negotiate the treacherous territory between the West and Islam, causing many to accuse him of talking out of both sides of his mouth. His speeches and books are subject to intense, even obsessive scrutiny. In 2004 the Bush administration denied him entry to the United States under provisions of the Patriot Act. But the ban was lifted this past January, and for the past several weeks Ramadan has been speaking widely across the nation.

Sunday’s speech was also controversial because it was held at the recently opened Roxbury mosque. Critics have accused the mosque’s backers — including the Muslim Brotherhood’s American branch, the Muslim American Society— of being extremists.

Now a professor at Oxford, Ramadan has been urging Muslims in the United States to overcome their “us versus them’’ mentality and finally embrace this non-Muslim society as their own: “You are at home in this country. The American people are your people.’’

Emphatically rejecting any notion of converting Americans to Islam, Ramadan urges Muslims to bring their Islamic values into the civic sphere and “change this society for the better.’’ Reminding Muslims that “we have values in common with other Americans,’’ he encourages them to reach out to non-Muslims and atheists on the basis of “universal principles.’’

So Ramadan tells Muslims that they must contribute to this society by struggling for “social and economic justice’’ and overcoming racism, poverty, and inequality — for all Americans. He insists on the equality of women in the workplace and in the mosque. Overseas, he urges Muslims to speak up for American values and democracy, reminding them that “we don’t accept torture and extraordinary rendition.’’ Citing our experience in Vietnam and today in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ramadan urges Muslims to have the courage to say no, and thereby “be more faithful to America’s values than many Americans are.’’

Many Americans will not like the sound of this. But many will. Either way, there is no reason to question Ramadan’s sincerity. His views are broadly consistent with what most Muslim leaders here are telling their fellow believers.

But there is a broader political context here that is critical to understand. Ever since 9/11, Muslim-American leaders have been at pains to distance themselves from the conservative Republicans with whom they had previously been allied, notably when they endorsed George Bush in 2000. To engage with liberals who have reached out to them, these leaders have backgrounded the conservative social values that Muslims still share with Republicans. So when Ramadan urges Muslims to bring their values into America’s civic arena, it is striking that he says nothing about social issues that Muslims, along with many other Americans, feel intensely about, such as abortion, homosexual marriage, pornography, gambling, and alcohol and drug abuse.

No mystery here. Muslim-American leaders are merely repositioning themselves in response to overtures from newfound, desperately needed allies.

But will it work? Clearly, many non-Muslims are suspicious. And many Muslims appear unpersuaded. Ramadan’s effort to refashion a modern, cosmopolitan Islam risks leaving many traditionalist Muslims behind. One telling indicator was the polite but tepid reception he received last month when he presented his views to 1,500 Muslims in suburban Chicago.

As for Muslim youth, among whom Ramadan has undeniable appeal, similar questions arise. It is simply not evident that his earnest rejection of emotionalism and insularity in favor of more spiritual and universalistic values will engage young Muslims negotiating daily challenges to their identity and loyalty as Americans.

In a curious way, Americans have seen this movie before. In the midst of the Cold War, mainline Protestant leaders overcame denominational rifts and successfully fashioned a more liberal version of their beliefs. But one result was a tepid universalism that helped fuel the growth of evangelical and fundamentalist churches. As Ramadan travels around the United States, we might all ponder whether his version of Islam could similarly fail to appeal to many Muslims, old and young, who might then be tempted by more problematic versions of the faith.

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: The Boston Globe

Compromise Is Possible on Immigration Reform

William A. Galston, Noah Pickus and Peter Skerry — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:59:00 -0400

In a time of hyper-polarized politics, is a reasonable compromise on immigration policy possible? While the rancorous and unproductive Congressional debates of recent years point toward pessimism, the report of the bipartisan Immigration Policy Roundtable convened by the Brookings Institution and Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics suggests a more hopeful view.

The roundtable’s members saw immigration from divergent, often conflicting, perspectives. In fact, the range of political and ideological views we represented is unprecedented in recent immigration policy panels. Some of us were clearly attuned to the opportunities and realities of an increasingly interconnected global economy, which necessarily involves substantial movements of workers and their dependents around the world. Others of us were just as clearly concerned with the domestic costs and strains. Some empathized with Americans who are outraged that immigration laws are not enforced. Others held that our current immigration laws are unworkable and must be reconciled with social and economic realities.

During our deliberations, we came to recognize that we would never resolve our principled disagreements. Nonetheless, progress at the policy level turned out to be possible, and the results fruitful.

Despite our deep divisions, participants ultimately converged on a set of recommendations that would significantly enhance enforcement of our immigration laws at the workplace and set standards for the legalization of illegal immigrants. We also agreed on holding constant, at least for the present, the overall number of permanent legal residents admitted annually while adjusting the mix toward fewer family-sponsored and more employment-based admissions. And while insisting on the centrality of the nuclear family, we endorsed measures to reduce the daunting backlog of visa applicants. We also agreed on improvements in temporary worker programs and on efforts to assimilate and integrate immigrants into American society. And we recommended long-term measures to improve management of immigration by establishing an independent standing commission on these matters and engaging the Mexican government on a broad range of issues that affect cross-border population flows.

In a policy arena marked by mistrust on all sides, members of the roundtable came to see that it was vital to build trust by focusing on linked confidence-building measures. To this end, we recommended a carefully coordinated sequence in which employees, employers, immigrant advocates and enforcement proponents would be induced to share the same goals: to establish and certify a workplace verification system; to build the infrastructure to support an efficient, effective, and certifiable legalization program; and to make sure that both proceed as quickly as possible.

Our recommendation that Congress create an independent Standing Commission on Immigration was designed to extend this trust-building process into the future. For example, while the system of temporary work visas that has grown up alongside the permanent admissions categories has proved quite flexible, especially in response to employer demands, it lacks adequate public scrutiny and worker protections. Our proposed Standing Commission on Immigration would provide a forum where the national interest could be explored and debated, not just the needs of specific economic sectors.

The members of the roundtable understand that elected public officials labor under pressures that we did not. Nonetheless, we believe that our recommendations offer a blueprint for progress on one of the most divisive issues our country faces. Members of Congress from both parties must soon decide whether they want to address the issue seriously, or just continue to score political points while problems fester and public mistrust grows.

Authors

Publication: Roll Call

Breaking the Immigration Stalemate

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:00:00 -0400

Event Information

October 6, 2009
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

The Obama administration has committed to tackling immigration reform. But despite all the problems of our current system—threats to the rule of law, exploitation of vulnerable newcomers, real and perceived competition with Americans for jobs and public resources—reform will be exceedingly difficult. To break this stalemate, the Brookings-Duke Immigration Policy Roundtable is proposing six policy changes, including emphasizing enforcement at the workplace, setting standards for the legalization of illegal immigrants and establishing an independent Standing Commission on Immigration.

On October 6, Brookings hosted an event to release the report and to discuss the proposals and potential pitfalls to achieving them. The report is the result of months of deliberation by the roundtable, a joint project of Brookings and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Roundtable members represent a broad spectrum of conflicting views from across the “pro-immigration” and “restrictionist” divide, but have nonetheless come together in support of a single set of recommendations.

After the program, panelists took audience questions.

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Breaking the Immigration Stalemate

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Noah Pickus

Nannerl O. Keohane Director, The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University

James Gimpel

Professor of Government, University of Maryland, College Park

Angela Kelley

Vice President for Immigration Policy and Advocacy, Center for American Progress

Reihan Salam

Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation

New Media and the Immigration Debate

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:00:00 -0400

Event Information

September 25, 2008
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM EDT

Rotunda Room
Ronald Reagan Building
1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC

The U.S. media have hindered effective policy-making on immigration for decades, and their impact has been increasing in recent years as a result of an ongoing evolution in the media industry. Changes in the media landscape—the advent of a 24-hour news cycle, the growing Latino media, and rise of conservative voices on cable TV news, are increasingly transforming the context of our nation’s political battles, and promoting stalemate on an issue that is inherently difficult to resolve. Immigration, a topic likely to resurface on the public agenda in 2009, will need to be addressed by the next administration and Congress.

On September 25, the Brookings Institution, in partnership with the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, released a report examining the new media’s role in the U.S. immigration debate, and explored how the media conditioned public opinion and the policy landscape.

Brookings Vice President and Director of Governance Studies Darrell West provided introductory remarks. Authors E.J. Dionne Jr., senior fellow at Brookings; Roberto Suro of the USC Annenberg School; and Banu Akdenizli of the Project for Excellence in Journalism presented their findings. A panel discussion, moderated by Harvard University’s Marvin Kalb, followed.

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0925_media_immigration

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Moderator

Marvin Kalb

Edward R. Murrow Professor Emeritus, Harvard University

Panelists

Banu Akdenizli

Index Methodologist, Project for Excellence in Journalism

Martin Kaplan

Director, Norman Lear Center, USC Annenberg

Roberto Suro

Professor, USC Annenberg

T. Alexander Aleinikoff

Dean, Georgetown University Law Center

James Carafano

Senior Research Fellow, The Heritage Foundation

Tamar Jacoby

President, ImmigrationWorks USA

Angela Kelley

Director, Immigration Policy Center

Mark Krikorian

Executive Director, Center for Immigration Studies

Steven Livingston

Professor of Media & Public Affairs, George Washington University

Ryan Lizza

Washington Correspondent, The New Yorker

Doris Meissner

Senior Fellow, Migration Policy Institute

How Not to Build a Fence at the U.S.-Mexican Border: America's Conflicted Attitudes Toward Immigration

Peter Skerry — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400

The United States is in the midst of an intense debate over its borders. Immigration is approaching historic levels, and an all-time high of 12 million people—one third of the foreign-born population—are in the United States illegally. Fifty percent of them are from Mexico, and another 30 percent are from elsewhere in Central and South America. Most have entered across the 1,950-mile U.S.-Mexican border. In recent months, the two houses of the U.S. Congress have each passed immigration reform bills. The differences between the two versions are yet to be resolved, but they do have at least one important thing in common: Both mandate that hundreds of miles of new physical barriers be added to the existing 125 miles of fence along the border.

That remote, often forbidding border has now become the focus of a symbolic struggle over how Americans see themselves in the world. But symbols are open to interpretation. To many Americans, border barriers promote national security. To others, they smack of fortification and militarization by empire-building Washington bureaucrats. Meanwhile, market-oriented conservatives at the Wall Street Journal and human rights activists at the American Civil Liberties Union have both denounced the border fence as a new "Berlin Wall"—though its purpose is to keep foreign nationals out, not citizens in.

In this controversy, few have bothered to consider the mundane, physical details of the border fence itself. But when one looks at it closely, one encounters neither a particularly imposing structure nor a gold-plated military project. Instead, it is a jerry-rigged example of American ingenuity that reflects not merely ambivalence about immigration but also the competing objectives and compromises characteristic of America's decentralized and fragmented political system. Moreover, immigration control alone was never the driving force behind the building of the barriers. Instead, border-control policies have had to piggyback on other overriding national concerns. The result is a fence that is neither as draconian and militarized as critics claim, nor as effective as supporters would like.

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Peter Skerry

Publication: Foreign Policy

Give Illegal Immigrants Licenses and Obligations

Peter Skerry — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Last week, the Legislature again rejected a bill that would have allowed illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses. Immigrant advocates see this issue as a question of public safety and basic fairness, while their opponents regard it as rewarding illegal, even criminal, behavior. Still others seem willing to accommodate immigrants they believe are contributing to the state's economy but are nevertheless concerned about encouraging more illegal crossings. Is there any way to resolve this dilemma, or are Californians — and Americans generally — fated to continue running in circles around it?

To get at this question, we need to think about what is fueling the backlash against immigrants.

Underlying all the complaints about immigrants — they take away jobs, they undermine the rule of law, they ruin our schools, they crowd our emergency rooms, they make too much noise — is the generalized feeling that "things are out of control." One hears this about the distant Mexican border as well as neighborhoods next to downtown L.A.

This sentiment echoes the public's reaction to escalating crime rates in the 1980s and 1990s. Illegal immigrants are not criminals. But the current influx of immigrants — legal and illegal — is similarly straining the social fabric.

Key to the battle against crime during the 1980s and 1990s was the idea of "broken windows" — how such minor infractions as prostitution, public urination and drug possession can lead to more serious offenses. Criminals pick up on this quickly — and so do anxious citizens.

Recall the controversy in New York City, for example, over squeegeeing car windshields at stop lights and then extorting money from drivers. Immigrant day laborers loitering near Home Depots are today's squeegee men: not engaged in criminal activity per se, but representing to many passersby a sign of social disorder. The "broken windows" theory of policing reminds us that such unease, however misplaced or poorly articulated, nevertheless reflects rational concerns about strains in the social fabric.

If policymakers were to acknowledge the social disruptions resulting from mass migration, they might be able to resolve the controversy over driver's licenses. Illegal immigrants want licenses; Californians want less disorder in their communities. Why not issue licenses to illegals in exchange, say, for their commitment to making sure their children attend school regularly? Why not make such agreements the basis of a new social compact?

Singling out such behaviors as loitering at Home Depots may seem petty — especially to those insulated from the day-to-day effects of mass migration. Yet public concern about high rates of auto-related accidents — because of dangerous pedestrian practices and low seat-belt use — in mainly Mexican immigrant communities such as Santa Ana reflects anxieties about social order not easily dismissed. No matter. Such concerns are routinely dismissed, often with the bromide that immigrants bring changes that "threaten" people — as if they do not pose real challenges.

There are several additional reasons why immigration, legal and illegal, contributes to the sense that things are out of control.

Large concentrations of uneducated, unskilled immigrants struggling to make it in an alien environment clearly put strains on communities. Another factor is that today's immigrants are disproportionately male — either single or separated from their wives and families. As Los Angeles found out during the 1992 riots, such men are prone to engage in criminal activity when the opportunity arises — more than half of those arrested were Latinos. More routinely, the stresses of working-class immigrant family life — coping with exploitative employers or abusive landlords — contribute to instability and transience. And back when federal immigration agents enforced the law more aggressively, neighborhood raids were another sign of disorder.

Then, too, many immigrants don't intend to settle in the United States permanently. They expect to work here long enough to save a target amount of money and then return home. For many, such plans change and they end up staying. Yet because a great many immigrants arrive as "target earners" expecting to go back home, they often put up with hardships, even abuses, that would otherwise be less acceptable.

Such instability and transience heighten Californians' anxieties about immigration. Encouraging immigrants to settle down and become committed members of the community would help relieve them. Beyond driver's licenses, what other ways are there to give immigrants a greater stake in the communities where they live?

In 2002, the Little Hoover Commission put forward just such a proposal and called it the Golden State Residency Program. It proposed giving immigrants access to a driver's license, in-state tuition, healthcare, job training and housing. In return, they would stay out of the criminal justice system, pay taxes, learn English, make sure their children attend school and demonstrate a willingness to become citizens. Unfortunately, this proposal and its accompanying study were overshadowed by 9/11. But now that immigration is back at the top of the nation's agenda, this "broken windows" approach — giving immigrants a stake in their communities — is worth a second look.

This type of program would benefit illegal as well as legal immigrants. But at least it would foster a more explicit and enduring bond than the current precarious relationship between immigrants who are often unsure they want to be here and Americans who are unhappy they are. Of course, the program would need to be backed up with meaningful immigration enforcement — at the border and especially in the workplace.

Unlike President Bush's proposed guest worker program, a "broken windows" approach to immigration would consider the mobility of immigrants a liability and would try to curtail it. Unlike the typical responses to the immigration controversy that focus on broad, global factors such as labor markets, racism and terrorism, it has the virtue of pointing toward what we could do now. Even so, it won't be easy.

Authors

Peter Skerry

Publication: Los Angeles Times