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Best Reaction to Sanctuary Cities May Be Intuitive

In an intense search of the internet for all the facts I could gather relating to the issue of  sanctuary cities in the United States, I became as confused and frustrated as the political minds that are struggling to solve this perplexing problem.  In the process of assembling the facts, I have come to two conclusions, and I find that they are best expressed by men far wiser than I:

There are no facts, only

interpretations.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.

Albert Einstein

On running across Nietzsche’s quote, it suddenly seemed obvious that the very same fact can be used to justify two opposing positions.   Facts are subject to interpretation.

Fact: According to the Ohio Jobs & Justice PAC, sanctuary cities protect immigrant rights.  They improve relations between local law enforcement and the immigrant community.

Fact: According to USA Today, when officials or citizens refuse to report illegal aliens to ICE, repeat offenders may be released to commit more crimes instead of being detained or deported.

With Einstein’s advice to change the facts, the following may suffice to support it:

Fact: The Los Angeles Times recently reported on a mind boggling 2005 study by the Government Accountability Office. The study examined the cases of over 55,000 illegal immigrants incarcerated in federal, state and local facilities. It found that they had been previously arrested an average of eight times each, that roughly half had been convicted of a felony, and a fifth had been arrested for a drug offense.  Many had also been convicted of violent crimes.

Fact: Take San Francisco. If, as claimed by those opposing sanctuary cities, communities are made less safe, then we should have seen a rise in San Francisco’s murder rate in the 26 years since it enacted its sanctuary law, plus a further spike since 2013, when the city amended the law to cover even repeat felons such as Lopez-Sanchez. Instead, the city’s murder rate has fallen to its lowest level in decades.

That facts can be used to support almost any position should be obvious. Therefore, it is my contention that another approach may be followed in a quest for the solution to this or many other perplexing problems facing society. I refer to intuition as a counter to an analytical reliance on facts.

In the confusion of trying to elicit truth from fact, it must be noted that facts, as defined by Nietzsche, lend themselves to a variety of interpretations; in having to select from conflicting facts, we may find that intuition becomes an indispensable route to ultimate understanding.

Sophy Burnham, in her bestselling book “The Art of Intuition,” defines intuition as a subtle knowing without ever having any idea why you know it. It’s different from thinking; it’s different from logic or analysis … It’s a knowing without knowing. While at times intuition could be little more than a hunch, as critics claim, I contend that hunches, rather than being plucked out of thin air, are more often than not the product of past experience and knowledge.  Chances are better that they will be from experiences no longer remembered or knowledge which we didn’t know we had. As Einstein further reminds us, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

From somewhere in the recesses of my mind it occurs to me that in the search for solutions to the sanctuary cities issues, we may not be seeing the forest (i.e. the cause of the issues) for the trees (i.e. the facts cited as solutions). Calling on what I believe to be an intuitive sense of right and wrong, I believe the facts cited as solutions obscure the cause of the problem.

In truth, by Adam Smith’s own admission, we have a failing capitalistic system that places the needs of industry and society before the needs of the individual citizen.  Since it is a cardinal tenet or even a mandate of capitalism for the employer to demand of the employee the utmost product for the least possible remuneration, it follows that the employee thus becomes a commodity. Would it not, therefore, follow that the undocumented employee fearing exposure is an obvious object for unethical exploitation by the employer? This, then, means that a system of unregulated capitalism itself becomes the cause for a need to reform.

In recognition of this truth, I intuitively conclude that the only immediate solution for the sanctuary city issues is to regulate the system by rigidly enforcing both minimum wage laws and the laws against the hiring of undocumented workers. We would thus put a halt to the flood of illegal immigrants and alleviate the poverty of native and/or legally documented workers. Therein lies the solution.

Why, then, are the existing laws ignored? The truth is that elected officials pressed by unscrupulous entrepreneurs simply choose not to enforce such laws in order to maintain a sufficient number of unskilled and undocumented workers thereby, keeping wages at an absolute minimum. The cause of the problem is obvious, but until that cause is honestly addressed, until employers are made to hire only native or documented workers at or above the minimum wage there can be no realistic solution.

The cause for a need to reform an unregulated capitalistic system is that it currently addresses the pitiless and unrestrained greed of an entrepreneurial segment of society at the expense of a poverty ridden citizenry. The solution can be found only with a reliance on intuition.

I can’t help but think that it was intuition that prompted Henry Ford to pay his employee a wage that would allow him to purchase the Model-T which he built. Such an approach to understanding the real problem would be better than to rely on an analytical jungle of facts in economic terms, whose only purpose is to make a flawed system even more efficient.

Would not much of the confusion and frustration resulting from factual arguments both pro and con simply vanish? Would we not in humanitarian terms find ourselves better able to simply distinguish right from wrong?

Harold G. “Hal” O’Leary of Wheeling has been prominent in the arts community for many years. He was the founder of Oglebay Institute’s Towngate Theatre. In 2008 he was inducted into the Wheeling Hall of Fame. He also was awarded and honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from West Liberty University.

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