The Providence Journal declares my op-ed fit to print! Here is the un-edited version.

Make Immigration Policy a Meritocracy
The Providence Journal
17 August 2006

As our country deals with the highly-politicized problem of illegal immigrants, we need to take this time to rethink the very basis of our immigration policy. According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services, our country annually accepts up to 480,000 family-sponsored immigrants, up to 140,000 employment-based immigrants, and up to 55,000 diversity immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Oceania. That policy emphasizes diversity at the expense of merit and diminishes our competitiveness in the global economy.

It is therefore within our national interest to strengthen the requirements for employment-based immigrants and to allow more people to immigrate under that category. We need to stop judging people based on the color of their skin and start judging them on their ability. Consequentially, by increasing the flow of smart people into this country, we would also boost our economy.

Immigrants with higher education can contribute more positively to this country. First, we are in dire need of well-educated people. They will help fill the high-demand skilled jobs in engineering, scientific research, and math education. Second, this policy has already been successfully implemented in Canada and Australia, which highly value skilled workers in their immigration processes.

Letting only smart people in is a win-win-win policy. Because they have already signaled to their future employers that they are smart and hardworking employees by working hard to earn advanced degrees, their employers will be more willing to pay them higher wages. Since they are higher-paid, they will contribute more taxes. So, our society will benefit from their labor, our government from their taxes, and they will benefit from getting the opportunities that were denied to them back home.

Of course, by favoring one group, we deny that favor to another group. Less smart people would find it harder to immigrate. This seems unfair. Less educated immigrants, after all, also work hard. They are, in fact, usually willing to work harder and for less money than the average American applying for the same job. But, unfortunately, because our country cannot contain everyone who wants in, it has to manage the scarcity of American soil by keeping some people out. It should keep out less educated immigrants, I believe, because they contribute less to our society.

First, their oversupply is competing down low-paid wages. That competition hits the government-mandated floor on wages: our minimum wage. Because some employers are not willing to pay even that much, yet some workers are willing to accept much less in return for their labor, black markets develop, especially in urban centers like my hometown, Atlanta. But, because their pay is so low, yet their healthcare needs are all the same, they depend more heavily on our healthcare system. Their drag on the healthcare system is unjustified by their unregulated—and therefore untaxed—black market wages.

If the United States favored brains in the immigration process, we will increase aptitude here and encourage it abroad. If now, many foreign students study hard in our classrooms only to return to make money in their workrooms back home, then this policy would encourage foreign students to become domestic students. By studying hard to get into this country, students would also increase education levels at home. America will take many, but not all, and those who stay will contribute greater to domestic life as a result of our policy.

I do not mean that all immigrants should meet such high expectations, but most. Refugees should be exempt, for example; and those who come from places where higher education is more dream than reality. For most, however, a rigorous application of the meritocracy standard will lead this country on a road to a better immigration policy. It’s what our country deserves.

Here is an unpublished article on the Middle East crisis.

The Middle East Tragedy

Two phone calls. The first call found my aunt in a bomb shelter in Haifa, her hope giving way to trepidation. The second call found my friend’s trepidation replaced by hope. He had just found out that his uncle boarded a plane bound for the United States hours before the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) bombed the Beirut International airport. These phone calls brought home the Middle East tragedy.

How bitterly ironic that wars waged for the public good, or at least with the public in mind, so often hurt more people than they help. Israel entered Gaza to find one kidnapped soldier; it entered Lebanon to find two. Now, dozens of soldiers lie in its path to salvation. Hezbollah similarly acts out of “respect for public liberties” (from Lebanon’s constitution) as a parliamentary group, yet as an extraparliamentary organization it has put events in motion that have brought death, displacement and despair to the same public it seeks to protect. War is an ironic type of tragedy, without heroes and in a constant search for the worse villain.

How bitterly tragic that the one army in the world that is best equipped to fight terrorism discovers itself so ineffective against the terrorism it encounters. A tragic flaw lies in the nature of Israel’s opponent, for where does the terrorist end and the human being begin? IDF soldiers search for Hezbollah terrorists filled with a desire to die and find human beings filled with a desire to live. Confused, they shoot both, and the more human beings they kill, the more terrorists are born. Through death, they escape their nature, yet it is through their nature that they find death.

Most bitter is the realization than the end of even this conflict will not provide closure. The mass civilian casualties that have accompanied Israel’s entrance into Lebanon have only emboldened Hezbollah’s major backers, Iran and Syria. Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has now joined Syria’s Baath party in its support of Lebanon; neither show signs of acceding to American and European diplomacy. Even if diplomacy can somehow buckle Iran or Syria to publicly denounce Hezbollah, that diplomatic victory will not ensure a military victory. Diplomacy stands little chance of stemming the flow of aid from Iran and Syria to Hezbollah, yet if the two countries appear to comply with international demands, they will gain immunity from Israel. Iran and Syrian have nothing to lose from the outcome of this conflict, and no incentive to close up shop on terrorist organizations.

And what of Hezbollah? Hezbollah may come out battered, but without an incursion into Iran and Syria, which is currently politically-infeasible, it will not come out beaten. Weeks into the offensive, Hezbollah has been able to maintain its daily volleys of over 100 rockets into northern Israeli territory. If the IDF has been unable to stem this volley, they stand little chance of stifling the Hezbollah leadership without significant Lebanese casualties. The IDF’s hands are politically-bound on this front, too, as their Qana mishap has shown. Israel cannot afford another Qana without facing major backlashes of world opinion and, more damaging, withdrawal of American support. All politics, casualties and no catharsis – that is the nature of the Middle East crisis.

Over in Haifa, my cousin and his girlfriend were about to get married on July 10. That was two days before the rockets began to fall. Now, they have postponed their marriage until these hostilities cease, so instead of a marriage in war, they can have a marriage under cease-fire. But not a marriage under peace – there are only cease-fires in the Middle East. They are waiting each day for their relatives to call them from Haifa and tell them that it is safe to return. My friend’s uncle is waiting until Lebanon is safe again. This is, in the end, an imperfect tragedy, always seeking and always painfully unable to find its catharsis.

Aha, someone read my AJC article, after all! I found this on the National Alliance of State Science and Mathematics Coalitions (NASSMC) website.

Michael Belinsky, a math tutor at Georgia State University, says most of his students, no matter their age or status, are plagued by a lack of basic math skills. “The source of our state’s math woes lies somewhere between second and fifth grades,” he writes. He advocates the kind of mathematical drilling he had in his native Russia, and more pressure to excel from parents.

A list of Dartmouth alumni in the White House:

Hank Paulson, Secretary of Treasury
Robert Portman, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
Katherine Baicker, Council of Economic Advisers
Matthew Slaughter, Council of Economic Advisers
Andrew Samwick, Chief Economist of the Council of Economic Advisers (2003-2004)

The article mentions other noteworthy Dartmouth alumns:

Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
David Blanchflower, member of the Bank of England's policy-setting committee (England equivalent of the Federal Reserve)
Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE
Robert Reich, Labor Secretary under Clinton
and others...

And here is a Bloomberg article worth reprinting:

Dartmouth Outshines Ivy League Rivals on Bush's Economic Team
June 8, 2006, Bloomberg News

The John F. Kennedy administration had its Harvard clique of advisers. The Ronald Reagan White House had the "Chicago school'' of economists. On President George W .Bush's economic team, "Big Green'' -- Dartmouth College -- rules.

High-profile alumni of the Hanover, New Hampshire, school include Henry Paulson, named last week by Bush to be Treasury secretary, and new White House budget director Rob Portman. Two of the three members of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers came from Dartmouth's faculty, as did a former CEA chief economist. Raul Yanes, tapped last week by Bush to be legal adviser and staff secretary, is a Dartmouth grad.

Dartmouth, the smallest of the eight Ivy League schools, is overshadowing rival universities Harvard, Princeton and Yale, which combined boast 14 U.S. presidents among their graduates. Dartmouth's ties to a president who plays down his own elite academic pedigree -- Bush has degrees from Yale and Harvard --are partly a result of its focus on researching issues from health-care to trade policy that are increasingly crucial to government, professors said.

"The Dartmouth economics department puts a lot of emphasis on policy-relevant research, and that fosters both faculty involvement and students who go on to contribute in government,'' said Katherine Baicker, 35, who taught at Dartmouth for seven years before joining the Council of Economic Advisers along with Dartmouth professor Matthew Slaughter, 37.

Just Coincidence

Unlike the Harvard or University of Chicago ties to the earlier administrations, Dartmouth's connection to this White House is more coincidental than ideological. Paulson, 60,graduated with an English degree in 1968, and Portman, 50, studied anthropology in the class of 1979.

"It's a very nice thing that the college is getting this sort of attention, but I don't think there's a common thread through all this,'' said Dartmouth economist Andrew Samwick, who was chief economist of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2004.

Nonetheless, the college's reach has extended recently into central banks. Timothy Geithner, 44, a 1983 graduate with adegree in government and Asian studies, has been president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York since 2003. And Dartmouth Professor David Blanchflower, 54, last month became the newest member of the Bank of England's policy-setting committee.

Only Ivy College

The liberal-arts college's student body of about 4,100 undergraduates is about a third the size of the largest IvyLeague school, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Dartmouth is also the only Ivy League school that calls itself a college rather than a university, a title that hasn't changed since it was chartered by King George III of Britain in 1769.

The charter document declared the school's mission to be, in part, the instruction of Indian tribal youth in "all parts of learning which shall appear necessary and expedient for civilizing and Christianizing children of pagans.''

Nowadays, many of Dartmouth's graduates also seek work in investment banking, most of them products of the Tuck School ofBusiness, which placed ninth in U.S. News & World Report's 2007 rankings of U.S. business-school programs.

"We tend to be very practically oriented and policy-oriented, so that makes us useful as a place to tap into in just about any administration, Democrat or Republican,'' said Doug Irwin, a Dartmouth historian and economics professor.

From Reich to Ingraham

Robert Reich, Labor secretary in the Clinton administration, and Laura Ingraham, a conservative talk-show host and former speechwriter for the Reagan administration, went to the college, as did Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and chief executive officer of Fairfield, Connecticut-based General Electric Co. Prominent Big Green graduates in journalism include David Shribman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Paul Gigot, editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

Dartmouth's approximately 400 faculty members for undergraduate studies aren't known for adhering to a single school of thought in economics or a particular political persuasion, Dartmouth economist Andrew Bernard said.

"What we have is a large number of very good applied researchers,'' Bernard said. "And they make really good candidates for policy positions because they've been dealing with real-world issues.''

Should Iraq be split up into Shi’ite, Sunni, and Kurd territorialities or remain united as one country?

Every country is bound by its history. The United States, when deciding the future of Iraq -- and we are the ones to decide its future, since we are currently the ruling power in the region -- will draw from its own history to answer the above question.

America's history shows that a strong centralized government is a better government. A good example of a strong government uniting and stabilizing a sovereign territory is the evolution of the United States of America from a confederate system to a federal system. Decentralization, in the first case, made governance impossible. Taxes were not collected, an army was not raised, and finally and most importantly -- internal conflict was not adequately managed.

Once a strong central government was put into place, it was able to unite the different territories under a single rule. Taxes were collected, an army was raised, and internal conflict was better managed.

The major conflict -- the Civil War -- although it was bloody and terrible, was not able to shatter this system. Under a confederate system, a civil war would most likely have led to dissolution of the republic.

A decentralized three-government solution has several problems. First, it will be more open to external pressures from Iran, Syria, and the United States. Its people, while having more say in a decentralized government, will be held hostage to external interests and will have insufficient power to hold off these interests. Second, whither Baghdad? Sectarian fighting between the Shiia and the Sunni will most likely break out over this holy and ancient city. This brings the greater question of territorial division -- and we know the importance of territory in the Middle East.

A strong, central Iraq will better manage any internal conflict and present a strong face to the outside world. Centralization makes the possibility of dictatorship more likely, since all parties will compete for absolute control, yet the development of liberal institutions that constrain such outcomes are the hallmark of Westernizing any non-democratic regime.

The end of Israel’s Lebanon offensive cannot possibly provide any stable solution to the Hezbollah problem. The IDF’s entrance into Lebanon in search of Hezbollah has produced mass civilian casualties that have only emboldened Hezbollah’s backers, Iran and Syria. Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei now pledges to stand in support of Lebanon, and Syria shows no signs of giving in to American and European diplomacy. Even if diplomacy can somehow buckle either Iran or Syria from publicly denouncing Hezbollah, that diplomatic victory will simply gain them immunity from military strikes. This means that the aid from Hezbollah-supporting groups in Iran and Syria will continue to flow, yet the IDF will be unable to execute surgical strikes within either country because those countries' governments will be complying with international demands.

And what of Hezbollah? Weeks into the offensive, Hezbollah has been able to maintain its 100-rockets-day barrage of Israeli territory. If the IDF has been unable to find even a significant amount of weapons stashed away in Lebanon, they stand no chance of effectively incapacitating the Hezbollah leadership without significant Lebanon casualties. Their hands are politically-bound on this front, as their attack of Qana has shown -- Israel was forced to comply with a Condoleeza Rice-demanded, if only to break it afterwards. Israel cannot afford another Qana without facing anything from Security Council condemnations (which the United States will most likely veto) to anti-Semitic protests in other countries. (A major factor binding Israeli policy choices is the world's reaction against the Jewish diaspora, which is why Israel has to be doubly careful not to anger heavily-Jewish countries.)

Israel’s only chance of removing the Hezbollah threat is an military incursion into Syria and Iran. But because such an act is politically infeasible, the problem will remain unsolved even the end of the Lebanon offensive.

Writing is both a craft and an art. We craft our thoughts into a particular sentence structure, which our language strictly defines. A word expresses a single concept. A sentence is a relationship between words that expresses a single idea. A paragraph is a relationship between sentences that expresses a thought. The concept, the idea, and the thought can be simple or complex, intricate or straightforward.

The art of this craft comes from word choice and sentence structure, which have the ability to convey more meaning. Sometimes art conveys more meaning than is necessary; at other times, it confuses. For this reason, I rarely attempt art when crafting my prose. I believe the art of writing should be used rarely and with respect.

The purpose of the prose should guide the balance between art and craft. If writing to convey information, as I often do, then one should place information before all else. In my writing, therefore, style is much less important than structure. If a sentence has extra words, they should be cut. The same goes for extra sentences in a paragraph and extra paragraphs in an article.

What is the difference between fiction and non-fiction?

Fictional and non-fictional narratives draw content from each other. Because human memories are imperfect, when we describe non-fictional events of the past, we cannot recall every detail precisely and accurately. We omit some details; other details we misrepresent. Our minds do not intentionally misrepresent these events– -- that is, we do not set out to lie --– but misrepresentation occurs. Recall the major geopolitical event of the 21st century, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. When the Boeing planes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, gray smoke bellowed from the collision. Was the smoke gray? Possibly it was, but I did not know for sure. Yet, my account seemed very realistic, regardless of the validity of that detail. Why did it seem so? Because in our minds, when we read the word "smoke,"” we immediately think of the many other representations of smoke that we have previously seen, in movies, around campfires, on July 4th, and elsewhere.

Our memories blur reality. We remember smoke as an abstract object, and when we recall specific instances of that abstract concept (unless the instance was particularly memorable, such as green or red smoke), our mind interposes the abstraction on reality, creating memory. This is how non-fiction draws from fiction -- an event that occurred borrows details from other events creating a memory of an event that is not strictly accurate.

Fiction also draws from fiction. Some philosophers argue that our imaginations cannot create anything that is not already present in the world around us. A mind is, essentially, nothing more than the sum of its inputs. If that is true, then fiction can do nothing but re-process reality. More so, not only is fiction limited to reprocessing reality, but fiction is not even privileged enough to deal with reality as we see it. Writers of fiction work with those abstract concepts that our mind creates out of our many particular experiences. Thus, fiction is twice removed from reality, first, by our inability to precisely remember events and, second, by the re-processing of those events into an innumerable different combinations.

From here, two possibilities of originality arise. First, the re-processing of reality yields events that either do not exist, or could not possibly exist in our reality. Tolkien creates Hobbits, Asimov creates feeling, dreaming robots -- these do not exist in our reality. Rowling creates humans who can fly unaided by technology -- these cannot exist in our reality. But none of these creations is new. Men fight, robots fall in love, and Hobbits die. Rain, for example, falls in all three worlds. Sometimes the rain is red, at other times blue, yet at other times invisible and deadly. But the primary concept of rain is borrowed from our reality, not invented. This is just an imposition of our reality on our imagination, proving that our imagination is just the re-processing of our reality.

A second possibility of originality can exist if our mind is more than the sum of its inputs. Some philosophers argue that our mind can create something that does not exist in the world around it. Most things we create, however, resonate with reality. This is where argument stops and belief begins. I believe that fiction pushes at the boundaries of the real, and sometimes uses its narrative to represent reality in a different light, but never breaches the boundary of the real, simply because it is impossible to do so.

Some questions remain unanswered here. If we accept that fiction is a re-processed narrative of the external world, then how can we explain fictional narratives that predict science, like the Jules Verne's Nautilus? In that example, and many others like it, does science follow fiction, or did the science already exist for the fiction to follow. Does, in short, art imitate life, or life imitate art?


If fiction and non-fiction are hopelessly interwoven, what privileges one type of narrative over the other?

Something causes most readers to adopt a mindset when they are reading fiction that differs from the mindset they adopt when reading non-fiction. That something is a type of a social contract between the reader and the writer, an agreement about the nature narrative presented to one by the other. The social contract states that, on the one hand, the reader agrees to suspend disbelief when reading a fictional narrative and, on the other hand, the writer agrees to protect his non-fictional narrative from the encroachment of fiction. But all non-fiction suffers from misrepresentation (as I discussed in part 1), so the writer’s part of the contract is not a strict oath (as strict as a social contract can be), but rather a promise to battle fictitious accounts to the best of his or her ability.

Historians, the chroniclers of past events, are, therefore, the foremost warriors against fictitious narratives. Theirs is the task to separate fact from fiction and write down only fact for future generations to read and believe.

The interesting question arises when historians craft our understanding of our own past events. What happens when a historian breaks his or her oath? If caught, surely the perpetrator is punished. At most, he or she is banned from recording events; at the very least, the contract between the reader and that particular historian is broken.

But if the act goes uncaught, what is its effect on our understanding? Each uncaught misrepresentation of past events creates a writer bias. We have, therefore, two types of biases in non-fictional writing, intentional and unintentional misrepresentation of past events. Unintentional misrepresentation should not create much bias, because these errors, being natural, would be made on all sides of any given argument or all retellings of any event. (There is no reason to assume that various natural biases would not be normally distributed around the real version of any given event.)

Intentional bias creates a much larger problem if it goes uncaught. This bias is not cancelled out by offsetting natural bias, and there is no reason to assume that offsetting intentional bias always exists. This means that if a historian intentionally misrepresents events and this act is not corrected by further historians -- due to, among other things, lack of information -- then a permanently erroneous version of reality is recorded.

Next: What happens when history errs?

Here is the unedited version of the op-ed I published in The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

To sum up, students' math skills fall short
07/25/06
Atlanta Journal Consitution

President Bush once said, “Rarely is the question asked, ‘Is our children learning?’” Our state’s college math students would answer with a definitive no. And I know why.

I tutor mathematics at Georgia State University. Throughout the day, I help people of all ages with math of all types, from elementary algebra to advanced calculus. I have worked with teenage students and with students in their forties who want to get a math degree or just exercise their brain. I have noticed that—whether young or old, whether full-time employees, full-time students or both—they share a single Achilles’ heel. They lack basic math skills.

When solving arithmetic, statistics or calculus problems, my tutees struggle with the additive, associative and commutative properties. They would understand derivation and integration—calculus is taught well at Georgia State—but would stumble through the basics, such as simplifying equations or complex fractions. The problem is not with our colleges or our high schools, but with our elementary and middle schools. The source of our state’s math woes lies somewhere between second and fifth grades.

My experience lacks a wide perspective. After all, Georgia State is only one university and the group of people who take summer math classes might radically differ from the overall student population. Still, Georgia State is a large university in a large city. If not indicative of the country as a whole, it strongly represents the state of education in Georgia.

If our schools fail to teach basic math, how did I learn it? I was lucky in two ways: where and to whom I was born. I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and went to school there until fourth grade. My parents put my education above all else. In all subjects they knew, they drilled me extensively and expected only the highest grades. To alter an inspirational quote hung in my Holcomb Bridge Middle School homeroom, my parents told me that if I shoot for the moon and land among the starts, shoot again.

Perhaps my two accidents of birth can provide a solution to our fledgling mathematic education. No, I do not mean that we should send students to Russia. But for all the things that country did poorly, it excelled at mathematics education. I was methodically drilled on how to multiply, divide, reduce complex fractions and simplify equations. Our schools should learn from them.

The real path to education, however, starts at home. Learning from my parents, when I become a father I will also push my children to excel. There should be no middle ground here. If parents don’t set their children up to succeed, they set them up to fail.

Once parents step up to the plate, however, and once schools improve to better facilitate the learning process, then together we can put me out of a job.

Dear reader,

Welcome to my blog. I recently graduated from Dartmouth with a double major in government and economics. Now I work as a business strategy consultant.

This website started as a collection of my published articles and works in progress. Over time, it has evolved to cover my opinions on contemporary politics and business issues. I hope that you may find some my thoughts useful, or at least interesting.

Please feel free to contact me at mikebelinsky at gmail dot com.

Sincerely,

Michael