The connection of immigration and labor

What a great speech - I just have to share this! After serving in Postville and Miami, the issues of immigration and labor are intertwined - the economy and our culture can't be separated into separate issues. I know, however, that not everyone is dwelling on these issues as much as I am, and it may be difficult to understand just how connected they are. This speech was given today by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, and it describes how the labor movement has been shaped by and needs to embrace immigrant workers. It is rather long, but it's definitely worth the read!


Remarks by AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka at the City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland Ohio, June 18, 2010

Thank you, President Roller [City Club Board President Jan Roller].

Good afternoon. I am delighted to be here with you in the great city of Cleveland. I want to talk to you about the grave economic challenges we face today – and the labor movement's vision for where we need to go.

There is no better place to have a discussion about our economic challenges than Cleveland—where business and labor built the American middle class. Cleveland embodies both the consequences of our failed economic policies of the last three decades – and our hope for a different future.

The economic crisis has hit hard here—116,000 lost jobs in the last decade in Cuyahoga County. Eighty-six thousand home foreclosures last year alone. A self-defeating attempt to address budget shortfalls by attacking school budgets and teachers.

But we can also see a glimpse of a better future in the Lake Erie wind turbine project—with turbines built here in Ohio, in the OneCommunity Project fiber optic network, and in Cleveland's role as a global center of fuel cell development.

We're at a turning point today. The economic course our nation started on in 1980—the effort to have a low-wage, high-consumption society that imports more and more of what it consumes—has hit the wall. We cannot afford to stay this course– of letting the private sector and the financial markets run amok, of outsourcing everything that's not nailed to the floor, and of pushing down workers every chance we get. And last night's vote by Republicans in the United States Senate to block a simple extension of unemployment benefits for the most hard-pressed people without jobs is just the latest shame. At some point, there is nobody left to buy the junk that we import from everywhere but here.

We now face a future of prolonged high unemployment and stagnant or falling wages—unless we do something different.

Today I am going to talk about doing something different.

We need a new national economic strategy for a global economy.

At the heart of our strategy must be a workforce with world class skills and world class rights and trade policies that serve the interests of the American people. But today I also want to talk to you about what may seem like a strange subject--immigration--because it is patently clear that we cannot talk about our national workforce strategy unless we face head-on our own contradictions, hypocrisy and history on immigration.

The truth is that in a dynamic global economy in the 21st century, we simply cannot afford to have millions of hard-working people without legal protections, without meaningful access to higher education, shut off from the high-wage, high-productivity economy. It is just too costly to waste all that talent and strength and drive.

But immigration reform is not just an economic issue. The way we as a nation treat the immigrants among us is about more than economic strategy—it is about who we are as a nation.

I grew up in a small town in Southwestern Pennsylvania, not that far from here. The immigrant path led from the coalmines to Pittsburgh to Cleveland.

And if you look around Cleveland at the ethnic clubs and the churches, you see a city that immigrants built--Hungarians and Poles, Irish and Italians, Serbs and Croats and Jews, as well as African Americans. Cleveland is a city where the traditions of the places we came from are the very foundation of our community.

It was not easy when my family came to this country. My parents fled poverty and war from different corners of Europe. When I was a kid, there was an ugly name for every one of us in all twelve languages spoken in Nemacolin, PA—wop and hunkie and polack and kike. We were the last hired and first fired, the people who did the hardest and most dangerous work, the people whose pay got shorted because we didn't know the language and were afraid to complain.

We got to the mines and the mills, and the people already there said we were taking their jobs, ruining their country. Yet in the end the immigrants of my parents' and grandparents' generation prevailed, and built America. This is the history of my family, and this is the story of Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Detroit and Chicago and Baltimore and a thousand cities and towns across America.

And yet today I hear from working people who should know better, some in my own family – that those immigrants are taking our jobs, ruining our country. Haven't we been here before?

When I hear that kind of talk, I want to say, did an immigrant move your plant overseas? Did an immigrant take away your pension? Or cut your health care? Did an immigrant destroy American workers' right to organize? Or crash the financial system? Did immigrant workers write the trade laws that have done so much harm to Ohio?

My friends, we are most of us the children of immigrants.

But there was no labor movement in America until workers learned to look at each other and see not immigrants and native born, not white and black, not different last names, but our common fate as workers.

The labor movement believes that our goal as a nation should be a future of shared prosperity – not stubborn unemployment and a lost generation. That our economic strategy must bring us together instead of driving us apart. Our strategy must help us be the kind of country we want our children to thrive in—the country our history tells us we can be. The home of the American Dream.

So exactly what is the American Dream? Some will tell you the American Dream is the idea that in America anyone can become rich. And the fact that the upper reaches of our society are relatively open is a good thing about our country—but it is not the American Dream.

The American Dream is not that a few of us will get to be rich, but that all of us will have a fair portion of the good things in life. Time to be with our families. The chance for our children to get an education and the opportunity to make their own way in the world. Laws that protect us, not oppress us.

The American labor movement is all about the pursuit and the defense of this idea of America. And we have learned through our history that it is only when working people stand together—in the workplace and at the polling place—that the American Dream is secure.

Recently, the American Dream brought a man my age named Elvino and his son Ramon to America from Mexico. They are experienced bricklayers and were hired to work on a large mixed-use housing development—a public project. They and thirty others worked for five weeks, and the contractor just never paid them.

For too many immigrants seeking the American Dream, this is the American reality. Hard work rewarded with ripoffs. And then no way to seek justice. That's why I am so proud to be able to say that Elvino, Ramon and their co-workers are taking this injustice to the U.S. Department of Labor, thanks to the efforts of Bricklayers Union Local 18 in Cincinnati and the Interfaith Worker Rights Center—whose members understand that truly an injury to one is an injury to all.

Immigration to the United States is part of a larger picture—the picture of how we are getting globalization wrong. There is no better way to understand that than to look at what has happened between the United States and Mexico since NAFTA was implemented in 1994.

NAFTA was sold to the American public on the idea that increasing trade with Mexico would create good jobs in both countries and slow the flow of undocumented workers coming to the U.S. from Mexico.

Instead, inequality has grown and workers' rights have eroded in both the U.S. and Mexico since NAFTA's passage. And illegal immigration flows have tripled.

Today we treat our relationship with Mexico as if it were a national security problem—solvable with military aid and a militarized border. And that is a dangerous mistake. The failures of our relationship with Mexico represent a failed economic strategy. They cannot be solved with guns and soldiers and fences. They must be addressed through an economic strategy for shared prosperity based on rising wages in both countries.

Instead, at the heart of the failure of our immigration policy is an unpleasant fact, one that you almost never hear talked about openly: Too many U.S. employers actually like the current state of the immigration system—a system where immigrants are both plentiful and undocumented—afraid and available. Too many employers like a system where our borders are closed and open at the same time—closed enough to turn immigrants into second-class citizens, open enough to ensure an endless supply of socially and legally powerless cheap labor.

Our immigration system makes a mockery of the American dream. The people doing the hardest work for the least money have no legal protections, no ability to send their children to college, no real right to form a union, no economic or legal security—no way to turn their contributions—their years of hard work—into the most fundamental right of all, the right to vote. That is intolerable for a democracy.

Recently, I met a young woman named Fabiola, who came to the United States when she was two years old. Her parents have worked in the United States for twenty-two years. Fifteen years ago, her father became a U.S. citizen, so all her younger siblings who were born here also are citizens. But Fabiola fell through the legal cracks and is now too old to become a citizen under current immigration law.

But that has not stopped her from working hard to live the American Dream. Recently, she graduated from the University of California with a degree in international development. But she cannot find a job in her field because she is undocumented.

How does Fabiola's story make any sense in economic or human terms? Her talents and her education are being squandered because our immigration system is simply not working

That is why the AFL-CIO is fighting to fix this broken immigration system as a crucial element of our broader economic strategy. Because we stand for the American Dream for all who work in our country. Because we are for ending our two-tiered workforce and our two-tiered society. And because an underclass of disenfranchised workers ends up hurting all workers.

But we are not for any kind of immigration reform. We will not support the return to outdated guest worker programs that give immigrants no security, no future here in the United States, no rights and no hope of being part of the American Dream.

Immigration reform must begin with the principle that workers in the United States deserve to enjoy a fair share of the wealth we create—that wages should move up with productivity. The labor movement and a broad coalition of faith-based and immigrants' rights groups have worked with former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall to put together such a program for comprehensive immigration reform.

The AFL-CIO is for a fair path toward legalization for all undocumented workers who are working to realize the American Dream. We are for the DREAM Act, that gives young people like Fabiola a future in the only country they know.

We need an independent commission to determine our society's genuine need for more immigrants, and then we need to build a pathway that allows immigrants to be securely part of our country from day one—able to assert their legal rights, including the right to organize, without fear of retaliation.

And together with this commission, going forward we are for establishing real penalties for employers who break the law. We must focus enforcement not on those who come here seeking the American Dream, but on those who would exploit them.

This is the reform the labor movement is fighting for.

But instead, we see today a dangerous drift toward a politics of hate. Last month, I went to Arizona to stand with working people who were the target of a hate campaign—a campaign for racial profiling waged by the state legislature and signed into law by the governor. A campaign to make anyone who might look like an immigrant live in fear of the police. All of us should fear such a system: In the end, don't all of us who aren't Native Americans look like the immigrants and children of immigrants that we are?

As President of the AFL-CIO, my message to working people is that we all are bound together by our lives as workers, our dreams for our families, and our hopes for this country's future. The labor movement stands for giving all workers in America the right to dream the American Dream.

Unfortunately, the American Dream is slipping away.

Today, as in any economic crisis, there are people who offer hatred and divisiveness as the solution to the crisis. If our political leaders do not lead, if they do not offer help in the present and a clear strategy for prosperity in the future—starting with good jobs—those voices of hate will grow, they will become more powerful, and they will feed on the public's anger and pain and desperation.

President Obama has laid out in broad terms the approach we need to take. He has spoken out for creating good jobs, rebuilding manufacturing, taking on the challenge of climate change and energy independence, growing exports and investing in our infrastructure, including our education infrastructure.

If we are truly going to build a world class workforce, we need to restore workers' fundamental human right to organize and bargain with their employers. And we need to make sure every worker in America – documented or undocumented – is protected by our labor laws. That is why it is so urgent that we reform our immigration system.

The President's strategy also requires that we invest in rebuilding our country. Consider this fact—as a result of the economic recovery act, we are now in the process of planning approximately 500 miles of high-speed rail, including lines here in Ohio. Sounds good, until you realize that China, a country about the same size as the United States, is in the process of constructing 5,000 miles of high-speed rail.

Restoring workers' rights and building workers' skills. Creating the infrastructure of the 21st century. Thinking strategically when it comes to trade policy. These are the strategies for making the American Dream as real for our children as it was for my parents.

But that will not be enough. We as a nation must be true to our better selves—employers must not make a buck on the backs of workers who live in fear of deportation, and workers must stand together in the workplace for good jobs, safe jobs, health care for all, and retirement security we can count on. And so when we talk about making the American Dream real, the labor movement stands for making it real for all of us who do the work of our country. All of us—no matter what we look like, who we choose to love, or where we come from. Surely there we can find common ground.

Thank you.

Article: Human Trafficking ‘Serious’ in U.S., Report Says

June 14, 2010, 12:32 PM EDT

By Nicole Gaouette

June 14 (Bloomberg) -- The trafficking of men, women and children for labor and commercial sex is a “serious” problem in the U.S., according to the State Department.

The department’s 10th annual report grades 175 nations on their efforts to fight this modern form of slavery. The U.S. is listed for the first time, placed among those countries that are doing best to comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the American law against human trade.

Still, the report said the U.S. is a source as well as a transit and destination country for people forced into labor, debt bondage and prostitution. The work is predominantly in manufacturing, janitorial services, agriculture, hotel services, construction, nail salons, elder care, strip-club dancing and domestic servitude, the U.S. said.

“Behind these statistics on the pages are the struggles of real human beings, the tears of families who may never see their children, the despair and indignity of those suffering under the worst forms of exploitation,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at a State Department event to mark the release of the report today in Washington.

The International Labor Organization estimated there were 12.3 million victims of forced labor, sex trafficking, debt bondage and recruitment of child soldiers worldwide in 2009. In the same year, there were 4,166 successful prosecutions for trafficking, the State Department report said.

Bottom Tier

The U.S. report lists three tiers of nations. Among those in the bottom section -- nations that don’t comply with the law and make no effort to do so -- are Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Mauritania and Sudan.

Japan, Israel and Oman are listed in the middle tier -- nations that don’t fully meet the law’s minimum standards yet are making “significant” efforts to do so. Oil-rich Qatar is listed in between the middle and lowest tier on a watch list of countries that don’t meet minimum standards and whose progress is less certain.

Trafficking can’t be blamed solely on international organized crime, Clinton said.

“It is everyone’s responsibility,” she said, citing “businesses that knowingly profit or exhibit reckless disregard about their supply chains” and “governments that turn a blind eye or do not devote serious resources to addressing the problem.”

“All of us have to speak out and act forcefully,” Clinton said.

Enforcement Urged

The trafficking report calls for better law enforcement, improved laws and more prosecutions for trafficking. The report changes each year, and countries can move from tier one, where the U.S. and others are, to the bottom tier, occupied by Saudi Arabia and other offenders.

This year, 22 countries were upgraded, including Djibouti, which moved from the second tier to the first, while 19 lost ground, such as the Dominican Republic, which slipped from tier two to tier three.

Sixty-two countries on the list have never prosecuted trafficking, according to the report.

“Most countries that deny the existence of victims of modern slavery within their borders are not looking, trying or living up to the mandates” of a United Nations protocol mandate against trafficking, the report said.

Activists Honored

Clinton handed awards to activists working against trafficking in Hungary, Jordan, Mauritania, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Brazil and the U.S. to celebrate their achievements. She praised their “ resolute and genuine stance on fighting this issue.”

The American recipient, Laura Germino, coordinates the Anti-Slavery Campaign for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a Florida community organization of more than 4,000 migrant workers.

In remarks to the crowd, Germino said that “we are fighting for tier zero.” Seated behind Germino on the stage, Clinton broke in with one word that prompted cheers and applause.

“Yes,” the secretary said.

--Editors: Mark Schoifet, Bill Schmick

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-14/human-trafficking-serious-in-u-s-report-says-update1-.html

Opinion piece in the Miami Herald by the new Archbishop of Miami.

Let `illegals' stay, earn their citizenship

BY THOMAS WENSKI

To those who accused Jesus of breaking the laws of his day, he replied, in Mark 2:27: ``The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.''

This teaching underscores the point that positive law, even Divine positive law, is meant to benefit, not to enslave, mankind. The patriots who broke the law by tossing tea into Boston Harbor understood this -- as did Rosa Parks, who broke the law by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. When laws fail to advance the common good, they can and should be changed.

Our immigration laws need to be changed: They are antiquated and inadequate for the promotion and regulation of social and economic relations of 21st-century America. On this point everyone seemingly agrees. However, the solutions proposed should not make the situation worse. Outdated laws, ill adapted to the increasing interdependence of our world and the globalization of labor, are bad laws. Proposed changes, however, must take into account both human dignity and the national interest.

For this reason, the U.S. bishops and a broad bipartisan coalition ranging from unions to chambers of commerce have supported broad comprehensive immigration reform that, while addressing future needs for labor by providing for a legal guest-worker program, also offers an ``earned'' path to legalization for those 10 million or so workers already in the country as well as fixing the unacceptable backlogs for family reunification visas that keep families separated for intolerable lengths of time.

A narrow, restrictive legislation focusing on solely ``enforcement'' will only make matters worse. Indeed, a billion dollars has been spent on border enforcement over the past 10 years -- and yet, until this current recession, illegal immigration had increased because the labor market demanded willing and able workers. Illegal immigration should not be tolerated. It leads to abuse and exploitation of the migrants themselves; and, ultimately, businesses that rely on their labor -- and, in doing so, help fuel the growth of the American economy -- would prefer and benefit from a reliable, legal work force.

But, fixing illegal immigration does not require the ``demonization'' of so-called ``illegals.'' America has always been a land of promise and opportunity for those willing to work hard. We can provide for our national security and secure borders without making America, a nation of immigrants, less a land of promise or opportunity for immigrants.

Victor Hugo's 19th-century novel Les Miserables tells how pride and neglect of mercy represented in the bitterly zealous legalism of Inspector Javert ultimately destroys him. Today, modern-day Javerts, on radio and TV talk shows, fan flames of resentment against supposed law breakers, equating them with terrorists intent on hurting us. However, these immigrants ask only for the opportunity to become legal -- to come out of the shadows where they live in fear of a knock on their door in the dead of night or an immigration raid to their work place. Like Jean Valjean, today's migrants only look for the opportunity to redeem themselves through honest work. Today, many take umbrage at the Catholic bishops' advocacy on behalf of these ``illegals'' -- but, in doing so, we stand in a proud moral tradition, like the novel's benevolent Bishop Myriel, who gave his candlesticks to the desperate Jean Valjean and protected him from arrest by Javert.

For this reason, we call upon Congress to seize the opportunity for a comprehensive fix to our broken immigration system. To date, its failure to act has contributed to neo-nativist anti-immigrant sentiment and to ill-advised initiatives like Arizona's recent immigration law that usurps what is the purview of the federal government.

A nation that honors lawbreakers like the patriots of the ``Boston Tea Party,'' a nation that can allow the dignified defiance of Rosa Parks in her act of lawbreaking to touch its conscience, is a nation that also can make room for modern-day Jean Valjeans. We can be a nation of laws, without becoming a nation of Javerts. As Jesus reminded the embittered zealots of his day, laws are designed for the benefit -- not the harm -- of humankind.

Thomas Wenski is the archbishop of the Archidiocese of Miami.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/06/06/1667159/let-illegals-stay-earn-their-citizenship.html#ixzz0qB8fp8P6

A story of modern day slavery in Florida

Video from the St. Petersburg Times

Come walk with us, the journey is long...

Last week, I traveled to Washington, D.C. with an amazing group of community members from Miami Dade, many of whom are directly impacted by the current broken immigration system.

As we traveled, our newly-formed community shared information about our lives and why we were going to Washington. Juanita, who is Puerto Rican and therefore a Citizen, shared her daily concerns about her undocumented husband. She said she worried every day that he could make a mistake, catch the attention of the police, and be taken away from her. Maria Gabriela, another traveler, is a survivor of domestic violence who is documented but her own experiences have encouraged her to always fight for what is right, including keeping the families in our community together. My own motivation to join the struggle for immigrant rights was heightened while doing relief and recovery work in Postville, Iowa, following an immigration raid that destroyed the community by targeting the migrant workers, rather than the meatpacking plant that was exploiting them.

There were six buses of immigrant advocates from Miami Dade, and forty from the state of Florida. At least 150,000 people from around the country participated in this March for America. Standing in the middle of the crowds outside the White House and on the National Mall took my breath away. I was surrounded by determined people of faith, workers, and activists who were standing together, hoping for a more humane solution to our immigration system. Men and women from around the world, representatives from around the United States, stood together waving American flags and holding signs reading, “I’m a U.S. Citizen. Please reform immigration now so I can keep my Dad”, “We are all (or were) Immigrants”, and “This land belongs to you and me”.

Each of the 150,000 participants, as well as the family members and neighbors who were unable to attend, have a story. We each have motivations and struggles that have led us to where we are today. My hope is that we can join together to learn about one another, and to ensure that everyone has the right to raise their children, to live with their spouses, and to earn decent wages in order to support their families. It was my pleasure to represent SFIWJ at this historic event.

Disabled Immigration Detainees Face Deportation

By NINA BERNSTEIN

Immigration Report from Texas Appleseed and Akin Gump (pdf)

The detainees, mostly apprehended in New York and other Northeastern cities, some right from mental hospitals, have often been moved to Texas without medication or medical records, far from relatives and mental health workers who know their histories. Their mental incompetence is routinely ignored by immigration judges and deportation officers, who are under pressure to handle rising caseloads and meet government quotas.

These are among the findings of a yearlong examination of the way the nation’s immigration detention system handles the mentally disabled in Texas, where 29 percent of all detainees are held while the government tries to deport them. The study, conducted by Texas Appleseed, a public interest law center, and Akin Gump, a corporate law firm, documents mistreatment at every stage of the process.

Among many examples in the 88-page report, to be released Tuesday, is that of a 50-year-old legal permanent resident with schizophrenia who had lived in New York City since 1974. In November, a New York criminal court declared him incompetent to stand trial on a trespassing charge and ordered him to serve 90 days in a mental institution. Instead, he was transferred to the Willacy County Regional Detention Facility in South Texas, to face a deportation proceeding without counsel — so abruptly, the report said, that his family and lawyer did not know what had happened.

At the detention center, he received no medication for weeks, and in March, he was deported to the Dominican Republic. “My mother is devastated,” his sister, Janet Jiminez, said on Sunday. “She says he will die out there on the streets.”

“I’ve been a U.S. citizen for many, many years,” Ms. Jiminez added. “If we have a law system and the law system has declared that you are incompetent and should be taken to a mental hospital, why are you taken to Texas to be deported?”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the report said, routinely ignores its discretionary authority to leave such detainees in community settings rather than lock them up, at great expense, in distant jails where they can rapidly deteriorate.

The agency is reviewing the report, a spokesman, Brian P. Hale, said Monday, adding that “in cases where ICE is required by law to detain certain aliens with serious medical and mental health issues, we work to ensure the person receives sound, appropriate and timely care.”

A recent government memorandum shows that agents are under intense pressure to increase detentions and deportations. In the memo, James M. Chaparro, the Obama administration’s chief of detention and removal operations, congratulated agents for reaching the agency’s goal of “150,000 criminal alien removals” for the year ending Sept. 30. But Mr. Chaparro urged them to overcome a shortfall in the goal of 400,000 deportations by making maximum use of detention slots, including an additional 3,000 this year.

Despite the administration’s vow to focus resources on detaining and deporting the most dangerous criminals, the Feb. 22 memorandum, posted online Saturday by The Washington Post, instructed agents to pick up the pace of deportations by detaining more noncitizens suspected only of unauthorized residence. Such illegal immigrants can typically be deported more quickly than legal immigrants with criminal convictions.

The publication of the memo clearly embarrassed the administration. A spokesman, Sean Smith, said that “our focus continues to be on the criminal side,” and that Mr. Chaparro was reprimanded Monday by John Morton, the chief of the immigration enforcement agency, at a meeting with immigrant advocates. The memo, Mr. Smith added, was sent without Mr. Morton’s approval and “is completely unrelated” to the findings of the study.

Ann Baddour, who directed the study, disagreed. “Setting these kinds of quotas only encourages the process of detaining people and taking them far from their infrastructure,” she said. “When you take a mentally ill person from New York to rural Texas, you’re basically setting them up for almost certain deportation.”

Another example in the report is that of a Haitian man found incompetent to stand trial in an assault case and sent to a state mental hospital in Boston. The day he arrived, however, immigration agents sent him in shackles and without medical records to the Port Isabel Detention Center near Los Fresnos, Tex.

In that case, the man was eventually returned to the Boston hospital, said Maunica Sthanki, a lawyer involved in the study. More typical, she said, is the mentally disabled refugee from Southeast Asia who was wrongly taken into custody in Providence, R.I., sent to Texas, then abruptly released without notice at a rural gas station at 11 p.m.

The report details several such releases: a schizophrenic woman who spoke only Russian, left in a dangerous area at 1 a.m.; a man lost for a week on his way back from Texas to his family in Maryland; a delusional man who was deported four days earlier than planned, though his parents had arranged for his voluntary departure to Mexico, where his mother was to pick him up.

Two years later, the man has not been found, but a body matching his description is in a morgue in Mexico.

Young Adults Doing Religion on Their Own? Blame It on Politics

February 25, 2010 - PoliticsDaily.com. Article available here.

Last week, the number-crunching folks at the Pew Center released a report titled "Religion Among the Millennials." It's part of an ongoing analysis of the generation of young adults between 18 and 29 years old.

This report was a meta-analysis of lots of surveys done over the past several years, some by Pew and some not. Many of the results seemed pretty "duh" to me: Young people tend to lean left politically, be more open to change, more tolerant of differences than their elders. It has ever been thus, ain't it? As Plato kvetched more than 2,400 years ago:

"What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?"

But two paragraphs in the report jumped out at me:

"Fewer young adults belong to any particular faith than older people do today. They also are less likely to be affiliated than their parents' and grandparents' generations were when they were young. Fully one-in-four members of the Millennial generation -- so called because they were born after 1980 and began to come of age around the year 2000 -- are unaffiliated with any particular faith. Indeed, Millennials are significantly more unaffiliated than Generation Xers were at a comparable point in their life cycle (20 percent in the late 1990s) and twice as unaffiliated as Baby Boomers were as young adults (13 percent in the late 1970s)."

So that seems different, evidence of secularization on the march. But then we have:

"Young adults' beliefs about life after death and the existence of heaven, hell and miracles closely resemble the beliefs of older people today. Though young adults pray less often than their elders do today, the number of young adults who say they pray every day rivals the portion of young people who said the same in prior decades. And though belief in God is lower among young adults than among older adults, Millennials say they believe in God with absolute certainty at rates similar to those seen among Gen Xers a decade ago."

Which says to me that young adults are not losing faith, just unplugging from religious institutions at a rate unprecedented in U.S. history.

(And I know that "mileage may vary" for individuals. There are lots of politically and religiously conservative and engaged Millennials -- they're just in smaller proportions than among their elders.)

That data got me thinking about Robert Putnam, the Harvard professor whose book "Bowling Alone" made a powerful case a decade ago that Americans were disengaging from all manner of institutions -- from churches to social clubs to bowling leagues.

Putnam later reported that the trend had plateaued a bit after the Sept. 11 attacks, as many Americans sought social cohesion as a way to cope with the trauma. Maybe the survey results about Millennials were evidence the trends had resumed and even accelerated? I wondered what Putnam was doing these days.

Imagine my surprise: He and Notre Dame professor David Campbell have co-authored a book scheduled for publication this fall titled "American Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives."

So I pinged them, asking what they thought of the Pew report. The bad news: Campbell replied that the book's publishers have asked that they not do media until closer to when the book comes out. The good news: They've been talking about their analysis for a while.

Putnam is the head of Harvard's Saguaro Seminar on civic engagement. The Social Capital blog reported on a presentation that Putnam and Campbell made last year for the Pew Forum.

No surprise, then, that their data tracked what Pew reported last week:

"Young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of 5-6 times the historic rate (30-40 percent have no religion today versus 5-10 percent a generation ago)."

And now their explanation:

"But youth's religious disaffection is largely due to discomfort with religiosity having been tied to conservative politics."

They are hardly the first social scientists to link conservative politics and disengagement with organized religion. Back in 2002, Berkeley professors Michael Hout and Claude Fischer took the same line in the American Sociological Review:

"We seek to explain why American adults became increasingly likely to express no religious preference as the 1990s unfolded. Briefly summarized, we find that the increase was not connected to a loss of religious piety, and that it was connected to politics. In the 1990s many people who had weak attachments to religion and either moderate or liberal political views found themselves at odds with the conservative political agenda of the Christian Right and reacted by renouncing their weak attachment to organized religion."

But the entanglement of religion and politics is hardly a new American phenomenon. From the abolitionists to the temperance movement to the civil rights movement to the Vietnam era protests, people of powerful and visible faith were central to the battles -- on the right and on the left.

So has the Religious Right of the past couple of decades been more offensive, somehow, than previous faith-and-politics combinations? Are the Millennials more susceptible than prior generations? And if so, why?

Putnam and Campbell have said they thought the trend was reversible, that religious institutions with fewer political ties could engage in all-American entrepreneurship to swoop in and give the disaffected Millennials a religious home. But even high-profile religious leaders such as Saddleback's Rick Warren who have tried to stay out of the political swamp have found themselves pulled in from time to time. And it's hard to believe that people of powerful faith will be able to resist applying the standards of that faith to the thorniest political issues of our time.

Maybe Putnam and Campbell will have all the answers in that book. We'll ping them again in a few months to find out.