There are some 25 million immigrants[1] living illegally in the United States.[2] Many of them snuck across our Southern Border[3] and many others came to the US on visas of one sort or another and don’t leave. For some, this constitutes a heavy burden and a present danger to our country. To others this is the least we can do for suffering people whose homelands offer them little by way of hope for the future, and hope for their children to find a better life. Which focus is best?
National health? Don’t underestimate benefits of national stability even for those banging on our doors to be let in.
Help for the desperate? Most Americans want to help the less fortunate but don’t want to sink their own boats and destroy their own families in the process.
Can both be accomplished? Perhaps.
Is immigration the best way to help those in less prosperous nations? No, but let’s move on for now.
Are these the only things involved in the immigration issue? Not by a long shot, but for now let me propose a comparison.
India has four times the population of America. So, let me ask you a question. What if I told you that 100 million Americans were illegally moving to India, three and a half million to each of the twenty-eight states, manipulating what systems they could to use public resources, using their workforce advantages to edge out competition, frequently working under the table to avoid paying taxes and risking discovery, many working with seditious forces within the country to gain greater access to entitlement programs, to get driver’s licenses, and, thus, voting power in elections, to secure citizenship, and to lay anchors for bringing the rest of their families to join them there? The scenario is silly in terms of reality, I know, distance would make this impossible, and global foot traffic is not OUT of the West, but into the West (If you believe the lies of Critical Theorists about how unbearable life is here for “non-Whites” that should be a wakeup call for you.) and there is little chance that Americans could blend in being that, unlike the West, India is almost mono-racial (Bi-racial if you count Manipuri, but Manipur itself is practically mono-racial, and they number only slightly over 3 million in a country of over 1.4 Billion.). But work with me hear. Let’s pretend that these 100 million souls could blend in, and could take a foot hold.
How would you feel about that news?
What do you think the Indian Government should do about it? How should the Indian people respond?
What if, instead of Americans, it was half the population of Pakistan, that decided life was better in India and just started moving in, slipping through borders, or if it were half of Bangladesh plus all the people of Nepal?
What about those players involved in making it happen behind the scenes? What should the Indian government do to them?
What, in the end, would you call such a movement? Would you reach for the word colonize?
In 1861 only 125,945 Britishers called India home[4] out of just over 200 Million (.06 of one percent of the population) as opposed to our 100 million who would constitute almost 8 percent of India’s population. Granted the British ruled rather than slipping in unnoticed if possible, but these numbers are off the charts and portend radical political power. Even so, does our emotionally unhinged sense of “colonization” limit itself to rule? Critical Theorists call the very existence of Western people with a culture a colonizing force, sending their minions into fits to “de-colonize” everything from lawn care to mathematics to musical notation. If existing and building and creating is colonizing by the very fact that these carry pride of place or even influence, then what other term could be used when 8 percent of a population is constituted by people who forced their way into the country unbidden and disallowed? Did you reach for the word invasion?
We are not alone in this. In 2021, over 2 million people from the Middle East and Africa flooded the EU as part of a decades long program by progressive leaders to open Europe to the world and have proven deaf and numb to the impact that this radical shift in population with its cultural and criminal baggage has had and is having on their own people. If you want a broad picture of the stated rational and consequences of this progressive push, I again highly recommend Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe.
Many around the world of Marxist inclination have called for open borders. Many Christians too have declared that this is the only way to fulfill the mission of Christ to help the poor, oppressed and down trodden. “We’re privileged so we owe it to the world to let them come and have an equal share of what we’ve built here.” This is not an “of course” issue, however, whether for or against.
There are complications and important questions of organization and identity to be addressed. For instance, is the idea of nation a Biblical idea? Yes. Do border agreements constitute part of the challenge of being a nation amid other nations in Scripture? Yes. Does nationhood constitute a “body” of people with the same rights of self-defense and other natural rights as a person might? With certain caveats for natural difficulties in defining said rights in such a context, I’d give a hesitant yes… I’d take issue with defenses of nationhood for conquered people’s living under tyrannical despots like some African nations and places like North Korea. Here, the claims of sovereignty by a despot on behalf of a subdued and conquered people are more than a little suspect.
If you too said yes, to the idea that a unified people have the right of self-defense from threats domestic, foreign, and governmental, let me ask you a question. Do you lock your doors? Do you lock your car? Do you secure your space and your family within that space? Do not nations have the same right?
When my wife went through the process of coming to America to live, she was vetted a hundred ways from Sunday. She had to have background checks, proof of support, and medical tests and had to provide references and sign waivers for social services for X numbers of years. This is perfectly reasonable. All would-be immigrants are not equal. Each culture achieves general agreement about life in community. Cross-cultural conflicts can be sever and bloody. Should a nation throw open its borders to potential criminals and those carrying diseases and those whose worldviews and behavioral patterns make them a danger to the people in the host nation? Is not, then, illegal border crossing a defiance of the host people’s right to self-protection?[5]
Can you have open borders without having a one-world Government? If you say no, then the issue of open borders demands the eradication of national sovereignty the world over—overthrow… violent colonization. If you say yes, then what level of cooperation would be required to keep such a state of affairs from turning into an actual invasion with intent? From turning into complete chaos?
Is it right for people in one part of the country far away from the immediate consequences of border issues, to make choices about immigration that other people who live in the middle of the hive have to confront? It is nice to have warm feelings about immigration and the poor and suffering of the world, but it is indecent to make choices out of your warm sentiments that other people have to pay for in the real world. It is one thing to feel good about what you do, and quite another to actually do good for all involved.
So, let us return to one last point on this issue, one we raised above. Is immigration the best way to help the poor around the world? There is an interesting discussion by Roy Beck in which he uses gumballs to give the visuals of the numbers involved in the question, “Does Immigration Really Help The Poor?”[6] He opens, “Some people say that mass immigration into the United States can help reduce world poverty. Is that true? Well no it’s not and let me show you why.” With gumballs, each representing 1 million people he begins to look at the actual numbers involved in the hope of immigration as a cure for what ails many nations. The visuals are stunning. One gum ball represents legal immigration in the US… it sits alone in a wine glass. A huge container and a vase representing those of Africa earning less than $2 a day sit beside it. He adds two of those jars for those in India earning less than $2 a day. Then he adds another huge jar for China. For the rest of Asia he trucks out two more of those jars, and a vase for those in South America. The need is so much greater than can possibly be addressed through immigration. Most of those represented in his huge jars are too poor, too sick, too dysfunctional to even imagine becoming immigrants to the US.
It gets worse. Given that vast numbers of our immigrants in the US come from Mexico, his numbers and gumballs shift to represent those of the world who make less than the average income in Mexico. He lugs out another six huge jars of gumballs to add to the six plus already on the table.
He says,
“So what is it that the elites are telling us? They’re telling us that when we take this 1million immigrants that we somehow or another are tackling world poverty and we have to do it regardless of the effect on our (own) unemployed working poor, the most vulnerable members of our society, regardless of the effect on our natural resources. Even if we went by the most radical proposals in Washington which are to actually double our immigration to 2 million a year which would totally overwhelm our physical, natural, and social infrastructures, we couldn’t make a noticeable difference.”
He goes on to raise another problem with this immigration plan saying,
“…and we may be really hurting the impoverished people of the world because the million that we do take are among the most energetic, often the better educated, certainly the most dissatisfied people that, if they did not emigrate, would be the agents for change to improve the lot of all the people in these countries. The true heroes in the global humanitarian field are the people in these countries who have the wherewithal to emigrate to another country but instead stay in their countries to apply their skills to help their fellow countrymen. Unfortunately, our immigration system tends to entice these very types of people to abandon their countrymen.”
The situation gets even worse when Beck turns to action in the face of birthrates. For each million that we take into America from the best and brightest of these nations, 80 million more are being born into the impoverished situations that tug so viciously on our sympathies. Beck declares, “Immigration can never be an effective or significant way to deal with the suffering people of the world; they have to be helped where they live. 99.9 percent of them will never be able to immigrate to rich country. There’s no hope for that; they have to bloom where their planted.”
Here’s the rub. Critical Theorists have people so freaked out about the very idea of “colonization,” that the best ways of helping backwards and dysfunctional and impoverished peoples are denied even the most basic considerations. We have a world full of broken cultures, broken values, broken processes, broken governments and broken people struggling in systems of self-perpetuating violence and ignorance, yet, real help is denied them because Marxist ideology has taken hold. Marxists need people poor and broken because they need them angry and full vengeance, blaming the enemies of Marxists for their troubles. These poor are only controllable and useable when they are poor and broken.
The nations, however, need to be tutored in the path of life and delivered from the clutches of despots and despotic ideas alike. And what do we offer them? We offer them NGOs (non-governmental organization) that preserve and propagate dysfunctional mentalities, and Foreign aid that gets swallowed up in corrupt systems run by those very despots.
But there is hope. Those who understand must embolden and educate those who don’t understand and must overcome corrupt leaders advancing systems of elitist power over the welfare of the masses.
[1] Out of 235 recognized nations, the bottom 180 of them have smaller populations than that, including Australia and North Korea. It is equivalent to the entire population of the smallest 8 nations of the world combined, 3x the population of Israel, Switzerland, and even Hong Kong. It is 4x the population of Norway. 5x the population of Ireland. It is the equivalent of 73x the population of Iceland, living among us illegally.
[2] The numbers are debated, given the nature of the counting, and are also highly manipulated by those with particular agendas and a willingness to lie to the world. These sites put the number at about 11 million. A 2018 Yale study put the number at 22 million as of 2016. Mohommad Fazel Zarandi, Jonathan S. Feinstein, Edward H. Kaplan, “The number of undocumented immigrants in the United States: Estimates based on demographic modeling with data from 1990 to 2016” Plos One 9/21/2018, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201193 (6/28/2023).
[3] “U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had 211,401 alien encounters along the Southwest Border (SWB) in April 2023 — up almost 10% from the previous month and up nearly 20% from April 2021. 86% of the total SWB encounters were between ports of entry — up 12% from March. In just the first seven months of FY2023, 96 people whose names appear on the terrorist watchlist, including a shocking 16 in April alone, were stopped trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry. April had more terrorist watchlist apprehensions at the SWB than all of FY2017, FY2018, FY2019, & FY2020 combined. So far in FY2023, nationwide, CBP has arrested 17,533 individuals with criminal convictions and apprehended 377 known gang members, 111 of those being MS-13 members.” Committee on Homeland Security, “FACTSHEET: Illegal Crossings of the Southwest Border Increased in April Ahead of Title 42’s End,” https://homeland.house.gov/factsheet-illegal-crossings-of-the-southwest-border-increased-in-april-ahead-of-title-42s-end/#:~:text=U.S.%20Customs%20and%20Border%20Protection,nearly%2020%25%20from%20April%202021. (6/28/2023).
[4] British Raj, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#:~:text=From%20then%20on%2C%20the%20Indian,and%20men%20of%20the%20Army. (6/28/2023).
[5] It is interesting what Covid revealed about those pushing for open borders. While many where clamoring for forced vaccination, they were also calling for open borders and tolerance of mass numbers of unvaccinated people across our Southern border was required. Gathering in public or church was to be forbidden, but protesting in mass was okay.
[6] Roy Beck, “Immigration and World Poverty Explained with Gumballs—Does Immigration Really Help the Poor?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6tSqGCfoCI (6/28/2023).
