Thoughts on Our Current Migrant Problem
It is not compassion for government to spend money it doesn’t have to help people in irresponsible ways.
By Larry Craig
Imagine you own a company and you regularly hire 100 workers a year. Times are hard, and a lot of people are out of work. You want to help people, so should you hire every person who comes to you looking for a job, even though you have to go deeply into debt that you know you will never be able to repay?
We have about two million people a year now looking for asylum in our country. That means that they want to stay permanently. They walk into our country, and we don’t even have time to find out who they are before we must transport them into the interior of our country. No background checks, no medical exams.
There are issues and questions with regards to this current migrant problem that nobody is talking about.
1) We used to have illegal immigration, but word has gotten out that if you get caught crossing the border illegally, the magic word is “asylum” and you automatically have a right to remain in the country. We rarely have the type of cases that our lawmakers had in mind when they wrote the Refuge Act. They were thinking more along the lines of, say, Ukrainian refugees right now or Christians escaping from Iran or North Korea.
2) The fact is that a person crossing our border illegally will live a better life than they would have had if they had stayed where they were. They are often being housed in hotels, and they are given money, free cell phones, free legal counsel, and free medical care.
3) In the old days, we didn’t have welfare for our immigrants, but they came for the freedom to make a life for themselves. Now they come because our government will take care of them.
4) Our government is criminally irresponsible with other people’s credit cards, racking up debt and interest payments and stealing their incomes through inflation and taxes.
5) Compassion is what you do with your money to help other people. It is not compassion for government to spend money it doesn’t have to help people in irresponsible ways. It is borrowing money that you have to pay back for generations to come.
Why should we expect people to travel thousands of miles under uncertain, hard conditions? Let’s let every poor person in the world apply for assistance from their own countries, and we can just electronically send them the money. That would be far more efficient than our current system, and we could help far more people.