Mass Migration is Not "Loving Thy Neighbor"
A response to insanity coming from Protestants, Bishops, and the Pope
The migration crisis is at a boiling point. The discourse surrounding the mass importation of third-worlders into small, often poor, midwestern towns has reached the highest levels. At the last Presidential debate, Trump lamented that “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.” The noble regime fact-checkers (narrative controllers) quickly retorted that this was disinformation. But it is not. There is a lot of evidence.
This is besides the point. The pet-eating is only a microcosm of the broader problems surrounding mass migration into the United States. Christians of many flavors are noting that we should let these migrants in and do everything we can to help them. We should do this because, as Christ said in the Gospel of Mark, the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. Christ was correct about this, but those who assume his statement mean embracing mass migration have a profoundly disordered view of love that benefits the foreigner at the steep expense of their actual neighbor.
Harming Your Neighbor at Home
There is this myth out there among the progress-Philistines that we live in a “post-scarcity” world. It is an absurd claim made by profoundly uneducated communist sympathizers. Scarcity is a fact of reality. The pie is only a certain size, and we must decide how we are going to slice it up. Sure, we can make the pie bigger, but it is not infinitely large. There is only so much to go around. This goes for jobs, homes, social services, and even food. Migrant influxes impact each of these at the expense of heritage Americans. Heritage Americans are the people whose ancestors built this country, the people descended from your grandparents’ neighbors. They are your neighbors. Obeying Christ’s dictum to “love your neighbor” means that you must first take care of these people. If you are loving others at their expense, your love is not love. It is disordered moral self-pleasure.
Migrants are taking jobs from heritage Americans. They are willing to work for lower wages, partially because they are also receiving government benefits on the side. Even if they are less productive, many businesses that employ them are receiving either tax deductions or subsidies. This makes a migrant an enticing short-term employee. If you run a factory, are you more likely to hire the qualified heritage American, or the less-qualified migrant who comes along with massive tax breaks for your company? Douglas Mackey’s reporting sheds light on the issue:
To make things worse, migrants are often sending remittance payments back to their home countries. On a recent trip to Washington, D.C., I struck up a conversation with my Uber driver. I often ask about where they are from and how long they have been in whatever city they are driving me around. This one mentioned that he is from Kenya. I asked him if he liked the U.S., and he told me flatly that he did not. He told me that he works as a manager at a furniture store during the day, and at night he drives his Uber. He is building up his bank account so he can buy a large ranch back in his home country. This is probably the best-case scenario for a migrant; he is working jobs that provide services for people and paying his taxes. But, even still, he is sending American capital overseas to become a nobleman in his home country.
The plight of domestic workers is something that even Marxists once understood. Bernie Sanders used to be against mass migration until the party leadership told him to get with the program. Yeah man, mass migration is totally just for enriching cultural diversity and not at all about creating a cheap labor base for mega corporations. Tell yourself whatever you want to hear.
Migrants also have a serious impact on the housing prospects for heritage Americans. Fellow Hillsdale student Josiah Lippincott already published an economic analysis on the subject, demonstrating how mass migration drives up housing prices.
In addition, mass migration messes up the rental market. The government is enthusiastically proclaiming that they will help landlords who house migrants. If the government is footing the bill, the demand curve is extremely inelastic in all cases. This means that price changes do not affect the quantity demanded as much as they do in a free market. As a result, landlords are given a golden opportunity to jack up prices when the government pays. Heritage Americans are priced out, and their housing is taken by migrants. This is occurring all across the midwest, with renters being forced to move in with friends because they can no longer afford rent.
Social services are also overloaded. A country that gives a single benefit to any migrant when there are still homeless American veterans indicates that our regime’s priorities are astoundingly backward, if not sinister. Douglass Mackey’s phenomenal reporting on the Haitian crisis in rural Ohio demonstrates how the government is shelling out over $1 billion for migrant benefits.
That guy who, after losing his job and home to migrants, is on his third-to-last fentanyl dose in the streets? That same guy whose great-grandfathers fought in World War 2? No, he is not your neighbor, he does not get a crumb from the government. That money should go to the people who took his job instead! That veteran who got his leg blown off in the Iraq war and got screwed over by the VA, who is now homeless and can’t catch a break? The money to help him would be better suited to pay for luxury hotel rooms for migrants with bogus asylum claims! And even if either of these guys manages to get a job and a home, both of which are now harder thanks to the migrant crisis, he will be taxed to pay for benefits for these migrants.
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Some migrants are also criminals. Oh, but immigrants, both legal and illegal, commit crimes at a lower rate than American citizens! Take a second to understand why this is a terrible argument…
If you cannot figure it out yourself, I will lay it out for you. When immigrants commit crimes, American citizens do not suddenly stop committing crimes. It is an additional crime that is 100% avoidable if the migrant is back in their home country. This is only a valid argument if you assume that every American citizen will be replaced with a migrant. That is the only conceivable way that this argument holds water. It assumes that the ethnic cleansing of every last American citizen. It assumes replacement.
Once again, Douglass Mackey makes some good points on this statistic:
Mass migration is not loving thy neighbor. It is quite the opposite. It harms your neighbor. In Charles Haywood’s book review of St. Basil’s On Social Justice, he states:
It seems quite obvious we should; our primary duties are to those in our immediate community, for practical reasons (such as that we can more easily identify those in need) and also because it is much harder to love abstractions. Moreover, we often owe specific duties to those immediately around us that we do not owe to everyone. This implies that charity should not generally be directed outside the country, or even, usually, outside our own towns and cities (and in any case the vast majority of charity to foreigners is demonstrably wasted, when it is not actually of negative benefit to the recipients). It also implies we should work vigorously against our societies admitting migrants, who depress wages of the working class, thereby increasing poverty of those already in our community, and who also destroy the social fabric of our societies, turning high-trust societies into low-trust societies. No doubt many of those people want to come here because they believe they will be richer here than in their native lands; but we have no duty to facilitate this desire—none at all. In fact, it seems to me that working for the importation of millions of migrants to America, as many “charities” do, notably the enormously powerful and very destructive so-called Catholic Charities, is a gross violation of Christ’s cardinal commandment of charity, of love for our fellow man, cleverly camouflaged as adherence to Christ’s command. Its real drivers are a toxic combination of Left doctrine, which aims to destroy all societal bonds and create fully atomized man; Left hopes that migrants will add to their political power through new voters and vote fraud; and misplaced maternal emotions from legions of childless women unfortunately allowed to influence American public policy. Real charity would be aggressively working to prevent any more migrants from arriving, and to deport those already here.
Ending Mass Migration is Better for the Migrants
Pope Francis stated earlier this week, “To send migrants away, to leave them wherever you want, to leave them … it’s something terrible, there is evil there. To send away a child from the womb of the mother is an assassination, because there is life. We must speak about these things clearly.” This statement was made urging American voters to weigh between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
However, Pope Francis is missing the broader context of the immigration issue in the United States. When there is a pro-open-borders President, the migrants flock to the United States. When there is an anti-open-borders President, such as Donald Trump, the migrants stay home. Todd Bensman, a researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies, explained in his book Overrun how migrants did not bother making the trip to the United States when Trump was President.
This is good for us, and this is good for the migrants. Getting to the United States illegally is extremely dangerous. If one is to take the Mexico route, they often put their lot in with the cartels, paying them for safe transport. This enriches the cartels, which allows them to expand their drug and human trafficking operations.
In addition, who is going to be the best at smuggling people whilst evading law enforcement? Human traffickers are best qualified for such a task. This creates a dangerous situation for illegal immigrants as they attempt to get to the United States. It is bad for them, and it is bad for Americans.
Christendom Needs to Do Better on Immigration
Yesterday, Ohio Bishops released a statement on the migrant crisis afflicting communities like Springfield. However, instead of sympathizing with the now-homeless and recently unemployed Americans or those who got in a migrant-caused car accident (there are many) or were threatened by migrants with machetes (again, many such cases!), they encouraged us to do more help the migrants and integrate them into the community. But there is no more community. Adding 20,000 migrants to a town of 50,000 destroys the local community. There is no more cohesive social body when 33% of the population comes from a completely different culture. The statement is remarkably insensitive to the plight heritage Americans are facing. To quote X poster Limitanei:
Despite [the Bishops’] platitudes and equivocation on “partisanship and ideology,” they have made their preference obvious. With every point of rhetoric they act as agents of the Left, turning their backs in the twisted name of faith on the residents who see injustice and communal obliteration.
They deny the well-documented belief of Haitian wrongdoing within Springfield community as sinful gossip. They ignore the questions of consent and common good to insist that unconditional acceptance of the migrant is the requirement upon the Catholic. They guilt the faith with no other option but complicity as “the people of Springfield integrate their new Haitian neighbors.”
It is telling they use only the words of recent Popes and ignore the words of ancient Church Fathers like St. Aquinas, who cautioned, “…if foreigners were allowed to meddle with the affairs of a nation as soon as they settled down in its midst, many dangers might occur.”
By using the words of Pope Pius XII, the man who decried global communism as an atheistic ideology aimed at, “upsetting the social order and at undermining the very foundations of Christian civilisation”, these bishops undermine the truth, demand the faithful stay silent, and consent to the unending waves of foreigners. It is a disgrace and a failure.
Across denominations, Christians who defend mass migration based on Christian principles are scandalizing the faith. This is a disordered love, one that privileges the “neighbor” 8,000 miles away over the true neighbor suffering in our communities.
Do you want to truly help foreigners living under terrible regimes? The answer is not mass migration. The answer is not even foreign aid. The best possible thing that can be done for third-worlders is something that has become taboo in the last century: colonization. But I will leave that for another time.
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