by Sandra Coleman
“Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.”
Thomas Sowell
The other day I came home to discover a fawn soundly napping in my back yard. A lovely sight.
The next day, however, when I found him wandering around the yard, I suspected he had lost his mom. When he followed me bleating, his soft fur and adorable eyes peering up, my heart melted, and I felt compelled to help, driven to comfort and sustain.
There is a connection, I think, between my reaction and that of Americans facing the immigration crisis. If we personally encounter or know illegal immigrates, we understandably and rightly sympathize. We want to help. And we naturally conclude that mass immigration will help reduce world poverty. The World Bank, however, reports that 5.6 billion people in the world live on less than two dollars a day.
Let’s say, for example, that we double our yearly one million immigrants to two million. Hardly a dent in the problem and such a situation could overwhelm our physical and social infrastructure. In addition, as the most ambitious and better educated leave their countries for American soil, their own countries lose their most valuable resources, their most energetic and resourceful people. Some immigrants, of course, pose serious threats for us.
History has shown that no nation can survive the conflict of two or more competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; a curse for a society to be. Over 100 languages are ripping the foundation of our educational system and national cohesiveness. The fact that immigration has been good for America does not settle the debate that it must always be good. To make every individual immigrant symmetric and ignore the cumulative impact of millions of them is naïve and sentimental.
If I had tried to feed the fawn cow’s milk, I could have harmed his digestive tract. Fortunately before I did, he had vanished into the trees. Hopefully his mother returned for him.
