It's for the children

In an Aug 10^th piece in Today’s Catholic, my bishop urged us to support the wave of children crossing our southern border illegally. I’ve been toying with a response:

Dear Bishop Rhoades:

 

I have read and reread your column published in the August 10^th edition of Today’s Catholic.  I wasn’t going to reply because I’m a guy who happens to support the rule of law.  In today’s America, on this issue, to many that makes me a hard-hearted, anti-Christian, racist bastard.  Weird huh?  Simply for expecting the nation to have a secure southern border and an orderly process to enter the country, I’m labeled some kind of xenophobic racist.   

We might start by asking our selves how we arrived at this humanitarian crisis.  We have 60,000 children who flooded our border since October.  Why?  Haven’t the poverty, violence and gang crime that have gripped the countries contributing to the flow of unaccompanied minors to our southern border existed for decades?  Why are they risking everything to come to America now? 

One reason - the main reason in my opinion – is that our president, unconstrained by the congress, the constitution, or any other law simply announced to the world that the policy of prosecutorial discretion — which allows immigration agents to defer deportation of low-risk, non criminal undocumented immigrants — would be expanded to all DREAM eligible youth.  As a result, governments are running ads on radio telling their citizens to get their children to America before this arrangement ends.  With no real impediment what-so-ever to their crossing the southern border, they’ve flooded in.  It’s sort of an “if you don’t build it (a wall) they will come” situation.  The “they” in this case not only includes the needy children but also includes large numbers drug traffickers, human smugglers probably some Islamic State terrorists, maybe a few ebola carriers etc. 

Also complicit in this humanitarian crisis, in my opinion, is the US Council of Catholic Bishops.  The USCCB has been an open and loud advocate for amnesty – not only for children but for the 11 million illegal alien already in America.  Don’t think that the USCCB’s continuous calls for amnesty don’t affect people’s decision to risk entering the country illegally.  I agree it’s a humanitarian crisis, but the sequence of events leading to the crisis are all of our own doing. 

I think everyone would agree that America can easily absorb 60,000 children.  Do you happen to know what the total will be or when the crisis will end?  Nobody in government seems to be capable of answering those questions.   When we reunite these children with their families, will that start a chain migration process that will increase the total number migrants entering the country due to this crisis by a factor of five to ten times?  And what about the other children of the world who face similar circumstances but cannot simply hop a train and arrive at an open American southern border?  Do we have some kind of orderly process to address those children? And not to be too crass, since the focus is on illegal migrant children, I assume that all American children have been fully served by USCCB.  

I honestly believe that you and the USCCB don’t see this crisis in political terms.  That said, the undeniable truth is that how this crisis is handled will have far-reaching, long-term political ramification.  As has been the case with most issues of my adult life, USCCB chooses to side with Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry Catholics. 

Governments fail for many reasons.  They become too big, corrupt and unresponsive to the people they are formed to serve.  In the final days, they use the treasury to buy votes and provide their security.  We are 17 trillion dollars in debt with no hope of this generation or the next ten paying that bill.  The IRS, Bureau of Land Management, NSA, DoJ, EPA, VA etc. seem to be staffed wholly with overpaid corrupt bureaucrats more interested in lining their own pockets than serving the people these agencies were established serve.  America has 45 million people on welfare, 11 million on disability, a labor force participation rate not seen since the 80s.  So it’s not surprising that the US Chamber of Commerce would be siding with the USCCB calling for an amnesty to provide a replacement work force for the one our government pays not to work.

 

America has been a force for good for the last 200 plus years, but anything that cannot last forever won’t.  I think America is reaching that point.  Then what?  Who will do the good works for children that Americans have done when we are an entire nation that looks like Detroit or California?