There is one aspect of the immigration debate that most liberals do not like to discuss. Recognizing a right for anyone to flee misfortune, liberals invite them to pour over the border, which most do illegally. However, they refuse to look at the reasons behind the growing migrant stream and seek to stop it.
Dealing with the issue this way is like bailing water out of a boat with a large hole in its hull. After a while, even the most heroic efforts to stay afloat come to nothing. Unless the hole is repaired, the ocean water will overwhelm the ship.
This metaphor describes the present American immigration policy and its disastrous consequences.
Making Distinctions
A distinction must be made between two immigrant groups.
The first is the traditional immigrant category of people. Like the generations that built America, they seek opportunity and a better life, want assimilation into the American people and are willing to take the necessary legal and often difficult route to citizenship and its duties.
The second migrant group is by far the greater number today. These are the people who are fleeing from evil and oppressive regimes, criminal states and failed policies (frequently a stripe of Socialism). These migrants enter and stay in America any way they can, usually illegally. Unlike the first migrant group, however, many, if not most, of these unfortunate people would much rather have remained in their native countries. They are people who have become displaced.
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Simply supplying those in this latter group with a new place to stay does not address the real problem. Often, it only aggravates it by encouraging ever greater masses of “nation-orphans” to risk emigrating, causing them untold suffering and even death.
Beyond Helping Others
Of course, there is nothing wrong with helping others secure the means for a dignified life, which they lack due to oppressive governments and internal chaos.
Justice, charity and solidarity call for helping those in need of liberty and material well-being. Americans have been very generous in helping millions in this situation.
However, these unfortunate individuals are the victims of a greater injustice that most liberals refuse to see, much less address. These displaced people have been deprived of a forgotten right that lies at the core of what is wrong with America’s current immigration policy.
The Right to a Homeland
That forgotten right is the right to a homeland. Communist, socialist, Islamist and other crime-ridden regimes tyrannically take away this right, depriving their citizens of something extremely precious. American policy should do everything possible to help secure or restore this right.
All individuals need a place that comes to define them. They have a right to a place they can call home, where they feel most comfortable. They can demand that this right not be taken from them
This home is not easily replaced by an arbitrary place—as pursued by America’s present policy. It may take decades for a person to feel at home in a new place.
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Thus, rather than concentrating on resettling millions of people, a correct immigration policy should seek to punish those regimes that drive their own people from their homelands in despair. A correct immigration policy would help create the conditions for people to stay in their homeland countries, not move to another.
The Home as a Place of Development
Indeed, homelands work because people sense security in what is known and familiar. These places provide an atmosphere of stability and affection to help residents develop their talents and abilities to the fullest. Citizens can appreciate the local culture, which belongs to them as a birthright.
For example, the tragedy of a homeless man consists of being deprived of a place where he might develop his qualities, raise a family and contribute to society. The government or some charitable organization might provide him with shelter, but this can never replace the security, affection and well-being of a family home.
Thus, those evil regimes that deprive their citizens of their homeland take away the immediate means for individuals to develop themselves normally and fully. It is comparable to taking a boy away from his parents and siblings with no just cause and placing him with others in a forced adoption. The boy will be marked for life by the trauma and never feel entirely at ease in the new situation.
While it is praiseworthy to provide for those in great need, it is much better to help those deprived of home and homeland to recover them, giving them again the natural object of their patriotic love.
The Impulse to Turn Inward
The right to a homeland comes from human nature. Homelands are a natural development of a person’s drive to self-sufficiency. In the face of a hostile world, people will turn inward and provide for their needs. This tendency begins with the individual and is extended to the family, community, and nation.
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The origin of this turning inward comes from a desire to express one’s personality and originality. To do this, the person draws from and vigorously develops those God-given qualities and possibilities that make each one unique and unmistakable in the order of creation. Communities and nations analogously turn inward to develop themselves.
Formation of Homelands
This self-sufficiency easily leads to the formation of homelands since these inward movements come to be tied to a community and place.
Hence, a homeland is formed by the intimate relationship between a people and a place. Each place has its own vegetation, lay of the land, natural wonders, hinterland, and mysteries.
When families settle in a place, they gradually discover the area’s features. They curiously take on some characteristics of the area, and it might be said that the place comes to reflect a bit of the mentality of the settler families. A rugged land often leads to the forming of a hardy people, whereas a sunny Mediterranean climate might result in inhabitants with cheerful dispositions.
True communities and homeland regions form in the fortuitous circumstances where families feel the happiness of being at home, anchored in a particular place. They form a culture that expresses the fecundity of this relationship and the affections of their hearts.
The nation becomes the true home above all others. Hence, inhabitants become sensitive to a place and develop natural preferences for the setting where they were born or raised: its panorama, land, climate, or food. They come to prefer their own land even to other places with better and richer resources. Their place has a wide variety of delights that, for them, are supreme. No other place can rival what their own means to them.
The Destruction of Homelands
So much of modern immigration comes from the destruction of homelands. Communist, socialist and Islamist evil regimes brutally break the strong links between peoples and their native lands. They turn flourishing nations and cultures into hellish wastelands. As a result, people flee in despair from the places for which they, and their forefathers before them, have natural affection.
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Nations like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, for example, were once stable and happy Latin American countries. Today, they are reduced to the most abject misery. Millions have fled these countries rather than continuing to live there in desolation, oppression and deprived of all honor. This state of affairs represents a massive injustice that demands that all free nations do everything possible to bring down these torture chamber regimes that deny human rights and decency to their own peoples.
Similarly, if on a lesser scale, the socialist policies pursued by governments in Mexico and other Latin American countries, for example, prevent their economies from reaching their full potential and thus also favor the present immigration crisis on the American border.
U.S. policy should reflect and implement the intent to liberate all nations, but especially those in the Western Hemisphere, from such evil ideologies.
Western nations can receive these homeless masses, but by far, the greater charity would be to do everything possible to defeat, not appease, the evil regimes driving their own peoples to despair. They should punish the evildoers and help restore these homelands to their people, to those for whom they are the country of their birth and the focus of their hearts’ desires.
Isolationism Makes Problem Worse
Adopting isolationist policies in the empty hope they will allow America to avoid the world’s problems only makes things worse. Such baseless hopes fail since when free nations fall to evil or corrupt regimes, inevitably, the next step is that masses of desperate “nation-orphans” appear at their doorstep seeking refuge.
Instead of isolationism, America and the West should pursue policies that favor this natural and vital link between a nation and its people.
Thus, for example, it is better to vigorously support Ukraine’s defense from Russia’s unjust aggression than to abandon it to defeat and cruel occupation. Ukraine’s defeat will open the floodgates of millions more “nation-orphans” who will come in despair to America and the countries of the West.
A Cold and Sterile Policy
The best policy must address causes, not effects. Today’s crisis calls on America to vigorously defend peoples’ right to their own homeland.
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Doing so will prevent America from becoming the adoptive homeland of the world.
Massive immigration is destructive to America, the host nation. It overloads governmental services, dilutes the culture and ends up depriving Americans of a properly functioning homeland.
Many liberals insist upon massive immigration as a means for leveling the inequality between nations. They promote a cold and sterile policy of indiscriminate resettling of people anywhere that treats people as if they were all equal—mere numbers without roots, sentiments, attachments or aspirations. Such policies do not consider the most important and human aspects of life.
American policy should take a more Christian approach that considers the needs of souls to express themselves where they are most comfortable—in their respective homelands.
The misguided policy of enabling the massive resettlement of millions in America will not stop the longings of these orphaned hearts for their native lands. Moreover, as stated, it is extremely destructive to America. More than just stopped, open border policies need to be reversed through the eradication of the evil regimes that drove so many millions in despair to America’s shores. This bringing of justice to evildoers, this truly chivalrous defense of widows and orphans, would allow millions of displaced migrants to fulfill their hearts’ greatest desire—to return home, to be back again in their own homeland.
The above article is based on considerations found in the author’s book, Return to Order: From a Frenzied Economic to an Organic Christian Society—Where We’ve Been, How We Got Here and Where We Need to Go.