Immigration charitable, but unsustainable

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Executive director, Council for Secular Humanism
Tom Flynn
Immigration charitable, but unsustainable
Q: Illegal immigrants are flouting U.S. laws, but does affluent America (or Arizona for that matter) have a larger moral or spiritual obligation to help illegal immigrants who are trying to better their lives? What about religious obligations to welcome the stranger? Are we our brother's keeper?
Illegal immigration is one of those situations where I think Christian notions of charity and welcoming the stranger lead us in exactly the wrong direction. (Just one more reason why I'm proud to be a secularist.) To me, most commentators on both sides of the immigration debate miss the real point, which is (or should be) population policy. Yes, Mexico has a surplus of people, many of them poor and miserable, who will pay any price to go elsewhere. Yes, America must seem a glittering paradise to many of them. But the qualities that make America so attractive are now endangered by -- OK, I'll say it -- excessive human numbers. This is especially true in our southern border states, where existing populations already tax natural resources, especially water supplies, far beyond the point of sustainability.
Viewed from that standpoint, and in the context of secular values, Arizona is already overpopulated . A substantial fraction of the people who live there already will need to go back north just to make this sere desert landscape sustainable in the long term. Allowing large-scale immigration is out of the question for reasons that have nothing to do with race or culture.
Of course, recognizing this requires us to rethink a couple of traditional verities. One is Christianity's historic call to welcome the stranger at all times and places (a call Christians have a very uneven record of heeding, by the way). Another is America's civic tradition of welcoming anyone with a strong back and a willingness to work. A century and a half ago, the nation needed as many such immigrants as it could get. Today we don't have natural resources enough to provide for the folks who are already here.
There's an overwhelming new fact we need to take account of that trumps both of these traditional considerations: in a very real sense, America is full.
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/o...d_borders.html