Immigration is a topic I struggle with as a Christian. I don't think there is ever a one set rule on it that can be applied to all situations. Our situation now is a mess, a disgrace, and I am ashamed of it. I don't think that a country has a Christian or moral obligation to let in any economic migrants that want to come. Might be a good policy to let in some but there is no obligation to let in anyone just seeking a better economic future. Our door should always be open to true people in need and hurting though. A case in point is we should immediately take in all the Afghans who helped us. If we don't they will probably be killed. So if they want to come put them on a plane and send them here. People fleeing true violence and civil war. We should take them in and shelter them. I am not sure we have an obligation to keep them long term. We can always have them go home to help rebuild their homes once things have calmed down and gone back to normal. We also have to keep in mind what large scale immigration does here. If we take in to many people of any certain skill set we then hurt those who are already here who have that skill set. Also it might increase discord in communities. I don't know but it might. Anyway it is a tough topic for me. Thoughts?
There are, I think, tens of millions of people who face "true violence" or civil war. Maybe even hundreds of millions. The world is an unfriendly place, overall. Immigration is a question of national policy, based on protecting the citizens of this nation. From that basis we are supposed to look at how it will affect the citizens to let more people in, and decide accordingly. There must be limits and controls, as well as checking to make sure we don't let in dangerous or harmful individuals (including carriers of infectious diseases). I get what you're saying about wanting to let in everyone who is in danger in their home country. Unfortunately I don't think we have the capacity, nor is the good of foreigners the primary basis for deciding; it's the good of the citizens that our government is obligated to protect first. There are those who say letting them all come in is "the Christian thing to do," but the government is not the Church. The government would be negligent (or worse) if it didn't properly control and vet the inflow. It the government were the Church, if the US were a uniformly Christian nation, things would be different; but that's not the case. Yes, as a Christian I would love to be able to "make it all better" for everyone in the whole world. Trouble is, if we just let them all come in willy-nilly, we'd be overloaded; not enough food, housing, electricity generation, etc. Our nation isn't capable of policing the whole world or solving the world's problems or righting all the wrongs around the globe. So I think the best we can do is allow a carefully managed trickle to come in. If only we were carefully managing the trickle! Since the first of the year, we aren't. There's a serious gushing leak right now. And I don't think we should be made to feel guilty for wanting to fix the leak. Too many of the ones who're coming in across the southern border are of the dangerous/harmful variety. The current situation is somewhat analogous to leaving food out on the campsite picnic table in bear country just because we saw some very hungry chipmunks.
Immigration is a challenge, and there are many aspects to the challenge. Both North America and Australia are in a position where the bulk of the population has roots elsewhere within 5-7 generations. Deuteronomy 26:3-5 You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, ‘Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.’ When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God: ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. I take the view that the Deuteronomy passage is challenging us to remember that we ourselves and wanderers and pilgrims in our own place and time. The somewhat woke cartoon is a handy reminder. None the less, nations have meaning, and borders have purpose. Governments are elected by their citizens to protect and lead the nation. So who gets to come in? Currently in the world there are about 70 million refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced persons. The population of the planet is around 7 billion. This means that 1 in 100 human beings is essentially or effectively stateless. Western Nations have been in the sites of many of this group as countries where they might like to belong. Of course some of our largest economies in the world contribute to the number rather than provide rehabilitation for them. Australia has had a lot of criticism. We have largely taken a stance where we say, if you want to come here, it should be because you want to be one of us, not simply make us one of you. The rise of a militant streak in Islam has served to highlight some of this concern. The Lindt Café Siege was a terrorist incident in Sydney, and the perpetrator transpired to have been a person who was denied access through migration, and some how snuck through on a boat as an Asylum seeker. This is something we do not want to repeat. On the other hand there is a Tamil Family, who have become productive members of a rural community, whose permanent residency status has been denied and are subject to an impending deportation, when they clearly seem to be the people we would want. The moment there is a line, it is going to be in the wrong place for some cases. I get that. Our nations have been built of the back of migration, at least economically. Somehow we need to find both charity and wisdom.
I view the entire immigration debate very cynically. It seems that big corporations and political interests control America's immigration policy and use faux morality to keep everyone in line. The Lord has set the boundaries of the nations (Acts 17:26). Nations have a right to ensure their existence (this goes for black, white, green, or yellow people). Most bourgeois Christians that I know support mass migration because it's a form of virtue signalling because it is supported by the most powerful in society (media, banks, corporations): Whereas much care isn't given to the lower classes of their nations, which are looked down upon as racists, backward, and hateful. It doesn't help in modern America that everyone lives in their protected bubbles. Many mass migration Christians have very little to do outside their safe suburban neighborhoods. They really don't interact with the on-the-ground aspects of what mass migration does to less well-to-do communities, but GDP goes up, so everything must be great! Mass migration isn't something that a Christian has to accept. It is a societal/political/economic issue that Christians should be comfortable supporting or opposing due to their conscience and interpretation of the Bible. There were probably Christians or supported the migration of the Goths into the Roman Empire, which led to some major ethnic conflict and the eventual collapse of Rome. However, to the glory of God, God used the collapse of Rome to convert many people and destroy the moral decay of Rome. We should always trust in God's providence no matter what.
A lot of our immigration troubles are caused by the brainless decisions of our countries. The war with Iraq, destabilizing Syria, overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi, and abusing South and Central America etc.
I get what you're saying about wanting to let in everyone who is in danger in their home country. Unfortunately I don't think we have the capacity, nor is the good of foreigners the primary basis for deciding; it's the good of the citizens that our government is obligated to protect first......... By danger I don't mean normal violence or even h igher violence in a country than we are used to. I mean war, deprivation, suppression by governments in a violent way
Yeah it is an issue I struggle with. I also see the affects of large scale immigration of low skilled workers. I deal with the construction business and on the apartments going up right now they seem to be dominating the work force. Twenty years ago that would have been mostly n ative born blacks and whites out there
The problem with compassion is that evil actors can use it for policy purposes. In my travels I’ve seen Muslim countries where one husband may have ten or more wives (polygamy), and by each of them have total of 50 children whom he will purposefully send as panhandlers on the streets. It’s a nice little army, that will reliably return him a nice profit. I’ve been told that sometimes they may even maim their children, disfigure them, cut their arms off, so as to extract even further pity from the passers by. For this reason in the tradition of the Church, the ‘poor’ in the gospels are first and foremost understood as the spiritually poor, not primarily the financially poor. There are times in Christian history, such as in the Netherlands, where the paupers and panhandlers were actually arrested. “He who does not work, shall not eat.” So applying all this to the question of immigration, the migrants have no superior moral status by the virtue of being migrants. They can indeed be decent people whom we should support, or they can be pawns in the hands of evil geopolitical actors trying to corrupt the US political and financial system. At the end of the day, national sovereignty is a real thing, which someone’s poor status does not take precedence over.
In general my understanding is that a Muslim man may have up to four wives (and only in jurisdictions were that is legal). And a a reality check, very few women would have the reasonable prospect of bringing fifty living children to the point of economic usefulness. Four wives and 5 children a piece would certainly be a tribe I would not want to have to feed. None the less I don't think we should exaggerate the issue. There have been a number of studies of fertility rates of Muslim families against Non-Muslim families which suggest that Muslims are in growth and Non-Muslims in decline, simply because they are having more babies than we do. It is one of many challenges in the modern era.
The locale I picked up these stories from was Africa, where I have gone on mission trips. So there, the 10 is definitely (visibly) legal. I am not aware of any upper limit in fact, for them, although someone can correct me if I’m wrong. My point is not that they hade these 20-50 children and then, oops, now somehow they have to feed them. My point was that they have these 20-50 children specifically so they would have more panhandlers out in the streets. These are farmed panhandlers and paupers. And so what, are the rest of us now supposed to be prisoners or morally culpable? The same logic applies to the “migrant caravans” coming to the US organized by marxist groups, specifically to flood and destroy the US economy.
Hands up all those who think the Native Americans should have let the Pilgrim Fathers starve during that first winter and then kept everyone out who tried to set foot on their territory and steal it, give them all sorts of diseases, slaughter their women and children and put them on reservations to become alcoholics or tourist attractions? Uncontrolled immigration certainly didn't do THEM any good, did it. Now the boot's on the other foot, immigration has suddenly become a problem for the 'Americans' who are already there. So what's new? .
The American Indians slaughtered far more European settlers, than the other way around. Do you know anything about early american settler history, or are you just getting your history from fishwrap newspapers like the Guardian? And they are far from being "Native" Americans, since when they crossed over the Bering Bridge from Eurasia, they slaughtered and exterminated all the original people who had lived on this land before them. Then they settled here, and proceeded to exterminate each other's tribes for thousands of years. It is only because the European settlers moved here, that they were forced, upon threat of force, to stop exterminating everyone around them.
And this was when? A bit pre-history I would imagine. Yep it's been going on for thousands of years and the waspy white hoards are only ONE of those big immigration problems your continent has witnessed. Try telling that to the Plains Tribes whose Bison the white settlers all killed and left to rot on the prairy, in the attempt to starve them into submission and steal their land. Savages you did a favour to by relieving them of the hardship of living off the land. That generally seems to be the incomer point of view, I suppose. No doubt the wave coming over the Mexican border has convinced themselves they are going to do you all a favour too by working for next to nothing keeping your houses clean and doing all the menial tasks that a huge economy like the USA desperately needs to function properly. What goes around, comes around, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, history repeats itself for those who refuse to learn from history. Taking over other people's countries eventually has consequences, especially when other peoples learn how to do it. Jesus imagined one kingdom with only one King, and he called it The Kingdom of God. He might have planned to have borders in it but I imagine He more likely thought it should be an international Kingdom with a righteous worldwide government. Of course primarily such an international Kingdom would require each and every subject in it to be spiritually renewed in order to work, so it would have become a heavenly Kingdom BEFORE it could ever be an earthly one. John 18:36. . What think Ye?
Muslim men can have up to four wives. Most Muslim marriages are not polygamous. But each year more than 1,000 men apply for a polygamous union. They do this via the Islamic law courts.14 Feb 2020 Source: Google Search featured content. I attended a lecture-symposium interview religious discussion, and this was discussed and what they said is what Google declares. If there is a practice of 10 synchronous wives I suspect it would be in breach of Islamic tradition and law.
I think it is extremely frowned upon if a husband is insufficiently wealthy enough to support more than one wife for him to be claiming he can. I might be wrong about that though. In any event I guess King Solomon must hold the world record for number of wives + concubines, and he wasn't a Muslim, but again, I may be wrong. .
The population of "The West" (I'm defining as Western Europe, Canada, USA, NZ, Australia, for ease) is 592,857,230. The global refugee population is ~26 million. If everyone chipped in there's more than enough capacity just among the wealthiest countries. If other nations with capacity, like those in Eastern Europe, Latin America and East Asia wanted to chip in it would be even easier. The tension is that it would be really hard to coordinate, really hard to stop others from flooding in once the gates are open and really expensive (in the short term) to integrate that many refugees in a short span of time, say 10 years or so. So we delude ourselves by pretending it's impossible, when really it's only hard. For reference, every country in the world combined only resettled 63,726 refugees in 2019. Of 26 million refugees, every nation on this planet combined can only find enough space for just over 60,000 people. And over half of that figure is covered by just two countries - the US and Canada. Historically if you combine the intake of the US, Canada and Australia, over the past 10 years those three countries settle more refugees than the rest of the world combined. And some years (e.g. 2018), Canada settles more than the US. We've all got much more capacity than we take in, including those three. I don't think there's much wrong with being selfish on an issue so distant, it's impossible for a flawed human to care about so many things so deeply, but I think it's important to be honest about our selfishness and not pretend we're compassionate but limited. If we really tried, and we actually cared as much as we pretend we do, we could have the refugee crisis solved in a decade. Only through that honesty of our own selfishness can we act on our compassion to the extent we genuinely possess it. At the moment we're not doing enough, that is obvious, and we're not doing as much as we actually care to do. Let us be open about it, so we can find the strength and the courage to do a little bit more.
An article from the Epoch Times shows what the situation is like near the southern border: Tensions Run High on Border as Crisis Worsens By Charlotte Cuthbertson July 6, 2021 DEL RIO, Texas—Alison Anderson and her husband, a Border Patrol agent, moved from a remote ranch near Big Bend, Texas, after one too many armed encounters with illegal aliens on their property. Anderson grew increasingly concerned about her ability to protect her young daughters as groups of men would approach the house while her husband was at work. On multiple occasions, she was left to fend off illegal immigrants with her firearm, as the closest help was an hour away. The family moved to Del Rio at the beginning of 2020, and at first she breathed a sigh of relief. “We wanted a safe upbringing for our kids,” Anderson told The Epoch Times on June 25. “I want them to be able to play outside and not have to worry about a group of 15 people or 24 or 40 cutting through. Or someone snatching my kids.” But since January, the masses of illegal aliens traversing through her neighborhood has had Anderson more worried than ever. Border agents caught a convicted rapist several weeks ago on the edge of her property. “Having three little girls and having convicted sexual predators in and or around your property is terrifying,” she said. Her girls are aged 5, 3, and 1. “It’s terrifying, because I feel like I can’t let my guard down for one second. And that is why we left the ranch—because I couldn’t let my guard down for one second. I had little people depending on me, and I don’t like that feeling. I don’t like all the feelings that come with it—the stress, the anxiety, the constant worry.” Once a relatively quiet region for illegal border crossings, the Del Rio Sector is now the second busiest, after the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. “We’ve seen a tremendous increase. So far this fiscal year, today, we’ve caught 144,000 people in the Del Rio sector,” Sector Chief Austin Skero said on June 24. Agents in the sector have also had a 1,400 percent increase in arrests of illegal aliens with sex-related criminal convictions so far this fiscal year, compared to the same period last year, Skero said. A large number of the detainees had convictions for crimes involving a minor. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t read a paper or a report from my agents that talks about criminal aliens, sexual offenders that they’ve apprehended out there,” newly appointed Acting Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said at an event in Del Rio on June 24. As the crow flies, Anderson’s house is four miles from the international border, and the people she encounters are trying to avoid capture. The property lines up next to a road that has become a pickup spot for smugglers to load their vehicles and make a run to a large city, often San Antonio. Anderson said she’s in the process of installing a camera system, and she and her husband plan to build a fence around the house—both things they wouldn’t normally consider. Many of her neighbors are elderly and terrified, she said. “I have one neighbor that said she won’t even go out of her house if her husband isn’t home. “It’s unacceptable to not uphold and enforce the immigration laws that Congress put in place to keep U.S. citizens safe.” Dogs Make the Difference Rancher John Sewell said his three Blue Lacy dogs have likely helped change the outcome in his favor during several encounters with illegal aliens, including when a group of five men approached him and said they wanted a ride in his truck. “I said, ‘No, y’all just need to keep walking,'” Sewell said. “My car was in the opposite direction to where they should have been walking, but they started walking to my car. Well, of course, when the dogs smelled them, it was just a fiasco.” The dogs rounded up the group, but when the illegal aliens started looking for something to pick up in defense, Sewell said he pulled his gun out and told them to get going. “Finally, they got 50 feet or 70 feet away; I called the dogs back, and they went on,” he said. Sewell’s ranch is in Uvalde County, about 55 miles from the international border. It’s also six miles from a Border Patrol highway checkpoint, which means illegal immigrants use his ranch to skirt the checkpoint by foot before being picked up again on the other side. “In 25 years, I’ve never personally carried a gun. In the last five months, I carry one every single day. That ought to tell you all you need to know.” He’s getting a camera installed at his main headquarters, and his wife doesn’t answer the door without a gun in her hand. “Usually before, if someone came to the house, they were in dire straits—really dehydrated or lost or whatever. Now … they want you to give them a ride,” Sewell said. Several months ago, as nine men ran straight toward him, Sewell grabbed his rifle and released his dogs, while yelling at them to stop. The dogs headed the men off, and they jumped a fence and ran off. “If I hadn’t had the dogs, I don’t know what would have happened. I felt like I was going to have to shoot,” he said. “I’m just at my wit’s end. I can’t sustain having to worry about the two out of 10, or two out of 100 bad guys that happen upon me.” Sewell estimates Border Patrol is catching about one-third of the illegal aliens that are crossing. Last week, he personally saw 45 people, and his ranch is 27 square miles of remote pasture. It’s also a hunting ranch, and he’s concerned about what will happen when the season opens on Oct. 2 and hundreds of people with high-powered rifles are in the area. “If it’s anywhere close to this, there’s going to be multiple confrontations every single day,” he said. He attributes the dramatic increase in illegal traffic to the Biden administration’s policies and doesn’t see help coming from Washington. “It’s not our position to send them more money to keep their people in their own country. It’s our position to protect our borders,” he said. “We live in a republic, the last I checked. And that means that our government is supposed to protect us from all of the things like this. But that is not happening.”...
I am a joint world record holder in this regard. Among married men, I share the world's record for having the lowest number of wives in a lifetime: one. Any others here who share that record with me?
I'd like to call attention to the part of your comment that I've highlighted in bold print. The US has definitely done more than its fair share of welcoming the "poor, huddled masses yearning to be free" for the past couple hundred years. US citizens have nothing to feel ashamed about in this immigration issue. The US has had an immigration system that has worked pretty doggone well (not perfect, because nothing done by man ever is perfect) for a long time, and loads of people have found new opportunities here. Problem is, since January of this year our government has mucked it up badly. It has lost control of the situation. Citizens' lives and safety are being placed in jeopardy because of this.