Whenever the topic of immigration comes up on my radio show, callers challenge me, “All Americans started as immigrants.”  Since my accent offers a clue that I wasn’t born in the Bronx, callers imply that I personally must be pro-immigration.  And I am. However, I along with many Americans do not favor being taken advantage of.

Not everyone who comes to this country deserves the title of immigrant. That word describes someone who emigrates from his country of birth and fondly embraces his new home.  Until about 1965 that meant that while retaining fondness for native foods and cultural customs most immigrants wanted a fair chance to build a new life in a wonderful new country.  They asked for nothing more than that.  And through their exertions they built their lives and contributed mightily to everyone else’s.

More than anything else they wanted to become Americans.  They struggled to make sure they and their children became productive and successful citizens.  They all came to America to become American, not just to find jobs.  Economic opportunity was one of the benefits luring them to this country, but it was part and parcel of a whole package that included the English language, citizenship, pride in America’s history and gratitude for becoming part of her destiny.

Today, while many who come to the United States are made in the same image as these earlier immigrants; far too many are not.  Many are not even migrants.  To use an old xenophobic British term—they are foreigners.  It is not I labeling them thus. In both word and action they proudly proclaim it themselves.

Many Americans feel concern about the masses coming over our borders, and find it difficult to distinguish between immigrants and foreigners. One need only be honest to observe the following three trends:

1. America’s educational, medical, and welfare resources are disproportionately burdened by foreigners.

2. This group is disproportionately represented among criminals and prison inmates.

3. Government lacks methods to distinguish between those who wish to adopt the English language and integrate into American culture and those who don’t.

All this flows from a mistaken idea that has become a fatal fault line in the bedrock of American immigration policy.  Government has violated a law of nature as surely as if it had attempted to violate the law of gravity.  American policy has codified the idea that a person can be a recipient without incurring any obligations in return.  It has violated the natural law of reality which is that one cannot get something for nothing.

The good Lord created a world in which He intended humans to learn that one receives in relationship to what one gives.  Human society functions best when those who give nothing, get nothing in return.  That way, at least the next generation learns the lesson of reality.  Even charity and compassion must be delivered with certain expectations from the recipient.

We have to exert ourselves to make anything good happen.  In the very beginning Man was placed in the Garden of Eden to work the garden and make things grow.  If you do not plough and plant, you will not reap—not even if your name is Adam.  Nobody has any right to live by the sweat of another man’s brow. 

Noah was instructed to build an ark which would hold two of every creature as well as all their nutritional needs for a year.  That is one big boat for a 600 year-old man to build.  It is just not possible for any human to have built a vessel larger than a coastal freighter, in the one year God gave him.  How do believers explain this gargantuan feat of backyard boat-building?  The obvious answer is that God assisted Noah with a miracle.  In true rabbinic fashion, this answer only introduces another more important question: if an old man’s twelve months of exertion brought an ark into being only through a miracle, why didn’t God just go ahead and cause the ark to appear overnight through the same miracle?  Doing so would have saved poor old Noah quite a few blisters.  Why should Noah have had to labor for an entire year?  The purpose of the story is to teach us—nothing for nothing.  You want a miracle?  Just start the job.  Get going and God will help.  But you have to put in your part.  Nothing for nothing.

One critical distinction exists between government administered assistance and that offered by private individuals and private charitable organizations.  Government is unable to ask or even expect anything in return from the recipient, be it a student benefiting from public education, a mother benefiting from food stamps, or an illegal immigrant benefiting from the hospital emergency room.  So insidious is this inability that eventually government assistance programs get called “entitlements.” 

When Congress wished to appropriate money for helping people in need, it was Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett who in a speech to Congress in about 1830 said:

Mr. Speaker--I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the suffering of the living, if there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member on this floor knows it.

We have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.

 

That is right.  Government should not be in the charity business.  The most successful private and faith-based charitable organizations administer their aid expecting something in return.  This protects the human dignity of the recipient.  God created us to be givers not merely takers.  Government charity turns recipients into takers.

Most Americans are compassionate and fair. We are willing to give a chance for a new life to people who wish to seize the opportunity and become assets to their new country.  If a school announces that all students will get A’s no matter their tests results, the industrious student is penalized.  When a country announces that everyone coming over the border will be automatically eligible for medical care, schooling and other government charity, the foreigner is attracted.  The genuine immigrant suffers.

The road back leads via the realization that nothing truly does beget nothing.  Only that way will America once again be able to distinguish the immigrant from the foreigner.