How Many Migrants Can a Nation Absorb?

Nov 6, 2018 by Jill

by John Paul Meenan, Crisis Magazine:

The migrant caravan is like something out of a future, apocalyptic dystopia—or, to go back in time, perhaps an image from Exodus—where thousands of men, women, and children trudge a thousand miles under the hot tropical sun across hot tarmac and dirt roads, hoping to land on America’s doorstep, in search of opportunities not to be found in the failed, crumpled, venal, socialist states from which they hail.

What is President Trump to do? Welcome them all in, as one interpretation of Pope Francis’s recent exhortations seems to imply? Turn them back? If so, how? Persuasion? Water cannons? Trump has already sent thousands of armed soldiers—the report yesterday said 15,000—so that the would-be immigrants will face a fully-armed human wall. Are any to be let in? Should agents sift through every one of the migrants, to determine the worthy from the not, and the wheat from the chaff? And, if so by what criteria? And where would they house the thousands for the months this would take?

Clearly, at a certain magnitude—one is hesitant to put a number to this—a “migration” becomes an “invasion,” as in Rome, circa 476, when the barbarians (so-called since they could not speak Latin, and their German tongue sounded like “bar-bar” to the city dwellers) streamed across the borders in ever-greater numbers, thus shifting the demography of an already exhausted and demoralized Empire for ever more, leading to its downfall, as some have argued. Americans should take note.

Yes, Pope Francis keeps reminding us to be generous, to open our “homes,” and to build bridges not walls. All good things to ponder, in the abstract. But we must also keep in mind that a country (or a house, for that matter) without a border to defend and control is no longer a country in any functional sense.

Read here

Read also: Pope Francis peddles fake history and phoney theology to push migration agenda by Jules Gomes, Rebel Priest