By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Walking home with a neighbor after Midnight Mass last month, I noticed a person bundled up on the bus stop bench just a block north of the church. Even the desert gets chilly on a winter’s night, and it was about 1:30 a.m.
I said “Merry Christmas” and walked a few more steps before I stopped and remarked to my neighbor about her being at the unlighted bench. Was she expecting a city bus here in the middle of the Christmas night?
It’s a middle-class neighborhood, but the wealthy aren’t so far away. Nor the poor.
“She’s homeless,” he instantly replied about the stranger.
If a stranger walks up to me in a daytime parking lot and starts with a story about needing gas money because he forgot and left his wallet at home, I’m completely suspicious and not reaching into my pocket for some cash or even coins.
But this woman hadn’t asked for anything. She just looked lonely and didn’t seem to expect Santa would be bringing her any gifts on the street.
I went back, gave her $10, said “Merry Christmas” again, and walked on to where I had my own front door, lighting, and roof.
I hadn’t solved any major problems for the stranger in the night. If she needed a job or housing, it was still up to her to make a connection. But lending a little hand seemed right to do on Christmas after a church full of people had just prayed before a dimly lighted manger.
The chance encounter might prompt reflections about the never-ending border crisis. We can do something for these needy unauthorized entrants, but they must do more for themselves back at home.
The United States attracts the largest number of immigrants in the world, with a larger immigrant population here than in any other nation. But justice doesn’t demand that we be responsible for that entire world, even though many millions of potential or actual “migrants” apparently wish we would. We have our own families to care for first.
It is grave injustice if the migrants’ own nations are so unfair to them, and grave injustice if the wanderers never cease to enter illegally and impose themselves on us, rather than work hard for redress back home.
Just after Christmas, the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic
reported local churches that receive migrants were stretched to the limit, while ICE was inundated with new arrivals who kept coming across the border. They stop here then move out to other locations around the U.S. Nor was Phoenix unique in being overwhelmed yet again.
The maquiladora factory system was started south of the border to lift economies there, even though it took some jobs away from the U.S. But still unlimited wanderers came here illegally, in addition to the millions who obeyed legal procedures.
Just after Christmas, Phoenix radio host Mike Russell (KFYI, 550 AM) recalled that the creation of NAFTA was supposed to lift Latino economies so that other nations’ citizens wouldn’t have to come here for work. And still they came, in never-ending numbers.
People can have problems that aren’t their own fault, but that doesn’t absolve them from acting responsibly. Unless a person is downright reckless about his health, it’s not his moral fault or a sin if he becomes ill. But he’s obligated as best he can not to spread his disease. How often do you hear that if you’re sick, stay home, don’t infect your office or school?
In fact, spreading infectious diseases is one of the resulting injustices of illegal immigration, although political correctness would like to forbid recognition of this among its various problems.
It’s not Third Worlders’ fault if their nations’ health standards aren’t already up to ours, but it’s an affront to justice when diseases that medical work in the U.S. had eradicated start popping up again to afflict healthy people here.
Amid similar stories, a November 29 Fox News report noted a large number of physical ills in the “migrant caravan” to the U.S. that had been blocked in Tijuana, among them “respiratory infections, tuberculosis, chickenpox and other serious health issues, Tijuana’s Health Department warned,” as well as lice and skin ills.
Guest-hosting for national radio talkmeister Rush Limbaugh on December 31, commentator Mark Steyn marveled at the fact the U.S. government had to erect road signs in southern Arizona to warn drivers of dangers they could encounter due to illegal immigration.
Americans might not even travel safely in their own nation due to the unauthorized invasion.
And Steyn was aghast that ranchers south of Tucson, in the most powerful nation in the world, have to lie powerlessly in their beds at night as they hear illegal immigrants passing through their land.
The Wanderer asked two of its contacts in southern Arizona about the unabated mass illegal immigration. They both declined to be quoted by their actual names because of their security concerns.
One of them, whom we’ll call Mrs. Jones, said, “The fact is that our border security is ‘designed to fail,’ only as much as those who profit from it need the failures.
“Those who profit from human smuggling, human sex-slave trade, drug smuggling and distributing drugs to every state in our nation, transportation contractors paid for with your tax dollars (the big white buses), those contractors who house-feed-clothe illegal aliens paid for with your tax dollars, they all depend on a border designed to fail,” Mrs. Jones said.
“Supply and demand is successful only as long as there are cash cows driven to their businesses. You as a law-abiding, tax-paying United States citizen have NO say in the matter,” she said.
The other woman, whom we’ll call Mrs. Smith, emailed her extended thoughts. The rest of this article is simply an extensive quotation of what Mrs. Smith wrote.
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“As I understand the causes of the huge exodus of the stronger of those coming in droves to America with tenuous claims of the need for asylum, there are a myriad of reasons.
“Some of the current reasons seem to be obvious. The wish for economic opportunity is the most common motivator, which is often forthrightly stated outside of a formal claim for asylum to American immigration officials.
“Another stated fear is of the violence by gangs of their fellow citizens ingrained in the Central American cultures, much as it is in sections of Baltimore and Chicago in the United States.
“But the remote causes are the ones which are deeper and more difficult to overcome. They are also more numerous.
“One obvious one is the fact of an entrenched oligarchy which, unlike the ragtag escapees from religious persecution and tyrannical governments who immigrated to America, was present from the beginning of the Spanish- and Portuguese-developed Central, South American, and Mexican cultures.
“These original elitists were beneficiaries of land grants and business licenses and governing power conferred on them primarily by the monarchs of Spain and Portugal.
“This gift of power and riches allowed the oligarchs to enslave and suppress the indigenous of what became the countries of Mexico and the Southern Hemisphere. And it has not changed much in spite of revolutions and foreign investments and interventions.
“Another reason is the fact that the governing documents of these countries, imposed by the elitists, are often weak where basic human rights and governmental duties are concerned.
“So the instability of these countries continues and the revolutions arise again and the people suffer. And many try to leave.
“But a new phenomenon, the formation of organizations with a short-term and destructive view of how to liberate the poor of these countries, has taken on a prominence.
“Money and organization and food for the journey offered by these groups like Pueblo Sin Fronteras, supported in part by Catholic groups, make the hordes successful in getting to America.
“This solution devastates the sending countries and America. It does nothing to help families stay together or countries to stabilize.
“It may feel good to many to separate families and bring the poor, but the poor and Americans need justice and their human rights protected.
“One way is for America to force the changes in the constitutions and the governments of the sending countries to ensure their own peoples’ safety and opportunities, so they can live in the human dignity everyone deserves.
“One small beginning solution is to help the countries to the south draft and entrench a constitution protecting basic human rights and establishing the rule of law and, most importantly, assure that any changes to such a constitution can only be done with much consultation by the people themselves and not ever by the oligarchic
government alone!
“This would begin a governing by the consent of the governed. It would lift the pall of historical discrimination by the oligarchs of these poor of Central and South America and Mexico.
“But it is only a start. It will take much work to change the problem, but change is crucial to prevent a bigger crisis.”
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