Tag Archives: immigration

Too Rich to Care?

Maybe we grew too rich to care. That is, enough of us became too rich to care. That is, to care for the less well off—in our town, in our country, in our world. Anybody walking down an urban American street may understand that plenty of people need help.

Our drug addicts need help. Who desires to be addicted to drugs or see their loved ones become addicted? Yet, in one of the richest countries in the world, we were unable to overcome the forces that decreased the ability to stay off drugs. We’ve heard a lot about stopping drugs from coming in—but if more of us had a purpose in life that involved contributing to society, we might never consider something like drugs, including alcohol.

When we gave the rich more ways to opt out of paying income taxes, we had less money to fund social security or deal with our ever increasing national debt. Or indeed, to fund programs to help addicts kick drug habits.

We also desire both less immigrants and less children. While our birth rate drops, we build walls to keep out migrants who could help make up for our decreasing births. That means, of course, less taxpayers for our increasingly elderly population—or to fund our military or programs to help recovering addicts.

We have increasingly seen our government as set up to help those who already have plenty to grab more. Eventually, though, those who don’t have, will outnumber those who do.

After the Second World War, our country was blessed with a flood of immigrants from countries devastated by that war. They worked in our factories—and also consumed the goods from those factories, contributing to a rising standard of living.

Immigration needs to be controlled, removed from the hands of traffickers, but immigration itself is an asset. It means growth, not only physically, but in new ideas and art as well as new workers and consumers. If we close off immigration entirely and see it as a curse to be overcome, we will die from a lack of growth in ideas as well as people.

We Need Immigrants

The United States, like many developed nations today, is facing population decline within its native born population. Fortunately, lots of people would like to immigrate here. Many of them have skills we need, such as nursing skills for an aging population and agricultural workers for our farms. Some have computer and other skills for higher level jobs.

Meanwhile, paths for legal immigration are narrow. The desire to immigrate, with no meaningful legal line to join for many, feeds irregular migration, leading to its control by gangs and sometimes drug dealers.

“States that focus on border restrictions, mass deportations, or the abrogation of legal protections for asylum seekers will fail to solve the problem. They will simply redirect it while creating a new host of problems that will, in the long term, feed the problem rather than solve it. They will empower criminal networks and black markets while leaving their own economies worse off. The system will continue to decay.” (“Migration Can Work for All; A plan for Replacing a Broken Global System,” Amy Pope, Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2025.)

Our current system feeds irregular migration, as family members migrate irregularly to stay with those already in the U.S. “That so many migrants who are undocumented find jobs in the informal markets of their destination countries signals an imbalance between legal immigration pathways and economic need . . .”

The author suggests one approach is for countries with labor shortages, such as the United States, to set up programs within the refugee sending countries to train would be immigrants for jobs needed in the receiving country. This would include preparing them for legal migration.

If reasonable pathways to migration are in place, countries will have more justification for shutting down the illegal ones. The idea is not to stop migration but to channel it, then work to shut down illegal migration traffic.

Migration from places with less possibility for improving one’s life to ones of greater possibility has been the norm since civilization began. Better to work with it for good.

To Make a Better Life

Sometime back before the American Revolution, my ancestors, probably including those of both English and Irish nationalities, immigrated to what would become the United States.

They were part of the great migration of European peoples to the Americas. Native Americans would suffer greatly, pushed further and further into less fertile areas, forced to give up sovereignty and lands.

Slaves and their descendants suffered also, shackled by prejudice that denied them the American dream.

For people like my ancestors, however, the new lands allowed them to flourish as they probably never would have in Europe. Like other immigrant families, some of my ancestors did better than others. A few became well-off, others became small farmers, others eventually landed in urban areas, becoming workers and small business owners, surviving both depression and times of war.

My own parents kept their home during the Great Depression of the thirties, saved by one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s new deal programs. Later, they managed to send my brother and me to college. We both enjoyed middle class American lives.

Not surprisingly, I have sympathy for immigrants. I think one of the greatest gifts the country has been granted is renewal brought about by managed immigration. Indeed, the castoffs of Nazi Germany, given sanctuary in the United States, helped power the defeat of that same regime.

Some of my beliefs, I freely admit, come from my Christian faith, a belief that those who are blessed are obligated to bless others. We the blessed, are called to share those blessings.

This country has allowed some to amass great wealth. I don’t believe that being rich is in itself a sin. I do believe it is a great responsibility. The responsibility is to choose between the path of the rich man in Jesus’ parable who ignored the poor seeking crumbs from his table, or that of the one known as the Good Samaritan, who chose to help the needy one he happened to meet.

People Versus Machines?

“Machines are not better at personal care, machines are not better cooks, and machines will not necessarily be better than people at driving trucks.”

Lant Pritchett, the author of these words, is a research director at the University of Oxford and a former Wold Bank economist. Pritchett makes the case for immigration over automation in “People Over Robots,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2023.

He points out that some automation replaces the work of a laborer with the work of a customer, as when a customer must use a self-checkout machine. Pritchett doesn’t mention it, but I suspect some of us may miss the human interaction with a live cashier as well.

The dramatically lower birth  rates in developed countries, as well as the increasingly higher education levels, have led to a shortage of workers for “manual, nonroutine tasks,” Pritchett writes. We are, it seems, in need of workers while less developed countries have a surplus of potential workers. Pritchett sees as a waste of time and resources the efforts to develop machines for work better done by humans.

A lack of agricultural workers may result in less than beneficial results, Pritchett writes. Farmers relying on machines may prefer genetically modified products that can be better harvested by machines such as thicker-skinned tomatoes. Automation may tend to eliminate foods that can’t easily be harvested by machines, such as asparagus and strawberries.

As Pritchett points out, the movement of labor happens with or without legality. The problem with illegal movements is their tendency to exploitation and abuse.

It seems a waste of both people and nature not to provide for people-oriented immigration policies.

Building Up the Land to Restore the Future

When I was growing up, my father used to spread the leaves gathered each fall from our trees into a small plot at the back of our yard, rather than burn them. He used the rich humus produced by the leaves over the years to enrich soil for our plants.

This kind of activity is practiced on a larger scale by an organization called “Plant with Purpose.” This group works with farmers in Mexico, Haiti, and other countries to merge economic and environmental renewal with spiritual renewal.

Much of the land in poorer countries has been depleted through years of deforestation and over-farming. Unable to produce a good living from the land, young men emigrate to cities, sometimes returning later addicted to alcohol or drugs and drawn to criminal gangs practicing violence.

“For those living in rural villages, the answer to emigration is often simple: Restore the land to restore the future.” (“Better Than a Wall,” Sojourners, August 2017)

Such groups promote sustainable agricultural practices, including “cover crops, organic compost, and natural soil erosion barriers to revive farmland.”

Better agricultural practices on one farm in Mexico included planting to maximize this particular plot of land. Food crops were planted on parts of the hilly land, then trees above the crops. Runoff water was used for irrigation. Grass during the dry season fed animals.

The soil gradually was replenished and produced better crops, leading to more food and a higher income. As neighbors were drawn to reproduce the process, immigration lessened. Fewer young men migrated northward.