People sometimes say that they support legal immigration, but not illegal immigration. What do we mean when we say we support legal immigration? Trump, for example, thinks that some people should be allowed to come into the country, those who have a lot of skills, but he thinks that we have an obligation to allow others into the country who may need to come, but won't necessarily benefit OUR economy. So, if you want to come into our country, you can't just get in line. For many people, there is no line to get in. Should people be allowed into our country for compassionate reasons, or does allowing such people into the country render us suckers?
41 comments:
No country should tolerate illegal immigration. Regarding legal immigration, many countries have much stricter laws than we do (which makes it cute when they criticize us). And some of those with far less control, like Sweden, have recently found out the problem with such a policy. At some point it becomes detrimental. It is in every nation's best interest to regulate immigration based on its economic and demographic needs.
Flawed humans in a fallen world can't accomplish perfection. We have to balance compassion with practicality. Where that balance should rest is of course debatable.
I'm probably alone in this on this forum, but I quite sincerely would like to see international borders abolished altogether, and the term "illegal immigration" consigned to the dustbin of history. A person ought to have the right to live wherever he chooses. Nation states ought to be like states (within the United States). I need no permission to move from Idaho to Kansas, or from Alaska to Rhode Island. The same ought to hold true for moving from Pakistan to Nigeria, or from Guatemala to the United States.
I've written this before on this website, and I repeat it here to show that I meant what I said.
Hal,
Mexico is the most obvious and pertinent one that comes to mind, for a quick response.
One world government can't have any possible downsides. Abolish national sovereignty!
Who's advocating one world government? I certainly am not! Because I can freely move from Massachusetts to Mississippi doesn't mean that those two state governments do not exist, nor does it abolish their many differences.
Did you not notice that both Massachusetts and Mississippi allow this since they are part of a superior governing body?
Our current world order is not set in stone, noe is it in any fashion divinely established. In the MIddle Ages, the various kings were (in theory) subordinate to the Holy Roman Emperor. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, this was no longer the case. That was the beginning of the Modern Era of the sovereign nation state. And we can all see what a disaster that proved to be. The Napoleonic Wars, WWI and WWII were the result. We are currently in the midst of a realignment in the international order, and who knows what will result? One thing is for certain, and that is that the day of the sovereign nation state (despite Brexit) is at an end. The planet is too small to allow such frippery. Global challenges such as climate change, etc., simply cannot be overcome by the status quo.
I do not know whether the coming era will be defined by a "one world government" or something else, but what we have today is not only not helping matters, it is actively hindering us from arriving at workable solutions.
Perhaps we need to revive the Holy Roman Empire?
Perhaps we need to revive the Holy Roman Empire?
So long as only Catholics are under their authority!
The Roman Empire came into existence by conquering diverse peoples and keeping them under control. Outside of the Empire were the "barbarians" who were not periodically at war with the Empire.
The Empire eventually fell to pieces since it did not originally come about by mutual consent and the cost to maintain it by force (with blood and treasure) proved too much.
The post WWII empire of the US/EU is disintegrating just like the Soviet Union did.
The HRE in many ways reminds me of the (pre-Trump) USA. Both entities were defined by adherence to an ideal, rather than to a people. Allegiance to both was loyalty not to blood or to land, but to order and process.
The Protestant revolt destroyed all order in Christendom and bequeathed to us our current international anarchy, with its hundreds of millions of dead. The Trumpian Revolution blew to pieces the Era of Constitutional Order in North America. God only knows what bloodshed and chaos will be the lot of our children as a result.
The Trumpian Revolution blew to pieces the Era of Constitutional Order
Please. You don't even believe the words of the Constitution should mean what they meant when they were written. So much for the "Era of Constitutional Order".
Also, your Trump derangement is showing again. Trump being elected is the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation? Haha!
The Protestant revolt destroyed all order in Christendom and bequeathed to us our current international anarchy, with its hundreds of millions of dead.
Quite the claim. At any rate, I don't want to get into a Catholic Church bashing discussion.
"Trump being elected is the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation? Haha!"
Gigantic historical hinges often turn on the most trivial of causes (such as Henry VIII's lust, or a stupidly designed 2000 election ballot in Palm Beach County). I guess a Catholic in Renaissance England might be accused by you of having "Elizabethan derangement syndrome".
Legion,
"National sovereignty", a direct outcome of the Protestant Revolt, is one of the most disastrous ideas in human history. Oceans of blood have been its result, yet no one can point to a single good thing to have resulted because of its triumph.
Legion,
Thanks for not wanting to bash Catholics on a thread related to immigration policy rather than religion.
Starhopper,
You are out of bounds. Regardless of how much you hate Trump.
Who, BTW is a Protestant!
"Who, BTW is a Protestant!"
He claims to be, but shows no signs whatsoever of being an actual Christian of any stripe.
"You shall know them by their fruits."
It's fruity to claim Donald Trump is Martin Luther.
He's living rent free in your head.
"It's fruity to claim Donald Trump is Martin Luther."
Oh, no. I have far more respect for Martin Luther than I do for our current president. If nothing else, his was a truly great mind, and he was an important theologian (despite being a heretic), and quite a fine composer to boot.
But Trump is no Luther for sure! I was only comparing their overall negative influences on world history. Luther's is sadly demonstrable, whilst Trump's is yet to be seen - although its trajectory is already frighteningly obvious.
For context, here is my list of the 10 most disastrous personalities in world history:
1. Mohammed
2. Josef Stalin
3. Antiochus Epiphanes
4. Adolf Hitler
5. Martin Luther
6. Christopher Columbus
7. Muhammad Ali Jinnah
8. Attila the Hun
9. Alexios Angelos
10. Whoever invented rap music
bmiller said...
Did you not notice that both Massachusetts and Mississippi allow this since they are part of a superior governing body?
There are places you can move freely between the US and Canada, as well.
Starhopper said...
10. Whoever invented rap music
You hate the blues? Because rap is the inevitable consequence thereof.
Did Martin Luther have wars between nation states as a goal when he posted his Theses against the many problems with the Catholic Church? Did Hitler have his atrocities in mind as a goal? Should we burn effigies of Henry Ford for the millions of car deaths he obviously intended by mass producing automobiles?
I'm not familiar with some of the names on the list, but I do know that one of the names doesn't belong. Otherwise One Brow has an excellent point - if you cast full blame for an unintended outcome, then at the very least the blues players are to blame for rap.
Oh, I'm not (actually) blaming the people on my list for anything. As I (or so I thought) rather carefully wrote, these individuals (other than my facetious No. 10) were the proximate cause for more suffering than any other similar sized grouping I can think of. Not that they themselves necessarily participated in the evil that followed in their wake. In short, the world would have been a far more peaceful and pleasant to live in place had none of them ever been born.
To attribute the same level of causality between Luther and Stalin and Hitler just doesn't work for me.
You may blame Luther for the splintering of Christendom, but the deaths due to the wars that followed were minor compared to WWII and the purges of Stalin.
You also forgot about Mao and Lenin. But Marx was the common inspiration of all of the worst monsters of the 20th century.
I gave serious thought to including Mao, but didn't for 2 reasons:
1. I wanted to "spread the wealth" as it were amongst the years, and not not have a list with half the names from just the 20th Century. So I have one person from the Classical Era, 2 from the transition period (5th through 9th centuries), 1 from the Middle Ages, 2 from the Renaissance, 3 from the Modern Era, and one wild card.
2. I wanted all the individuals to have damaged human society on a global scale, and I regard Mao as basically a regional disaster.
"To attribute the same level of causality between Luther and Stalin and Hitler just doesn't work for me."
Hitler and Stalin were undoubtedly more personally responsible for the evils they unleashed on the planet, but face it - without Luther, we would arguably have today a united Western Christendom. (Heck, even the Orthodox might have re-entered the fold by now, were the West not so badly splintered amongst itself.) We wouldn't be plagued by 30,000 squabbling denominations, each rather ridiculously claiming to be the sole depository of divine truth. We would not have criminal televangelists getting rich off of gullible ignorant followers. Heresies like the Prosperity Gospel would have never gotten off the ground. There would be no Mormon church, because that faith was basically a spinoff of the mid-19th Century revivalist culture in the US. There likely would have been no Jim Jones, no Heaven's Gate, no L. Ron Hubbard, and no David Koresh - or else their influence would have been immeasurably smaller.
True, it's unlikely that Luther ever foresaw such a sorry state of affairs, but he remains the primary reason for things being the way they are.
Mao, Stalin and Hitler were all students of Marx. So you could replace them all with him, especially if you want Luther on the list.
without Luther, we would arguably have today a united Western Christendom.
Devil is in the details, as it were. United under what? Protestants by definition do not believe that the Catholic Church is the actual church, so being united under Catholicism is not a very appealing option for Protestants.
We wouldn't be plagued by 30,000 squabbling denominations, each rather ridiculously claiming to be the sole depository of divine truth.
I note Catholics rarely include themselves in this! I myself would basically call the Catholic Church one of the first denominational splinterings, except they gained the power of the state through the Emperor and were able to exert much more influence than any other denomination. But even discounting that, splintering was already occurring as early as the time of Paul's epistles. It helped the Catholics maintain control when they essentially controlled the government and could punish and even execute those who strayed, but eventually, because of or despite the Catholic Church, people would have largely become literate and someone would have made a non-Latin Bible they could read. The Berean spirit was going to emerge one way or another, with or without Luther, and human nature would lead to schisms. :)
We would not have criminal televangelists getting rich off of gullible ignorant followers. Heresies like the Prosperity Gospel would have never gotten off the ground.
True, but Catholics do have their own unique organizational struggles that my Bible study never will.
This is why MSM lacks credibility.
I've got to wonder if it's because when a MAGA hat is involved the wearer must be pure evil.
I have had dealings with the Black Hebrew Israelites on multiple occasions in Baltimore. Although they are absolutely loony in their theology and their bizarre racial ideas, they are to a person some of the politest people you will ever come across, and I was never once condemned for being white. I at no time for even a nanosecond felt threatened by them, and it is possible to have a reasoned discussion with them about their admittedly weird beliefs.
And by the way, in a city with way, way too many murders, you won't see any when the BHI are around. Same thing goes for the Nation of Islam. Zero crime while they're on the scene.
Something to think about, when you read news reports condemning these people. The true story is very nuanced - not at all simplistic.
The news story condemned a high school student for waiting for a bus and not reacting when an elderly man pounded a drum in his face (he's not from BHI).
If reporters didn't have an agenda they would have gathered eye witness reports from all witnesses regarding "who, what, when and where" rather than just talking to the guy with the drum.
And BTW, just because no BHI person ever threatened you doesn't mean that some of them didn't insult a group of high school students. Are you saying the high school students are lying?
Of course my comment was directed at the reporting of the event by the MSM.
Never heard of the BHI or the guy with the drum or the high school.
But look at the reaction from these "trusted" outlets:
CNN
PBS
NBC
Forgot this:
“[The] incident involving students from Covington Catholic is harassment, but unfortunately not surprising. The racist rhetoric coming from our politicians normalizes hate across the country & in our classrooms.” —SPLC’s Maureen Costello,
Post modern ideas of science as social contract vs scientific defense of truth,
Metaqcrock's blog
Marx and Engel's vision of paradise on earth.
Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung January 1849
The Magyar Struggle
...But at the first victorious uprising of the French proletariat, which Louis Napoleon is striving with all his might to conjure up, the Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names.
The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.
Imagine there's no Slavs. It isn't hard to do.��
The heart of socialism, the "-ism" that started genocide.
Crickets from the socialists?
Maybe they don't understand their own heritage.
I doubt there are any "socialists" amongst the readers of this blog.
Haha!
OK. Defenders of socialism.
But it also says a lot that you responded. :-)
bmiller said...
Mao, Stalin and Hitler were all students of Marx. So you could replace them all with him, especially if you want Luther on the list.
Two out of three isn't bad for you.
bmiller said...
Crickets from the socialists?
Maybe they don't understand their own heritage.
Why would socialists respond to attacks on communism?
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