When I was growing up in Old America, most people went to church and subscribed to some notion of Christian charity. As adults, most of my friends continue to hold fast to this principle, myself included. It has always been satisfying and humbling to help out those who need a hand, and many organizations — religious and otherwise — have long-established infrastructure and operations to facilitate it.
But with the destabilizing influx of millions upon millions of illegal aliens into the country, with help from actors who have obvious anti-American intent and with no end in sight, I have lately given up supporting many of my local charities with my time or donations. I’m incredibly sad about this; it felt good to help needy neighbors. Now that there is a burgeoning population of foreign nationals with their hands out, however, I can’t bring myself to do it. Here are the major issues I’m having:
Illegal immigrants brought their plight upon themselves.
One of my biggest struggles as a Christian has always been to refrain from judging the people who need help. We’ve all made poor life choices at one time or another, and oftentimes the old saying applies: there but for the grace of God go I.
But there’s another old saying that holds equal sway with me: reward bad behavior, and you get more bad behavior. I have never believed in enabling poor decision-making.
It’s incredibly dangerous and expensive for impoverished people to traffic themselves to the United States. The ones who don’t die often suffer traumatic experiences and wind up indentured to the smugglers and coyotes who take them across the border. They wind up in a strange land with no resources. They made a deliberate, incredibly consequential decision to undertake this course of action, and the results are on them.
It’s never enough.
One faith-based social club I know does an annual coat drive for children. It’s a lot of work and some expense, but they’re happy to help keep local kids warm. At the giveaway last November, the recipient ranks were swelled with newcomers who happily helped themselves to parkas and jackets. Then, on their way out the door, they began taking the wrapped gifts from beneath the Christmas tree in the corner. The organizers had to explain that the gifts were decorations — just empty boxes — not additional presents on top of the warm coats they were giving away that day. It was a head-scratcher moment, but it underscored that although Biden’s third-world colonizers are not the first mass of penniless immigrants to the United States, they are the first that came with hands out, which they use to rake in every benefit they can get.
My immigrant family members would have died of shame before they’d have accepted a single public penny or service.
They’re ungrateful.
There’s an air of entitlement and ingratitude about the aliens that makes the thought of doing anything to help them deeply unattractive. In Old America, there was a saying that “Beggars can’t be choosers.” But the new colonizers are perfectly comfortable making completely irrational demands.
New York City is a good example of a scene that’s playing out all over the West. Hotels in midtown Manhattan — where my family and I have stayed on occasion over the years but only as a special treat because it’s expensive — have been booked over to the local authorities to house the foreign nationals. One in particular — the Watson Hotel — has been housing single adult males. The city recently began to relocate them to a shelter set up just for them at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal so that women and children foreign nationals could use the hotel. But the men refused to leave and began protesting, camping out on the sidewalk rather than relocating.
You see, some of them had found work in Midtown and didn’t want to have to commute.
If you’ve ever lived in or near New York City, you understand the jaw-dropping gall of such demands. Almost no one can afford to live in Manhattan — you have to be immensely successful to live in Midtown. That these jerks came into the country illegally and then demanded first-class accommodations pretty much demolished any residual charity I might still have harbored for them.
These particular aliens have since relocated, and the city provides a free shuttle for them to get to their undocumented jobs in midtown.
Too many of my tax dollars are already going to them.
My tax dollars are already giving Biden’s colonizers way more than I think they should be given. Anyone who has raised children, who has spent five years paying for their braces, cringed at medical copays, and scrimped to give them that new cell phone for Christmas knows how dear these things are. I flinch at every child I see getting carried or walked across my country’s border, because I know I’ll be paying for their needs with my tax dollars, and it’s infuriating.
Immigrants to America aren’t supposed to become a public charge.
They shouldn’t be here in the first place.
America has a system in place by which genuine victims of political persecution can apply for asylum. It involves entering the country through a legal port of entry and making a valid claim of seeking refuge and asylum. The system is not for people who simply want to escape poverty for a better lifestyle; such non-emergency migrants are supposed to apply for legal immigration status and wait in line. But none of these rules are being enforced by the Leftists running the government right now.
Rather, poor, unskilled, needy people are flooding over the border wherever they please, some eluding authorities while others turn themselves in and repeat the line they’ve been coached to say: that they fear for their lives in their homeland.
Nor are these illegal aliens interested in remaining in the safe countries they traverse on their way to the United States — countries that already speak their native language and have more in common culturally, in many cases.
The whole operation is, in my opinion, treasonous and destructive. Were I to donate to charities that help further it, I would contribute to the systemic invasion and looting of my beloved country.
Related: New Biden Admin Program Will Hide Numbers of Illegal Immigrants Entering the Country
There’s no endpoint.
There are far too many people living in poverty in the world for Western nations to take in and bring up to their living standards. Nearly 700 million live in extreme poverty and, depending on what criteria you use, there are between 1.3 and 4 or 5 billion souls dwelling in relatively impoverished conditions. We can’t take them all. We can’t even handle the massive number we’ve already allowed in.
I don’t mean to sound hateful or un-Christian. I am grateful every day for all the gifts with which I was born. And charity is an act of grace; it’s sacred. But impoverishing or endangering one’s self, or contributing to a collapse of order, of morality, or of one’s own home, is a bridge too far. I’m out.