You may have missed the news because the leftwing mainstream media pretty much buried it, but a Gallup poll conducted last month showed that more than any other issue Americans identify immigration as the number one problem facing the U.S. today.
The percentage of Americans who identify it as the number one problem is 27%. The number two problem, at 23%, is government. Race relations (7%) and healthcare (7%) are the only other problems named by more than 5%. (Climate change is the top issue for merely 4%.)
We shall ignore here other problems that were named. The question is why do people, despite continuous bombardment of pro-migrant propaganda from mainstream media, see the massive flow of aliens into the nation to be a problem, let alone the biggest of all?
The question is easily answered. People want security and social stability. It is natural. It is why, once upon a time, most Europeans lived in homes inside city walls, venturing outside them only to work in surrounding fields and graze livestock. More exactly, for human life truly to flourish, security and stability are not merely desirable. They are necessary.
Our answer, simple as it is, invites explanation. The security of which we speak is of three interrelated kinds. One kind is economic. People need jobs. I should say a man does because ideally a man should be able to earn enough for his wife to be able to stay home and manage it, including tending to children and their needs.
How much is “enough”? Detailed discussion of this question is better left for another occasion, but according to the Church’s social teaching as taught by popes of the past, what a man earns ought to be sufficient not simply to sustain the life of the family but to make it gracious, at least to some degree. The trick is to limit or regulate the degree lest it become too great for the man’s own good and that of his family.
If discussion of this question is better left to another occasion, mentioning it now provides a segue into identifying a second kind of security. I’ll call it cultural security. It is necessary in order for us to be at ease, to feel at home, in society.
We don’t feel as if we are in America when too many clerks in too many stores don’t speak enough English to answer our questions or the distinguishing architectural feature of the house of worship down the street is a minaret instead of a steeple or the new neighbors next door park cars on their lawn as well as in the driveway.
Our sense of becoming strangers in our own land becomes more acute when we hear the country — not the government but the country itself — disparaged by an immigrant woman in a hajib who is supposed to be (as a member of Congress) “representative” of the people. What people is that? Are they like any you knew when you were growing up?
Then, still speaking of culture, there is art and entertainment. The quintessential art of our day is cinema — movies. Did you see the one about an African kingdom technologically far advanced beyond anything built in America or Europe but of which the world knows nothing because it is hidden underground?
The third kind of security is border security. It is vital. In fact a country can’t even exist without borders. They define it. Throw open its borders, as required by secular liberal globalism (beginning with international corporations that have no loyalty or allegiance to any nation) and it doesn’t take long before jobs start disappearing and the local convenience store stops selling beer because alcohol is against the religion of the Somalis who’ve bought the franchise. Ordinary Americans understand this. It is why they see immigration as the number-one problem facing the U.S. today.
Of course Big Business is not alone in promoting open borders. Listen to this from Peter Beinart, professor of political science and CNN political commentator. It is the conclusion of an article he recently wrote for The Forward, formerly a national Jewish daily newspaper which is now fully digital. “Most American Jews know…the more America welcomes Somali immigrants and Guatemalan asylum seekers not only into the country but into the political process — the more it truly becomes a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-faith liberal democracy — the safer we will be.”
For a traditional Catholic to quote that is to risk being maligned as anti-Semitic, but let me demonstrate that Beinart is correct, and increase the risk, with a rewrite: Most U.S.-born, English-speaking Christians, blacks, Hispanics and Asians as well as whites, know…the more America welcomes Somali immigrants and Guatemalan asylum seekers not only into the country but into the political process — the more it truly becomes a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-faith liberal democracy — the less America will remain the land of their forefathers and the less secure politically, economically and culturally will be their place in it.
In sum: Whose land is America to be?
