By John F. Di Leo –
Through a temporary stay of a lower court’s action, which is usually a signal about what they will decide in the end, the Supreme Court has hinted that it will soon settle one of those obvious questions that never should have needed to go to the Supreme Court in the first place:
In confirming the “public charge rule” in DHS v. NY, SCOTUS will confirm that a President of the United States has the right to refuse green cards to applicants for immigration who would be virtually certain to be dependent on welfare if we let them in.
The illegal alien lobby and the social worker brigades are apoplectic, of course, but the President’s policy just brings us into line with virtually all other countries. No matter what the screamers scream, there is nothing improper or bigoted about the rule.
Many countries don’t have any immigrants at all, simply because nobody in his right mind would want to move to them…
…but of the many countries that are attractive to immigrants, practically all set some kind of financial requirements upon all applicants, either requiring that people prove they have a regular income, or demonstrate a certain net worth, or have a family member committed to supporting them, or show that they already have a job in place in their new country.
It’s just common sense… so of course, the activist left opposes it.
Our nation has an admitted national debt in the tens of trillions, and an unacknowledged but real debt of well over $100 trillion, when unfunded future obligations are considered.
We simply cannot support unlimited new arrivals, continually overloading our welfare system.
To use one of the Left’s favorite words… it is simply unsustainable.
These United States have plenty of generous welfare programs for our people… with sources from local to state to federal, delivering free benefits from housing to schooling to food. Every American taxpayer already bears the burden for an enormous number of people, and every such additional burden, unnecessarily added, therefore constitutes a confiscation – yes, to an extent, a theft – from the taxpaying American citizenry.
We simply cannot afford to offer such benefits to the other six billion indigent people around the world. We may feel sorry for them, but we cannot take care of them all by ourselves.
Individual Americans may choose to voluntarily fund charities to help them abroad – and as the most generous people in the world, we already do – but the government cannot force it, and certainly should not knowingly expand an already-unsustainable burden through rampant immigration.
At long last, the Supreme Court is putting this common sense fact in writing, through their indication of an eventual endorsement of the public charge rule.
The outcry over it, however, raises a different, but related, issue, one well worth noting:
Who is our government there for?
Not just, “what does it do?” – build roads, defend the border, coin money, arrest criminals, etc. – but who is the government there to serve? Why does a nation have a government at all?
Well, the government is there to serve the nation’s citizens.
Our Framers recognized that such a statement would be too broad, almost unlimited in fact, so they designed a constitutional government to build walls around it. “Government can do this, and only this… that, and only that….” Elected officials cannot be allowed to just do whatever they want, just because they won an election; they can still only do what the Constitution says they can. And they do it for the American people, not for anyone else.
Because the Constitution – the contract that allows our government to exist – is an agreement signed by the people of the United States.
There are about 200 countries in the world, with around seven billion people distributed between them. We only have a third of a billion here, so that means the USA is populated by about one 21st of the people on earth.
The modern Left would have us believe that we – just one-twenty-first of the world’s people – have an obligation to feed and clothe and raise and teach and shelter and cure everyone else. The idea is as insane as it is unaffordable.
Oh, yes, the picket signs are out: “No Human Is Illegal.” “Nation of Immigrants.” “Hate Has No Home Here.” But all the demonstrators in the world can’t make their argument make sense.
Do the protesters not understand that this isn’t about hate, and it isn’t about being mean or being cheap?
It’s about responsibility… and it’s about math.
We cannot afford to care for all the people on earth, and we cannot be forced to, because we have a constitutionally elected government that owes its loyalty to the American citizenry, not to the whole world.
For decades, the Left has delighted in calling themselves “citizens of the world,” and calling for an end to borders and walls. This denial of reality has caused our nation to become awash in drugs, debt, indigence and pain. When you open the floodgates, you get flooded.
This nation has the best legal structure on earth, the best economic opportunity on earth, the best all-round culture, coming from millennia of western civilization, born in Greece and Rome and improved over the centuries.
Our legal structure was designed to be the fairest, our government the most limited, our respect for the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the ideals of liberty championed in the Scottish enlightenment, all qualities surpassing the structures of any other nation. We are, as President Reagan referred to America, that “City on a Hill,” to which all other wise countries should aspire.
All of this is put at risk, if we dilute the school populations with enough children who weren’t raised to respect education, if we dilute the employment pool with enough people who don’t have the drive to seek advancement, if we dilute the voting population with enough voters who weren’t raised to understand what makes our system work.
Our system can handle some such dilution, as long as assimilation is a known and achievable goal. But we blew past the levels of achievable assimilation decades ago, and we need to reform the system, not only for our own future, but for the benefit of a world that depends on a strong and successful USA.
The modern Left wants us to believe that the American government, the American economy, the American welfare system exists to serve the whole world. They don’t.
This isn’t an anti-immigrant or xenophobic statement. We are all descendants of immigrants, if you go back far enough, and the American people know it. The Left counts on fear of the painful accusation of bigotry to make the defenders of the American system back down. We cannot allow that tactic to win.
We must remember that we are not only beneficiaries of the brilliant and generous choices made by our forefathers, we are also stewards of this system. Our Founding Fathers left us in charge; it’s our job to keep their system going, and to put a wall up over efforts to destroy it.
When asked as he left the Constitutional Convention, “What sort of government have you given us, Doctor?”, Benjamin Franklin replied “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
That statement was a charge to us all. The Framers put the design on paper and the Founding generation implemented it… and it is our duty today to be caretakers for that visionary system.
Our government exists for us, and we must respect and protect that system in exchange.
The President’s “public charge rule” is just one of many common-sense elements of this commitment.
And it would not be controversial in the least, if our country didn’t have so many enemies, both within and without, agitating for policies that are utterly destructive to the United States of America.
Copyright 2020 John F Di Leo
John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, actor and writer. His columns are found regularly in Illinois Review.
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